Eden Close

by Anita Shreve

  He could feel the tension in his mother's body, a static current running along her arm, causing even his own arm to raise goose bumps. She stood with her hands clutching her robe closed—still, intent, warding off, as if by her will alone, the sound of another gunshot. His father would say later that he felt no danger, but Andy thought his father must already have been forgetting his fear when he said it. Had his father not imagined the consequences of being seen by a gunman, possibly a murderer, on the dirt drive as the man ran wildly into the cornfields?

  Andy and his mother saw the flashing lights just a split second before they heard the siren, coming fast along the straight flat road from town. One, two police cars, an ambulance following—the town's entire force. And then another vehicle, half a minute later: the fire chief. The vehicles swung into the drive and over the lawn, spewing themselves every which way like children's toys, leaving the drive free for the ambulance. The police cars and the ambulance lit up the night with eerie flashing beacons, red and blue, out of sync, so that Andy could see through his own screen door the back door of the other farmhouse and the bedroom windows upstairs to the north and west, awash in the unnatural pulsing lights. Two policemen ran from one of the cars to the back stoop and into the Closes' kitchen. From the ambulance, turning around and backing down the drive to the Closes' back stoop, another man alighted, swinging open its wide rear door.

  "I'm going out there," Andy said suddenly.

  "You stay here," his mother insisted. "Your father said."

  But Andy was already through the door and down the steps. He put his hands in the pockets of his shorts and walked toward the edge of the circle created by the ring of official cars. The humid night was thick with mosquitoes; they whined at his ear, and he slapped at one on the back of his neck. He heard, too, the slap of the screen door behind him and turned to see his mother walking carefully down the back steps on the sagging treads, her curiosity stronger than her husband's admonition. The crows and summer birds, aroused at the wrong hour, had lost their fright and were silent now. Andy could hear the low, muffled voices of men at the front and sides of the house, searching already with powerful flashlights for someone or something, though no one outside the house yet knew what it was they might be expected to find. The headlights of a car—a Chevy?—approached the house, the driver slowing to see what the commotion was, perhaps suspecting an accident. Andy watched the car pull over. A man and a woman got out and crossed the road. They stood at the edge of the drive, staring at the scene, puzzled. And then, he knew from the soft furry breath at his arm, his mother was beside him.

  Impulsively, he put his arm around her and jerked her toward him. It was the first time he had ever touched her quite this way, from his full height, as if he were now the stronger of the two. It was a scene he thought he had seen somewhere before, on television possibly, in a show. The son, grown, towering over the mother, assuming the role of protector, steadying her while a husband is taken off in handcuffs or on a stretcher. The image, lasting only seconds, was inexplicably delicious. It was not unlike a similar and baffling feeling he sometimes has even now when he hears of someone else's bad news and has an irrepressible and horrifying urge to smile.

  The Closes' back door swung open hard. It was De-Salvo, the thick-necked, heavyset police chief. Andy knew him from the hockey games. His face was pocked along his jowls. He had a son who years ago had made All State as a wing, and though his son had left the town, the father still haunted the games, as if to catch some echo—a shout skimming across the ice, a hand on his shoulder with a reminiscence—of his son's triumph. DeSalvo gestured sharply to the man standing at attention by the ambulance. As swift as skaters, the attendants slid up the back stoop with the stretcher and into the house. (Paramedics? Andrew doesn't know if they were called that then. Were they not simply volunteers, roused from their beds, as he was, by calls in the night?) His mother moved her face closer to his bare chest. Unconsciously, he braced himself for what the night might deliver next. But didn't the urgency of the stretcher imply injury and not death?

  Andy could see the man and the woman at the end of the drive edging along closer to the house. A policeman was patrolling the front and spotted them too; he barked at them to move back. Andy thought he could imagine the prurient curiosity of the couple, exciting them enough to trespass, and how they would tomorrow assault whoever would listen with the details, their own status momentarily and satisfyingly enhanced. Then the policeman, turning back to his task at the front of the house, saw Andy and his mother and raised his flashlight to them. Andy brought his hand up to shield his eyes.

