Waiting for Eden

by Elliot Ackerman

  I nodded as though I already knew that, but I saw nothing of a constellation in this pattern. To me, it was only a smattering of blue against her very white skin. Still, I wanted to trace my fingers between these stars, connecting, I don’t know what. Maybe that was the point.

  I said nothing, and for a moment everything became awkward among the three of us. Then my friend stamped hard on the floor. “Fuckers!” he said and lifted his foot. Crushed beneath it, and smeared into the shag carpet, was a pair of cockroaches.

  “Did you have to do that?” asked Mary, wincing as she scooped the mess up with her napkin.

  “Christ, I hate bugs,” he said, looking at me.

  Mary tossed her napkin in the trash, washed her hands and sat back down. When we finished our meal she offered to do the dishes, but he said we’d do them. And it was in little ways like cleaning up the crushed cockroaches and doing the dishes that I noticed they were always kind to each other. She left the table and walked into the back of the house. We finished the dishes, and as I turned off the faucet, I noticed the shower going in another room. My eyes wandered in that direction as if imagining the water against her nakedness, running on her neck. I must have looked for too long because Eden said: “Yep, I’d think you were weird if you didn’t.”

  I felt my blood go warm and it spread from my stomach into my limbs, him knowing what I felt toward her before I did.

  “C’mon,” he said and nodded at the door.

  We walked out through the garage, the two of us. Here, an Everlast heavy bag hung from a chain. I hit it once as hard as I could. Eden smiled at me and we drove back into work, where we’d shoot all through the night.

  On the range, machine guns fired long bursts, and when the guns went high, the tracers cut red incisions into the sky until they disappeared, and when the guns went low, the tracers cartwheeled into the earth, starting fires in the brush. From our shoulders we shot rockets, and when they missed their targets, they slammed into the ground, throwing up great fountains of earth and then dust. And when they hit, they hit the steel hulls of old tanks and showered sparks into the darkness and brush, and this caused more fires, and soon the fires were so many that we had to stop shooting and wait until they burned out. So we waited and it grew later than midnight.

  I didn’t mind the waiting because I did it with Eden, and we sat on the ground in the darkness. “Fucking look at it burn,” he said. And I could see the firelight reflecting off his smile. For a while neither of us spoke. We were too tired. Then he said: “She’s mad at me, you know. She’s teaching two, sometimes three classes a day at that gym. I told her it’s too much and she needs to quit, so she’s mad at me.”

  “So what if it’s too much?” I said. Anyways, it didn’t sound like much.

  He glanced at me, making some invisible judgment, then he added: “We’re trying, you know, and having trouble.”

  I stood and shook my legs. They’d fallen asleep. I also wanted to see if the fires were dying, but they weren’t, they were spreading. Then I looked down at him, and he was already looking up at me.

  “So you’re not going to reenlist? You’ll stay back here and get out,” I said.

  “I don’t think I could do it all again with a kid back home.”

  I nodded.

  “But we’re having trouble,” he added.

  I sat down next to him and leaned back, searching the night sky for Andromeda, and I think he knew I was searching for it, but I don’t think he cared because he knew I couldn’t find it and he’d learned how to a long time ago.

  Then the stars disappeared and the fires went out.

  It had started to rain.

  Eden woke up and then he became awake. He was still in the hospital. After the stroke, everything had been reorganized. Some things were gone, but others had been added. His vision was gone. Now there were just the blurs that separated darkness from light. Lying there, awake, he watched the bright blur of morning. In that blur were memories, a head full of them. Each was only a speck, but they were like pieces of sand seen so close that they appeared as entire planets. The time he’d spent with her in the Mustang at Onslow Beach became a universe to him. Her breath had smelled like the peanut butter in their sandwiches, he remembered that, and also that she’d worn the same bra for nearly a week. It was black. Its lace was rough under his fingers and he touched it whenever he could, reading her body like braille.

  His wife.

  As he lay there, he could smell her near him. Soap and water. She always had a way of saving him. He looked toward the lightest part of the room, by the window, where he knew she slept on the couch.

  How long had she been there?

  A man should be able to look down on his wife sleeping, he thought. Look down, close his eyes and smell her. And he could now do some of these things, and in them, he felt himself returning. Other memories returned, too. He thought of the cockroaches from before. They seemed like a dream and his terror an embarrassment.

  I know what’s real now, he told himself.

  Through the springs in his bed, he felt Mary’s feet plant on the floor.

  He could feel so much.

  This too was new.

  The light dimmed by the window, she was blocking it, standing over him. What are you looking at? he thought. He could feel the clean softness of sheets pulled to his neck, and he could feel his skin, tight and crumpled like wax paper against the bones and muscles of his face. He could feel her breath, her lips moving against his cheek as she spoke soundlessly to him, the heavy curtain of her hair mixing with the stubborn and bristled crust of his hair. She kept her lips moving, whispering so low her voice couldn’t be heard. Then he felt a great vibration from the other side of the room. He thought it was a door slamming, but he couldn’t hear it. Her lips kept moving.

