Eden Read online

  I tried to play it down. “She probably has a normal life,” I said. “She’s probably just not on the Internet.”

  Noreen’s phone buzzed. She dug it out of her purse. “It’s interesting,” Noreen said, squinting at the screen and quickly texting something, “because I’ve been thinking a lot about Eden lately. About you and Eden. Maybe it’s because of my job and that we just started this new program for at-risk youth. Not that you or Eden were what we call at-risk.” She finished her text and dropped her phone back in her bag. She pursed her lips, which she did when she was thinking about how to say something. “You had middle-class parents, you weren’t hungry or abused, but your parents were rather uninterested in your lives. Especially Eden’s mom. It’s a lot for a kid to digest, you know, the fact that they are a burden to their parents. Everyone’s a burden to their parents, I guess. I don’t mean you were a burden in terms of money or school or childcare. I mean, maybe you were, but I think you and Eden were a burden to your parents because you were a burden to their identities. It’s like they had children before they knew who they were or what they wanted. Before they even thought about whether they wanted children or not. Everything just happened, and now they can never make an objective, honest decision about it. And they have to deal with that. Unless, of course, you’re Eden’s mom and you just drop your baby off with a kind stranger.”

  “My mom wasn’t a stranger,” I said. I knew I shouldn’t engage with her on this, but I couldn’t help myself. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Suddenly you’re defending your family?”

  “I’m trying to do the right thing, that’s all. I’d rather not lie in court.”

  Noreen pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head. “What would happen,” she said, “if you didn’t look for Eden? If you simply accepted the fact that you’re never going to see her again?” Noreen looked at me, expecting a response. She widened her eyes and jutted her chin to get me to say something.

  “Maybe it’s something I have to do for my own moral code,” I said. “To feel I did the right thing in this situation.”

  Noreen sighed and turned back to the grassy expanse of the Mall. “Your moral code has nothing to do with it. That DA wants to make a career move and he wants you to do the work for him. He took a shot in the dark, you answered, and he got lucky. He’s not going to let go of you now. You walked into that one. You should’ve told me about it before you went.”

  Another group of schoolkids crossed toward the Washington Monument. Sullen teenagers slumped from the weight of their backpacks. They moved twice as slowly as the elementary kids skipping in the opposite direction.

  “I just feel like you allow yourself to get hung up on Eden,” Noreen said. “It prevents you from getting on with your life. And it doesn’t have to.” Her phone buzzed from inside her purse, but she didn’t bother to retrieve it. She hugged her purse tightly to her body, trying to smother the interruption. “I should probably get back,” she said. She slipped her hands under her breasts. “I have to pump.”

  I walked with her back to her office building. The conversation changed to chitchat about people we knew in New York and how Noreen’s cat was adjusting to the baby. She stopped me on the corner and pointed me toward the Metro. We hugged goodbye. Noreen’s hugs were both strangely clingy and light, and I was always the one who moved away first.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” she said. “Remember, you have friends. Don’t isolate yourself. I know you do that.” She had her sunglasses back on and I couldn’t see whatever look she was giving me. If it was concern or pity or some remnant of love. We both turned and walked in opposite directions.

  On the Metro I flipped through the folder the DA had given me. The girl in the other case had just turned eighteen. She was a senior in high school and lived with a foster family. She wasn’t from around my dad’s area but from someplace near Chesapeake. She had been in town visiting a friend on her own. It was unclear how she got there, because she didn’t have a driver’s license. She was last seen at a shopping mall, leaving with a man in a truck. She had six foster siblings, and her foster parents didn’t report her missing for three days. And since she was eighteen, she wasn’t considered a juvenile. It happened a couple of years before me and Eden.

  The DA included the girl’s obituary in the file. It described her life with her foster family, how she babysat all of her little foster siblings, how they all went to church regularly, how she sang in the youth choir and volunteered in the community. As if being abandoned or an orphan was an idyllic life.

  The police speculated that the girl’s body had been dumped in a wooded area and that her assailant assumed she was dead, or nearly so. She had been stripped to her underwear as we had. She had been sexually assaulted. The night before she was found, the temperature dropped and it was very cold. The girl somehow made it to her feet and walked through the freezing woods in only her underwear. She was close to a highway. She was found on the sloping embankment where she had crawled out of the drainage ditch on the side of the road, one arm reaching forward toward the pavement. She died of exposure. She had almost made it.

  I wondered why I had never heard the story of this girl, but my dad lived in the rural no-man’s-land that wasn’t covered by the DC or the Richmond papers. I wondered if the DA back then just wanted Larry off the street, in prison, and used our case, since there were two people who could testify and that’s why Larry pled guilty to kidnapping.

  The girl smiled at me from a photocopy of her senior-year portrait. She had worn a plaid button-down shirt for the occasion. She smiled in front of a marbled background; a tiny gold cross peeked through from where her top button was unbuttoned. Her hair looked shiny and clean.

