Eden Close (8 page)

 

A
NDREW RUBS
his sore shoulder and bends down to survey the dismaying contents of his mother's refrigerator. He observes that it seems to contain random pieces of a number of different puzzles—nothing adding up to a satisfying whole. He has never been fond of Edith Close (primarily, he supposes, because she so ignored him—but more, he'd prefer to think, because of Eden), but despite this dislike he cannot help but feel for her the fundamental unfairness of it all: the neat and terrible symmetry of the two intruders—the one on a fresh June morning, a foretaste of what could be lost; the other on a humid August night, taking everything.

 

A
ND WHEN
the police came the next day, with a social worker, there was Jim at the door. He announced they were keeping the child. If they had to be merely foster parents for a while, that was fine, said Jim. But eventually, he was sure, the child would legally be theirs. The police, unprepared for this, had papers stating otherwise, but these were of no consequence to Jim, who calmly went where he was told, signed where he was bidden, showered his irresistible charm on women who knew shortcuts through the bureaucratic maze, and in that way slipped through the miles of red tape that might have daunted another man.

With motherhood rudely thrust upon her, her hormones ill-prepared for the job, Edith Close performed the tasks required of her as if directed by remote control—a poor connection that might short-circuit at any time and often did. With Jim around, the infant had, at least, a playmate—though Edith's nascent jealousy, a subtle mist through which she floated and which had not yet created the sharp tongue that would come later, often demanded that Jim put the baby down "so the poor child can sleep." But with Jim away, Eden ceased to exist in any tangible way at all—the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear.

Andrew, who has settled for a casserole left by the Ladies Guild, which looks more or less like goulash, remembers the afternoon Edith Close left the baby outside in the carriage without the net and went upstairs to lie down. The Closes' honey-colored cat—whose jealousy, unlike his mistress's, was uninhibited—leapt silently into the carriage and was about to do away with the usurper when the baby's screams brought Andy's mother running from the kitchen. She scooped up the child, giving the sullen cat a remarkably deft kick—thinking the row would alert her neighbor. But even when she went to the back door and called for Edith—rather crossly, Andy thought—it was some minutes before the dazed woman arrived at the door. It was Andrew's mother's impression, as she told his father at dinner that night, that Edith had simply
forgotten
the child altogether.

Andrew doubts, as did his mother, that their neighbor willfully meant to harm the baby. It was rather, as he has thought before, a case of faulty connections: a matter of her fear of losing Jim (who for years had gone off in his black Buick to other rooms in other towns, and about whom rumors of other women often circulated). A child who developed, as luck would have it, an astonishing head of blond curls, several shades lighter than the hair of her adoptive mother. Though she was not a fat child, she had plump cheeks, an appealing pink coloring and remarkably dark lashes
for so fair a skin type. Her eyes were blue, like Edith's, causing the women of the town to comment how like the mother the child was (a remark that must have filled Edith with ambivalence), but a more vivid blue, a greenish blue, which on an older girl or a young woman today you'd say was enhanced with contact lenses. She was a child whose beauty was indestructible: You could forget to wash her face or comb her hair, as Edith often did; you could put her in a pair of dull hand-me-downs from the rummage sale—and yet, passing by the playground at the school, it would be she whom you noticed first among the other faces and small bodies on the swings or on the jungle gym.

The more Edith ignored the child, the more Jim spoiled her, as if to redress the deficit—or perhaps it was the other way around: Edith meant unconsciously to temper his excess. But his love being the more passionate and less ambivalent of the two emotional forces in the household, Eden grew up more spoiled than ignored—spoiled "rotten," his mother sometimes said, a phrase that has always suggested to Andrew bruised and softened fruit, a picture distinctly at odds with the beguiling, if willful, child who was growing fast into puberty next door.

