In the Garden
By John Cafiero
What were the chances that a guy named Adam would run into a girl named Eve? Okay, the chances of that are not so bad: they're common enough names. But that they would hit it off—the accident of their names providing an instant, jokey intimacy between them, a way of saying to each other, “I really like you; in fact, I liked you as soon as we were introduced,” simply by making continuous references to gardens, apples, and serpents? That they would hover near each other for the duration of the party at which they met, leave together to continue their conversation over coffee at a diner and then separate with a single, chaste kiss and the mutual promise of future phone calls that would lead to outings? What were the chances of that happening?
Okay, so still not mind-blowing. You might even say it's inevitable—two young people so named, in a period of their lives when both are dating furiously . . . .
Furthermore, the unimpressible would say, her name was Eva, not Eve. But that is a tiny, desperate distinction indicative of a very small soul.
So, then, what were the chances that they would marry? Because they did. After dating for six months, it began to seem foolish to them that they weren't married, so life-changingly, unalterably in love were they. So they moved in together, got engaged, and—six months later, when Adam had finished his Master's in chemical engineering—got married. And when Eva filled out the forms to change her last name to Adam's, she changed the first name as well. Her friends and family, with the touching enthusiasm with which people seem to make the most obvious jokes about other people's names, had begun calling her Eve as soon as she began dating Adam. This lapsed into habit, and, one day, when she was at the bank, endorsing a check made out to “Eve,” she realized that she had had her name effectively changed for her. This annoyed Eva/Eve at first; after all, she was her own person and, love him as she may, she was not defined by her relationship to her boyfriend/fiance/husband. But it was a single letter, in fact almost the same letter, and it would have been more trouble than it was worth to ask people to call her by her given name. (She tried it a couple of times and had seen in the faces of her interlocutors that she was coming off as difficult.) Eventually she had begun to introduce herself to new acquaintances as Eve. And by the time of the wedding, she was settled into her new name.
Soon after the wedding, they moved to a different city—Adam had accepted a job with a company that manufactured food dyes—and then none of their everyday acquaintances knew them as anything other than “Adam and Eve.” No one in their new town had known Adam when his name wasn't a funny coincidence that denoted (another well-worn joke) a “match made in heaven.” No one knew Eve when she was Eva.
One morning, Eve was picking out some tenacious bits of pulp in Adam's sticky orange-juice glass. (He had a habit of nursing an immense glass of orange juice, his only breakfast, throughout his morning rituals—from newspaper to dog walking to shower to shaving to dressing to garage—leaving the empty glass wherever he happened to finish his juice that day, so that, sometimes, it was a bit of an Easter-egg hunt with the orange juice glasses, as they would sit for days undiscovered in an improbable nook. She had found a glass on the high shelf in their closet, thin dust overlying the orange film of juice residue. She had found one in the yard; the sun had hardened the juice residue into a hard lacquer. This one she just threw away.) When, this morning, she put down the butter knife with which she was attempting to scrape orange pulp out of the glass and quietly threw up in the sink, she suddenly felt very biblical—not as Eve, though, but as Mary. Renaissance annunciations flashed into view in her mind as they had in the slides she'd seen in her art history classes in college. (She'd only had another semester to go to finish her art history degree, but she had stopped going to class when planning for the wedding began to take all of her time. She had vague plans of continuing her degree after they were married.) Her secular, agnostic imagination could not conjure an angel, so this gastric spasm would have to do. Either way, she had been visited in secret, while her husband was away, and been made aware that she was pregnant.
She went to their bedroom, took off her clothes, and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She had long, curly hair then, and she untied it and let it fall over her. She cupped her belly—was it already sticking out a bit?—and gazed at herself. Though renaissancy (in addition to the long hair, she had a high forehead, pale skin, and a trim voluptuousness that would have made her a popular model in Florence or Bruges), the effect was definitely more along the lines of her namesake than of the mother of God. And, although they hadn't been trying to get pregnant, they had grown more cavalier about birth control now that Adam had a job, they had a house, a family. There was nothing immaculate about it.
Naming their son Cain wasn't a conscious decision; Adam had said it as soon as the swirling gray pixels of the sonogram image had resolved into a recognizable fetus shape. “There's little Cain,” he had joked. “You're right,” the sonogram lady had said, “It's a boy.” They continued to refer to him as “little Cain” throughout the pregnancy and saw no need to change his name when he was born.
What were the chances of that?
So, you would think that's enough, right? A joke's a joke.
When she became pregnant again, Eve hoped for a girl, partly because she wanted one of each and partly because she knew that if she had a boy, they would name him Abel. There was just that kind of momentum behind the name thing. She didn't want two boys named Cain and Abel, but she was powerless to stop it if it happened.
