Wonderland

There were no words; words no longer existed. Time and consciousness were fluid. Abstract. But there was an awareness. And with it, an urgency. Death.

Death.

Death like a drumbeat, calling from the past. It had a familiar scent.

Death.

As if she had encountered it before.

Orla tried not to think of it as an amputation, but that’s how it felt. When they left the New York City apartment behind, that was a leg. She’d hobbled northward weeks ago and now, waving goodbye to her husband’s Plattsburgh family, that was an arm. She buckled her seat belt with her remaining hand, gazed down at her remaining foot, boot-clad and muddy. This body would never dance again. No more exhilarating reveals as the curtain rose on the stage. No more applause. No more making her sinewy limbs as fluid as a piece of music. Only bare-bones living. And endless woods.

Shaw had been such a good partner in the first couple of weeks after her retirement. He’d focused daily on the positives: her perpetually strained muscles could finally heal; she’d suffer no more blackened toenails; she wouldn’t have to spend hours a day in the company of sweaty, smelly people. In the spirit of the new life they were planning, she’d acknowledged the truthfulness of his optimism. But she didn’t have a clear memory of having made such complaints, at least not frequently, and not with the intention of wishing her life had been different. Sometimes the writer’s pencils wore down, and sometimes the painter’s brushes became stiff. These were casual obstacles of the trade, as were her aches, not reasons to abandon one’s art.

Yet she knew, in her marrow. Forty-one was old for a ballet dancer and everything required more effort than it once had; the time had come. And she’d agreed—the end of her time would mark the beginning of Shaw’s. It was his turn to pursue his artistic dreams.

Some days she felt nothing but the excitement of such a big change, a true adventure. But other days…moving deep into the Adirondacks was a bit more extreme than what she’d once envisioned, when “leaving the city” meant moving to a place like Pittsburgh, where she’d grown up. A smaller city, it was the best of all worlds: diverse, cultural, affordable. They could have a nice family home there, sprawling by Manhattan standards, and the children could have their Lola and Lolo. Her parents would have been so happy to have them so close. But, as a couple, they also embraced the philosophy of seizing the day. And exploring. And the possibility of making discoveries about yourself in unexpected places.

“Carpe diem,” she murmured.

Her moment of acceptance shattered, flash-frozen, and she caught her breath. There, on the side of the road. A pair of legs. A bloated body.

The car drew closer and it was real enough—not an illusion—but the back half of a deer, not a human. She saw the rest as they passed, the front legs crossed in prayer, blood staining the snow around its skull. The road dissolved behind them, obliterated by the sideways sleet. It hadn’t felt like this before, when she knew they’d be returning to Walker, Julie, and the boys at the end of the day. The trees got denser and swallowed the light. There was no going back.

Shaw whirled his attention from the road to her. “Did you just say ‘Carpe diem’?”

Orla shifted her back to the hostile world just beyond the glass. His grin reminded her to resume breathing. There were flecks of bluish paint in his hair; it had become a common sight during the past year, when he finally understood the quivering arrow of his internal compass. He’d started with small canvases and acrylic paint, but over the months the canvases grew, and their apartment took on the aroma of linseed oil and turpentine when he switched to oils. He wasn’t the tidiest of painters and some part of his skin or clothing—or hair—provided a preview of his day’s work. Though what was in his hair now was surely from their daughter’s newly rehabbed bedroom.

“Did I?” she asked. “I guess I did—that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. We’re carpe-dieming to the fullest!”

She snorted; sometimes his enthusiasm was contagious. Hoping to catch a glint of a smile on her daughter’s face, she turned toward the back seat. Behind her, Eleanor Queen sat gazing out the window, eyes on the sky. Orla prayed she hadn’t seen the dead deer. She wanted the wilderness—which was still what she called the Adirondacks—to be good for her contemplative child. Eleanor Queen—just El or Eleanor to some, but never to her mother—hadn’t seemed stalwart enough, aggressive enough, to survive into adulthood in the city. At nine, she was still afraid of the dark, one of many fears that Orla and Shaw accepted in a resigned way; they couldn’t, as imaginative people themselves, promise-promise-promise that nothing frightening lurked in the dark. And they respected that their daughter had pragmatic fears: bustling stairs that descended into the subways, sirens that screamed of danger, sidewalks with their crush of hurrying pedestrians.

Beside her daughter, four-year-old Tycho sat in his car seat bouncing a fuzzy, long-limbed moose on his knee. He sang under his breath with his own melody and lyrics: “Driving down the road…going to our home…driving in the car…going very far…”

As much as she’d tried to fully embrace the move—for her children’s sake, and because Shaw wanted it so very badly—a fear shadowed her that her urban family wasn’t suited to the wilds of nowhere. It followed her as they rode in the car, a black specter with an inky, human shape that she could almost see at the edge of her vision.

She turned back to Shaw, ready to request his reassurance (for the hundredth time) that they’d thought through every contingency and were truly ready for their new lives. But looking at him, she didn’t need to ask. So content and eager, his hands at ten and two, he drove their new-old four-wheel-drive SUV like it was what he’d been waiting for, and he was finally where he belonged. And maybe he was. She saw him with new clarity. The scraggly beard, the dirt under his nails, the way his bulky coat looked twenty years old in spite of being a recent purchase. The Adirondacks was his territory; Plattsburgh, where they’d spent the past three weeks with his brother, his hometown. When she’d Googled cities near Plattsburgh, she’d gotten a list of honest-to-God hamlets; the nearest actual city, by her standards—Montreal—wasn’t even in the same country. Maybe Shaw had never really been a city boy, but his creative impulses had driven him there.

