The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora Page A

quickly and been stripped bare. These unadorned days will soon be gone, too, cloaked by the holidays. Then the year will end and Nayana will fly away.
    It would be right, Rosalie thinks, to secure some time alone with the girl while she can. She schedules a Saturday appointment at a salon. They can get manicures and have their hair done, and perhaps Nayana can have her eyebrows and facial hair waxed before Thanksgiving. It must be hard for her, Rosalie thinks, living with dark tufts over her lip and at the sides of her face. She wonders if there are opportunities for basic grooming in Bangladesh, of if girls just have to make the best of their lots.
    At the salon, they sit together, their fingertips dipped in cuticle-softening solution.
    â€œAre you close with your mother, at home?” Rosalie ventures.
    â€œYes, of course,” Nayana says in her forever lilting voice. “She has no one except me and my sisters.”
    It is very difficult, Nayana explains, to be a widow in her country. There is virtually no chance of her mother finding another man to marry. Rosalie is impressed by the girl’s unsentimental understanding of this, her poise in speaking about it. “That’s very sad,” she comments.
    â€œIt’s different here,” Nayana says, glancing at Rosalie. “People can find another chance. Women can marry again. Orphaned children can go to new families.”
    Rosalie nods, enjoying the cool sensation of the solution at her knuckles. She lifts her fingertips from the bowl and admires the softened, pinkened skin. When she looks at Nayana, the girl’s face is somber.
    â€œNoah told me about his father,” she says. “I am very sorry.”
    Rosalie holds her fingertips aloft, glistening.
    â€œWhat about his father?”
    The girl stares with her overlarge mongoose eyes. She speaks again in a softened voice. “That he was a victim of the terrible day, in the offices of the World Trade Center.”
    Rosalie brings her hands into her lap and wipes the fingertips on her jeans. She feels the usual knife stab at the sound of the words World Trade Center , but it takes a long moment for her to parse the rest of the girl’s sentence. She turns it over in her mind, but it still makes no sense. Michael, thank God, had been nowhere near the towers that day. This is something she has reflected upon innumerable times, and for which she has offered prayers of thanksgiving along with those of healing for the less fortunate.
    â€œHe showed me the name, the . . . plaque in the park,” Nayana continues. “He showed me his birth father’s name.”
    Rosalie stares at Nayana. “His birth father? What are you talking about?”
    Nayana looks back in terror. “He told me how his birth mother died when he was a baby, and how, after 9/11, he was an orphan. You and Dr. Warren were very kind to take him in. Especially with so many children already.”
    Rosalie feels the blood hammer in her eardrums. She forces a plastic smile.
    â€œI see. You say that he showed you a name on a plaque? What was the name?”
    â€œThomas Callahan,” the girl whispers.
    The blood has entered Rosalie’s face now and fills the vessels behind her eyeballs. She nods and blinks slowly, spinning for a moment the way she had that cyclonic morning, grasping for new bearings. She remembers the name Thomas Callahan. He’d been a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, she believes, one of the five local men incinerated that day. She knows the plaque, of course, though she hasn’t looked at it for a long time. It’s become part of the scenery, embedded in the boxwood shrubs, as invisible as the flagpole beside it. With the passing years, the names in the granite have lost their raw wrongness and assumed a permanent, fated quality.
    Rosalie and Nayana are quiet while the manicurist girls dab their fingers dry and paint their nails with cool brushstrokes. As they are rising to