Eating the congealed goulash, Andrew remembers scenes he has long forgotten. Jim arrives home from a trip and opens the door of the black Buick. He is in his shirtsleeves, with his tie still knotted. There are packages in his hands. He sees Eden on the new swing set he has ordered from Sears, the one Andy's father had to pour the cement for when Jim could not (or would not) figure out the directions. Eden spies Jim, squeals with delight and looks for the present she knows will be there. Then there is Edith at the screen, peering out, patting her hair. She runs down the steps to her husband. She is wearing a new sweater that Andy, who is playing with an old toy car on his own back stoop and who is wishing Jim
would look his way with a stick of gum, has never seen before—a soft white furry sweater with a low jeweled neck. Sometimes she says the name
Jim.
Sometimes she puts her arm around his waist. Then, when he has greeted his wife with a kiss, Edith bends to the child, and in an animated voice neither Eden nor Andy has heard in three days, says how pretty the dress is that Jim has brought her and touches the child for the first time since Jim went away. In the beginning, when she is very small, Eden is happy to have her mother hug her at last. Later she will just be confused. Then she will learn to smirk. And finally she will shrug her mother off with a rude word or a gesture that Edith will publicly ascribe to Eden's "difficult phase."

Andrew, giving up on the goulash and scraping his plate, now understands these domestic jealousies in a way that was impossible for him as a child. Jealousy was there, even in his own house, he realizes, on his father's face, when Andy, with a fever or a scraped knee, would choose his mother's embrace instead of his; and he has felt it himself, more recently, watching a flicker of hesitation pass over his son's features when Billy leaves his mother to come away with Andrew for an evening or a weekend.

But, in an instant, as he grasps Billy's hand or ruffles his hair, the hurt is gone, healed, as quickly as it came. While for Edith Close, there seemed to be no healing, no respite from her own imagination.

 

T
HEY WERE FRIENDS
, good friends, for a year, possibly two. He was fourteen and Eden was eleven. Before that time, she'd been uninteresting as a playmate, though she'd always possessed the inherent fascination of a celebrity by dint of her arrival. And before she was eleven she whined a lot, having learned early that the thin grating sound was the only one that seemed to penetrate the thickening fog of preoccupation
that surrounded her mother, and that it worked miraculously with Jim, who couldn't bear to see his daughter unhappy, no matter how absurd the cause. But by the age of eleven, she'd seen, looking across the yard, that Andy and his friends were considerably more interesting as potential companions than her distant mother and her too attentive father or the girls at school, who had never quite been friendly. And being clever, not to say manipulative, she was quick to intuit that acceptance by these older boys required radical surgery. Thus Eden became, for a brief and happy period in her life, a tomboy.

He remembers vividly the day she first came to them. He and Sean and T.J. were fiddling with their fishing rods by Andrew's back stoop, getting ready to head out to the pond to catch some catfish before supper. It was September or October, Andrew thinks, a school night, because he'd had to finish his homework before he could go. But early in the year, before hockey practice had started. It was muggy; they were in T-shirts, enjoying the last taste of summer and summer pleasures before the cold set in in earnest.

T.J., who was always the quickest of the three, had his rig ready to go, leaning against the side of the house, and was executing an idle tap dance in the dirt by the stoop, his sneakers raising puffs of dust around his feet.

"Come on, you guys," he said impatiently. "It'll be dark soon, and anyway I gotta be home by supper or my old man'll cream me."

"Take it easy," said Andy lightly, threading his line through the guides. "We've still got two hours."

But it was Sean who was having trouble that day, his line hopelessly tangled in a knot he'd been working on with no results for twenty minutes. His brow was knit into a furrow, and his face was nearly as red as his hair from his frustration. T.J. and Andy were both waiting for him to blow,
Andy more than a little worried that Sean would suddenly yell
Shit,
with Andy's mother chopping vegetables right beyond the screen. And then that night at the supper table, there would be the lecture about bad language and comments about the company Andy kept. Though his parents liked T.J., who had, even at an early age, the gift of charm and who had developed a talent for salesmanship, mostly of himself, they were nervous about Sean.

Sean's parents were well known in the town. Both were heavy drinkers, but their reputation had been earned because of their fights: legendary sharp-tongued battles heard through the open window of the apartment they lived in with their three children over the TV repair shop; bitter tirades in the shop itself while embarrassed customers pretended to be studying the contours of a picture tube; or silent, ugly tableaux seen through the rolled-up windows of the family Pontiac, Sean's mother's lined and dead-white face turned toward her husband, who would, like his son, grow red from his fury.