  6

  After she left my mom’s house with Suriya, Eden moved out to a commune about an hour or so from where my dad lived. For the rest of high school I saw her only occasionally. If it were up to Eden, I wouldn’t have seen her at all. Eden was busy. She was trying to live. She didn’t have time to make the rounds to visit me and the various parents, and maybe she didn’t want to. So I always visited Eden, and Eden never visited me. She sort of apologized. She said the whole purpose of living in an alternative community was to be intentionally alternative and not beholden to the outside world, and she included me as part of the outside world.

  Her teacher Eric, the guy my dad punched, moved to the commune too. Eden didn’t tell me that directly, but I saw him hanging out in the little town where Eden and I would arrange to meet. I assumed she didn’t want my dad to know about him and that’s why she never mentioned it. I didn’t know if he was her boyfriend or not.

  “Thought I would come see you,” I wrote in a letter, “because I’m leaving for college soon. I’m moving to New York.” Visitors weren’t allowed on the grounds of Eden’s commune. “It’s not a commune, it’s a community,” Eden said the first time I met her out there. “It’s not about being a tourist attraction for liberals who want to day-trip off the grid.” “Sorry,” I had said as we drove into town. “It’s not a zoo,” Eden said. “And there isn’t really anything interesting to see. If you’re really interested, I’ll give you something to read.” At the end of the hour Eden had allotted me at the local diner or library or park, I asked her for the reading materials. Instead of giving me a pamphlet, Eden wrote down a list of books. “There are some here I’ve read,” I said. “Then read the ones you haven’t read,” Eden said. “It’s always more telling what you haven’t read, isn’t it? Who cares what your favorite book is? It’s the book you’ve never heard of that’s important.” She turned away from my car, not wanting a ride home, and walked off into the middle of nowhere.

  I sent a follow-up to my letter with an exact date. I had a summer job and was leaving at the end of August and there wasn’t a lot of time. A whole day was needed to try and see Eden, because it would depend on when she could get a free moment and if she had luck hitchhiking into town or had to walk all the way. I would wait
where I always waited, by the small park square with the dry fountain, or in the diner, or at a table near the window in the tiny public library.

  Eden didn’t show up. I waited at the library until lunchtime and then went to the diner. Then I went back to the library. The librarian asked me to leave at seven. “We’re open until eight,” she said, “but only for returns and express checkout.” Express checkout was a collection of battered trashy novels and the video collection that was kept behind the desk. A group of teenagers flipped through a binder of laminated movie covers trying to pick something out. A middle-aged guy plunked a pile of science-fiction novels on the counter.

  It was still light out. I weighed my options in this small intersection that called itself a town. There was only a post office, which was now closed, a gas station with a convenience store about a block away, and on a side street, a store selling handmade crafts that looked abandoned. There was a church that I never saw anyone enter, but someone must stop by because the front lawn was neatly trimmed. I crossed the square back over to the diner.

  There weren’t many customers so I slid into a booth, claiming it for myself. The waitress put the same menu I had seen at lunchtime in front of me, along with a glass of ice water.

  “You got a no-show?” the guy behind the counter asked. I smiled meekly. There was no way to hide it.

  “Guess so,” I said.

  “From the commune place, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You know how to get there? I’ll take you there if you want,” said a customer at the counter. He was hunched over a bowl of soup. He had a baseball cap pulled over his forehead and his stringy goatee was slick with steam.

  “I don’t think they allow visitors,” I said.

  “Depends,” he said as he slurped another spoonful. He reached for a napkin from the dispenser. His hands were shaky, as if he hadn’t eaten for days. “Depends who you are and who you know.” He wiped his mouth. “But I’ll take you there. Not a problem.”

  I looked over at the man behind the counter. He met my eyes briefly and then looked down at the dishes he needed to bus. “Sure,” I said to the other guy.

  We walked out to the parking lot together. He told me his name was Steve and said I could follow him most of the way and then either we could walk in or he could drive. I said, “Isn’t it easier if we just take your car?” He stopped and looked over at me, nervously nodding. “It’s fine with me,” I said, defusing any weirdness about it, “as long as you can drive me back here.”

  Most people must think that I have an aversion to getting into cars with people I don’t know. That after what happened to me and Eden, I would never accept a ride from a stranger again, even if it was from someone as unthreatening as another kid’s parent. But in reality, after what happened, I was more prone to accept rides from strangers, to get into cars with friends I knew were drunk, and to fool around with people I had just met and had no intention of ever seeing again. I was testing something, daring something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  Steve’s car was dirty. It smelled like smoke. It had a kid’s car seat in the back. He lit a cigarette before he got in, and after he pulled out of the parking lot, he took it out of his mouth and held it far out of the window. He asked if it bothered me, and I shook my head and said no. The sun was setting and the road was dark. He flicked on his high beams. A little stuffed elephant dangled from the rearview mirror.

  “Ever been up there before?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “She always told me to meet her in town.”

