Eden Close (25 page)

His afternoons are as rhythmic as the mornings. After he and Eden have been together each day, he drives to the mall in search of gifts for her she cannot keep. He has become, as a result of this habit, a devotee of the mall. He has bought her a peach-colored cotton sundress and a copy of
Ethan Frome,
which he plans to read to her. He has bought her a box of chocolates, which they devoured one day after swimming. He has bought her sunscreen lotion for her face and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Today he has bought her something special, the most ingenious of his purchases.

"I'm going swimming," she says, stretching and sitting up.

"I'll come with you," he says.

"No. lean do it myself now."

He is about to protest, but stops. There is no reason she can't swim on her own. Her sense of direction is uncanny. He has noticed that she has entered and come out of the water at exactly the same spot each day. He wonders how she does it: does she feel the path with her feet, or does she hear her way?

Propped up on one elbow, he watches her walk to the pond, wade out up to her waist, then dive forward to begin her crawl to the other side. He likes watching her swim. Her
strokes are neat, mathematical, and he takes pride in seeing her strength return with each passing day. She can easily finish twenty laps now, and if they had more time, she might do thirty.

He lies back with his hands under his head. He thinks he hears, very faintly, a distant rumble of thunder. The strangling heat wave, now in its eighth day, has broken all records. It is as if the entire town and its environs were waiting breathlessly for the siege to break. He hopes it is thunder that he has heard, and that it will come soon, this afternoon, bringing with it a soaking, rinsing rain. He imagines the rain, bouncing up from the cracked ground, dripping from the wet leaves, falling onto his face and shoulders as he shuts his eyes and turns his face gratefully up to a cloudburst....

He wakes with a start, annoyed to see he has been dozing. He has no idea how long he has been unconscious: seconds? minutes? He stands awkwardly and too fast, feeling hollow as he does so. He scans the pond. There is no sign of Eden. He glances around the clearing, but she is not there either. He calls her name, the first time hesitantly, the second time abruptly, as he runs to the water's edge.

"Eden!" he shouts, as if he were cross with her.

The surface of the pond is eerily smooth.

"Holy Christ!" he yells now, flailing into the pond. His heart is loose inside his chest. His lungs are huge balloons, pushing against his ribs. The water is molasses. It is like the nightmares he used to have as a boy when he couldn't run fast enough in his dreams. "Jesus God," he cries as he pitches forward to swim, not knowing in which direction to head.

To his right, he sees a ripple, than a hand. She rockets straight up in the water not twenty feet to the side of him, panting hard. She smiles. She listens for him. She waves in his general direction.

"What the hell are you doing?" he snaps angrily, trying to catch his breath.

"I'm just swimming," she says, surprised by his tone. "What is it?"

"I thought you'd..."

He turns and heads back toward shore. He holds his chest where his heart is palpitating and walks around the perimeter of the clearing, with the other hand on his hip. She does not follow him, remains in the water where he has left her. When he circles close to shore, he sees her making waves with her fingers, idly stroking the surface. He lunges into the pond, pulling his feet high and clear until the water reaches above his knees. He dives forward in her direction. He bobs in front of her, lifts her in his arms, cradling her, then rolls her in the air and lets her belly-flop into the water. She comes up sputtering, gasping. She makes a broad sweep with her forearm, spewing the water in his direction. He dives, catches an ankle, drags her under. He holds her there, kisses her, but she pushes at his shoulders, propelling herself to the surface. When he comes up for air, she is laughing. He grabs her around the waist, pulls her onto her back, slides her over himself. She turns abruptly, plunges his head under water, and leapfrogs over his body. When he stumbles to his feet, he sees that she is already halfway to shore. She runs dripping up onto the grass, quickly feels with her feet where the blanket is and sits down, hugging herself. Home free.

"You're an asshole sometimes, you know that, Andy?"

The word is a song note he thought he might never hear again. It lifts him up, makes him as buoyant as a child's inflatable toy in a pool. He bobs happily, watching her, then slithers out of the water to the blanket. He sits beside her.

"I fell asleep," he says, "and when I woke up I was disoriented. I thought you'd..."

"Drowned?"

"Yes."

She touches his shoulder, runs her hand down his arm. "I'm sorry," she says.

"I just feel...," he says.

"I'm responsible for myself."

"It's more than that."

"It's hard to believe now," she says, "but I once wished that
you
would drown."

