The Garden E-Book

Clare Beams

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 419

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

From the critically acclaimed author comes an eerie, psychologically thrilling novel about womanhood and bodily autonomy ___________________ 'Pet Sematary meets Rosemary's Baby with a literary sheen' NEW YORK TIMES 'A feminist voice for the 21st century' JOYCE CAROL OATES 'Prepare to be haunted' RACHEL YODER ___________________ It's 1948, and Irene Willard is pregnant for the sixth time. After five miscarriages, she checks into an isolated hospital that promises to deliver this child safely. Between examinations and experimental treatments, she discovers a mysterious garden on the grounds, where the boundary between life and death is strangely permeable. As the doctors' plans crumble, Irene tries to harness the power of the garden for herself. But she must face the unimaginable risks associated with such unimaginable rewards... ______________________ More praise for The Garden 'Truly original' DAILY MAIL 'Page-turning, horror-infused' LITHUB 'A dreamlike chiller' OBSERVER 'I'm in awe if this book' JESSAMINE CHAN 'A shimmering, strange, important novel' RUFI THORPE

Leseprobe

Also by Clare Beams

The Illness LessonWe Show What We Have Learned

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Clare Beams, 2024

The moral right of Clare Beams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBook ISBN: 9781805462361

Atlantic Books

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For all haunted women

What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

— WERNER HEISENBERG, PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY

Everybody in the house is asleep—everybody but us. We are wide awake.

— FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, THE SECRET GARDEN

WEIGHT

1

The house held still, and behind it the garden rested, brown turning green.

*

Doctor and doctor, Mr. and Mrs., came out onto the steps to watch the approach. They did this when they could. Welcome made a difference.

Without turning to him she said, “Remember not to talk too much.”

As if he ever did or could or wanted to when she was there.

*

George and Irene drove toward the house that held their future and saw the doctor and doctor standing at the top of the main stair, right in the maw of the gaping door. That was the way things looked to Irene: the steps the tongue, the portico the brow, the facade the wide marble face.

George slowed the car, just enough, Irene feared, to be noticed. “Jesus,” he said. “What is this place? Why are they watching us like that?”

“Speed up. They’ll think we’re afraid of them.”

“Reny, we are.”

Fear wasn’t the feeling Irene had been aware of before this moment. But as the car neared and Irene kept an eye on the doctors, waiting for them to move, she understood that all along she’d been imagining a hospital, like the one where they’d met these doctors the first time. Instead it seemed she had to face the mammoth, patient creature of this house, which was stationary, yes, but stationary like a living thing holding still on purpose only until it could take her inside. Look, even its arms were extended— two long wings, angled in, ready to close.

And she had to face these complementary doctors too, fixed as the statues that flank entries. If it were Irene standing there with the woman doctor, the match would be nearer. “You look alike, a little, did you notice?” George had said to her after their first appointment. Irene had noticed only that feeling of hard-to-place familiarity that makes a person ask, Do I know you from somewhere?

The doctors’ eyes weighed, and Irene wondered how clearly they could see her and George through the windshield and if the doctors could read lips. “You’re really going to leave me here?” she said to George, trying not to move her mouth much.

She meant it to sound playful, but to be here they had both peddled themselves. George’s forehead gathered.

“No, it’s all right,” Irene said.

They were close enough now to see smiles rising to the doctors’ faces.

George stopped the car and came around to Irene’s door with the rollicking gait she loved. She put her hand in his so he could help her out. Every time he stewarded her lately, he seemed to be rubbing her face in his stupid hope, when she had enough of her own. She climbed forth. She touched the slippery rose-colored fabric of her new maternity suit. This was the color she’d wanted right away from the catalog’s many choices, warm and bloomy.

“Good morning!” the woman doctor called, and descended the stairs to press George and Irene’s joined hands.

George broke his grip then to reach up the stairs and greet the man doctor, still a few steps up, as if sealing some bargain.

“How was the drive?” asked the woman doctor.

“I tried to take the corners slow. For her stomach,” said George.

“What a good sign,” the woman doctor said.

Irene peered into her face. Not a perfect mirror, no: something similar about their chins and the hard set of their mouths, the lift of their eyebrows, but this woman’s eyes were blue where Irene’s were wheat-colored, and Irene’s hair was darker. And, of course, the doctor was older too. How old? Older than Irene’s own age, twenty-eight, but much younger, she thought, than her mother. In that middle territory, what happened to a childless woman? Irene had begun finding out for herself. Kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms full of screaming quiet. Sun on carpets, rain on doorsteps. Quiet so loud she could hear nothing else. But she wondered if for this woman doctor it might be different.

“Very promising,” said the man doctor. He had charm, but there wasn’t much to wonder about him.

The doctors led the Willards up. Stairs brought out the sluggish drag of the weight at Irene’s center, and even here she didn’t like this awareness, which had never led anywhere good before. Her body had over and over proven itself a liar. She’d started to suspect this might just be a new uncovering of a trait it had always had.

As they fed themselves in, one by one, Irene had time to notice that up close the marble of the house was in fact veined like skin.

