Eden Close Read Online Free PDF

towel, darkened by a large black stain, hiding Eden's face. She lay motionless, but Andy knew from the urgent syllables of the attendants that she couldn't yet be
dead. She was covered by a bed sheet, a long flower-print one, he remembers, a sheet as smooth as glass over her body, and from that he knew she was naked underneath. He remembers clearly the way her toes stuck out from the sheet, and how the nail polish on them, in the dim light, shone as black dots. He sees, too, the long sticky clump of pale blond hair falling away from the bunched towel.
    A force as primitive as running into a street to save a child made him start forward, but his mother held his arm. The attendants raised Eden to shoulder height and slid her into the ambulance as if onto a shelf. One of the men climbed in after her and slammed the door. The door wouldn't fasten properly, and as the ambulance sped out the drive (taking Eden to the same hospital her mother had left only forty minutes before), Andy could see the attendant furiously opening and closing the rear door to get it to catch. As it made the turn onto the road, the driver started up the siren, sending an electrifying wail out over the silent cornfields, summoning all who would listen from their sleep, announcing that something of importance had happened at the farmhouses two miles from town.
    Andy watched the receding lights of the ambulance. The driveway was suddenly quiet, too quiet. Something about the scene he had just witnessed wasn't right, wasn't the way it would have gone on TV. He looked at the empty drive, and then he knew at least what the question was: Why had a fourteen-year-old girl been sent alone to the hospital?
    It was his mother who said it first.
    Where's Edith?
    Â 
    A NDREW FINGERS the quilted sides of the jelly tumbler and gets up to open the back door. He stands at the screen, hoping for a wash of cool night air. But as it was on the night of the shooting, the air is dense and smells unclean. When he was a boy, and the air was bad, his mother would always
say, sniffing as she said it,
The dairy.
In the summer, if there was a southeast wind, the sickly scent of sour milk, mixed with the smell of cows, would float over the cornfields. But today, who can say? He doesn't know the industry of the area anymore; and if he did, he thinks, he's not sure he would recognize the odor. The smell could be that of toxic waste, from a plant not unlike the one his own company has in New Jersey. He seldom has to visit the plant, and no one ever talks to him about waste and disposal, but he knows it is a touchy subject. Periodically there are quiet suits and directives.
    He takes a large swallow of brandy, draining the glass. Though the air is dull and the night black as a cave, the earth around him is noisy and alive with the castanets of cicadas, relentlessly sending out their frenzied scratchings. Or at least it sounds like scratchings. He doesn't know how they make their sounds, and it has always puzzled him how such a relatively small insect can be so noisy; he thinks the riddle is one that if Billy were with him he would bother to solve.
    He looks out the screen door, down the dirt drive to the road. He thinks to himself, in the manner of a pronouncement:
This is the day my mother was buried.
He expects to feel a shudder of grief. When that does not come, he forces himself to think about his mother under the ground, as if that might trigger the appropriate sorrow. He waits for the horror of the image to assail him. But, as has been happening of late, his emotions won't cooperate. The images he tries to bring into focus are like sexual fantasies that no longer do the trick. Instead, at this moment, he is inexplicably distracted by thoughts of Edith Close at the burial. And this distraction, which feels like someone lingering overlong in his bedroom or his office, denying him badly needed privacy, teases him away from his mother.
    He sees Edith standing alone, off to one side.