In Search of Eden, page 7
“Hi, Dad.” Eden’s voice trembled. She stroked his arm with one finger. “I love you.” A tenuous rise on the last word, a phrase that expected a comforting reply, but there was nothing from David, just the steady hushing sound of the ventilator, the beeping of the monitors, the hum of their machines. Eden withdrew her hand. She suddenly looked very small and frail, and Joseph reached down and took her hand in his. She stepped closer to him. He covered her with his arms. She was frightened, just a scared little girl.
After three days David’s condition was still critical, and all of them were tense and brittle. None of them had slept much since the ordeal had begun. Sarah was staying in a room near the ICU, with Eden sleeping on the floor beside her on cushions. She had insisted over Sarah’s objections. Joseph hadn’t heard the conversation, but Sarah’s voice had risen in tension as she had argued with her daughter, and he had watched Eden’s face grow closed and cold. He and his mother were staying at the Holiday Inn nearby. Joseph ferried them back and forth in his rented car. David had survived the first onslaught of injuries and surgeries, but now a secondary wave of troubles had attacked. His kidneys were in distress, overwhelmed by the waste products of devastated muscle.
“We may have to do surgery to remove the damaged muscle,” the doctor—one of the myriad—said briefly.
Sarah shook her head helplessly and looked even more fragile than she had the days before.
They did the surgery. David survived. They waited to see if the kidneys would regain function or if dialysis would be necessary. Sarah was not doing well, and he remembered now that she had always hidden from disaster. He wondered if she would leave, but she did not. She was trembling and tense, wouldn’t eat, and haunted the hallways. Eden stood at the doorway of the ICU, looking through the rectangular glass. Look at your daughter, he wanted to urge Sarah. Be strong for her. But somehow he knew even if he spoke the words, they would do no good. It would be like urging a lamb to fly. So it was his mother and he who comforted Eden.
The days were a strange dance of creeping in and out of David’s room and up and down the stairs, of pretzels and soda and vending-machine coffee, an endlessly droning television, the same clumps of families growing increasingly familiar, and an endless parade of doctors and specialists giving Sarah updates. They did the dialysis. After another three days, the report was guardedly hopeful. His kidneys had begun to function again. After another two days he began to wake up.
There was a giddy joy. Unrealistic, Joseph thought, exchanging glances with the resident on duty while his mother and Sarah and Eden hugged.
“This is where the real pain begins,” the young doctor told him quietly. “Up until now you’ve been the ones who suffered. From now on he will suffer, as well.”
Joseph did not go in. His brother was barely conscious, still on the ventilator and in severe, unremitting agony. He would wait until later to see him. Their reunion would be traumatic enough then. He did not want to burden his brother with it now. Better he see faces that would bring comfort.
The days and surgeries blurred together. They took David to the operating room almost daily to do wound care. He finally had the surgery to set his broken leg and arm. Joseph began to realize this would be his brother’s life for the foreseeable future. It was time for him to return home. He needed to be back at work, yet he was hesitant to leave. He knew his mother could cope with Sarah and Eden, but it seemed a lot to ask of someone who had her own griefs to bear.
David’s awakening seemed to have caused Sarah more pain, as well as relief. He understood. It hurt him terribly to see his brother suffering. He could only imagine how Sarah felt.
“I don’t know what to do.” Sarah stood in the hallway, looking gaunt and tense. The cup of coffee in her hand shook as she raised it to her lips.
“About what?”
“Eden.”
“What about her?” Joseph asked, feeling suddenly defensive for his niece.
“She can’t stay here,” Sarah said bluntly.
Joseph stayed silent.
Sarah began spilling words. “I can’t cope with her and David, too. It’s too much. And I can’t leave David.”
“No. Of course not.” He forced himself to focus on the present words, their present meaning. “What are your options?” he asked.
Sarah took another swallow of coffee and visibly pulled herself together. She ran her hand through her disheveled hair. “She could board at her school in Fairfax. Or she could stay with friends and continue as a day student, I suppose. My parents would take her if I asked, but they’re in retirement mode since they moved to Gatlinburg. The doctors say David will be in the hospital for six to nine months.”
“I suppose you could get a place here,” he offered. “An apartment. She could go to school here, and you could all be together.”
Sarah shook her head. “I can’t do it right now, Joseph. I just can’t.”
“Have you asked her what she wants to do?”
Sarah shook her head. “I know what she’ll say.”
Joseph raised his eyebrows.
“She’ll want to stay here with David.” A slight smile. “She adores him.”
He nodded, then after a pause suggested the obvious. “Let us take her.”
Sarah’s expression showed she had considered it. “It would mean a new school,” she pointed out.
“But she’d be with people she knows who love her.”
“She adores you, too,” Sarah said.
He heard a hint of bitterness. It must be a sour pill to know that the daughter of her betrayal loved the one betrayed. He felt ashamed that it pleased him. “I’ll take her back with me,” he offered simply.
Sarah sighed, then nodded wearily. “Fine,” she said.
He saw lines of exhaustion on her fine features.
“I just can’t deal with her here,” she repeated. “She wears me out when everything is normal. I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to keep track of her and deal with all of this, too.”
