Eden Close (20 page)

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.

 

O
N 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.

 

A
LL 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 their 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.

Andrew visits all of the shoe stores and the shoe departments of Sears and Caldor's. He visits some of the stores twice. He lingers over the selections, unable to come to a decision, unable to settle upon what he thinks is the perfect shoe. For he wants the shoes to be right, and he examines each display with the kind of scrutiny hitherto reserved for forays into toy stores in order to buy birthday presents for Billy. He fingers canvas shoes that have no ties, deliberates as to whether they might be a more sensible choice. He thinks of boat shoes as perhaps being more practical. He realizes, in Caldor's, throwing his head back in a gesture of disbelief at his own stupidity, that color is irrelevant. He is, for a time, seduced, despite his natural antipathy, by the endless shelves of sixty-dollar running shoes and lets himself be taught
the intricacies of arch support. He passes several times by the first shoe store he entered, hoping the salesgirl there will have gone on a break. Finally, after an undetermined amount of time has passed, and after he has eaten a hamburger and a vanilla shake at Burger King, he walks purposefully into the first shoe store and makes for the rack of plain canvas sneakers. He allows the ambitious salesgirl no time to intercept him, picks out a pair of blue sneakers and says,
Size six and a half please,
in a voice normally reserved for giving taxi drivers directions. He suspects she will outwit him by coming out of the storeroom with a smile to say they are out of stock, but perhaps she is less interested in him than he thought, for she returns in a minute with a box. He checks to see if they are indeed blue and size 6½, which they are. He pays for the sneakers and walks out with the box under his arm.

Then he begins on the sunglasses.

The quest for the sunglasses takes not quite as long, but standing in line at the register, listening to one teenage girl tell another, enigmatically, that she has burned her blue silk blouse, he looks at his watch and sees that it is already quarter to seven. He is due at T.J.'s at seven. He doesn't even have the wine. He will have to bolt, buy the wine, drop by the house, throw on a clean shirt. No time for a shower and a shave. And even so, he will be late.

He pays for the sunglasses and heads for the exit door. As soon as he opens it, the heat hits him like a thick wall. Nearly seven o'clock, and it still feels like a hundred.

He walks unhurriedly to his car. He is humming a song heard overhead in a store. He has the sneakers and the sunglasses, and tomorrow he will give them to her.

 

H
E RINGS
the bell beside T.J.'s front door, turns and glances down the street. Each house is, in its construction, identical
to the one beside it. Any individuality, to the extent that characteristic exists at all, is created only by the paint or the trim or the false panes in this window or that. The sign at the entrance to the subdivision reads: "Water's Edge—Center-Hall Colonials," but the houses have little in common with the colonials Andrew knew in Massachusetts years ago. Even the driveways and the lawns and the redwood decks at the backs are clones of each other. What is to prevent a man, he wonders idly, from coming home drunk late one night, swerving into the wrong driveway and fumbling at the wrong door with his keys? Or opening an unlocked door and slipping into the wrong bed beside the wrong wife?

"Andy-boy. Pal," says T.J., opening the door and letting out clouds of frigid air. "Come in quick, before the heat gets in."

T.J. has on a white cotton sweater with the sleeves pushed' up to the elbows and a pair of khaki pants with a profusion of pockets. The pants look as though they are meant to be worn on safari. Andrew proffers the bottle of wine wrapped in a paper bag. He has thrown on a clean dress shirt over his sweat-stained back. His fingernails are still black, and he has not shaved. T.J. raises an eyebrow but says nothing. The icebox sting of the air-conditioning, an air-conditioning that makes the interior of the house feel like late November, creates along Andrew's spine an instant and deep shiver.