  “Yeah, they do that. That’s their thing.” He wound the steering wheel and the car turned off down a dirt road. We shook back and forth in our seats as the car descended a small hill. He slowed down to avoid deep ruts, winding the steering wheel with one hand.

  “Do you live there?” I asked.

  “Me? No.” He didn’t give any explanation other than that. We were quiet for the rest of the drive until he stopped the car in front of a gate. “This isn’t their gate,” he said. “But you gotta go through the neighbor’s property to get there. There’s no . . . what do you call it? When there’s no road. No way in. They’re boxed in by other properties.”

  He got out of the car to open the gate and rehitched it after we passed through. When he got back in the car he said, “I really shouldn’t bring you up here, but I saw you were waiting all day and I know tomorrow they’re all leaving.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They’re shutting down here for a while. Going somewhere else. Maybe Pennsylvania? They got some friends there. I don’t know what it’s about. But I thought, if you were trying to get in touch with someone, and you sent a letter tomorrow, they’d never get it.”

  We arrived at a second gate. He stopped the car. Up on a hill was a small farmhouse with porch lights on.

  “Look,” he said. “They’re real particular. You should wait here and I’ll go in and ask for you. And you know I can’t promise if anyone will come out or not. Whoever you’re looking for might have left already.”

  “I understand.”

  “Who you looking for again?”

  “Eden,” I said.

  “And whom do I say is calling?”

  “Hope.”

  He said, “Okay,” and got out of the car. He walked to the gate and unhitched it just enough to slip to the other side. I heard him trudge through the grass as he disappeared into a black patch on his way up to the house. And then all I heard was the whir of late-summer insects.

  I was conscious that I was leaning forward and looking intently over the dashboard. People can smell desperation on you, my friend Layla told me before I interviewed for a summer internship I didn’t get. I leaned back in my seat and exhaled. I wished I smoked cigarettes at times like this. When you were trying to make like you didn’t care.

  I put one foot up on the dashboard. It was a junky car anyway.

  A screen door slammed against a rickety wood frame. I fought the urge to sit up.

  Steve was walking back down the hill with a woman. But I could tell, even from this far away, that it wasn’t Eden. Too tall, too thin. When they made it to the front of the car, the two of them split up and each came around to a side door. The woman bent down to my window. It was the drag queen, Chrissy, who drove away with Eden and Suriya a few years before. She smiled at me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Your friend’s not there,” Steve said as he got in the car.

  “Where did she go?” I asked.

  “We’re all going to different places,” Chrissy said. “I don’t know what I can tell you. I only know where I’m going.”

  “Why is everyone splitting up?” I asked.

  “Oh, that is a long story. I wish I had time to explain it.”

  “Are you going to be coming back here sometime later?”

  Chrissy stood up and arched backwards, rubbing her sacrum with her hands. The shirt she was wearing rode up and exposed a strip of her belly. “Hmm,” she said and looked up at the farmhouse. “That’s a good question.” She turned back to me. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I hope so.” She stared across the dark field. Then she leaned back down to the car window like it was causing her great effort to do so. “I’m sorry you came all this way.”

  I turned and looked through the windshield at the pool of light from the car’s headlights. The hippie flip thing is like an Alice in Wonderland verbal riddle. They keep repeating the same thing with a look on their face like they are thinking deeper thoughts than you, until you finally hit on something that proves to them that you can think for yourself (or that you think like them) and that you aren’t working for the feds or a cult deprogrammer. “All deprogrammers do is rape you and retraumatize you,” Eden said to me once, right after she told me that if I ever showed up with someone, she would never talk to me again. I had forgotten about that when I accepted the ride.

  “Could I leave a message?” I asked.


  “Oh, sure,” Chrissy said.

  I didn’t have anything to write with. I never carried a purse; purses felt ridiculous to me, something to slow you down. Whatever I couldn’t fit in my pockets, I didn’t need. Eden always had a sack with her. It was like her long hair. All these things used to create a cloud around her, to distract you from looking directly at her. Not long after the thing with Larry, I saw a movie on cable with a sex scene where the man held the woman down and then grabbed her long, loose hair and fucked her from behind. After that, I cut my hair very short. I liked how it made me look androgynous. I liked having nothing to hide behind, nothing to pin me down. I’ve had short hair ever since.

  I didn’t have a pen or a notebook or anything to write on. Neither did Steve. He rooted around the back seat, but only came up with a gnawed crayon.

  Chrissy squatted down by the window. “Just tell it to me,” she said. “I’ll remember.” She closed her eyes and had a holy smile. She wore eyeliner and was older than I thought she was. She looked like she expected me to kiss her.

  “Tell her Hope came to talk to her. To see her. Because I’m moving to New York for college in a few weeks.” I added the last part so Eden wouldn’t take her usual glacial pace of getting back to me.

  Chrissy opened her eyes and said, “Who couldn’t use a little hope?” She stood up and shook my hand goodbye. I watched her go through the gate and walk up the hill. Steve stretched his arm over my headrest as he backed the car out of the dirt road until it was wide enough to turn around.