Eden Close Read Free

table—her long thick hair and the white collar of her high school picture; the ivory satin of her wedding dress seen through a blizzard at the church door (his father holding a fur jacket over her shoulders); the dazed expression of sensual pleasure in her eyes as she cradled her infant, himself, in her arms. He always thought of her, in the photographs, as beautiful, and he was startled for a moment to realize—to realize he was
capable
of realizing—that she had no beauty left at all. The subtle color of the once auburn hair was already gone, replaced by short, too bright, reddish curls.
    And then, because he was seventeen, he had another realization—one that had possibly been lurking below the surface all along but now became, like many of the insights he was having that summer, a conscious thought: Even though you could love someone as much as he had loved his mother and she him, her only child, you could leave her if you had to. You could even look forward to leaving her.
    "Your show is on," his mother said behind the screen.
    He went in then and upstairs to shower, to wash away the smell of gasoline that lingered from his summer job at the Texaco station. After the shower, he sat downstairs in the living room watching the rest of the TV show with his parents, not because he wanted to (he would have preferred to be alone in his room), but because it had been the family ritual for years to watch one TV show together before bed. He was very conscious that summer of rituals, and he didn't want to break any of them. He knew his parents would soon be lonely without him, and though he sometimes felt himself wanting to begin the separation, he didn't like to think about his mother's face or his father's tight smile after he had gone. There'd been a time, not so long ago, when the family rituals—the elaborate pancake breakfasts on Sunday morning, the deliberate choreography of the holidays, the small triangle of the supper table—had been the highlights of his days and weeks and years.
    Yes, he now sees, his father had already taken off his shirt and was wearing only the sleeveless undervest and trousers. His mother fanned herself with a magazine and got up during a commercial to make them all lemonade. (Oddly, near dawn, they all sat around the kitchen table and drank the remaining lemonade together after the police and the ambulances had gone. How like his parents not to think of whiskey or brandy first in a crisis, as he would now—
does
now.) They all went up to bed after the show, shortly past ten o'clock (he remembers having said so to the police), his father winding his watch as he walked up the stairs, as he had nearly every night Andrew could remember; his mother hoisting her weight up the stairs by her grip on the banister, her tread heavy on each riser, short of breath at the top; and himself, as light as air, flying, bounding, sprinting up the stairs, not an obstacle for him as they were for his parents.
    Later, after he left home, he liked to imagine that he had looked out of his screen window, while he was waiting for his mother or his father to vacate the single bathroom at the top of the stairs, and had had a thought of Eden that night—had posed a query or had seen a silhouette of her moving across the window. But it was, in retrospect, impossible to know if he'd thought of her that night or that morning, or when he'd gotten off the bus from the Texaco station. Eden had been too much a part of his life—as much a piece of his geography as the hydrangea tree outside his window, whose white puffy blossoms are turning now to salmon as they do at the end of every summer; or as the way his mother looked each morning at breakfast in her bathrobe, nursing her coffee as she stared out the kitchen window, making, he always thought, some kind of peace with the weather and with how the day seemed about to unfold. He had known Eden all her life and most of his, and though he was too