Waiting for Eden Read online

  In the months after Andy was born, Eden’s brother and sister, all the family he had left, decided he should be let go. They were both much older and with children of their own. When they spoke to Mary about this they told her of Eden’s aunt, who’d raised all of them, and how when she’d become sick they’d done everything to extend her life and all it had amounted to was the pain of a slow death. They said all this to Mary many different times and in many different ways, always asking her to let go of Eden. Always she said no. After they asked for the last time, they went home, had a memorial service for their brother and stopped visiting the burn center in San Antonio. They also stopped visiting the redheaded girl.

  Mary would never leave him. Soon Eden became like an appendage to her, one she spoke for. Grafts, hydrogel treatments, cleanings, all decided by her. His body became her own, and she anchored to it. Even as she refused to leave, she wanted him to die. She just had to look at her daughter, Andy, to feel that want. The girl’s first steps were taken down the linoleum hallways of the burn center. After that first year, guilt for her daughter overcame guilt for her husband. A few nights after those first steps, she called her mother and asked if Andy could stay back east with her. They both agreed the girl would visit the hospital every few months, seeing her mother only, being spared visits with Eden, and that this new arrangement would be just for a little while. But neither would say until when.

  Then, on the third Christmas, Mary decided to go home and spend the holiday with her daughter and mother. There was no specific reason, except that she’d come to feel he might never die and that what little remained of him might live even longer than she. The doctors encouraged her, of course. They told her that on a subconscious and emotional level her happiness would help him find some peace. She thought maybe that was true. They also told her that he wouldn’t even know she was gone. This she couldn’t believe. If it were true, it meant all the time she’d spent at the hospital didn’t matter.

  The whole week before her trip, she camped out on the sofa in Eden’s room. But it was only the day of her flight that she told him she was leaving.

  “I’ll celebrate with you when I come back,” she said.

  The motor on his breathing pump kicked into gear.

  She climbed up on his bed and leaned in, not touching his burns but so close that her smell would linger around him. Before, when they would be in bed together, she’d often wake when he’d bury his face deep into the nape of her neck, covering himself in her dark hair to what she worried was the point of suffocation. One of the first things he ever told her was that he liked her perfume, but she never wore any. Her smell was of soap and water.

  “I’ll get some pictures of Andy opening the dollhouse,” she told him.

  My friend stared across the room, the blue in his gaze running to gray, walleyed and just gone. Then he blinked a couple of times.

  Between the blinks, she thought he looked at her real quick. She stared at him but his eyes were now fixed across the room. She decided that was enough. It was enough of a sign that he understood, she thought.

  She’d long been warned by the doctors about too much skin-on-skin contact with him, especially on the face, so she kissed the pillow next to his cheek.

  She left that afternoon. In the morning it’d be Christmas, and over the next three days he’d come awake.

  It’s not pleasant to say or to think on, but up until that Christmas the parts of Eden his wife and doctors obsessed over weren’t much. He’s my friend so I can say this, and in a quiet moment the doctors would tell you the same. They’d explain how he was brain damaged: thirty percent reduction in frontal lobe activity, fifty percent reduction in parietal lobe activity, contusions throughout. That’s how it was. Even if you forgot about the burns, the blast had cleaved his helmet right in two. And the little of him that was still there, well, it was difficult to call that him. He had a mind all right, but it’d become like a twice-cut jigsaw, pieces in the pieces.

  He’d forgotten a lot. Or maybe the old things just meant less. For instance, he no longer remembered the name of the valley where it all happened, the Hamrin, but he knew the smell of burnt pine and the painful way the dry mountain air used to crack bloody fissures into his lips and the inside of his nose. He didn’t remember that he’d been a corporal in 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, but he did remember what it felt like to be far from home, wanting to kill but afraid of death. He remembered he’d had friends who’d felt the same.

  I know he remembered me.

