The Other Eden

by Sarah Bryant

  AFTER the first few hours of fatigued unconsciousness, I slept little that night. I didn’t dwell on the disturbing facts that had come to light that evening; instead, I was thinking about what to do next. For I had realized two things in the course of that night: first, that I wasn’t yet ready to relinquish my love for Alexander, and second, that if there was any hope of salvaging it, we had to get away from Eden. By the time the first light dissolved the darkness of the sky, I had decided that if it were in my power to arrange it, we would leave that day.

  Of all my memories of Eden, this is the one I most often return to: lying in the moth-colored light, listening to the muted rhythm of Alexander’s breathing, believing myself finally free of the past. I used to think that its potency was a result of what happened afterward, but now I’m not so certain. Until that moment, I had always allowed someone or something else to steer me, whether it was to my own good or not. I believed that the decision to leave Eden was my first adult one. I couldn’t see it for what it was: a desperate attempt to transplant my love for Alexander into a more concrete world, where the drama and uncertainty and deception that had characterized it at Eden couldn’t threaten it.

  I was twenty-one. Alexander was my first experience of love, Eden of adult life. Both were products of a wildly distorted reality. I don’t know whether our love could have survived a more mundane kind of existence, whether there was even any true love left between us. That morning, though, I believed both.

  I lived my last day with Alexander with more enthusiasm than I had most that summer. We seemed to have come to an unspoken truce. I didn’t have the energy left to speak of the past night’s trauma, and he, no doubt, lacked the desire. This is one of the things that has made me wonder whether even then, he suspected what lay ahead.

  However, that confrontation was still hours away, and we filled the ones between with the simple pleasures we had previously neglected. In the morning we played with Tasha in the shallows of the lake, then lay on the warm spit of sand in the lacy shadows of a black cypress as the sun centered itself in the sky. That afternoon we picked peaches from the orchard by the stables, then tucked Tasha, sticky and sweet, into her bed for a nap. While she slept Alexander played the piano for me. He played his own music, and I knew that every note was an appeal for forgiveness. I didn’t yet know whether I could accept it, but I felt something in me ease.

  I didn’t tell him about the tickets to Boston. I didn’t want anything to mar the brittle beauty of that day. Instead, the reminder of our recent troubles came from Mary. Though she hadn’t seemed worried when we went out in the morning, her look was dubious when the three of us came back to the house that evening. She was quiet throughout dinner, and when I got up to leave with Alexander afterward, she said, “Eleanor, I wish you would stay here tonight.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You must be tired.” Her words sounded forced, as if they were not her own.

  I looked at Alexander. His mouth had turned down into a tight frown. “Eleanor is perfectly recovered,” he said.

  “Yes, she seems to be. I don’t want anything to threaten that.”

  The two of them looked at each other, their eyes in silent conflict. It was Alexander who backed down.

  “You’d better listen to Mary,” he said.

  “But—”

  “It’s only one night.” He smiled reassuringly. “I’ll come in the morning. Sleep well, Eleanor,” Alexander said, kissing both my cheeks. He smiled tautly at Mary and then left.

  When I was sure that he was beyond hearing, I demanded, “Don’t you trust him, either?”

  Her face had collapsed into a mesh of fine lines. “Of course I do. It’s just that the doctor said—”

  “I heard what the doctor said! I can’t believe that you listened.”

  “It’s . . . it’s not that I don’t think you’re well, Eleanor—”

  “I’m not mad like my grandmother. In fact, I’m beginning to think that she wasn’t mad, either.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Maybe she was tormented by something she knew—something no one else would believe.” Mary looked up at me, but she didn’t answer. So I asked, “Who referred you to Dr. Dunham?”

  “What?” There was fear in her tone now.

  “It was Dorian, wasn’t it?”

  “I know what you think of him, but he only meant to help.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore, Mary. I’ve reserved our tickets home. Are you coming?”

