Eden

by Andrea Kleine

  Zara told me she had checked around for Eden anyway, in case I wanted information later, and couldn’t find anything. “You could pay for a background check but it will probably only give you her birthday,” Zara said. “On that note, I don’t think she’s dead.”

  We said goodbye. I called one of the numbers Zara found.

  “Hel-lo!” I was startled by the massive cheeriness with which the person answered, as if he were the last person in the world who actually enjoyed talking on the phone. I was a little dumbfounded and unsure of what to say. I felt like the inexperienced telemarketer I had been for one particularly dreadful week at a temp job. “Hi,” I stumbled. I cleared my throat. “I’m looking for someone named Eric.”

  “I happen to be someone named Eric.”

  His merry charm relaxed me a bit.

  “Did you used to teach at a boarding school in Pennsylvania?”

  “In the very distant dream of decades past, I did indeed teach at a school in Pennsylvania. Did I just win a sweepstakes? Or are you checking things off a list in order to steal my identity? Do you also know my favorite color and the name of my childhood pet?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a former student? If so, I’m afraid that take-home exam is long overdue.”

  “No, but my sister was.”

  “Oh! Who was your sister?”

  “Her name is Eden. I’m trying to get in touch with her.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Uh . . . hang on one sec.” I heard footsteps, as though he was walking away from something or someone, or changing rooms. Retreating somewhere. He spoke more quietly and asked how I got his number. I said I found it online and took a chance. “Huh,” he said. I said I would’ve emailed but I didn’t have his email address. He said he didn’t email all that much. He was pretty private with technology. He wasn’t terribly interested in the Internet. “It had a lot of potential in the beginning,” he said, trying to pick up his perkiness again, “but it turned into the wrong kind of potential.” He chuckled nervously. “Sounds like a lot of paranoid anarchistic jargon, I suppose.” I heard him take a slurp of something. “But I’m rather glad, for instance, that I am not a teacher now, with all these consumer reviews posted in public. Back at that school . . . let’s just say they fired me, although I don’t recall there being anything felonious that precipitated it. I didn’t think I was doing anything dramatic, but I guess somebody did. If that happened today, I would be in a virtual stockade, which wouldn’t be all that virtual because it would render my reality, my nonvirtual reality, quite impotent and infirm,” he said. “Ha.”

  There was a pause.

  I said, “Then you lived with Eden, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “After that imbroglio at the school, I had a group of very dedicated students who elected to keep me in their lives. We outgrew what I could provide as accommodations, so we all moved down to that rotted farm in Virginia. I can’t remember whose idea that was. Maybe Eden’s. You know, we were just sweet young people who thought we could outcalculate society in our search for . . . I’m not entirely sure what it was we were searching for. I think it was authenticity. It had nothing to do with politics. Hmm, I take that back. It was political. Our existence is always political, and we are always at the hands of capitalistic creeps bigger and better resourced than ourselves. But it’s a lovely dream, isn’t it? Trying to form a more perfect union. A vegan, environmentalist union of equals dedicated to liberal, freewheeling intellectual pursuits. I mean, who wouldn’t want to do that? I think we were lucky to have had it for the little time we did. Now? Jeez. We live in a world with such narrow, unisystemic thinking. Such corporate, monopolistic ideology. Those were some good times, though. Some galactic fantastic times. It’s such a blur now. Youth is like that. And then suddenly, bing, it’s over and everything scatters.”

  He paused his babble-a-thon. “So, you’re Eden’s sister?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m trying to find her. We sort of lost touch.”

  “Right. So you must be Hope.”

  My throat tightened. I felt sweaty and pushed the sleeping bag off of me. They could still be together after all these years. Eden could be there with him, wherever he was, right now.

  “You’re Hope,” he said. “The little sister. The playwright in New York. And you were also a witness to my boxing demise at the hands of your father.”

  “Yes,” I said, suddenly confused, perhaps confused about who I really was. As though the situation were reversed and he had called me.

