Eden Close by Anita Shreve

said. I made you look at me.
    I said, Afraid?
    You shook your head.
    You said
I
might have been your sister.

THREE
    T HE WALK IS SHORT, SEVENTY FEET . T HE LAWN IS DRYING , and he could even now be mowing it. He thinks:
In an hour, I'll be doing that.
    He has washed, changed into a pair of khaki pants and a dress shirt, rolled to the elbows. He walks with his hands in his pockets, a walk he made unthinkingly a thousand times in his youth. He heard her car in the drive when he was washing up in the bathroom, and the faint clatter of a screen door; like clockwork, she is home at two-fifteen each day. A dozen large rosy-brown hydrangea blossoms are strewn along the top of the long grass by the drive; the small tree, he notes again, took a beating during the electrical storm in the night. He can't imagine it will last much longer now. His mother planted it the year she and his father bought the house, forty years ago at least, and he has always associated it with his mother, its lush growth with her well-being. Now it seems to him its foliage has grown too dense for its spindly trunk and must soon topple over.
    His heart is beating too fast when he reaches the back stoop. Annoyed, he takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. When he puts his foot on the first step, he feels it
give—as if it had accustomed itself all these years only to her weight and could not bear a pound more. It has been nineteen years since he entered this house—and he is aware, as he raps quickly on the frame of the screen door, that he is stepping again into a scene from the past, even though he knows, from the encounters of the last several days, that it won't feel at all as he has remembered it.
    She comes to the door at once, wary, then alarmed. Their eyes involuntarily flicker away from each other, in the manner of people who do not like each other much but feel compelled to be polite.
    "Andy," she says, not opening the door.
    "I came to say hello to Eden," he says almost too brightly, and with this greeting, he opens the door and steps up into the kitchen. Edith backs away from him.
    "Eden's asleep," she says quickly.
    She is still wearing the pinkish-gray silk dress she had on earlier, a color that immediately begins to fade as he follows her away from the bright sunlight of the doorway into the kitchen. The shades are drawn over the sink and over the window facing the drive, a detail he has not noticed before, coming and going in his car. The effect is of a kitchen shut up for a season, waiting for the summer people or the new tenants to enter. He has a powerful urge to raise the shades with a snap, to see her kitchen and her face in the sunlight.
    "I keep them closed to shut out the heat," she says, noticing his glance toward the window. "It's cooler that way."
    He stands in the center of the linoleum floor, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the interior dusk, waiting for a cue, but she gives none.
    "May I sit down?" he asks.
    With an odd nervous movement of her hands, she indicates the: chair. She offers to make him a glass of iced tea. She is at the sink and then the refrigerator, getting ice, her back to him still.
    "Thank you for everything you did for my mother," he says, although he is not entirely sure exactly what was done.
    "I feel badly about your mother," she says, turning now with two tall glasses in her hands. "I ought to have seen it coming on. She did say once she had headaches. And in June, I was in the market when Carol—you remember Carol Turner—Carol said your mother had nearly fainted in the store just the day before. But I thought it was the heat, not a spell."
    A
spell.
He hasn't heard the word used this way since he lived at home and his mother spoke of his grandmother-to make him understand why she was sick and couldn't see him.
She has these spells, Andy,
his mother said. And so had his own mother, only there'd been no one at the house to know.
    "We see them in the patients at the nursing home," she