Eden Close (26 page)

 

W
HEN HE
enters his kitchen, arms full of grocery bags from the A &: P, and a plastic bag from the mall dangling from his fingers, the phone is ringing. He lets his bundles fall to the kitchen table, lifts the receiver.

"Andrew?"

"Jayne."

"You sound short of breath."

"Oh, a bit. How are you?"

"I'm fine, Andrew. I think the real question is: How are you?"

"Better. Better," he says vaguely.

The been asked to call...."

"I know. I should have called in."

"You
are
coming back?" she says.

"Yes. Soon. Is it very bad there?"

"Everything that can go wrong..."

"And Geoffrey?"

"The usual. Well past hysteria."

Through the kitchen window, Andrew can see a long blanket of tarnished silver clouds advancing on the western horizon.

"Jayne, before you say any more, I've decided to take some vacation time. There's a lot owed me, but I'm thinking in terms of another week, ten days."

There is a pause.

"Jayne?"

He thinks that perhaps they've been disconnected, but just before he is about to hang up, he hears a male voice on the line.

"Andrew."

The one spoken word brings Geoffrey, all six feet four inches of him, clearly into focus. He will be standing at Jayne's desk, his free hand fussing with the knot of his tie. Andrew can see the black aviator frames with the smoky tint, the neatly trimmed black mustache with flecks of gray, the black wing tips, glossily polished.

"Geoffrey."

"Sorry about your mother."

"Thank you."

"But that's not why I called."

"No."

"It isn't a convenient time right now for a vacation. The agency is collapsing under the weight of this project even as we speak. We may have to scuttle them altogether and start anew with someone else. We need you, Andrew, to tighten the reins, to get this thing under control. The product's been ready for six weeks."

"I know."

"So you'll come in, then. Tomorrow?"

"No."

"Then when?"

"I'm not."

"Come again?"

"I can't. Not right now. I'm sorry, Geoffrey."

There is a long silence.

"I think you should give this some more thought, Andrew. Consider what I've said."

"I'll do that."

"I want you to call in tomorrow. Talk to me after you've thought about it. You can take a month's vacation when this is over."

"Its not the vacation per se, Geoffrey. It's that I can't leave here right now."

"I don't want to have to say your job is on the line."

"No."

"We don't want that to be a consideration."

"No."

"So don't back me into a corner on this one, OK, buddy?"

"No."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"I think so. This isn't personal, Geoffrey. I'm not trying to cause a problem."

"Then don't."

"I'll call you."

"Do that."

Andrew holds the phone to his ear long after he has heard the click on the other end. He replaces the receiver and walks to the left side of the window so that he may have a better view of the blanket of clouds on the horizon. He hears, distinctly now, a long roll of thunder in the distance. It is as though a town were waiting for an advancing army to liberate it.

The office must be in worse shape than he thought, for Geoffrey to have threatened him—though Andrew knows the threat is almost certainly an empty one. He would have to be AWOL a lot longer than this for Geoffrey to let him go. This knowledge, however, is oddly disappointing. Getting fired now would come as a relief, absolve him of responsibility for the future.

The phone rings again.

"Andrew?"

The chemical reaction in his larynx deflates his voice by half an octave.

"Martha."

"Where are you?"

"I'm here, obviously."

"I mean, why aren't you in the city? You were only going to take a week."

"I've decided to stay on a bit, take some vacation time."

"Vacation time? But what about Billy? He's been expecting you."

Andrew winces. This fact, which has lain at the back of his thoughts for six days, kept in check by Andrew's attention to the details of his house and of providing for Eden, spirals out of its niche and floods the whole of Andrew's consciousness.

"It's only another week," he says, in a voice that has risen a notch. He clears his throat. "I need to sort some things out."

"Andrew."

"What?"

"You sound odd. Is everything all right?"

"No. Not really."

"What is it?"

"I can't talk about it now. I'm sorry. Tell me how Billy is."

"He's great. All tanned and healthy. But I think you're going to have to talk to him."

"I know. Put him on." He waits, his chest tight, for his son's voice. "Daddy?"

