by Anita Shreve
HE BURIES the dog under the hydrangea tree. It is a frustrating process in the rain, since the hole he makes with a spade keeps filling up with water and falling in at the sides. It has to be a largish hole and fairly deep to accommodate the dog and to keep stray animals from digging at it. When the lightning comes again, he has to retreat to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He looks out the window at the dog and the half-dug hole. The lightning stops, and he goes out to resume the digging. At times he wishes he had not decided to do this, because he knows he has to think now, to plan, to make lists about the immediate future. He is afraid to have an idea and then not remember it later. But when the hole is fully dug, the dog placed inside it, the soil raked over, he is glad that he has done this.
SHE ISN'T sitting in the chair when he enters the kitchen. She is at the sink and turns immediately when he opens the door. Her face seems agitated, hard to read. She is wearing a long blue seersucker bathrobe, and she is rubbing her arms with her hands as if she were cold. He has been worried all morning that Edith would not go to work, and when he heard the Plymouth start up, he raised his head toward the ceiling in grateful thanks.
"What's going on?" he asks at once. He does not go to her. He senses she wouldn't want that yet.
"She found the tape recorder."
"How?"
"I thought she was taking a nap. She said she was going to. I put the headphones on and was listening to the stories when she came into the room. I should have heard her long before she ever got to my room, but with the headphones on, I couldn't."
"I'm sorry."
"She took it."
"What did she say?"
"She didn't say anything. She just left."
"Do you know she's selling the house?"
She nods. "I heard her on the phone. But how do you know?"
"It was T.J.'s agency that she called."
"Ah."
"Come over to the chair and sit down," he says. "We have to talk."
"What is there to talk about now?"
"Let's go upstairs," he says, "to your room. I want to lie down with you, talk to you that way."
"No," she says quickly. "Not my room. I'll come sit down."
She makes her way to the chair and perches on it reluctantly, as if about to hear a lecture she intends to resist. She folds her hands in her lap. Her face, he now sees, has become, on the surface, impassive, struggling to keep in check a face underneath.
He reaches across for her hand. She gives it unwillingly.
"Tonight," he says, "I'm going to pack up the house for good. When I come tomorrow, I'm going to help you pack. Then we're going to get in my car and drive to my apartment in New York. We'll leave a note for Edith. When we get to the city, I'm going to take a short leave of absence from my job. We'll get you settled in a good program for the blind, but we'll be together, live together."
He is improvising now. Until this minute he has been unable to think beyond the drive south, the exhilaration of that open a highway.
She begins to shake her head.
"What?" he says.
She says nothing, but he can feel her retreating even further, inch by inch.
"What is it?" he asks more forcefully.
"I can't do that," she says. "I can't leave."
"But why?"
"I wouldn't know how."
"I'll be with you every step of the way. It doesn't have to be the city; we can go anywhere."
"You have a son," she says. "And I have Edith."
"You have Edith?" he asks incredulously.
"I have to have Edith and she has to have me. There are things about this you don't understand, things about me you wouldn't like if you knew."
"There's nothing about you I couldn't deal with. I love you. I've told you that. It's simple."
"No; that's just it," she says. "It isn't simple at all."
She withdraws her hand, rises and edges toward the sink.
"I won't leave here without you," he says. "There's nothing more important in my life that I have to do."
She hunches her shoulders forward, rests her weight on her hands at the lip of the sink. He can see the shape of her back, her waist beneath the robe. Her hair is tangled, not brushed. There are dishes in the sink she has not washed yet. She runs her palms along the porcelain rim. She takes hold of the faucet, massages it with the heel of her hand.
The silence worries him. He feels that he is losing ground. "I won't leave without you," he says again, "and I won't let—"
She cuts him off. She whirls around quickly from the sink. "I've changed my mind," she says. "I want to go upstairs now."
He guesses she is doing this to stop him, to divert him from his campaign. But he imagines that lying next to him, she cannot fail to hear him.
He follows her through the dining room, the living room, up the stairs and, after they have reached the landing, through a darkened doorway.
A flash of lightning through the sole window lights up the room, illuminating hundreds of faded pink roses on the walls. The paper is peeling badly, revealing another, grayer paper beneath it. Someone years ago, perhaps when Eden was a baby, thought to cover the more somber paper with one befitting a little girl, but having no expertise in wallpapering, as was the case with Jim and Edith, merely covered the one paper with the other. Oddly, he or she also papered the slanted ceiling over the bed, but there whole patches have come away, laying bare a crumbling plaster. The bed is tucked under the slanted ceiling, one side against the wall, with only a foot of space above the edge of the bed where the wall and ceiling meet. The bed has no headboard, only an iron footboard, painted white, but chipped in so many places it looks more mottled than painted. A worn pink chenille bedspread is drawn up neatly to the single pillow. The floor, wide plank boards, is painted a chocolate brown. On the other side of the room is a small desk of maple with a stained green blotter on its surface. There is a radio on the blotter and a hairbrush. Beside the hairbrush is a sealed plastic bag with what seems to be a large lump of moist clay inside. On the chair in front of the desk is the blue sundress.
