Eden

by Andrea Kleine

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I have a reason.” I unzipped my backpack and rooted around inside. I pulled out her copy of the letter from the DA. “I thought you might want to read this.” She looked at the envelope that was crumpled from having been at the bottom of my pack for so long. Its corners were gray and feathered with lint. I held it out to her, waited for her to take it. She angled her head to read the return address, partially obscured by my thumb. “No,” she said. “I don’t. You can burn it. It never got to me.”

  I put the letter on the bench between us. “Do you want me to tell you what it says?” I asked.

  “You can tell me whatever you want.” She reached up to her hair, pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes, and leaned back on her hands.

  I’m not sure what I expected from Eden. Part of me wanted to cry and hug her and have her be so, so happy to see me. I wanted her to tell me that she missed me. That she thought about me all the time. That she loved me. I wanted her to be my big sister and take care of me. I wanted her to put her arms around me. I wanted to rest my head on her chest. I wanted to curl up into her. I wanted her to take me home and make up the sofa bed for me and heat up leftover dinner for me and lend me money to take a plane home. I wondered how long she had been living out here. I wondered if she was married, if she had kids.

  The envelope lay between us, not touching Eden. I didn’t want to play all my cards right away, but I knew she could outlast me in the silence game. Eden would have never come looking for me. I was the one who had caved. It was like she had expected me all along. She knew that one day I would show up.

  “It’s about Larry,” I said. “He’s up for parole.” Eden didn’t show any reaction. She lifted her cheeks in something resembling a smile but more designed to cover up any other kind of emotional response. Maybe that wasn’t what she was expecting, though she seemed to know the script to this scene we were playing out, whereas I was unprepared and forced to improvise. I said, “They want to talk to you, to see if there’s any more evidence you could give. They’re trying to convict him of murdering a teenage girl. From around the same time.”

  Eden made her mild smile and didn’t move. She lifted her face and basked in a sliver of sun that glimmered through the trees. Her long shaggy hair falling down her back toward the bench. Her cotton tights disappearing into cowboy boots. She looked like she had been born in California and had never left.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said.

  “Do you want me to tell you more about it?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “You would let him get out of jail?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting out of this or why you want to hang on to it. Or why you want to hang on to me.”

  “You’re my sister.”

  Eden pulled up one leg and rested her heel on the bench. “We’re not kids. We’re grown up. We can choose to be who we want.”

  “You really think that’s true?”

  “Maybe you like being this way. Maybe you like who you are and where you came from. But what has it done for you? I don’t know, Hope. If you’re free, why do you want to tie yourself up again?”

  I thought, I had come all this way for Eden to tell me that coming all this way was a sign of my inferiority.

  “That’s a weird, kind of perverted, semi-Buddhist yoga thing to say. I didn’t know that was your thing now,” I said.

  “There are a lot of things about me you don’t know.”

  “Maybe I would know more about you if you hadn’t dropped off the face of the planet.”

  “You could’ve come anytime.”

  “How?” I was unsure whether I was going to laugh incredulously or cough out tears. “Nobody knew where you were. You cut everyone off. You just left.”

  Eden shrugged and the neck of her dress slipped down her shoulder, exposing a bra strap. “Why would I have stayed?” she asked.

  “Maybe for the parents? Maybe for me?” My throat tightened. I felt bad about my last line. Like I was guilting her. “I’m sorry,” I said, not entirely sure what I was apologizing for. “I’m here now.”

  “You only want to have something to do with me if it has something to do with our past. You don’t care about me or my life now. You’re not really interested in me or in helping some lawyer, you’re only interested in how this whole situation can help you. You’re like Dad that way.”

  “Mom died,” I said. I don’t know why I said it; it just spilled out of me. “Cancer. She had cancer.” Eden looked at me queerly. Why did I say that? What did I want from her? What good would it do to have her put her arms around me and say, Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.

  Now I was doing my best not to cry. I felt my bottom lip quiver like a little kid’s. And then I did start to weep.

  I bent forward and covered my face with my hands. I sobbed into my fingers. I breathed erratically. I couldn’t stop. I was shaking, and snot and tears pooled into my cupped palms and dripped onto my pants, my borrowed pants from Layla, clothes that weren’t even mine. It was so unlike me to cry in public. It was something Noreen held against me. That I couldn’t express myself. That normal emotional reactions were foreign to me. I felt Eden put her hand on my back. I thought, Eden never even met Noreen.

  I wiped my nose with the back of my fingers and sat up. I looked at Eden, who was still wearing her dark sunglasses. Like she was wearing a mask. It was so strange to be looking at her. Here is someone who was so much a part of me. Here is someone I used to look at every day, but haven’t laid eyes on in years.

  Eden pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head. The sun had moved behind a hill on its way down to the ocean and the glare was gone. Eden had dark circles under her eyes and lines running across her forehead. There was a small strip of gray on her hairline and sprouts on her temples.

  “Don’t tell Dad where I am,” she said.

