Eden Close (2 page)

But his father didn't come to the door, and Andy walked on down the dirt and gravel drive to the road, his hands in his pockets, thinking that soon he would go away, to Massachusetts, to school. He reached the road and the Closes' house. It, like his own, was a simple, nearly too spare farmhouse of white clapboards. Decades ago, the two houses had been set in a farmer's family compound at right angles to
each other, with the back stoops the nearest point of contact, for two brothers to call to each other, or for a mother to watch over her new daughter-in-law. Now, though they shared a common drive, the families were not related, except in that way that two families, living far from town, might come to weave their lives together. Indeed, a passerby, cruising along the straight road from town, would know, at a glance, that the two families were not related: The first house, close to the road, though swathed in lush overgrown vegetation, particularly a profusion of blue hydrangeas in August, was the more derelict of the two. There was always peeling paint, a roof that needed mending, a shutter fallen in a storm. The house behind, facing north, Andy's own house, as if to disassociate itself from the careless house out front, was expertly if humbly manicured, its own hydrangea bushes trimmed neatly to size, its surrounding lawns cut and fertilized with discipline.

Mrs. Close worked nights then, as a nurse at the county hospital, and their car, a black Buick, was not in the driveway. Andy thought, if indeed he thought of it at all, that she'd taken the car and not the bus to work. (Later—hours, days later?—Andy would know that this impression was mistaken. He would be told, or would overhear, that Mr. Close, thinking to escape the heat, had driven his wife to work and then taken the car to the movies. And when his wife's shift was over, he brought her home just minutes after midnight.)

Andy might have wondered then if Eden was at home with her father or was out. He was not able to say later if he saw lights on in the house or not, or if he did, in what rooms the lights were. He tried to explain to the police that he passed that house, looked at that house, a dozen, twenty times a day, every day of his life, so that he could not say for sure if the lights he saw in the living room or the upstairs
bathroom were on precisely at that moment, or earlier in the evening, when he was taking out the garbage, or on another night entirely when he had passed by his own screen window and had looked out.

He walked to the road and stood there, looking up and down. He had no plans for the night. He wore a white T-shirt and dungaree shorts and was letting his hair grow, despite his father's sharp comments, long enough for college. The road was flat as far as he could see in either direction. That time of night, after dinner, there were few cars on the road: a family in a station wagon going out for ice cream; an older boy, like himself, about to pick up a girl; a grown man escaping the dishes, heading for the package store. Strangers used the road too, passing through from towns and cities he did not know to other towns and cities. And occasionally there might be a trucker who had a night delivery off the highway.

Across the road, in the fading ocher light, were the cornfields of a working farm; the farmhouse lay on another road, parallel to his own. Sometimes Andy saw MacKenzie and his son, Sam, on tractors, working the fields. Sam didn't play sports at school because his father needed him in the afternoons. The drying and brittle cornfields rose like briers for several acres in both directions, lending the two farmhouses on Andy's side of the road even more of a sense of isolation in August than in December. The corn was feed corn for dairy cattle. Andy was glad his own father was not a farmer.

That evening Andy stood there, alone on the road, hearing only a distant barking of a dog, the faint whine far off of a car along a highway, the clatter of dishes in a dishpan, a faucet running in his mother's kitchen. He looked east and south, across the cornfields, as he had been doing for weeks since his acceptance at college had arrived in the mail, thinking of leaving, of getting out, yet afraid, too, of the
leaving and of what might lie ahead. Already he had a sense of leaving for good, though when he spoke to his mother, he talked often of his vacations, of Thanksgiving, of returning to teach at the junior college in the county. But he knew, even then, that this wasn't true, that he would return for Thanksgiving and for Christmas and probably for the first summer vacation, but that he would really never come back. That what he was to be lay not behind him in the small rooms of the farmhouse but across the cornfields he could not, this month, see over.

