by Anita Shreve
It is only when he begins a succession of pours to rinse out the soap after the second wash that the tangles give way, and when he rinses it for the final time, the hair looks as though he might get a comb through it. He squeezes the excess water out gently and wraps a large towel around her head as he lifts her shoulders off the sink. Her blouse is wet all along the collar and her shoulders. Her body is heavy now, like a drowsy child's. He stands in front of her to dry her hair. Her face is inches from his stomach. He can feel her warm breath through his thin summer shirt. He has a fleeting image of pulling her head toward him so that her mouth touches his skin.
He draws up a kitchen chair next to her and begins to comb out her hair. It is a painstaking process, made more difficult because he does not want to hurt her and he is new at this. He learns to hold the hair in a tight fist above where he is combing the knots out; in that way, she won't feel the pull at her scalp. He parts it in the middle, not knowing how else to do it.
"Best to dry it in the sun," he says. His voice is husky. He clears his throat. "We'll sit on the steps. There should be a bit of sun there."
"I never go outside," she says. "And we only have twenty-five minutes."
He checks his watch. She is right. "How do you know that?" he asks.
"It's just something that I know," she says. "I hear it. Things sound different at different times of the day."
He opens the door and leads her to the back stoop. He tells her that the bottom step is broken, and she says she knows that—she heard him cursing yesterday. He laughs. They sit on the top step, side by side. He sits with his elbows on his knees. Their shoulders are almost touching.
"Why did you do this for me?" she asks.
"I don't know," he says.
They sit in silence. He wishes he could ask her what she is thinking about, but he knows he himself would mind the question, so he doesn't. Her hair begins to dry and turn to corn silk, first at the ends and then near the crown, curling around her face. It was, he thinks, an intrusive thing to have done, full of risk—a thing born not entirely of altruistic motives, were he to examine his motives, which he thinks he may not do. At the very least, it wasn't like him, though he is hard-pressed these days to know what is like him and what isn't. In all the years of his marriage, he never once even combed Martha's hair, never mind washed it.
"I'll have to go inside now, and you have to go," she says when there are only five minutes left.
She stands up, and he stands up with her.
"Eden..."
"She will know now," she says quickly.
"That will have to be all right, won't it?"
She doesn't answer him, instead moves toward the door.
"I'll be back," he says.
HE PARKS in front of the TV repair shop. An hour has passed since he was with Eden, and he doesn't know what made him head in this direction, but now, as he looks into the glass window of the shop, it seems to him that, yes, he meant to come here, to see O'Brien, to say hello.
The door is unlocked, but when he enters the shop, the room is so quiet, so still, that at first he thinks that Henry O'Brien is not inside. The shop seems not to have changed much in nineteen years, apart from a thickish layer of dust covering all of the TVs and radios and picture tubes and other components. Even the television sets themselves seem old—all secondhand, some portables, some larger models. He does not remember the dust from before, or this sense of deathly quiet in a hot dusty room on a summer day. As a young boy in the shop, he was fascinated by what then appeared to him as shiny, mysterious, nearly unfathomable pieces of that exciting thing called technology; and as a somewhat older boy, waiting for Sean to finish haggling with his father over a curfew or a five-dollar loan, he often felt uncomfortable in the shop, hoping only that Sean could make his escape before his father lost his temper.
"Hello," Andrew calls.
He hears a murmur, a movement in the back room. He makes his way toward the sound.
"Hello," he calls again.
He; thinks he hears a greeting, peers into the open doorway. Henry O'Brien is sitting at a large gray metal desk littered with small electrical parts, white receipts, paper coffee cups, an ashtray overfull with cigarette butts and gum wrappers. Andrew can see only the top of the man's head at first—the reddish hair now paler with streaks of gray, a thinning at the crown—until the man looks up and squints his eyes to get a better look at Andrew or to place the face and body. The eyes are reddened and watery, as though with permanent tears.
"I know you," says O'Brien. "Wait a minute."
Andrew can see the progress of the man's thoughts as they pass across his face: A customer? No. A man from the town? No. Then there is the quick flicker of pain in the eyes, tie moment of recognition.
"Andy."
"Yes."
"That's right. Your mother died."
"Yes."
"My wife..."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"You need some work done?"
There is no air-conditioning, nor even a fan in the shop, and the back room is airless, with a heavy trace of cigarette smoke. O'Brien is wearing a T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder. His skin is pinkish, blotchy, and there is several days' growth of gray stubble on his cheeks. Andrew notes, from his vantage point standing over the desk, that the coffee cup at O'Brien's elbow is filled with a clear amber liquid.
"No," says Andrew. "I just stopped by to say hello."
"That so."
It is an unexpectedly sullen response, and it takes Andrew by surprise. Why has he come? he now wonders.
O'Brien does not invite him to sit down. He takes a long swallow from the coffee cup. He examines Andrew closely. "You done well for yourself, I know," says O'Brien, looking narrowly at Andrew.
