But Ethan, the boy who favors her. Him, Mari still understands. Because he’s only eight, not yet nine, though that birthday will sneak up on her before she knows it, and then he, too, will start to grow away from her. But for now she understands him because Ethan, like all children under the age of ten, is still mostly wild.
At the sink, Mari uses the sprayer to rinse the stainless steel clean. She turns off the water. Dries her hands. She looks out the window, over the tips of basil, rosemary and thyme she’s growing in her container garden on the sill. Out into the grass, which for the first time in as long as she can remember is getting too long. Ryan usually trims the grass so tight to the ground nothing living could ever possibly hide in it. In the spring, summer and fall he rides his mower every weekend, beer in hand. He might not be able to find the laundry basket, but the yard is somehow tied up in his manly pride. It’s not like him to leave the yard untended, but over the past few months he’s been working long hours. Coming home late. The weather has been rainy for the past three weekends, leaving him to sit inside on the couch watching a series of whatever random programs he finds when he taps the keys of the remote.
Now the grass would tickle her shins if she were to walk outside into it. So she does. Barefooted, step-stepping carefully from the wide wooden deck onto the slate patio and finally, at last, into spring-soft grass that bends beneath her toes and does, indeed, tickle her shins. Mari sighs. She closes her eyes. She tips her face to the late-afternoon light and breathes in deep.
She listens.
A bird chirps softly. A dog barks, far off. She hears the murmur of voices, a television or radio, from the neighbor’s house on the other side of the yard. A passing car. The squeak of bicycle wheels. There is sometimes the rustle of squirrels in the trees or rabbits hopping into the brush, but most of the wildlife in this neighborhood has been eradicated by family pets, loud children or exterminators.
These are the sounds of her life. She misses the sound of running water that had been the constant backdrop of her childhood. Two houses down, the Smithsons have a plastic waterfall set up in their backyard, but it’s too far away for her to hear. Mari used to have a container fountain on her deck, just big enough to grow a single water lily, but last winter she forgot to bring it in before the first freeze and the pump burned out. Ryan tossed the entire thing in the trash, and she hasn’t yet replaced it.
Her feet swish in the grass as she steps forward again. A twig crackles and snaps. Mari pauses. She breathes in deeply again, lashes fluttering on her cheeks, but none of this is the same as what she’s missing. This is not what she’s hoping to feel.
That she only gets in dreams.
She opens her eyes and looks at her yard. Ryan mows the lawn but won’t bother with weeding. They have a service for that. Mari hates to pull up what the Home Owner’s Association calls weeds and she calls wildflowers. She despises pulling up plants only to put down the chopped-up bits of dead trees. Mulching seems like the utmost waste to her. Ridiculous and expensive. She and Ryan fought about it when they moved into this neighborhood, but the HOA had rules about “curb appeal.” She notes the carefully pruned beds that should be beautiful and yet leave her cold, still wanting. Still suddenly desperate for something lovely. Something wild.
The only beauty Mari sees is in the far back corner of the yard, the one that butts up to the tree line and beyond that, the last farmer’s field that will be another subdivision by the end of the year. Tall oaks, weather-worn, defend her emerald-green and perfectly manicured lawn from the tangled, reckless patches of clover that edge the soybean field. Here’s where the gardening crew tosses the cuttings, the scrap, the leftovers. It’s where Ryan dumps the grass from his mower bag. It’s a shady place, a haven for small, running creatures. It’s hardly overgrown, but it’s the closest she can get to the forest. There’s a word to describe it that she once read in a book. Verdant. That’s what this place is.
There’s a fairy ring of mushrooms here, too, in the small, chilly bit of shade. They’re edible, though Mari knows better than to pluck them, rinse them and sauté them in butter. Her children won’t eat mushrooms no matter how they’re prepared, and Ryan will only eat the kind that comes in a can if they’re on top of pizza. Besides, nobody she knows eats mushrooms they find in their yard. As with many of her long-standing habits, it would be considered...strange. Mari touches the velvety cap of one and leaves it to survive in its small patch of soil.
This is where Ryan finds her, sitting on an old lawn chair he’s tried three or four times to toss into the trash. The plastic woven strips are frayed and sagging, molded to her butt, and the metal legs have rusted. Mari keeps it because it doesn’t seem like such a sin to sit on a chair like this one in this forgotten bit of backyard, while taking one of the newer, fancier deck chairs would. Ryan says nothing about the chair now. In fact, he says nothing at all.
Mari stands. “What’s wrong?”
She’s alarmed when Ryan’s mouth works but no words come out. Ryan is never without words. It’s one of the better reasons she fell so hard in love with him, his ability to always find a way to communicate with speech what she could only say with silence. She’s more alarmed when he gets on his knees to bury his face in her lap. Her hands come down to stroke the short, clipped ends of his pale hair. When she ruffles it, glints of silver shine in the gold. Ryan sighs, shoulders rising and falling, and his face is hot against her bare thigh.
“What’s wrong?” she asks again, neither of them moving until Ryan lifts his head to look at her.
“I have bad news,” her husband tells her, and not for the first time, her entire life changes.
BESIDE HIM, MARI slept. The peaceful in-out of her breathing normally soothed Ryan into sleep himself, but tonight he lay wide-eyed and wakeful. Unable to relax enough for dreams.
He could wake her. A kiss or two would do it. He turned his head to look at her. She lay facing away from him, the smooth slope of her shoulders and hips clearly outlined because she slept, as she almost always did, with only a sheet to cover her. She went to bed naked even in the winter. Hell, Mari would be naked all the time if she could get away with it.
He could push up behind her. Inside her. They’d move together the way they always did, and it would be good for both of them with hardly any effort on his part. It was one of the things he loved so much about her, her easy and effortless response. He knew it had nothing to do with his skill or his prowess, but that it was something innately sensual inside her. He was the only man she’d ever been with—Ryan knew this. But would she respond that way to any man? Or was he somehow special? Thinking of this depressed him so that he couldn’t even feel the twitch of an erection, couldn’t even lose himself in that small and simple distraction.
Too bad his dick hadn’t felt that way a year ago, when Annette Somers had strutted her way into his office with half the DSM-IV listed in her file as diagnoses. All the classic symptoms, traits and characteristics of at least three different mental illnesses, along with hints of half a dozen others. Knowing she knew how to play the game hadn’t kept him from being played.
It was too much of a cliché, but here he found himself in the awkward, not to mention financially disruptive situation of having been placed on probation at reduced salary by his practice. Worse was the very real possibility that not only could he lose his license, but Annette’s husband, Gerry, had been making noise about malpractice.
Even if eventually it all worked out and he didn’t lose his job, money was going to be tight for a while, no question. They’d have to cut back. Way back. The kids wouldn’t be happy, especially Kendra, but they’d just have to understand that this summer there couldn’t be a pool membership or that expensive sleepaway camp. No horseback riding lessons. They could cancel their cable TV if they had to, he thought. Cut back on dinners out. It could work. It would