Eden Close (27 page)

When he hears the thunder subside, he raises himself off the ground to a sitting position. He tries to clear the rain from his face with his sleeve. The dog's eyes are closed. He puts his hand on the animal's head, lets his hand caress the inert body. The dog has stopped panting, is not breathing at all.

"It's all right," he says, stroking the wet fur. The rain
soaks them both, indifferent to the living and the dead. He thinks about the dog's silence on the brink of death. Did its hind legs not hurt? he wonders.

And then, so completely drenched that he has begun to shiver, he thinks about injury and damage done. The thoughts come warmly and familiarly into his brain; it was what he was trying to dream about all night, an exploration rudely thwarted again and again by the nocturnal chaos of the storm.

Can damage be erased, redressed? he asks silently.

"And who of us is not damaged?" he asks aloud.

He thinks of T.J., lost to his belief in the morality of material things.

He thinks of Martha, twisted from an early age by an anger that refused to explain itself or leave her.

He thinks of Geoffrey, with his wing-tip shoes and his expensive dark suits, committed ten hours a day to the drama at the top of a glass and steel building.

And he thinks of himself, engaged so long in the same enterprise, forfeiting the thing he cared most about—the daily fatherhood of his son.

Is Eden any more damaged than himself? he wonders. Than any of them? And was it folly to imagine that he could, by loving her, ease the hurts of her past? Or she his?

A rusty green pickup truck sails past Andrew, stops short, nearly hydroplaning on the wet pavement, and backs up to where Andrew is sitting. A middle-aged man, wearing a once white T-shirt and a brown felt hat with a brim, leans across the front seat and rolls down the window. Andrew can see the gray stubble on his cheeks, an eyetooth missing.

"That yer dog?" he asks.

Andrew shakes his head.

"What you want to do with it?"

"Bury it," says Andrew.

"Well, then, throw it in the back. You live around here?" Andrew nods, tells him where he lives. "Better get in," says the man.

 

H
E BURIES
the dog under the hydrangea tree. It is a frustrating process in the rain, since the hole he makes with a spade keeps filling up with water and falling in at the sides. It has to be a largish hole and fairly deep to accommodate the dog and to keep stray animals from digging at it. When the lightning comes again, he has to retreat to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He looks out the window at the dog and the half-dug hole. The lightning stops, and he goes out to resume the digging. At times he wishes he had not decided to do this, because he knows he has to think now, to plan, to make lists about the immediate future. He is afraid to have an idea and then not remember it later. But when the hole is fully dug, the dog placed inside it, the soil raked over, he is glad that he has done this.

 

S
HE ISN'T
sitting in the chair when he enters the kitchen. She is at the sink and turns immediately when he opens the door. Her face seems agitated, hard to read. She is wearing a long blue seersucker bathrobe, and she is rubbing her arms with her hands as if she were cold. He has been worried all morning that Edith would not go to work, and when he heard the Plymouth start up, he raised his head toward the ceiling in grateful thanks.

"What's going on?" he asks at once. He does not go to her. He senses she wouldn't want that yet.

"She found the tape recorder."

"How?"

"I thought she was taking a nap. She said she was going to. I put the headphones on and was listening to the stories when she came into the room. I should have heard her long
before she ever got to my room, but with the headphones on, I couldn't."

"I'm sorry."

"She took it."

"What did she say?"

"She didn't say anything. She just left."

"Do you know she's selling the house?"

She nods. "I heard her on the phone. But how do
you
know?"

"It was T.J.'s agency that she called."

"Ah."

"Come over to the chair and sit down," he says. "We have to talk."

"What is there to talk about now?"

"Let's go upstairs," he says, "to your room. I want to lie down with you, talk to you that way."

"No," she says quickly. "Not my room. I'll come sit down."

She makes her way to the chair and perches on it reluctantly, as if about to hear a lecture she intends to resist. She folds her hands in her lap. Her face, he now sees, has become, on the surface, impassive, struggling to keep in check a face underneath.

