Eden

by Andrea Kleine

  When we heard Larry’s voice in the distance it didn’t bother them at first. It was just someone else in the woods. Maybe a hunter or a hiker. They looked in the direction the voice came from but didn’t stop walking. I tried to keep up with them. I tried not to hear anything. But eventually I couldn’t walk anymore.

  The boys noticed and turned around and stared at me. “What’s wrong?” one of them asked at a normal volume.

  “That’s the guy,” I said in a whisper. “The guy who kidnapped me.”

  They stared at me. And the realization washed over them that I wasn’t playing a game. That it wasn’t a bunch of bullies who tied me up as a joke. They noticed that my bra was wet and dirty and that I wasn’t wearing shoes and that I was shaking.

  Larry shouted something. I turned in the direction of his voice and saw him in the distance, his jacket flickering through the tree trunks as he ran up a dry creek.

  The boys dropped their stuff and ran.

  And there I was. I thought I would follow the boys back to their house, their house that couldn’t be that far away. They had walked here. They could run home. And I could have followed them. We all could have made it. Larry wouldn’t have caught us all. We had a good start. He was a safe distance away. It would’ve been hard for him to catch up to us. But I couldn’t run.

  I couldn’t stand still either. I ran back into the woods. Circling away from Larry, who was coming up the creek. Away from the boys running toward home. Back into the woods. Toward the way I had come. Back to the tree that held me. To Eden.

  19

  I had to tell Noreen what the play was really about.

  Noreen knew that I hadn’t seen or spoken to Eden since I left for college, but I never told her about Larry. I think, in her social-worker head, she had decided that Eden was probably mentally ill. She brought it up and I didn’t correct her. She once said, “That, or there’s something she absolutely will not forgive your parents for.” Since I didn’t talk about Eden, Noreen rarely mentioned her. But suddenly she was intrigued by this play. She asked to see the video of the old production. I stayed in the bedroom working on my laptop with my headphones on while she watched it. When it ended she came and stood in the bedroom doorway. “That was kind of violent,” she said. “It was pretty disturbing.”

  She rambled on about why she thought it got positive reviews. Sure, people held it up as a kind of feminist manifesto, but they were reacting to the sexual violence. She felt I was playing into their porn fantasies of watching two women go at it. It was both a cat fight and two girls fucking. She said it played right into straight-male fantasies about lesbians. “And then of course one basically dies in the end, and the other is made to suffer—the textbook cliché in mainstream media where you have to be punished for being gay, either by death or desexualization.”

  Noreen paused and looked down at her feet. I was trying to swallow and lubricate my throat so I could say something in my defense.

  “But then,” Noreen said, “I have to admit, it was compelling. It was sort of riveting. It was so violent, and yet it was a turn-on, and I wondered why I was getting turned on by these two people tied up together and trying to bite through the ropes or bite through each other. It was disturbing but I wanted to know what was going to happen. It kind of hooks you. And I feel disturbed that it hooked me.”

  Noreen was still standing in the doorway. “I guess I was surprised you wrote it,” she said. “It’s nothing like your other plays.”

  I hadn’t said anything in a long time, so I cleared my throat and said, “Yeah, I guess not.”

  Noreen came over and sat down next to me on the bed. I pushed my laptop aside. Noreen looked down at her hands and picked at her nails. “But how did you come up with that? What made you write it?” She peered up at me with a look on her face that I knew meant she loved me, that she wanted to know more about me, she wanted to excavate me so she could love me more. “Was it something to do with Eden?”

  It was then that I told Noreen what happened.

