In Search of Eden (45 page)

They piled into the truck after taking a cold drink each for the road. Miranda kicked off her shoes. Eden flaked out in the backseat.

“She's going to be too tired for church tomorrow,” Miranda said, then remembered David was coming and they probably would not attend. She wished she hadn't brought it up.

“We're near my place,” Joseph said. “I'd like to show it to you if you'd like.”

“You'll like it,” Eden mumbled sleepily from the backseat. “It's really cool and he built it himself.”

Miranda smiled and Joseph did, as well. It was the last they
heard from her. She was sound asleep when the truck stopped beside the log house perched on the side of the mountain. Miranda got out of the truck and walked across the wet grass to the riverside in bare feet. Flick bounded down and into the water, obviously overjoyed to be home.

“Oh, it's absolutely beautiful,” she said, looking down over the valley, barely outlined by moonlight. She was aware of Joseph standing very close behind her. His hands touched her arms, and she leaned back against him.

She almost told him then. It was right on the edge of her heart and ready to come spilling out.
I need to tell you something, Joseph,
she wanted to say.
I had a baby. When I was just fifteen.
She wondered if it would matter to him. If he would look at her differently after that, and somehow the wondering tucked the truth back into her heart.

He took her hand. “Would you like to see the house?” he asked. “I think we can leave her here for a minute.”

She peeked at Eden, who was sound asleep.

“Flick,” Joseph called. “Stay here.”

Flick sat down obediently at the door of the truck, and Joseph went ahead to the porch and turned on the lights.

It was a beautiful house. Log and chinking with a tin roof, a wide wraparound porch, and planked floors. Inside was warm wood and color. There was a huge stone fireplace and a wood-stove.

“I can't believe you did all this,” she said.

“It was a labor of love.”

She looked at him. He smiled and she didn't see the bitterness she had expected. He held the door open for her, and they stepped back out on the porch. He turned out the light and closed the door. Flick was still guarding Eden. They stopped at the water's edge again.

“I'm ready to let it go now, Miranda,” he said quietly. “I've been angry long enough. I want to forgive Sarah. I want to forgive my brother. I just don't know how to talk to them about it.”

“Don't you think if your heart is ready, the opportunity will present itself?” she asked quietly.

He nodded in the darkness. “I suppose you're right.” Miranda could tell he was smiling.

She could have told him then, as well, and on the way home, as the truck bumped down over the graveled road, she realized why she hadn't. She was afraid.

Finally they were back in town. He dropped off Eden first, stopping at his mother's house and carrying her in. He returned after a few minutes, locked the front door behind him, and drove Miranda home.

He walked her upstairs to the door.

She opened it.

He frowned. “Don't you lock your door?”

“In Abingdon? With you on the job?”

He smiled but then grew serious again. “Please lock your door from now on.”

“All right.”

He peeked in and apparently satisfied himself that there were no ax murderers in wait.

“It's been a perfect evening,” she said.

He smiled. “As much fun as going to Caroline's for dinner and then the Barter Theatre?”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn't trade this night for anything. Not anything,” she said, and she meant it from her heart.

He leaned down and kissed her tenderly. She touched his rough cheek, his warm chest. They broke apart.

“We'd better say good night,” she said.

He nodded. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

She went inside and didn't go to bed for the longest time. She looked at herself in the mirror and promised herself that no matter what happened, she would remember this day.

chapter
47

D
riving into Abingdon in the back of Ruth's big car, looking at the back of Joseph's neck and looking across David to her daughter, who chose not to sit beside her, Sarah was put in mind of the Roman triumphs. They were parades of sorts, during which the victorious general would march back through Rome, his vanquished enemies driven before him in chains while everyone saw their disgrace. The streets of this small perfect town were not lined with jeering onlookers, but she imagined them so. She pictured a great cloud of witnesses looking on their destruction.

Her fears and anxieties of the earlier months had boiled down to this bitter fatalism. It seemed that her and David's relationship had taken the same path as his body. Both had been wounded and raw but now had hardened into a ruined mass of scars.

David had not touched her since the accident. Even after they'd moved into the apartment by the hospital so he could practice real life. He had slept in the bed and she on the sofa. “It's better that way,” he'd said, and she didn't argue, remembering with shame the way she had blanched when she'd been asked to care for his wounds. That was probably what he was
remembering, as well, fearing her cringe. They had lost each other. The sweet intimacy they had once enjoyed was gone, crushed as completely as David's body.

She remembered a Bible verse somewhere about being stricken, smitten of God and afflicted, and she realized that's what she felt had happened to them. From the first, as soon as she had lost David's baby, she had felt she'd come under the hand of God. She had been expecting the punishing ax to fall ever since. The only difference was that it should have fallen on her, not on her husband. It was her shame. She was the one who had lied and been false. It was her womb that remained barren and shut. Now David had been cut down, and that was her fault, too.

And she had lost Eden. The replacement child. Oh yes. Sarah's motive was clear to her now. She had never really wanted to know Eden. She had never tried to ask,
Who are you, little girl?
She had wanted only to make her be what she, Sarah, had needed her to be, and she had collapsed into helpless tears whenever Eden refused to be molded. And now it was too late to change, even if she somehow found the strength. She had lost another child, her daughter.

Sarah knew it the moment she saw Eden at the airport. She had thrown herself at her father, had wept openly and held him, but she would not even look at Sarah. Ruth had held Sarah's hand and whispered comforting words.
“She's a child,”
she had said.
“She doesn't understand.”
Joseph had succeeded in giving them both stiff hugs without really touching them. And now as they drove through the streets, Sarah looked out the window at the town that had been so familiar, that had been her home for most of her life. Now the prospect of staying here seemed unbearable. But so did the prospect of going home. She feared what would happen when it was time to return to Fairfax. She could not imagine living with this silent husband and child so far away from warmth and help.

