Eden Close

by Anita Shreve

  T.J. and Didi look at him as though he has just suggested stepping out of an open window with a long drop below. "Sure," says T.J., recovering. "Whatever."

  Andrew opens the door a crack and slips through so as not to let in any hot air. He walks to the railing at the edge of the deck. The heat envelops him like a warm bath. He puts his hands in his pockets and looks up and down the row of redwood decks behind the houses. He is struck by the silence. The grass has little of the symphony he hears outdoors at his own house. Nor are there any human voices at all—only the drone of air conditioners. The door behind him slides and clicks. T.J. is beside him, a short-sleeved T-shirt replacing the white cotton sweater.

  "Sorry about that crack," says T.J. "She didn't mean anything, just remembering."

  "It's nothing," says Andrew.

  "She still gets under your skin, doesn't she?"

  "Who?"

  "You know who."

  "Eden? No. That was years ago."

  Not door someone lets a dog out. The dog immediately turns and whines to be let back in.

  "Hot out here," says T.J.

  "Yes. Sorry to have made you come out."

  "You'll be going back to the city soon."

  "Yes." Andrew turns, sits on the railing. He looks at T.J. "Sometimes I think I'd like to know what really happened that night, though, before I go."

  "What night?"

  "The night Eden was shot, the night her father was killed."

  T.J. crosses his arms against his chest, looks at his feet.

  "For instance," says Andrew. "I've always wondered why Sean, if he didn't do it—and let's suppose for a moment he didn't—why he left town so soon."

  T.J. peers up at the hot, starless sky. He puts his hands in his pockets. He looks at Andrew. "Because maybe he thought people would pin it on him. He was always pretty impulsive, not too bright sometimes."

  "But how did he know about it?"

  "Everyone knew about it."

  "So fast? Did you talk to Sean that morning?"

  "What are you getting at?"

  Andrew looks through the glass door, sees the gun cabinet in the corner.

  T.J. had access to shotguns, he is thinking.

  I'm losing my mind, he is thinking.

  He shakes his head. "Forget it. This town is beginning to get to me. I have to go home."

  "No harm done," says T.J. "You've been under a strain, your mother dying and all."

  Andrew puts a foot up on the railing. "Where's the water?" he asks.

  "What water?"

  "Water's Edge."

  "Oh, that. It's just a name. You know how these subdivisions go. Tudor Hills, Fox Run, Waverly Manor. They're trying to make it sound like we're living on an English estate."

  In the silence they both hear a small plane overhead.

  "Don't you miss that big white silo?" asks Andrew.

  "You've seen her, haven't you?" says T.J.

  Andrew hesitates, shrugs, then nods.

  "You be careful," T.J. says.

  "How did you know?"

  "Whenever you lie, you smooth the hair over your ear. It's a dead giveaway. You always did it."

  "Thanks for the tip."

  "What's she like?"

  Andrew glances at his old friend. "It's hard to say. In many ways, perfectly ordinary. But not really."

  "What does she look like?"

  "Good. She looks good. There's a scar, but she looks ... OK. She's not deformed."

  "I didn't think so. I told you I saw her a few times in a car—just a peek. She seemed OK but like she was asleep or something."

  Andrew puts his foot down, stands up straight. "I'm going to go now," he says. "I'm exhausted. Tell Didi..."

  "So soon? She probably made a dessert or something," T.J. protests, but something in Andrew's face makes him change his mind. "Yeah, OK. I'll tell her."

  Andrew shakes T.J.'s hand. The two men, their hands still gripped, look at each other.

  "Don't, ah..." T.J.'s voice trails off.

  "Don't what?" says Andrew.

  "You be careful," says T.J. "Go easy. You never know."

  "Never know what?"

  T.J. lets go of Andrew's hand. "I dunno. It's been a long time. This isn't your scene here. I can see that. You'd be better off getting back to your job, your kid...."

  Andrew nods. "I'll see you Monday, then," he says.

  He waves as he makes his way down the redwood steps. He walks around the house to his car. Once inside, he snaps in a tape of Miles Davis and turns up the volume. As he backs into the street, another car starts up T.J.'s driveway. Two boys get out. The boys, in spiked hair and T-shirts, each holding a rolled wet towel, make their way toward the back of the house. Neither enters his home through the front door.

