Eden Close

by Anita Shreve

  "Oh," says Andrew, embarrassed. "You looked."

  "Yeah, what the hell," says DeSalvo. "I always look. I called you right away, but there was no answer. I woulda brought it by yesterday, but I hadda take my wife to the hospital. Problems with her hip. And I been tied up there with her all night. I told the luncheonette to tell you I had it, if you called."

  "I hope your wife is all right," says Andrew.

  DeSalvo scratches his chest. "They're gonna put a pin in, but the doctor says she'll be OK in a month or so."

  "I must be getting back," says Edith Close, moving past the two men, giving them a wide berth. She walks slowly down the gravel drive toward her front door. She walks as though she knows they are watching her back.

  "Piece a work," says DeSalvo.

  Andrew looks at the retreating figure and nods.

  BY TEN FORTY-FIVE, he has been circling his kitchen floor for nearly an hour. The half-empty beer in his hand is warm; an empty is on the table. His T-shirt is damp at the back and under the armpits. Already the humidity has weight to it. His face feels gritty from lack of sleep. A shower would help, he knows, but he is reluctant to leave the kitchen, as though remaining in the kitchen for a long enough time will finally deliver an answer.

  The list of chores now feels more burdensome than it did earlier this morning, but he cannot focus on it. The things of the kitchen, except for the framed collage of snapshots, which he'll keep, and the Hoosier cabinet, which will be sold at auction, are all going to the Salvation Army. A family finally dismantled. It must happen all the time, he thinks, every day, in every town and city in America.

  And then who will live in this house? he wonders. A couple looking for an affordable starter home, a couple who will imagine this house to have more charm than it does, a couple who will furnish it with inauthentic country antiques? He envisions the new wife, her brown hair streaked with blond highlights, her lithe, athletic form dressed in khaki shorts and an oversized T-shirt, as she repapers the walls—as if this gesture will secure her dreams.

  I should get back to work, he says aloud. He plays the phrase like an old tape that doesn't really interest him anymore but he nevertheless wants to hear again, just in case. Each day away from work makes the thought of returning there more and more foreign. He cannot this moment conceive of ever again having the inclination or the stamina to survive a ten-hour day in a thirty-story building, though he knows he must. Must return, and soon.

  It's the heat and fatigue, he says to himself, though not entirely convincingly. This will pass.

  He leans against the fridge, finishes the beer, moves away again. He needs a shower, needs a shave, needs a hair wash. A hair wash. His fingernails are black with soil. The knees of his jeans are green with grass stains. Grass stains don't come out, Martha said a hundred times, holding up a pair of Billy's overalls.

  There's the wine to get, he reminds himself, trying to refocus on his list of chores. The south wall to paint.

  I said to Eden I would be back, but what if Edith is right? he asks himself again. And then again.

  He opens the back door, with no clear destination.

  Then he has it. He will take the car for a spin, head north for an hour or two, return after two o'clock. He will get in the: car and move, stay away. Stop by for a quick goodbye tomorrow or the next day. Leave it alone, forget about it.

  Relieved to be moving forward, he hustles down the steps, walks briskly to the BMW. He puts his hand on the door. He stretches as he reaches for his keys in the front pocket cf his jeans. The keys aren't there. They're on the counter in the kitchen.

  I knew that, he says to himself.

  "I THOUGHT you wouldn't come."

  "I nearly didn't."

  "She's warned you off."

  "She's very concerned about you."

  "You think so."

  "Yes, I do."

  "Then why are you here?"

  "Well, I think she's concerned, but I'm not convinced she's right."

  "I told her I washed it myself, but she didn't believe me. It's the part. I never get it right."

  Her hair is freshly brushed, the part he made yesterday still straight.

  "I want to ask you something," he says.

  "What is it?" she says after a time.

  "Was it very bad?" he says. "In the beginning, I mean. I never knew until today what happened, where you were."

  She hesitates. "There are things about the beginning I don't remember," she says. "And what is bad? Worse than before? Worse than now?"

