Eden Page 4

  Larry cut a deal. He pleaded guilty. Eden and I didn’t have to go to court. The lawyer said we could go to trial and he was sure Larry would go down with the maximum sentence, because the bus station ticket guy said he had seen Larry hanging around a lot and therefore it looked premeditated, like he had seen our dad picking us up before and that’s why he said what he did. But my mother thought we shouldn’t have to go through all of that. Especially Eden. No one asked me and Eden what we thought. I didn’t know that a trial was an option until after it was over and done.

  I stopped going out to visit my dad. Now he would drive into Charlottesville and spend the day with me. Sometimes he would sleep over at a friend’s and see me again the next day. He stopped complaining about all the driving. His girlfriend at the time had broken up with him. Her name was Luce, short for Lucinda. I ran into her on the Downtown Mall one day after school. She apologized for leaving my dad. “It was too much negative energy for me,” she said. “I’m not as strong as you girls.” She went inside herself when she said that and seemed spaced out and far away. Then she came back to me and sort of tried to smile. I correctly guessed (having gotten confirmation from my father) that she had been through a lot of therapy. “Luce had other problems,” my father said.

  A few months later, Luce moved to North Carolina, but she and my mom stayed friends. “Why wouldn’t I be friends with Luce?” my mother said. “She’s not the reason your father and I split up.” My mother was friends with many of my father’s ex-partners, and she was best friends with Eden’s mom, Suriya. People would say that it was interesting that Eden chose to live with my mom, but it really wasn’t a choice at all. There wasn’t ever a question about where Eden would live. No one expected her to leave everything and move out to the middle of nowhere with my dad. And Suriya was a free spirit. She went to India almost every winter for three months or longer. One time she was gone for a year. She spent the summers traveling around with a guy who sold T-shirts at music festivals. In between she would sometimes live with us, or with a lover if she had one. Eden’s mom was a lesbian. Some people thought she and my mom were lovers, but they weren’t. Boys in middle school used to tease Eden about her mom. They’d say something like “Your mom’s a dyke and you’re a dyke too.” Eden was good at dealing with it. She would say, “You don’t even know what that means.” And the boys would protest that they did. “Oh, really?” Eden would say. “What does it mean, then?” “It means you’re a muff-diver,” they said. “How do you muff-dive?” Eden asked. “You should know,” the boys said. “But I don’t,” Eden said, “so you should tell me, since you know.” She would zero in on one boy and make him turn red and explain what exactly a muff was and what one did with it when diving. She would finally get him to say, “And then you smell it. And you lick it, like a dog does.” One time Eden made a sixth-grade boy wet his pants, challenging him to say it.

  Eden easily immersed herself in the clique of liberal, well-off smart girls who go to expensive progressive boarding schools. Other girls at her school had mothers who lived in ashrams, but they usually had a family trust fund behind them. Unlike other scholarship kids, the ones plucked for their ability to appear in brochure photos and make the school look better and feel better about itself, Eden’s poverty, and her mother’s rejection of both heterosexuality and capitalism, secured her social status. “Her mother truly is liberated,” one of her friends said.

  Eden rarely came home on weekends. She didn’t come home for Christmas break because she got invited to go to a friend’s ski lodge in Vermont. My parents felt odd about it because neither of them skied and no one we knew skied. My mother worried that it would be expensive: “They have to buy those tickets and things. And the equipment.” Eden said they didn’t have to worry about it. She would go directly from school to her friend’s house, and the same friend would drive her back to school in January. She didn’t come home for spring break either, because she was working on a “community engagement project.” She spent the summer with her mother, traveling around New England, and then stayed with Luce down in North Carolina and worked at a music festival. My mother was a little hurt that Eden never came home. My father didn’t think it was a big deal. “She has too much of Suriya in her,” he said. “You can’t pin people like that down. Believe me, I tried.”

