Guardian of Eden (21 page)

 “I could never hate you. I love you more than anything in the world. Do you believe that?” She nodded while still wetting my t-shirt with tears.

“
But you still love
Maddie
, too?” she asked as she pushed away a little and looked into my eyes. I sighed and struggled to find the right words to say. It had been less than a week since I last spoke to
Maddie
, but it felt like a lifetime ago. Our worlds were so far apart nothing was capable of bridging them together.

 At first I avoided any mention of her or her father’s name in the news, but lately, for lack of anything else to do, I had become obsessed with following the campaign trail. I knew every scheduled TV appearance and interview for Senator
McPhee
for the next two months. I didn’t have any pictures of
Maddie
, so I looked forward to every opportunity to possibly see her face. It was pathetic, I know. And I hated myself for being so in love with her. For as long as I could remember, I’d tried my best to control my life, to protect myself and my family from any kind of pain. But I couldn’t control this pain.

“Yeah, I still love her,” I admitted guiltily. “But she doesn’t love me. You had nothing to do with us breaking up.”

“
Well, I’m
gonna
get you back together. I’m
gonna
fix it. I am.” Eden wiped the tears away from her eyes with new found determination. A sparkle returned to her eyes that I hadn’t seen for weeks. I didn’t feel like breaking her spirit and telling her it wasn’t possible.

Under the circumstances, my father allowed me to miss a visitation with him the next Saturday. He said we’d pick up our game of chess in a few weeks. I was fine with that. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t even want to leave the house. Both my mother and Eden were afraid that I was falling into a depression. They did whatever they could to cheer me up, but nothing worked. I stayed in bed staring at the television like a vegetable refusing to write poetry or study the dictionary like I used to.

I even refused to go to school. I didn’t want to have to explain where all the bruises on my face came from. Eden brought my work home to me every day and I was able to stay on task.

She also got in the habit of hanging out in my room for hours after school. I didn’t mind. I liked having her around, but I kind of felt I was a bad influence on her. I thought she should be out living her life instead of watching me wallow in self pity.

 “Why don’t you go to the studio with Corbin? I’m sure he could use your help with something,” I suggested one afternoon. Eden shrugged and continued to stare at the TV.           

“
Richard doesn’t think it’s a good idea that I spend so much time with Corbin,” she said after a moment.

“What does Richard have to do with any of this?” I asked, sitting up in bed a little. He obviously hadn’t learned anything from the physical altercation we’d had.

Eden didn’t respond at first. She dipped her apple slice into the bowl of purple dyed Cool Whip that sat in her lap. When she was little, she always wanted me to dye food to her favorite color purple before she would eat it. She thought it made the food prettier, thus more edible. She hadn’t done it in years, but recently I’d noticed that many of the concoctions she brought me to eat or drink had a purple tinge to them.

Eden sucked the Cool Whip off the apple slice then said, “After you got stabbed, I was so depressed that I started seeing Richard more often.
Just about every day.
I needed someone to talk to.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me or mother?”

“You’re recovering. I didn’t want to bother you. And mom…well, she’s too concerned about you to care about what’s happening to me.”

“That’s not true.”

Eden shrugged. “Anyway, Richard thinks I need more friends my own age and that all the time I’ve been spending with models and stuff isn’t good for my self-image. He doesn’t want me to grow up too fast. He thinks that’s part of
your
problem. You never got to be a kid.”

“My problem?
What does he know about my problems? He
is
my problem.” I lay down in the bed at stared up at the ceiling. Where did he get off telling my sister how to live her life? He had no clue what was best for her. I’m the one that knew what she needed and how to make her feel better. “Have you written any poems recently?” I asked.

“No,” she replied simply.

“Well, why don’t you go do that?”

 “I’d rather just stay here with you,” she said. Then she looked at me with her big brown-green eyes. Her eyes were pleading. Pleading for what, I couldn’t tell.

 I began to lose track of time. One day melded into the next with complete monotony. My bruises looked better, but were still noticeable. The stab wound only hurt to the touch. It wasn’t my physical ailments that kept me in bed. It was something else.

“
Okay, get up,” Eden commanded one morning as she drew the blinds allowing the obnoxious sun to pour in. “Take a shower and put this on,” she said as she plopped some clothes on the bed.

“
What? Why?” I asked. I sat up in bed and tried to avert my eyes from the sun.

“It’s your birthday and I have a big day planned.”

I sighed. “Eden, I appreciate the gesture, but I’m really not up to it.” I lay back down in the bed and said, “Besides, there’s an interview on C-SPAN that I really want to see today.”

Eden stared at me blankly for a moment visibly planning her next move, trying to think of something to say that would get me out of bed, something different than all the things she’d said in the past three weeks that didn’t work. Apparently, she couldn’t think of anything; instead, her lip began to quiver and a second later she burst into tears.