  Like prayers, the rhythm of her words never stopped.

  He could hear none of it.

  He couldn’t hear.

  A rush of anxiety welled up in him, crashed and then spilled like a silent wave of nothing. For there was nothing he wanted to see or hear. If he could’ve heard, the nurses would’ve told him he was blind. If he could’ve seen, the nurses would’ve written words to tell him he was deaf. I won’t be afraid, he promised himself. I will be bigger than everyone else.

  I will be dead.

  I will be on this earth closer to death than anyone and knowing what only the dead know. That is something, he thought, to know what only the dead know. And what is that? All they know is they were once alive, and are dead only because of it.

  Through the springs in his bed, he felt the door slam again. Then he felt fast little footsteps working their way around the room. It was so clear to him. He could imagine the entire room. How could you let her see me like this, he thought. Then he felt a soft hand with narrow bones petting his head, carefully, and then another smaller and more delicate hand.

  Andy’s.

  The small hand wouldn’t quite open and it rested on him in a little fist, clutching at itself. Then he felt the fast little footsteps move away from him.

  Mary shouldn’t have brought her for this, he thought. Was it so important for the girl to have some last memory of him, even if it was this one? Years before, on the news, he recalled seeing a certain report of a school shooting. As the children had walked out of their classrooms hand in hand, a policeman had the presence of mind to tell them to shut their eyes so they wouldn’t see their dead classmates spread out in the hallways and gymnasium. The policeman had been hailed as a hero for sparing the children that sight.

  He wanted to be like that policeman.

  He could feel the sweat coming off him as he lay there, the sting of it in the open wounds around his neck and sides, and the sheet getting wet and sticking to his back, also his heart thrumming against his chest, too big and too strong to just die. He felt like his
heart was burying him, pounding him deeper and deeper into the bed, so deep that eventually the sheets would envelop him, closing invisibly over his head like mud-waters.

  Why did she let Andy see him like this, naked and disfigured?

  He worked to breathe slowly, but still his heart pounded. He shut his eyes, counted to one hundred, recited the Lord’s Prayer. The pounding kept up. The sensation was familiar, one he’d felt often enough before. It was how it’d been after his first deployment, when they’d tried to conceive the girl.

  Eden didn’t think trying in the old way would help, but Mary did and she drove them to their old place at Onslow Beach. It was winter and the parking lot was empty. Seagulls flew overhead and they looked black against the sun. The seagulls also walked on the dunes and here they looked white. She parked the Mustang with its fender to a break in the dunes, looking out at the ocean. Near the shore the wind chopped whitecaps into the waves, but farther out the wind wasn’t as strong and the water was very smooth. On the ocean there were a few big ships and they were distant enough to look like they stood still, even though they moved fast and heavy as big ships do.

  When she turned the ignition off, he didn’t say anything and it was quiet between them. The heat wasn’t on and soon it escaped the car and the air became cold inside it. She became cold and frustrated that he wouldn’t touch her. So she turned the car on again and reached into the backseat for a bag of bread ends she’d brought. She stepped outside and fed the seagulls while the car heated up.

  He watched her from the passenger seat. She walked up to the dunes with the bag and the seagulls that had been there flew off. They circled in the sky where the sun was and again they looked black against it. Then she began to throw pieces of the bread in the air. A few of the seagulls were able to catch the bread in this way, but it was hard to do and most couldn’t manage. So the bread fell into the sand and soon the seagulls gathered around her. She laughed as they came close, pecking at her feet with their yellow bills and white necks. He looked into the sky and he could no longer see the black silhouettes of any seagulls, even those that could catch the bread had chosen to do what was easy and gather around her.

  Soon the bag was empty and she came back through the dunes toward the Mustang. The wind on the beach had blown across her face, reddening her cheeks. She climbed into the driver’s seat. The car had been warm for a while and she was very cold now, and she said as much, hoping he might warm her.

  He pressed her hands between his two. And hers were soft and so cold he wondered if the narrow bones in them might snap. She leaned into him and breathed warmly toward his neck. He began to feel as though he wasn’t warming her, but that she was making him cold. The curtain of her hair was now very close to his face and he could smell her smell. He couldn’t tell the difference between her hands and his, they both felt numb to him. She pulled back for a moment. He felt his heart eating at his chest in a way that had become more and more familiar in the many months since he’d returned home. She took off her sweater and beneath it she wore the black lace bra from before, from when it had been easy for him. He touched her, and she flinched against his cold hands. Knowing she’d done this, she leaned into him, encouraging him. He could feel the blood in all his body collapsing onto his heart as he ran his fingers over the rough lace that cupped her chest. She reached after him, hoping to find something there. But what he had for her was unmoving and cold. Still she climbed on him, becoming warmer herself and trying to warm him under her. She went on with it until her face was pink and sweat beaded beneath her eyes. But he had become too cold to make anything of it, so he pushed her off him. She sat back in the driver’s seat and turned off the Mustang.

  Neither spoke for a time. Without her on him, he felt his body returning and she dressed and put on her sweater. Then she told him: “I’ll be with you for as long as it takes.”

