Eden Close Read Online Free PDF Page A

car—a Chevy?—approached the house, the driver slowing to see what the commotion was, perhaps suspecting an accident. Andy watched the car pull over. A man and a woman got out and crossed the road. They stood at the edge of the drive, staring at the scene, puzzled. And then, he knew from the soft furry breath at his arm, his mother was beside him.
    Impulsively, he put his arm around her and jerked her toward him. It was the first time he had ever touched her quite this way, from his full height, as if he were now the
stronger of the two. It was a scene he thought he had seen somewhere before, on television possibly, in a show. The son, grown, towering over the mother, assuming the role of protector, steadying her while a husband is taken off in handcuffs or on a stretcher. The image, lasting only seconds, was inexplicably delicious. It was not unlike a similar and baffling feeling he sometimes has even now when he hears of someone else's bad news and has an irrepressible and horrifying urge to smile.
    The Closes' back door swung open hard. It was De-Salvo, the thick-necked, heavyset police chief. Andy knew him from the hockey games. His face was pocked along his jowls. He had a son who years ago had made All State as a wing, and though his son had left the town, the father still haunted the games, as if to catch some echo—a shout skimming across the ice, a hand on his shoulder with a reminiscence—of his son's triumph. DeSalvo gestured sharply to the man standing at attention by the ambulance. As swift as skaters, the attendants slid up the back stoop with the stretcher and into the house. (Paramedics? Andrew doesn't know if they were called that then. Were they not simply volunteers, roused from their beds, as he was, by calls in the night?) His mother moved her face closer to his bare chest. Unconsciously, he braced himself for what the night might deliver next. But didn't the urgency of the stretcher imply injury and not death?
    Andy could see the man and the woman at the end of the drive edging along closer to the house. A policeman was patrolling the front and spotted them too; he barked at them to move back. Andy thought he could imagine the prurient curiosity of the couple, exciting them enough to trespass, and how they would tomorrow assault whoever would listen with the details, their own status momentarily and satisfyingly enhanced. Then the policeman, turning back to his task
at the front of the house, saw Andy and his mother and raised his flashlight to them. Andy brought his hand up to shield his eyes.
    "You there," the officer called.
    Andy, his arm still raised, nodded. It was Reardon. He saw again the diffused beacon of a flashlight against the steamed-up window on the driver's side of his father's Ford, and Reardon's face, peering and smirking in the darkness as he watched Andy's date worry her hair with her fingers.
Move along now,
Reardon had said with something like amusement or satisfaction on his face.
Not safe to park here this time of night.
Andy and his date, a girl he hadn't known well, had driven home in silence.
    Reardon lowered the light. "Where's your father?"
    Andy pointed to the Closes' house. Instinctively, he pointed upstairs.
    "Either of you hear or see anything?"
    Andy looked at his mother.
    "We heard some things," she said cautiously.
    "You stick around, then," said Reardon. It was an unnecessary command. Where did he think they would go?
    The screen door opened, and a stretcher bearer backed out quickly. Andy heard, beside him, a gasp, and before he was even certain himself, his mother said her name.
Eden.
    He felt his thighs loosen, along with the bottom of his stomach, not so badly that he feared he might fall, but enough so that his mother felt the weight and stiffened, becoming a crutch. Their roles, so new and pure just a moment before, were again reversed; he was, after all, still her boy.
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    T AKING A quick swallow of the brandy, he remembers now a white bath