  Eden went to the boarding school for less than a year. Then my mother received her high school diploma in the mail. It was the beginning of Eden’s senior year. She was seventeen. Apparently, she had completed all the state requirements and elected to graduate early. I thought my mother would be glad that they wouldn’t have to pay for another year of tuition, but she was immediately on the phone to my dad, livid, asking if he knew anything about it, which he didn’t. “Then where is she?” my mother asked. And looking at the date on the diploma she asked, “And where has she been for the past two months?”

  My parents called Eden’s friends, but they wouldn’t say where she was or they pretended not to know. They called the school, but the school had no idea. Her adviser had signed off on her early graduation, but neglected to tell anyone else. And now the adviser no longer worked there. My dad asked if he had been fired, but the school wasn’t at liberty to say. “That means he was fired,” my dad said. “If he wasn’t fired, they would’ve effusively said no. You only cover up when it’s something bad.”

  My father and I drove up to Pennsylvania in The Camper to get Eden. He didn’t want to stop for lunch, relenting to my hunger only when it reduced me to being annoying and grouchy, and only because we needed gas and there was a drive-thru without a line. We made no stops other than that and drove the rest of the six hours straight to the school. My father parked in a spot reserved for faculty, and when I pointed out that he couldn’t park there he said, “I don’t give a fuck.” He got out of the car and race-walked up the steps to the school with me scurrying after him, my new backpack bouncing against my spine as I tried to catch up.

  My dad bolted into the school office like a cowboy, pushing open the double doors with no announcement, not caring whom he bulldozed over and left stranded in his wake. He didn’t stop until he got to the desk and said, “Get me the principal.” The back-to-the-land female teachers, unused to such outbursts and unused to strangers, smiled at him and said their school had no principal; it was nonhierarchical and was cooperatively administered by the faculty. To which my father responded, “Bring me whoever the fuck’s in charge or I’m calling the police.”

  I could tell my father was nervous. He was putting on a tough-guy act but he kept nodding his head, his overgrown curls jiggling free around his ears, his glasses sliding down his nose on nervy sweat. He fiddled with his fingers a lot and his hands flew up to his lips and he bit his nails. Then he realized he was doing it and dropped his hands to the desk and clenched his fists to keep them there. This whole thing was weird. No one used to worry about Eden at all. No one minded that she went on walkabout last summer, sleeping in the back of a van with Suriya and the T-shirt guy she worked for. But now my father desperately needed to know where Eden was and what she was doing. He was putting all of his parental chips on this one moment. So that he could save Eden from whatever this was, this minor dilemma, this small-time infraction. It was his golden heroic opportunity.

  I was directed to wait in an old overstuffed armchair. Kids at this school waited in comfortable chairs before having a talk with whoever was democratically elected by the cooperative to deal with a student who was a contrarian in an unproductive or disruptive manner. I watched students wander in and out. There was a large card catalog against the wall opposite me, and students and teachers regularly went up to it and pulled open drawers, then pushed them shut and went on their way. When there was a lull in foot traffic, I got up and went to inspect it. Each drawer had someone’s name on it. I followed the drawer labels with my eyes, some of them decorated with stickers or ancient graffiti, until I found one with Eden’s name and slid it open. There were no library index card
s inside. It was a mailbox. Inside was a letter I had written Eden a month ago. My own handwriting stared up at me, the envelope slightly crinkled and worn and postmarked, as if a part of myself had gone away somewhere, traveled to someplace I had never been, and sent word from afar.

