"Eden," he says too loudly, shaking off the other sound. "There's something I have to ask you."
"What?" She props herself up and raises the quilt to cover her bare arms. The chill from the day outside has reached her. He returns to the bed, sits on the edge beside her.
"After Edith shot Jim, what did she do with the gun? I mean, how did she get rid of it so fast? My father was there within minutes."
She hugs the quilt around her. She says nothing.
"Eden?"
"I wish you wouldn't ask this," she says.
"Why?"
She doesn't answer him. He waits.
"Tell me," he says. "I have to know."
"It was your father," she says quickly. "It was your father."
"My father?" He lifts his head up sharply to look at her. "My father?" he asks again, unconsciously mimicking her.
She bites her lip, then releases it, giving up a last parcel.
"He saw what she had done, thought he knew why she had done it. Maybe he knew or had sensed it, about Jim. He took the gun and put it back in the box he had built. After the police had finished with him the next day, he came and got it and kept it in his garage. I think he thought she shouldn't go to jail for shooting him. It would have repulsed him, about Jim and me. He didn't guess, then or ever, that it wasn't Jim she meant to kill."
"Did Edith tell you this?" he asks.
She turns her face to him. "We'd long passed the point of having secrets," she says.
Andrew tilts his head back to study the ceiling. He sees his father's face, returning across the gravel drive, the barrel of the rifle limp along his leg. Will there be no memories, no portraits, left intact? His imagination skids out from under him, careens around the room.
"And my mother?" he asks finally. "Did she know?"
Eden nods.
Andrew says nothing, waits.
"After your father died, she came to the back door with the gun. She said, 'I don't have to have this anymore,' and she left."
There is a clock on his mother's dresser. He can hear it ticking. He sees his mother bent over the other side of the bed, making the bed, smoothing the quilt, looking up at him. Already there is something in her posture, in her face, that has changed forever. He remembers the way she would turn away from him, deflect him, whenever he asked about Eden. In time Eden will tell him other stories, small stories of this conversation or that, of that event or this, so that away from them, the houses, too, will change, and the landscape of his childhood will grow branches, sprout wings.
"Is there anything else?" he asks.
"No."
"Would you ever have told me if I hadn't asked?"
"I don't know. I was hoping you wouldn't ask, but I don't know about ever."
From where he is sitting he can see most of the room—the room in which his parents slept, made love, created him: the two screen windows, the pale green wallpaper, the light overhead on the ceiling. Did his parents lie here arguing in suppressed whispers, he wonders, trying to comprehend and possess the object his father had taken to the garage? An object that would alter the homely pattern of their days, that would not let itself be forgotten for even one day, no matter how deeply hidden? And would his father have confided his vision of the scene he had witnessed, his understanding of that horror?
Eden's hairbrush is on his mother's dresser now; his own toilet kit and a list he has written are on his father's. Some of his clothes are still in his suitcase on the floor, hers in a carton on the chair. They will leave soon, drive south to the city.
He slips his hand under the quilt, finds the hem of Eden's nightgown and raises it to her waist. He lays his hand on the flat of her belly, feeling the warmth there. He likes to imagine it is already rounded, swollen, but he knows it may be weeks yet before the shape will change. He is impatient for this to happen, impatient for the visible signs.
"This is everything," he says, touching her.
Her face is ripe with sleep or her condition. She lays her own fingers over his where they are resting.
He leans forward to kiss her at the side of her face. As he does so, he moves into a patch of sunlight coming through the window, forming a bright square on the pillow and the headboard. The sun hits the side of his face, warms his face with its heat. He shuts his eyes. He feels her skin with his mouth, under his hand.
If only his luck will hold, he is thinking.
Your hands erase the memory of others.
A part of you is inside me, and I will always have that.
You have made me give up all the secrets, and I am lighter now.
You talk of days stretching after days, and you believe in them. I do not believe in them, but I believe in this day.
Your mother's quilt has a sweet smell. She had secrets too, and she is lighter, glad that I have told them.
Your face shimmers in the water, and I sometimes think that I can see it.
I will feel and smell my baby, but I will never see its face.
We will leave this place and not come back, and in our dreams it will turn to dust.
Other Novels by Anita Shreve
Strange Fits of Passion
0-15-603139-6 • $14.00
When domestic abuse ends the marriage of a seemingly perfect couple, a woman is forced to go in search of new beginnings. The only question is whether her husband will threaten her fresh start.
"Superbly rendered...both touching and romantic."
—Cosmopolitan
"Shreve's prose is clear and compassionate, and her message moving."
—The Washington Post Book World
***
Where or When
0-15-603127-2 • $14.00
Out of the blue, Siân Richards receives a letter from her first love. She sees no reason why she can't write back, but what begins as an innocent correspondence soon becomes a dangerous intimacy.
"Who hasn't dreamed about reuniting with one's first love? Where or When indulges the fantasy, then sets it afire...This is a seductive read."
—Vogue
"Lyrical and poetic...A haunting study of time and eros."
—People
"A thoughtful, beautifully written contemporary romance."
—The Washington Post
"Exquisitely written...A gripping yarn."
—The New York Times Book Review
Anita Shreve, Eden Close
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