They arrived at Ruth's, and somehow the first horrible evening was over. Joseph finally left, and Eden finally went to bed.
Sarah asked her mother-in-law for another room, giving a simple explanation. “We sleep better separately.”

“Of course,” Ruth said, deep sadness in her eyes. “Take your pick, Sarah.”

She chose the one next to Eden, even though the proximity was only physical. She'd tried two, five, ten times to converse with Eden, who still refused to even look at her and answered only in monosyllables.

Sarah lay now in the empty bed and rehearsed a speech.
You're doing nearly everything yourself now,
she said to the David in her mind.
Would you object to my going to my parents for a while? I haven't seen them for a long time. And I would like to go somewhere and rest.
He would be as happy here as anywhere, she thought. And Eden was happier here with Ruth, her new friends, and her father. Without Sarah.

It would be so simple to run away. She could go to her father and mother, and they would ask no questions. Perhaps she could go back to being a girl again and forget all this trouble.

She must have slept. She awoke in the dark, the only light a full moon that shone on the bed and on the floor. She opened the door and went next door, carefully turning the knob, then peeking in to look at her daughter. Eden was back in the playroom, hers again, and Sarah felt guilt for the summers she had shipped Eden here because she was tired. Tired from the exhausting effort of trying to make Eden be the child she never was and never could be. Eden lay sprawled across her bed. She saw the dark unruly hair and freckles and could not help but look down at her own tanned arm and imagine her own blond hair and brown eyes.

Whose child are you?
she wanted to ask her daughter, and she felt a curiosity that had come too late.
Whose child are you? Not mine. Never mine, for all my desiring it.
But now she wondered who Eden was. What she loved and what she wanted. Now that it was too late to know.

She shut the door gently and went to David's room. She
opened it quietly and saw him carefully positioned on the bed, his wheelchair nearby. His Bible on the nightstand. She couldn't make out his face or features, but she could hear his breathing.

She stood in the hallway and listened, and it was almost as if she could hear the old house breathe, and she fancied a
what if.
It caught at her mind, and she held it with a longing she hadn't known she possessed.
What if
she could stop time, could turn back all their breaths until things were at the beginning place again. She could undo all this, but even as she thought it, she knew that would mean no sweet years as well as no bitter ones. She quietly closed David's door, then went back into her room and lay on the bed and knew that, even as she had named their daughter Eden, she had given voice to that wish. She had been searching all her life for the way back to that place. But she knew the truth now. There was no going back. This was their life, their broken life. There was no going back to Eden.

chapter
48

M
iranda spent the morning before meeting Eden's father by watching the DVD Ruth had given her.

“It's of one of his conferences,” Ruth said, “on finding your lost heart.”

She turned up the volume on her laptop and watched him speak, reminding herself that the David Williams she saw here might not match the one she would meet this afternoon.

He was tall and slender, warm complected. She could see a faint resemblance to Joseph, though he was darker in complexion and not nearly as classically handsome. Still, there was something extremely winsome about his appearance. He had dark, longish hair, soft beard, gentle eyes, expansive gestures. But mostly, she supposed, his attractiveness was due to what could only be called his spark. He had a way of emphasizing what he said. Phrases would tumble out on top of one another as if he was too excited to slow down. She tried to follow what he was saying in addition to observing him. And again, she was struck by the fact that his face was unguarded and open. His eyes so warm and inviting. His gestures so inclusive, his words so full of hope.

David Williams thought God possessed the secrets to finding
that hidden treasure of the heart. And that He was willing to share them. A theory she had heard expounded on before, though the practice of it remained elusive, at least for her. And this man didn't sound like any religious speaker she had ever heard. He was actually interesting, but she was having trouble understanding him. She tried to hold in her mind all the things he was saying, to follow the flow of his logic, but even though she thought she might be a somewhat intelligent person—despite Mama's evaluations—there seemed to be too many words for her to process, and they were spilling over one another. She would grasp hold of one, and then it would slide away. They were slippery thoughts, these, and she felt as if she were trying to sew Jell-O to pudding. He talked about losing heart and wounded hearts and healing the heart and the enemies of the heart and the home of the heart. She liked that last part. The home of the heart, and she had a flash of insight that it might be the true destination she was seeking. And perhaps it was what her father had been looking for on all those journeys. But then the epiphany slid from between her fingers, and she was reminded again of those shooting stars. Before you really knew what you were looking at, they were gone.

She watched a few minutes longer, then turned down the sound. David continued to gesture and smile. She wondered if the opposite situation was true now. Perhaps he still said the same things but lacked the joy and life so obvious here. She realized with a surprising sense of fervor that she hoped not.

“This is our friend Miranda,” Ruth said, giving Miranda the reassuring pat on the shoulder she probably needed herself. Miranda could tell Ruth was under a lot of strain, and she wondered again if it was a good idea for her to be here, but Ruth had called and invited her, and Joseph wanted her to come to the family supper, as well.

“I want you to meet them,” Joseph said firmly, and she wanted to meet them, too. She wanted to have faces to put on
these people who had tipped the first domino in Joseph's life. She reminded herself not to judge as she walked across the room to meet Sarah.

She had pictured someone coolly conniving. But Miranda's first glance at Sarah drew only compassion from her heart. She almost caught her breath at the sight of that drawn face and sad eyes. She was beautiful, but she wore grief like a garment.

“Hello,” Miranda said with a warm smile.

“Hello,” Sarah said and smiled back, but it was superficial, only a movement of her face.