  Eden got up and walked away from me. She blended into the current of students, all going along their way. I sat there in the same position, unable to move. I didn’t want to leave this place where there could still be some connection to her. I put my hand on the spot on the bench where she had been sitting, feeling for her leftover warmth. After a while I stood up, picked up the letter, and dropped it into the trash can stuffed with garbage from the café. A student came up to me and asked for directions. I said I didn’t know where that building was. “I’m not from around here,” I said. “No one is,” the student said.

  26

  I wandered through the campus, unable to figure out where to go. I circled around buildings with bike racks shaped like triangular clothes hangers. I wanted to go inside and rest on one of the couches in the student lounge, but I couldn’t bring myself to enter any building. I walked slowly, following paths lined with wild grasses. There was a constant movement of people funneling calmly around me, disappearing through glass doors or turning off into the woods. I let them pass me by.

  The sky was a clear, relentless blue. The parking lots had long-reaching vistas, and in the distance everything merged in a haze down by the sea with only a pale strip separating atmosphere from water. I didn’t know how far it was to walk, but I thought that if I headed downhill, I would eventually wind up back in town.

  Most of my walk was in the sun, and it felt warm and good. I followed a narrow bike path through a scrubby meadow. I was alone in the field except for the one biker, who whizzed by calling out, “On your left!” and making me hop onto the grass. I played the conversation with Eden over in my head. Water would well up in my eyes but I could inhale and blink it away, and if anything escaped, the sun dried it up quickly. There was no cover on the meadow path and I felt damp patches forming where my backpack rested against my lower spine and where the straps pressed on my shoulders. A film of sweat covered my forehead. I was thirsty and licked my upper lip and tasted the salt.

  The bike path deposited me onto a street. A sidewalk appeared. I took comfort in the methodical rhythmic tromping of my feet, hea
vy, keeping me from tumbling downhill all at once, head over heels. While I waited at a stoplight, I wondered if I was in Eden’s neighborhood. If she had a little house near here with a hedged-in front yard, with a lemon or an avocado tree, or something else that grows all year round out here. I wondered if people around here knew her. I thought about what Eric had confessed to me when he said, “I guess I still want her to love me,” and I guessed I felt the same way. I wanted her to love me. But Eden was Eden. I couldn’t say if she still loved me or not. She loved me how she loved me, if she did at all. Or she hated me for reminding her of what happened with Larry, or she hated herself. Because we wouldn’t have gotten in the truck if she hadn’t insisted. If we had used the phone at the bus station or called collect from a pay phone. None of it would have happened and we would be someplace else. We might be totally different people. And yet, I didn’t want to be anyone different. I wanted to be us. Who we were. I wished I had said something like that. But even if I did, Eden would probably have responded the same way. And if she did love me, there didn’t seem to be a dial or a switch to turn her love up or turn it off, or adjust it somehow. It was just there, how it was. How it had always been.

  When I made it into town, I started thinking about where I was going to stay. I had a friend who lived in Oakland, but I didn’t know how to get there, and I didn’t tell him I was coming. I thought about calling Zara and asking if she would buy me a plane ticket home and I would pay her back in a month or so, or six, and if I could live at her loft while I got back on my feet. Zara would probably buy me a ticket with frequent flier points that she never used. I wondered how much a motel would cost. I wondered how much money I had available on my almost maxed-out credit card. Now I wished I had The Camper with me. But The Camper was in Arizona, and somehow I would have to figure out how to get back there and get it fixed, if it could be fixed.

  “Fuck.” I sat down on a curb and took out my phone. I called my dad.

  “I was actually going to call you,” my dad said as soon as he answered, “but you know, I wanted to give you your space. So look, I wrote a letter and sent it to that county DA and the parole board and I heard back that parole was denied. Then I talked to a lawyer friend of mine who said they usually shoot them down the first time but it will come up in the future. But my lawyer friend also said that even if he did get out, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the state. Plus, he’s old now and probably in poor health since he’s been in prison for so long, so you know, even if it did happen, I don’t think he would be any kind of threat. I think we would be okay. But we don’t have to worry about any of it for at least another year.”

  I honestly didn’t know what to say. I felt relieved. A lightness. And slightly nervous, like I hadn’t eaten and suddenly realized I was ravenous. And strangely, Larry felt small and insignificant and far away.

  My dad said, “The letter I wrote, it was a damn good letter. I might try and publish it as an op-ed, although, if you’re not on staff, they always take the teeth out of it. I have to see if I still have any contacts in the editorial department. Probably everyone’s retired. But maybe someone can put in a word.”

  “Dad,” I said. “The Camper broke down.”

  “Where? Where are you?”

  “It broke down at this place where I was staying in Arizona, but then I had to get to California so I left it there, but I can go back and get it.”

  My dad was quiet. I heard him breathing, with several elongated exhales. Then he said, “Just leave it there.”

  I was startled. “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Let it go.”

  I was about to thank him, but he cut me off and said, “I’ll talk to you soon, okay?” and he hung up.

  A city bus pulled up and opened its doors for me but I waved it away. An older woman clipping her hedges asked if I was lost. “Not exactly,” I said. She smiled. She said there was a youth hostel a few blocks away and it was pretty nice. I stood up and she pointed me in the right direction.

