Eden Close (21 page)

"Look at you!" she says.

Andrew is momentarily at a loss for words. "It's great to see you," he stammers. "Your house is ... I think your house..."

"Isn't it?" she says, and whisks a frothy pink drink off a stainless-steel counter and hands it to him. He looks at the stainless-steel refrigerator in front of which Didi is standing. He, too, he thinks, once owned a refrigerator like that.

Didi's hair is still curled in a blond flip, a hairstyle he hasn't seen on a woman in years. Enormous gold earrings dangle from her earlobes. She, too, is wearing safari pants. A gold bracelet clinks when she puts her hand near the counter. He takes a sip of the strawberry froth. The deep shiver that began in the hallway takes over his body in earnest when the icy cold drink hits his stomach.

Too swiftly, before he can brace himself, Didi again envelops him, her head nuzzling under his chin. The gesture rattles Andrew's arm, and he tries to steady his drink over her back. A drop of pink froth falls on her white sweater.

"I'm so sorry about your mother," she mumbles into his shirt. They stand motionless for what feels like an uncomfortably long time. She gives a little squeeze and then lets him go.

Andrew can think of no reply. Did she even know his mother?

"So, pal," says T.J., slapping Andrew on the shoulder. "Let's go talk about your house while Didi here fixes us up a gourmet dinner."

"Well, we're just barbecuing," says Didi, smiling apologetically in Andrew's direction. The smile is identical to the smile of her youth—a dazzling display that always seemed to him part of a too vigorous performance.

"Come see where I live," says T.J., steering Andrew's shoulder to yet another doorway.

As remarkable as the black and mirrored interiors of the other rooms have been, nothing is as surprising to Andrew as the room into which T.J. leads him. It is as if, passing through the door, they had entered another era, another aesthetic, another house entirely. The room is what Andrew's mother would have called a den, a pine-paneled room with a maple "early American" sofa covered in plaid fabric. Beside the sofa are two matching reclining easy chairs. A rust-colored shaggy carpet is on the floor, and a small TV is in a corner on a wire pedestal. In another corner is a glass cabinet filled with guns.

"This is the family room," says T.J. "We hang out here."

Through a sliding glass door, Andrew can see the redwood deck on which is a gas grill, not unlike the one he and Martha had in Saddle River. Andrew wonders when, if ever, the other rooms are used.

T.J. sits on a chair, makes it recline. He takes a long sip of his drink.

"We'll go for one thirty. The furniture gone?"

Andrew stares at T.J. After a blank second, he realizes T.J. is talking about Andrew's own house.

"Nearly," he says, sitting in the other chair. "It's all arranged."

"Can you get someone in to do a good cleaning? I can recommend some people if you want."

"Sure. Whatever you say."

"I'll want to move on this by the middle of next week. You'll be gone by then, right?"

"I may," Andrew hedges. "I hope to be."

"I'd like to open it up. Get some people in quick. Think we can do a fast sale. Certainly we should get some action by early September. Come by the office Monday, we'll sort some things out."

"Sounds fine," says Andrew.

"You're fixing it up, right?"

"I'm (doing some things. This heat is slowing me down." Andrew has an intense longing for the heat, looks covetously at the redwood deck. "Where are your boys?" he asks.

"They're at a friend's pool. Maybe they'll be back before you go."

"Do your boys hunt?" asks Andrew. Behind T.J.'s head is the glass gun cabinet. "I didn't know you had so many guns."

T.J. cranes his head to look at the cabinet. "Always had 'em," he says. "You remember. We used to hunt when we were kids."

"I recall only the rifle then. I don't ever remember you with shotguns."

"They were my dad's. He kept his gun cabinet in the basement. Locked. I take Tom junior hunting now and then, but he doesn't have a taste for it like I did. You never really did either, come to think of it, did you?"

"No. I guess not. I liked the skill involved, but I never liked finding the animals after we'd hit them."

"Yeah, my kid's like that. Tends toward the wimp once in a while—no offense."

Andrew is not offended. He thinks he would probably like T.J.'s son.

"You've done well for yourself," Andrew says in the silence, changing the subject.

