Free Eden Close by Anita Shreve

to bring up even one objection—though, said Andy's mother later, there were plenty of them for a practical woman to consider: a distraught mother might, with second thoughts, return; the baby might not be right in some as yet undetermined way; she might herself wake up pregnant any day now, creating two babies to care for (this last objection would immediately be seen as transparent, however, as it had all but been ruled out by the all-knowing Dr. Ryder).
    "Eden," said Jim, dreamily skating between the sink and the stove. "We shall call her Eden."
    Edith looked up at him; she seemed to be about to protest.
    "The Garden of Eden come to us in a basket," he rhapsodized, exposing, Andy's mother was to say later, a hitherto unrecognized and not altogether welcome strain of sentiment, seeing as how the child had actually arrived in an Oxydol box; and creating in that instant a lifetime of confusion by giving the infant a name that sounded so like the adoptive mother's. ("Edith's had stitches?" Andy's father would say distractedly from the dinner table, having half heard a story his wife was telling. "No,
Eden's
had stitches," she would reply, in endless exasperation.)
    And Eden she became, as Andy's mother sat watching her neighbor's face—and saw upon it the struggle give way to the swift sharp knowledge that something irrevocable had happened in her life and that the exact shape of what she'd had before was, in an instant, gone. The hand that had been propping up her chin slipped silently into her lap. Her mouth opened slightly, and Andy's mother could hear beside her a long, slow intake of air.
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    A NDREW RUBS his sore shoulder and bends down to survey the dismaying contents of his mother's refrigerator. He observes that it seems to contain random pieces of a number of different puzzles—nothing adding up to a satisfying whole. He has never been fond of Edith Close (primarily, he supposes, because she so ignored him—but more, he'd prefer to think, because of Eden), but despite this dislike he cannot help but feel for her the fundamental unfairness of it all: the neat and terrible symmetry of the two intruders—the one on a fresh June morning, a foretaste of what could be lost; the other on a humid August night, taking everything.
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    A ND WHEN the police came the next day, with a social worker, there was Jim at the door. He announced they were keeping the child. If they had to be merely foster parents for a while, that was fine, said Jim. But eventually, he was sure, the child would legally be theirs. The police, unprepared for this, had papers stating otherwise, but these were of no consequence to Jim, who calmly went where he was told, signed where he was bidden, showered his irresistible charm on women who knew shortcuts through the bureaucratic maze, and in that way slipped through the miles of red tape that might have daunted another man.
    With motherhood rudely thrust upon her, her hormones ill-prepared for the job, Edith Close performed the tasks required of her as if directed by remote control—a poor connection that might short-circuit at any time and often did. With Jim around, the infant had, at least, a playmate—though Edith's nascent jealousy, a subtle mist through which she floated and which had not yet created the sharp tongue that would come later, often demanded that Jim put the baby down "so the poor child can sleep." But with Jim away, Eden ceased to exist in any tangible way at all—the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear.
    Andrew, who has settled for a casserole left by the Ladies Guild, which looks more or less like goulash, remembers the afternoon Edith Close left the baby outside in the carriage without the net and went upstairs to lie down. The Closes' honey-colored cat—whose jealousy, unlike his mistress's, was uninhibited—leapt silently into the carriage and was about to do away with the usurper when the baby's screams brought Andy's mother