Eden Close (14 page)

"Oh," says Billy. "Daddy?"

"What, Billy?"

"Don't pack away the car."

He knows that Billy means the wooden go-cart that Andrew's father built for Andrew when he was a boy and that Andrew's mother saved for the time when Andrew himself had a child. During a visit to his mother when Billy was five, he took his son to the high school parking lot and taught him to steer.

"No, I won't. It's safe and sound in the garage."

"Mommy wants to talk to you."

"Billy?"

"What, Daddy?"

"I love you."

"I love you too."

Andrew can hear the squelchy sound of Billy kissing the telephone mouthpiece. He bends to do the same, but the small voice is too quickly gone. He hears a shuffling of the phone, Martha asking her mother to take Billy outside. Andrew braces himself.

"So," she says. He hears a faint sigh. Fatigue? Irritation? Then there is a quick drag and exhale of cigarette smoke. He can see her as clearly as if she were standing next to him. Jeans, a white shirt, a sweater tied around her neck, sandals, her feet tanned. There will be a frown of impatience on her brow. Her head will be slightly inclined because she wears her shoulder-length brown hair parted to one side now, and often there is a wave of hair that wants to fall across her face.

"He sounds..." Andrew takes a quick breath of air. "He sounds good."

"He's great," Martha says. "Great. He wanted to talk to you. He was upset when I told him about your mother. But he's better now." Drag and exhale.

Holding her cigarette between her fingers, she will push the hair off her face. He has seen her on the phone a thousand times.

"I'm relieved," says Andrew.

"So listen," says Martha. "You sure you're OK?"

"I'm OK."

"How long are you going to stay there?"

"Another week."

"Oh....I guess there isn't anything I can say."

"No. Probably not."

"You'll come get Billy when we get back?"

"You know I will."

"Well, then."

There is a pause.

"Andrew?"

"What?"

"It's strange, isn't it?" she says. "What is?"

"You doing this alone."

 

A
PERSON
walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost—but not quite—unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones. A random sperm meets a random egg and becomes your child, whom you love more than life itself. Yet the meeting, that infinitesimal beginning, is no more astonishing than the division of a cell.

He had met Martha at an antiwar rally their senior year at college. Not a memorable meeting—she had asked him merely to hand out leaflets in front of the ROTC building—but he had found himself attracted to her, despite, or perhaps because of, her total preoccupation. It was her anger that he noticed, a clear blue anger, so purely defined by the effort to stop the war—an anger that gave high color to her cheeks even as it lent her speech, with its broad
A's
and its other New England idiosyncrasies, an articulate speed. At first he was content merely to observe her—she was ferocious without being strident in the meetings he attended—but as the year progressed he found himself more and more often paired with her on political projects. Years later, when he would be forced to examine the reasons they had come together, as if puzzling over an insolvable calculus problem, he reflected that it wasn't that the pairing had ignited a passion between them but rather that it had allowed them to drift toward a future that was as much determined by circumstance as it was by desire or will. If they, for instance, had met their junior year in school or later, in graduate school, and had not had to face together the milestone of leaving dormitories and finding another place to live, would they have been impelled to take an apartment they could share together?

Not that he didn't love her. He did, or thought he might, though she, with the admirable bristles and spikes of her anger, was not always easy to love. They were married by then, living in a one-bedroom third-floor walk-up on Fayette Street in Cambridge. The tub was in the kitchen. Martha studied on the bed. He took a table by a window in the living room. At night, when he was finished studying, he'd go into the bedroom. She would be asleep, sitting up, with a book on her lap. Gently, so as not to wake her, he would carefully remove all the papers and books to a table beside the bed and would ease her down under the covers.

And sometimes, having done that, he would watch her, beginning to formulate the calculus problem that would be their marriage. For even by then her anger was starting to
become unfocused, more diffuse. The war had ended; it was harder now to find a cause. She was often dissatisfied, discontent. He thought then it was courageous of her, her willingness always to live at the edge, but later he came reluctantly to see that she was this way not by choice but because the anger was herself.

He thinks now how slow he was to understand this, and how often he was impatient with this thing in her she had not wished upon herself, could not control. When they were in New York and living on the East Side, he thought her anger the result of having been uprooted from her home territory and of not being able to find a better job than teaching English in a private school. But by the time Billy had arrived and they had moved to Saddle River, the anger had focused on himself, or, more specifically, on the marriage, or, more specifically still, on the state of being married at that particular place and time. And by then the anger had become contagious, so that he had developed in her presence bristles and spikes, though he would never be as concise or as articulate in an argument as she, and so more often than not lost the verbal battles.

He used to think it was the move that had destroyed them. It had happened coincidental^: a door had opened just when he had wished it to, and so he had walked through it. It was on an afternoon in their last year of graduate school—both of them waiting to hear of jobs for the next year—when he had had an epiphany of sorts following a stultifying session of a freshman course he had taught. He had seen, that day, standing in the classroom after the students had left, a future stretch before him of endless similar afternoons, of dusty books and chalk-filled rooms and freshman themes, and he had realized that this was not what he'd had in mind at all. Yet it wasn't until Geoffrey called, some weeks later, asking Andrew to come and work for him at the
pharmaceutical firm, that a plan had taken shape. Geoffrey had been his professor in an American Studies seminar; Andrew had been his favorite pupil—indeed, the two had often finished the seminar with beers at a local bar.
It needn't be forever,
Geoffrey had said on the phone, knowing Andrew would be reluctant after so long an investment to turn his back on academia.
Just come down and give it a try.
And so he had, and the company had offered him so much money that even Martha had been, for once, speechless.