His mother called to him. He turned. He saw her framed in the screen door, the yellow light of the kitchen behind her. He saw the red smock she wore to cover her heavy breasts and abdomen, the bottom of her shorts cutting into her thighs. And, standing in the road, he saw, too—the vision surprising him—the younger woman she had once been, as though he knew for certain he was leaving all of them. He saw the young woman of the photograph albums she kept on the coffee table—her long thick hair and the white collar of her high school picture; the ivory satin of her wedding dress seen through a blizzard at the church door (his father holding a fur jacket over her shoulders); the dazed expression of sensual pleasure in her eyes as she cradled her infant, himself, in her arms. He always thought of her, in the photographs, as beautiful, and he was startled for a moment to realize—to realize he was
capable
of realizing—that she had no beauty left at all. The subtle color of the once auburn hair was already gone, replaced by short, too bright, reddish curls.

And then, because he was seventeen, he had another realization—one that had possibly been lurking below the surface all along but now became, like many of the insights he was having that summer, a conscious thought: Even though you could love someone as much as he had loved his mother and she him, her only child, you could leave her if you had to. You could even look forward to leaving her.

"Your show is on," his mother said behind the screen.

He went in then and upstairs to shower, to wash away the smell of gasoline that lingered from his summer job at the Texaco station. After the shower, he sat downstairs in the living room watching the rest of the TV show with his parents, not because he wanted to (he would have preferred to be alone in his room), but because it had been the family ritual for years to watch one TV show together before bed. He was very conscious that summer of rituals, and he didn't want to break any of them. He knew his parents would soon be lonely without him, and though he sometimes felt himself wanting to begin the separation, he didn't like to think about his mother's face or his father's tight smile after he had gone. There'd been a time, not so long ago, when the family rituals—the elaborate pancake breakfasts on Sunday morning, the deliberate choreography of the holidays, the small triangle of the supper table—had been the highlights of his days and weeks and years.

Yes, he now sees, his father had already taken off his shirt and was wearing only the sleeveless undervest and trousers. His mother fanned herself with a magazine and got up during a commercial to make them all lemonade. (Oddly, near dawn, they all sat around the kitchen table and drank the remaining lemonade together after the police and the ambulances had gone. How like his parents not to think of whiskey or brandy first in a crisis, as he would now—
does
now.) They all went up to bed after the show, shortly past ten o'clock (he remembers having said so to the police), his father winding his watch as he walked up the stairs, as he had nearly every night Andrew could remember; his mother hoisting her weight up the stairs by her grip on the banister, her tread heavy on each riser, short of breath at the top; and himself, as light as air, flying, bounding, sprinting up the stairs, not an obstacle for him as they were for his parents.

Later, after he left home, he liked to imagine that he had looked out of his screen window, while he was waiting for his mother or his father to vacate the single bathroom at the top of the stairs, and had had a thought of Eden that night—had posed a query or had seen a silhouette of her moving across the window. But it was, in retrospect, impossible to know if he'd thought of her that night or that morning, or when he'd gotten off the bus from the Texaco station. Eden had been too much a part of his life—as much a piece of his geography as the hydrangea tree outside his window, whose white puffy blossoms are turning now to salmon as they do at the end of every summer; or as the way his mother looked each morning at breakfast in her bathrobe, nursing her coffee as she stared out the kitchen window, making, he always thought, some kind of peace with the weather and with how the day seemed about to unfold. He had known Eden all her life and most of his, and though he was too young then to be able to say with any confidence precisely how it was he was connected to Eden, he knew that he was troubled, as the days of August moved toward September, about having to leave her behind.

 

H
E SEES
that he has pulled the sheet from the foot of the bed during his dream—during the boyhood fear in the dream?—and it now lies in a damp rough swath across his chest. He brings it to his face and inhales a musty scent; it must be years since anyone has slept in this narrow single bed, he thinks. When he used to visit with his wife and his son, the three of them always slept together in the double bed in the guest room at the opposite end of the hallway—and it was, for him, one of the highlights of those visits, their holding each other in that soft, lumpy bed. As a general rule, Martha didn't believe in letting Billy sleep with them (the child-care books, she said, insisted it would make the boy too dependent), and so they hadn't, except on these rare and wonderful occasions.