  As Mary told Eden about her Christmas plans, he listened but didn’t really hear her. He was busy staring across the room. The linoleum floor shone perfectly except for in the far corner, where a small panel was missing. Here, in the grouting, hair and oily dust-scum collected. But he wasn’t looking at the filth. He was looking at a cockroach that stood in it. That entire week while Mary camped out on Eden’s sofa, this cockroach had been roaming the room just staring at him.

  Eden didn’t know the name for a cockroach anymore, but he knew that its hard-backed shell and thorny legs could run a number on him. He didn’t know his wife’s name either, but she had just kissed his pillow and he knew the smoothness of her dark hair and her soap-and-water smell. All week she’d been by his bed, and he’d felt the sadness of her slow and heavy movements, but he’d been distracted too. He kept thinking, Look at that bug, fuck man. Sitting there across the room, it was trouble. The cockroach had crept close a couple of times. It’d already gotten up on the foot of his bed once. My friend’s legs had cramped with fear then, even though he didn’t have legs. He’d tried to stare down the cockroach with a concentration that bordered on telekinesis. He’d seen its tentacles shoot straight up, like the cockroach knew how powerful Eden’s mind was and that the dumb bug would have to scheme up a better way to sneak onto the bed.

  His first night alone was Christmas Eve, that’s when she left. Not long after the sun went down someone, he didn’t know who, came in and shut off the lights. Eden’s blank eyes patrolled the room. He couldn’t see, but he could smell that cockroach, crawling out there. To him, its scent was puke and fear, swirling invisibly around his bed. Even though he strained to stay one step ahead of the bug, eventually he drifted to sleep. But in his dreams, he looked for that fucker.

  My friend was exhausted. He never knew if and when he slept.

  Then, in what seemed like the middle of the night, he heard a noise from the window ledge behind him. It came quickly, intoning thunder. He knew what it was: a thousand of those cockroaches, an entire brigade of thorny feet clopping behind him. He could feel the vibrations of their march. They rattled his sheets against his skin. Listening to the endless iterations, he began to sweat, the wet salt bubbling up through his few unmelted pores, then soaking back into his wounds. The sting of it. He could now feel every exposure of his body and in these places he felt his pulse and heartbeat. They pounded together, wild as native drums.

  Then it all stopped.

  He ground his teeth in the new silence. They were coming for him, he was certain. He sniffed the air. Their smell was gone. He didn’t know why, but this made him more afraid. With his blitzed eyes, he strained to glimpse just one of them. He wanted that least bit of dignity, which was to see them coming before they ran up his bed and into his wounds and stumps, pouring down his throat. He kept sweating. He couldn’t stop and it burned many parts of him. Other parts it didn’t. He didn’t feel anything there, and this reminded him that those other parts were dead. Still he waited. If he could’ve spoken, he would’ve said: “C’mon, you fuckers! Come get some!” He would’ve been scared shitless as he said it, but he would’ve.

  He did nothing and the room remained quiet.

  It was quiet for a long time.

  Just when he thought he’d imagined the entire cockroach army, he heard them again, thousands of their invisible legs banging behind his bed, near
the window ledge, a miniature phalanx of ancient soldiers striking swords on shields, all in unison, all in the cadence of advance. He knew they’d crawl over him before he could even get a look and he did the only thing he could: he waited.

  When the sun rose that’s what he was still doing.

  Mary went home. The next morning she woke up on the floor of her old room, now her daughter’s room. It was very early on Christmas. She’d gotten in the night before and after putting Andy to bed she couldn’t bring herself to leave the room so she slept there, wrapped in a comforter. She’d always been a side sleeper, but the carpet was thin and the hard floorboards put an ache in her hip, which woke her. She propped herself up on her elbows, bringing her face level with the edge of her old bed. The girl slept deeply, and her red hair tumbled off the side of the bed toward the carpet.

  The room was dark, becoming dim. Mary crawled to the window and stood, the comforter falling from her shoulders like a lost skin. She twisted the wand on the blinds to close the slats. Andy stirred at the little bit of noise. With the slats shut, it was very dark again. Mary crept across the room avoiding the places where she knew the floorboards creaked. She left the door open a crack. The house was quiet except for the noise of faraway birds growing slowly louder.

