Eden Close

by Anita Shreve

  "You'll come with me now," he says. He tries to say it casually, though she must hear his heart racing beneath his voice.

  She doesn't make him wait. She nods, a small gesture.

  The balloon inside his chest expands, bursts. He lifts her, taking them both by surprise, and carries her to the bed. She is weightless, no longer resisting him. He drapes her gently on the pink bedspread. He sits on the edge of the bed, looking down at her, holding her by the wrist. Then he is bending over her, kissing her while he unties the sash at her waist. His hand finds her skin, and she moves to make room for him to lie beside her. He tries to free her arms from the robe, and she helps him. His stomach and chest are suffused with warmth—she must feel the heat radiating from his pores. He slides over her, hunkering down. She is feeling his face, reading him. He tastes the salt at the edge of the almond eye. She murmurs something he cannot quite make out. He thinks she is saying his name into his ear. She opens her thighs and guides him, and he feels, as she takes him in, a gathering there of more love than he thought was inside him. She moves against him slowly: there is no time against which to measure this. She has her arms hooked around his shoulders from underneath. He feels her curl a foot around his calf. Soon they will drive south on the thruway, toward the city. He will buy her clothes, and she will wear them, and she: will cast her portraits in precious metals. He will make it up to her; he will give her what was taken from her. The bed creaks merrily and loudly under their double weight. He pictures a pair of ribald characters in a play he read somewhere years ago, and he wants to tell her of this lusty image. He bends his head down to kiss her breasts. He wants to tell her of the drive south, of all there is ahead of them. He is full of images, like bright bits in a kaleidoscope. They are with Billy, and Andrew is making pancakes for the three of them. They are under his mother's quilt on his bed in the city, drinking wine. They are in a concert hall, listening to a piano. He slides his mouth along her neck, reaches his hands down underneath her to hold her there.

  But she is pushing at his shoulders. He doesn't understand. He is confused, thrust too quickly away from her, away from the images. He feels her fingernails cut into his skin.

  He rises up to see her face, and there is terror there. He hears, too late then, what she has heard, on the floorboards. He whirls around to face the doorway.

  Edith is standing just inside the door with something large and strange in her arms—a sight as incomprehensible and as meaningless in the universe they have just created as a code he will never decipher. He struggles for sense, for clarity. He hears Eden cry out behind him. Instinctively, he raises an arm, a hand, to separate himself from the apparition in the doorway, even as it brings the large and strange thing closer to its face. He wants to shout Wait, and perhaps he does. The adrenaline hits his thighs then, his calves. He leaps up.

  It is the leap of an athlete, a left fielder grazing the sky for a fly ball, a goalie catapulted off the ice to make a save. He will catch the ball, the puck. He knows it. He cannot fail.

  But it is not Andrew the gun is intended for.

  SIX

  THE NIP IN THE AIR TASTES OF COLD WATER. EVEN ON THIS second Saturday in September, he can see his breath, the steam rising from the mug of coffee. The maples are already turning, in the sunlight, a translucent pink, and he knows that down by the pond the leaves of the birches will be the color of brass.

  He finds T.J. in the dining room of the Closes' house, standing with his hands in his pockets, surveying the stripped walls. The shades and curtains in the room have been removed, so that the sun makes the newly washed windows gleam. A few last remnants of the old paper, a mildewed and darkened pattern of cabbage roses, fill a plastic trash bag by the doorway.

  "I brought you these," says Andrew, handing T.J. a pair of stained jeans and an old blue plaid flannel shirt. "And I brought you a cup of coffee."

  "Thanks." T.J. cradles the coffee. "I called Didi, told her I'd be hanging out with you for a while. The kitchen looks great, by the way. Like an ad for Country Living or something."