  “What did I lose over there?” he asked, staring at the ocean and the unmoving ships on it.

  “Nothing you’ll find by going back,” she said, knowing his mind.

  He exchanged a look with her, unsure what to say. Then one of the seagulls landed on the hood of the Mustang. It pecked at the windshield wipers, wanting something more. They had nothing else to give, so the two of them left and went home.

  It was now the day after Christmas and the late afternoon sky was sharp and blue, filled with a cold wind. Dressed in sweats and a wool peacoat, Mary stood outside the hospital’s automatic doors. She snubbed out her second cigarette and put the butt in her pocket. There was nowhere else to put it. Above her, streetlamps already glowed, anticipating the night, but daylight lingered, keeping the lamps dim. She walked beneath the lamps and along a cement path that wound through a grass field and to a dormitory, built long and low, like a bedridden skyscraper.

  Andy had arrived early that afternoon. She’d visited her mother at the hospital before, but she’d been a baby the last time she saw Eden. Mary, whose instinct was to protect her daughter from certain memories, had been overruled by her mother, who insisted the girl be put on a plane for a final visit. And so late that day Mary stood next to Eden’s bed with her daughter. She had told Andy to put a hand on his chest. Andy hadn’t wanted to, but she did. And that was it. Between mother and daughter, at least one of them had managed to tell him goodbye.

  Now Andy napped in the dormitory room.

  Mary climbed a single flight of stairs. At her door, she slowly slid the key into the lock and eased the latch open. She slipped into the space that was both kitchen and living room. The last of the light cast pinstripes through the blinds, landing on the sofa, where Andy slept under a mound of covers. Mary perched up on a barstool at the kitchen counter. She reached into a fruit bowl piled to the brim with unopened mail. She took a handful and began to thumb through it, bills mostly: insurance claims, utilities and rent she still paid for base housing, phone payments and the rest of it. There was also junk mail, solicitations and scams that had been sent to her address at the burn center. Mary often wondered what sort of a son-of-a-bitch would send junk mail to an address with “Family Support Facility, Burn Center” in it. But it wasn’t one person. It was many. She imagined the hundreds of them at their desks, databases opened, pecking her name and the words Burn Center at their keyboards, over and over.

  She threw the mail back into the fruit bowl. She’d finish her bills later and knew she was fortunate. Money was one of the few things she didn’t have to worry about. The insurance had paid out plenty.

  She worried about Eden, though. Gabe, the old nurse with the faded tattoos, had told her to head back to her room and get some rest. These last couple of days he’d taken a personal interest in Eden and he’d promised to call with the news they were all waiting for. And even though Gabe had said he’d call, she still couldn’t sleep. So she watched her daughter sleep.

  The sun set and filled the dormitory room with a brief type of orange light, like a liquid, and then darkness. Quickly it became cold and Andy began to kick away her blankets, as if she wanted the cold. Still her mother knew better, and knew the girl needed rest. She crossed the room and pulled the blankets back over Andy’s shoulders and tucked them behind her. Her daughter was warm again, pinned beneath the blankets, and for as long as Mary could she would make sure the girl slept.

  Eden and Mary had tried many times before, but after that time at the beach he wouldn’t try again. Instead, he began to throw himself into his training: he practiced his shukrans and as salaam alaikums, he drilled the privates in small-unit tactics, he held inspections without anyone asking him to. I noticed the change in him even though I didn’t understand it. He also stopped complaining about our night training. He no longer complained about the lieutenant either, and he didn’t seem to mind that we’d finish our days at 1500 and then have to come back at 2100. In fact, he didn’t even go home during this time. He just stayed at work, waiting for it to get dark.

 
Now there was no dinner for me to be invited to. But it wasn’t the dinner I missed, it was her. So at 1500, while he stayed at work, I’d go exercise at her gym. I knew her class schedule and I’d make sure to be finishing about the same time she was. She’d stand by the door of the wood-floored aerobics studio and as each of her students left, she’d thank and encourage them, as if she were a minister after Sunday services. I’d walk by and she’d smile at me, too. Sometimes she’d ask about the training we had planned that night, but she never asked as though she were interested, she asked as though she were fact-checking what Eden had told her.

  After a while, she must have understood that I waited for her. Even on days when her class schedule changed, I’d finish my workouts when she finished hers. For weeks niceties and nothing else passed between us. Then, one night after her late class, as she let her students go, I smiled at her as I usually did. But she didn’t seem to notice. From one of the gym’s mirrors, I watched as she cleaned up the equipment in her studio with quick little movements. Set across her face was a vacant look with some type of worry knitting her eyebrows close, and after I showered and walked out of the gym I found her alone in the parking lot smoking a cigarette.

  She still wore her sweaty clothes. When I stepped outside, she cupped her hand around the cigarette, hiding its burn, but when she saw it was me, she kept on smoking. I didn’t know that she smoked and it seemed strange that she’d do it here, outside the gym. An awkwardness passed between us and she asked if I was going back to work. I didn’t answer her question, but asked if she had another cigarette. She offered one and we stood together.