  Everyone would sleep for another hour, she thought. Downstairs she put her coat over her sweats and stepped into the narrow backyard of the row house. Two troughs of soil flanked the yard. In the night there’d been a dusting of wet snow. It layered the black plastic sheets that protected the frozen and fallow rows. The spring before Mary’s mother had taken pictures of Andy seeding the rows. Months later her mother took more pictures of the girl, picking what she’d grown. She’d sent the photos to Mary and each one was very bright: the green lattices of stalked crops, and the reds and yellows of tomatoes and squash resting heavily in the dirt. Between the troughs were a stone side table and wicker chair. In the warm weather this is where her mother read.

  Mary stepped around the side of the house. Here the trash cans were kept in a narrow passageway that led to the street. The trash cans were now all plastic. When she’d last visited they’d been aluminum. There was a small brick step there. She dusted the new snow from it and sat. From her pocket, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and some wooden matches. The morning was very still. Her match struck loudly. The smoke she exhaled billowed into the cold air, tumbling into clouds.

  Her mother didn’t know that she’d started smoking again, but her mother never knew that she had smoked. It was one of the first things she’d learned to hide, and now it seemed easier to keep hiding it in the old way. When she finished her first cigarette, she stood and reached under the clapboards at the bottom of the house. She felt around, palming frozen soil and paint chips. Then, from beneath a familiar trestle, she pulled up an old coffee can half filled with cigarette butts. She opened its lid. It’d been there a long time and she thought it would stink, but in the cold it didn’t. She finished her cigarette, dipped its cherry into the snow and tossed the wet butt in the can. Then she smoked a second. She didn’t know when she’d have a chance for another.

  She heard her mother in the house and before her second cigarette was finished she snubbed out its cherry in the can. Then she shut the lid and reached back up under the clapboards, hiding the can. She took a stick of gum from her coat pocket and walked around to the front porch. There was a spigot here and she washed her hands in its cold water. She then grabbed the newspaper off the front steps and walked back inside.

  The house opened into the den. There her mother sat at a wooden table, wrapping the last few gifts for Andy. Mary hung her coat by the door and sat the newspaper on the table. Her mother finished with the gifts and began to read it. Her mouth moved around each word, drawing wrinkles into the softness of her skin like a separate and disappearing text, and her manicured hands pulled against her thinning hair, which was a mix of black and gray like smoke from burning plastic.

  Mary crossed the den and walked into the connecting kitchen. She began to cook breakfast. She added eggs, milk and oil to an expired box of pancake mix. She whisked the ingredients together. There was a dish of cut strawberries in the refrigerator. She didn’t ask what they might be for, but instead she added them to the batter. Then she laid slabs of bacon on a paper towel.

  The pilot light on the burner clicked stubbornly, refusing to catch a flame. She looked at her mother, who was still reading, not watching her, so she took the matches from the pocket of her sweats and lit the stove. She greased the skillet and poured out the first of the batter. It spit in the heat, small bits landing on the skillet’s walls, burning quickly. She turned down the flame. Slowly, the batter fattened as it warmed, its edges bubbling to porousness.

  The noise of cooking was very loud now. The sun was up too.

  Mary reached into the cupboard and brought down plastic dishes. All the cups and plates were mismatched. She couldn’t find a set of three. She put them away and climbed on top of the counter. From her knees she could reach the high cabinets and her mother’s china. She gently sat down three plates, trimmed in gold. She brought down three crystal goblets, too, and from a far drawer laid out some unpolished silver. The top plate was very dusty, so were the goblets. She wiped her hands against her sweatpants and cleaned everything by the sink, then she set the table in the den.

  As Mary did this, she heard the skillet sizzle on the stove, spitting again. Her mother had forked the bacon onto it, having come into the kitchen to take over the cooking. Mary glanced at her mother, who now ran the edge of the fork under the dark brown rims of the pancakes.

