Free Eden Close by Anita Shreve Page A

running from the kitchen. She scooped up the child, giving the sullen cat a remarkably deft kick—thinking the row would alert her neighbor. But even when she went to the back door and called for Edith—rather crossly, Andy thought—it was some minutes before the dazed woman arrived at the door. It was Andrew's mother's impression, as she told his father at dinner that night, that Edith had simply
forgotten
the child altogether.
    Andrew doubts, as did his mother, that their neighbor willfully meant to harm the baby. It was rather, as he has thought before, a case of faulty connections: a matter of her fear of losing Jim (who for years had gone off in his black Buick to other rooms in other towns, and about whom rumors of other women often circulated). A child who developed, as luck would have it, an astonishing head of blond curls, several shades lighter than the hair of her adoptive mother. Though she was not a fat child, she had plump cheeks, an appealing pink coloring and remarkably dark lashes
for so fair a skin type. Her eyes were blue, like Edith's, causing the women of the town to comment how like the mother the child was (a remark that must have filled Edith with ambivalence), but a more vivid blue, a greenish blue, which on an older girl or a young woman today you'd say was enhanced with contact lenses. She was a child whose beauty was indestructible: You could forget to wash her face or comb her hair, as Edith often did; you could put her in a pair of dull hand-me-downs from the rummage sale—and yet, passing by the playground at the school, it would be she whom you noticed first among the other faces and small bodies on the swings or on the jungle gym.
    The more Edith ignored the child, the more Jim spoiled her, as if to redress the deficit—or perhaps it was the other way around: Edith meant unconsciously to temper his excess. But his love being the more passionate and less ambivalent of the two emotional forces in the household, Eden grew up more spoiled than ignored—spoiled "rotten," his mother sometimes said, a phrase that has always suggested to Andrew bruised and softened fruit, a picture distinctly at odds with the beguiling, if willful, child who was growing fast into puberty next door.
    Eating the congealed goulash, Andrew remembers scenes he has long forgotten. Jim arrives home from a trip and opens the door of the black Buick. He is in his shirtsleeves, with his tie still knotted. There are packages in his hands. He sees Eden on the new swing set he has ordered from Sears, the one Andy's father had to pour the cement for when Jim could not (or would not) figure out the directions. Eden spies Jim, squeals with delight and looks for the present she knows will be there. Then there is Edith at the screen, peering out, patting her hair. She runs down the steps to her husband. She is wearing a new sweater that Andy, who is playing with an old toy car on his own back stoop and who is wishing Jim
would look his way with a stick of gum, has never seen before—a soft white furry sweater with a low jeweled neck. Sometimes she says the name
Jim.
Sometimes she puts her arm around his waist. Then, when he has greeted his wife with a kiss, Edith bends to the child, and in an animated voice neither Eden nor Andy has heard in three days, says how pretty the dress is that Jim has brought her and touches the child for the first time since Jim went away. In the beginning, when she is very small, Eden is happy to have her mother hug her at last. Later she will just be confused. Then she will learn to smirk. And finally she will shrug her mother off with a rude word or a gesture that Edith will publicly ascribe to Eden's "difficult phase."
    Andrew, giving up on the goulash and scraping his plate, now understands these domestic jealousies in a way that was impossible for him as a child. Jealousy was there, even in his own house, he realizes, on his father's face, when Andy, with a fever or a