When the sonogram pixels whirled around again and settled into the shape of another boy, the sonogram lady (it was the same lady) joked, “You're not gonna name this one Abel, are you?” Adam and Eve smiled weakly but didn't respond. The sonogram lady scanned Eve's belly from different angles. She had trouble finding the kidneys, and then thought the heart seemed to be in a strange place. She brought in a doctor, who commandeered the sonogram machine but had no more success than the sonogram lady had. The doctor gave Eve some tissues with which to wipe the sonic goo from her belly and talked to them about the possibility of birth defects, the need for vigilance with this pregnancy, the fact that, if they were planning to have a “natural” childbirth, they could forget it.
In the car, Eve felt the breaking of a feeling that had been welling up since the sonogram lady failed to find the baby's kidneys, and, once it broke, she could identify it: she was overcome by impotence. The process going on inside her was going off the rails, but there was nothing she could do about it. She wanted to reach inside herself and cup her baby's heart and nurture it and make it grow strong. She wanted to take one of her own kidneys and fashion two normal, complete kidneys for her baby. She did not tell Adam any of this, because she knew that he would try to soothe her in the clumsy way he had that simply smothered her expressions of frustration or anxiety. At home, after Adam went back to work and Cain went down for a nap, Eve wept angrily.
Throughout the pregnancy, they referred to the baby simply as “the baby.” During labor, the baby's heart fluctuated like an unpredictable stock, and the Doctor decided she didn't like what she saw and ended up performing a C-section on Eve because, she said, the baby's heart couldn't stand the stress of labor, and Eve wept again on the operating table, though now less angrily and more with relief. When, in the recovery room, a man came to fill out a birth certificate, Adam said, “Abel,” when asked what the baby's first name was to be. And that settled it.
Abel was a delicate child; he was prohibited from playing rough contact sports like football or boxing, as a strong blow to the abdomen could cause severe damage to his internal organs. He had little to moderate stamina, and was easily winded. But Adam and Eve decided as much as possible not to treat him differently from his brother. This policy played out differently, however, as executed by each of them. Adam turned out to be a coach kind of dad, and displayed a contempt for weakness and any injury that the boys couldn't just “walk off,” while Eve plied Abel with little secret affections and preferences, which Abel, more often than not rebuffed, being a child with a large requirement of personal space and a strong sense of boundaries.
Two factors kept Cain and Abel apart. One was that Cain was always forgetting himself and tackling or karate kicking his brother, which brought down a rain of corrective exhortations from his parents that jarred him back into himself from whatever pleasurable fantasy persona he happened to be inhabiting that decided to attack his brother. When he began playing with other children that he could wrestle or sit on with relative impunity, he generally forsook his brother as a playmate. When the time came for them to attend middle school, the boys begged their parents to send them to different schools, as they were continually teased about their names. They didn't tell their parents about the comments they heard and overheard from many children and some teachers about how their parents must be crazy and bad parents to name their children Cain and Abel. Neither did they tell them about the few occasions when they had been egged on to fight, a spontaneous circle of children forming around them during an argument between the two, with some of them chanting “Kill him! Kill him!”
So the boys were sent to different schools. Cain was pronounced academically gifted and evinced a talent for track sports. Abel was not pronounced anything and was even a little deficient in academics, despite the fact that his medical exemption from P.E. bought him a free study period; he spent this looking at car magazines. Nobody ever said anything to them about their names.
(However, they were listed once, alongside Zoot and Crunchberry, in a filler piece in the local newspaper about unusual names registered on county birth certificates.)
Abel did develop a talent for sardonic humor that endeared him to a stratum of boys who were slight of build and geeky but not actually smart. Over the course of a year, Abel's increasingly pithy and sour epithets bore him to the top of this group of boys, two of the defining characteristics of which were their lack of academic, athletic, or social distinction and their derision of those who did distinguish themselves in these ways. That and a fondness for “classic rock.” The summer between tenth and eleventh grades gave Abel's friends downy mustaches, a generous addition of vertical inches, and surprising heft. These came with some startling life experiences that added up to much less geeky, much more imposing personae. Though still sweet faced and barely five feet tall himself, Abel absorbed his friends' newfound thuggish gravitas as well as their enthusiasm for drugs and petty crime. He became distant from his family. His grades went from matter of concern to lost cause. He stayed out all hours and came home only to eat and sleep. He became repugnant to the clean-cut, exemplary Cain. His parents, after years of giving him special consideration, did not know how to deal with this, though Eve suspected that Adam had secretly given up and no longer really cared what happened to Abel. She even sensed a certain amount of relief.