  The youth hostel was a large Victorian house with several guest bungalows in its picket-fenced compound. I unlatched the gate and wandered through the garden looking for the office. All the lights were off and no one seemed at home. I found two young straight guys playing Ping-Pong on the covered back porch. “They kick us out during the day,” one of them said. “Come back after six p.m.” I asked if it was full up for the night. “I wouldn’t say it’s high season,” he said as he sent the white ball bouncing off the table, “but it is taco night.”

  They asked me if I wanted to play, but I said no. I sat in a lounge chair listening to the tick-tock of their game. I wondered if Eden was right, if I was hanging on to what happened to us because for some reason it made me feel less alone, because somewhere I always had Eden. I thought about Suriya trying to free herself of people who could claim her, and how during this whole bizarre road trip I was maybe doing the opposite. My accumulated menagerie of people was supposed to put things back together for me, tell me which way to go. And now I’ve wound up here, at the end of something, at the end of the road. An ending. And I suddenly missed my mother. I could find Eden and see Eden again, but I would never see my mother again. And I should’ve made more of an effort to see her, but my mother would’ve probably brushed me off and told me to get on with my life.

  I got up and walked to the garden gate. The Ping-Pong ball had popped off the porch and I picked it up and threw it back to the guys and told them I would be back later.

  I followed the sidewalk that ran along the top of the cliff at the beach. I passed an old hippie guy who had a VW camper like my dad’s, only a different color. He opened a can of beer and poured it into an empty sports drink bottle. He coaxed his dog out of the camper and hauled the sliding door closed. I followed him down the cliff steps to the beach, where he drank his beer and played fetch with his dog. His ruddy skin melted into the landscape. The dog’s paws made a pleasant sound as they patted the flat wet sand.

  I climbed back up the steps to the top of the cliff and wandered along the scenic walkway. I stopped at a cove and leaned against the railing at the top of a lookout. The sun was setting into the ocean. The sky was pinking up. People were getting out of school or work and filtering down to the sea. They stretched on wet suits and pulled surfboards from the roofs of their cars. They wound their long hair into ponytails. They laughed. They made their way to a staircase carved into the stony cliff beneath me and stepped down until their legs were submerged in the water that slapped against the walls of the cove.

  I watched a young teenage boy pull on his suit and work his fingers into neoprene gloves. He was with his family. He seemed to be doing this for the first time. Maybe he was traveling with his family and checking out colleges. He seemed to be sixteen or seventeen. He grabbed his board and headed for the stairs going into the water. His dad called out to him. The kid turned around halfway down the stairs. His dad shouted something. The kid shook his head and smiled. He said, “I can’t hear you!” He gestured that the waves were loud and the tide was coming in. The sounds of the ocean were overtaking the sounds of the street. His dad said something again and the kid laughed. “Can’t hear you, Dad! I’m going down,” and he turned, knowing that his dad couldn’t say anything to stop him. He got in the water and paddled out.

  The surfers floated in bands outside the cove’s border. They bobbed over waves that weren’t big enough. The more experienced ones pushed their way past the break and waited for something to happen. The others tried to get out as far as they could without being shoved back to shore or speared by one of the lucky ones who caught a wave.

  The teenage boy had problems joining them. He didn’t quite have the hang of it. He lay on his stomach and paddled out but the surf kept lobbing him back in, upending his board, crashing over him awkwardly. His older sister stood with his dad on the cliff. “Keep your board down! Board down! Nose down!” she yelled. “Nose down! Get out there! You have to go through it!”
/>
  I watched him try and make it back out to the other surfers. I thought, Will I always be that kid on a rented surfboard? Not used to the water. Wading out to where I’m not wanted. Never quite escaping what I try to leave behind. Not recognizing a break until it was already on top of me.

  I thought about what Zara said to me before I left. About how I was addicted to continuing. So was Zara, in a way. So was Jamie, relentlessly so. It was what we did. It was how we lived. Make one decision and then another. Make one mark, then another. Write one word. Write another.

  I took my notebook out of my backpack, felt around for a pen. I opened to a blank page and wrote: a play where the entire room is white, filled with light, completely open, with a single painted line—a thin stripe in blue painted along the upstage wall, representing the horizon, representing possibility.

  I wrote, filling page after page, as the sun disappeared, ending the day, and the surfers paddled back in. When I closed my notebook, the sky had dimmed.

  It was becoming night.

  The streetlights came on.

  In this play there is only one character. A woman crawls silently through the audience. She reaches the stage and pulls herself ashore. She is soaking wet. She is surprised she is alive. Undestroyed. Her body movable. She stands up. And begins to speak.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you

  Betsy Lerner

  Bobby Previte

  Helen Atsma

  The Hermitage Artist Retreat

  The MacDowell Colony

  Montalvo Arts Center, Lucas Artists Residency Program

  About the Author

  Andrea Kleine is the author of the novel Calf, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by Publishers Weekly. She is a five-time MacDowell Colony fellow and the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. A performance artist, essayist, and novelist, she lives in New York City.