Had Orla’s divinity kept him there? Sometimes she saw herself through his eyes—his shimmering awe of her talent, her drive.

Maybe, when they first became lovers, he’d thought a bit of her golden dust would rub off on him. He didn’t complain when it hadn’t and never suggested giving up on his own dreams. She respected him for that, and they stuck to their city lifestyle even when their friends moved onward, seeking a different life or more space in Brooklyn or Astoria. And then came Eleanor Queen. And Tycho. She’d made two post-maternity comebacks—rare for her profession—but the Empire City Contemporary Ballet wasn’t as elite or competitive as the city’s more renowned companies. And she had worked for it—to get in, to stay in, to come back—beyond even what her abilities and body might have predicted for her future. So they became the classic Manhattan family, squashed in a six-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom apartment, making it work against the odds.

Shaw slipped a CD into the dashboard player. Acoustic music, surprisingly melancholy. He never asked anyone else what they’d like to listen to. Orla might have been the primary breadwinner, supporting her family with her formidable albeit not quite star-worthy talents, but it was Shaw who set their family’s beatnik tone. Orla’s father called him, privately, a dabbler. She didn’t think that was entirely fair, since Shaw took on most of what should have been shared household duties. But it was undeniable that Shaw’s true calling was hard to pin down. He’d played guitar at several Village open-mics. Read his poetry at others. He wrote a screenplay, and  took photographs, and whacked away at pieces of wood that never quite became the sculptures he envisioned. But that had changed during the past year when he’d settled on a medium and the daily discipline needed to pursue it.

After becoming mesmerized by a particular exhibition while gallery-hopping in Chelsea (a favorite, free activity) and revisiting the exhibit numerous times, Shaw claimed an unfamiliar certainty: He knew what he needed to do. He channeled his energy into painting somewhat surreal versions of things he’d photographed. Cityscapes had attracted him at first, a blend of gritty realism with a touch of unexpected whimsy. Sophisticated and polished, they made his previous efforts look like doodles. But his real desire was to turn his eye on the natural world. Had it just been a matter of his needing more space—which he certainly did if he wanted to continue painting anything larger than the lid of a shoebox—Orla might not have been convinced to make such a rural move. But he needed nature now the way she’d once needed a metropolis with the heart of a diva.

They’d visited the land for the first time six months ago; his brother, Walker, had alerted them to it soon after they started talking about what they might do and where they might do it. Neither of them had particularly liked it; the old wooden farmhouse was a mess and more cramped than Orla had desired. They hadn’t even bothered to show it to the kids then, not considering it a real contender, though they’d poked around the nearby, undeniably quaint town of Saranac Lake Village. The only thing Shaw had really sparked to was the tree: a giant evergreen fifty yards behind the nothing of a house, its massive trunk rocketing upward from the middle of the earth, surrounded by smaller trees, like attendants in waiting.

While the real estate agent made phone calls in his car, Orla and Shaw had strolled back to the tree, Shaw attuned to its siren call, a glow on his face.

“I saw a tree like this once, a bit north of here, when I was camping with my dad. Was just a kid, maybe nine—Bean’s age. I told my dad I could feel it. I felt something. Maybe it was the first time I realized, or thought about, how there were things in the natural world that outlived us, that saw history and maybe recorded time in their own way. My brother just teased me—par for the course back then. But my dad said something really weird—so weird that I always remembered it, and Walker shut up, no witty comebacks.”

“What did he say?” Orla slipped her hand into his. Shaw’s father had died of pancreatic cancer years ago, and she often wished she’d gotten to know him better.

“That sometimes when you’re out in the world—he meant the mountains, the forests; he’d always lived here—you recognize the other parts of your soul.” Shaw looked at her then, still pondering those words. “I had no idea what he meant, but after that, every time I went into the woods I was looking…for something.”

“For parts of yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“Your dad taught you…to see how we’re part of something bigger. I like that.”

“How we’re connected.” He’d held her face in his hands and kissed her. Orla got light-headed, giggly, like they’d gone back in time and were newly in love.

Just as they’d reached for the tree, fascinated by the ancient bark, the real estate agent’s voice cut through the air. They hurried back.

Orla thought that had been the end of it, an interesting possibility and a pleasant visit. But after they got home, Shaw began reporting a recurring dream: Orla and the kids living on that land. Blossoming. And visions of himself in the room off the living room, conjuring his masterpieces. They resumed talking about it. The surrounding trees had been so beautiful in the spring, a tapestry of bursting green, with that special tree off in the distance.

“It’s like it’s our guardian,” Shaw had said. “I see it, towering, in my dreams.”

And his work improved and evolved, incorporating more and more wild greenery even though they hadn’t yet left the city. As his process and his vision solidified, he became more convinced.

“It’s calling to me. I think it’s my muse.” The ancient tree began to invade his work, peeking over the tops of buildings.

Orla had never been called by nature, but she believed him. It was a new thrill—for both of them—to see him find himself by losing himself in the creation of his paintings. Orla liked how the land reminded Shaw of his father and the philosophical lessons of his youth. When they checked back in with the real estate agent three months later, the price had dropped. The house had been empty for a while; out-of-state relatives were anxious to sell. They put in a lowball offer, and when it was accepted, a trajectory was set in motion.