The Mapmaker's Children (2 page)

N
EW
C
HARLESTOWN
, W
EST
V
IRGINIA
A
UGUST
2014

“A
dog is
not
a child.” Eden clutched the railing, her face swollen like a day-old bee sting.

Her husband, Jack, stood at the bottom of the staircase. In his arms drooled a dog the size and color of a pumpkin. Threaded between the handles of the briefcase at his feet was a pink rose gone limp from the summer heat.

“I thought…” he began.

She shook her head. What had he thought? That he could simply stop somewhere and bring home a substitute. It was thought
less
.

The August sun shone through the screen door, splashing light onto the burnished oak floors. She put a hand over her eyes.
Too much. Too bright
. She still wasn't used to having a door beyond the door. The renovating architect said all the homes in New Charlestown had similar. Their Adams Morgan brownstone might've been cramped and in the middle of city chaos, but she'd loved its hunter-green door, shellacked by centuries of paint and heavy as lead. When she shut it, there was a sealed kiss. A perfect match of wood to wood.

“Please.” Eden squinted beneath her bladed hand. “The door. I'm not even dressed.” She tugged Jack's Sting T-shirt down over her bare thighs.

He began to turn, but she stopped him.

“Wait—do it on your way out. Take it back.” She nodded at the dog.

“I can't take it back. He was the last one in the box. I got him from a gypsy on Route 7.”

Annoyance burned in Eden's chest. She resisted the urge to correct him. There might've been gypsies in England, but the term was simply pejorative in the United States. He'd been here long enough now.
He should know. And how could he have taken on such a responsibility without one word to her? It was like she didn't exist anymore, impotent as the nursery room under this roof.

The dog reached up to sniff the starched collar of Jack's button-down and lick the five o'clock shadow at the base of his jaw. Jack didn't wear aftershave but somehow still smelled of musky cedar and spearmint. Winter garden smells she'd once romanticized as coming from his English country home.

During the early years of their marriage, when he showered each morning, the steam billowing into the bedroom was so heady with his scent that it often woke her from the deepest sleep. She'd pull him back to bed, naked and warm, and let herself forget time, work, and restraint—let herself be submerged in all that was Jack Anderson and the family she hoped they could create.

Starting a family was on her bucket list, after running a marathon and scuba diving. Jack and she had done the Cherry Blossom ten-miler in D.C. to get into shape for the wedding, then snorkeled on their Virgin Islands honeymoon. Close enough. She'd crossed off both on the list and immediately started baby making; however, when it came to conception, “close enough” was anything but.

She'd had two miscarriages at the beginning. Quiet tragedies. A stain in her underwear, blood in the water, gone in a minute. Thimble hearts that beat, then stopped. She'd still mourned as if she'd known their faces.

During the first, Jack had looked at her with such brimming despair. His eyes like two deep wells of sorrow. She'd hated seeing her own pain reflected back.

“My first didn't take, either,” Eden's mother had said on the phone, pausing to inhale her Newport on the other end. “God will give you a child when He thinks you're good and ready.”

Eden had cringed and bitten her tongue. Her mother had been raised Catholic and had converted to Judaism when she'd married Eden's father; then they'd converted the family to Presbyterian. Somewhere along the way, she'd cobbled together her own strict tenets of faith. One of which was that you didn't mess with procreation.

“New souls are governed by God, not test tubes,” she'd said years ago when a picketed fertility clinic made the national news.

Her rigidity and emotional distance had always been so, made even more apparent when Eden's father had a heart attack at a business dinner in Manhattan. He died with a mouth full of strawberry cheesecake. Eden had been twenty-one, a senior at Georgetown University, her brother Denny twelve. Their mother benevolently waited until Denny was in prep school to sell their childhood home in Larchmont, New York, and move to a chalet in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Eden didn't tell her when the second pregnancy went the way of the first. In fact, she didn't speak of it to anyone.

“Please,” she'd begged Jack through the locked bathroom door. “I don't want you in here.”

