The Body Farm, page 7
In recent months, Eden has seemed further away than ever. She’s a teenager, it makes sense, but still, it has turned his heart to water. She has refused to get on the phone, only texting. She has limited her responses to the bare minimum, sometimes just a cold, inscrutable K.
What has Carl missed during this period of near silence? How badly did he fail Eden by moving across the country all those years ago? He thought she was in good hands. He thought he was leaving her with the better parent.
○
At an oasis, Carl watches his daughter dash across an open field, chasing the chipmunks that gather around the picnic area in hope of scraps.
“I’m gonna catch one,” she shouts. “I’m gonna name it Chippie.”
Carl smiles indulgently. It will be good for Eden to work off some extra energy. Fourteen-year-olds are not calibrated to spend hours cooped up in a car. Giggling, Eden darts this way and that, finally disappearing into a grove of snow-covered pines. Carl zips up the coat he bought at the oasis shop, brand-new and stiff.
Right now Eden is refusing to speak about what happened, feigning normalcy. She’s her father’s daughter, with a fine poker face of her own. He will take his cues from her. He will let her come to him.
After a moment’s thought, he pulls his phone from his pocket.
“Hello?” June cries, almost before the first ring has ended. “Yes? Is that Eden? Eden?”
“It’s me,” Carl says, settling at a picnic table. “We’re in Indiana.”
“What do you want?” June says coldly. “You don’t need to rub salt in the wound, Carl. I understand that you’re not bringing Eden back here. You’ve made it perfectly clear, despite my expressed wishes.”
“I was just calling to check up on you, actually.” He keeps his voice gentle, picturing himself as a horse whisperer holding out a handful of oats to a skittish mare. Calm and nonthreatening.
When Carl arrived at the hospital yesterday, Eden’s wounds had already been assessed and treated. He hurried into the recovery room and found his daughter curled in a fetal ball on the white bed, flanked by a representative of CPS on one side and a neighbor on the other. June wasn’t there, of course. She’d been taken away in a squad car, while Eden left home in an ambulance.
The social worker gave Carl the broad outlines of what had happened: assault and arrest, prognosis and procedure. Mrs. Westerman, June’s next-door neighbor, filled in the rest. She was a soft-spoken woman who kept laying her palm on Carl’s forearm as she spoke. She’d insisted on accompanying Eden to the hospital, she told him. The poor child shouldn’t be surrounded by strangers after such a trauma.
“Yesterday was a bad day for everyone,” Carl says now. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“Really?” June says suspiciously.
“I would love to understand what happened between you and Eden.” He infuses his tone with warmth. The effort scalds his throat, but he needs to know what went down, and Eden isn’t talking. Not yet, anyway.
“Well, that’s a nice change, I have to say,” June says. “I thought you were blaming me for everything.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it? I never got to talk to you at all. One of your neighbors mentioned that you were yelling about a murder as you . . . as the car drove you away. Is that what happened?”
He pictures Mrs. Westerman’s wrinkled brown face, her eyebrows raised and pulled together with anxiety. She’d lived next door for years, she said, and always thought June was a nice, God-fearing woman. No, she didn’t know what June could have meant about a murder. Yes, that was definitely the word—June shouted it over and over, pointing at Eden as the squad car pulled away.
“I suppose I did say something like that,” June says. “It’s a little hard to remember all the details. I was in quite a state.”
“Did you . . .” He falters, wondering how to phrase this. “Were you trying to murder Eden? Is that what you meant?”
“Oh my goodness, no,” June wails. “No, of course not. How could you think such a thing? I was trying to protect Eden. I still am.”
Unable to speak, Carl closes his eyes.
“That’s why you need to bring her back to me,” June says. “This is an emergency. A family crisis. We should be on the same side, you and me.”
There is a crunching of feet, and Eden emerges from the shelter of the trees, packing a snowball. She crouches low and begins to form the bottom layer of a snowman.
“What does Eden need to be protected from?” Carl asks, finding his voice. “What did you think you were protecting her from when you ruptured her eardrum and gave her a goddamn concussion?”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” June snaps.
“Sorry,” he says, though his patience is starting to fray. “I’m just trying to understand. I’ve never known you to be violent, June. Are you saying that someone else was trying to murder Eden? That you were protecting Eden from someone other than you?”
“Yes,” she says. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“But Eden said you punched her. Mrs. Westerman said it was just you and Eden in the house. The police arrested you. Are you saying . . . I don’t . . .” He stammers to a halt.
“When you see your child subjected to violence, you respond with violence,” June says. Then she sighs. “But I went too far. I see that now. ‘For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God,’” she adds, and Carl can tell from her tone that it’s a Bible quote.
“You aren’t making sense.” He wants to scream at her, but he keeps his voice low so that Eden, now working on the middle part of the snowman, won’t hear him.
“I’m in my right mind,” June says. “Do you want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Then you can judge me as you please.”
“Fine,” Carl says. “Yes. Tell me.”
“I woke early for morning prayers. I always do. I was surprised to see the light on in Eden’s room as I went downstairs. I usually have to bang pots and pans to get her up these days.”
