by Anita Shreve
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
Other Novels by Anita Shreve
Copyright © 1989 by Anita Shreve
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of
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following address: Permissions Department,
Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive,
Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
www.HarcourtBooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged
the hardcover edition as follows:
Shreve, Anita.
Eden Close: a novel/by Anita Shreve.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.H7385E34 1989
811'.54—dc20 89-34712
ISBN 0-15-127582-3
1SBN-13: 978-0156-03133-2 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-15-603133-7 (pbk.)
Text set in Berkeley.
Designed by Michael Farmer
Printed in the United States of America
A C E G I K J H F D B
For John
ONE
THE AIR LAY AS HEAVY AS WATER IN THE SQUARE DARK ROOMS of the farmhouse. The house was still, sounds indistinct and muffled, as if heard through cloth. Upstairs, in the boy's room, the clock over the desk ticked away the minutes just past midnight. In the next room, where the boy's parents slept, there was the soft rattle of an old fan, moving the thick air from outside the house to inside and over his parents' bodies. As they had done nearly every hot night that summer, they had offered the fan to the boy, but the boy, aware that summer for the first time of his parents' age, had refused to take it from them.
In the house, far from town, Andy slept on his back in his bed. He slept badly, his lips lightly parted, his body smothered by the August night. A damp sheet, loose from its moorings, covered his chest. The boy's chest was bony then, without the muscles that would come later, and he had an older boy's summer growth, as if he'd sprouted too fast and had lost the grace of childhood. He was tall now, so tall that he towered over his parents, and his unfamiliar limbs, splayed under and out from the sheet, gave his body a lanky awkwardness, even in his sleep. His skin had an August tan and had all but lost the marks of adolescence. His hair, dark brown and thick and slightly too long, against his father's wishes, was wet at the sides and the back with the heat. He turned, pulling the sheet with him, as if to say, despite his dreams, OK, now, enough of this.
The boy's father, in the next room, sleeping on his stomach in a sleeveless undershirt and boxer shorts, moved a hand near his ear to make a mosquito go away. His mother lay beside his father, on her back, like the boy. She had thrown off the sheet entirely, but her body was clothed in her pink summer pajamas. She had curlers at the sides and top of her head. The mosquito, discouraged by the father, alighted on her thigh, and too late, in her sleep, she moved her leg against the air.
Beyond the screen in the boy's room, there was only darkness. The darkness lay over the town and along the road that led from town, and it lay over the two farmhouses that were set two miles along that road like an afterthought, with only each other for company. The two houses were only seventy feet apart, the one facing the road, the other, his own, down a short dirt drive, pointing north, overlooking an abandoned cornfield. Indeed, the darkness had come that day from the north, blanketing that part of the state where the town was and where the boy had been born. In the afternoon, clouds the color of dust had moved along the sky like thick batting, diffusing the sun until it was only heat and blotting out the moon and the shooting stars of August in the evening. The blackness folded the heat back down upon itself and pushed it through the screens and into the rooms where the boy and his parents slept.
Later they would all know and be able to say that it was ten minutes past twelve when the sounds started. It was the boy who woke first, seconds before his parents. He heard a woman cry out, and he thought, as he swam up through his sodden sleep, that it might be his mother. But when he was awake, he knew that the sound was outside, in the darkness past the screen. The boy pushed the sheet from his chest as if the sheet kept him from understanding the sound outside his window. Perhaps, too, he heard then, through the wall, his father or his mother, sitting up. Like him, suddenly alert.
The second sound was a hoarse cry, nearly a shout, from a man, and with that there was immediately the frightened squeal of another female voice, that of a child still, like himself. He heard his father's feet on the floor, the rustle of trousers, a zipper—then his mother's muffled voice, anxious, questioning. The boy moved down to the foot of the bed, where the window was. On his hands and knees, he looked out at the night, waiting for the voices to explain themselves.
There were two shots, the boy and his parents would say later. Two shots fast upon each other, so that they sounded, in the silent night of midsummer, like one explosion shattering the air. The boy knelt frozen, his hands on the sill. He knelt that way for the seconds of silence that followed the explosion, until he heard the loud voice of his father telling his mother not to move. And then calling his son's name through the wall. Andy. He could hear his father open the door of the closet where he kept the rifle on a shelf. Then his own door opened. His father, in his sleeveless undershirt, rifle in hand, said, Get away from the window. The boy heard his father's footsteps running on the stairs and the soft whir as his father dialed the phone in the hallway downstairs.