After the bleeding stopped, she took a shower so hot it made her skin pink and speckled. She cried furiously under the water jets until the steam choked her quiet; then she placed her soiled underwear in the trash atop the used Q-tips and dulled razor blades. She knew she'd never be able to work out the stains. She slipped into her white terry-cloth robe and emerged at nearly midnight, her dark hair dripping a wet trail.

Jack sat on the ground, his head leaned back against the wall, mouth open, snoring. She put a hand to his chin to wake him, and he fumbled to stand.

“The baby's gone. Let's not talk about it.”

He nodded and reached to pull her into his chest, but she took two steps back, her bare feet smearing the droplets on the ground. The pain was too acute; his compassion felt like peroxide on an open wound. She couldn't bear it, even if it would make the healing easier.

His arm dropped to his side. “What can I do?”

Nothing
, she thought. He could do nothing. It was her body. Her fault.

Following that, her body had seemed to give up completely. They'd spent nearly two years attempting to conceive naturally, without success. She'd tried yoga, massages, Reiki, a phase where she exercised, a phase where she barely lifted a toe. Her homeopath prescribed more red meat, then no meat, Chinese herbs that smacked of stewed stinkbugs, acupuncture,
goji berries, organic tinctures in strange dark bottles, teas, and vitamins. When none of those seemed to cure her, she moved on to modern medicine: a fertility specialist, who recommended drugs to induce ovulation and daily hormone injections that made her sob over a missed green light, a cookie dropped to the floor, bow-tied pigtails on little girls. The ob-gyn had instructed her to minimize stress, and the holistic healer said city living was subconsciously traumatic.

So they'd moved to New Charlestown and she'd sacrificed everything: her position at the public relations agency; her lifelong love of pulling on a pair of sneakers and running for miles; birthday parties and anniversaries of friends; her ability to think in a straight line; her ability to enjoy a moment without worrying that she could lose the very thing she wanted most and the only thing she couldn't achieve through sheer determination.

Five rounds of in vitro, plus the move, and their savings were depleted. Even with Jack's promotion to Aqua Systems marketing VP, they'd agreed that if it didn't work this time, they'd have to stop and wait a year or more, to save up. Eden was empty in other ways, too: her heart was bankrupt.

She'd
felt
pregnant after the last embryo transfer. Her breasts were tender, her appetite unsettled, her ankles achy. The same signs she'd had with her two earlier pregnancies. So when the doctor had placed the sonogram wand over her belly, she'd been smiling, searching the grainy black-and-white monitor for the bean she just knew was there. Instead, a black cavern reflected back. Barren.

She was thirty-six. Jack was thirty-nine. A year from now seemed as incurable as a death sentence. They were miserable and had been for a long time. What was the point, she wondered. No child's face to look into and say,
That's you and that's me in one person
. There was Jack and there was Eden and years of silent disappointment between.

A loud chirping began from a crevice in the floorboards.

“You've let a cricket in,” Eden sighed. A thumping in her temples echoed the sound.

The dog in Jack's arms shook his woolly ears and lifted his nose in
the direction of the tweets, sniffing out the tiny intruder. His round black eyes, barely visible through the dense coat of curls, settled on her. He tilted his head and let his tongue loll out, smiling.

The tangled frustration in Eden's chest tightened to a knot. An impulse surged: to hold him for a minute and feel the soft heartbeat against her own. But even that was a stabbing reminder. So she crossed her arms tightly, her wrists pinched against her ribs.

“We don't know the first thing about raising…” The words cut her to the quick. She gulped. “A dog.”

Jack ran his fingers through its wild sprigs of fur, and it licked at his palm appreciatively.

“He could be diseased,” she argued to him, to herself. “Rabies or pinworms or worse. We've never had a pet. Why start now?” She cocked her hip and felt the smart of the old injection site, still tender after so many weeks. “And what are you trying to say by bringing that home, Jack?” Tension zipped up her spine. Her cheeks flamed. The lingering synthetic hormones acted like kerosene on her natural temper. She bulged her eyes at him. “Just
what
?”

The chirping tempo increased.

Jack frowned. “Calm down, Eden.”