He reaches across for her hand. She gives it unwillingly.

"Tonight," he says, "I'm going to pack up the house for good. When I come tomorrow, I'm going to help you pack. Then we're going to get in my car and drive to my apartment in New York. We'll leave a note for Edith. When we get to the city, I'm going to take a short leave of absence from my job. We'll get you settled in a good program for the blind, but we'll be together, live together."

He is improvising now. Until this minute he has been unable to think beyond the drive south, the exhilaration of that open a highway.

She begins to shake her head.

"What?" he says.

She says nothing, but he can feel her retreating even further, inch by inch.

"What is it?" he asks more forcefully.

"I can't do that," she says. "I can't leave."

"But why?"

"I wouldn't know how."

"I'll be with you every step of the way. It doesn't have to be the city; we can go anywhere."

"You have a son," she says. "And I have Edith."

"You have Edith?" he asks incredulously.

"I have to have Edith and she has to have me. There are things about this you don't understand, things about me you wouldn't like if you knew."

"There's nothing about you I couldn't deal with. I love you. I've told you that. It's simple."

"No; that's just it," she says. "It isn't simple at all."

She withdraws her hand, rises and edges toward the sink.

"I won't leave here without you," he says. "There's nothing more important in my life that I have to do."

She hunches her shoulders forward, rests her weight on her hands at the lip of the sink. He can see the shape of her back, her waist beneath the robe. Her hair is tangled, not brushed. There are dishes in the sink she has not washed yet. She runs her palms along the porcelain rim. She takes hold of the faucet, massages it with the heel of her hand.

The silence worries him. He feels that he is losing ground. "I won't leave without you," he says again, "and I won't let—"

She cuts him off. She whirls around quickly from the sink. "I've changed my mind," she says. "I want to go upstairs now."

He guesses she is doing this to stop him, to divert him
from his campaign. But he imagines that lying next to him, she cannot fail to hear him.

He follows her through the dining room, the living room, up the stairs and, after they have reached the landing, through a darkened doorway.

A flash of lightning through the sole window lights up the room, illuminating hundreds of faded pink roses on the walls. The paper is peeling badly, revealing another, grayer paper beneath it. Someone years ago, perhaps when Eden was a baby, thought to cover the more somber paper with one befitting a little girl, but having no expertise in wallpapering, as was the case with Jim and Edith, merely covered the one paper with the other. Oddly, he or she also papered the slanted ceiling over the bed, but there whole patches have come away, laying bare a crumbling plaster. The bed is tucked under the slanted ceiling, one side against the wall, with only a foot of space above the edge of the bed where the wall and ceiling meet. The bed has no headboard, only an iron footboard, painted white, but chipped in so many places it looks more mottled than painted. A worn pink chenille bedspread is drawn up neatly to the single pillow. The floor, wide plank boards, is painted a chocolate brown. On the other side of the room is a small desk of maple with a stained green blotter on its surface. There is a radio on the blotter and a hairbrush. Beside the hairbrush is a sealed plastic bag with what seems to be a large lump of moist clay inside. On the chair in front of the desk is the blue sundress.

Another flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a shuddering crack of thunder. He looks out the window at the rain and at the trees whipping back and forth. The shade at the top of the window is torn along the bottom, and he sees that the panes have not been washed in a long time.

Nearly noon, and it is as dark as a heavy dusk.

It is the first time he has been in her room as an adult, though when he was a boy he was sometimes here while Eden collected a baseball glove or her mittens. Then the room was not barren, at least not as he remembers it. The desk was cluttered in those days with a record player and her records and her sports paraphernalia. Sleeves and legs of clothes spilled from the dresser. In the corner, he remembers, she kept her hockey stick and skates. He thinks, too, he must have been here on a stormy day, like this one, but he can't, for a moment, recall what it was they did here. He has a vague memory of endless games of Monopoly, stretching long past the point when he'd have been glad to concede the game to her if he could have brought himself to do it—or did they go to
his
house on rainy days?

