Eden Close

by Anita Shreve

"So Edith stashed the gun there after she shot Jim?"

  Andrew stops painting, glances at T.J. He is aware of a feeling of vague discomfort. It wasn't part of the story Eden told, or could have told. She'd have been unconscious then. The discomfort rises to a heat at the back of his neck.

  "I don't know," he says to T.J. "She must have."

  T.J. sets the roller in the trough, stands back to admire his work.

  "Whaddya think?" he asks Andrew.

  Andrew examines the wall. "Like a pro," he says.

  "Feels good," says T.J. "I haven't done this kind of work in years. Tell you what. I'll do another wall for you, then I gotta go. Tom junior's got a soccer game." T.J. picks up the roller, starts on the second wall.

  "I envy you, you know that?" he says.

  "Envy me? Why?" asks Andrew.

  "Starting fresh. Your life is like this room."

  Andrew is about to speak, but T.J. cuts him off.

  "Tell you the truth, I could use a fresh start right now."

  "Why?" asks Andrew. He faces T.J., who is keeping his back to him.

  "The till is empty, Andy-boy. Worse than empty, you follow me. I made some bad investments...." There is a pause. "I may lose the house."

  Andrew watches the deliberate way T.J. raises the roller, pretends to be smoothing over a rough spot. The flannel shirt is torn along the shoulder seam. He senses that it has cost T.J. to tell him this.

  "Me and Didi, we're supported by what we have," says T.J. "That goes, and I don't know. I don't know how we'd be together without all the stuff, but I don't have good feelings about that. Sometimes I think the till is empty there too."

  T.J. stands back to survey his work again, still avoiding Andrew's gaze.

  "No one starts completely fresh," says Andrew carefully. T.J. says nothing. "I'm on a leave of absence now," Andrew adds, "but soon I'll have to go back to my job. Maybe not full time. In fact, probably not—as a consultant possibly. I have to have an income, and that's the most efficient way I know how to get one right now. I've got a son to provide for—whom I want to provide for...." He thinks of Billy with a tightness in the center of his chest. This is now the longest he has ever been away from his son, but Andrew and Eden will drive to New York soon, and he will have Billy there. He knows that it will be hard for Billy to understand Eden's presence, but he cannot spare his son this. There are things now he cannot control, such as Martha's revelation, just a week ago, that she is getting married again—to a psychiatrist. She had planned to wait to tell him, she said, until she saw Andrew in person, but she had grown annoyed with his delays. Andrew found, over the phone, that he could not respond to this piece of news—immediately he was assaulted with visions of another man throwing grounders to Billy, another man tucking his son in at night. Andrew hopes the psychiatrist, whoever he is, will not be one of those shrinks who insist that everyone in the family unburden himself of his feelings. "I've got to see Eden settled," Andrew says, shaking off the insupportable image of another Father for Billy, "with tutors or a good program for the blind. I want to get her set up with ... Hang on a minute.'

  Andrew sets his brush down, retreats into the living room, reappears with an object in his hand.

  "What do you think of this?" Andrew asks.

  T.J. moves closer for a better look. He touches the surface, runs his fingers along the curve of the back, the straight chair back.

  "That's beautiful. Where did you get it?"

  "Eden made it. It's what she does."

  "Jesus."

  "But this is clay. She says it will break after a time. She's made dozens of them over the years. And they're all gone. When I think..."

  "Can't you spray it with something to make it last?" asks

  T.J.

  "I don't know much about the process, but I think it either has to be fired in a kiln, which she never had access to, or she could do them in wax, get them cast in a metal like bronze. My idea is to sell my condo, get us set up in a bigger place downtown, give her some room to do these."

  "Yeah," says T.J. He raises his eyes from the sculpture to Andrew's face. The glance is brief but naked. Andrew sees, on his old friend's face, a look of envy mixed with regret. T.J. pulls away first, pivots toward the wall.

  Andrew wraps the sculpture in newspaper, returns it to the carton in the living room. He and T.J. work in silence. T.J. paints three of the walls, leaving only the wall surrounding the window that opens onto the gravel drive. Then he changes back into his own clothes. He gives Andrew the jeans and shirt, as if handing over another persona, one he is reluctant to part with.