"Hi, Billy. What are you doing?"

"Me and Mommy are making a battleship with my Legos. I can't go outside 'cause it's raining. Are you coming to get me now?"

"No, Billy. Not today. I'm still at Grandma's house."

Andrew hears a long sigh, like that from an old man. The sigh enters his own body, goes right to his bones with a shudder.

"Billy?"

"Tomorrow can you come?"

"I can't tomorrow. But soon. I'll come as soon as I can. I love you and miss you."

"I love you too, Daddy."

"I went swimming today in a pond. And guess what color the water is."

"Green?"

"It's golden."

"Are there fish in it?"

"Lots offish."

"Can we go there sometime?"

"Sure. We'll see."

"Grandpop took me fishing in the ocean."

"Did you catch anything?"

"Nope. Well, kind of. I caught a lot of seaweed."

"You be good, OK, Billy?"

"OK."

"And I'll come soon."

"OK."

"Can I talk to Mommy now?"

"OK. Bye, Daddy."

"Bye, Billy. I love you."

Andrew falls into the chair by the phone, rests his head on his hand.

"So you don't know when you'll be here," Martha says. Drag and exhale. Away from him, she has lit a cigarette.

"I'll let you know."

"You know, Jayne called here this morning. She wanted to know if I knew what was going on."

"There's nothing going on. I'm just exhausted, that's all. I need some time."

"So you say. I'll try to handle Billy. But don't wait too long. You've never not come when you've said you would. I'm not sure he understands this."

"Give me another week. That's all. I'm sure I can sort this out by then."

"You don't sound good."

"I'm actually very good. That's the funny part."

"I don't know if I like this," she says. "You're not making a lot of sense."

"Don't worry. Everything will be all right. Give Billy a kiss for me."

"Andrew?"

"Yes?"

"You take care of yourself."

He stands up, heads immediately to the fridge. Taking out a beer and opening it, he holds it in one hand as he removes the groceries from the paper bags and puts them in the fridge and the cupboards. A half gallon of ice cream he has forgotten about has leaked into the paper bag. Halfway through this chore, he opens the screen door, stands on the back stoop. From there he can see nearly the entire horizon line where the army is advancing. It is a slow-moving storm, beginning only now to flutter the leaves in the trees overhead. Soon the leaves will turn their backs and shine silvery as the clouds slide across the sun. He can see a distant flash of lightning, can hear another slow rumble of thunder.

The phone rings again. He doesn't move. It rings seven times, and then it stops. When he's sure the caller has given up, he reenters the kitchen and throws the empty beer can into the wastebasket. He is nearly through the kitchen on the way to his bedroom when the phone begins to ring again.

"Andy-boy."

'T.J."

"Everything OK, pal? I thought you'da blown town by now."

"Not quite."

"Well, anyway, I got some good news for you."

"What's that?"

"I just had a call from your neighbor, Edith Close. She's sellin' too. Moving right away, she says. This is fantastic. With both houses on the market, we can get a much better deal now."

 

T
HROUGH THE NIGHT
, storms rattle the town, wave upon wave battering the gates, pausing for a time, then beginning again. The skirmishes—lewd light shows beyond his screen, punctuated by splintering cracks of thunder overhead—sever Andrew's dreams, causing him to start and wake a dozen times before dawn. In the morning, nothing has changed but the rising of a gray curtain of light that reveals the trees' wild careening and a lawn strewn with debris—branches, twigs, leaves and dead hydrangea blossoms. He wakes a final time, his mouth dry, his body soaked from a tenacious humidity that will not break. The sheets on his bed are grainy from too many days of dampness. He curls himself off the bed and slips on the jeans and shirt and sneakers that lie in a pile
on the floor. Stumbling into the dim bathroom, he flips on the switch there and is puzzled for a moment when the overhead light doesn't go on. To check that it is not simply a blown bulb, he reaches behind him for the light switch in the hallway and finds there, too, only a deadened circuit. He walks heavily down the stairway, through the living room and out to the kitchen, pausing only long enough to drink a glass of water.