  “I thought . . .” she began, and then trailed off. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Everything has changed. I don’t want to stay here anymore. If that doctor tries to stop me, I imagine there are plenty of others who can be bought.” I didn’t wait for a reply, but turned and went upstairs.

  The breeze from the open door touched my face, quelling my anger. The full moon was just rising over the tops of the live oaks. Its pale face saddened me inexplicably; despite the close warmth of the night, I shivered. I moved away from the window, took off my dress, and wrapped myself in my red dressing gown, buttoning it right up to the neck. Its touch was like human skin, familiar and comforting.

  Despite my previous sleepless night, I wasn’t at all tired. I paced the room for several minutes, then sat down at the dressing table, rummaged in one of the bottom drawers, and located the packet of tobacco and rolling papers I had hidden there months before. Smoking was a habit I had never really embraced and had completely given up when I moved to Eden, as Mary wouldn’t abide it. Now, though, I longed for the tobacco’s rush of optimism. I lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  Soon enough I was pacing again, my former unease growing. It was only when I heard Mary calling to Colette along the corridor below that I realized she might well be listening to my anxious footsteps. I dragged the armchair out onto the gallery and rolled another cigarette by the light of the climbing moon.

  I missed Alexander with an uneasiness that threatened to flower into panic. I knew that I would never sleep that night without his reassuring presence. My anger at Mary began to surface again: after all, Eden was my house, she had no right to hold me prisoner. After a moment I gathered my resolve, stubbed out my third cigarette, and opened the door.

  Mary sat in a chair on the stair landing, knitting. It was a moment before I regained enough composure to ask her, “What are you doing?”

  “I thought you might try to leave,” she answered with a touch of smugness.

  “I’m not a child, Mary. I can decide for myself when to come and go.”

  “I can’t let you leave, Eleanor.”

  “For God’s sake! It’s my mind, and I promise you that there’s nothing wrong with it!”

  “Of course not,” she said quickly. “But you had such a day yesterday—you must give yourself time to recover.”

  “Keeping me from Alexander isn’t going to help.”

  “He could have stayed here if it meant that much to him.”

  The insinuation in her words was quite clear. I began to push past her, but she caught my wrist in a surprisingly strong grasp.

  “I can’t let you leave,” she repeated, no longer meeting my eyes. I knew that she would wrestle me back to my room if she had to, and that she was quite likely capable, given the little sleep and food I’d had lately.

  Keeping my eyes on her face, I pulled my arm free. I turned to go back to my room, but she followed me. “You don’t need to watch me,” I said bitterly, damning the day I’d asked her to come to Eden.

  Her eyes flickered over to the open door, the chair on the gallery. “Perhaps you ought to take some medicine,” she said.

  “Hasn’t that done enough damage?”

  “I only meant a little bit. To help you sleep.”

  Without waiting for me to answer, she took a bottle from her pocket. It wasn’t my own chloral, but a bottle of pills. She shook two of them onto her palm and proffered them to me. I knew she wouldn’t leave until I swallowed them. I put the bitter p
ills on my tongue, took the water glass from the bedside table, and swallowed a mouthful.

  When I had set the glass back on the table, she embraced me and kissed my cheek.

  “Everything’s going to be all right, Eleanor,” she said.

  I smiled halfheartedly. She turned toward the door. Before shutting it she said, “I’ll be right outside if you need anything.” I forced another smile, and finally she left me alone.

  I waited until I heard her settle in her chair, then spat the pills out again. They had largely disintegrated, but there was little else to be done. I went back to the bed and lay down, feeling sick and desolate. The sheets were still twisted and rippled with the patterns of the past night. I pressed my face into the pillow where Alexander had lain. It had kept a trace of his smell; I turned over on my side, hugging it to my body as if it could dilute my fears, or lessen the ache of my unresolved feelings for him.

  My sleepless night and active day must have caught up with me then, or perhaps some of Mary’s medicine had been absorbed into my system, for after a time I drifted into a fitful doze.