Since he left home—and went to college, got married, fathered a child and separated from that wife and child—his room has evolved in the way the rooms of children do when the children aren't ever coming back. At first his mother kept it unviolated, the pennants and the posters on the walls, his desk neat, with his boyhood books and blotter, the few clothes he didn't take with him to school hanging in the closet. They were still there, he saw last night, as he hung up the charcoal gray suit he'd worn to the funeral; but she had used the closet herself, beginning when he didn't know, for her off-season clothes, if such a formal term could be applied to the oversized gaudy synthetics with orange diamonds, green stripes and pink flowers on the sleeves. She never lost the weight she vowed to lose and favored, right up until her death, large loose blouses that camouflaged her ever-swelling hips and thighs.

On the desk now is her sewing machine, and instead of the old pens and half-used notebooks he used to keep in the right-hand drawer, he found there last night an array of bobbins, fabric scraps and needles. There were other rooms she could have chosen to sew in—the sun room downstairs, where the light was good, or the guest bedroom. Perhaps, though, she wanted an excuse to be in this room, to savor some vestige of her son's presence. Or possibly she simply liked the east light in the early morning, or wished to see the other farmhouse, to reassure herself that she was not entirely alone. He tries to imagine what it must have been like for her to have a family and have it fall away: his own leaving and never really coming back except as a visitor; his father abandoning her five years ago with a heart attack. It has happened to him too—Martha and Billy have left him—though faster and without the dignity of these natural milestones. And he had not had time to be defined by the
family he'd made, as she was, nor to become rooted to a place.

The still, heavy night mocks the dream, teasing it in and out of his consciousness. He wonders if the weather, so similar to that on the night of the shooting, has brought on the dream, or if it is the coincidence of lying alone in this bed. Or is it that he needs to feel his parents young and alive again, and his dream has willingly obliged? It is a mixed blessing, he thinks, to hold your past again for a few moments, as he sometimes feels when he dreams of Martha as she was (as they were together) when they first met. He wakes from these erotic dreams of his wife as if immersed in a warm bath, and then is chilled by those first few hints of reality—a tie flung over a mirror, a briefcase on a bureau, sheets he hasn't washed.

He swings his feet onto the floor and arches his shoulders. His back aches faintly; he isn't used to such a soft bed. And with Billy gone, he seldom exercises now—though his body remains, despite neglect, reasonably lean. He still has his hair too, for which he is grateful. His father, from whom Andrew inherited his thick dark hair—as well as his pale gray eyes—went bald at an early age. Andrew isn't certain, but he thinks his father may have lost his hair by the time he was forty-five.

Beside the bed, on a table, Andrew sees the sleeping pills. Dr. Ryder, his mother's doctor, pressed a vial into Andrew's palm after the funeral. He imagines the doctor with many similar vials, a drawerful perhaps, kept for similar occasions, the gesture like that of a priest with a rosary card, or of a car salesman handing you a calendar as you leave the showroom. But he doesn't want a sleeping pill just now. He feels restless.

 

F
OUR DAYS
earlier, he was in the screening room at the other end of the twenty-seventh floor, watching a videotape of an advertisement for a pain reliever his company manufactures,
when Jayne, his secretary, got the call. The videotape had been especially poor, and despite the air-conditioning, he was sweating faintly when he returned to his office. As he walked in, Jayne came to his doorway with her hands clasped uncharacteristically in front of her. "There's bad news," she said quietly.

"Billy?" he said immediately, the adrenaline already shooting toward his fingertips.

Jayne shook her head quickly. Andrew slowly let out his breath. He thought he could bear anything except bad news about Billy, who was uncommonly prone to accidents—already a chipped tooth and a broken wrist, a scar over his right eyebrow. And since the child had left his keeping, Andrew's fears for him had increased exponentially. It was like the panic he sometimes had in airplanes.