The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora Page B

leave, Rosalie looks at Nayana and sees that the girl has been transformed. Her eyebrows are thin and arched. Cleared of its brush, her face is arrestingly intelligent. A new pair of earrings catches the light at either side of her head, and there is an iridescent blue sheen to her hair, inimitable by any Caucasian. Her body is lithe and graceful as she stands and puts her purse over her shoulder.
    â€œThank you,” she says to Rosalie with a slight bow of the head.
    Noah does not look up when his mother enters the room. He is seated on the braided rug in his underwear, examining some jarred specimen. There is a greasy cowlick at his hairline, exposing a set of blackheads. His mouth twitches as he peers into the jar.
    â€œNoah, can I ask you a question? Nayana told me something strange today.”
    â€œShe’s lying,” Noah says simply, after Rosalie has finished.
    â€œWhy would she lie?”
    â€œHow should I know? I don’t know what makes her do things.” His eyes rise but stop short of his mother’s face, somewhere near the clavicle. “I don’t even know why she’s here, to be honest.”
    Rosalie blinks. “I thought you liked having her here.”
    Noah scoffs quietly, in a way that makes her think of his father, then lowers his eyes again. “All I mean is that it’s not like it’s helping her, living here.”
    Rosalie feels the floor spin beneath her feet. She has a momentary flash of the school board meeting, feels that whirlpool wanting to tug her under. She lifts her chin, breathes in.
    â€œWhy did you lie?” she asks firmly.
    â€œI told you, she’s making it up. Why would you believe her and not me?”
    Rosalie does not answer. All at once, she wishes that Nayana had never come. She wishes she had never volunteered her home to any stranger.
    â€œWhat difference does it make, anyway?” Noah says. “It might as well be true.”
    â€œWhat might as well be true?”
    â€œYou know, about my birth father .” Noah’s voice lowers, trembles. “He’s never here anyway. It might as well have been him.”
    â€œPardon me?”
    Noah is silent, holding the jar to his eye.
    â€œWhat did you say?”
    Noah shrugs, and his mouth squeezes to the size of a button.
    Rosalie stands dumbly in the doorway for another second, a wax mold of a mother. Then, as if enough applied heat has melted her joints, she moves swiftly. In one fluent gesture, she takes the jar from her son’s hand and catapults it to the wall. She is surprised by the momentum. The thick glass cracks cleanly on impact and shatters upon the hardwood floor, radiating shards onto the rug where Noah sits. His hand is still aloft, cupping air, and he raises his eyes to his mother in pale alarm.
    The floor whirls as she turns and goes back through the door, closes it behind her and makes the latch snap shut.
    When Michael comes home from the hospital, Rosalie sits mutely beside him as he watches the news. He leans back into the couch cushions and assumes a pose of relaxation, of a neuro­surgeon having met the demands of his day. She will never know what his eyes witness within hospital walls, what scans of clotted lobes they examine, what eddies of blighted tissue. She does not presume to fathom any of it, has learned not to ask. Tonight, he has disrobed to a black T-shirt. Sitting beside him, the spinning feeling, which had subsided during dinner, returns. There is something disruptive about his presence, as if he were a dark magnet with alternating charges, first attracting, then repelling.
    Michael turns his head and looks at her. She wants to speak, to force the moment into normalcy, but her larynx is constricted. She should, she knows, tell him about their son’s transgression, but there is something in the way he looks at her, something blunt in his eyes that muffles her. She scrambles to rationalize this. There are, of course, many