When he tries to think of himself and Martha in Saddle River before they separated, he remembers too much and not enough. The memories flood in upon him like rain, but like rain, they fall through his fingers before he can grasp them. He used to think he could not remember because his memory was failing him, but now he thinks the forgetting is a trick of his mind to protect him. His mind protects him from the good memories, which are painful now to contemplate, and from the bad memories, which make him embarrassed for them both.

When their nights were very bad, he was incapable of remembering the good ones. Or if he did, they were like childhood stories that no longer had meaning or resonance. Yet when there were good times, sparse though they were near the end, he could absolutely not remember the silences or the bitterness or the emptiness that had followed their fights just a week earlier. Or the fear—a persistent image—that the tiny family he had made was coming apart at the roots. He would sometimes not even be able to remember any of the words of a fight they had had just the day before.

They were growing out of love, as if the love itself had always had a finite and predictable life, like childhood. And if they'd been told of this in the beginning, they might have chosen not to marry and have a child, though Andrew could not conceive of ever having made a decision that would lead
to a world without Billy. And so they stayed together well past the time when the love had ended, pretending and hoping the hiatus was only temporary, fearful of the future. Until one day when the gulf between them had grown so deep that Martha, having more courage than he and fearing less that she would lose Billy, went to stay with her mother until Andrew was able to move out. He found that night, when he returned home from work, a sad note that, though it offered him a certain kind of relief, nearly drove him mad to read.

And yet weren't those the best years of all—with Billy as an infant, a toddler, a little boy standing up in his crib with his arms wide to greet his father who had come home late from work? A tiny boy with a glove two sizes too big for him cheerfully missing each ball thrown to him, happy simply to be playing with his father, as indeed the father was happy simply to be playing with him.

Andrew marvels at this conundrum, and he wonders often if this happened only to him, or if it happens all the time, to everyone who marries.

 

A
ND HOW MUCH
, through all this, did he think of Eden? Did she not rise and bubble to the surface in his dreams?

In the beginning, when he was first at school, he felt uneasy when he met a girl. Pursuing pleasure, when Eden was so damaged, felt to him like an act of disloyalty. On visits home the first few years, he'd pester his mother with questions, but she was oddly reticent, changing the subject, as though she wished to protect him from the facts of the sordid and tragic business next door, perhaps believing the facts might distract him from what she thought was a more important matter—his education. When Martha began making the journey north with him, he found it awkward to ask of Eder, except in the most casual way. And by the time they'd moved to New York (and the journeys north had become even more infrequent), he had news of Eden only when he had a letter from home—in that era of ten-hour days at the office and of Billy's birth.

And yet it seems to him now that Eden was always there, a presence hovering at the edge of his dreams, a fragment of a life not entirely left behind. He would think of her at odd moments, at a hockey game with his son, or when he saw a girl with a head of blond curls on a street corner. Sometimes, when he thought of Eden and himself, the image that came to mind was of two trains on parallel tracks hurtling forward with abandon, until one had stopped short, derailed, while the other, his own, had gone on and on.

 

A
ND DID HE NOT
, through all this, think often of Sean as well?

The afternoon after the shooting, Sean left town—whether from grief or guilt no one ever was able accurately to say. Nor did anyone know where he had gone, for he had left no note. But T.J., realizing by evening that Sean was missing, told Andy in confidence over the phone that he thought Sean had gone south, toward New York City.

As it happened, this was a shrewd guess, confirmed on the second day after the shooting when a state trooper called at the apartment over the TV repair shop a little after supper to inform Sean's parents that their son had been killed in a hit-and-run accident as he was attempting to cross 178th Street in Washington Heights. The boy had had too much to drink in an Irish bar on the corner, said the trooper, and had, according to witnesses, walked across the street as though blind. It was never known what Sean was doing on the periphery of Manhattan—whether he had got off the bus at the George Washington Bridge by mistake (not realizing there was another leg down into the center of the city, with a stop at Forty-second Street), or whether he had met someone on the
bus who had enticed him into the neighborhood. But if there was someone, he or she never came forward. Indeed, none of the witnesses had ever seen Sean before.

After that day and later, Andrew was to think often about that ill-fated bus ride, to imagine what Sean had been thinking on the thruway south to the city and to wonder where it was that Sean had slept that night and why. Even today, when driving north on the Henry Hudson, he catches sight of the George Washington Bridge, or when he crosses the bridge from New Jersey, he never fails to think of Sean—blind drunk and lost in Washington Heights.

The town reeled from the news of the two events (there hadn't been a murder in the village in forty-two years; never a report of a hit-and-run) and waited for Eden to wake up, hoping she would put the pieces of the puzzle into place. And so it was that when Eden came out of the coma that had kept her a silent sleeping prisoner in her hospital bed for ten days and said (her mother vigilant beside her) the single name—one time, never again to confirm or deny it—no one was surprised.

 

I
N THE MORNING
, he surveys the gutter. It has come away from the house at one end and sags, as if at any minute the entire trough will break loose. It must be put right, though he has no certain idea how to do it. Walking back and forth along the southern face of the house, he tries to think about the problem logically. He will inspect the supports that are still holding, see how they're fastened, then reproduce that system along the length of the gutter. It isn't as though he has never done repair work before. He has, and still retains a vestigial memory of fixing things with his father in his boyhood. It's that he is, for reasons he can't bring into focus, edgy this morning, his nearly bucolic calm of yesterday morning badly ruffled.

He assumes it is because he slept so fitfully during the night. When he awoke at 5
A.M.
, having nearly asphyxiated himself with the loose top sheet and wanting, inexplicably, to drink a beer, he had been dreaming of a blue dress in a window. He looks over at the other house. The window, with its four vertical rectangular panes, is bare and lifeless, as if what he saw there
had
been only a dream and not a tangible image.