Twin mahogany desks stood within the doctors’ study, a line in two segments whose edges did not quite meet. The doctors bulwarked behind and left George and Irene to chairs in front, as if they were disobedient students. Only Irene had been such a student. She and George had been in school together, and though she knew he loved her already, he’d never understood why she had to say just one word too much, why she had to twist her mouth, raise her eyebrow, poison the milk of someone else’s dumb joy. It makes me feel delicious, she’d said to him, back when she could say to him anything she wanted. She’d faced many people across many desks and each time thought, Well? Talk, talk, talk, talk. What can you do to me? You can’t touch me.

Except the doctors could—she’d begged them to. The only other time they’d all met, when Irene had been a robed patient on their examination table, he and she had lifted her arms at the same moment to take her pulse, neither of them noticing the duplication because each was talking to George. In these cases . . . Her body at that moment occupied the physical space of the doctors’ marriage. As an omen, how could that be bad? She’d felt suddenly able to meet George’s eyes with ease: here she was, winning fallow ground, so ready, once they chose her and set about solving whatever her trouble was, to produce every baby he’d come back from overseas wanting. These doctors had solved this trouble with other women. They were the only ones solving it. All she had to do was make them choose her.

Then they’d tipped her back on the table and put a cold, slick metal instrument inside her and peered with a light at some sore region deep within, and she’d felt the ache like a name that she’d been trying to remember. Oh, there it is.

In spite of herself, though, Irene was starting to feel less sure now. No person she’d faced across a desk had ever in the end succeeded in shaping her in any corrective fashion. George reached across the space between their chairs to take her hand again, and she let him—poor, sweet, wondrous George, who had also failed in so many ways.

“Are there any questions Dr. Bishop and I can answer before your examination?” the man doctor asked softly, considerately, as if they were fragile, or maybe his voice was just soft. Irene watched George noticing. George still had ideas about men left over from football. She hoped the man doctor’s handshake had been firm.

“Aren’t you married?” Irene said. “Aren’t you both Dr. Hall, then?”

The woman doctor spoke. “Technically, but it got confusing for everyone. So here, I use my maiden name. We find it’s easier for the patients.”

Irene wondered if this woman had wanted the feeling of having created herself out of the soil of her own life only, of having let nothing stick to her since.

“How many other patients do you have here?” George asked.

“Eighteen, at the moment,” said Dr. Hall.

“They’re all . . . ?” Irene said.

“They all have much your history.”

Irene didn’t like the word’s turning of her into a set of occurrences. She hadn’t considered the other patients much. “They’re all just like me? All at the same point?”

Dr. Bishop gave a bright laugh. “That would be a real miracle of timing, wouldn’t it? No, they’re at various stages now, but everyone joins us right around where you are now, Mrs. Willard, just about fourteen weeks.”

“Is there something special about that time?”

“All the times are special.”

Irene smiled. She’d only ever made it this far.

“But it’s the optimal time for beginning our treatment, yes. A time when the healthy fetus is growing rapidly and we can intervene to the best effect. You’re entering the stage when you’ll even begin to feel movements. You haven’t felt any movements yet, have you, Mrs. Willard?”

Irene sat up straighter. Instantly she seemed to grow a new sense there at her middle, waiting for—what? “Should I have?”

“No, no, not necessarily. It would be quite early.”

So again, already, there was a bar Irene was failing to clear, and now they would ask and check until her failure was unmissable. Irene wasn’t sure she could bear this after all, being here, herding herself with these like-circumstanced women, making those circumstances the only part of her that counted for anything. Giving up her whole life to steep here in failures, comparisons, and other women’s sounds and smells.

Panic rose and she stood—the panic climbing her throat, the weight, that central weight, pulling, stretching her between. “George—” she said.

Right away he stood too. He would take her from this room if that was what she wanted, and they could go home and wait to see what happened this sixth time, wait for what she knew was coming. A disaster, but at least a familiar one.

Dr. Bishop’s eyes were on her again. Irene could see that this woman knew what Irene was remembering; she felt the doctor’s gaze on all of it. The fourth time and the blood on her mother’s couch, a stain the shape of a bell, ringing iron all through her. Her trembling hands, her mother’s mouth drooping at the corners, and the sound her mother made then, low, urgent, indecent, Irene had thought distantly—this wasn’t happening to her mother, who did her mother think she was? The first time, when Irene had thought maybe this was only some part of the process no one spoke of— her family doctor hadn’t spoken much at all when she’d gone to her appointment the week before, had just beamed at her as if she’d turned out to be very pleasing when Irene had never been pleasing in all her life—so it might be normal, this small smear of red brown on her underclothes marking where the crease of her had been. A decorous sign of itself sent forth by the thing growing inside. The third time as slight to begin with, the blood more red than brown but no more of it, but by then she’d known better than to read decorousness there. She’d run her finger down and down that sticky red line, that awful error, trying to wick it away. The second time, the worst. Late enough that her outlines had begun to yield to a firm paunch she’d patted before her mirror in the evenings, so hard under palms—as if her inner self, hard, always, was being revealed, and this was what people meant by showing. Then sudden waking to blood, blood, blood in a pool in the bed, George screaming, and in the washroom a hot ripping wave and beneath her the sound of something wet dropping, and she knew, she knew before she looked what she would see, but still she looked: the lump of skin and two small dots—were they eyes? Why is such a terrible thing allowed to happen? she’d thought, with no clear idea of what should have intervened on her behalf. She’d had a senseless fear of touching the thing in case touching might hurt it.

