Waiting for Eden

by Elliot Ackerman

  Mary didn’t reply. She could feel the weight of her guilt, for what she’d done with me that night. Always she carried that guilt with her. In her mind there was an opposite truth. In her mind, she’d abandoned him that night with me, when she tried to trap him at home with the baby we conceived.

  “I just want you back here,” said her mother.

  “I know you do.”

  There was little left to say so they said they loved each other and hung up. Soon the door from her husband’s room opened and Gabe stepped into the corridor. In the fluorescent light he seemed older, the shadows finding more of his face to hang themselves on. There was another chair next to Mary’s; he flipped it around backward, straddled it and wrapped his forearms over its top.

  “He’s sleeping,” said Gabe.

  Mary nodded.

  “He’s not suffering anymore.”

  She nodded again.

  “I don’t know how long it will be,” he said, “but I can make it quicker and I can make it so he doesn’t suffer at all.”

  Gabe didn’t say anything else, he just sat next to her, and that was what she needed. Down the hallway, the afternoon sun poured through a western window, blanching the already white floors and halls into the type of brightness that made everything disappear.

  Then Gabe turned to her one last time. “You know this is going to end.”

  She said nothing to him.

  My friend awoke into a dream.

  He stood in some middle place that was all whiteness. I found him there and stood next to him. He pointed to his side, to the spot where Gabe had stuck him with the needle. His skin was clean and smooth, lucent as if it were subtly out of focus.

  “Do you think she wants them to kill me?” he asked.

  I didn’t know, so in his dream I said nothing.

  The two of us sat down, cross-legged, as if the whiteness were a field of grass we waited in. All this time I’d watched him, but I’d never seen him here. Then he asked if I thought he was going to die.

  “I don’t know.”

  Then he apologized for nothing in particular, he just said I’m sorry. I said the same and in the same way. It wasn’t an apology to each other; it was an expression of regret, for how everything had turned out.

  “What’s it like where I’m going?” he asked.

  He’d always been my friend so I lied to him again. “It’s better,” I said. But I didn’t know. I’ve always been in this place of whiteness waiting for him like it was some act of repentance.

  I hope this is repentance.

  Still, there may be nothing past this, and I wanted to tell him that, but couldn’t. Even being dead, I worried I’d say anything to console a desperate and dying man.

  So there was nothing to say.

  Eden broke the silence between us by cracking his knuckles, one after another, savoring the work as his thumb clamped down over each finger. In this place his body was whole again. He began to shake his hands and make loose fists, pushing them into the opposite palms, cracking the joints all at once. He shut his eyes and breathed. Then, without opening them, he said: “You know it’s easiest on us.”

  “None of this is easy,” I replied.

  “No, but what she’s gone through is worse than what you or I have. We may have burned and bled, but we were never asked to wait. She’s waited, they all have. They’re trapped by us and they wait.”

  “She wanted to trap you with a baby,” I reminded him.

  “But she never asked me to wait,” he replied, and looked out into this place where nothing came or went except the whiteness. Then he looked at me again. “Can I go back to her now?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “And where will you go?”

  “I’ll be here,” I said.

  On Tuesdays her first class was at six a.m. Those mornings she’d open the gym and change in the locker room. By the showers there was a full-length mirror. Standing naked and alone, she’d dress in front of it. Her arms and legs were muscled from her work at the gym and her dark hair hung against clean white skin, the kind of skin that would never hold a blemish or a tan. Appreciating her unappreciated body made her resent the way Eden had abandoned it. To Mary, her naked reflection seemed like a masterful painting left to hang on a shabby wall.

  Her last time had been with me, and it’d been a couple of months more since their final try parked at the beach. Since then Eden hadn’t touched her and she was running out of time. She could feel the acid in her stomach and could see the lost sleep in her face. Still, if she could coax Eden to bed with her just once more she’d be able to claim the child was his. He would stay then, she thought. That had been their agreement once, when I first met them. With a baby he’d stay. She felt sure of this and sure that she could build a whole world on the small chance that the child wasn’t really mine.