  "Listen," he says to Andrew. "Later on, say four o'clock or so, you want to go for a run with me?"

  Andrew accepts the clothes. He watches T.J. slip his arms into his leather jacket. T.J. lifts a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, puts them on. He seems to retrieve something with this gesture.

  "Sure," says Andrew. "Why not? I'd like that."

  T.J. rests a hand on Andrew's shoulder. He opens his mouth as if to speak, then seems to decide against it. Andrew follows him through the kitchen. He holds open the screen door as he watches TJ. saunter toward his Prelude. His walk is sharper now. T.J. leans against the car, twirls his keys. He looks over at Andrew's house. "You've really done a lot for Eden. I mean, you've really saved her."

  "No," Andrew says quickly. "I think it's the other way around."

  T.J. looks up at the sky as if searching for a cloud. "Why didn't Eden leave?" he asks. "Why didn't she just get out?"

  Andrew hesitates, but only for a second. "Where could she go?' he says. "What could she do?"

  T.J. thinks, then slowly nods. "I'll be back around four," he says, folding himself neatly behind the wheel. Andrew watches; the red car back out the drive and swing in the direction of town.

  He lets the screen door slap behind him, stands on the stoop, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. The stoop is sturdy now; he finally repaired it last week. He leans against the railing and looks north over the cornfields—a crisp ocher against a bright blue sky. The answer is not sufficient, he knows. The true answer is one Andrew feels but cannot say. To know it as he does, T.J. would have to have seen Eden that first day Andrew came upon her in the kitchen. He could say it was guilt, complicity, fear of Edith's harming her again—but Andrew knows it is more than that. It was, he thinks, an absolute forfeit of will—a sacrifice made deliberately to survive her deprivation.

  HE WALKS across the grass, deep green now and soon in need of cutting. The BMW in the driveway is growing dusty, as his father's Fords always were. Looking at it, he can't help but think of the first time he took Eden out in it, just two weeks ago. It was a clear day, crisp like this one, with the first real hint of fall. Perhaps it was the cooler temperatures, or a feeling it was time, but he knew when he woke that morning that he would take her out, that she was ready for an excursion. In the week since the aborted shooting, he had been to the mall and had bought her some clothes, so that she was wearing that day a new pair of jeans and a vivid blue-green sweater that he had picked because it matched the color of her eyes.

  "We'll just drive," she said, seeking reassurance, when they got into the car.

  "We'll see," he said, not committing himself, backing out the drive and turning onto the straight road through the farms and cornfields. He had discovered, in the short time he had been with her, that she responded to new experiences better if he simply announced that they were going to happen. Asking her if she wanted to do something was likely to make her anxious—though there had not been anything yet that he'd suggested that she hadn't, in the end, enjoyed.

  There wasn't a lot of traffic on the road. He took the car up to sixty, edged it toward sixty-five. The clean air made the farms and the fields look washed, and he wished, as he knew he would wish a hundred thousand times in the years to come, that she could see what he could see. He was still tentative about verbal descriptions. He wasn't certain that they helped her—nor even if, after nineteen yea
rs, she could "see" his portraits. The visual world, he was coming now more fully to understand, would not be what they shared.

  He pressed a button to lower the window on his side, so that she could feel the speed, the air, the day. The wind buffeted her hair; she raised a hand to keep it off her brow. Slowly, he lowered the window on her side, telling her that if it was too much for her, she should say so. Her hair, luminous when the sun hit it, swirled up and around her head like wild bits of silk. She tried to shelter her face with her hands, then gave up and sank back into the headrest. He took the car up to seventy. For the first time ever in his adult life, he wished he had a convertible.

  He drove for an hour, changing direction, changing the type of road when he could or when he had an inspiration. He tool, a small back road he knew was full of twists and turns, took it just a shade too fast so that she would feel it. She laughed when the centrifugal force pressed her up against the door; once she grabbed for something to hang on to, got the gearshift—he took her hand. He felt reckless, faintly like a teenager with his father's car, a thought he enjoyed—the vestigial memory of the boy pretending to be a man, with his girl beside him in the car—until the thought made him sad, and he put it away quickly: She had missed all of that, all that went with those years, and he would never, no matter how many times he took her out, no matter how fast he drove, be able to give it back to her.