Outside the air feels charged: he thinks he can smell a faint trace of ozone. It is not raining, but he knows the calm is deceptive as he surveys the sweep of sky over the town and sees no break in the clouds in any direction. He heads down the gravel drive, past a faded green shutter that has fallen from an upstairs window at the Closes' house during the night. At the road, he stops. He has no destination, merely a desire to leave the two houses for a time so that he can think. To his right is the town, with its pockets of subdivisions encroaching farther and farther along the straight road out toward his house. To the left is a nearly empty expanse of road through farmlands and cornfields, leading to the next town. He turns left.

He walks on the asphalt, his hands in his pockets, stepping into the ditch from time to time when he hears the whining of a truck or a car. He marvels at the amount of debris on the road and wonders where it is that the wires are down, causing the blackout. He wonders, too, if the luncheonette has opened for breakfast, if T.J. and his wife are even aware, in their insulated capsule, that storms have shaken the county. He tries to imagine how they will survive without their air-conditioning if they, too, have lost their power. He wonders if the women and their babies are getting ready to go to the mall now, or if they will stay home today.

He walks perhaps three or four miles before he is aware
of just how far he has traveled. He has managed not to think too strenuously, which, he realizes, is what he wanted all along. He has reached a spot in the road on either side of which are only cornfields. An angry burst of thunder takes him by surprise, for he has not noticed any lightning preceding it, and it seems to him that the thunder is close, just off his left shoulder. The sky, too, is darkening, as if it would return so quickly back to night. He thinks now that he should turn around, that in his drowsy state he has come too far. It is foolish, he knows, to be walking on an open road, so far from shelter, with the promise of another storm.

He starts to make a turn, when he sees, in the middle of the road up ahead, not fifty feet from him, a small shape that seems as though it shouldn't be there, that doesn't look like a tree branch or a blown cornstalk. He squints at the shape, trying to make out what it is, torn between investigating it and retreating toward his house. He moves a few steps forward, in order to see more clearly, thinking he can discern the outline of an animal. It moves slightly, raising its head. A pencil-thin dagger of lightning in the cornfields to his left lights up the scene: the wet road, the waves of undulating fields, the huddled shape. He feels raindrops on his hair and shoulders—an announcement of yet another storm, followed immediately by a drumming shower. He jogs to the shape, crouches down beside it. A beagle's head turns toward him, its eyes calm and sorrowful. The dog looks at Andrew, as if for an explanation of this calamity, and lays its head down, still watching the man. A bolt of lightning appears to strike the road not a hundred feet from Andrew, startling him. The crack of thunder is so sudden and so sharp the dog lifts its head again. Andrew sees that the creature's hind legs have been crushed, and there is a smear of blood, about three feet long, on the asphalt—washing away now in the rain_ where the animal has tried to drag itself. Andrew peers up
and down the road. In the distance, coming from town, he sees the headlights of a vehicle. Another bolt of lightning and then another, a pair of jagged wires piercing the space around himself and the dog, make him shudder involuntarily. He has always, even as a boy, harbored a fear of lightning. He bends down and tries to slide his arms under the dog. It gives a faint moan. The headlights of the car are more distinct now, moving fast along the road. Andrew lifts the animal into his arms, feeling the dead weight of the hindquarters. The dog raises its head, tries to reach its nose to Andrew's face. He carries it to a grassy patch beside the road and lays it down as gently as he can. The car whizzes past, showering Andrew and the dog with a fine spray. The center of the storm is upon them now, spewing out its stabs of lightning with abandon. Andrew crouches toward the ground, so as not to be a target, then lies on the grass on his stomach beside the dog. The thunder is so loud—or his sudden fear of the accompanying lightning so paralyzing—that he cannot move, save to cover his head with his arms and hands. He chooses not to watch, but he knows, his breath held, then released in spasms, that all around them there is lightning, dancing gaudily in the cornfields. His spine tingles with the image of his exposed back as an electrical field, inviting the ferocious charge. He stretches his arms out in front of him feeling the earth. The thunder rises like the crescendo of an orchestra gone mad. He presses his brow hard into the grassy soil and waits.