Unable to move as his father had commanded, the boy stared at the darkness outside the screen. The last sound began then. It was reedy, a high-pitched wail, rising at first like a tendril of smoke into the sky—a female voice, though nearly inhuman, gathering momentum as it rose. He imagined a woman opening her mouth, her voice rising from her in a thin, quivering stream. The boy heard his father stop dialing, listen and replace the receiver. The keening rose, sliced through the night. The boy shivered with the sound and backed away from the window. The cat downstairs jumped onto the kitchen table and started to hiss. Crows and summer birds, awakened by the unearthly cries, or perhaps by the gunshots, began to chatter and caw. And through the wall, the boy heard his mother say, as if in comprehension, Oh God, oh Jesus.
ANDREW WAKES from the dream in the same bed in which he was a boy and is disoriented. The dream lingers, vivid and heavy, pulling him down, causing him to swim in confusion between the night of the gunshots, when he was seventeen, and this night, the night of his mother's funeral, when he is thirty-six and sleeping alone in his parents' house for the first time in his life. He makes the dream linger longer than it might, enjoying the sensation of diving deeply into the boy's body and thoughts, hearing with the boy's ears as he has not been able to do in nineteen years, enjoying even the fear—the ability to feel that kind of fear chasing along the spine.
Andy. He hears again the exact timbre of his father's voice, and of his mother's—muffled, murmuring, anxious. There are details in the dream he hasn't remembered in nineteen years, and he thinks (briefly, because he does not want thoughts to interrupt or block his way back down into the dream) that the dream has worked like hypnosis, giving back sight and hearing that have been lost to him. In his waking thoughts he hasn't been able to see, as he can now, his father as a younger man, the shoulde
rs still muscled under the sleeveless vest, the thin open weave of the undershirt, nearly like gauze, so unlike the thick cotton T-shirts he himself wears now. The midnight stubble on his father's face, the hard stomach lying flat beneath the undershirt. In his waking thoughts he can make his father appear only as he was shortly before he died—clean shaven, the thickened waist straining at the belt, the chest sunken, as though the center, the power, of the body had slipped. Most of the images he now has of his father's youth come from photographs, so that his father is frozen in this pose or that, that expression or this, but has no life, no voice—just as his own son's early years seem locked forever in the photographs and movies Martha, his ex-wife, has taken. His son is seven now, but Andrew cannot reliably remember how he sounded or what he said at two or at four.
He rolls over in the bed, hoping to sink deeper into sleep, to keep the dream alive. He can feel a door closing slowly. The dream is slipping away, and he is losing the feeling of being a boy. but the door hasn't entirely shut: he can still make out some of the details. He had forgotten, but can see now, the way the clouds came on that afternoon, a sour color filling the sky, turning trees and skin in the early evening light a pale, sickish yellow. And he can hear again the excited sounds of the birds just after midnight, when there should have been silence. He had forgotten the way his father held a gun, pointed straight down along the side of his leg, like a brace. And that his mother wore curlers to bed. And he had forgotten (indeed, how could anyone have retained the precise sound?) the terrible pitch of the woman's cries. At any point in the intervening years, he could have said that, yes, there was the sound of a woman crying in grief or in horror, but he couldn't have described it. Occasionally he would, when he was younger and more eager to impress, tell the story to a new acquaintance or to a woman, giving his childhood its only bit of glamour: The man next door was murdered when I was seventeen. His daughter was raped. But he hasn't, until the dream, been able to hear the sound.
But is the dream accurate? he wonders. Have bits been added for dramatic effect or for some psychological payoff? No, he thinks (his thoughts intruding, coming faster, taking precedence over his sleep), the dream is true in the details that are there—nothing that is there is altered (except, perhaps, the part about the mosquito, which must have bitten him just now and worked its way into the dream)—but like edited copy, the dream has left out certain messy or seemingly irrelevant complications.
He had forgotten, but remembers now—and this was not part of the dream—the way the heat and the dirty air raised tempers that day, like an irritant chafing the skin, causing his parents, earlier in the evening, to speak in uncharacteristically querulous tones. He remembers that night at dinner—a cold, disappointing meal of ham slices and potato salad (it was too hot to cook, or even to eat)—that when his mother once again offered him the fan, there was an edge to her voice as if she knew in advance that he would decline it and was tired of the minor triumph of her son's refusal and of the larger implication of her son's generosity. And he remembers that after the meal, she rose in silence to get the ice cream from the freezer and put the half-empty carton on the table. The dessert looked to Andy as if it would taste like the cardboard it came in, and he didn't want it despite the heat, despite his usual thirst for sweets. He got up from the table and went out the screen door, letting it bang a little harder than usual, hunching his shoulders slightly against the possibility that his father would swing open the door in anger at his son's sudden sullenness.
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 b
ehind 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.
