by Anita Shreve
He finds his charcoal gray suit in his bedroom closet, picks up another carton in his mother's room. Pulling the kitchen door to, he lets the screen door bang shut one final time. He throws his suit and the carton, spilling the contents, into the back seat.
He puts the key into the ignition, but it jams. He tugs at it, tries again. There are shooting pains in his right temple. He thrusts the gearshift into reverse. He whirls around in his seat to back out the driveway, lets the clutch out too fast and stalls.
He slams the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.
He sees his mother coming toward him, and there is something important he wants to tell her, but the image fades before he can reach her. He sees Billy standing in the doorway of the house at Saddle River, watching Andrew pack on the day he left for good. He feels Eden break, mourning what he cannot comprehend. His head sinks below the surface, and he knows he is drowning. Billy is calling to him, but he cannot hear the words through the water. He cannot leave her, not now when she is causing him to drown. He lets the water close over his head. He feels the weight of his own body. He allows himself the sensation of sinking, of letting go.
He leans his head back against the headrest and opens his eyes. He realizes he has been crying.
He sees that he has left the lawn mower out beside the garage. A wasp flies through his open window and begins to crawl along the inside of the windshield. He takes a deep breath, shudders with a last spasm. In the near distance there are cornfields, and over them the heat shimmers.
You are thinking that my world is black. But it is not. When my eyes are open, there is thick fog. Dark fog that turns to white fog when I go to the window and the sun is out. I can make it brighten and then turn dark. The fog darkens, like before a rain.
You are something warm hovering over me.
You said my name, and until then, I had forgotten how it could sound. You were hungry too, for more than you could say. You are not like the others, not like my memories, but I have always known that you wouldn't be.
I am afraid now to dream of you.
I heard your door slam. And again. And I thought that you would leave me.
In the water, I was free.
I was his, which I knew and didn't. She burned me with it when she thought the time was right.
There is light coming into my world, but there is darkness too.
FIVE
SHE IS LYING ON HER SIDE, AWAY FROM HIM, WITH ONE KNEE bent, the other leg outstretched beneath her, while he traces small designs on her back with his fingertips. In the six days they have had at the pond, he has learned this about her—and, he supposes, she has learned this about herself: that she likes to have her back lightly stroked after they have been together.
Beneath them is a cotton blanket that he brings with him every day, and they have now found the coolest part of the clearing. Sometimes he marvels that they have not been intruded upon, or discovered, apart from the boy with glasses who saw them that first day and fled. He slides a hand down her side, along the curve of her hip. Her skin is smooth, like glass, despite the heat and the humidity. He would like to lie here all his life, he is thinking, just repeating that gesture.
She lifts a shoulder, then drops it. She means for him to keep touching her back. She tells him what she likes, not in words but in small movements and gestures, so that he has found himself alert to this communication, eager to move where he thinks she is directing him. This language, new to him, is exhilarating, heightening his pleasure. In all his years with Martha, she would never say what it was that pleased her, as if he must blindly guess at her desires, hoping to read her correctly, though he remembers that too often she seemed disappointed that he had not quite found his way.
In the hot days he has been with Eden, they have made no pretense of their desires. Just as she has no gift for small talk, she no longer knows how to be coy. On Sunday, the first day after they had been to the pond, she was waiting for him in the kitchen. He had brought the blanket, which he told her about. They walked in silence to the pond, and once inside the clearing, nearly dizzy with wanting her, he began immediately to help her off with the blouse and shorts and sneakers she had worn. The pitch of his need was keen, knife-edged—he felt only that he had been away from her for too many hours—and was matched by something both undernourished and generous in herself. And though there is within her a core of reserve he cannot yet penetrate—a repository of things she sees that are still unclear to him—their intimacy is intense, unlike anything he has ever known. Only much later that noon hour did he remember the blanket, abandoned at the edge of the clearing. He shook it out and unfolded it for them to rest on, establishing that day a pattern of resting afterward and then swimming.
When she swam that Sunday he made himself keep up with her. He didn't want her leaving him, if only for that. Twice while swimming, she exclaimed something he couldn't quite make out, and when she stopped, breathing so hard he could see her ribs rising and sinking, she was almost laughing. It has been, he thinks, a remarkable stroke of luck, finding the pond again, discovering together something that gives her so much pleasure.
Sometimes they have talked, though it surprises him when he Is away from her how long their silences are, as if they had years together stretching into the future in which to unfold to each other all there is to know. Occasionally he feels an urgent need to ask her questions so that he will understand her secrets, so that they might reach another kind of intimacy, but he has learned, even in the brief time they've had together, that questions unsettle her, cause her to withdraw from him. What she gives, she gives in her own time, small parcels of knowledge.
"She told me in the spring, that last spring," she said, as they walked back to the houses on Sunday.
He was already learning to take a few seconds to determine what she was talking about.
"About Jim, you mean?" he asked.