  Eric took a deep breath and let it out. “I can’t exactly go on without knowing specifically what you want. The great story swivels on the pin of my personal compass of ethics.”

  “Okay,” I said. There was an awkward silence while I waited for him to ask me questions, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted elocution. “I need to find her,” I said. “My mom died and I need to get in touch with her. It’s actually about a legal matter. Not about my mom, about something else.” I was stammering. He said, “Hmm.” Maybe he didn’t believe me, or maybe he did and was trying to decide if this was a good enough reason to give me what I wanted.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  He slurped on whatever it was he was drinking. He swallowed. “Eden is a tricky character. Angry, intelligent, mesmerizing, beautiful, that’s how she walked into my classroom. She had the gravity of a war veteran and she was only a teenager.”

  “Were you and Eden lovers?”

  “We were. But then, like most romantic partnerships, we plateaued. Her interest in me waned. I still loved her when we were on the fritz. You know, the usual. I thought we could patch things up. I thought we still loved each other.”

  “So she broke up with you and left? And moved out? Do you know where she went?”

  “Okay,” Eric said. “This is a lot for me to process.” He took a deep breath. “I admit I’m not prepared. And I feel like I’m winging this. I’ll tell you the whole kit and caboodle, although I’m not sure if I should. Partly from my own feelings of loyalty and guilt, and partly out of consideration for you and your feelings, neither of which I know very well, or at all.” He took another good breath.

  “I know everything that happened to you,” he said. “Eden told me. At first she just told me the journalistic facts. Then, when we left the farm and it was just the two of us trying to figure out our lives, that’s when things imploded. There was a certain barrier, a certain boundary between us, keeping us apart, or keeping her apart from me. I craved a closeness she didn’t want to have. And part of that had to do with you, Hope.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, I didn’t have a great relationship with my parents. And I regretted my lack of interest in my own family. But your family seemed eclectic and interesting and kind of cool, even your dad, who I’m going to assume doesn’t punch everyone he happens to be introduced to. I didn’t know why Eden had cut you all off. I couldn’t fathom the reason. I finally comprehended it on the last day we were together, the day our interpersonal morass turned into an all-night, heartbreaking, breakup conversation that left us both strung out from tears shed. I was trying to rescue Eden with my antiquated, patriarchal, paternalistic I-don’t-know-what. And Eden couldn’t stand being rescued. She didn’t need my rescuing. But she needed yours that day in the woods. And she couldn’t live with that.”

  Even if I wanted to answer him, even if I wanted to say something, I couldn’t. I never told Noreen that detail. I hadn’t told Janet the therapist. I didn’t remember if it was in the police file the DA had given me. I might not have ever told anyone. I was pretty sure I hadn’t.

  Eric took a big breath.

  “You went back for her. You found her and pulled her out of the truck and got her out of there. Without you, she would have probably ended up a bunch of body parts in a ditch somewhere, decomposing in a creek.”

  Eric stopped talking. He was finally quiet. And I knew he would be until I said something. Until I relie
ved him of this burden of knowing. Eden had told him everything. He knew everything about me. More than Noreen ever knew. More than my parents.

  “Hello?” Eric asked softly to make sure I was still there.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Eden’s in Santa Cruz,” he said. “She’s been out there a while. She used to work at the university out there. I don’t know if she still does. That’s about all I know. I’m sorry.”

  I sat up and pressed my forehead against the rear window. It was cool and damp.

  “Why are you talking to me?” I asked.