  But Eden wouldn’t touch her and the truth of how she’d used me grew inside her, coming on a schedule. Then, on one of those Tuesdays, she ran out of time.

  That morning, she changed in the gym as she always did and taught her early class and another before lunch. That was all she was scheduled for. She’d planned to use the afternoon for an errand, a trip to a lawyer’s office to sign on to Eden’s power of attorney. The deployment was only three weeks away and she’d need the power of attorney—car payments, mortgage payments—she’d watch over his domestic life until he returned. But when another instructor called in sick, she was asked to cover an afternoon class. So she rushed out during lunch, handled the power of attorney and came back with just enough time to change into her sweaty clothes but not enough time to eat. As she led her class through their fourth round of split lunges, her sweat turned cold and the world closed in on her. When she passed out, she tumbled forward and on the way down knocked her head against a kettlebell, setting a gash that was tidy as half a penny pressed into the skin. Her students rushed over to her and she quickly bled enough to slicken the studio’s buff wood floor. They pressed white sweat towels to her head, and she pushed back at their arms, trying to stand on her own. When she came to her feet, the little crowd stepped away from her and she stumbled toward a workout bench by the studio’s door. She sat there for a time, leaning forward, her elbows propped on her knees and her head pressed to the towel. Some of the blood trickled over her wrist and down the soft inside part of her arm.

  When the gym owner came in everyone cleared out from the room. He was an unathletic man and his paunch swayed like a cow’s udder. He brought Mary a cup of water and then took her by the arm and out to his car. As they walked she protested in a wheezy and weak way, she didn’t want to see a doctor. He took her anyhow. It was a twenty-minute drive to the naval hospital and all this time she asked him to just bring her home. He ignored her, and when he dropped her off at the emergency room entrance, she was still asking to go home.

  Two paramedics helped her inside. Rows of plastic chairs and hushed conversations filled the emergency room. With her head tilted back and a towel still pressed against it, she split her attention, eavesdropping on the conversations around her and listening to the steady mutter of daytime talk shows from the televisions hung in each corner. One woman, who was very fat and likely diabetic, sat on a motor scooter next to her son, a lance corporal, who was lean, muscled and handsome in his camouflage uniform. The woman was missing a leg, and the leg she had poked from beneath her cotton pajamas, throbbing into calcification and covered with dry, flaky skin, which flecked gray as bark off a dying tree. Mary felt no sympathy for the old woman, if anything she felt the resentment which the woman’s son likely couldn’t feel. He’d sacrificed this day, along with who knew how many others, to preside over his mother’s decay.

  On the other side of the waiting room was another mother, a beautiful girl, even younger than Mary. She had two children, twins it looked like. The three of them slept again
st each other, their faces puffy and the lids of their closed eyes reddened and seeping. They didn’t sleep well, but stirred, moment to moment. The emergency room seemed like a way station where they’d collapsed after finishing just one leg of an interminable journey.

  Mary leaned forward and took the towel from her head. She thought perhaps the cut had stopped bleeding, but as she touched it with the tips of her fingers it seeped again. Desperately she wanted to leave this waiting room. It wasn’t the sick people who upset her. It was the dependence. Yes, it troubled her to see the old and the young who couldn’t fend for themselves, but more than that it troubled her to see those who’d been forced to give up their best days to tend to someone else’s worst.

  On the far side of the emergency room two broad automatic doors swung open. A middle-aged nurse in scrubs passed by the receptionist’s desk. In an announcer’s voice she read Mary’s name from a clipboard and peered out over the rows of patients in the room. Mary stood, heading toward the automatic doors. She moved quickly, prodded forward by the shame she felt when her name was announced as if she were one of these many who couldn’t help themselves.

  Past the doors, Mary followed the nurse down the whitewashed corridors. She struggled to keep up, her head swimming with each step. Finally they reached a small examining room. Mary sat on a blue vinyl table in its center, the wax hygienic paper crumpling beneath her.