  Alexander and I knelt on the floor of the ballroom. Cold, grey light filtered onto us. Alexander wore the dark suit that he had worn to the costume ball; I wore Eve’s wedding dress. We looked at each other for a time without speaking, and then I leaned over, kissed his cheek, stood up, and said, “Good-bye.”

  I left the ballroom through another open door and, without looking back, stepped into black nothingness. There was a sensation of rapid movement, and then I found myself in the garden with the boy flautist. I stood above the ice pane set into the ground, looking at the gashed white face beneath it. It seemed I stood there a long time, without thought or emotion, just looking.

  In the moments before I awakened, the face changed. It grew younger and younger, until it was the face of a child. For a moment I thought it was mine; then I saw the auburn hair, the wasted look of one who has barely survived a deadly illness.

  TEN

  I awakened with Tasha’s name on my lips, and I knew there was no time to lose. I didn’t dare risk Mary’s still being awake; instead, I slipped on a pair of sandals and went out onto the gallery.

  Leaning over the balustrade, I made out the gnarled fingers of a wisteria vine twined around the pillar below. I swung over the railing and felt around with one foot for the vine. There was a giddy moment when I could not find a foothold, but once I located one, it wasn’t difficult to ease myself downward. Then I ran around the house and down the path through the topiary garden to the lake’s edge.

  The light from Alexander’s study window shone through the trees. When I reached it, though, I found that the room was empty. I ran around to the front door and flung it open, calling his name and Tasha’s. There was no answer. My perfunctory search confirmed what I already knew: Tasha’s bed was rumpled but vacant, Alexander’s untouched. There was no clue as to where either of them had gone, but I suppose in my heart I had known all along where I would find them.

  My compulsion was to make a straight line for the house on the hill, but I retained enough composure to realize that this was folly. I would never find my way in time to help them, if I found it at all. Fighting panic, I hurried back to Eden, then around the house to the driveway. The car was parked in the shadows of the magnolia. I knew that Jean-Pierre left the key in the ignition; I only hoped that I could start it on the first try. Hardly breathing, I put the car in gear, turned the key and pressed the switch. I almost didn’t believe it when the engine coughed into life. As I pulled forward, I could see shadows moving behind the house’s lit windows in the rearview mirror; and then the light was gone.

  I had only a rudimentary grasp of driving, but by the time I reached the turnoff for the house on the hill, I had managed to shift gears and speed up. Moonlight flickered still between the trees, but the weather had begun to change. Earlier, when I had fallen asleep, the sky had been clear. Now tattered clouds skittered across it like dry leaves.

  Lightning flickered on the horizon as I pulled up in front of the dark house. After a moment a rumble of thunder answered it. Despite the wind gathering in the trees, the air was close and stale. The leaves of the oaks by the side of the house fretted like anxious hands, their silvery undersides flashing in the intermittent patches of moonlight. My grandfather had told me once that a storm is coming when the leaves show their backs.

  I stood in the long, dew-wet grass, trying to gather the courage to face the dark rooms alone. As if answering this thought, the stormy cowl shifted from the face of the moon. It shone clearly for a long moment, dragging me from my torpor.

  Drawing a deep breath of the stagnant air, I moved toward the doorway. As I pushed through the long, damp grass, the strap of one sandal snagged on something and broke. I took both shoes off, then stood staring at my bare feet. In the dark, the jacquard of the dressing gown took on a greater contrast, its vines and tendrils black against the dusky red. With a sinking heart, I crossed the last few feet to the front door, and took a few tentative steps into the room beyond.

  Somebody had closed the curtains and shutters after the party. I moved carefully, trailing a hand along the wall to my left, my eyes straining into the insufficient light. Gradually the furniture became lighter patches, the doorways darker. I didn’t allow myself to look at anything more than a few feet away. I knew that if I did, my mind would begin to make things of the shadows that I didn’t want to see.