“She’s no trouble,” Joseph said. “We’re glad to have her.” And then he saw her standing not ten feet away, listening to their conversation. Sarah followed his gaze and half turned, sloshing coffee when she saw her daughter. Joseph wondered how much Eden had heard. He wondered if she had heard her mother say she was too much trouble.
“Oh, hi, honey.” Sarah smiled at Eden with the guilty face he remembered well.
Eden didn’t answer and would not look at her mother. So she had heard enough.
Joseph excused himself to leave the two of them alone. Sarah gave him a panicked look as he passed by her.
“I won’t be any trouble,” he heard Eden say as he walked away, and his heart stretched out in pain toward his niece. Oh, how well he knew what it was like to stand in that place. He couldn’t hear what Sarah answered, but the following day he and Eden boarded a plane for home.
“She doesn’t care where I go. As long as I’m out of her hair,” Eden said bitterly.
“That’s not it at all,” Joseph argued, but Eden turned her face away and he, out of his element, didn’t know what to do.
After arriving in D.C., they drove to Fairfax and spent the night in David’s house before filling the backseat of Joseph’s car with Eden’s clothing and belongings. They made the drive back to Abingdon the next day in silence, Eden staring out the window.
The town seemed unnaturally cheerful with all the Christmas doings. Carolers strolled; tourists shopped. The promised storm had dumped nine inches of snow, which still adorned everything with a clean sugar coating. He stopped at the Hasty Taste and bought Eden a grilled cheese sandwich and chocolate milk.
“My place or Grandma’s?” he asked. She shrugged, so he picked his mother’s. She was all set up for visitors. They drove there, unpacked the car in silence, and then he settled her in her old room, the nursery/playroom, still full of toys and things she had reveled in the years before.
He went downstairs and made himself coffee, then returned to check on her. She was asleep on the bed, clutching a stuffed dog, and her face looked very young and vulnerable. He unfolded the quilt on the foot of the bed and covered her up, but he left a light burning. He remembered she didn’t like the dark.
chapter 8
*
Does repellent have one l or two?” Janelle asked, tapping her cigarette butt into her empty Coke can.
“Two,” Dorrie said. She looked back down at the handwritten notes she was transcribing and read the sentence aloud. “‘If your home doesn’t have mice and rats, they are just waiting to get in.’ Who writes this stuff?” she asked in amazement.
Janelle grinned. “Don. He gets a kick out of it.”
Dorrie pictured Don, the head exterminator, a pleasant, heavyset man who reminded her of Hoss on Bonanza. He didn’t exactly seem the threatening type, but then again, everyone had a living to make. She sighed and went back to her typing.
“This is truly disgusting,” she said after another minute. She leaned back from the computer screen and read aloud again. “‘Mice have no bladders. They trail urine at all times. Therefore, any time a mouse walks through your home, he leaves a trail of urine, and the scent invites other mice to follow.’”
Janelle shrugged and took a drag of her cigarette in defiance of Minneapolis’s “No smoking anywhere in the entire city” policy. “That’s the business, kiddo,” she said, flicking another ash. “It pays our salary.”
“Grossing people out is our business?”
Janelle grinned. “You want them to sign up for the twelvemonth-guaranteed contract, don’t you?”
Dorrie continued reading. “‘A typical infestation pattern is mice followed by rats.’” She looked doubtfully at Janelle. “This isn’t true,” she said. “Is it?”
Janelle gazed toward the ceiling as if in fond reminiscence. “I had nightmares my whole first year in the business,” she mused. “Mice at the windows. Rats coming up the drain. Mice in the cupboards. For months I wouldn’t sit on the toilet without looking first.” She shrugged and took another draw. “After a while you get used to it, though,” she said, exhaling a delicate little lick of smoke. “And I’ll tell you something, it beats cleaning sewers. Now, that I couldn’t abide. My brother-in-law cleans drains. You should hear him tell about some of the things he’s snaked out of people’s sewer lines.”
“No thank you.” Dorrie went back to her typing. She could see Janelle watching her, amused. She concentrated on the brochure. She typed another sentence, this one about the reproductive habits of rats. She closed her eyes for a minute, then resolutely went back to her typing. She had a moment of yearning for the kindergarteners at the Lutheran school. She had thought about going back to visit, but she hadn’t done it.
This was the worst job she had ever had. In her life. Worse than the dry cleaners in Santa Fe with all those toxic chemicals. Worse than the dog groomer in Los Angeles. After that one there were dog hairs on everything she owned. This was definitely worse, but it was the only thing the employment agency had open on such short notice. The Mice B Gone Exterminators were the bottom of the barrel. The end of the line.
She felt something ominous building up behind her discouragement. It was that full-to-the-brim feeling that came over her whenever she’d had all she could take of something. She had awakened this morning and looked at her small apartment with distaste. She had known every single thing she was going to see today before she even opened her eyes. She knew there would be the small quarter-moon-shaped stain on the ceiling from the leaky sink upstairs. She knew there would be dark green loop carpeting and Danish modern furniture in the small living space. She knew there would be an unfriendly cat and a bus ride into town and another day spent typing about rats and mice and then another bus ride home, and oh, she was bored. She was tired of it and sick of it and disappointed.