  “A doctor will be by in a few minutes,” said the nurse.

  She shut the door tightly and the noise of it rang in Mary’s ears. Mary closed her eyes softly and everything became louder. Her heart thumped in her chest. Her head throbbed. She lay on the examining table and curled up, waiting for the doctor. She struggled not to pass out again. She held the sides of the table so if she did, she wouldn’t fall to the floor. Now, more than ever, she needed to protect herself.

  Eventually the doctor came into the room. Mary pulled herself up slowly and heavily. She felt as if her head wore a crown of fog.

  “No need to get up,” said the doctor, a resident. She read from Mary’s chart on the door. “Fainting spell at work?”

  Mary nodded, wondering what else was written on her chart.

  “You eat today?” asked the doctor, who laid Mary down and now pressed around her stomach, working her way lower and lower.

  “No, I haven’t had much of an appetite.”

  “How far along are you? Ten, twelve weeks?”

  The fog that had rested around Mary’s head lifted. This doctor was the first to put words to what she’d done with me.

  Quietly, Mary began to cry.

  “You didn’t know?” asked the doctor.

  Mary looked away. “No, I knew.”

  The doctor finished her exam and walked across the room. She rested Mary’s chart on a counter and began to write. Mary sat up and watched her.

  The doctor turned from her work and spoke again: “Command notification is mandated when a dependent visits the emergency room. Your husband’s already called over, asking after you. We’re required to update him on your condition.” Then she placed her hand on Mary’s arm. “I’m sorry.” The doctor stopped speaking for a moment, not sure how to go on.

  Mary wiped her eyes and set her jaw. After a few moments she began to bite her nails.

  The doctor finished writing. She walked over and in her hands she carried a thin hooked needle. Gently, she parted Mary’s hair, smoothing it down so she could see the gash, its shape a half-moon. The doctor dabbed the wound with an alcohol swab. Mary’s eyes widened, her skin stung and then everything became cool and painless.

  The doctor began with the sutures. “I know a place out in town,” she said with a voice that was lost in her work. Her face was now very close to Mary’s, furrows streaked the doctor’s forehead and her eyes trembled, her concentration holding like an outstretched arm carrying a weight. What she said next, she said slowly, each word given with the same deliberation as the needlework: “The man who does it is quick and neat.”

  “Neat?”

  “There won’t be anything to remind you of it when it’s over.”

  The doctor pulled tightly on the last suture.

  Mary winced.

  The doctor leaned back, examining her work as though she were reading a menu. Satisfied, she crossed the room and stood at a counter, where she filled out a prescription for an antibiotic. She handed over the prescription and with it another piece of paper. On it was an address, written not in a doctor’s scratch but in clean block letters for Mary.

  “They can fill that on your way out,” said the doctor. Then she looked at the other piece of paper. “I hope you’re able to do what’s right for you.”

  Mary clutched the paper in her hand and looked at the address. She knew Piney Green Road. She’d driven past it a hundred times. It was a quiet street islanded by half-vacant strip malls. It was one of those streets that had an empty and untraveled sidewalk where the grass cracked up through the pavement. A place where she’d never had a reason to stop.

  When Mary left the naval hospital, she took a cab to her car at the gym. Then she started her drive home. It was late afternoon. She had a voicemail from Eden. He was already there, waiting for her. She took a longer way back and drove by Piney Green Road, just as a detour, she told herself, just to find the address she’d been given. Then, on the way, she passed a Days Inn. The rooms were cheap. She wondered if women came there afterward to rest.

  The clinic was in one of the strip malls, in a shop front that was unoccupied on either side. When she found it, the sun was getting low. It was still open, though. Three cars were parked out front. She wondered about the cars and parked her own across the street. She reclined her seat and waited, but she didn’t know what for. Just up the block from her was the road sign. She loved the name—Piney Green—and the determined grass growing up through the pavement, trying to be in some part worthy of its namesake.