  “Not like that,” Mary said. “Do it with a spatula.”

  Her mother looked at her like she was a child and, disregarding her protest, flipped over the first pancake with the fork. It landed perfectly. She spoke to her daughter but watched the skillet: “We’ll be late if you don’t get Andy up.”

  “I’d rather let her sleep.”

  “You know, I don’t force her come to church with me, she likes it.”

  Mary climbed the stairs toward her daughter’s room. Before she could get to the door, Andy reached up and opened it. She stood, leaning against the jamb, her hand still on the knob, upset in the way children often are in the mornings, frightened by new days. Her face was wet and a little swollen, and Mary petted away the wetness. Andy rubbed her eye with a little fist and then reached up with both arms. Mary scooped the girl onto her hip. Andy had turned three a few months before, but was very slender and long limbed. Mary worried she was thin in ways she couldn’t afford, though Mary’s mother didn’t have this worry and said the girl was just plain skinny.

  Andy rested her head on Mary’s shoulder. The girl’s red hair mixed with her mother’s black hair. From the top of the stairs, the house smelled of pancakes and bacon. At first the girl turned away, not wanting to eat breakfast, but when she heard her grandmother moving in the kitchen, she struggled from Mary’s arms. Andy held on to the banister as she took the stairs slowly, one at a time, making sure not to trip on the hem of her nightgown. Her grandmother served them both pancakes and bacon on the mismatched plastic dishes, and the two gathered around the Christmas tree.

  Mary said nothing, but went to the wooden table she’d set with the china and gathered it back up into the high cabinet while her mother and daughter ate on the other side of the small row house.

  “If you aren’t going to have breakfast,” her mother called out, “help us get started with the presents.”

  “In a second. I want to check in with the hospital,” Mary said. At first she moved through the house, slow and deliberate, searching for her phone in the obvious places: her purse, her suitcase, the pockets of her coat, but it was in none of those. Then she checked her daughter’s room, and the crumpled comforter on the floor. She came back downstairs, walking and rewalking where she’d come in the night before.

>   Grandmother and granddaughter finished their breakfasts. They sat by the tree waiting and Andy began to ask about her presents. Her grandmother told her to wait just a little more.

  Mary used the kitchen phone to call herself. It went to voicemail. She did this again and again, moving through the house in a panic, telling her mother and daughter to be quiet as she listened for her phone ringing or vibrating. While Mary searched, her mother let Andy open a few of the gifts. When Mary saw this, she stopped looking for a moment, not wanting to miss the time with her daughter. She sat on the floor and watched Andy tear through the wrapping paper. She also looked up at the Christmas tree, which towered above them. Lights circled it as it peaked against the ceiling. Tucked into its branches were decades of ornaments passed down through the family. There was an ivory bulb dusted with gold, a reminder of Mary’s father. Unlit among the electric lights were three silver candleholders, survivors of a much larger set that had been her great-grandmother’s.

  Mary ran her eyes over the tree, searching for one decoration in particular. It was a picture of her and Eden from before. It hung in a silver snowflake frame, and she couldn’t find it. She wondered where on the tree it was hidden, or if her mother had made the decision to leave it off the tree this year, or maybe if her mother had thrown it out, not wanting to look at it, ever.

  Once Andy finished opening her presents, her grandmother said it was time for everyone to get ready for church. The girl headed up to her room with a new stuffed toy in a headlock.

  “I still don’t like that you take her,” said Mary.

  “I wish you’d come,” replied her mother.

  Mary looked away. “The only contact I gave the hospital was my cell.”

  Her mother didn’t say anything, but walked to the kitchen phone. She dialed a number written on a green Post-it and handed the receiver to Mary. After several transfers the line found its way to the shift nurse who was on call at the burn center. Mary explained about the lost phone and the shift nurse told her that Eden was fine and his condition stable. The shift nurse took down the number to the kitchen phone and said she’d call if anything happened.