“Okay.”
“I opened the door just to check on her. I thought she might have fallen asleep studying and left the light on. She has an algebra test coming up. Her grades have been slipping a little. I was going to get her a tutor.”
“Right. Sure.”
“Well!” June takes a shuddering breath. “I was caught off guard. There was Eden, my Eden, standing in front of her mirror in a pair of men’s boxer shorts. I don’t even know where she got a thing like that. And she was winding something around her chest. At first I thought it was a bandage, I thought Eden was injured. But no. She was binding her breasts.”
Carl shoots a glance at his daughter kneeling in the icy field. The snowman is small and crooked but almost complete.
“Eden had the strangest look on her face,” June says. “Kind of—I don’t know, drugged, maybe. I didn’t recognize her. Carl, in that moment, I swear I didn’t recognize her.”
“You’re saying that . . .” He trails off, unsure if he has understood.
“Her breasts just bloomed. I brought home a B-cup bra for her only last month. I thought she’d be so excited. I was, when my time came! And here she was binding them. Forcing them flat against her chest. Crushing her femininity. It’s violence! Where did she even get the idea to do such a thing?” June does not pause for an answer, continuing, “It’s all this nonsense on the internet. It’s like a contagion. Genderqueer this and orientation that. Saying your pronouns whenever you tell someone your name. And what is this business about they? How can one person be they?” Her voice climbs to a higher register. “I should never have let her go to public school. I knew in my bones that I should homeschool her. I blame you for that, Carl, I really do. You were so insistent! And now look what’s happened.”
“What did happen?” he asks unsteadily. “What happened next?”
June makes a tutting sound. “Eden was so preoccupied that she didn’t even hear me come in. I asked her what she was doing. She grabbed her robe. She said it was nothing—just a game.”
Carl shifts his weight on the picnic bench. Eden is gathering sticks, measuring them against one another to make sure the snowman’s arms are even.
“I knew it wasn’t a game,” June says. “I knew that was a lie. It isn’t the first time she’s . . . This topic has come up before.”
“It has?” he shouts, forgetting to keep his voice low. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“Why would I? She’s just a little confused. One time she mentioned something about it in the car. She said she didn’t feel like a girl that day. I told her it was just hormones and adolescence. Their bodies go through so many changes!”
Carl clutches his brow. All those one-word replies from Eden. Strings of emojis, without substance. Never wanting to get on the phone, much less FaceTime. Of course she didn’t feel she could share something so profound with him while they were hundreds of miles apart. The guilt is a body blow, knocking the wind out of him. Was Eden planning to tell him about this six months from now, when she came to stay with him in Nevada for the summer break? Would she ever have told him?
“She’s been dressing more masculine,” June says. “I didn’t really notice it at the time, but now . . . There was a dance at school and I bought her the loveliest dress, new earrings, cute shoes. Then she went in jeans. I just figured it was a fashion thing.” She pauses, humming a little, her thinking noise. “The other day she asked me how I know I’m really a woman. I didn’t even understand the question. ‘I am as God made me,’ I told her. ‘And so are you.’”
Carl wishes he could reach through the phone and throttle June. “So when you say you’re protecting Eden . . .”
“From herself. We have to protect her from herself in this moment. She’s in terrible danger, Carl. ‘Train up a child in the way he should go,’ the Lord says. Somehow the devil got into my home. I’ve always tried to raise her right. Binding her breasts! What’s next? Pills to stop her periods? Disfiguring her body with surgery? I’ve read about what can happen.”
“Oh god, poor kid,” Carl says.
“Lord’s name in vain,” June hisses.
He does not apologize. The blood is roaring in his ears.
“She’s the fruit of my womb,” June says. “I know my own daughter. I knew she was a girl before the doctor even found out, remember? I felt her there. I’m the one who birthed her and held her miraculous body in my arms. I’m the one who wiped poop out of her little vagina every time I changed her diaper.” Her voice increases in volume, crackling with static. “Front to back, always front to back. I taught her that. I brushed out her tangles. Painted her toenails. We pressed flowers together. I took her to Disney World to meet the princesses from the movies. I know her better than anyone. Better than she knows herself.”
Eden has finished the snowman, staring at it proudly with her hands on her hips. Carl pushes off from the picnic table, rising to his feet.
“She’s a mixed-up little girl,” June says. “This is the devil’s work, you understand? We can’t let her destroy her God-given body. That’s what I meant by murder, Carl. The devil is telling my daughter—our daughter—that she’s a boy. The devil is trying to murder my little girl.”
Carl hangs up without saying good-bye. In the distance, Eden waves to him, then points to her snowman and takes a bow.
○
They make it through Illinois without a single bathroom break. Eden wins the race across the border to Iowa, flinging out her arm before Carl even registers the sign. He wasn’t paying attention, too busy watching her surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye. Eden’s clothes give nothing away: jeans, a T-shirt, gender-neutral. He has decided that he will continue to think of her as “her” until Eden tells him otherwise. He can’t take June’s word about anything.
