Eden Close (15 page)

But, of course, it's not the same place at all. The Vietnamese woman behind the counter nods politely but without recognition. When he came here as a boy, the luncheonette was Bud's, they called it that,
See you at Bud's,
and through the years it has evolved from Bud's to Bill's to other names and now, enigmatically, to Al's—though that cannot be a real Vietnamese name, he is thinking. The place is cleaner than he remembers it ever being—a feeling more than a valid comparison, for it wasn't anything he paid attention to as a boy. But even the old ceiling fan, he sees, has been polished shiny.

The specials are on the blackboard: Beefeater Sandwich Served With Fries / Turkey Health Club With Sprouts And
Avocado—this last the only real clue, besides the new owners, to the passage of time. He slides onto a stool near one end of the counter. The Vietnamese woman nods, and he nods back. He orders the Turkey Health Club and a Pepsi.

There is a rustle at the other end of the counter. An older man in a gray jogging suit picks up his sandwich and his glass of milk, walks to the stool next to Andrew and lays his lunch on the counter.

"Andy?"

Andrew begins to rise. He shakes the man's outstretched hand. "Chief DeSalvo."

"Not anymore. Retired six years. Art. Call me Art. Mind if I join you? I'm here every day. Same time, same station. I get bored of my own company."

"Not at all. Please."

The Vietnamese woman brings Andrew a tall glass of Pepsi filled to within a millimeter of the rim. There is no ice in the glass. Andrew and DeSalvo look at the Pepsi.

"Some things just don't translate," says DeSalvo, and Andrew laughs.

"Sorry about your mother," says DeSalvo. "A lot of memories."

"Thank you."

"You in town long?"

"No. A few more days. Just to pack away some things. Fix up the house."

"You sellin'?"

Andrew nods. DeSalvo's hair is steely gray, clipped short, like a Roman's. A fine gray stubble covers his cheeks, hiding some of the pockmarks on his jowls, but his eyebrows are still thick and unruly and black. Beneath the jogging suit, his body is round and shapeless, what they used to call a barrel chest gone to fat. There's a wheeze in DeSalvo's voice, though the eyes are still a surprising blue and hard.

"My boy was ahead of you—what, three, four years?"

Andrew nods. "Nicky. How's he doing?"

"I dunno," DeSalvo says wearily. "Kids. They're a heartache. You got kids?"

"I have a son. Billy. He's seven."

"Great age. Terrific age. It's later they break your balls. Nicky, he's had a bitch of a time with drugs. Lost his job. His wife and kids left him. Hey, I don't blame her one bit. He's clean now, but big fucking deal. The ball game's over, and he didn't even get to suit up."

"People can change their lives," Andrew says cautiously.

"Yeah, tell me about it. My wife, she cries herself to sleep every night: her grandchildren are in California. Your boy skate?"

"Not really," says Andrew. "He lives in New Jersey. The ponds don't freeze for very long in the winter. Hockey's not the passion there it is up here."

The Vietnamese woman brings Andrew his sandwich, which is stuffed with sprouts and looks surprisingly appetizing.

"He lives in New Jersey, and you don't?"

"I live in New York City."

"You divorced or what?"

Andrew nods.

DeSalvo shakes his head. "I always say to my wife, 'You got your health, you got your family, the rest is bullshit.'"

Andrew nods again, feeling vaguely chastised.

"Anyway," says DeSalvo, "you look like you're doin' good. I seen your car. You're lookin' good. You workin' out?"

Andrew smiles. "No," he says.

DeSalvo turns and examines him. "You haven't changed much. Last time I saw you, musta been—what, ten, fifteen years?"

"More like twenty. The last time I saw you probably would have been the night of the, you know, shooting."

"Did you go to the inquest?"

"No," says Andrew. "Since my mother and I had been together the whole time, they used her testimony instead."

"Yeah, I remember now. Long time."

The Vietnamese woman appears with a cup of coffee for DeSalvo.

"Bothers me, that case," says DeSalvo. "Bothers the fuck outta me, if you want to know the truth. I'll tell you straight out, we blew that one. There was procedures we coulda done sooner—we lost ten, fifteen minutes. It makes a hell of a difference. And we shoulda gone straight for the O'Brien kid. Questioned him at the very least, had him in custody so he couldn't leave town. It had the marks of a hot-tempered son of a bitch like O'Brien—you know, some kid she turned down and he'd gotten pissed. Then he panicked and shot the father. So when she said, you know, that one time to the nurse, it was him, we were ready for it. And, of course, by then, he was already dead, so where was the problem?"