  After a time he took the straight road back, but when he reached the houses he said nothing and bypassed them. He looked to see if she knew, but she was still lying against the headrest, her eyes closed, and appeared to be lost to the sensation of the moving car. It wasn't until they got closer to town and passed a school playground, where there was a soccer game in progress on the field, that she leaned forward, listening.

  "Where are we?" she asked.

  "You'll see," he said.

  She stayed bent forward, alert, listening now to the once familiar sounds of men with hedge clippers, children squealing to each other from bicycles, the slightly thicker traffic of a small village. He parked in front of the luncheonette.

  "Where are we?" she said again.

  "I thought we'd get some lunch."

  "No," she said unequivocally, shaking her head.

  "I don't have anything at the house to eat," he said.

  "That's just an excuse."

  "Look, it has to happen someday."

  "Maybe, but not here, not now."

  He sat back in the car, looked across to the gas station, thought a minute.

  "I'm going in to have lunch," he said. "You can come with me or you can sit in the car."

  He ran his finger along the humps in the steering wheel, waiting for an answer.

  "All right," she said after a time.

  He didn't know if the "All right" meant all right, she'd stay in the car, or all right, she'd go with him, so he decided to interpret the answer to his benefit. He walked around to her side of the car, opened the door. She hesitated, then got out. He took her hand.

  "Trust me," he said.

  "You've been saying that for days."

  "Well?"

  The shooting had happened only a week before; she was a celebrity, the source of rich gossip. Few had seen her in nineteen years, but with the exception of the Vietnamese man behind the counter, who would not have known who she was by sight, may not even have understood all of the stories that had passed from stool to stool that week, everyone in the place looked up, stared at Eden.

  Without question, Andrew thought, there were times when he was glad she couldn't see.

  But she knew. They took a table by the window, slightly away from the counter.

  "Are they looking at me?" she asked, her head lowered.

  "Lift your head up," he said. "Look at my voice."

  She did so.

  "DeSalvo's here," he said. The former police chief had waved when they entered. He would give them a minute, Andrew knew, then come over, a gesture of solidarity as much as of friendship.

  "And some men I don't know, and ... ah..."

  "Who?"

  "Henry O'Brien," he said quickly.

  "Oh," she said.

  O'Brien was glaring at Andrew and Eden, as though frozen, as though stricken by the sight of an unwelcome vision from the past. The other men, politely, had gone back to their sandwiches—though Andrew noticed that they contrived, by reaching for the salt or the napkin dispenser, to look surreptitiously in Eden's direction. Only O'Brien continued to stare openly.

  "Will he cause a scene?" asked Eden.

  "No," said Andrew. "I don't think so." But the truth was, he didn't know. O'Brien's eyes were rheumy; he'd already been drinking. There was a slow wave of anger moving across his brow.

  The Vietnamese man came to the table. Andrew read Eden the menu from the blackboard. "I recommend the Turkey Health Club, but not the Pepsi," Andrew said to her.

  "Fine," she said.

  Andrew ordered.

  "Raise your head. Look at my voice," Andrew said again to Eden.

  She did so, but she kept her face tilted slightly toward the window, away from the men.

  "You're beautiful," Andrew said. "You have nothing to be ashamed of."

  She shrugged.

  "You're the most beautiful woman in here," he said.

  She grimaced, then smiled. "It sounds to me like I'm the only woman in here," she said.

  "Well, there's that," he said, enjoying her smile.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw O'Brien put his leg to the floor, about to stand. Andrew stiffened but kept his gaze on Eden. I le hadn't known O'Brien would be here; he should have looked before he brought Eden in.

  O'Brien swiveled, bent to stand, swayed a bit. Even if Andrew wanted to get Eden out, there wasn't time. For one incredible moment, he actually thought he might have to fight O'Brien. He tried to envision the scene, could not imagine himself landing a punch on the man's face.

  But DeSalvo had seen O'Brien move too, perhaps even before Andrew had. "Henry," DeSalvo said, instantly behind O'Brien, slapping the red-haired man on the back, lowering him onto the stool. "How ya doin'? How ya doin'?"

