Eden Close Read Free Page B

his hair too, for which he is grateful. His father, from whom Andrew inherited his thick dark hair—as well as his pale gray eyes—went bald at an early age. Andrew isn't certain, but he thinks his father may have lost his hair by the time he was forty-five.
    Beside the bed, on a table, Andrew sees the sleeping pills. Dr. Ryder, his mother's doctor, pressed a vial into Andrew's palm after the funeral. He imagines the doctor with many similar vials, a drawerful perhaps, kept for similar occasions, the gesture like that of a priest with a rosary card, or of a car salesman handing you a calendar as you leave the showroom. But he doesn't want a sleeping pill just now. He feels restless.
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    F OUR DAYS earlier, he was in the screening room at the other end of the twenty-seventh floor, watching a videotape of an advertisement for a pain reliever his company manufactures,
when Jayne, his secretary, got the call. The videotape had been especially poor, and despite the air-conditioning, he was sweating faintly when he returned to his office. As he walked in, Jayne came to his doorway with her hands clasped uncharacteristically in front of her. "There's bad news," she said quietly.
    "Billy?" he said immediately, the adrenaline already shooting toward his fingertips.
    Jayne shook her head quickly. Andrew slowly let out his breath. He thought he could bear anything except bad news about Billy, who was uncommonly prone to accidents—already a chipped tooth and a broken wrist, a scar over his right eyebrow. And since the child had left his keeping, Andrew's fears for him had increased exponentially. It was like the panic he sometimes had in airplanes.
    "I'm so sorry," said Jayne. "It's your mother. She had a stroke just after breakfast and died almost immediately. A woman named Mrs. Close called to tell you, but I didn't want to break the news to you in the screening room. She says to call her. I have the number."
    Andrew sat down. He remembers that his fingers could no longer hold a pen and that already a certain kind of numbness had set in, a disbelief in the truth of the event. He wouldn't need the number, he told Jayne. He had known it by heart since he was four, had been taught it in case of an emergency and later had used it to call Eden.
    Although that conversation was days ago, Andrew is not sure even now that he has taken it in. The chaos of a funeral creates a blur inside which one can choose to remain. He has felt, alternately, grateful that his mother died so easily and so quickly; saddened that she might, even so, have known of her death, if only for a moment, and may have called out to him, her only son; relieved that he will no longer have to think of his mother as lonely; and horrified that the burden
of being utterly alone has finally passed to him. He has no parents now or any family of his own to go home to, to create rituals with.
    He walks from room to room upstairs, switching on lights as he walks, naked but for his shorts. The contradictory feelings have come in gulps, unexpectedly assaulting him and then leaving him to move about in the curious kind of peace that tending to business has always offered him. Like a good secretary to himself, he has made lists: lists of people to call and tasks to be completed to get to this day, the day of the funeral, and a long list of chores to accomplish before he can leave the farmhouse and the town. The list contains notes such as
call auctioneer, call real estate agents, do gutters, select mementos.
He imagines the sorting out, the auctioning off of the furniture, the minor repairs to the house and the arrangements to sell it will take him a week, and he called Martha to say that he will be upstate another seven days. When Martha offered to come to the funeral, Andrew said no, Billy was too young. Their presence, he thought, would distract him. Billy's trusting face and sturdy body would enthrall him as they always did; with Martha, there would be a tension that