  "You there," the officer called.

  Andy, his arm still raised, nodded. It was Reardon. He saw again the diffused beacon of a flashlight against the steamed-up window on the driver's side of his father's Ford, and Reardon's face, peering and smirking in the darkness as he watched Andy's date worry her hair with her fingers. Move along now, Reardon had said with something like amusement or satisfaction on his face. Not safe to park here this time of night. Andy and his date, a girl he hadn't known well, had driven home in silence.

  Reardon lowered the light. "Where's your father?"

  Andy pointed to the Closes' house. Instinctively, he pointed upstairs.

  "Either of you hear or see anything?"

  Andy looked at his mother.

  "We heard some things," she said cautiously.

  "You stick around, then," said Reardon. It was an unnecessary command. Where did he think they would go?

  The screen door opened, and a stretcher bearer backed out quickly. Andy heard, beside him, a gasp, and before he was even certain himself, his mother said her name. Eden.

  He felt his thighs loosen, along with the bottom of his stomach, not so badly that he feared he might fall, but enough so that his mother felt the weight and stiffened, becoming a crutch. Their roles, so new and pure just a moment before, were again reversed; he was, after all, still her boy.

  TAKING A quick swallow of the brandy, he remembers now a white bath towel, darkened by a large black stain, hiding Eden's face. She lay motionless, but Andy knew from the urgent syllables of the attendants that she couldn't yet be dead. She was covered by a bed sheet, a long flower-print one, he remembers, a sheet as smooth as glass over her body, and from that he knew she was naked underneath. He remembers clearly the way her toes stuck out from the sheet, and how the nail polish on them, in the dim light, shone as black dots. He sees, too, the long sticky clump of pale blond hair falling away from the bunched towel.

  A force as primitive as running into a street to save a child made him start forward, but his mother held his arm. The attendants raised Eden to shoulder height and slid her into the ambulance as if onto a shelf. One of the men climbed in after her and slammed the door. The door wouldn't fasten properly, and as the ambulance sped out the drive (taking Eden to the same hospital her mother had left only forty minutes before), Andy could see the attendant furiously opening and closing the rear door to get it to catch. As it made the turn onto the road, the driver started up the siren, sending an electrifying wail out over the silent cornfields, summoning all who would listen from their sleep, announcing that something of importance had happened at the farmhouses two miles from town.

  Andy watched the receding lights of the ambulance. The driveway was suddenly quiet, too quiet. Something about the scene he had just witnessed wasn't right, wasn't the way it would have gone on TV. He looked at the empty drive, and then he knew at least what the question was: Why had a fourteen-year-old girl been sent alone to the hospital?

  It was his mother who said it first.

  Where's Edith?

  ANDREW FINGERS the quilted sides of the jelly tumbler and gets up to open the back door. He stands at the screen, hoping for a wash of cool night air. But as it was on the night of the shooting, the air is dense and smells unclean. When he was a boy, and the air was bad, his mother would always say, sniffing as she said it, The dairy. In the summer, if there w
as a southeast wind, the sickly scent of sour milk, mixed with the smell of cows, would float over the cornfields. But today, who can say? He doesn't know the industry of the area anymore; and if he did, he thinks, he's not sure he would recognize the odor. The smell could be that of toxic waste, from a plant not unlike the one his own company has in New Jersey. He seldom has to visit the plant, and no one ever talks to him about waste and disposal, but he knows it is a touchy subject. Periodically there are quiet suits and directives.

  He takes a large swallow of brandy, draining the glass. Though the air is dull and the night black as a cave, the earth around him is noisy and alive with the castanets of cicadas, relentlessly sending out their frenzied scratchings. Or at least it sounds like scratchings. He doesn't know how they make their sounds, and it has always puzzled him how such a relatively small insect can be so noisy; he thinks the riddle is one that if Billy were with him he would bother to solve.