  Andrew laughs. But he is pleased with the kitchen. He has sanded away the green paint on the walls and cabinets, replaced it with a semigloss white. He has torn up the cracked linoleum and sanded and refinished the wide old plank flooring underneath. He threw away the shades and gave the table and chairs to the Salvation Army. The kitchen is now pristine and simple, waiting for new owners to walk in and claim it. He likes standing in the center of the kitchen, drinking his morning coffee there. His only regret is that Eden cannot see what he has done. She has rubbed her bare feet along the satin finish of the floorboards, felt the glossy paint on the cupboards, smelled the fresh tang of new paint in the room. But he could tell, by looking at her face, that to her the room was still green and dark, still contained too many memories. After that day he did not ask her again to "see" his work, and she has not returned to her house, not even when he emptied and packed her own room. She stays now with him at the other house, across the yard.

  T.J. finishes the cup of coffee and sets the mug on the sill. Andrew watches as T.J. strips off his brown leather jacket, his expensive safari pants and a vivid lime green and blue cotton sweater. He puts on the flannel shirt Andrew has brought, zips up the jeans.

  "You look better," says Andrew. T.J. acknowledges the dubious compliment with a wry grimace.

  Actually, Andrew is thinking, T.J. doesn't look well at all. His face has lost its color, and new vertical lines have appeared in the center of his forehead. Although his stylish clothes are the same, the panache seems to be gone.

  "How is she?" asks T.J.

  "Good. She's sleeping."

  "I thought she looked very good when I came around ... you know, right after. I woulda been back sooner, but you both looked like you needed to be left alone for a while."

  "Thank you. We did. But it's better now."

  T.J. surveys the dining room. "Where do I start?" he asks.

  "I've got the walls down to the plaster, sanded the woodwork," says Andrew. "I'm going to paint the walls a linen white, do the trim in the same color, but a semigloss. I've only got one roller, though. Which would you rather tackle—the walls or the woodwork?"

  "I can do the walls," says T.J.

  "OK. Give me a hand with the dropcloth, then."

  The two men unfold the dropcloth and draw it up to the baseboard. T.J. crouches down, opens a can of paint and begins to stir it with a wooden stick. Andrew, with his own can of paint, does the same.

  "It was a great save, whatever you did," says T.J. "I've heard the story now twenty times, and each version is a little different. You're a goddamn hero in the town, you know that?" The statement is an invitation. T.J. looks at Andrew.

  Andrew shrugs, a gesture that belies the memory of that moment—the many epiphanies in that single frozen leap.

  "I hit the barrel with my hand," he says. "The shot deflected to the ceiling. Then I took the gun. In fact, when I did that, she just sat down."

  He remembers how she walked to the chair, and how she folded her hands in her lap, resolutely refusing to look at Eden, who had, in the tussle, risen to her feet and was tying the sash of her robe. Andrew, naked, had held the gun, with the barrel pointing toward the floor, and had told Eden, in a voice that wasn't entirely composed, to go to the phone, dial the operator and ask for DeSalvo's number, then to call DeSalvo and ask him to come out at once. If he wasn't at home, to call the luncheonette. Curiously, his nakedness in front of Edith Close had caused him no embarrassment—in retrospect, he imagined it was because they had all passed, in an instant, onto another plane of guilt and shame—but he walked nevertheless to the chair on which Edith was sitting and lifted his clothes from behind her. He sat on the bed, the gun beside him, and dressed, his hands shaking so badly he couldn't tie his sneakers. He had said to Edith—feeling like a poseur with the gun now in his hands, slightly raised in her direction—to go down to the kitchen. Following her, not knowing exactly what would transpire w
hen DeSalvo arrived, he began composing fragments of stories to see if they might hold, might be plausible, until he reached the kitchen and glanced at Eden, in her robe, at the table, and saw in her body and on her face that she knew that she was free now. She would say whatever she would say, whatever she had longed to say.

  "You called the police?" asks T.J.

  "I called DeSalvo. I thought I needed advice at that point more than I needed anything else. Later he called the police, and they came and got her."

  "And she told the whole story?"

  "No. It was Eden who did that. After they had taken Edith away, DeSalvo and I sat down with her, and she told us everything. She was very calm, very clear about it. It was a relief to her...."

  T.J. scrapes the drips off the paint stirrer, lays it on a piece of newspaper. He pours a measure of thick creamy liquid into the paint tray. "So it was Mrs. Close all along," he says.

