Eden Close (31 page)

"Is there anything else?" he asks.

"No."

"Would you ever have told me if I hadn't asked?"

"I don't know. I was hoping you wouldn't ask, but I don't know about ever."

From where he is sitting he can see most of the room—the room in which his parents slept, made love, created him: the two screen windows, the pale green wallpaper, the light overhead on the ceiling. Did his parents lie here arguing in suppressed whispers, he wonders, trying to comprehend and possess the object his father had taken to the garage? An object that would alter the homely pattern of their days, that would not let itself be forgotten for even one day, no matter how deeply hidden? And would his father have confided his vision of the scene he had witnessed, his understanding of that horror?

Eden's hairbrush is on his mother's dresser now; his own toilet kit and a list he has written are on his father's. Some of his clothes are still in his suitcase on the floor, hers in a carton on the chair. They will leave soon, drive south to the city.

He slips his hand under the quilt, finds the hem of Eden's nightgown and raises it to her waist. He lays his hand on the flat of her belly, feeling the warmth there. He likes to imagine it is already rounded, swollen, but he knows it may be weeks yet before the shape will change. He is impatient for this to happen, impatient for the visible signs.

"This is everything," he says, touching her.

Her face is ripe with sleep or her condition. She lays her own fingers over his where they are resting.

He leans forward to kiss her at the side of her face. As he does so, he moves into a patch of sunlight coming through the window, forming a bright square on the pillow and the headboard. The sun hits the side of his face, warms his face with its heat. He shuts his eyes. He feels her skin with his mouth, under his hand.

If only his luck will hold, he is thinking.

 

Your hands erase the memory of others.

A part of you is inside me, and I will always have that.

You have made me give up all the secrets, and I am lighter now.

You talk of days stretching after days, and you believe in them.
I
do not believe in them, but I believe in this day.

Your mother's quilt has a sweet smell. She had secrets too, and she is lighter, glad that I have told them.

Your face shimmers in the water, and I sometimes think that
I
can see it.

I will feel and smell my baby, but I will never see its face.

We will leave this place and not come back, and in our dreams it will turn to dust.

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