"I guess," says Andrew.
"Better than my boy."
"Well..."
"They crucified him, you know. Or maybe you don't know; you went off to that fancy school. But they crucified him in this town—never mind that he was already dead. They wanted a scapegoat, they got one. Killed his mother."
"I..."
"The kid never got a trial."
O'Brien takes an angry swallow of the liquid in the coffee cup, but it catches him the wrong way, causing him to cough once, then sending him into a spasm of uncontrollable retching. When he regains his voice, there is a tear of spittle at the side of his mouth, and indeed it seems to Andrew that the man means to spit his words.
"In this country," O'Brien says hoarsely, "you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but the way people look at me in this town, you know they made up their minds a long time ago."
"I'm sure..."
"It's all her fault anyway," says O'Brien, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I blame her."
"Who?"
"That whore. That bitch."
Andrew says nothing. He feels the heat rising along his neck behind his ears.
"She done it. She led him on, then turned on him. Made him crazy. And then naming him like that..."
A silence, like the cigarette smoke, hangs between the two men.
"She was only fourteen," says Andrew quietly.
"Fourteen. A hundred and fourteen. Makes no difference to me. If it weren't for her, my son'd be here now."
"Well, I'm sorry to have...," Andrew begins.
"That your car?"
Andrew turns to see the tail half of the black BMW just outside the open shop door. The light outside, in contrast to the darkness inside, is so bright that it gives the car an almost surreal aura. Seen in this way, across the shabby bits of the front room, the car seems unforgivably pretentious.
"Yes," says Andrew.
O'Brien sucks his teeth.
"Well, I guess I'll be...," Andrew says, turning back to look at O'Brien, who has deliberately resumed a hunched posture over a small piece of metal with many wires coming out of it. Andrew knows now that he was led to the shop by his desire to find out more about Sean, about the morning Sean
left town, but he sees that he will not find the answers here.
"Yeah, you do that...," says O'Brien, not looking up.
Andrew turns and walks back out through the shop. Bitterness hovers in the air like dust. Once outside, he stands for a moment on the sidewalk, letting the afternoon heat soak his head, feeling dusty and grayish and faintly guilty in the white sunshine. He looks across at the man who runs the gas station, waves. The man waves back. Even though Andrew doesn't know the man, no longer knows any of the people connected with the old gas station, the friendly wave is so reassuring that Andrew finds himself waving again.
It seems to Andrew that except for the waving, nothing in the street is moving.
THE HOUSE is now a labyrinth of cardboard boxes, some half filled, some sealed with packing tape, some empty, waiting for Andrew to decide on their contents. Tired, more tired than he has been since arriving, nearly numb with exhaustion, he wends his way through the maze of cartons, up the stairs and to his old room. It is after two in the morning. On a roll, he has been working all night, executing a kind of domestic triage, relegating some few precious items to cartons he will take with him back to the city, appointing more to be sold at auction with the larger furniture in the house, and remanding still less fortunate others to the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army and the auctioneer will come in a few days to collect everything, he has been told over the phone. He has only to transport the boxes he will keep for himself and Billy.
He turns on the light in his room and immediately shuts it off. Walking to the bed by the open window, he sits down, leans his head forward toward the screen and looks out. The night is as dark as a cave. No stars. No moon. He hears the crickets in the grass. Do the crickets live in the grass? he wonders. Across the way, there is the other house, and below his window the hydrangea tree. In the impenetrable darkness, he can't see either one.
In the darkness, he is thinking, he's as blind as she is.
THE DJ on the radio, a DJ who is too loud, too raucous, too juiced for seven o'clock in the morning, announces to Andrew as he eats his cereal that the heat is back—a fact that needs no telling. Already the inland humidity has settled on the land and entered the house like an unwelcome visitor preparing for another languid nap. In August, Andrew reflects, the heat is never far away, hovering as it does on the horizon, waiting for the brief teases of cool, clean air to dissipate and vanish.
The promise of a sweltering afternoon rearranges his priorities. Two jobs that he has planned on tackling—tidying the herb and flower gardens and beginning the paint job on the south wall—must be done in the early morning hours. Later, after he has been to visit Eden again (the anticipated visit anchoring his day, lending his day a sense of urgency he cannot yet quite define), he will find a liquor store and buy a bottle of wine to bring to T.J.'s that evening. He wishes he had been able to think of a reasonable excuse not to have to go to the dinner tonight—though he is looking forward to finding out what T.J.'s children are like; and he is, if he thinks about it, intrigued, as he has always been, by the chance to see how someone else's life, a life he once knew nearly as well as his own, has unfolded.
He finishes his cereal and walks to the garage, where he finds a pair of ancient, dirt-encrusted garden gloves and a small hind hoe. Rummaging through the drawers there, he realizes with dismay that he will have to pack up these items as well.