  Noreen fluctuated between shock, being upset with me for never telling her, and putting on her professional social-worker hat and trying to control her reaction. But she couldn’t keep it together. She started crying hysterically. I put my arms around her and stroked her back. I tried to calm her. I so wanted her to stop crying that I sort of brushed it all off like the kidnapping wasn’t that serious a thing. She became confused and pushed me away. “Oh my god,” she said. “Are you fucking kidding me? Are you making this all up?” It was an accusation and a plea. I almost wanted to lie to her. But I said it was all true. I said she could call my parents and confirm it with them. That made her cry more. Noreen had met my parents, had gone down to visit them with me, had looked through old photo albums of me and Eden as kids, and no one had ever mentioned it. “You are all so incredibly fucked up!” she said.

  When we went to sleep that night, Noreen turned to me and said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” I didn’t know what to say in response. I glanced down at the sheets. “Do you feel safe with me?” she asked. I said I did. Of course I did. “But why did you never tell me about it?” I said I never talked to anyone about it, and Noreen said, “But I’m not just anyone.”

  Noreen insisted I see a therapist. I tried to say I really couldn’t afford it, but Noreen called around and got me a referral to someone who would let me slide to the bottom end of the sliding scale and so I had no excuse not to go.

  The therapist’s name was Janet. She had an office on the Upper West Side that was a hellishly long subway ride from our apartment. I was buzzed into a waiting room that whirred with white-noise machines. Inside her office, Janet sat in a knockoff Eames chair and I sat opposite her. Between us was the ottoman that matched her chair, and after she sat down she slipped off her shoes and propped up her stocking feet. Janet was probably sixty. She had short sensible hair and glasses. She asked me how I knew Noreen, and I laughed and said, “She’s my girlfriend.” Janet chuckled a bit and said, “Good thing I don’t know her very well.”

  A silence settled in, and after I missed my chance to bring things up on my own, Janet asked me why I was here.

  “It was actually Noreen’s idea,” I said.

  “Why did she want you to come?”

  I never told many people about what happened because I never knew where to start. The bus station? My dad forgetting to pick us up? Eden? I’d have to explain my whole family situation. I’d have to draw out the family tree and explain the intricacies of everyone’s relationships. It was too much to talk about, which is why I wrote a play with hardly any words in it. I thought it was clear. It felt clear to me. It was only Noreen who was confused and wanted it explained and spelled out. I wasn’t sure what to make of her critique before I told her. It seemed she didn’t want to like the play but did so only begrudgingly, and if someone else had written it, she wouldn’t have liked it at all. She would have preferred I write a different play about what happened. And this was the play she wanted me to write: a two-character drama with a therapist in which I explain myself, recount my experiences, sob or punch a pillow, and somehow, through this exposition, then expulsion, I find relief and let go and everything is all right in the end. I hated that kind of resolution. Everything is not all right in the end. In the end, your bruises become scars and they make you who you are. This kind of erasure of the past as therapy disturbed me. It angered me. My trauma was my trauma. Larry was mine. He was mine and Eden’s. I did not see the purpose of performing him to Noreen’s standards, of processing him the way she thought I should.

  I said something like that to Janet. She said, “You sound angry.”

  “Why can’t I be angry?”

  “You can be angry,” Janet said.

  We didn’t say anything for a moment. I wondered how much time was left, but the clock was positioned so that only Janet could see it.

  “Survival can be hard for other people to understand,” Janet said. “Often people don’t und
erstand that it’s an ongoing process. They think it begins and ends with the trauma.” Janet sat up in her chair and pulled her feet off the ottoman and placed them on the floor. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “People automatically put themselves in your position and wonder what they would have done. If they would’ve gotten into the truck. If they would’ve used the pay phone.”

  “I know we should’ve called!” I snapped at her. I wasn’t sobbing. I wouldn’t sob. I wouldn’t play this game. This was not my play. “I know we shouldn’t have gotten in the truck. But we got out of there. And we were fine.”

  20

  I ran back. I found the trees. Eden wasn’t there.

  I turned around in place. In all directions the woods looked the same.

  I knew I shouldn’t stay in the same place too long. I knew I shouldn’t yell for Eden. I didn’t know which way Larry would come from. I didn’t know these woods. I didn’t know any woods except the shortcut through the trees behind my dad’s house to the swimming pool at The Pines.