Another flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a shuddering crack of thunder. He looks out the window at the rain and at the trees whipping back and forth. The shade at the top of the window is torn along the bottom, and he sees that the panes have not been washed in a long time.
Nearly noon, and it is as dark as a heavy dusk.
It is the first time he has been in her room as an adult, though when he was a boy he was sometimes here while Eden collected a baseball glove or her mittens. Then the room was not barren, at least not as he remembers it. The desk was cluttered in those days with a record player and her records and her sports paraphernalia. Sleeves and legs of clothes spilled from the dresser. In the corner, he remembers, she kept her hockey stick and skates. He thinks, too, he must have been here on a stormy day, like this one, but he can't, for a moment, recall what it was they did here. He has a vague memory of endless games of Monopoly, stretching long past the point when he'd have been glad to concede the game to her if he could have brought himself to do it—or did they go to his house on rainy days?
He surveys the room again, returning to the moment. The weight of it hits him now. He imagines how she must sit here with the darkness falling. He wonders if he would be able to stand that, or would he have to find a light? There is a light, a wall lamp near the door. It must be for Edith, for when she comes during the evening.
He watches Eden sit on the edge of the bed, as if momentarily preoccupied with choices, then lie back close to the wall. She raises one knee slightly, and the robe falls open when she does so. She stretches out an arm to indicate that he should come.
There is something uncomfortable about her posture. He tries to read her face. Already she is eons away from him.
He sits in the chair by the desk. He would like to know what she has in its drawers, whether the "things" that she makes are there. The radio is an old one, of round brown plastic.
He wishes they could go back to the kitchen, start again.
"I'm lonely over here," she says.
The voice is one he hasn't heard in years. He remembers the afternoon as clearly as if he were at the pond this moment. You can touch my blouse, she said, and the voice was the same. But then he was a boy, and he resisted her.
He bends down to loosen the laces of his sneakers. They are still soaked from his walk. He thinks of the dog under the tree He would like! to tell her about the dog. He takes off his shirt, unbuckles his belt. He lays his clothes on the chair, over the blue sundress.
He walks to the bed, lies down beside her. He thinks only that he will hold her, bring her back. But under his weight, when he moves toward her, the bed creaks abruptly and loudly in the silence—the old iron springs protesting a man's additional weight. Yesterday, he thinks, they might have laughed together, but now the sound makes her freeze, as if she had badly miscalculated, as if she had not anticipated this echo. Quickly, he presses his hand against the small of her back, drawing her closer, but she is stiff against his embrace.
"Eden," he says, but she doesn't answer him.
He can feel her fear, or something like fear, along the tendons and muscles of her back. The fear is contagious and travels up his arm to his own chest. Alarmed, thinking he can stop the current by a bold gesture, or by seizing her to him more tightly, he roughly shifts her hips under his. The bed creaks again. He kisses her, but her mouth is empty.
"What is it?" he asks, the fear gathering in his chest like a cloud.
He raises her arms and pins her hands up behind the pillow.
"What is it?" he asks, shaking her wrists.
She lifts a knee as if to twist him off her, but he presses her leg with his own and holds her to the bed under him. He looks at her closed eyes, the almond eye. She turns her face away.
"Who was here before me?" he whispers hard into her ear.
She gives a cry and strains toward the wall. He lets her go but. wraps an arm around her abdomen and pulls her buttocks against him. He puts a hand at the back of her neck, bending her forward. He raises the skirt of her robe until it is bunched at her waist. A sensation, as swift as a kick, moves through his chest when he sees her exposed, too white, too vulnerable. But he is lost now to reason, letting his fear guide him. Holding her hipbone with his free hand, he slips inside her from behind. She cries out again as if he had hurt her, but he doesn't believe he has hurt her. It is something else she is resisting. He can see the buttons of her spinal column rising from her buttocks until they disappear beneath her robe. He moves his hand down to the place where her thigh joins her hip and holds her there.
"Tell me who," he insists, his voice no longer a whisper.
She reaches for the edge of the bed nearest the wall to anchor herself against his pounding. He can see her shoulder quiver with the strain. Beyond her shoulder is the faded paper with the roses and its brittle cracks. But he is suddenly confused, not in her bed but in the pond, grabbing for her hand because she has gone under.
"I was his," she cries out to the wall. The voice is taut, stretched, too high-pitched.
"Who?" he says hoarsely to her back. He holds her tightly now, diving beneath the water to reach her, nearly there.
"Jim's?
It is a wail that comes to him from across the pond. He breaks the surface. The cry reaches him, buffets his ears like a high wind. He takes the name, looks at it, remembers it.
He stops, halted in frenzied midsentence. His eyes refocus on the blue and white stripes of the seersucker cloth. His body slips away from her of its own accord.
He makes a sound like a man coming up for air. He rolls onto his back.
Outside, the lightning comes again, but it is nothing and barely registers. The thunder is more muted than it was when they entered the room. The storm, he thinks, must be moving on. The panes rattle in the loose window frame as if from a farewell gust. He glances over at her desk, at the clothes on the chair, at the clay on the blotter. His eyes stray back to the slanted ceiling directly over him. He squints at the paper. There are tiny holes surrounding the crumbling plaster, he now sees. Of course, he thinks, from the shooting. And there will be other tiny holes in the room too.