"We were fighting, and she threw it at me. I picked up a glass and threw it at her. I didn't really try to hit her, and it broke in the sink."
He wasn't sure, but he thought he might remember that day, a day he was working under the car and he heard glass shattering.
"Why then?" he asked. "Why did she wait so long and tell you then?"
"They'd decided together never to tell me, because of what he'd done. But she couldn't stand it anymore. She wanted me to know how he was," she said. "To make me see him differently."
HE HAS given her small parcels too, though of a different nature. One day he fashioned a picnic of sorts out of tunafish sandwiches and grapes and cold water in a thermos and cookies from a bakery for dessert. On Tuesday, he bought her a gold necklace, which she wore while she swam. On another day, having searched the county until he found it, he brought her a book in braille from a library in a town nearly twenty miles away. It was My Ántonia. She had told him, when he asked, that she had been taught braille when she was first in the hospital but hadn't had a book in braille for years, not since Edith stopped bringing them home shortly after Eden came back to the house to live. He watched her finger the raised dots, trying again to recall the letters. Each day he has brought the book and watched her read. He wanted her to take the book home with her, to hide it in a drawer, but she said no, she didn't want to risk Edith's finding out they'd been together.
"She must suspect something," he said.
"She never says. I'm very careful."
"Why don't we just tell her and get it over with?"
"Tell her what?"
"Tell her we're going to be together when we want to."
"She won't leave, then. She won't go to work."
"But why?"
"She's afraid of you."
"Afraid of me? That's ridiculous."
"It isn't that easy," she said.
HIS LIFE now has achieved a simplicity he would have said was impossible. He lives for the hours between ten and two. He wakes early, with the dawn, and labors on the house. In the coolest hours of the day, he has repair
ed the torn screen, finished the gutter, repainted the back stoop and sanded the woodwork on the mantel in the living room. He is sometimes vaguely aware that he is doing this work so that he can put the house up for sale, but in the six days since he tried to leave and failed, he has resisted thinking of the future. He cannot now imagine getting into the BMW and driving away for good, nor can he quite sort out the consequences if he doesn't. As a result, he has resolutely decided not to think about it, to savor each day as it comes to him, to experience his days as organic, without a master plan. He has noticed, however, that the things inside the cartons have begun to come out, to spread themselves gradually again over the house. And on Monday, as he was meant to do, he went to T.J.'s office, but not, as T.J. had intended, to drop off the key. Instead he told T.J., who swiveled in a gray chair, eyeing Andrew warily, that he wanted another few days to accomplish ail the repair work on the house he had set out to do. He felt he owed it to his parents, he explained rather lamely, to leave the house in good condition. T.J. had let his chair snap straight up with a thwack and had stood, adjusting his belt. "OK by me, pal," he had said, not looking at Andrew, "if you're sure you know what you're doing."
His afternoons are as rhythmic as the mornings. After he and Eden have been together each day, he drives to the mall in search of gifts for her she cannot keep. He has become, as a result of this habit, a devotee of the mall. He has bought her a peach-colored cotton sundress and a copy of Ethan Frome, which he plans to read to her. He has bought her a box of chocolates, which they devoured one day after swimming. He has bought her sunscreen lotion for her face and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Today he has bought her something special, the most ingenious of his purchases.
"I'm going swimming," she says, stretching and sitting up.
"I'll come with you," he says.
"No. lean do it myself now."
He is about to protest, but stops. There is no reason she can't swim on her own. Her sense of direction is uncanny. He has noticed that she has entered and come out of the water at exactly the same spot each day. He wonders how she does it: does she feel the path with her feet, or does she hear her way?
Propped up on one elbow, he watches her walk to the pond, wade out up to her waist, then dive forward to begin her crawl to the other side. He likes watching her swim. Her strokes are neat, mathematical, and he takes pride in seeing her strength return with each passing day. She can easily finish twenty laps now, and if they had more time, she might do thirty.
He lies back with his hands under his head. He thinks he hears, very faintly, a distant rumble of thunder. The strangling heat wave, now in its eighth day, has broken all records. It is as if the entire town and its environs were waiting breathlessly for the siege to break. He hopes it is thunder that he has heard, and that it will come soon, this afternoon, bringing with it a soaking, rinsing rain. He imagines the rain, bouncing up from the cracked ground, dripping from the wet leaves, falling onto his face and shoulders as he shuts his eyes and turns his face gratefully up to a cloudburst....
He wakes with a start, annoyed to see he has been dozing. He has no idea how long he has been unconscious: seconds? minutes? He stands awkwardly and too fast, feeling hollow as he does so. He scans the pond. There is no sign of Eden. He glances around the clearing, but she is not there either. He calls her name, the first time hesitantly, the second time abruptly, as he runs to the water's edge.
"Eden!" he shouts, as if he were cross with her.
The surface of the pond is eerily smooth.