That wasn’t true, though—that the second was the worst. The fifth was the worst, though it had been another so early she’d passed only a little more blood than it was usual for her to pass every month, with only one big clot, half-dollar-sized, that she could pretend was just more blood. The fifth was the worst because the most recent always was. This one, then, would be worst of all.

Irene watched Dr. Bishop see this with her. She couldn’t do a thing to prevent Dr. Bishop from seeing.

When Dr. Bishop spoke, leaning forward with her elbows in lovely angles on the desk, it was straight to Irene. “Mrs. Willard, of course you can leave if you wish.” She paused and let the pause linger.

Dr. Hall filled it. “But really, you should understand that this is your best option.”

“Yes,” Dr. Bishop said. “That’s what I was going to say. Our results are quite something. Of the women who’ve gone through the program so far—”

“How many is that? You haven’t said,” George interrupted. “Forty have completed their time with us. Thirty-four have had healthy babies.”

“So six . . .”

“Six is a lot, isn’t it?” Irene said. “One or two, you might think it was a fluke—they had worse problems than the rest, or they did something wrong. But six, doesn’t six mean you aren’t fixing something?”

“Remember, these are patients who, like you, Mrs. Willard, have experienced repeated fetal loss. For inclusion in our program, at least three losses prior to the current pregnancy. So having produced from their ranks so many healthy babies—it’s a real success.”

George looked at her. “Irene?” As ever, he would do anything she wanted.

Dr. Bishop waited patiently. This woman knew Irene would never choose the familiar thing if there was any other option, no matter what the other option was; would never go home by choice to wait for the wave, the streak, the clot, the pool, the groan, the clench, the seep, the first slight cramp, each moment a terrible balance of hoping and dreading, listening and trying not to listen, feeling and trying not to feel. The waiting, Irene had come to think, was worse than what had come eventually every time.

No, that was a lie too.

Irene took in a breath. In breathing at all, she was feeding the weight, her body making that choice again and again. She couldn’t get away if she wanted to.

“Yes, all right,” she said.

So the doctors led them to the second floor, up a wide, curving staircase made of a pale white stone that looked as if it would feel soft if Irene touched it. These steps were so shallow that going up them hardly jostled the weight at all—they’d been measured out for taking time and turning the climber or descender into a spectacle for people below. No one below now, though Irene could hear other people, these other women with their histories, moving around in unseen rooms.

The examination room itself also owned its purpose only halfway. The sheeted table and the gown Irene would wear were white, but the rest had been left jewel-toned: the deep blue drapes covering the high arched windows and the rich, thick carpet, which was patterned like stained glass. A beautiful room, she tried to notice that it was a very beautiful room, even if its beauty was of a kind that suggested enchanted sleeps.

Irene hesitated on the threshold. “This isn’t much like most hospitals,” she said.

“It used to be my family home,” said Dr. Bishop. She didn’t mean a present-tense family, Irene understood, but one that stretched back in time like a line of cemetery stones. Feet upon feet upon these same floors. Neither Irene nor George had any such family, just middle-class parents bluntly proud of what they’d made.

Dr. Bishop took Irene by the elbow to get her moving again, steered her into a corner, and pulled a curtain shut between them. She produced a light chatter while Irene took off her clothes and put on the starchy white gown. “We only spent the odd weekend here before this all began, but it turns out to be the perfect place. Fortuitous!” Fortuitous, yes, the inheriting of ancestral estates. Irene could see the tips of Dr. Bishop’s fingers, wrapping around the cloth and shifting as she held it shut: she was so close. The curtain didn’t do much to relieve the strangeness of taking off clothes in a room that held these other people, and Irene sat to be sure she wouldn’t fall and embarrass herself while removing her boots. The gown pulled and scratched against her breasts, which, as happened every time, had become foreign to her, so large and so tender that a stray bump could bring her to tears. She watched George’s feet beneath the curtain, moving. Dancing, if she’d been judging by ankles.

She closed the gown and shifted the curtain aside, pulling it from Dr. Bishop’s grasp. Without looking at any of them, she hefted herself onto the table and put her heels in the chill metal stirrups, like mounting a horse, maybe, a thing she’d never done. Dr. Bishop must have. Already the gown was parting enough that it might as well not have been there.

They flanked her again, the doctors; they seemed to settle naturally into the flanking of things. They paused, and she saw that they were coming to a decision about who would take the lead: a glance, something (what?) exchanged, then Dr. Hall stepped to the center. “Slide forward, please,” he said. Maybe they wanted to communicate that while this was Dr. Bishop’s house, while she had mostly talked to them today, there was a man here too in charge of all of it, a doctor as she and George were used to seeing a doctor.