  I saw the glint of Larry’s truck and ran over to it. I crouched down when I got close, in case he was there. He wasn’t there. But he was close. And he would be here soon.

  Eden was lying down in the back of the truck. She looked asleep. For a second I froze, thinking she could be dead. He could have killed her and then gone back for me.

  I reached for her foot. I touched it, then wrapped my hand around her ankle. She felt cold, but we were cold because we had been in the woods for almost two days. I squeezed her ankle. “Eden,” I said quietly, “wake up.”

  I pulled on her leg. Larry hadn’t tied her up. Maybe he could see that Eden was tired and weak. Maybe he made something up and told Eden he was taking us home, but she should know not to believe him. “Eden,” I said. I grabbed both her ankles and pulled, dragging her out of the truck. I got her to the edge of the truck bed and then pulled her arms to make her sit up. I put my arm around her and put her feet on the ground. She tripped and stumbled to her hands and knees. I helped her get back up. I said, “Come on.” I took her hand. I didn’t know which way to go at first. I thought about finding our pants and putting them on. At least our shoes. I wondered where our backpacks were, if they were still in the back of Larry’s truck and I didn’t think to grab them and I wondered if the school would charge us for losing our textbooks. Maybe we could try to drive the truck since Eden knew how to drive. She could drive if she would only snap out of her zombie thing. I looked in the driver’s window to see if the key was inside, but I couldn’t quite tell. I ran around to the other side and looked in. I don’t know why I didn’t think to open the door but I didn’t. I didn’t see the key. My heart was pounding in my chest. It was so loud and so strong I thought it must be pushing through my ribs. I picked up Eden’s hand again. We ran. We ran through the woods. Branches scratched our skin. I thought we could run faster if we didn’t hold hands, but when I let go, Eden grabbed my wrist and she wouldn’t let go, so we ran awkwardly and not very fast. And everything hurt under our bare feet. I didn’t know where to go or how far. I told myself, Just keep going.

  I didn’t know where Larry had taken us. He could have taken us to a state park and we could be running in these woods forever, until dark, when we would have to stop and we couldn’t make a campfire out of two rocks or two sticks because then he could find us. At one point Eden stepped on something and yelled out in pain and I told her to shut up and pulled on her arm so hard she yelled again, but then she shut up and we kept running.

  Abruptly the woods ended and we were on a lawn. The woods had spit us out somewhere. Vomited us up. The trees had said, Enough of you. Go back somewhere. Go somewhere else. Eden and I slowed down out of shock. Shock at the manicured lawn that was a neighbor to the woods. We stopped. But only for a second. We were too easily seen here. We stuck out. No one was around. Larry could be right behind us and drag us back into the woods and we would be swallowed alive and never get out. We ran.

  There was a building on the far side of the lawn. I didn’t know what it was. An office park. A private school. A small shopping mall. The parking lot was full of cars but they all looked dead. People had parked their cars here and then vanished. Got on a spaceship and blasted off to a new colony. It felt like there were no people left in the world. Like the entire world had been wiped out by a plague while we were in the woods.

  I didn’t know if anyone was in the building because its windows were all tinted like sunglasses. I thought, At least it will be warm inside. At least the floor will be smooth. At least there will be a bathroom and a phone. The doors are glass so if they are locked we can break them. And who cares if it sets off an alarm because then the police will come. Larry won’t come inside if the alarm is going off.

  The door drifted open in my hand. Easily. Without any weight to it. Without requiring any heft from me. There were people inside milling around. It was like an ant farm. A bunch of bugs exposed going about their lives under a rock. A pretty receptionist in pristine clothes picked up a phone to call security to get us out of there. Two wet, dirty, scratched-up, muddy, bloody girls in their bras and underwear. Me with my face beat up. Eden with her headphones still around her neck. By then Eden has begun to shake uncontrollably. And to gasp. And to not really breathe well. They probably think she is epileptic. Or has some kind of disability. Or is on drugs. We are both out of breath. I pull Eden over to the receptionist’s desk. I put my hand on the counter. My hand that still doesn’t feel right. And I start screaming something.