"Holy Christ!" he yells now, flailing into the pond. His heart is loose inside his chest. His lungs are huge balloons, pushing against his ribs. The water is molasses. It is like the nightmares he used to have as a boy when he couldn't run fast enough in his dreams. "Jesus God," he cries as he pitches forward to swim, not knowing in which direction to head.
To his right, he sees a ripple, than a hand. She rockets straight up in the water not twenty feet to the side of him, panting hard. She smiles. She listens for him. She waves in his general direction.
"What the hell are you doing?" he snaps angrily, trying to catch his breath.
"I'm just swimming," she says, surprised by his tone. "What is it?"
"I thought you'd..."
He turns and heads back toward shore. He holds his chest where his heart is palpitating and walks around the perimeter of the clearing, with the other hand on his hip. She does not follow him, remains in the water where he has left her. When he circles close to shore, he sees her making waves with her fingers, idly stroking the surface. He lunges into the pond, pulling his feet high and clear until the water reaches above his knees. He dives forward in her direction. He bobs in front of her, lifts her in his arms, cradling her, then rolls her in the air and lets her belly-flop into the water. She comes up sputtering, gasping. She makes a broad sweep with her forearm, spewing the water in his direction. He dives, catches an ankle, drags her under. He holds her there, kisses her, but she pushes at his shoulders, propelling herself to the surface. When he comes up for air, she is laughing. He grabs her around the waist, pulls her onto her back, slides her over himself. She turns abruptly, plunges his head under water, and leapfrogs over his body. When he stumbles to his feet, he sees that she is already halfway to shore. She runs dripping up onto the grass, quickly feels with her feet where the blanket is and sits down, hugging herself. Home free.
"You're an asshole sometimes, you know that, Andy?"
The word is a song note he thought he might never hear again. It lifts him up, makes him as buoyant as a child's inflatable toy in a pool. He bobs happily, watching her, then slithers out of the water to the blanket. He sits beside her.
"I fell asleep," he says, "and when I woke up I was disoriented. I thought you'd..."
"Drowned?"
"Yes."
She touches his shoulder, runs her hand down his arm. "I'm sorry," she says.
"I just feel...," he says.
"I'm responsible for myself."
"It's more than that."
"It's hard to believe now," she says, "but I once wished that you would drown."
He looks at the surface of the pond, returned to its glassy, golden state. "I love you," he says.
She squeezes his forearm. "You think you know me, but you don't."
"I know enough."
"I could say I love you too, but I don't know what it is."
"I do," he says.
"I wish I could see your face when you make love to me," she says after a long silence.
He turns to look at her. He hoots. He drapes his arm around her shoulder.
"I'm glad you can't," he says. "I probably look ridiculous."
After a time, he consults his watch. "I've brought something for you," he says. "I'd better give it to you now."
She no longer protests when he gives her presents, and he likes that. He reaches for the plastic bag he brought with him to the pond.
"It's a battery-operated cassette tape recorder," he explains, taking her hand and letting her touch the small rectangular object. "It's easy to operate, and I've brought you some books on tape to listen to." He fetches the boxed cassettes from the plastic bag. "Short stories by Chekhov," he reads, "and Smiley's People by John le Carre."
She fingers the buttons on the tape recorder.
"And here's the best feature." He pulls from the bag a set of headphones. Smoothing her hair behind her ears, he adjusts the headphones and plugs in the jack. "Listen to this," he says.
He snaps the cassette of Chekhov into the tape recorder. "Nod v/hen the sound is the right level," he says. He turns the volume up slowly, and she nods. He watches her listening. He pushes the stop button and moves the headphones off her ears.
"When you have these on, no one can hear the tape. You can play it in your room, and she won't hear you. It's small, so it can easily be hidden."
"I don't know," she says cautiously.
"Trust me. Here, give me your hand, and I'll teach you how to
use this." He takes her fingers and shows her how to read the buttons. Play. Stop. Eject. Record. Play. She holds the black box, listens to the words on the cassette. If he can find the right cassettes, he can give her an entire world that has been lost to her all these years.
She pushes the stop button, takes off the headphones.
"When are you leaving?" she asks.
Leaving. It is a question he has scrupulously avoided asking himself for six days. "I don't know about that," he says.
"You'll have to go. You have a life you have to go back to. You have a job and a son."
He flops back onto the blanket and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I don't want to talk about that now," he says.
"Now you have things you don't want to talk about."
"It's different."
She puts the tape recorder aside and crosses her legs, supporting her weight on one hand.
"In the beginning," she says, "I was asleep. Then I cried for a very long time. And then I felt guilty and knew I was being punished."
"Punished for what?"
"For how I'd been."
He is silent.
"You remember," she says.
He ponders this confession. It is another parcel, a small piece of the puzzle. She has given it, he thinks, because she wants him to tell her something, to give her in return a clue about the shape of her future. It has, however, the opposite effect. It irritates him, makes him suddenly want to know more, as if she had merely teased him.
"It's not enough," he says rashly, not looking at her. "Tell me more."
"There isn't..."
"Tell me all of it."
"There isn't any more."