Irene slid her bottom to the base of the table, so far she seemed about to fall off, though surely he’d tell her? No one could want that. To herself, looking down, she appeared to be covered by the gown that spanned her knees, but she could feel small drafts below. She was two pictures that didn’t belong together: a chimera of a naked woman and a clothed one, joined at the middle. The weight lived somewhere right at that seam.

If it still lived.

“Hmm, yes,” Dr. Hall said pleasantly, with his hand deep inside her. There was a stiff, slightly painful resistance in its stretching. “Nice heavy uterus. That’s promising.”

“Mine, you mean?” Irene said, because it bothered her that he hadn’t said so. Then: “Heavier than when you checked last time?” She wished she could get her voice to sound less plaintive.

“Yes, I’d say there’s been continued growth.”

He pushed down on her abdomen from above, pinning something within her between that hand and the hand inside, finding that something’s perimeter the way he might have prodded the outlines of an object buried in a thick blanket. He withdrew. She hollowed.

“Good,” he said. Dr. Bishop gave a surprising relieved sigh. Irene felt its echo in her chest, but she had to look away from George’s face and its unbearable joy.

They sat her up then. Irene stuck moistly to the examination table, as if she’d been turned inside out. Dr. Hall tied a tourniquet around her arm and drew blood—a quick sting. She turned her head so she wouldn’t feel swimmy. My, how will you ever bear labor? the gleeful vicious nurse at the family doctor had asked in her very first pregnancy, when Irene had done the same thing. That nurse never said it again, not with any of the others, though Irene turned her head each time.

Dr. Hall finished and taped her arm up, and Irene saw the vials in his hands. They’d be warm there, against his palm. Hers and not hers; his and not his.

“What do you test it for?” she asked.

“Primarily the levels of hormones,” Dr. Bishop said. “That’s where our therapy takes aim: at stabilizing those levels, evening out the excess variability you’ve shown.”

Irene had been too preoccupied with the question of whether she’d be one of the handful selected to pay much attention to anything the doctors had said during their first meeting. She considered now. Stabilizing, excess variability. “That’s what’s wrong with me? That’s why this keeps happening, because things are unstable?”

George’s eyes flicked to hers.

“That’s the thinking,” said Dr. Hall.

“So how do you stabilize me?”

“Our approach is two-pronged,” Dr. Bishop said. She held up a young-looking finger—Irene noticed that her hands were much larger and thicker than her own. “First, we supplement and manage hormone levels through chemical means. Before fetal demise, hormone levels tend to swing, often quite dramatically. If we can monitor for and regulate these swings, the crisis seems in many cases to be preventable.”

Crisis. That was a good word, active and chaotic; better than loss, which had always made Irene think of demure weeping.

“What chemical means?” George asked.

“We use a drug, a new drug from Europe, that we saw could simulate the particular combination of hormones that support optimal pregnancy. It’s been our breakthrough.” Dr. Bishop said this without a hint of modesty. “A simple injection.”

“That’s it? That will do it? Just some shots, that’s all I need?”

Dr. Bishop gave her graceful laugh again. “Not quite.” She held up a second finger and turned her eyes, blue like a wrong note, on Irene alone. “The second prong of our approach aims to rectify the maternal environment in a more overarching way. In these repeated cases, our theory is that the general state of the mother may be implicated.”

Irene felt herself go very still.

“So we try to address that too. We conduct our treatments here, in this secluded environment, to reduce stress. And we provide you a full program of support. The correct kinds of healthful food. Activities, both mental and physical, of the right degree and kind. Plenty of rest. And regular talk sessions with me, to help you understand and then let go of your more unhelpful feelings.”

“The talking on couches?”

“Our own version of that.”

“Dr. Bishop’s version, anyway—it’s her specialty, not mine,” Dr. Hall said fondly.

“But what can talking do?” said George.

“The body and mind,” Dr. Bishop said, “are intertwined. In the gravid patient these connections are particularly muscular, particularly effectual. We use them here to move things in the right direction.”

Within herself Irene pictured a web made of fleshy pinkish strands, pulling one thing toward another thing.

“The women often find it’s an important outlet. And it lets me just keep tabs on how everyone is doing.”

“I had a girlfriend at school called Tabs,” Irene said. “Tabitha, really, but that’s what we all called her. I haven’t thought of her in years.” Ruddy-cheeked Tabs would have babies upon babies by now.

Dr. Bishop kept talking as if she hadn’t heard. “And then, of course, when the time comes, you deliver.”

“Here?”

“We’ve made ourselves into quite a state-of-the-art hospital, with additional support staff we bring in when the occasion calls for it. We have everything you might need.”

“How often can I come see her?” George asked.

“We have our visiting days every couple of months or so.”

“That’s not much,” George said. Since they were fifteen, the only time they’d been apart for more than a few days was when he was deployed. The prospect of all those hours and days and weeks without George in them made it hard for Irene to breathe.

“We’re trying to give our patients a break from their real lives, that’s all; a time of undisturbed quiet,” Dr. Bishop said. “It’s difficult, I know, but keep reminding yourselves what we’re trying to accomplish. Hold that in your mind, like a prize.”