Yes, that was it, she realized. She was disappointed. She saw that now. The city that had seemed so gleaming, so promising and full of hope when she’d arrived was now familiar and dreary. She didn’t see the sparkle anymore, only the dingy spots. As she had so often found, the longer she looked at things, the less appealing they became. And really, what was holding her here? She didn’t need to answer the question. Nothing. Absolutely nothing and no one.
The empty feeling that came with that knowledge was accompanied by a little pulse of excitement at the thought of going someplace new. Who knew what people she might meet or what she might do? Where would she go? She thought of the possibilities.
What was she in the mood for? Long, lonely stretches of wilderness? Montana? Wyoming? She shook her head with a shudder. Somehow her loneliness here in Minneapolis ruled that out. She thought of crowds and bustle and decided she wanted a large, friendly city. Maybe she would settle in Little Italy in New York. No. Not in the winter. Too much cold and snow. L.A., then? No. Too much smog. San Francisco? San Francisco! Now there was an idea, and for a moment she thought of cable cars and sunshine and Rice-A-Roni and a book she’d read about a single woman who lived in San Francisco and fell in love with a carpenter. Yes! San Francisco! She stared into space as she filled in the details of the daydream. Her apartment would be in one of those Victorian row houses on the hilly streets. Yellow with white trim, like the one in that movie she’d seen where Chevy Chase played a police detective who’s protecting Goldie Hawn. A batty old man lived downstairs, and Goldie worked in a library and drove a sports car along winding highways that hugged the ocean. There were marinas and vineyards, and she remembered a commercial she’d seen with a handsome man sipping wine, and in the background were long, rolling acres of grapevines. She remembered seeing dappled sunlight and happy people sipping jewel-colored liquid from fluted glasses. They’d been eating pasta. Well, she liked pasta. The spokesman had been handsome and sturdy looking, with a nice beard, and she became lost for a moment in the pleasant story she told herself.
She looked up. Janelle was watching her. “It’s been nice knowing you, kiddo,” she said with a kind smile.
“I’m not gone yet,” Dorrie said, feeling somehow ashamed. She went back to her typing with vigor, but in a way she knew she was lying. She was as good as gone, and she could tell that Janelle knew it by the wise and oddly pitying look in her eyes.
The apartment was silent and empty when she arrived back home, and for a moment Dorrie hoped Frodo had managed to escape and run away. She had left the bathroom window open a few inches. No such luck. He jumped at her feet, as usual, and as usual, she startled. She fed him, tried to pet him, thereby subjecting herself to more of his ill treatment, then put her frozen dinner in the microwave.
She turned on her cell and saw two missed calls with her mother’s familiar number. Odd. Dorrie checked for messages, but there were none. She frowned, trying to remember the last time her mother had called her. It had been last March, on her birthday, in fact, and she still remembered the message. “Just called to see how you’re doing, but you’re probably out with your friends.” Loud sigh. “So you’re twenty-six today. When I was your age I had a husband and a child and two jobs. Talk to you later.” There had been no good-bye, just the decisive click of Mother disconnecting.
But Mama was consistent, at least. There had been a check in the mailbox that day, as there was every birthday. For twenty-five dollars. The same every birthday and another one at Christmas, along with a generic card, both signed in her mother’s firm, unadorned handwriting.
She thought about calling Mama back but decided to eat her supper first. She then fussed around the apartment for a while, and just as she had steeled herself to make the call, her phone rang. She went to answer it, feeling a sudden foreboding.
It was Mama, and she didn’t mince any words. After a perfunctory greeting, she delivered her message.
“I’ve got cancer,” she said. “Breast, and it’s growing like kudzu.”
Three days later the apartment was cleared of Dorrie’s belongings, which had been dispersed to various places. Frodo had gone to the old lady upstairs, who already had four cats. Dorrie wished her luck. She hadn’t exactly been sorry to quit at Mice B Gone Exterminators, but she would miss Janelle. She would catch the 5:50 bus to Nashville, but first she had one last thing to take care of.
Good Shepherd Lutheran School looked strangely different today, even though Dorrie had been away less than three weeks. Class had just dismissed for the day, and children were streaming from every door. She felt oddly self-conscious as she headed down the hallway and had a sudden image of a small vine tugged out of the soil before the bud could flower and bear fruit.
She took a deep breath and wondered if she should continue on, but the decision was taken out of her hands. For there down the hallway was Roger, standing in the doorway of her old classroom, holding today’s artwork, blinking behind his glasses. A tired-looking middle-aged woman, obviously another substitute, stood behind him.
“Teacher!” Roger’s face lit like a candle, and Dorrie felt her heart lurch, coming precariously unbalanced. He came toward her and held out his arms, and before she could think, she was on her knees beside him, feeling his sturdy warmth.
“Where were you?” he asked solemnly, hug completed.
His round cheeks and earnest expression made her feel inexpressibly sad.
“I had to be somewhere else, Roger,” she said, giving one of those meaningless explanations that probably do not fool children in the least.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” he asked.