  "You must have loved Jim very much," he says.

  "He was my father."

  "I know."

  "No you don't."

  It seems to him that she has taken some care with her appearance today. She is wearing a blue sundress with white buttons down the front, and a belt. Her feet, he observes, are still bare. When he entered the kitchen, she was sitting at the table, her body facing the door. There is a blush of pink along the bridge of her nose, across her cheekbones and on her forehead. From the sun yesterday. It wasn't the part that gave away his presence. It was the sun.

  "You've been drinking," she says.

  "A couple of beers."

  "I haven't smelled that in a long time."

  "I'm afraid I didn't have any time to clean up," he lies. "I was working in the garden."

  "I know. I heard her speak to you."

  "I apologize if I..."

  "Smell like you've been working hard? I don't mind. It's interesting."

  He wonders if he should offer to make her lunch. He wonders what she eats. Yesterday neither of them mentioned food.

  "I think we should take a walk," he says.

  "No." She smooths the fabric of her dress along her thighs.

  "It'll be good. Through the cornfields. Like old times."

  "There are no old times."

  "Well, then, just for now."

  "I almost never go outside."

  "You said that yesterday. Why?"

  "What is there to go outside for?"

  "You don't have to be afraid. I'll hold on to you, lead you."

  "I won't," she says.

  "She never takes you out, does she?"

  She shrugs. "When it's necessary."

  "Listen," he says.

  "What?"

  "We're going to do this."

  ONCE OUTSIDE, it is as though, in the few short minutes he has been in the kitchen, some unseen hand turned up the heat a few notches, leaving it just this side of unbearable. Or perhaps it is that the gloomy kitchen, with its drawn shades and green paint, has had the unexpected benefit of providing a natural air-conditioning. Whatever the cause, Andrew is assaulted by both the glare and the heat as soon as he opens the door, a double assault that makes him wonder seriously if he should take her out.

  Almost instantly beads of sweat form along his brow, on his upper lip and under his nipples. It is real heat, the kind that soaks a man only moments after he has put on a clean T-shirt, that drives children to seek relief under lawn sprinklers. In the luncheonette, the men will be sweating under the laboring ceiling fan. The town pool will be a mass of color and bodies, and in the backyards of the houses closer to town, old women will forfeit their dignity, choosing instead to sprawl in green and white plastic lawn chairs, their white legs, nearly entirely bare, white with purple veins, offered up to a stray breeze in the shade.

  The heat makes him want to go to the pond—the body needing to slake its thirst—and this desire pushes aside caution. He holds open the screen door and reaches for her elbow, leading her out onto the stoop. Of course, he sees at once, the glare is nothing to her. Indeed, she keeps her eyes open wide, a stare into the white heat that unnerves him, with his own eyes narrowed into tight painful slits against the sun. He wishes he had a pair of sunglasses with which to cover her eyes. It is as if her gaze, so unaffected by this light, had rendered her naked, too exposed, and he is moved to shield her.

  "I'm going to pick you up and lift you over
the step," he says.

  At her side, his left arm around her waist, he hoists her over the rotted stoop. When he puts her down he takes her hand.

  "Do you remember the way to the pond?"

  She shakes her head.

  "Just stay by me. We'll go slowly."

  "I don't want this," she says.

  With an authority more assumed than convincing, he leads her along the newly mown grass south toward the edge of the cornfields. The grass is already turning brown in patches. He has cut it too short for August, too short for the heat.

  She moves reluctantly, a slight resistance in his hand, a shrinking back from each step taken. Her hand in his is like that of a child who cannot keep up with, or who does not want to keep up with, an adult. He tries to convey confidence in his grasp, holding her hand firmly, not giving way to her resistance. He looks at her face. The too bright light makes it sharp in its clarity, the scar finely detailed, the blue-green eyes; vivid and unflinching. He has a sense now of how strange this outing is for her, retracing a journey made in childhood, made then with the easy, unselfconscious movements of a girl, and not made in the nineteen years since. Now the journey must be to her the way a blindfolded walk through a foreign city would be to him, hazard awaiting each tentative step, a sense of complete and frightening helplessness but for the guide.