  She waited until the sun had almost set. Then the door to the clinic opened. A girl, not much younger than she, walked toward one of the three parked cars. She had long red hair and was alone. She wore plain blue sweats and under her arm she carried a pair of jeans and a blouse, clothes from before, it seemed. She walked around the side of the strip mall and threw them in a dumpster, then she climbed into her car. The girl sat there for a moment, seeming to make a call. Then she drove off in the direction of the Days Inn.

  Mary pulled out from her space. She’d need to drive past the Days Inn to get home, but she didn’t want to follow after the girl. Instead she took a back way. When she finally arrived, it was dark. Eden’s car was in the drive and the lights were on in the house.

  Eden could see nothing but the difference between light and dark. He could hear even less. Everything was very still, and his thoughts, clear. He knew exactly where he was. He thought this might be the last time he was ever awake and alone. He knew what Gabe was coming back to do. He knew when he next felt the cool alcohol swab on his side this would signal his end. He didn’t feel afraid, or much of anything. It was just something he knew. How many times had he been shot at on deployment, or how many nights had he lain awake before a patrol wondering about dying and feeling afraid, even when death was a remote thing, and now, he knew a man would soon come with a needle to end him.

  Strange, he thought, to feel so little about it.

  If that’s what Gabe was going to do, Eden wanted some say in it. He wanted that dignity. But the tap code hadn’t worked. Despite the violence of Eden’s attempts, no one had recognized it. And so it occurred to him to try something simpler. Something to show he was alive, nothing more. Slowly he clacked his teeth again: clack, clack, clack, clack, clack…clack, clack. Shave and a haircut…two bits. He kept it up, over and over. It was a jolly sort of clacking, not desperate as before. He sung it happily as if he were whistling his way through a park, or humming in the shower. />
  Then he felt a heavy shifting next to him. It was Gabe. He’d been sitting in the room this whole time. Eden struck his teeth together, clacking out the steady five-and-two rhythm, but he could feel his heart racing. The room was still dim. He could see nothing of Gabe in the light. But he could feel him. He was close, and then he leaned on Eden’s bed and reached over him.

  Eden could smell him now and he smelled clean, but in an unpleasant and fake way, like how a dog smells when it comes back from the groomers, clean but still a dog. Then Eden felt Gabe’s heavy palm on his chest. His heart pumped deep and hard. Gabe must have felt it, too. Eden was waiting for the pinprick now, the last one. He did all he could. He kept up the clacking, beating his tune as he went under, like some idiot brass quintet on a sinking ship. He wanted to think about the simple rhythm, nothing else. Not Mary, Andy or me, not the day in the Hamrin and the smell of violence mixing with the smell of pines, not the years he’d spent in this bed, and most of all not about what was coming. He just wanted the clarity of that old five-and-two rhythm. Shave and a haircut…two bits.

  Gabe’s other hand moved onto him. But it wasn’t the pinprick that came next. Gabe’s fingers drummed something out: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap…tap, tap.

  Eden stopped.

  He’d been so ready for Gabe to take him away and now he didn’t know what to do.

  Gabe had been watching the whole time. He sat on the sofa, where Mary usually sat, holding the syringe, ready to go. This one injection wouldn’t quite kill Eden, but it’d put him under for good, then, soon after and without pain, he’d fade away completely.

  Gabe came to the bedside and the needle was primed, its tip wet. He took what he believed to be a last look at Eden, who’d begun clacking his teeth again. With that look, a thought came to Gabe, clear as an idea upon waking: it’s shave and a haircut. Gabe drummed out the rhythm on Eden’s chest, giving it a try. Eden became silent. Gabe set the syringe down. He had thought Eden’s clacking was a tick from a failing brain, the synaptic electrocutions reading out along his clenched jaw. But to stop, this was a reaction to what Gabe had done—a reaction meant you were alive.