  O'Brien, momentarily restrained by DeSalvo's beefy hand, mumbled something Andrew couldn't hear.

  "Al, cup a coffee for my friend Henry here," DeSalvo said in a loud voice, so that all could hear. "Talk to you in a bit, Henry, but I gotta go say hello to my friend Andy before he blows town."

  DeSalvo walked to Andrew's table and, in a gesture that took Andrew by surprise, bent to kiss Eden's cheek, the way a man like DeSalvo might casually greet the wife of an old friend.

  "Thank you," Andrew said, meaning O'Brien but also the kiss.

  "Mean son of a bitch," said DeSalvo under his breath, "but I'll give you some advice." DeSalvo stood to his full height, hitched his navy blue jogging pants. "You enjoy your sandwiches," he said. "Take your time. That's OK. But Henry's a powder keg even under the best of circumstances, you follow me."

  Andrew nodded. He watched DeSalvo return to the place where O'Brien was sitting, take the outside stool, so that he was blocking O'Brien's view of Eden. Andrew could just see the back of O'Brien's head, the longish hair curling over the collar of his jacket, the bright pink skin leading to his ear. No one could help O'Brien now. That was damage that could not be erased, undone.

  When DeSalvo had gone, Eden took a bite from her sandwich and said, "I told you it was a bad idea."

  He looked across at her. Her hair had taken a heating from the wind. Another woman would have combed her hair in the car before going into the luncheonette. Andrew realized that he would have to be alert to these small gestures for her. The blue-green sweater, a loose cotton, hung neatly from her shoulders, exposing a small white crescent of skin at the neckline. She had the sleeves pushed to the elbows. He reached for her wrist, rubbed the back of her hand. His heart lifted at the sight of her across from him, raising the sandwich to her lips, her hair framed by a Coca-Cola poster behind her—lifted at the thought
of the two of them doing something as ordinary as eating in a luncheonette.

  Andrew took a bite of his own sandwich.

  "It wasn't entirely a bad idea," he said.

  WHEN HE enters his own house, he listens for sounds of movement, hears none. There are dishes in the sink he must wash later. He walks through the house and up the stairs, making his way quietly along the floorboards of the hallway, thinking he will not wake her yet. But when he enters his mother's room and sees her lying beneath the quilt, her hair in a braid that trails along the pillow, he cannot resist the impulse to sit on the bed beside her. She stirs slightly, and he says, It's Andrew. She smiles in her sleep, before she comes fully to consciousness.

  He looks at his watch. He should wake her now, he thinks. He has discovered, sleeping with her, that she has lost the common distinction between night and day. She sleeps only three or four hours at a stretch, twice a day, often getting up to prepare herself a meal at three in the morning. He would like to retrain her to a rhythm they could share.

  "Where have you been?" she asks drowsily, reaching immediately to touch some part of him. It is her way of looking at him, making contact. She rubs a hand along the cloth of his sleeve by her side.

  "I've been with T.J. He came by for a visit, stayed to help with the dining room. You should wake up now. It's nearly noon."

  She smiles again. He thinks she is sometimes amused by his efforts to guide her into a normal routine. He wonders if this effort on his part isn't his way of reclaiming for himself some sense of order in his small universe. These have been extraordinary days, extraordinary events, beyond his ken—brought now barely under control.

  She yawns, bringing a hand to her mouth.

  "I'm hungry," she says.

  "Good," he says.

  He walks to the window, lifts it open. "It's a fantastic day," he says. "Can you feel it?"

  He bends, peers down into the yard. Perhaps it is looking through the encrusted screen that does it—that makes the sound come unbidden into his thoughts. The dream did get it right, he realizes suddenly. It was through his own sodden sleep that he first heard a woman's voice cry out, and he thought it might have been his mother. Then there was the second cry, a hoarse shout, that of a grown man, and immediately the frightened squeal of another female, a child still, as he himself was then. And finally, after the shots, the reedy, high-pitched wail, the tendril of smoke rising to the sky, gathering momentum—the anguished voice of Edith Close. He hears again the terrible keening.