Eden

“Oh, my God, you’ve gotten so big,” Isaiah said as he lifted his nephew and sat in the kitchen with his mother and sister, exhausted. His mother had said nothing while he dandled Javon, and he wondered if he had made up her recriminations, if they were all in his head. He always thought his mother wanted him to stop running around, to find something hardworking and real and secure, that she would never take his writing seriously, let alone his love life which she knew nothing about. But maybe it was just him? Maybe he applied all of his dread of never finding a real place or a real life to her.

He looked at her briefly, and realized that was only half true.

There was a knock on the door and Isaiah said, “I’ll get it,” but his mother said, “No, I’ve got it.”

A few minute later Melanie came in. She was always a woman of bright colors, and this time it was every shade of green, her bronze colored hair tied back.

“Mel!”

“Isaiah, Sharon. Hello, Mrs. Frey. It’s bad! It’s real bad.”

She took a seat while Mrs. Frey said, “Let me get you a drink,” and went to the refrigerator.

“It’s not so bad really,” Melanie amended, “Thank you, Mrs. Frey,” she took a sip of the lemonade.

“You all should be the first to know.”

“Know what?” Isaiah said.

As if she’d said nothing, Melanie sipped lemonade again and said, “Did you have a good time in Chicago?”

“Yes. A very good time. Now what the hell are you talking about?”

“Isaiah,” his mother reprimanded.

He would have to get his own place, Isaiah decided.

“Well,” Melanie said, “It’s me and Richard... We’re divorced.”

“It’s not really a tragedy,” she said over drinks when the Immortals minus Nick were all together again, north of town.

“Actually, the real tragedy was me deciding that being married was a good idea. I don’t know what was going through my head.”

Isaiah was about to say that he didn’t know either, but thought better of it and settled on a polite shrug.

“We all have those crazy moments,” was what Shanna said.

“But the whole time I was married—was it a year, even—?”

“Not quite,” Isaiah told her.

“Well, it felt like a few years. The whole time I just kept thinking of all the things I wanted to do. Like, I wanted to go down Route 66. Do you want to go down Route 66?”

At the same time Shanna said, “That’s not even a possibility,” Isaiah said, “Yes! That’s a great idea.”

“I think so too!” Melanie said in a tone of profound joy.

“I think we should go,” she said. “I think we ought to go as soon as possible.”

Shanna looked from Isaiah to Melanie.

“You two,” she said, “are going down Route 66?”

“Well, technically,” said Isaiah, “it would be going west on Route 66.”

Shanna opened her mouth, but Melanie said, “We’re going to do this?”

“We’re gonna do it.”

Later, upstairs in the spare room where Isaiah wrote when he wasn’t in his room, he and Melanie planned out the trip.

“Already I’m thinking it won’t really be Route 66.”

Isaiah licked his bottom lip while his finger went over the large map of the United States that he’d taped to the wall. “I think that the real trip doesn’t start till we get to Chicago.”

“Oh, we have to go to Chicago!” Mel said.

“But really, that’s as far west as I’ve ever been,” Isaiah told her. “I am not a well traveled boy.”

Melanie jumped off of the bed and came to the map, standing beside Isaiah. Her finger traced out a line.

“We could take this uh… 94 and.… You know… I don’t really follow these numbers too well or how one becomes another, but I’m thinking it would be nice to see Milwaukee, and I’ve always wanted to see Green Bay.”

“Yes!” Isaiah said. “Let’s do that. And I’ll have to cart my computer you know that, right?”

“Right,” Melanie said. “And that means I need to take notebooks. I really, really want to write again.

“We can be like Basho. We can record our travels.”

He looked excitedly at Melanie. “Where should we go after Green Bay?”

“Oh, isn’t it enough to just plan that far?”

“I suppose so, but I always like planning a little too much. Just going one step too far.”

Melanie stood looking at the map, her index finger running over northern Wisconsin. Then, suddenly, it scooted over west.

“I wanna see the Twin Cities. I’ve always wanted to go to Saint Paul.”