  He shuts his eyes and tries to experience the walk as she must. Immediately he is aware of a sensation of tremendous heat at the top of his head and of the sullen quiet of the noon hour. He is uncomfortable, unsure in his footing, this uncertainty betraying itself through his hand, for he feels her resistance grow stronger. And when he opens his eyes—he can, he thinks, have taken only ten or fifteen steps at best—he sees that he has already veered off course.

  At the edge of the cornfields, he can just make out the path to the pond. It is overgrown with wild blackberry bushes and bittersweet. Young boys seldom use it now, he imagines: perhaps the odd boy, exploring a path from the pond, coming suddenly upon the two stark farmhouses and realizing how far he had strayed.

  The heat is producing a faint headache at the back of his eyes. "We'll have to go single file," he says, wiping his brow with the end of his T-shirt. "I'll hold my hand behind me, and you take it. I'll go very slowly so you won't trip."

  "Where are we?" she asks.

  "Put your arms out," he says.

  She does so, brushing the drying leaves of corn.

  "Do you remember this?" he asks.

  She fingers a corn sheaf but doesn't answer him.

  When they begin to move, her walk is even more tentative than before. Once she puts her hand on his back as if to steady herself. The journey is awkward, slow going. He wonders if they'd do better if he walked behind her, with his hand on her shoulder, guiding her.

  A fly begins to buzz around his head and won't leave him alone no matter how he swats at it with his free hand. The heat in the cornfields, without any shade overhead, is oppressive. He feels the heat drain his confidence. He is afraid, for a moment, to look at her. What if Edith was right, he wonder, and this expedition is too much for her? And might the sun be harming her in some way he has not anticipated?

  She answers his unspoken question with a cry. Her hand slips out of his. When he turns around, she is crouched toward the ground. He sees a shiny object near her foot. It is the pop top of a beer can, the sharp edge curved upward.

  "Jesus," he says. "We forgot your shoes. I should have thought, Let me look at that."

  She is sitting on the ground, massaging the ball of her foot. He takes her foot in his hand and examines the sole. He can see no blood, no puncture.

  "I would like to go back now," she says.

  He lifts her up. "We have to get you some sneakers," he says. "You have no sneakers?"

  "Don't buy me any sneakers," she says.

  "It's all right," he says, thinking. "I can keep them at my house. We can use them when I take you out." He says this as if it had already been decided they would be going outside for walks together again in the future. He says this as if sliding in sideways.

  But she hears it. "Soon you will go away," she says.

  "Well, not ... not immediately."

  "If she knows that you have been again, she will not go to work."

  He ponders this.

  "I can be careful if you can," he says.

  She doesn't answer him.

  "I have to go to T.J.'s tonight," he says. "And I don't want to go."

  "You don't like T.J.," she says.

  The suggestion surprises him. "I don't know. He and I are different now."

  "So are we," she says. She turns in the path. She refuses his hand and holds her arms out instead, letting the cornstalks guide her.

  ON THE RADIO, in the car, on the way to the mall, Andrew hears that the heat wave, expected to last for most of the coming week, will break records for this part of the state. This evening and through the night, says the announcer, the temperature will remain in the high nineties. The announcer segues into a follow-up on the lead story, which Andrew has missed. The thirteen-year-old girl who was found raped, sodomized and beaten in her father's barn earlier this morning has died of her injuries at the county hospital. Andrew stares at the digital readout on his radio. The police, says the announcer, have made no arrests, but the girl's sixteen-year-old boyfriend, who appears to have been the last person to have seen her alive, has been taken in for questioning.