Dr. Bishop’s mind, Dr. Bishop’s prize—Irene would have liked to see them.

Still, she did try holding her own in her mind while she dressed, while she kissed George goodbye on the front stairs. Wasn’t that prize worth everything? And wasn’t this the first place that had offered her steps, actual steps, to get it, keep it, give it to George?

“There’s a lot I would say, if you didn’t already know,” George told her, her chin cupped in his palms.

“I know.”

Irene watched him get into their car and drive it away. She bore it by imagining their home, just as it was, but with a further person inside. A small face that was a blur of light.

*

George drove slowly down the driveway, then very fast after he knew he’d passed her sight line. He wasn’t sure why. It didn’t seem a good moral sign, this fleeing from his dearly loved Reny and what she contained, as if all of it were a mess he had made.

It was a beautiful spring morning, and he drove and drove into it.

2

Dr. Hall appeared after George’s car had vanished—he waited until then, considerately—and took Irene’s elbow to show her back up the stairs. Instead of turning left, toward the examination rooms, they turned right this time, onto a mirror-image hallway. “The bedrooms are this way,” Dr. Hall said. He had her suitcase in his hand. She’d lost track of it at some point.

“Where’s your wife gone?” Irene said.

“Oh, she’ll be working away somewhere.”

“Why’s it so quiet? Where are all the others?”

“In between group activities and mealtimes we encourage rest. You’re expending enormous amounts of energy all the time.”

But the sensation of the weight at Irene’s center felt like the opposite of using energy, like the heaviest quiet. It dulled her.

The hallway extended, long and straight, windows to one side and doors to the other. The drapes were all closed here too, disorientingly—Irene couldn’t keep hold of the angles in her mind to know what part of the grounds she’d be seeing if she could see anything.

Dr. Hall opened one of the doors in the line of other doors and waved Irene in. So this was where she’d be doing all her resting and waiting. A bed with high, proud posts, a desk, a chair, a bureau, all of the kind of dark, visibly dense wood that marked them as a separate species entirely from Irene and George’s light and flimsy bedroom set from Macy’s. Thick, deep-colored blankets and carpet. Curtains, closed again, and a clean but unoccupied smell in the air. On the bedstand, a jarringly modern alarm clock and lamp, like stowaways. Irene imagined other identical rooms stretching to either side of this one in the trick of multiplication you can get when you point mirrors’ reflections into each other.

The doctor came into the room after her and set her suitcase down on a luggage stand beside the bureau. “Now, no lifting this. You can take the clothes out from right there. Do you have everything you need to get settled?”

“Sure. I’ve never been anywhere so fancy. Old fancy. I mean, not shabby or anything, just everything seems like it’s been here forever.”

“This kind of America is the closest thing we have to Europe, that’s what I’ve always thought.” Dr. Hall laughed. So he could joke about the house—it wasn’t his.

“George and I used to talk about taking a European trip someday. I wonder if he’ll ever want to now.”

Dr. Hall pressed his lips together sadly, as people did when they were women, or too old, or for any other reason hadn’t been in the war. “Well, we hope you’ll be comfortable here, Mrs. Willard.”

“I think I’m too afraid for that.”

He fixed her with a serious look. “Try your best not to be afraid.”

“Why, does it know?”

“The fetus is quite resilient. Unlikely a passing worry will affect it.”

“But?”

She could tell he hadn’t expected that.

“It’s true that part of what we’re doing here is treating your mind like a powerful instrument that can work for your baby’s health or against it. We’ll try to help you understand how to direct it productively, while also taking medical steps to safeguard the uterine environment.”

“That’s me, the uterine environment?”

“You could say so.”

“Glad to hear I’ll be safeguarded.”

Here was Dr. Bishop, at the door. “I see you’ve found your room, Mrs. Willard.”

“Hi there, Lou,” Dr. Hall said. “She’s just getting settled.”

Dr. Bishop came to stand with Dr. Hall and laid a hand on his arm. Even this invulnerable doctor hadn’t wanted to leave her husband alone with a woman who looked a little like her but younger, maybe. Their white coats were touching. Irene wondered if they got them from the same supplier.

“I wanted to tell you that dinner begins at six o’clock, in the dining room,” Dr. Bishop said. “You can meet the others then.”

What a treat, Irene almost said but stopped herself from saying. George was her good influence; without him, she would have to try harder. “Thanks.”

She stepped to the window, hoping this would show these doctors they could go away, and began shifting aside the curtains, so thick and multifolded, covered in their purple fleurs-de-lis, that they reminded her of a medieval queen’s dress. She couldn’t seem to find the part.

“What are you doing, Mrs. Willard?” Dr. Bishop said.

“Letting in some sun.”

“How about lying down for a while instead? You’ll feel more peaceful without all that strong light.”

Irene dropped the curtains.

Dr. Bishop nodded, and the lamplight shifted around on top of her hair, which had found all the shine there was in this dim. “Then we’ll see you at dinner.”