“
Don't
tell me to calm down,” she snapped. “I'm not a child—I'm your wife, and I'm tired of everybody telling me what to do without listening to a word I say!” Her voice pitched, and she didn't fight it.

The dog tucked his nose into Jack's sleeve cuff.

“You're frightening him.”

Truthfully, Eden's rage had been rising ever since the doctor's appointment two weeks prior. She'd wanted to break every instrument in the room. Throw the needles like darts. Smash the sonogram machine. Rip the paper gown to shreds. Scream at Jack, at Dr. Baldwin, at fate and God for being so damned cruel.

What she'd done instead was hold her breath and nod while the men jabbered words of regret and what came next:
surrogacy, adoption, cryopreservation, maybe a break was all they really needed
. Eden hadn't said a word. She'd lain there staring at the exam room's fluorescent lights, feeling
her lungs pinch. It was as if she'd been forced underwater and had yet to come up for air.

Now the dam broke and she yelled as loud as she could: “
Frightening?
He's a damned dog, Jack! A dog! He doesn't know what frightening is! This”—she slammed her fist against the banister—“is
not
frightening!” She had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from sobbing and tasted copper.

The chirping stopped, but the dog whined, legs swimming frantically. Jack set him down on the ground and he skittered into the kitchen, knocking over the briefcase and crushing the rose beneath it.

Jack exhaled. His eyes narrowed at her, then speared down to the floor.

It felt wonderful—the purge—for five seconds, before Eden regretted the whole thing. “I'm sorry,” she muttered.

This wasn't her. She was acting more like a teenager now than she had as a teenager: dramatic outbursts, pounding fists, her way or the highway, irrational, hysterical. She hated it. Hated herself in the moment, and yet she couldn't control the percussion of her heart from reaching that climactic cymbal. She was twisted up in pain, regret, a marriage that wasn't weathering the storms and maybe shouldn't have existed from the start. It'd made her ugly, hard, and mean.

Now she'd scared an innocent orphan dog to boot. What kind of monster was she?

“Denny texted me while I was dealing with the airlines,” said Jack. “Did he get in touch with you?”

Eden had turned off the phones, not wanting her rest interrupted. She figured anybody phoning the house was peddling something she'd just as soon avoid. She hadn't been downstairs yet to see the indicator light on the answering machine.

Jack pressed Play.

“Hey, E, it's Denny,” came her brother's voice.

She finally stepped off the stairs, to the ground floor.

He was working at a restaurant-bar in Philadelphia, waiting tables during the day and playing sets for the patrons at night. When Eden
thought of him, she heard songs so full of emotion that they vibrated her bones and made her nostalgic for a childhood that had been anything but enviable.

“Your cell rang through to voice mail, so I was hoping to catch you at home. Just wanted to, y'know, talk to my big sis…” What sounded like a siren went by in the background. “Late set at the café. Didn't get off until dawn—heading home now.” He paused and sighed, the air pushed through the receiver raspy. A flutter in Eden's stomach. Something was up, but then he quickly got off, saying, “Kay—so call me back.”

Jack picked up the phone. “I'll say you're not well—caught a bug.”

Eden shook her head. “No, it's fine. I'll call him myself. Tomorrow.”

Jack nodded. “Tell him I'm waiting for him to pay a visit and see the new house.”

“Uh-huh,” said Eden.

Like she wanted her little brother to witness what they'd become: dirty dishes atop unpacked boxes; the smell of Jack's Bombay Bistro takeout and new paint; her unbathed, unshaved, undone self in one bedroom and Jack in another down the hall. Initially he'd moved into the guest bedroom because his snoring kept her up. Her fertility specialist said sleep was a vital part of her optimal health. Jack hadn't asked to come back to their bed after the last transfer failed, and she was grateful.

In the kitchen, claws scraped wood. Eden found the dog rooting behind a tower of brown boxes in the pantry. Jack had requested that the perpendicular walls dividing the kitchen, pantry, and former maid's quarters be sledgehammered for expansion, but the architect had refused, explaining that they housed a major support beam. Apparently, if you mucked with the structure, everything would collapse. So they'd left the old walls as they were.