When he told Mrs. Frey, she was obviously not pleased. She wasn’t angry, she just seemed unhappy. The road trip was such an unstable, unsettled thing that paid nothing and didn’t have much to do with the real world. It was just more of the aimless wandering that he’d been doing for the last year. He’d do it until he came back here to crash again. He would be like his father who had never been able to do anything. All of these fears were subtlety traced over her face. He would be like his father, and like all the drifting men of the family. It had seemed once, with Javon who was in school now, that Sharon would be the problem, but she had gotten it together. She got up and went to an ordinary job everyday. Isaiah was incapable of doing anything ordinary and certainly not of doing it everyday. His feet... were not on the ground. He was floating and floating, and didn’t he know it? A strong wind might come and blow him away.

Well, it did blow him away, to Chicago with Melanie at least. He would have loved to sit down and tell his mother about how much fun the trip would be or how wonderful the monastery was. And he would have loved to tell her about how afraid he was often, how he had the same fears for himself that she did, and how sometimes guilt assaulted him for not being able to make her happy. And he would have loved to tell her about this book he was finishing, this book he believed in so much. But that was the sort of conversation that couldn’t happen. And so it didn’t. Isaiah just went to Chicago, and then Green Bay. and then he and Melanie wound up in Winnipeg and it was cold, cold, cold and Melanie said, “It’s like the Midwest. Only more so.” It filled them with a depression that was so sharp it felt good, and then they realized it was homesickness.

One night at a bar, Melanie threw up, and then she went across the street to the drug store. She went up stairs and came back a little while later.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, simply.

How could anyone possibly know that he was tired too? That he prayed in the night for a place to land. This writing was a bitch of a business. He perceived that he could have found a nice creative writing program at some university. Maybe Citeaux would have him, and he could go back home. He and Melanie were both desirous for home while they traveled, both conscious of a need to go back while her pregnancy rounded like a growing moon. They got as far as Nevada before deciding that it would be very hard to have enough money for a baby and the trip home. When Dylan was born this was the third child Isaiah was godfather too. He sent in his application to Citeaux that winter. He was twenty-five and would be twenty-six. The book was long done. It was finished in rejoicing, and not knowing how to find a publisher, he’d gone on to write a second one, this one a novel. These books were his secret life that meant nothing to his family, and he could tell, sadly, nothing to his mother. Though few opinions mattered, hers did, possibly because it was ever present, always in the house with him, and then possibly because her feelings mirrored his worst ones.

“I know I have to leave,” Melanie said, dandling Dylan. “I don’t even know how right now, but I know I’ve got to leave this house, and you’ve got to leave yours too. It’s the only way you’ll get relief, and the only way your mother’ll get any piece of mind about you.”

Isaiah opened his mouth, but Melanie said:

“I don’t mean leave to go on a trip. I mean leave home, and don’t come back.”

Of course, Isaiah had known this. He would have to have some semblance of normalcy to be right with his family, or at least be independent enough and far away enough that it didn’t matter how abnormal he was. The news about graduate school would be a good thing too. That would give him time to write, and cushion him from his family, plunge him in a world of people like him. But could they really be people like him? Had they given up as much to be writers? Could someone who had become so odd fit into an established university?

Well, not that year. That spring he got the letter, very nicely stated, from Citeaux, that its creative writing program would not have him. It meant for now he was stuck in this house at least another year unless he picked up some other strange job, and it meant he would be seen as a failure.

This was one of the times he wanted to cry.

And then something worth crying about happened. It washed away all of his troubles, and Isaiah found that at such an event the only thing you could do was get your act together and find the next step.

Jason called in a panic.

“Isaiah, I need you to get up here right away!”

“Uh...”

It was late at night, and Isaiah’s jaw was locked; his eyes were gummy. His hand banged about on the dresser ineffectively, searching for his glasses.

“What’s going on?”

“There was a car crash,” Jason was crying into the phone. “I’m at the hospital. I’m at Mount Sinai. Elle was driving with DJ, and the car crashed.”

Isaiah felt all the strength go out of him, and the floor move under his feet.

“You gotta get here. DJ’s all banged up. And Elle… Elle’s dead.”

END OF

PART ONE

EDEN