  When he is in his own house, Andrew walks deliberately through all the rooms, opening each window as he goes, letting the night air—sultry, luxurious—into the house. Within seconds, his skin is damp. He walks to the bathroom, strips off his clothes and turns the water to hot in the shower. He steps into the steaming cubicle. Later, scrubbed clean and naked, he turns on a light in the kitchen. The kitchen has been stripped; it looks too bare in the summer night. Andrew lifts a carton off a chair, sits on the chair. He bends to open the carton. One by one, he takes each of the items out of the carton and puts it on the kitchen table. When the carton is empty, he gets a beer from the fridge. He drinks the beer slowly and with enjoyment, occasionally fingering the objects on the table.

  THE STEAMY weather is bearable now, just, at five in the morning. Andrew takes a cup of coffee, goes outside to sit on the back stoop, thinking that a stray early morning breeze might come his way. The sky is pearly, with a pink wash on the horizon. He slept deeply once he went to bed, but woke too early, too alert to go back to sleep. The landscape is still, peaceful, except for the first birds. Yet Andrew knows that within the hour, it will be uncomfortably hot and humid. He thinks briefly of the chores he might do in the morning to while away the hours until the Plymouth backs out of the drive.

  In the distance he hears a drone—a small plane on an early morning flight? he wonders—but when the drone draws closer, he realizes it's a machine, a vehicle. He sees it then across the road, a red tractor catching the first rays of the dawning sun, an old red tractor with its driver, MacKenzie, bathed in coral light, coming down a path between the cornfields. Andrew, with his cup of coffee, walks to the end of the drive, reaching it just as the tractor is about to make a turn onto a furrow paralleling the road. MacKenzie, who has farmed the land across from the houses ever since Andrew can remember, puts the tractor in neutral, waves at Andrew, then gestures with his arm to come across the road.

  Up close, the roar of the tractor is too loud to permit conversation, so Andrew hops up beside the farmer.

  "Didn't wake you, did I?" asks MacKenzie.

  "No. Not at all," says Andrew.

  "Have to be out early in this heat." MacKenzie half turns in the seat and holds out his hand. Andrew, switching the coffee cup to his left hand, shakes it. He looks at MacKenzie. The farmer, a tall, lean man, even in his mid-sixties, has a long, weathered face. Below his eyes, which are a watery blue, are deep pale crescents composed of tiny fine lines. MacKenzie has on a plaid short-sleeved summer shirt and a cap that says Budweiser across the front.

  "Sorry about your mother."

  "Thank you," says Andrew.

  "I heard it was quick," says the farmer.

  "Yes. It was."

  "Good. That's the best." MacKenzie takes a pack of Carltons out of his shirt pocket, lights a cigarette, inhales deeply. "Actually, I was thinking about your family just yesterday," he says. "You heard about the girl?"

  "The girl?"

  "There was a girl they found yesterday. Thirteen..."

  "Yes, right," says Andrew. "I heard."

  "Made me think..."

  "Yes. So did I. Awful story."

  "Yeah. And the way they think it was the boyfriend," says MacKen
zie. "Just like then." The farmer takes a quick drag. He holds the cigarette like a dart, between the thumb and first finger. "Course, they sure as hell tore up my fields, even so."

  "How do you mean?" asks Andrew, taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee.

  "They came here one morning with about six fellas at first, then a coupla tractors, and dug up half my fields before they gave up. No compensation either. You musta been gone by then."

  "I must have," says Andrew. "I don't remember that."

  "You working in New York City?"

  "Yes."

  "That all right for you?"

  "It has been. How's Sam?" Andrew asks, shifting the focus onto MacKenzie's son.

  MacKenzie rests his elbows on his knees, brings his folded hands to his forehead. The smoke from the cigarette in his fingers curls under the brim of the Budweiser cap.

  "Gone."

  Andrew at first thinks MacKenzie means that his son is dead.

  "I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't know. When did it happen?" Andrew tries to remember if his mother ever mentioned the MacKenzie boy. Had he gone to Vietnam? Died there?