Irene made herself leave the curtains alone after the doctors had gone. They knew many things she didn’t, that was why she was here.

A while later, maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour—she’d dozed off on top of her new bed’s thick, soft quilt and couldn’t be sure—Irene heard women’s voices in the hall outside her bedroom. She suspected them of having stopped right by her door on purpose, knowing she was newly inside. She rose and went out so she could get meeting them over with.

The two women standing there didn’t in fact seem startled when she opened the door. “The new girl!” said one, offering a hand. “I’m Margaret.”

Too old is her problem, Irene thought. Very clear, even though Margaret’s cheeks were plumply rosy, shiny as ripe apples, and the belly-rounding she rested her other hand on looked firm. She put Irene in mind of a happy mother in a storybook, but a happy mother who should be well into having her children. A few of them should be scampering leggily around her by now, according to the clock of her life, which had left its marks in a telltale slackness around her eyes and neck and mouth, not the kind of thing that could be hidden.

“And I’m Pearl,” said the other, who stood in a hunch to hide her considerable height and keep it from offending, with her hands still clasped. Her name suited her in a way that did not flatter, for she was pearly pale and delicately twitchy, with light gray eyes that jumped at and then away from Irene’s face. Too nervous, Irene thought.

“Irene. Nice to meet you,” she said.

How would they each be diagnosing her? But the doctors must have deemed all their limitations surmountable.

“We’re both just that way,” Margaret said, nodding farther down the hall.

“How long have you two been here?”

“Over a month now,” said Pearl. “Margaret and I got here about the same time.”

“So that makes you . . .”

“Just about eighteen weeks, and Pearl’s nineteen,” Margaret said. Irene could see it was a feature of this place, having the weeks burned into your brain that way, an identification as crucial as your name. Margaret’s proud hand circled her stomach as if she were rubbing a lucky stone. “You?”

“Fourteen,” said Irene, feeling remedial. Stupid: they all were.

“I remember week fourteen. That was right around when I really, finally started to feel like I could stand to eat again,” Margaret said.

“Do you both have . . . other children?”

They shook their heads. “I don’t think they let you come here if you do, do they? I just meant this time,” Margaret said.

“This is the furthest I’ve ever gotten,” said Pearl.

“You’re further than I ever have.”

Margaret leaned toward her. “How many for you, before this?”

Irene tensed, and the skin between her shoulder blades tightened as if Margaret had breathed on it. “I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Of course not, I just thought—”

“Excuse me,” Irene said, and turned back into her room.

Why be nice? She wasn’t required to make friends here. That wasn’t part of the rules as they’d been explained to her. She laid herself down again in coffin-position on her bed to wait for the women to go away. What did it matter if her inner self was like these other women’s somehow—the corridors or caverns all their babies occupied, or even their minds? No one could make her own that self, whose contours were only visible in what it had killed, as her true one. She was here, yes, incidentally, and she would do everything that it was necessary for her to do here, but she wouldn’t do a thing more.

Once the hall outside was quiet, Irene rose. She didn’t want to see another person today. She would skip dinner—who needed dinner? Not her. If the weight did, well, it could take what it needed from other places inside her, help itself—that was what her family doctor had told her when she couldn’t stop throwing up.

She took her coat and started down the stairs, unseen and free as a ghost.

Outside, though, instead of freer, she felt pinned by the low-ceilinged afternoon. The clouds were thick and pewtery and hung without moving in the air, near enough they appeared touchable with a leap were she not so heavy. Patchy snow here and there on the hills still, well into March. The only tells of the season were the earth’s slight ripeness beneath Irene’s feet and a hint of green visible only in the periphery, as a sort of haze around the branches of the trees, hovering like a trick of light above the grass.

Irene wandered up the drive a ways, then turned to look the house full in its face. It seemed ready to spring forward at any moment and set all the bulk of its balustrades, columns, porticoes, and grand monarchical porches moving. Everything was a little too crisp-edged to be authentically ancestral. Why hadn’t she seen right away? It wasn’t really a very old house. It was only pretending to be one.

Was Irene allowed to be out here? No one had said she wasn’t.

Facing the house like this, she could just see crumbling lower walls she hadn’t noticed on the drive in, jutting out from behind it, like the ruins of a previous structure. These were brick, not marble.

Irene wound her way toward the mystery while the glossy windows of the house watched. Clouds, all those clouds, reflected themselves at her. There was relief in turning the corner to be unseen again. In back everything seemed abandoned, though the grounds in front—a large lawn running from the circular drive all the way to the woods at the sides—were freshly mown. Why had these rear shambles been permitted? Because this part wasn’t seen most of the time, maybe; because someone, everyone, had lost interest.

And here were the crumbling brick walls, bordering something. A wrought-iron gate stood crookedly ajar. Dead brown ivy hung in the way, and Irene pushed it aside to enter. It brushed closed again behind her with a windy sound.

Inside, she found a traditional kind of walled garden, now become a plotted world overrun. Trees at the four corners, meant to produce ornamental fruit at human height, had outgrown their stations and were higher than the surrounding walls. Shrubs had crept and snarled together, bristling. Roses upon roses upon roses upon roses had spread shaggily and tumbled over the paths, with all the wet brown paper of last season’s blooms snagged in the bramble. Beneath Irene’s feet, snow-flattened thickets of grass, unmown years’ worth.