  Andrew nods, stands and holds his brush as steadily as he can against the strip of molding nearest the wall.

  "She found them in bed together?" asks T.J. The question is rhetorical, or a request for confirmation. T.J. has heard this part of the story oft repeated now from people in the town. For the town, the revelations have been titillating and deeply satisfying, closing an unresolved chapter in its history.

  "He was leaving Eden to go back to his own room because he knew Edith would be home soon, but she'd come earlier and they hadn't heard her."

  "We all thought Mr. Close was at the movies and came home with Mrs. Close that night," says T.J.

  "So she said."

  "I guess no one was going to question the story of a grieving widow and a badly injured child."

  "Well, they didn't."

  Like a flashbulb popping in front of his eyes, the image of Edith Close being pushed to the ground by the ambulance attendants comes briefly into focus. He hesitates, then says to T.J., "They didn't think to question the grieving widow, because she really was grieving. You understand that it wasn't Jim she meant to shoot?"

  Andrew is surprised by his own desire to tell T.J. these facts—after all, he and T.J. have so little in common now—but there is, in the telling, a kind of relief for himself too. Perhaps it is the shared activity of the work that brings on the atmosphere of confidence, or possibly seeing T.J. in old clothes.

  TJ. puts the roller down, turns to Andrew. "And he got in the way?"

  Andrew nods. "Something like that." Andrew wonders now if Jim, too, had leapt to make a save.

  T.J. shakes his head, gives a low whistle. "She tried to kill her own daughter?"

  Andrew nods. "His daughter."

  T.J. stares at Andrew, trying to take this in. He turns, resoaks the roller in the tray, lifts it to begin another long strip. "You ever guess that about him?" he asks. "About him and Eden?"

  It is a question Andrew has thought about in the three weeks since Eden told him about herself and her father. He knows the answer is no, he did not imagine this of Jim. And yet the clues may have been there, he now thinks. He remembers the way his mother would watch Jim caress his daughter on the steps. "Sickening," she would say, and he thought she meant Jim's indulgence. But perhaps she felt something else too, something she couldn't articulate or even bring to clarity in her thoughts.

  "Watch for drips," says Andrew. He opens one of the windows to let out the paint fumes. Immediately, clean air fills his lungs. When he has finished the painting, he will rent the sander again and refinish the narrow oak floorboards. The Salvation Army has taken away the rug and the furniture—indeed, they have taken most of the furniture in the house. Almost nothing, apart from a mahogany sideboard in the dining room, was good enough for auction.

  "T.J.," says Andrew. "There's something I feel bad about."

  "What's that?"

  "Well, for a while, maybe a half hour or a day—I can't remember—I thought it might have been you. Those guns..."

  "Forget about it. You were under a lot of strain. You weren't thinking clearly."

  "You didn't tell Sean, then?"

  "No, and I don't know who did, though the news spread fast that morning. His father maybe. My guess is that Sean went crazy when he heard it, didn't know what he was doing."

  Andrew watches the shiny paint cover the dull sanded surface. Painting, like mowing, he is thinking, is rewarding work. He cannot tell T.J. how obsessed he has become with this house—seized by the notion of transforming it, sanding it clean, airing it out so thoroughly that the past, like the paint fumes, will drift out the windows and be dissipated in the clean September air. The work has been pleasurable, apart from the one day he was forced to enter Edith's room and remove the belongings there. The room, with its drawn shades, its bleak furnishings and its lone picture of Jim on a dresser, depressed him so much that he sat for long minutes on the worn bedspread, unable to proceed further. The worst moment was opening her top dresser drawer, as he had done in his own mother's bedroom. He was tempted merely to lift the entire contents into paper bags to take to her lawyer, to be given to Edith at the hospital with the suitcases of clothes, but a kind of prurient curiosity compelled him to linger over the items, fingering them, imagining them as clues to an enigmatic woman: a postcard from Jim from Buffalo, dated 1959; a pale blue nylon nightgown that appeared not to have been washed in years; a valentine from Jim that referred to an evening of intimacy; a certificate stating that Edith Close Was a licensed practical nurse. Astonishingly, or perhaps not surprising at all there was not a single trace in this dresser drawer as there was in his own mother's drawer that the woman had ever raised a child, that a daughter had ever shared her home. Not a single memento school paper or photograph. He put the contents in a shopping bag and left the drawer open, unable and unwilling to touch it again.