He surveys the room again, returning to the moment. The weight of it hits him now. He imagines how she must sit here with the darkness falling. He wonders if he would be able to stand that, or would he have to find a light? There is a light, a wall lamp near the door. It must be for Edith, for when she comes during the evening.

He watches Eden sit on the edge of the bed, as if momentarily preoccupied with choices, then lie back close to the wall. She raises one knee slightly, and the robe falls open when she does so. She stretches out an arm to indicate that he should come.

There is something uncomfortable about her posture. He tries to read her face. Already she is eons away from him.

He sits in the chair by the desk. He would like to know what she has in its drawers, whether the "things" that she makes are there. The radio is an old one, of round brown plastic. He wishes they could go back to the kitchen, start again.

"I'm lonely over here," she says.

The voice is one he hasn't heard in years. He remembers the afternoon as clearly as if he were at the pond this moment.
You can touch my blouse,
she said, and the voice was the same. But then he was a boy, and he resisted her.

He bends down to loosen the laces of his sneakers. They are still soaked from his walk. He thinks of the dog under the tree He would like! to tell her about the dog. He takes off his shirt, unbuckles his belt. He lays his clothes on the chair, over the blue sundress.

He walks to the bed, lies down beside her. He thinks only that he will hold her, bring her back. But under his weight, when he moves toward her, the bed creaks abruptly and loudly in the silence—the old iron springs protesting a man's additional weight. Yesterday, he thinks, they might have laughed together, but now the sound makes her freeze, as if she had badly miscalculated, as if she had not anticipated this echo. Quickly, he presses his hand against the small of her back, drawing her closer, but she is stiff against his embrace.

"Eden," he says, but she doesn't answer him.

He can feel her fear, or something like fear, along the tendons and muscles of her back. The fear is contagious and travels up his arm to his own chest. Alarmed, thinking he can stop the current by a bold gesture, or by seizing her to him more tightly, he roughly shifts her hips under his. The bed creaks again. He kisses her, but her mouth is empty.

"What is it?" he asks, the fear gathering in his chest like a cloud.

He raises her arms and pins her hands up behind the pillow.

"What is it?" he asks, shaking her wrists.

She lifts a knee as if to twist him off her, but he presses her leg with his own and holds her to the bed under him.
He looks at her closed eyes, the almond eye. She turns her face away.

"Who was here before me?" he whispers hard into her ear.

She gives a cry and strains toward the wall. He lets her go but. wraps an arm around her abdomen and pulls her buttocks against him. He puts a hand at the back of her neck, bending her forward. He raises the skirt of her robe until it is bunched at her waist. A sensation, as swift as a kick, moves through his chest when he sees her exposed, too white, too vulnerable. But he is lost now to reason, letting his fear guide him. Holding her hipbone with his free hand, he slips inside her from behind. She cries out again as if he had hurt her, but he doesn't believe he has hurt her. It is something else she is resisting. He can see the buttons of her spinal column rising from her buttocks until they disappear beneath her robe. He moves his hand down to the place where her thigh joins her hip and holds her there.

"Tell me who," he insists, his voice no longer a whisper.

She reaches for the edge of the bed nearest the wall to anchor herself against his pounding. He can see her shoulder quiver with the strain. Beyond her shoulder is the faded paper with the roses and its brittle cracks. But he is suddenly confused, not in her bed but in the pond, grabbing for her hand because she has gone under.

"I was his," she cries out to the wall. The voice is taut, stretched, too high-pitched.

"Who?" he says hoarsely to her back. He holds her tightly now, diving beneath the water to reach her, nearly there.

"
Jim's?

It is a wail that comes to him from across the pond. He breaks the surface. The cry reaches him, buffets his ears like a high wind. He takes the name, looks at it, remembers it.

He stops, halted in frenzied midsentence. His eyes refocus on the blue and white stripes of the seersucker cloth. His body slips away from her of its own accord.

He makes a sound like a man coming up for air. He rolls onto his back.