  I had written Eden on the anniversary of what happened with Larry. I always thought on anniversaries you should do exactly what you did the year before and see what was different. You should wear the same thing, re-create your day, eat the same thing for lunch if you can remember. But I didn’t take the bus to my dad’s anymore. A few months ago I had started going out to his house again, but my mom offered to drop me off because she was driving to DC. On the phone the day before, my dad said that we should go to the apple festival, and I said sure. I packed my backpack without thinking about it, because we always went out to my dad’s for the apple festival. It was one of the dorky things we enjoyed doing. We picked apples and brought them to a cider mill. My dad fermented his own hard cider in the basement. I packed my bag thinking it was just any other year we went to the apple festival, any other weekend I went to my dad’s. My mom dropped me off, and Sunday my dad drove me home because he said he had to do something in Charlottesville. I don’t know if that was true or not, or if taking me to the same bus station where Larry picked us up freaked him out. I didn’t remember it was the first time back at his house until I went to bed and Eden wasn’t in the room with me. That’s what I wrote her in the letter. It seemed sentimental and dumb now, and I could see Eden rolling her eyes at it or getting mad at me about it. She probably didn’t want to talk about it. Her life was so different now. Eden didn’t go back to anything. That’s when I realized she was already gone. That she would never move home again. She would probably go straight to college and never visit and move someplace far away, like France or something. She had talked about wanting to go to Amsterdam or Thailand or San Francisco or Seattle. I thought about taking the letter. Folding it in half. Shoving it into my jeans pocket. I was sort of embarrassed that it was there, like a little kid’s letter to Santa. A school project mailed to a soldier somewhere. My handwriting looked younger, even though I had written the letter only a month ago. I felt older staring down at it in the narrow wooden drawer.

  I shut the card catalog drawer with the letter still inside. Eden might turn up if she needed something. This place obviously had an open-door policy. Everything was communal. They had unisex bathrooms. There was barely any distinction between student and teacher.

  “Come on,” my dad said, reappearing and making a beeline for the door.

  We marched back to our ill-parked car and got inside. “Find this on the map,” he said, throwing me a yellow Post-it. “You’re good at that.” He started up The Camper and backed out of the parking lot. “Un-fucking-believable. They’re lucky I’m not suing them. I should sue them. How could you sanction something like that? You know, your teachers are in loco parentis,” he said, throwing around some eighth-grade Latin and one year of pre-law. “They are your parents when you’re at school. They are legally responsible for your kids while they’re in school. Fuck, I probably signed something saying I couldn’t sue when we enrolled her. Fuck. Fucking arbitration or some other bullshit. Dammit.”

  I gave directions. We went uphill and the wholesome farmland turned into forest. The woods grew denser. Small, interspersed towns sprang up, shaved out of the growth. It got cloudy. And dark green.

  We turned a corner at a house with a pool table sitting in the front yard. It was surrounded by the type of people I tried to avoid at school. The boys all wore baseball caps and the girls wore bleached jeans and too much makeup. One of them playfully leaned across the table and pulled a pool cue out of a guy’s hands. She had to half climb on the table to get it, and she used it as a pole to slide back to the ground. She squatted when she landed and stuck her ass out. Then she laughed at herself.

  The road wound through a neighborhood of tiny cottages and trailers. It probably used to be a summer community, but now it looked like people lived here full-time. We came to a mailbox that listed the number on the Post-it my father had thrown at me. “This is it,” I said. He stopped The Camper in the middle of the road without bothering to park or turn into the driveway. He got out and started walking up the dirt-and-gravel slope toward a double-wide trailer. He was halfway up before he said to me, “Wait in the car.” I opened my mouth to protest, but my father sensed this and repeated, “Back in the car.”

  I stopped walking and watched him continue up to the house. He pulled open a screen door and banged the ornamental knocker.

  No one answered. He knocked again. Metal attacking metal reverberated through the neighborhood, the sound bouncing off the mountains and echoing through the open air. When he reached to knock a third time, I heard him say, “Open up or I’m calling the cops!”

  I leaned against The Camper instead of climbing back inside. Up at the trailer house, the front door opened. “Get my daughter,” I heard my father say without a hello. I couldn’t hear what the person who answered the door said back. I could tell it was a guy, but he was speaking softly, and maybe he was just a kid, because his voice didn’t carry the weight of an adult. “I don’t give a shit,” my dad said in reply. The person went on about something and then I saw my dad push his way inside.