Irene forded the wreckage to the garden’s midpoint, where there was a dry fountain, a cherub at its center with a stain in a dark, troubling river running over-chin. A tiny strawberry of a penis peeked from between his chubby legs. The tip had broken off, and two of his fingers. She sat on the rim and peered over. She had the feeling she was looking into the center of the center of this place.

Within she saw black muck, old leaves, sticks, stones, all the things bones break from, and there, amongst the leaves, yes, something broken: a small dead field mouse. As if only sleeping, as they say—as Irene herself had said, but it wasn’t true, the eyes had never looked enough like eyes to be closed. It wasn’t true for this mouse either, with blood on its fur, with one eye open. Nothing had ever slept like that, or like her babies. The field mouse must have fallen into the fountain’s bowl, trying to reach water that wasn’t, and been unable to climb back up those steep sides, and then something had taken advantage of its exposure and killed it and perhaps left it here for later. It was browner than the mice the doctors would have used for the tests they must have conducted on their way to their breakthrough.

A sob welled in her and escaped in a desperate gulping note that was like the sound her mother had made for the bell of blood, and it startled Irene in the same way: But this isn’t yours.

She couldn’t seem to stand leaving the mouse trapped in there like that, though, even if of course it didn’t matter now. She took up a stick and poked it—wet, with more heft and resistance than expected, trailing its long skin-colored tail—and pinned it against the side of the fountain bowl. Carefully she slid the stick beneath, balanced the mouse on the end, and lifted, then placed it gently on the fountain’s brim. She steered the tail into a curl against its side. Then she found an old brown leaf and covered it up, like tucking it in.

Maybe her tragic feeling for this small dead thing meant something hopeful. She’d lain down in the dark like she was supposed to for a while; maybe she was already getting better at the task she’d come here to complete. Irene tipped her face up to the sky, so that she knew those clouds were reflected in her eyes, on her wet cheeks. As if she were painting herself with this place, a new coating over all the old facts of her.

On the way back in, she met Dr. Bishop, of course, coming down the stairs. “Where have you been?” the doctor asked. The question seemed meant for a child. Even as a child Irene had never liked it when other people tried to decide where she should be.

This was the trouble, really: Irene didn’t like this doctor, she was deciding, and she knew from long experience that the decision couldn’t be helped once it was made.

“I’m not allowed to walk?”

“We do take walks as a group, and spend time outside, as a group. During your free time, though, we encourage you to consider your energy. Think of it like budgeting.”

And that was something you’d say to some kitchen-table housewife who delighted in receipts. None of the roles this doctor wanted to assign Irene fit. “What a good analogy, thank you.”

Dr. Bishop had stopped close to Irene, very close, eye to eye.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Irene said.

“Pardon?”

“We look a bit similar. Don’t you think?”

“Do you think so?”

“George noticed too,” Irene said defensively. She could feel her cheeks warming.

“Well,” Dr. Bishop said in a humoring way. “Why don’t you go rest again for a while now.”

“I was just resting before.”

“Good! But more is even better. Go ahead and rest until this evening. We have a little concert planned for tonight after dinner.”

“Concert?” Irene echoed, picturing the pregnant patients resting violins atop their stomachs.

“Some local musicians.”

“I thought I might skip dinner, actually,” Irene said.

“Oh, we can’t have that.”

*

When the dinner hour came, Irene thought of George and resolved again to be better, as much better as she was capable of being. She went downstairs and followed the sounds of talking, the muted clinks of silverware on the edges of plates, down a broad hallway to the dining room’s double doors. It was a vast, dark space, like a cathedral or a high-ceilinged cave. You put a room this size in your house to declare you could summon enough people to fill it. Irene supposed Dr. Bishop had: three round tables covered in white tablecloths had been set in a line down the center, and around them were all the women, some looking like regular women anywhere, others swollen to impossible-looking shapes. Their modern clothes in bright factory-made colors again gave Irene the sense of two time periods laid on top of each other. Everyday housewives at an ancient banquet. Some of their clothes were fancier than others’—now that she was here, Irene understood that Dr. Bishop’s family money must really be funding this place, and the fee they were all being charged was only nominal— and some were older than others. But they were all equally out of place in this room.

The women chatted, crossed and uncrossed their legs, and moved their hands through the air. The doctors made a slow circuit and surveyed their plates. Dr. Bishop noticed Irene and gave her an approving nod that made her want to turn right back around.

But of course where could she go, really?

There was an empty chair near Margaret and Pearl at the far table, so Irene slipped into it. Better the enemy you know, et cetera—at least she’d already told these two her name and how far along she was and wouldn’t have to go through all of it again. She tried looking mostly at her plate and its piece of pale, glistening chicken, its carrots more yellow than orange, to signal that nobody needed to talk to her.