  "What'll happen to her, do you think?" asks T.J.

  "You mean Edith?"

  "Yeah."

  "I think they'll put her away."

  "The loony bin?"

  "Probably. Even if it comes to trial, which I'm not sure it will do. Eden doesn't want that. No one really wants that."

  "She's there now?"

  "She's under observation. Sixty days."

  He tries to picture Edith under observation, remembers her in the kitchen waiting for DeSalvo to come. She stood the entire time, refusing to sit at the table. Andrew still held the gun, though he knew it wasn't necessary. There was no place now that she would go.

  He had not been in a room with the two grown women before, and he thought how palpable the tension was between them, like an electric current running from the table to the place where Edith stood, a current so alive he himself did not want to intersect it. And yet the minutes in which they waited for DeSalvo were silent ones. Neither woman spoke to the other or turned her head in the other's direction. Andrew felt his presence to be intrusive, foolish. He sensed that even without him, the two of them would have waited passively for whatever was to happen next. Indeed, the shooting now seemed like a nonevent, something he might have dreamed—so much so that he was mildly embarrassed to see DeSalvo, overweight and breathless, sprint from his tiny car to the back door, a revolver in hand. That gesture, and his own posture with the gun, seemed hyperbolic—too much for the small, plain kitchen. DeSalvo felt it too, first looking wildly from face to face, then slowly lowering his own gun. He had handcuffs, but Andrew said he was sure they would not be necessary. He did think, though, that it would be better if Edith was taken away from the house, and it was then that DeSalvo called the police station. Again they waited in the kitchen. DeSalvo had the sense not to ask yet what had happened. Andrew thought that he should ask DeSalvo if he wanted a cup of coffee. He longed to show him the blown ceiling in the bedroom, to lend their vigil in the kitchen credibility, but he knew that would have to wait until the uniformed officers had come.

  After a time, they heard the sirens. Andrew raised a shade and saw two cars pull into the driveway. Men leapt from opened doors as they had been trained to do, and at once there wer
e too many people in the kitchen. DeSalvo took charge then, giving orders, and the tone of his voice and the flashing lights outside reminded Andrew of the other time when police cars had come to the two houses. A man took Edith by the elbow, gently, as if she herself were the victim, as if it were she who was in shock. She never said a word, never looked back, had no gesture of farewell for the woman at the table, the woman who was meant to be her daughter, the woman she had tried twice to rid herself of.

  "But she still wants to sell the house?" asks T.J.

  The question brings Andrew back to the present. "So she told her lawyer," he says. "Regardless of what happens, I don't think she'd be able to come back here. Not now."

  "No."

  TJ. lifts the roller, makes another straight sweep the length of the wall. "So where'd she get the gun?" he says.

  Andrew catches a drip, stands back to study the color. "It was here," he says. "It was always here."

  "Where?"

  "You think the linen white is OK?"

  TJ. looks over at the woodwork. "It looks fine to me."

  Andrew dips the brush again into the paint. "In a trapdoor under the floorboards of Edith's bedroom closet," he says. "Jim had bought the gun years ago, in the same aimless way he bought everything. He had a farmhouse in a remote part of town, so he thought he should have a gun—just like the way he used to buy seeds and then never plant them. He taught Edith how to use it in case a burglar came while he was on the road, and he had my father build a box—a kind of safe—under the floorboards for him. The funny thing is I remember when my father did that. I hadn't realized, I don't think, that the box was for a gun, but when Eden told us about it I remembered the weekend my father built it. It was a joke in our house, how Jim had seen the plans in Popular Mechanics but, like always, got my father to do all the work."