  The announcer, in a more lively voice, an advertising voice Andrew knows well, reads an ad for an end-of-season sale on pool and garden accessories. Andrew puts his foot on the gas, takes the car up to seventy. Before he knows it, Billy will be thirteen. Eden was fourteen. Just. But she didn't die of her injuries. A line swims up to him through the years from a book he liked when he was a junior in high school. He can't remember the line exactly. He has never been very good at precise recall of quotations. But it was something about there not being much difference between the ones at the farm and the ones in the graveyard, and how the ones in the graveyard were the lucky ones. The book was Ethan Frome, and he read it by his bedroom window for English homework one Sunday afternoon in January. He remembers vividly the way the world looked outside that window—a snow cover made bleak by the thin winter light of a January day—and how in keeping the earth was with the book he was reading. He imagines with an unwelcome clarity the face of the mother this morning as she was told the fate of her daughter. In New York, in the papers and on the radio, he has become accustomed, if not inured, to reports of the killing of children, the stealing of children and the sexual abuse of children, and these reports have sickened him and made him wary, and have caused him to be more protective of Billy than hi:; own parents had to be of him. But it is this report, heard in his BMW on the way to the mall, heard not ten miles from the barn where the girl was found, heard nineteen years after Eden was raped and shot, that is the most difficult to absorb. Though he has an understanding of differing sexual proclivities, and a tolerance for tastes he does not himself share, he cannot conceive of a desire that would cause a man to sexually batter a child and then kill her. Nor can he entirely fathom though a similar act might be said to have shaped many of his adult dreams and visions, how such a violence could take place here. It is the locale, he thinks, this deceptively inoffensive locale, that makes such a news report so incomprehensible. He turns up the volume of his radio so that the sound of a rock song—a piece of music he has never heard before, a loud atonal piece of music with lyrics he cannot decipher—fills his ears.

  ALL THE WOMEN of the county without access to a pool or to air-conditioning appear to have converged upon the mall. Inside, the temperature is regulated so that within minutes it is possible to forget the weather. Teenage girls in threes and fours, carrying packages, move en masse from one store to the next, lightly fingering merchandise, using it somehow as material for jokes, creating the mall anew as an activity to while away the long afternoon. Babies in strollers keep watch over the
ir mothers, as the mothers sit on concrete benches along the center of the mall, eating ice cream cones and smoking cigarettes, idly giving the stroller a push now and then, thinking of what to bring home for supper so as to avoid cooking in the heat. There are almost no men in the mall, Andrew observes, and those he does see are in short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, managers, he supposes, of the various shops, or else plainclothes security personnel. He himself is still wearing his sweat-stained T-shirt and his grass-stained jeans, and his appearance seems out of place among all the clean women and babies and girls.

  The mall is a long rectangle, with trees lining the center strip. On either side are the stores. He walks the length of the mall and back. There are four stores that sell shoes, not including the Sears at one end and the Caldor's at the other. There is also a store that sells greeting cards, a store that sells books, a store that sells video games and a store that sells fake country antiques. Most of the other stores sell women's clothing but not shoes.

  He begins with the most promising store, one that sells athletic footgear, and at once realizes he does not know Eden's foot size. He picks up a sneaker that looks as though it had been designed for an astronaut or by an astronaut and reads the size inside: 6½. The size looks right to him. He is drawn to a rack of plain canvas sneakers in white and pink and blue, but a wiry-haired salesgirl, plucked from her afternoon stupor by the sight of a reasonably young male, steers Andrew away from the simple sneakers to an array of high-tech running shoes along the left wall.

  "Jogging? No, I don't think so," says Andrew, who cannot picture the subtly toned blue and gray running shoes, with thick soles and puffy sides, on Eden. On Martha, yes, they would be perfect. His eyes stray covetously to the rack of plain canvas sneakers, but the salesgirl, piqued by his momentary inattention, launches into a discussion of the technology behind (or rather inside) a pair of white and silver "walking shoes." Lest he offend the salesgirl, who has actually stepped between him and the rack of canvas sneakers, he mumbles something about just looking and backs out of the store.