He takes a sip of coffee. He puts his cup down.

"You seen the girl?"

"Eden?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not sure. I might have seen her yesterday in a window."

"Hell of a story, that one. Caught the edge of the shower of the buckshot. They say a piece of it damaged something important behind her eyes. I forget exactly. I always felt sorry for her, even before. Well, she was a little bit of a pain in the ass too, if you want to know the truth, and she coulda gone wild, real wild. I had her in for shoplifting a coupla times. But she had spunk, and I liked her. She had a screw loose somewhere was all. What a waste."

DeSalvo bends his head forward and massages the back of his neck. "This is when I could kill for a cigarette," he says. "Had to give 'em up a year ago. I tell you, though, what really bothers me. You want a cup of coffee?"

Andrew nods. DeSalvo signals the Vietnamese woman and mimes a coffee for Andrew.

"What?" asks Andrew.

"You tell me why she was completely naked," says DeSalvo. "A fellow rapes a girl, he don't wait for her to undress. Take it from me, and I seen some rapes."

"But surely, at midnight, she only had on pajamas or a nightgown," says Andrew.

"We found a long summer nightgown, a pair of underpants and a book in a heap by the side of the bed. She'd been reading."

"Reading?"

"Yeah. A real egghead book. Reardon knew it. She'd stolen it from the library, by the way. Lemme think....
The Myth of Vesuvius,
or something like that. Mean anything to you?"

The Myth of Sisyphus?
Andrew looks sharply up at DeSalvo. He doesn't know which detail he finds more unnerving—the book or the modesty of the underpants.

"He could have made her undress at gunpoint," Andrew says, testing this notion, for he, too, has been subliminally thinking of Eden naked under the sheet.

"Yeah. He could have. But she don't remember that. She don't remember anything, in fact. Wouldn't say a word then and won't now, far as I know. But you think about that. I been thinking about it nineteen years."

 

T
HE CONVERSATION
with DeSalvo is making beads of sweat break out on Andrew's forehead and between his shoulder blades. For a second or two, he feels the same way he sometimes does when he knows he's going to be sick. The fan
makes slow revolutions above his head, while beside him, beyond DeSalvo, he hears the clinking of spoons and knives on china. Men eating, a midday break from the job or the house, maybe the highlight of the day, looking forward to the slice of blueberry pie, homemade, now in season, like an earned reward. He has on the slacks and the shirt he wore yesterday to visit Edith, and he can feel the shirt growing wet at the back and under his armpits. He looks at the clock next to the blackboard with the specials, a round face set into a fake copper kettle. It reads five to two. But it might be wrong. He checks his watch. The same. Five to two.

Is it possible?

He has to try.

He stands up abruptly and reaches In his pants pocket. He pulls out his checkbook, a wad of cash, some loose change; The smallest bill he has is a ten. He puts it on the counter. "Cancel the coffee," he says to the Vietnamese woman. He has to say it loudly, because she is at the other end of the counter. One or two of the men glance up, and DeSalvo suddenly looks at him.

"What's the...?"

"I just saw the time. Jesus, I'm an idiot. I'm supposed to be at the house for a conference call from my office at two," says Andrew, improvising wildly. "I'll be screwed."

"You'll make it in that car," says DeSalvo. "But just between you and me, Matheson's got a speed trap going by the Gansvoort place. I can take care of the ticket, but getting pinched will slow you down."

"Thanks for the tip."

Andrew gives a kind of wave and walks out the door. He jogs across the street to where his car is parked. His body wants to bolt, but he fights to keep himself moving steadily and easily toward his car, as if it were only a conference call he was trying to make.

When he slips behind the wheel, however, he can barely
restrain himself. He is not thinking
why;
it is only getting there that matters. He has to make it. He puts the car in gear, guns it, makes an illegal U-turn in front of the luncheonette and, like a kid who's just learned to drive, leaves rubber on the quiet road. He checks his watch. One fifty-eight. On this straight and narrow stretch from town, it can be done in two, three minutes. He knows this from one harrowing race with Sean when they were seniors, the two of them abreast at midnight, himself in his father's car praying there wouldn't be a dog or something larger on the road.

