Eden Close Read Free Page A

young then to be able to say with any confidence precisely how it was he was connected to Eden, he knew that he was troubled, as the days of August moved toward September, about having to leave her behind.
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    H E SEES that he has pulled the sheet from the foot of the bed during his dream—during the boyhood fear in the dream?—and it now lies in a damp rough swath across his chest. He brings it to his face and inhales a musty scent; it must be years since anyone has slept in this narrow single bed, he thinks. When he used to visit with his wife and his son, the three of them always slept together in the double bed in the guest room at the opposite end of the hallway—and it was, for him, one of the highlights of those visits, their holding each other in that soft, lumpy bed. As a general rule, Martha didn't believe in letting Billy sleep with them (the child-care books, she said, insisted it would make the boy too dependent), and so they hadn't, except on these rare and wonderful occasions.
    Since he left home—and went to college, got married, fathered a child and separated from that wife and child—his room has evolved in the way the rooms of children do when the children aren't ever coming back. At first his mother kept it unviolated, the pennants and the posters on the walls, his desk neat, with his boyhood books and blotter, the few clothes he didn't take with him to school hanging in the closet. They were still there, he saw last night, as he hung up the charcoal gray suit he'd worn to the funeral; but she had used the closet herself, beginning when he didn't know, for her off-season clothes, if such a formal term could be applied to the oversized gaudy synthetics with orange diamonds, green stripes and pink flowers on the sleeves. She never lost the weight she vowed to lose and favored, right up until her death, large loose blouses that camouflaged her ever-swelling hips and thighs.
    On the desk now is her sewing machine, and instead of the old pens and half-used notebooks he used to keep in the right-hand drawer, he found there last night an array of bobbins, fabric scraps and needles. There were other rooms she could have chosen to sew in—the sun room downstairs, where the light was good, or the guest bedroom. Perhaps, though, she wanted an excuse to be in this room, to savor some vestige of her son's presence. Or possibly she simply liked the east light in the early morning, or wished to see the other farmhouse, to reassure herself that she was not entirely alone. He tries to imagine what it must have been like for her to have a family and have it fall away: his own leaving and never really coming back except as a visitor; his father abandoning her five years ago with a heart attack. It has happened to him too—Martha and Billy have left him—though faster and without the dignity of these natural milestones. And he had not had time to be defined by the
family he'd made, as she was, nor to become rooted to a place.
    The still, heavy night mocks the dream, teasing it in and out of his consciousness. He wonders if the weather, so similar to that on the night of the shooting, has brought on the dream, or if it is the coincidence of lying alone in this bed. Or is it that he needs to feel his parents young and alive again, and his dream has willingly obliged? It is a mixed blessing, he thinks, to hold your past again for a few moments, as he sometimes feels when he dreams of Martha as she was (as they were together) when they first met. He wakes from these erotic dreams of his wife as if immersed in a warm bath, and then is chilled by those first few hints of reality—a tie flung over a mirror, a briefcase on a bureau, sheets he hasn't washed.
    He swings his feet onto the floor and arches his shoulders. His back aches faintly; he isn't used to such a soft bed. And with Billy gone, he seldom exercises now—though his body remains, despite neglect, reasonably lean. He still has