He crouches in front of the herb garden and tries to read it. It is a tangled mass of differing shades of green fading to brown: some herbs, like the sage and the rosemary, are immediately recognizable: others could be oregano or summer savory or winter savory or thyme. He decides that regardless of variety, each needs the same care—a weeding, a pruning and a watering—and so he begins, working fast, hoping to get the job done quickly so that he can move on to the flower bed and the painting.
He is trimming a small plant that could conceivably be a weed, though he thinks not, when he feels a light tap between his shoulder blades. The touch is so unexpected that he starts, whirling around in a crouch, with the hoe in his hand.
"She pretends she washed it herself, which she is perfectly capable of doing, but I know you did it."
Edith Close towers over him. Ungracefully, his left knee cracking, he stands to confront her. She has on a summer sundress, with a beige cardigan thrown over her shoulders.
He can think of no reply. It was a presumptuous act, and he cannot, for the moment, think of how to justify it.
"And sneaking behind my back," she says.
"I didn't sneak behind your back," he protests.
"You went when I wasn't there."
"Well, yes, but..."
"Well, then."
"She seemed fine to me," he says, trying to change the subject.
She has a purse on her arm. One hand is folded over the other at her waist. It is a gesture, common in older women, that he has never seen in a younger woman, a woman, say, of Martha's generation. He wonders, irrelevantly, if it is a gesture women grow into as they age.
"I'd have thought your mother would have told you more," she says.
"Told me what?"
"You know that Eden was away?"
"Yes. At a hospital, and then at a home for the blind."
She shakes her head. "Eden was badly hurt by the ... incident."
She looks down at the strap of her pocketbook, as if contemplating it. "At first we thought it was physical," she says. "She had numerous operations. She wouldn't talk—to me or to anyone. We thought it was related to the injuries. But the injuries were ... deeper than that."
He watches as she touches her purse—a talisman. "The injury to her head made her very sick," she says. "The place she was in wasn't, strictly speaking, a home for the blind." She looks sharply up at him, wanting to see his reaction. "It was a mental hospital."
He recalls Eden saying yesterday, apropos of nothing, Jim died here. He remembers thinking at the time that it was an odd thing to say.
"She did recover," Edith continues. "Not fast, but after a time. She reached a point where I felt she could come home. It was felt, I felt, I could care for her just as well here.
"But she needs quiet? Edith says forcefully, contracting her brow. "She needs not to be disturbed, not to be reminded of the past. We never speak of it. I would prefer that you not speak of it. I would prefer that you not visit her at all. You remind her of the past. You may even raise her expectations, her hopes," she says, her voice rising, as if to emphasize her point. "And then you will go away. And where will she be then?"
He again feels the heat seeping into his face. He wants to find her ludicrous, preposterous, but he cannot. Indeed, her speech is to him uncomfortably moving and embarrassingly accurate. For he has hoped to raise Eden's expectations, even if subconsciously, and he cannot deny that he will go away. And why should he have assumed that Edith cannot have changed in nineteen years? Rendered helpless, perhaps Eden immediately became more appealing to Edith. Or possibly it was the hole that Jim's death left in her life that allowed her finally to focus on her daughter. And yet, despite these sudden epiphanies, he wants to believe that visiting Eden is good for her.
"Don't you think you're overreacting?" he says, surprising himself not only with his rudeness but also with the word itself, for it is a term he associates with psychobabble, one Martha liked to use on him, a word he normally despises. But he has never been precise in arguments. The words that come to mind in a tense exchange are not accurate enough, and thus he is often rendered inarticulate, like a child cornered by an adult.
"She is my daughter," Edith says, the words stapling the air around them.
The sudden flash of anger is surprising in the quiet backyard.
But in a moment it is gone. She gathers herself together in a deft sequence of subtle movements, gaining an inch as she stands more erect, and recomposing her face until it is the one he saw in her kitchen—calm, cooler and, if wary, then more in control. He watches her, fascinated.
"Andy,
" she says, as if weary of the effort to teach good manners to the neighbor's boy, "you must see it from my point of view. Eden and I are family." She exaggerates the last word. It sounds furry, her voice deep with patience. "She's all I've got now, and I'm all she has. There are aspects to this you can't possibly understand. You've been gone for nearly twenty years...."
He is deprived (or relieved) of an opportunity to reply. The sound of a car slowing to turn into the driveway makes them both look up. A small white Toyota rolls over the gravel. DeSalvo hoists himself from the low driver's seat. Some cars, Andrew thinks, are just too small for some men.
DeSalvo waves and makes his way toward Andrew.
"You make your conference?" asks DeSalvo, short of breath, advancing slowly in the heat. "You left your checkbook on the counter."
"Jesus," says Andrew. He turns. "You know Mrs. Close."
DeSalvo casts a canny eye on Edith Close, nods. "How are you?" he asks.
"Fine. Thank you," she says.
"So all I can say is it musta been one hell of a conference call," DeSalvo says, turning to Andrew and handing him the checkbook. "You got a lotta cash in that account."