"Can't complain. Can't complain. Course I'm mortgaged to the hilt, but aren't we all? Got a good deal on the house. Knew the developer, got in on the ground floor, so to speak. Didi's really the one with the eye, though. Made this a showplace. Fabulous taste, don't you think?"

"Remarkable," says Andrew.

"She coulda been an interior decorator easy, with her eye, but we decided she should stay home with the kids. Your wife work?"

"Martha? No, not really. But she will now. She's got a teaching job at a private school in New Jersey starting in the fall."

"Your son's how old?"

"Seven."

T.J. nods. "Right," he says. "Great age. You must miss him."

"I do."

Andrew and T.J. take simultaneous sips of their drinks. T.J. drains his glass. He leans forward as if to get up.

"Get you another?"

Andrew cradles his glass, looks into its center.

"When we were kids...," he says.

There is something he wants to ask T.J., a question he must ask when Didi is not in the room. It is a question that has been hovering at the back of his mind since yesterday, but now, In T.J.'s den (or family room), the question seems too bold, too intrusive.

"When we were kids what?" says T.J.

"When Eden was ... was in that phase of hers before Sean ... Did you and she...? I mean, did you and she ever have anything...?"

T.J.
looks at Andrew with a stare as blank as Andrew's was moments ago. Then he shakes his head.

"Hey..." T.J. stretches out the word so that it lasts four syllables. "Wasn't everybody?" he says with a grin.

"You never said."

"You never asked me."

"That's no answer."

"Hey, what is this, the inquisition?"

"Sorry," says Andrew. "Really, it's none of my business anyway."

"Oh, that's OK," says T.J., gesturing expansively with his glass. "You probably don't remember this, but you were pretty touchy about Eden in those days. Like an older brother. I mean, you don't go around telling some girl's older brother you're screwing his sister, even if he is your best friend. Not that we ever screwed."

"Then you didn't?"

"Well, not technically," says T.J. "And I'll tell you something else. I don't want to burst your bubble, but I wasn't the only one, Not by a long shot..."

T.J. leans back in the chair, brings his glass to his forehead. "The way things turned out for her, I guess it's just as well she had what she had then. Though I'll tell you something. I never really knew it then, because I was too inexperienced to know this and too—how shall I put it?—
busy
to ruminate on her state of mind, but now as I look back on it, she never really liked it. I wouldn't say she was doing it because she was horny, you follow me. It was more a kind of act. Or more like she was driven. That's the feeling I got—like she was driven, trying to burn something out of her. Course, when you're sixteen, seventeen, who cares what the chick is into, as long as she's putting out, right? But like I say, now, when I think back on it..."

Andrew looks at T.J. Didi, on the deck, knocks on the glass doors. She is carrying a platter of small steaks to the
gas grill. She mouths the words "You watch the steaks" to T.J., puts them on the grill and disappears into the kitchen.

"Well, you remember what she was like then," says T.J., getting up. "You seen her yet?"

"No," says Andrew, lying.

An image of Eden as she is now, in her blue dress with the white buttons, her hair washed and neatly parted, fills the space between himself and T.J. He feels his glass being lifted from his hand.

"I'll freshen these up," says T.J. evenly, looking hard at Andrew.

 

T
HEY EAT
dinner on trays in the family room. Andrew wonders how important one has to be to rate dinner in the mirrored dining room. He is just as happy, however, to be eating here; at least from here he can see and imagine the warmth outside. Even so, he is so cold the utensils tremble in his fingers.

Didi serves a bottle of sweet pink bubbly wine with the steaks. Andrew wonders what happened to the serviceable red he brought. Didi, he discovers, has a gift for small talk, a gift Andrew begins to cherish as the evening wears on and his own conversational skills falter. She chats amiably, in response 10 Andrew's polite questions, about her two sons, about the summer camp they have just finished, about the boom in new houses in the town. She volleys some polite questions of her own. What kind of a place does he have now? What's it like living in New York City? What's his job all about? T.J. embarrasses him by repeating to Didi Andrew's title and managing to make it sound more grandiose than it actually is. T.J. also manages to suggest that Andrew makes a lot of money, which appears to titillate Didi. She glances at him with what feels to him like new respect. She asks about
the old house, inquires as to what he's doing with it, asks if he's seen Eden. He lies easily.