He forces himself to a sitting position. He stands and walks across the room to the window. The window sticks, then gives. On the lawn between the two houses, he can see eddies of leaves and twigs, twisted into dust devils by the wind. On the horizon is a seam of bright light beneath the cloud bank.
Her robe is still raised to her waist. He walks back to the bed and bends across it. He lifts her hand free of the edge, where she is clutching it. He smooths the robe over her legs. He walks to the chair and sits down.
He watches as she turns onto her back. She wipes away a patch of sweat near her temple with the palm of her hand. Already, through the open window, there is the faintest suggestion of a chill in the air.
On either side of the well of the desk are the drawers, the bottom drawers the deepest. He opens the one to his right. Inside is a forest of gray clay shapes. He lifts out one of the small sculptured pieces and puts it on the blotter. It is a figure of a nude woman, sitting on a straight-back chair, not unlike the one he is on. Her head is bent forward, and her long back is curved. One leg is stretched out, the other bent. The sculpture is about fifteen inches high, but he can make out the fine depressions to the side of one eye. The hair, thick and tangled, cascades down the back of the chair. It is an extraordinary likeness, but it is not just the likeness. It is the remarkable softness of the body against the square shape of the chair.
He looks over at Eden on the bed. She has to have heard him open the drawer. He draws out another. It is again a self-portrait, a woman in a sundress with buttons down the front, bending to the floor to pick up a shirt. He runs his fingers along the folds of the skirt, admires the way it opens as the woman has bent forward.
"These are wonderful," he says.
She says nothing, turns her face slightly away from him.
"This is what you meant," he says.
He takes another from the drawer. It is a woman in a nightgown, lying on her side.
"She brings me clay," she says. "But they dry up after a while, and they break."
"But they could be kiln-dried, couldn't they? Or reproduced in metal? They're beautiful." He feels a sensation, something like relief, that she has had this—and then another sensation, one of admiration, that she has been able to create such beauty in this barren room.
She hugs her arms as if she were again cold. She rises to a sitting position. Another gust whistles against the window.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I should never have forced you like that."
"It's all right," she says.
He runs his fingertips along the nightgown of clay. "I went for a walk this morning," he says, "and I found a dog lying in the middle of the road. It had been hit by a car and couldn't move. But it was still alive. I carried it to the side of the road. I lay down beside it while a storm passed over, and when I sat up it was dead."
She draws the robe more tightly around her legs.
"A man came by with a pickup truck and let me bring the dog home. I buried it this morning under the hydrangea tree."
She hunches her shoulders forward and rubs her arms.
"But the thing about the dog is it never cried," he says. "Do you remember any of it—the skating, the railroad tracks, the baseball?"
She tilts her chin up, as if thinking.
"I was remembering this morning," he says, "after I found the dog, that day you were hit with the puck on the cheekbone. Do you remember it? Sean had whacked it, and it caught you right under the eye. Your face turned white, but you didn't cry. I'll never forget it. You never made a sound."
She stands up and walks to the window, her back to him. Her arms are tightly wound over her chest.
"He was always in my bed," she says, "from the very beginning. He would lie down with me to tuck me in when I
was little, and sometimes we would sleep side by side."
"You don't have to tell me," he says.
She rubs one of the panes with a finger. "She didn't like it, his being with me, but there wasn't anything she could do. She didn't want to touch me herself."
He watches her from the chair. She is making perfect circles on the glass.
"When I was older, she told him I was too old for him to be doing that. She could say it then, so he stopped. But she started working nights, and he came when she was away. It started then, when we both knew we were hiding from her."
As we have, he thinks suddenly but doesn't say.
She turns toward him, leans against the sill. "I never said no, not the first time, not ever. It was what I had to offer him. To offer anyone."
He massages the sculpture in his hands. There is nothing he can say. He could say, It wasn't your fault, but the phrase seems meaningless, the world fault without reference. It is an intimacy he doesn't entirely comprehend. He knows there must be consequences, ramifications to this unnatural life she has had, and perhaps he could say it was this that made her the way she was then, but these would be shallow suppositions, made without understanding.
His eye falls to the chocolate floorboards by her feet. Somewhere on these floorboards, Jim died and Edith found him, and then his father found all of them. The ground lurches when he tries to bring Jim into focus. Soon his memories of Jim will have to be recast, redrawn again. And of Edith too, he thinks dizzily.
"Did she know?" he asks.
She doesn't answer him directly. She leans her head back against the window. "I've had all these years to ask why, and I still don't know the answer. I knew the answer better then; I could feel it. Now I can't. She wasn't cold to him. It wasn't that. He liked young girls. He needed to drink before he came to me, but he was always gentle, he never hurt me. It wasn't like you think. I don't know the word you would give it. I don't even remember his face now."
He puts the sculpture on the blotter, walks to where she is. He lays his hands on her shoulders, pulls her head to his chest. He is afraid to form the question, knowing that her answer will be permanent, unshakable. But he has to know.