As a boy, Sean was visibly chagrined by his parents' displays of temper, even though, as he grew into his teens, his own temper would betray him when he least wanted it to. But T.J. and Andy accepted this embarrassment and his parents' volatility as a given, much in the same way they unconsciously acknowledged that Andy's mother was too fat and T.J.'s mother was a social climber—these facts intruding upon their childhood, sometimes even causing them a moment's pain or awkwardness, but ultimately easily dismissed as not being pivotal to their lives. The weather was pivotal. And the condition of the ice or the fishing. Or a stolen baseball glove or the offer of a driving lesson or a chance at the playoffs. Their parents, however, seemed more like obstacles to be negotiated than central figures in the daily drama.

(Yet Andrew thinks now how wrong they were to be so complacent. For that legacy of volatility, or perhaps it was the alcohol, ultimately would destroy Sean; and is not T.J., Andrew wonders, just as socially ambitious as his mother?)

Andy didn't notice Eden until T.J. said, by way of a greeting, "Hey."

She was wearing a plaid cotton shirt and a pair of white shorts. She was barefoot, he remembers, and her hair, still long then, was pulled off her face in a low ponytail.

Although she'd sometimes come over when Andy was alone, she'd never approached him when he was with other boys, and Andy was waiting for a message or a summons from Edith or Jim about some task that needed attending to. But she stood there, her hands in the pockets of her shorts, and said, redundantly, "What are you doing?"

It all happened, Andrew thinks now, in a matter of seconds—a deft dance of questions and positions, each one finding, in the space of a few sentences and a look here and there, a role to take on. Sean looked up, the anger draining from his face, replaced by confusion. T.J. shoved his hands into his pockets and said,
Fishing.
Andy, not getting it yet, waited for the summons. Eden smiled, a deliberate smile that made them all stare at their feet, but when they looked up, the smile was gone.

"Can I come too?" she asked quite seriously.

T.J. whirled in a circle on his heel. Andy fumbled with an answer. "I don't know," he said unthinkingly. "You haven't got a rod."

T.J. hooted and punched the air. Andy, realizing the pun, rolled his eyes. Eden stood her ground.

"So?" she said, challenging them.

T.J. put an arm around Eden's shoulder, something Andy had never done. He was sure he himself had never touched her, and T.J.'s touch startled him, caught him off guard, so
that he felt in succession annoyed with T.J. and then confused, as he sometimes felt when he was in a room with his friends and his parents and had no idea what to say or whom to be.

"You want to watch the big boys fish?" asked T.J., winking at Andy. "It's a thrill."

Eden shrugged—careful not to appear too eager now that she had made her move.

T.J. put his hands back in his pockets. Andy said, unsure just what it was he was committing himself to,
OK by me.

Sean, looking first at Eden, then at T.J., then back to Eden, screwed his face into a squint. He peered at Eden as if she were a species unwelcome at the best of times.

"Jesus H.," he said aloud.

 

A
S A TOMBOY
, Eden was brilliant. She learned to be tough and savvy as if taking on a foreign language, and in doing so discovered an aptitude for it. After an initial period of disbelief, Andy and T.J. and Sean grudgingly found this new character acceptable, and they were more than a little awed by a tenacity in her that none of them could quite match. No matter how hard they tried in the beginning to shake her off, she stuck, like a stray. She made her mother cut her hair, though Jim had forbidden it; she took to wearing dungarees and white Keds. Though she was inches shorter than Andy or T.J. or Sean, she matched them stride for stride as they walked the tracks, her hands stuffed like theirs into the pockets of a maroon and gold junior high school jacket that was several sizes too big for her, a black knit cap, like the ones they wore, all but covering her bright gold fringe.

It was the year T.J.'s father let him have a BB gun to shoot squirrels with, and after she had wheedled a turn, Eden showed an enthusiasm for tracking and shooting small animals that surprised them—especially Andy, who even at fourteen was hard-pressed to understand why killing animals was fun. In winter, when every afternoon was spent with a hockey stick on the pond behind the cornfields, Eden watched the others at first, hunched in her school jacket, stomping her feet on the ground, both to keep them warm and in irritation. "I want to skate, you assholes," she cried, employing the word that was at the farthest edge of their vocabularies that month. And in the end, she bullied Andy into teaching her. Though she was small, she was, like her demeanor, fast and headstrong. And when she was hit with the puck—on the shin through her dungarees, at the side of her cheekbone, drawing blood, causing a scar that might have been permanent had that particular mark not been obliterated three years later—she, like them, did not cry but rather held her breath and stood perfectly still and let her face go white with the pain.