  I think I just scream.

  21

  I woke up in a Metro station. I had fallen asleep again. My mouth tasted horrible. I was still clutching my wet clothes, still wearing the clothes Layla had given me at her apartment. I wormed my arms into my musty jacket and left my folded wet jeans on the bench. I studied the map. A cleaning person came by. I asked him what train line I was on.

  Noreen’s address was in my phone. I figured out the station nearest to it. Her apartment building was much nicer than any of our old ones; it had a wide front stoop and her last name was etched into a tiny gold plaque over the doorbell. I pressed the bell with my thumb.

  It was still dark out. I slid down to my ass in the corner of her front door. I think I fell asleep there. I remember someone giving me a pillow.

  I had slept on a couch in a living room. My neck hurt. Soft noises drifted from the other side of the coffee table. A gentle tapping. I pressed my hands into the couch cushions and pushed myself up to sit. A baby was playing on the floor with plastic bricks. I think she was a girl. She paused and looked at me, determining if I was a friend. She held up a blue brick and passed it to me. I took it and rested it on the couch. She smiled and went back to her sorting. She banged two bricks together, enjoying their sound, the simple pleasure from action and result. She looked over her shoulder at me. I offered her the blue brick. She laughed and gurgled. She scooted closer to me and gladly took it back. I wondered where I was.

  “Okay, sweetie,” someone sang. Noreen’s wife walked into the room. I had met her only once before. She had changed her hair. When I’d first met her she had given me the cold cursory survey one gives a partner’s ex. Don’t even think of coming back here, the look said. You hurt her enough. I can’t believe she ever loved you. But now (Nikki, I think her name was) she swooped in and scooped up her daughter and talked about me in the third person with an air of friendly inclusiveness. “Were you playing bricks with Hope? Is that what you were doing? Were you sharing bricks with your new friend?” Nikki brushed the girl’s baby-fine hair off her face. “Bathroom’s down the hall if you need it,” she said, not looking at me.

  I staggered down the hall. I felt like shit.

  The bathroom was painted in seascape gray with tiny new hexagonal tiles made to look antique. There was a plastic basket of bath toys shoved against the wall. I sat down on the toilet and peed. A rubber ducky greeted me hello with a garish lipstick smile from a corner of the ba
thtub. A froggy hooded towel stared at me with bulbous eyes. Why were these things made for children? They were frightening. They looked dead.

  I couldn’t quite remember what had happened last night, the order of what had happened, or how I got here. I didn’t think I smelled like sex. I didn’t think I’d had sex with Layla or with Sam. I vaguely recalled being on the bed. I would’ve remembered if I had had sex with Sam because I hadn’t slept with a man for several years, since college, so I couldn’t summon up what it would feel like afterward. Would there be fluids if he had used a condom? Would it feel the same inside afterward? Would my cavities feel different? It would feel a little raw, I thought. It would sting when I pissed. But I’ve had other things inside me. What’s the difference? The oozy possibility of life? Of putting something in your body that you can’t get out?

  I wiped myself with toilet paper. Nothing felt different. Nothing looked different. Nothing had happened. We drank and they left. That was it.

  I washed my hands and face. I hesitated, but then thought, Fuck it, and borrowed someone’s toothbrush and brushed my teeth. I used some fancy face and hand cream that smelled like lemon cake. I ran my fingers through my hair and slicked it in place with water. I was as presentable as I usually was.

  When I came out of the bathroom I heard the front door shut. Noreen was at the end of the hallway. She walked toward me. “I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse. She put her hand on my shoulder, looked me straight in the eye, and asked if I was okay. I looked at the floor and Noreen ducked her head under mine to make me look at her. “I’m okay,” I said.