He lets his mind become the racing engine, because he knows that if he allows himself to think about what he is doing, if he can see himself doing it in his mind's eye, he will begin to doubt, and once he doubts, he will be lost. He slows to an irritating thirty-five at the Gansvoort farm, peering out the passenger window to see if he can spot a cop car in the forest of old and rusted '55 Chevys that Gansvoort has been collecting for years, but he sees nothing. A quarter mile past the farm, he brings the car up to sixty. To sixty-five. To seventy.

He's doing nearly eighty when he sees the houses in the distance. He checks his watch. Two-oh-two. He skids into the drive, throwing bullets of gravel as he does so. The Plymouth isn't back yet. He has known it wouldn't be.

He hurls himself from the car. He leaps over the broken step and tries the kitchen door. It opens. Only now does it occur to him that it might have been locked.

He is blinded by the gloom in the kitchen, by the abrupt change from bright sunlight to darkness. He moves, more by instinct and childhood memory than by sight, making his way through a shrouded dining room, through the living room, where he barks his shin on a low table, to the front of the house, where he knows there will be a hallway and the stairs to the second floor.

Memory serves him well. Ricocheting through the rooms, he reaches the front hall and turns the corner. He stands at the foot of the stairs. He looks up.

She is there, waiting, on the landing at the top.

"It's Andrew," he says.

"I know," she says.

 

T
HERE IS
a shaft of light from a raised shade to one side of her. His heart, which has been beating so fast he is sure he will have a heart attack, thumps loudly against his breastbone. Her hair is long, nearly to her waist, falling in tangles from her shoulders. The blond that he has remembered is now darkened to a dull brass—by time, by neglect. She is wearing a white sleeveless jersey and a pair of blue shorts that are too big for her. There seem to be smudges of gray, like paint, or something else, on her hands. The skin of her bare arms and legs is bone white, flawless, the unblemished white of Buffalo china, or so it seems to him, seeing the long white of her legs from the foot of the stairs.

She turns her head, or inclines it, as if to catch a sound. A bit of light from the window falls on her face as she does so. Her eyes, though sightless and seeming to stare at a point somewhere over his right shoulder, are still the same vivid blue-green, an unsettling color. She moves her hand to push a tangle of hair behind her shoulder, and the movement reveals a delicate haze of small white scars near the temple beside one eye. He sees now that this eye has more of an almond shape than the other, the hood of the eyelid slightly elongated into a slant.

"She'll be coming," Eden says.

Her voice is odd, atonal, as if she seldom uses it.

"I know. I'll be back," Andrew says.

He puts his foot on the bottom step, but she shakes her head. She is fourteen and thirty-three and, towering above
him, as insubstantial as a dream, more beautiful than any woman he has ever seen.

He wants to climb the stairs, to see her face more clearly. He wants to peer at her scars and her eye. He wants to touch the white skin of her arm.

"There isn't time," she says, and backs away.

The car was swimming fast along the road, and then I heard the gravel.

When I tell you nothing, you will go away from me.

You broke the shimmer on the water, and I thought that you would drown. I prayed that you would drown. Your shirt is wet and sticking to your skin.

Your weight is on the step. Have you finally come for me?

Your voice is through a fog, but I know your voice, and I have heard it all these years. You will be as I have dreamed you.

I heard you take the car slowly to its place. You stood there looking at my window. You are a boy with arms as thin as wood. Then I heard her car along the road. You didn't go inside. You watched her leave her car, but you didn't speak to her.

This room is very long and empty.

Your father was a brave but foolish man.

I
T IS RAINING, A HOT FAT RAIN THAT WILL END SOON AND BRING
the worms to the surface, so that when he emerges from the house later and stands on the grass or the gravel, the earth will smell of them. Last night, he went finally to the A & P near the mall, and this morning he had his first decent breakfast in nearly a week—cereal, toast, juice, coffee—the meal reminding him of his normal routines, his regular life. The rain drums and splashes against the panes in his mother's room, and too late he sees that he has left a window open during the night. He wipes the wet sill dry with a towel from the bathroom. His mother's papers are on the bed, a random, chaotic spill of papers found finally, after supper last night, under the bed, in a box meant usually for storing winter woolens. She had not known or even guessed she might die, he's sure, for there is no order to the papers, no series of little notes explaining about the insurance or the mortgage or where the key to the safety-deposit box is.