Eden Close (29 page)

"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 were 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."

"So Edith stashed the gun there after she shot Jim?"

Andrew stops painting, glances at T.J. He is aware of a
feeling of vague discomfort. It wasn't part of the story Eden told, or could have told. She'd have been unconscious then. The discomfort rises to a heat at the back of his neck.

"I don't know," he says to T.J. "She must have."

T.J. sets the roller in the trough, stands back to admire his work.

"Whaddya think?" he asks Andrew.

Andrew examines the wall. "Like a pro," he says.

"Feels good," says T.J. "I haven't done this kind of work in years. Tell you what. I'll do another wall for you, then I gotta go. Tom junior's got a soccer game." T.J. picks up the roller, starts on the second wall.

"I envy you, you know that?" he says.

"Envy me? Why?" asks Andrew.

"Starting fresh. Your life is like this room."

Andrew is about to speak, but T.J. cuts him off.

"Tell you the truth, I could use a fresh start right now."

"Why?" asks Andrew. He faces T.J., who is keeping his back to him.

"The till is empty, Andy-boy. Worse than empty, you follow me. I made some bad investments...." There is a pause. "I may lose the house."

Andrew watches the deliberate way T.J. raises the roller, pretends to be smoothing over a rough spot. The flannel shirt is torn along the shoulder seam. He senses that it has cost T.J. to tell him this.

"Me and Didi, we're supported by what we have," says T.J. "That goes, and I don't know. I don't know how we'd be together without all the stuff, but I don't have good feelings about that. Sometimes I think the till is empty there too."

T.J. stands back to survey his work again, still avoiding Andrew's gaze.

"No one starts completely fresh," says Andrew carefully. T.J. says nothing. "I'm on a leave of absence now," Andrew adds, "but soon I'll have to go back to my job. Maybe not full time. In fact, probably not—as a consultant possibly. I have to have an income, and that's the most efficient way I know how to get one right now. I've got a son to provide for—whom I
want
to provide for...." He thinks of Billy with a tightness in the center of his chest. This is now the longest he has ever been away from his son, but Andrew and Eden will drive to New York soon, and he will have Billy there. He knows that it will be hard for Billy to understand Eden's presence, but he cannot spare his son this. There are things now he cannot control, such as Martha's revelation, just a week ago, that she is getting married again—to a psychiatrist. She had planned to wait to tell him, she said, until she saw Andrew in person, but she had grown annoyed with his delays. Andrew found, over the phone, that he could not respond to this piece of news—immediately he was assaulted with visions of another man throwing grounders to Billy, another man tucking his son in at night. Andrew hopes the psychiatrist, whoever he is, will not be one of those shrinks who insist that everyone in the family unburden himself of his feelings. "I've got to see Eden settled," Andrew says, shaking off the insupportable image of another Father for Billy, "with tutors or a good program for the blind. I want to get her set up with ... Hang on a minute.'

Andrew sets his brush down, retreats into the living room, reappears with an object in his hand.

"What do you think of this?" Andrew asks.

T.J. moves closer for a better look. He touches the surface, runs his fingers along the curve of the back, the straight chair back.

"That's beautiful. Where did you get it?"

"Eden made it. It's what she does."

"Jesus."

"But this is clay. She says it will break after a time. She's made dozens of them over the years. And they're all gone. When I think..."

"Can't you spray it with something to make it last?" asks

T.J.

"I don't know much about the process, but I think it either has to be fired in a kiln, which she never had access to, or she could do them in wax, get them cast in a metal like bronze. My idea is to sell my condo, get us set up in a bigger place downtown, give her some room to do these."

"Yeah," says T.J. He raises his eyes from the sculpture to Andrew's face. The glance is brief but naked. Andrew sees, on his old friend's face, a look of envy mixed with regret. T.J. pulls away first, pivots toward the wall.

Andrew wraps the sculpture in newspaper, returns it to the carton in the living room. He and T.J. work in silence. T.J. paints three of the walls, leaving only the wall surrounding the window that opens onto the gravel drive. Then he changes back into his own clothes. He gives Andrew the jeans and shirt, as if handing over another persona, one he is reluctant to part with.