  He coughed, and something about his cough was tender. I thought he might cry. “I guess I still want her to love me. Call me a sap.” He coughed at his sentimentality and tried to rake it away. “I understand the desire to find your sister. I don’t have a sister, but if one came looking for me, I would want her to find me. I don’t know if that’s true for Eden. I don’t know what answers are out there for you. But maybe that’s not important. Maybe it’s not about the answer, or even the question. Maybe for you it’s about the journey.” He coughed again and I thought he was trying to keep himself from choking up. As if my journey reminded him of what he did not have, of what he’d lost, of all the people in his life that he could no longer hold or even talk to on the phone. “I don’t know what you hope to find, Hope. I don’t know if Eden will talk to you. And if she does, it’ll probably be what you already know. Her road is nothing you couldn’t imagine yourself.”

  My phone beeped, and when I pulled it away from my ear to look at it, he had hung up.

  25

  The Camper made it as far as Arizona. I was in a youth hostel campground when it passed away during the night. The next morning it refused to start. I turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened.

  I went into the clubhouse building where the free breakfast was already aflutter. Everyone looked to be college students or twenty-somethings. I was the oldest one there except for an Australian family of four. The father had taken his daughters out of school to see the world. “We are going once around the globe,” he said. “Horizontally. Then we’ll go home for a few years, get a job again, make some money, put some away, and next time we’ll do it vertically. That’ll be a mind-opener. Because we always think of ‘cross.’ Cross-country. Across the sea. We never think of up and down. Above and below. Pole to pole. North to south. Winter to summer. Think about it,” he said. His daughters looked miserable. They just wanted to go home.

  I poked my head into the kitchen and said my car was dead. I asked if I could leave it for a week. I said I had to get to California but would come back for it. “It probably needs a new starter,” I said. “And it’s so old the part will probably have to be ordered.” They said sure. The head kitchen girl walked out with me and announced to the dining room, “Hey, can some people with upper-body strength help her roll her van to the back lot?” The Aussie dad and a couple of guys helped me out. “Don’t make them like this anymore, do they?” the Aussie said.

  Back inside, I drank coffee and made peanut butter sandwiches to take with me. Everyone did this. They unfolded and peeled open napkins and wrapped up the food. One guy fished a plastic bread bag out of the garbage and reused that.

  I asked one of the guys who’d helped me move The Camper if he knew where the nearest bus station was. He said he didn’t. He asked where I was headed, and I said Santa Cruz. He said he was heading to Baja, but “those two girls are headed to San Francisco and they could maybe drop you. They have a driveaway.”

  My travel companions were a young queer couple, one femme and one maybe trans. They took one look at me and said, “Sure, climb aboard.” One of them was short and punky and from Switzerland and could speak six languages, but “none of them with good fluency.” The Swiss one used to be addicted to heroin and came here to get away from it all. “Switz is small. You run into the same people all over again, just in circles. I needed to be far from that. I needed to break from it.” The girlfriend was pale with long, raggedy blonde hair. “She’s from Seattle. She’s very West Coast,” the Swiss one said. “Very interested in astrology. She can tell fortunes.”

  The Seattle blonde turned around in her seat and smiled dreamily at me. “Tell me your birthday,” she said. “And the time you were born. And where.” When I told her, she leafed through her dog-eared paperback ephemeris to find my chart. “You’re a little older than us,” she said, “so your outer planets are different. The outer planets move slowly; they are more generational. You have Jupiter in your first house. People think you are lucky, and you are lucky. You’re a risk taker. Sometimes you feel unsettled. You have a great sense of self, even if sometimes you forget your own power. But you have the ruby slippers. Just gotta look down at your own feet.” I smiled at her, and she smiled back from behind windblown pieces of her pale, stringy, half-dreadlocked hair. I was unsure if I believed any of it. Suriya was into astrology and auras and spiritual vibrations. I asked the blonde if there was any way to change your sign or your astrology. I said, “I can’t believe that who I am is set in stone based on the day and time and place I was born.” “But isn’t it anyway?” she asked.

  We made it past Los Angeles and spent the night sleeping on the floor of a yoga studio outside of San Luis Obispo, the deal being we had to wake up early and mop the floor with essential oils before the first yogis arrived in the morning. We continued up the coast and my companions dropped me off in Santa Cruz, near the ocean. It seemed to be the main drag in town. “There’s a bus stop across the street,” the blonde pointed out. I hugged them both and thanked them. “This is great,” they said. “Now we’ll go up Highway 1. It’ll be pretty.”