  There was a camouflage tarp over a lean-to in the side yard. I thought it was covering up firewood, but I saw the sheeting separate and a young guy emerged. He was my age or a few years older. His clothes were rumpled as if he had slept in them for weeks. He looked up at the house where my dad was arguing with whoever was inside and saying he was going to call the cops and public health and shut this whole thing down. The kid wiped his nose with his sleeve and ducked back under the tarp. He came out shouldering a hiker’s framed backpack and squeezing a sleeping bag under one arm. He looked around behind his shelter and pulled a towel off of a tree branch. He slung it over his shoulder and headed down the driveway. I expected him to say hi or hey as he passed by, but he kept his eyes on the ground. He dragged his feet as he walked. He had beat-up boots held together by strips of dirty duct tape.

  “Let go of me!” Eden shrieked. She had kicked open the screen door and escaped. Her long hair flicked around her neck and floated up behind her in streams as she ran down the front steps. I hadn’t seen her in months. She looked thinner and more grown up. Before I could really see her face, she turned back to the house, surprised that no one had followed her.

  My dad held open the screen door. “Get your things,” he said. Eden walked backwards slowly, digging the toes of her sneakers into the loose gravel. “I don’t want any things,” she said. My dad yelled something back into the house that I couldn’t hear. He turned to Eden and said again, “Get your stuff.” “If I go back in there,” Eden said, “I’m not coming out again.” “Eden—” my dad started to yell. “And stop yelling at my friends!” she said, bending over, her arms rammed straight and ending in fists reaching toward the dirt. My dad stared at her. “Fine,” he said and let go of the screen door.

  My dad walked down the steps and said, “Let’s go.” He looked tired, worn out by being Mr. Macho with the people inside the house and earlier at the school. Eden stood there waiting for something else. None of her mythical friends emerged to say a teary goodbye. No concerned neighbors were intervening. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to do anything, if I was supposed to go up and give her a hug and tell her I missed her, which I wasn’t sure was true. I had gotten used to not having her around. And being around my dad was sort of easier with her not there. I wasn’t sure if Eden had seen me. I didn’t know if it would change anything about how she felt. On the other hand, I was starting to think that’s why my dad had brought me along. Think of your sister, he could throw out, as if I were much younger than my actual age, still clutching a teddy bear and easily reduced to tears.

  “Fine,” Eden said, walking back to the porch. “I’ll get my stuff.” She stomped up the stairs and back
inside. My father tried to catch the door and follow right behind her, but he missed it and had to open it again. It banged shut behind him.

  I walked a few steps up the driveway and turned around and looked back at the street. The Camper was blocking the driveway and a good portion of the road. There was a small ranch house across the street that looked tidy, with a fenced-in garden on the front lawn. Two little Asian girls were sitting at a picnic bench under the shade of the roof. They had a collection of leaves they were sorting and cutting up with pink school scissors. The older one would stack the pieces like she was getting ready to shuffle a deck of cards. Then she carefully placed her leaf collection in a pink plastic briefcase and snapped it shut.

  “I changed my mind!” Eden screamed from the house. I heard other people arguing now, and my dad repeated Eden’s name over and over, trying to get a word in edgewise. The two of them burst onto the porch, my dad holding Eden by the elbow and yelling at whoever was inside to back off or he was calling the cops. “Call them!” said a guy inside. “I’m sure they’ll bring family services into it and that’ll really help mend fences. You’re providing such a stellar example of parenting.” My dad pointed his car keys at the screen door. “Just try it,” my dad said. “I’m sure everyone camping out here is over eighteen.” Then he turned to Eden and said, “Come on.”

  Eden shook her arm free. “I said, I’m not going!” she yelled. She was carrying an old shopping bag in her other hand. I wondered where she got it, because it was from a fancy department store and probably no one in this neighborhood would shop at a place like that. A guy came out onto the porch and walked down the steps. I guess he was about my dad’s age or maybe younger. He was wearing cheap flip-flops and he jogged with little coordination, trying to catch up to my dad and Eden. He was skinny, except for a potbelly, and had glasses and a beard. He was wearing sweatpants and a really old T-shirt that had been washed too many times and was almost see-through. He was trying to be diplomatic. “I’m just asking,” he said as he caught up to my dad and Eden. “Look, hey, maybe there’s an alternative solution to this. Maybe we’re letting our emotions get in the way of clear thinking.”