Night comes early, though the clouds are so thick that it’s hard to tell when the sun actually sets. Eden curls in the passenger seat with her thighs against her chest, resting her cheek on her knees. Her eye is swollen completely shut now. The bruise has spread all the way down to her jaw. Iowa is a landscape of graceful, undulating hills. Carl knows it’s time to stop driving when he begins to imagine that he’s sailing a boat over ocean breakers. The fatigue has caught up to him, to both of them. Eden staggers up the steps to their motel room. In the bathroom, she brushes her teeth in drowsy slow motion.
“Get into bed, honey,” Carl says. “Tomorrow will be a better day.”
Eden laughs, then winces as her mouth begins to bleed. “You always say that.”
Twin beds stand side by side. Eden picks the one by the window and climbs beneath the blanket. Carl sits on the edge of her mattress. All day he has been careful not to touch her unless she initiates contact. This is a child who has just experienced extreme brutality at a parent’s hands. June was arrested for aggravated battery and aggravated child abuse. Aggravated—a nonsense word, given the circumstances. Carl can think of better terms. Unforgivable. Indefensible. Deranged.
“Want me to stroke your hair?” he asks. “Or would you rather I didn’t?”
“Fine, if you want to,” Eden says carelessly.
Her red-brown curls flow across the pillow. Carl traces each long ringlet with a gentle motion. It has always soothed her. As a toddler, this rhythmic petting was the only thing that could get her to sleep. At that age she habitually fought bedtime, growing increasingly teary while announcing more and more vehemently that she wasn’t tired, right up until she conked out mid-sentence.
Carl feels a lump in his throat. He has always been the father of a daughter. All of his touchstone memories—teaching Eden to shuffle a deck of cards, applying temporary tattoos on her skinny arms, offering advice while she tried on dozens of pairs of soccer cleats to find the right fit—belong to the father of a daughter. He was the one who taught her the correct terms for her genitalia, something June shied away from. When Eden got her first period, June lectured her about Eve’s sin and the burdens of womanhood, while Carl ordered flowers to the house in Utica with a congratulatory card.
Who is this child beneath the blanket? What has happened to the daughter he raised, the girl he thought he knew? Murder, June said, and Carl wouldn’t go that far, but there is loss here, primal and disorienting. He dances his fingers along Eden’s curls, just as he has always done, giving no sign of the ache in his chest, as powerful as an ebbing tide. It is grief, no more, no less. He swallows thickly. If there was ever a time for a poker face, it is this moment. Somehow he must pretend this child is still his own same Eden, not some stranger, an unknown quantity, a lanky teenage body made of mysteries.
“I wish I’d been there when you were born,” he hears himself saying.
“Yeah?” Eden asks dreamily.
“It’s one of my great regrets in life that I wasn’t there.”
“Why? Goopy baby. Umbilical stuff. Gross.” The last word ends in a yawn.
With each brush of his hand, Carl can see the tension melt from her shoulders. “I wanted to see you come into the world,” he says. “It’s the moment when you became real. When you separated from your mother.”
“I guess.”
“I took the birthing classes and everything. I was ready. But your mom didn’t want me there.”
“Well, she was mad at you, right?” Eden says. “That’s basically all I remember from when you lived with us. Mom being mad at you.”
He nods. “Sounds about right.”
“I bet she just didn’t want you staring at her coochie while she pushed a watermelon out of it. I’ve seen the pictures. I had a big head.”
Carl laughs, still stroking her curls. A silence falls between them, filled with the soft, staccato knocking of the radiator.
“You know you can tell me anything,” he says.
And just like that, the tension is back. Eden’s shoulders hunch together beneath the sheet and she rolls over, facing away from him.
“Mom used to tell me that too,” she says.
○
The motel alarm clock jangles at 3:00 a.m. Carl ushers Eden into a blast of wintry wind laden with snow. He settles her in the back seat with his hoodie balled beneath her head as a pillow and his new coat spread over her like a blanket. In his youth, Carl learned that it wasn’t safe to let a person with a concussion fall asleep, but the ER doctors informed him that since Eden’s pupils weren’t dilated and her speech and motor functions were normal, sleep was fine, even beneficial. She slumbers all the way across the remainder of Iowa. Snow falls so heavily that it erases the world beyond the headlights. Carl has the illusion of traveling at light speed as the flakes whirl in a conical vortex around the car.
He has it all planned out. Sixteen hours in the car yesterday, including stops for meals. Today they’ll drive even farther, but he hopes to be home before midnight, still enough time to collapse into bed and get enough sleep to hit the tables rested and refreshed tomorrow. He’s looking forward to the tournament. For the past two years running, he’s made it to the final table. He expects to this time as well.
After that, the real work will begin. He needs to look into local schools. He has no idea about the educational system in Vegas; he has never needed to consider it. A single father—that’s what he is now. In the past, he has been the other parent, a part-time counterpoint to June. Carl squares his shoulders. He is about to get a crash course in dentist appointments and algebra homework and curfew, all the essential, relentless minutiae that have flown beneath his radar until now. The moment June landed her first punch, everything changed for Eden—and for him.