But Margaret sniffed and said, “I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot, earlier.” Margaret must be the kind of person who could not release her grip. Her dress was red, with a childlike white Peter Pan collar, different from the dress she’d worn in the hallway. Maybe dinner was an event to these women, worth changing for.

“Let’s forget it,” Irene said.

Margaret shrugged and chewed.

The curtains in here were closed too, which made the room feel unanchored even in daily time. Irene knew some light remained outside, but in here they had only the tea-colored lamplight that fell from the chandeliers. Was sunlight meant to be bad for them? Were they supposed to sit still endlessly in the dark like bulging root vegetables?

At home, George would be eating a casserole left for him by one of the neighborhood ladies, Irene just knew it; they hadn’t advertised Irene’s absence, but everyone would have caught wind of it anyway.

Irene stood, looking for something to drink. Instantly the servingwoman was by her side. “What can I get you, ma’am?”

“I was just going to get some water.” Irene pointed toward the sideboard with its pitcher and glasses.

“Why don’t you let me,” the woman said, not a question—she was already doing it.

Irene sat again. “They don’t want us walking?”

“They want us to rest, I think,” Pearl said.

“So I keep hearing. What are we supposed to do all the time?”

“Well, rest,” Margaret said.

“There are activities and things, and our appointments. You’ll see, the time goes,” Pearl told her. “Sometimes I think I’m busier here than at home.”

Margaret laughed. “Not really, though, Pearl? I mean, my Ladies’ Auxiliary meetings alone run me ragged. They made me be president again this year somehow.”

“Well, you must need the rest, then,” Irene said. Her water appeared. She sipped. The tumbler had heft enough to bludgeon someone if she were so inclined. The water was cold and satisfying after the carrots, which had filmed her throat with that bitter rising warning taste the weight had made her prone to.

“I do wish they’d let us have salt,” Margaret said. “It’s so hard to get through all this without it.”

“We can’t have salt? Really, is this prison?”

Pearl snorted, the most genuine sound Irene had heard out of her yet. Irene resisted the urge to glance at her, lest she accidentally form some alliance, a bridge to a place she didn’t want to visit. When they all left this house, she would make sure she never saw either of these women again.

“And what do you mean, get through all this? Surely we don’t have to eat it all.”

“They like us to,” Margaret said. “They’ve weighed everything so it’s the right amount.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“It doesn’t hurt to be on the safe side, I guess,” Pearl said, recollecting herself, adjusting her hair.

Oh, but it all hurts, Irene thought to say, but she didn’t think Pearl needed to hear it.

“The sugar’s harder, I think.” Pearl sighed piningly. “But then I have such a sweet tooth. You know, I used to carry a box of Good & Plenty around with me while I did the housework. Iron a shirt, get two; mop the kitchen, get three. I stopped when Joe told me I was eating so many they were turning my skin pink.” Though her pale, thin skin was pinkening even under the strain of telling this story. Irene pictured Pearl, with her anxious height, hunched over the candy pellets like a lanky, jumpy heron.

“No sugar either?” Irene said.

“You get used to it,” said Margaret.

A bite of Irene’s chicken slipped from her fork onto her lap, where it left a grease print on the silk of that rose-colored maternity suit, as if someone had touched her with a dirty hand. Was it possible she’d put this dress on this morning in her own bedroom? Irene dipped her napkin in the tumbler and rubbed, even though she knew better with silk.

On the far side of the room, Dr. Bishop leaned over the sideboard and its extra plates of chicken. Those spares were punishments, maybe, to be doled out if anyone misbehaved. Dr. Bishop put a fingertip to the chicken, then put the fingertip to her tongue. She caught Irene watching her and fixed her face into its professional expression.

Then she moved to the edge of the center table. “Good evening, ladies!” Dr. Bishop said. “I hope you’ve all had a pleasant and peaceful day. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please be sure to say hello to our newest arrival, Mrs. Irene Willard.”

Arrival, such a loaded word in this room full of these women. They turned toward Irene and waved. The doctor stepped back again.

“Aren’t you eating, Doctor?” said Irene.

“Excuse me?”

“Doctors don’t eat?”

Dr. Hall, who’d been standing sleepily off to the side, woke up a little.

“We eat later, Mrs. Willard,” Dr. Bishop said.

“Can’t break bread with us mere mortals?”

Pearl gasped. The other women close by were beginning to listen too. Irene felt a recklessness pulse all the way down to the bottoms of her feet, which she pressed hard to the floor.

“It’s just easier if some aspects of our lives and routines are distinct. You’re new, of course, Mrs. Willard, but you’ll find that one of the elements of your treatment involves conversation of a different sort from what we might engage in around a dining-room table. It’s better not to muddy the waters—you don’t need to be talking to me in your session in the afternoon and then inquiring about my sister’s health over dinner in the evening.”

Irene wondered if Dr. Bishop actually had a sister.

“I guess I don’t want to be analyzed while I’m eating my chicken,” said Margaret.

Some of the others laughed. They lifted their forks again. Irene cut herself another bite of chicken too.

“Are you getting enough, Mrs. Crowe?” Dr. Bishop asked Margaret then.

“Me? Why? Am I not—”