I jumped out of bed and held her in my arms. I hated seeing my sister cry.

“Nothing’s right. Everything’s wrong,” she said through the tears. “I just want to take my big brother out for his birthday. Please, Garrett. It would make me so happy. I’m so unhappy, Garrett. Don’t you want me to be happy?”

“
Okay, Okay, Eden. We can go. I’m going to the shower right now.”

She calmed down a little and wiped away the tears with her fingertips.

“
Can I brush your hair like I used to?” she said recovering from her outburst with little gasps for air.

“
Sure,” I said. A small smile formed on her lips.

“
You got him out,” my mother said excitedly to Eden as I entered the living room. I noticed a strange smell. I looked down and saw the brand new carpet. It went without saying why it had been installed. After two weeks of my mother scrubbing the carpet, the blood stains from the fight with Joel hadn’t completely come out. She must have just given up and had it replaced.

 My mother crossed the room and hugged me tightly burying her face in my chest. As I held her in my arms, we shared a special moment of understanding. Deep down I knew she loved me and she wouldn’t purposely let harm come to me. She was weak and had honestly done the best she could in the circumstances she was given. I still had a mental vision of her beating Joel with a broom stick in my defense and sitting by my bedside all night watching me sleep. Only a mother who cared would do that.

 “I promise I will never let you get hurt again,” she said as she pulled away with tears in her eyes.
“No matter what I have to do.
I promise, Garrett. I swear it.” Something about the determination in her green eyes, the eyes that were exactly like mine, made me believe her this time.

 The special day Eden planned for me began with breakfast at the
Barnside
Diner. It was a 50s style greasy spoon near the neighborhood where we used to live. It held a lot of memories for me and Eden. On weekends we had gone there to eat breakfast and to avoid my mother’s alcohol induced rages or drug induced stupors. We sometimes stayed there for hours playing our word game or writing poetry. The wait staff knew us by name and often gave us extra food. Though we never said anything explicitly, I think they assumed we had a difficult home life and tried to take care of us.

As soon as we entered the door,
Anabel
and Darlene scrambled across the diner and tackled us with hugs.

"Mi
chula
, mi
chulo
, it’s so good to see you,”
Anabel
said in her thick Spanish accent. She was a cute little El Salvadorian woman in her 20s who had been working at the
Barnside
since she was 15. This diner was her home, and for a long time Eden and I were her little brother and sister.

“My God, you’re huge,” Darlene said to me.
“And gorgeous as all get out.
I swear if I were 30 years younger, you’d be in trouble.” Darlene then inspected my face for a moment. I could tell she noticed the bruises as a motherly expression befell her. She chose not to comment on them, however, and just gently rubbed my cheek as she said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“You two sit at the counter and order anything you want. It’s on me,”
Anabel
said as she took Eden’s hand and led us to our favorite spot.

“
Hey, Eddie, you owe me 20 bucks. I told you they would come,” Darlene yelled to the kitchen as she adjusted her massive bun of gray hair.

Eddie poked his head out of the kitchen. “Welcome back guys. Happy birthday, Garrett,” he said then quickly went back to filling his orders.

Eden and I spent the next two hours playing the word game with
Anabel
and Darlene. Some of the other customers even jumped in from time to time. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time.

Suddenly a middle aged woman sitting in one of the booths said, “Wait a minute, this is you isn’t it?” as she stood and slapped a magazine down in front of my sister.

 
Anabel
snapped it up and took a look. “Oh my God, it is you!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell us you were a Gap model?”

 “I don’t really want to talk about it,” Eden said meekly as she started in on her
french
toast again even though it had to be cold by then.

 
“But why not?
You look beautiful,”
Anabel
prodded.

"Hey, if she doesn’t want to talk about it, she doesn’t want to talk about it,” Darlene said in an authoritative manner that immediately put an end to the conversation.

A hush fell over the diner as no one knew what to say or why Eden wouldn’t want to talk about something as glamorous and exciting as being a model. Even I was confused. But maybe she just wanted the attention for me instead of her since it was my birthday.

 “Well, thank you so much for breakfast,” Eden said after a few moments, “but I have a lot more surprises for Garrett and we
gotta
get going.”

Anabel
and Darlene came over and hugged us goodbye.

“
Don’t be a stranger
,” Darlene said.

 “Yeah, you better come back for Eden’s birthday in a few weeks,”
Anabel
added.

“We will,” I assured them with a smile.

 Next, Eden took me to the
Folger
Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill. That wasn’t much of a surprise. It was my favorite museum because of the sessions of contemporary poetry it featured. I wondered when the actual surprises would begin.