  In this way I crept to the antechamber of the ballroom. I put my hand on the doorknob and let it rest there for a moment. I suppose a part of me had expected to hear music, but the house retained its recalcitrant silence. With great effort I broke through the spell of inertia that had settled on me for the second time, and turned the knob.

  The little light left in the sky shone softly through the glass doors, illuminating the marble floor. One of them was ajar. The piano hulked against its muted light, and I kept as far from it as I could.

  The rose garden lay bleak and mute under the cloud-covered sky. The only movement was the rippling of the long grass in the spasmodic gusts of wind, the only sound its rasp against the broken stone of the bench and fountain. I walked past these, toward the ivy-covered door in the wall. This door, too, was open.

  I pushed through the ivy into the round garden beyond. But for the stone flautist, it was empty. By the entrance to the maze I stopped, trying to remember the pattern that Alexander had explained to me. That sunny afternoon seemed years rather than weeks in the past. I knew that if something happened, it could be days before anyone thought to search here. I also knew that looking for Tasha and Alexander here was little better than a whim. In the end, though, my fear for their safety won over my trepidation.

  Before entering the maze, I filled my pockets with the limp petals of overblown roses; I dropped them every few steps. A pervading sense of claustrophobia descended as I made the first turn among the high hedges. I kept my eyes on the path ahead and concentrated on my rose-petal trail. I made my way slowly, counting turns, and finally came to the place where I thought the first statue ought to be. Rounding the corner, I came up against a solid wall of branches.

  For a moment I could only stare at it. Then I turned to follow the rose-petal path back the way I had come, just in time to see the last pale snips twirling away on a gust of wind. It was too much. I ran blindly after the wayward petals, as if catching them could save me. I followed them down a narrow corridor, half-aware of the folly but too afraid to care, and by luck or fate I stumbled up against Diana’s stone legs.

  For a few minutes I clung to the statue and sobbed, oblivious to the rising wind, the thunder rolling ever closer, or the pinkish flickers of lightning behind the recumbent clouds. Finally, awareness of my predicament broke through the primitive fear. I pulled myself together as best I could and forced myself to think of what Alexander had said about the pattern. The last part of his explanation, at least, was solid in my mind: at the clearings, I had to return to the begin
ning of the sequence.

  I looked up at Diana’s face; her stone composure helped me to compose myself. More of the pattern came back to me, then. It began with two right turns and one left, and I was fairly certain that this was meant to be repeated, then reversed. I couldn’t remember whether I had followed the reversal once or twice on my first attempt. Realizing that there was no way to tell except to try it, I made my way out of Diana’s clearing and into the first part of the sequence. I decided to try the reversal twice, and almost burst into tears again from pure relief when I found myself in another clearing with a statue.

  Returning confidence cleared my head faster than any amount of willpower. With only two more wrong turns I had established the pattern, and soon I was twisting my way through the narrow evergreen alleys at a fair pace. Nevertheless, it seemed that hours had passed before the path finally opened out into the oblong clearing with its dead tree.

  Beside the tree was a darker shadow. I moved toward it cautiously, until I could see that it was not Dorian but Alexander. I ran toward him then, but when I saw what he was holding I stopped short. In his arms, Tasha lay still and pale. He was rocking her gently, blank-faced, looking at nothing.

  I put a hand on Alexander’s shoulder. He did not start or pull away, but covered it with one of his own, as cold as the fear balling in my stomach. He turned to me, and there was no surprise on his face, only implacable acceptance.

  “I hoped that you wouldn’t come,” he said.

  “But you knew that I would.” I moved his arms gently aside and bent down to put an ear to the child’s chest. Her heart was still beating, and though her breathing was rapid and shallow, it was regular. I sat back and looked at Alexander.

  “Do you know how she came to be here?”

  He shrugged. “I can imagine.”

  “She’s your daughter, isn’t she, Alexander?”

  He turned his face from me.

  “For Christ’s sake, how many times do I have to ask for the truth?”