  "No, not dead," says MacKenzie. "Just gone."

  Andrew waits for MacKenzie to explain, or not to explain.

  "Me and my wife woke up one morning. It was his twentieth birthday. He'd taken the cash in the desk drawer. Gave hisself a birthday present. Left no note."

  Andrew tries to picture the boy he knew, a boy he always felt sorry for because he was never allowed to play sports. Instead his father made him work the farm, needed him at home.

  "Do you know where...?"

  "Not a word. Never a word in sixteen years." MacKenzie throws the still burning cigarette onto the ground. "I take care of these fields, but I can't tell you why. I got no one now to leave 'em to."

  Andrew looks over the fields, feels the heat already rising from them, wonders if a gun still lies buried somewhere out there, just beneath the probing tines of the farm machinery. All these fathers and their sons, he thinks. DeSalvo, his son a drug addict and now divorced; O'Brien, his son dead at seventeen; MacKenzie, his son gone for good. He thinks of Billy with a pang.

  "Well," says MacKenzie, "think I'd better get movin' before that sun gets much higher. My age, you can get heat stroke out here."

  "I think any age you can get heat stroke in this," says Andrew, hopping off the tractor. "My regards to your wife."

  "You stayin' or goin'?" MacKenzie asks.

  "I'm going," says Andrew, shouting from the ground. "Soon."

  "Best a luck to you, then," says the farmer, who puts the tractor in gear and lumbers slowly along the path.

  Andrew waits for a truck to pass, then crosses the road. There is no sound of movement yet in the Closes' house. He looks at his own and thinks of his father. He wonders if his father was pleased with his son's progress through life, or if he considered him lost, like Sam MacKenzie.

  But there is no one left now to ask.

  SHE IS SITTING in the same chair, wearing again the blue dress with white buttons. He notes the part is askew today, but that her hair is freshly brushed. He is carrying the new pair of sneakers and the sunglasses.

  He is relieved to see her sitting in the kitchen. He has imagined her in her room, unwilling to come down, to be with him again.

  "Did she say anything?"

  Eden shakes her head.

  "I've brought you something," he says.

  He puts the sunglasses on the table and bends down with the sneakers. He takes one foot in his hand. He has forgotten socks, he realizes, but no matter. "They're sneakers," he says, cradling her foot, sliding it into the unlaced shoe.

  The fit, if not perfect, is adequate. He tightens the laces, then puts on the other shoe. He stands up and looks at her feet. The blue sneakers seem disembodied from her long white legs.

  "You shouldn't have done this," she says.

  But he is proud of his purchase. When they were kids, he is thinking, girls often wore sneakers without socks. It was the style then.

  "And I've brought you these," he says. He picks up the sunglasses from the table and slides them onto her face. He moves the hair over her ears to secure the stems.

  "What are these for?" she asks.

  "They're dark glasses," he says. "To shield your eyes from the sun. I was worried the bright sun would hurt them."

  "Nothing can hurt them," she says.

  "How do they feel?" he asks.

  "How do what feel?"

  "The sneakers."

  "All right."

  "Let's go, then."

  She stiffens. "Where?"

  "I'm taking you to the pond."

  "Why?" she asks.

  "It's hot," he says. "And I feel like a swim. And I want to see it. I haven't seen it in years."

  "The pond," she says.

  "You remember it?"

  "I remember it."

  She turns her head. A fall of hair hides the side of her face, so that she looks, with her white skin and her dark glasses, with her long pale hair and her simple blue dress, like a film star making her first public appearance after a lengthy confinement in a rehabilitation center.

  "It will be too dangerous," she says.

  "Dangerous? Don't be silly," he says, knowing even as he says it that the remark is too glib, too easy.

  He takes her hand; her fingers are cool. He feels a rough substance on her fingers and looks at them. "What's this?" he asks, massaging a gray patch.

  She hesitates. "It's clay," she says. "I ... I make things with it. They taught me when I was away."

  "What things?" he asks.

  "Oh," she says. "Just things. Shapes."

  He tugs at her gently to make her stand.