  He looks out the screen door, down the dirt drive to the road. He thinks to himself, in the manner of a pronouncement: This is the day my mother was buried. He expects to feel a shudder of grief. When that does not come, he forces himself to think about his mother under the ground, as if that might trigger the appropriate sorrow. He waits for the horror of the image to assail him. But, as has been happening of late, his emotions won't cooperate. The images he tries to bring into focus are like sexual fantasies that no longer do the trick. Instead, at this moment, he is inexplicably distracted by thoughts of Edith Close at the burial. And this distraction, which feels like someone lingering overlong in his bedroom or his office, denying him badly needed privacy, teases him away from his mother.

  He sees Edith standing alone, off to one side. She was the only woman there who wore a veil—a hat with a black veil from another era, even in the heat. The other women—women from the Ladies Guild, wives of dairymen—wore sleeveless summer dresses and stood in clumps, stooped, their necks bowed by what seemed to be the thickening of old age between their shoulder blades. Yet she stood erect and alone, in black, the only one there to wear that color. Not family, yet nearly that, the geographical accident of being the only neighbor having given her the status, almost, of a sister.

  When he had spoken to her on the phone the night of his mother's death, she was, as she had always been, reserved with him—even if, on this occasion, for a sentence or two, a trace of something softer crept into her voice—and he found he could not call her anything but Mrs. Close, as he had since he was a boy. But at the burial, after the funeral, aware of her presence for the first time that day, he looked up and saw that she was watching him. She looked away quickly, and he remembers her standing on the hill, gazing out over the gravestones, beyond the iron fence, listening but not bowing to the prayers. He thought, or felt, how distant she had always been, even before the shooting. She seemed more fragile than he had, as a boy, known her to be—but though he knows she must be in her mid-sixties, she had at the burial the bearing of a younger woman, a bearing some women never achieve.

  After the burial, everyone returned to the church. It had been arranged without Andrew's knowledge. There was coffee in a large green metal urn and brownies and cookies someone had baked, refreshments, a woman he didn't know whispered softly, touching his arm on the hill. When his father died, his mother had provided food at home, and he had thought then how macabre it was to entertain, to eat, so soon after you had put a man into the earth. He himself had had no appetite for days after his father's burial, as he has none now and didn't at the church today.

  There were old worn green velvet drapes up on a stage and a portrait of Jesus on a wall. Metal chairs were unfolded and placed near the table with the food, as if for a children's dance. He stood benumbed, not from grief but from strangeness. People came and said soft things to him and moved away and chatted with more animation, out of his hearing, to each other. It was the strangeness of being in a room that you had known overwell as a child and that hadn't changed in any detail but now seemed as unfamiliar as death.

  She came up to him and explained: The guild thought you wouldn't want the trouble. He understood that they saw him now as a bachelor again. She was still wearing the veil, and he couldn't clearly see her eyes. He wanted, almost maliciously, to walk out, for he thought, with a slight irritation, that someone could at least have asked him if he wanted this, but the impulse passed. It was right, he remembers thinking, that she should stand with him; she was as strange in that place as he was.

  He looks at the clock over the sink. It reads twelve-fifty. He thinks he might have to resort to the sleeping pill after all, but then remembers that he can't; he's had the brandy.

  He looks out the door in the direction of the Close farmhouse, but he can't even perceive its outlines. There are no lights on anywhere—not even the faint glow of a night-light. Somewhere upstairs, he knows, Eden is lying on a bed or sitting in a chair, the darkness irrelevant to her.

  AFTER HIS mother had asked Where's Edith? they stood together, waiting. Andy had his hands in the pockets of his shorts; his mother had her arms wrapped around his elbow. Andy knew it had to be Mr. Close who was hurt; how else could there have been that awful crying? A policeman opened the back door and called to two others. Andy, straining, could hear bits of grunts and breathless sentences. "...is talking now ... medium height, a mask, yellow shirt, she's pretty sure ... on the stairs ... pretty hysterical ... face blown ... Christ, you should..."