  I watched them drive off. They were so young. Driving a car that wasn’t theirs, that they got to use for free. The blonde smiled and stretched her torso out of the window to wildly wave goodbye. Then she sat back down and put her bare feet up on the dashboard. Taking off with her European girlfriend/boyfriend with the mischievous grin, whose short spiky hair looked magically great though neither of them had showered for days. They had only two backpacks, a purse, a little money, a little weed, and vegan sandwich wraps pilfered from the yoga studio. They were young and together and didn’t know each other very well, but were sure they were very much in love. They cared only about getting to the next place they wanted to go.

  I watched their car disappear, heading north.

  I thought, I’m not young anymore.

  I walked to the bus stop and studied the schedule and the route map. I noticed the area code of the bus company’s phone number. I opened my bag and pulled out my dad’s phone bills. I found one with the same area code and dialed. “UC Santa Cruz,” a friendly lady answered. I was caught off guard. I asked to speak to Eden. “I’m sorry, there’s no one by that name in this office.” I said I was sorry to bother her and hung up. The bus came and I took it uphill to the university.

  I hiked through the campus. Paths wove into stands of redwood trees and then unfurled into parking lots. The buildings were constructed so as to seem to grow out of the earth. The air was cool and sunlight splintered through the dark green trees. Everything felt pure.

  I found my way to the library and sat on a cement bench. There was a café on the ground floor and steel boxes with slots to feed in your books for a quick return. An endless stream of students flowed out of the woods. I unzipped my backpack and took out the phone bills again. I dialed a number with the same area code and got someone’s voicemail. I tried another, but it was no longer in service. Another was a main department line. It listed its faculty and staff members, none of whom were Eden. She could have changed her name a long time ago. I realized I should have figured all this out before I left the East Coast. I came all this way on one person’s word.

  I dialed again. I’ve got nothing else to do, I told myself.

  “Hello?” The voice sounded familiar, but different. A voice I hadn’t heard since I was a senior in high school. Since I was seventeen or e
ighteen years old.

  “Eden?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “It’s Hope.”

  Pause.

  “I’m in Santa Cruz,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s great,” she said in a way that made me think she was not alone.

  “I’m outside the library.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll come down.”

  I said I was on the side with the café, outside near the path that goes into the woods. “Well, you probably know better than I do,” I said. “I’ll find you,” she said.

  I waited, wondering if I should change the bench I was on. If I should sit in profile because I wasn’t sure which direction she would come from. I put my bag next to me on the bench to save a seat for her. I looked over my shoulder at the path from the woods. A footbridge was suspended between two redwoods, traversing a ravine. I suddenly felt cold. It was cold in this stone plaza, a sort of way station, a chilly oasis. I was shivering. But also sweating. I was so jittery. I scanned the students casually loping along their way, locomoting without any urgency or cares.

  “Hey.”

  I turned around and stood up. It was Eden. Older. But her. “Still got your short hair,” she said. Hers was long, cut to make it look messier and curlier than it was. It was streaked with lighter shades that might have been from the sun or might have been dyed. She was shorter than I remembered. She was wearing a dress that was kind of loose and flowy.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  I stared at her.

  “I wanted to see you,” I said.

  She laughed. “That took long enough.”

  Eden’s response was so familiar. Her sharp adolescent cutdown. It stung like I was still thirteen years old. It was what I knew, but it wasn’t what I expected. I expected her to be moved that I wanted to find her. But Eden was turning this all around. She seemed mad at me. I should have tried to find her long ago. I should’ve moved in with her at the commune instead of going to college. I should’ve accidentally picked up the phone at Dad’s when she called. As if this was all part of a game. Or a dare.