  "We'll go as we did yesterday," he says. "Side by side until we get to the path, then me in front and you follow."

  She pulls her hand away from his but lets him take her elbow. She looks, he thinks, like a film star who may have been let out too soon.

  The sun burns overhead through a zinc-white sky. The grass in the sullen light no longer appears green. Near the back stoop, the leaves of an old lilac bush hang mildewed and curled. On the radio this morning he heard that power blackouts, as a result of the heat wave, have already occurred in certain pockets of the county. The town pool reported record numbers yesterday. A tennis tournament at a local boys' camp has been postponed. At least one elderly woman has died of heat prostration.

  He looks at Eden beside him, at the tiny seed pearls of sweat along her white brow. He stares at the small blue feet making footprints in the limp grass. Time has contrived to shorten the distance between them. He has grown very little since he was seventeen, whereas she is taller now by several inches. Still, though, the top of her head barely reaches to his shoulder.

  With his free hand he pulls his own sunglasses from his shirt pocket and puts them on. He unbuttons the front of his shirt, yanks the tails out. He wishes he had on shorts. He has said, improvising, that he is taking her to the pond because he wants to swim, but in truth, until he said those words the thought had not occurred to him. He doesn't even have a bathing suit here. Yet the thought of plunging into the water, now that it is spoken, is seductive. He wonders if there will be small boys there seeking relief from the heat in the pond—or if boys nowadays prefer to stay inside their air-conditioned houses watching videos. He thinks of T.J.'s mirrored hallway and of his own twenty-seventh-floor office in New York.

  When they reach the path, she makes a movement to shake his hand off her elbow. She touches the cornstalks on her left.

  "I can go like this," she says. "It's easier for me."

  He walks slowly in front of her. Beyond the point they reached yesterday, the path is sometimes barred by brambles, toppled cornstalks, densely grown underbrush. He uses his feet and hands to clear a way for her. He takes his shirt off and makes a fan of it, then a towel to wipe his brow. When he turns around to watch her, as he does often, he sees that Eden is stepping cautiously but evenly, w
ith no apparent fear or hesitation. He tries to ascertain, from glimpses of her face, what her thoughts might be, but the set of her mouth below the dark glasses gives no clue. Rather she seems only to be concentrating on the map her fingers read and the progress of her feet.

  Deep inside the cornfields—halfway, Andrew reckons, to the pond—he pauses for a moment to allow her to catch up, and it is then that he becomes aware of the sound, an intense resonant hymn of insects and small movements, punctuated at moments by the soughing of a dry sheaf or the quick whomp and flutter of a bird's wing, rising.

  The path is shorter than he has remembered it and opens up to a grassy bank. Beyond the bank, the water shines like polished brass. Long vines have overtaken the trees, and the shade is denser at the water's edge than he recalls it having been years ago. A thick profusion of wild red lilies along the embankment, with the gold-colored water scintillating among and between the petals, stops him with simultaneous pleasure at their beauty and the guilty realization that she cannot see them. Should he tell her of them, he wonders, or is that worse?

  On her own, she can go no farther than the cornfields, so he takes her hand and leads her to a damp grassy patch beneath the tallest tree, the tree most encumbered by vines and hence the one providing the coolest shade. She sits, leaning against the tree for support, her legs stretched out in front of her. She reaches for the hem of her dress and brings it to her face, wiping her forehead, her upper lip, the top of her chest. Her thighs, uncovered, are white, with a fine down of golden hairs. She smooths her dress along her legs, covering herself.

  "You can tell me," she says.

  "Tell you what?" he asks.

  "How it looks. Is it how it was?"

  He surveys the landscape nearest them. "It is," he says, "but more so. The trees are covered with vines. The water is much the same. Do you remember the color?"

  She shakes her head.

  "Its gold," he says, "from the minerals."

  "Gold," she repeats.

  "And here..." He stands up and walks to the mass of lilies. He snaps one off its stem and brings it back. He puts it in her hand.

  "Do you remember these?" he asks. "They're lilies. Red. They've grown wilder, thicker along the banks. It's hard to say if anyone's been here recently. There's no obvious debris left behind, no trampling."