  Behind the policeman, Andy saw his father at the Closes' screen door, wanting to get out. His father said something, and the policeman stood to one side. In turn, the policeman mumbled something to Andy's father, and his father shook his head slowly several times—not a gesture of refusal, but rather one of disbelief.

  Andy watched his father walk toward him. It was a moment Andrew would never forget, though he wouldn't know until years later that the thing his father had seen, the thing that had changed his father's face and the movements of his body, had, in the space of a few short minutes, soaked in so deep that it would never leave him. Even in the dim, pulsing light, Andy could see the rivulets of sweat running down from his father's temples. His father's walk was slow, the rifle no longer a rigid brace—more like a heavy broken tool he was taking to the garage to fix. When his father stood in front of them, he looked first at Andy and then at his wife. He spoke to her.

  "Go inside now. Take the boy. They're bringing Jim out."

  "Jim?" his mother said quickly.

  "It's bad. You go on in. Quick, now."

  But his mother would not move. "What happened?" she demanded. "Tell me."

  His father raised his arms, as if he meant to shepherd his family back to shelter. But when he saw she would not move, he lowered them. He stabbed the barrel of the rifle into the gravel, like a stick. He looked at the ground. He sighed—a deep, exhausted sound.

  "Jim is dead," said his father. "Eden's been shot, but she's still alive."

  His mother brought her hands to her mouth. Andrew heard a high, strangled murmur.

  "But how?" she asked. "Who?"

  "I don't know. It looks like, looks like," his father said, faltering, repeating himself, "and I think Edith was trying to say this, a man broke in while she and Jim were out, Jim was out, and Jim found him in Eden's room. He was"—his father hesitated, looked at Andy, searched for the proper wording—"assaulting Eden, and the man had a gun—we heard the shots.... Eden somehow got in the way ... a struggle, I think.... Edith saw the man on the stairs....He had a mask....She found them both." His father stared. "I saw her in the bedroom ... covered, covering..."

  Andy watched his father's mouth tighten. He was seeing something Andy could only imagine, yet could not imagine at all. The image refused to form. Later Andrew realized that his father must, at that moment, have been in deep shock himself. How could his father, a dairyman, ever have been prepared for that scene in Eden's bedroom? Why did they think, did his father think, sheltered as he was by his homely routines, that he was any bet
ter equipped to deal with it than Andy or his mother?

  His mother put her hands on his father's shoulders and laid her forehead on his chest. Along the road from town, Andy could see, and hear, a parade of ambulances and police cars, moving fast toward the houses. These would be from the county and the state, he was thinking. When the first ambulance pulled in the drive, they brought out Edith Close from the house.

  The black stain was on her white uniform, her shoes, the side of her face, her mouth and her hair, but most of all on her hands. She was supported by a policeman at each side of her. Her feet barely moved. At the bottom of the steps, a pair of attendants or paramedics tried to get her to lie down on a stretcher. She protested wildly, pushing against a restraining hand on her chest, as if she feared she might drown. But the men overpowered her. In shock, in her raving, she raised her knees and spread them, kicking, and Andy saw, up her skirt, the white flash of her underwear. He felt a shiver move through his chest. He thought then that of all the things he had witnessed that night this was something he should not have seen.

  HE STANDS up to rinse out his glass. He puts it on the sideboard. He is mesmerized by the quiet. He is not sure he has ever before realized how quiet it is here, how unnerving that quiet can be. He thinks of turning on the radio but realizes the loud voice of a late-night disc jockey will be even worse. And anyway, he tells himself practically, he has got to sleep. There's that list of chores.

  He turns out the lights as he goes. In his room, he makes a halfhearted attempt to remake the bed. As he bends to tuck in the top sheet at the foot, he suddenly realizes that the dream did get it wrong. Or if not wrong, exactly, then out of sequence. He sits on the bed and replays the dream. In his dream, he has imagined that it was the cry of a woman that first woke him—with thoughts that it might be his mother. He remembers that panic, that struggling to the surface, as if for air. And yet it can't have been a woman's voice he heard first, he thinks logically. It has to have been the voice of a man first, the voice of Mr. Close.