No, he says again. No, he hasn't.

"We used to call her—God, isn't this awful—we used to call her Goldilicks."

"What?"

"You know. Goldi licks." Didi blushes.

"Oh," says Andrew.

"I hear she's real deformed," says Didi with an expression on her lips that Andrew takes to be disdain.

T.J. shoots a glance at his wife. Andrew starts to speak, closes his mouth. He puts down his plate. He takes a sip of pink wine, puts the glass on the floor.

"I'm just going outside to stand on the deck for a minute," he says. "To tell you the truth, I'm freezing."

T.J. and Didi look at him as though he has just suggested stepping out of an open window with a long drop below. "Sure," says T.J., recovering. "Whatever."

Andrew opens the door a crack and slips through so as not to let in any hot air. He walks to the railing at the edge of the deck. The heat envelops him like a warm bath. He puts his hands in his pockets and looks up and down the row of redwood decks behind the houses. He is struck by the silence. The grass has little of the symphony he hears outdoors at his own house. Nor are there any human voices at all—only the drone of air conditioners. The door behind him slides and clicks. T.J. is beside him, a short-sleeved T-shirt replacing the white cotton sweater.

"Sorry about that crack," says T.J. "She didn't mean anything, just remembering."

"It's nothing," says Andrew.

"She still gets under your skin, doesn't she?"

"Who?"

"You know who."

"Eden? No. That was years ago."

Not door someone lets a dog out. The dog immediately turns and whines to be let back in.

"Hot out here," says T.J.

"Yes. Sorry to have made you come out."

"You'll be going back to the city soon."

"Yes." Andrew turns, sits on the railing. He looks at T.J. "Sometimes I think I'd like to know what really happened that night, though, before I go."

"What night?"

"The night Eden was shot, the night her father was killed."

T.J. crosses his arms against his chest, looks at his feet.

"For instance," says Andrew. "I've always wondered why Sean, if he didn't do it—and let's suppose for a moment he didn't—why he left town so soon."

T.J. peers up at the hot, starless sky. He puts his hands in his pockets. He looks at Andrew. "Because maybe he thought people would pin it on him. He was always pretty impulsive, not too bright sometimes."

"But how did he know about it?"

"Everyone knew about it."

"So fast? Did you talk to Sean that morning?"

"What are you getting at?"

Andrew looks through the glass door, sees the gun cabinet in the corner.

T.J. had access to shotguns,
he is thinking.

I'm losing my mind,
he is thinking.

He shakes his head. "Forget it. This town is beginning to get to me. I have to go home."

"No harm done," says T.J. "You've been under a strain, your mother dying and all."

Andrew puts a foot up on the railing. "Where's the water?" he asks.

"What water?"

"Water's Edge."

"Oh, that. It's just a name. You know how these subdivisions go. Tudor Hills, Fox Run, Waverly Manor. They're trying to make it sound like we're living on an English estate."

In the silence they both hear a small plane overhead.

"Don't you miss that big white silo?" asks Andrew.

"You've seen her, haven't you?" says T.J.

Andrew hesitates, shrugs, then nods.

"You be careful," T.J. says.

"How did you know?"

"Whenever you lie, you smooth the hair over your ear. It's a dead giveaway. You always did it."

"Thanks for the tip."

"What's she like?"

Andrew glances at his old friend. "It's hard to say. In many ways, perfectly ordinary. But not really."

"What does she look like?"

"Good. She looks good. There's a scar, but she looks ... OK. She's not deformed."

"I didn't think so. I told you I saw her a few times in a car—just a peek. She seemed OK but like she was asleep or something."

Andrew puts his foot down, stands up straight. "I'm going to go now," he says. "I'm exhausted. Tell Didi..."

"So soon? She probably made a dessert or something," T.J. protests, but something in Andrew's face makes him change his mind. "Yeah, OK. I'll tell her."

Andrew shakes T.J.'s hand. The two men, their hands still gripped, look at each other.

"Don't, ah..." T.J.'s voice trails off.

"Don't what?" says Andrew.

"You be careful," says T.J. "Go easy. You never know."

"Never know what?"