He looks at the surface of the pond, returned to its glassy, golden state. "I love you," he says.

She squeezes his forearm. "You think you know me, but you don't."

"I know enough."

"I could say I love you too, but I don't know what it is."

"I do," he says.

"I wish I could see your face when you make love to me," she says after a long silence.

He turns to look at her. He hoots. He drapes his arm around her shoulder.

"I'm glad you can't," he says. "I probably look ridiculous."

After a time, he consults his watch. "I've brought something for you," he says. "I'd better give it to you now."

She no longer protests when he gives her presents, and he likes that. He reaches for the plastic bag he brought with him to the pond.

"It's a battery-operated cassette tape recorder," he explains, taking her hand and letting her touch the small rectangular object. "It's easy to operate, and I've brought you some books on tape to listen to." He fetches the boxed cassettes from the plastic bag. "Short stories by Chekhov," he reads, "and
Smiley's People
by John le Carre."

She fingers the buttons on the tape recorder.

"And here's the best feature." He pulls from the bag a set of headphones. Smoothing her hair behind her ears, he adjusts the headphones and plugs in the jack. "Listen to this," he says.

He snaps the cassette of Chekhov into the tape recorder. "Nod v/hen the sound is the right level," he says. He turns the volume up slowly, and she nods. He watches her listening. He pushes the stop button and moves the headphones off her ears.

"When you have these on, no one can hear the tape. You can play it in your room, and she won't hear you. It's small, so it can easily be hidden."

"I don't know," she says cautiously.

"Trust me. Here, give me your hand, and I'll teach you how to use this." He takes her fingers and shows her how to read the buttons. Play. Stop. Eject. Record. Play. She holds the black box, listens to the words on the cassette. If he can find the right cassettes, he can give her an entire world that has been lost to her all these years.

She pushes the stop button, takes off the headphones.

"When are you leaving?" she asks.

Leaving. It is a question he has scrupulously avoided asking himself for six days. "I don't know about that," he says.

"You'll have to go. You have a life you have to go back to. You have a job and a son."

He flops back onto the blanket and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I don't want to talk about that now," he says.

"Now
you
have things you don't want to talk about."

"It's different."

She puts the tape recorder aside and crosses her legs, supporting her weight on one hand.

"In the beginning," she says, "I was asleep. Then I cried for a very long time. And then I felt guilty and knew I was being punished."

"Punished for what?"

"For how I'd been."

He is silent.

"You remember," she says.

He ponders this confession. It is another parcel, a small piece of the puzzle. She has given it, he thinks, because she wants him to tell her something, to give her in return a clue about the shape of her future. It has, however, the opposite effect. It irritates him, makes him suddenly want to know more, as if she had merely teased him.

"It's not enough," he says rashly, not looking at her. "Tell me more."

"There isn't..."

"Tell me all of it."

"There isn't any more."

"I don't believe you. Was it Sean?"

"I don't remember."

"You know you said it, though. Someone has told you you said it."

"I know I said it one time, but I don't remember it. I have no memory of that time. Please don't do this." Her voice rises at the last sentence.

Even with his eyes shut, the sun is so bright behind his lids he has to squint. He wishes he had his sunglasses on. He sits up quickly, knowing he has gone too far. He touches her thigh with the backs of his fingers. He notices that her hand is shaking.

"I'm sorry," he says.

She sits perfectly still—though inside, he knows, there must be a turbulence he can only guess at. It is, he thinks, a finely honed skill, her poise, a means of coping with too much darkness, too much silence, too many bad memories.

"Is that thunder?" she asks.

He listens and hears nothing. "I don't know. I heard something like thunder earlier. I hope it is, though. Then maybe this awful heat will break."

"I don't want it to break," she says.

"Why?"

"Because then it will be something else, and we'll be different."

He slides his arm along her back and draws her down so that she is lying now on top of him.

"There isn't time," she says. "I can feel it."

He stretches an arm and looks at his watch behind her head. "It's exactly one-oh-seven," he says. He kisses her, pressing her head down toward his face with his forearms. She moves slightly, making small adjustments to accommodate her breasts, her hipbones.

"I think the place likes us," she says. "I think it wants us to stay here."

And as he looks past her head at the trees above them, he believes that what she has said is true—that there is about the pond and its clearing an unmistakable benevolence. Once it offered them its seasons of childhood games. Now, years later, overgrown and neglected, it shelters them as lovers.

 

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.