By the time Cain graduated and left for college, Abel had unceremoniously left home and moved into a friend's trailer on the south side of town, and Adam and Eve were once again alone. They marveled at the intactness of their house, their lives, as if after an eighteen-year hurricane. The boys had set off into the world, in mutually exclusive directions, and they felt they had averted disaster.
Cain was a dutiful son; he came home from college most weekends and mowed the lawn or washed his mom's car when he wasn't studying or jogging. Late in his first year of college, he began dating the girl he would eventually marry. Her name was Thomasin; she went by Tommy and did not look unlike his mother, which was a little disturbing at first, but the resemblance dissipated the better Cain got to know her. She was an art student, a sculptor, and unlike his mother, a conscientious feminist and very political. He loved her physicality—not only her body and the intimacy she had allowed him, but her sheer enthusiasm for the physical, the “concrete,” as she called it. This had something to do with being an artist. She touched him with awe and it made him feel like the “what a piece of work is man” speech from Hamlet they had somehow spent an entire two classes talking about in his English lit class. He immersed himself in thoughts and sense memories of her in bed at night to cleanse himself of the anxieties or annoyances of the day.
This is what he was doing one night in his parents' house when a chill made him pull up his covers and realize pleasantly that he had fallen asleep. But the thick comforter somehow did not abate the cold, and, annoyed, he floated back up to nearly full consciousness. Looking across the room, he saw the curtain flutter. Had he left the window open? He rose and walked across the room to shut it, thinking it more odd as he progressed across the room, when he bumped into someone. Putting two and two together about the window and this unexpected presence, and suddenly awash in fear, anger, and, strangely, thoughts of Thomasin, he steadied himself against a bedpost and punched with most of the considerable force in his large right arm. He struck an abdomen and a body collapsed at his feet.
Of course—what were the chances—it was Abel.
The atmosphere in the hospital room was charged with a volatile combination of anger and solicitude. Surgery stanched the internal bleeding and found surprisingly little damage to Abel's internal organs. Adam, Eve, and Cain, on entering Abel's recovery room, saw what looked like a little boy sleeping, and allowed themselves again to feel uncomplicated love for the infuriating Abel. When consciousness began to seep back into him, Abel threatened Cain with murder charges, lawsuits. Abel offered to call the police into the room right then and tell them how Abel was caught breaking and entering. As morning broke, Abel no longer seemed like a small boy, and a bill was brought to Adam and Eve for Abel's treatment. They all left without saying goodbye to Abel, who was asleep again.
Back at college two months later, Cain got a phone call from his father telling him that Abel had received an aluminum-baseball-bat whack to the stomach during an attempted robbery of a convenience store. The other guy had run. Apparently, Abel had been wielding a gun, so the guy with the baseball bat was not charged with anything. Self defense.
Cain was stoic during most of the funeral, but when they began to throw dirt on the coffin, his face broke into an awful grimace and he wept explosively. He stepped away from the group surrounding the grave to hide his face, a suddenly vividly red fountain of tears and mucus. This happened to him regularly for a little over a year after the funeral. He almost always managed to keep it from Tommy, but when he could not, her response to it struck him as so precisely right, so helpful, that it became a deciding factor in Cain's asking her to marry him. Another was that he could not abide the thought of someone who had seen him break down like that lapsing into mere acquaintance.
Two weeks after the funeral, Eve asked Adam for a divorce. She saw his face and body stiffen in reaction, in resistance, then relax as he did a quick accounting of his responsibilities and what he had to lose. Ruefully, almost sweetly—so that she remembered the days of the constant jokes about “Adam and Eve”—he granted her an easy divorce.
Eve moved to Florida, reverted to her maiden name, and changed her first name to Jennifer, the most unremarkable name she could think of. Working the third shift at a call center, which gave her time to study between calls, she took classes part time and finished her degree. She found a job teaching at a private girls' school, where she met her second husband, Barry, the head of the math department, a widower with a 13-year-old daughter named Carly. Barry, though not as handsome or confident as Adam, was considerate and utterly devoted to her, and he lit up the household with a sense of humor that she recognized as an element that had been almost totally absent from her previous life. She was surprised to find herself angry with Adam after the fact for not having made her laugh more often. Carly was a bright and trusting child who took to her promptly; love developed between them almost as quickly and thoroughly as it had between Jennifer/Eve and Barry and had a quality of calmness and understanding she had never experienced with the boys. She rolled the idea of having a child with Barry around in her mind—she was not so terribly old; she had seen older women pumped up with fertility drugs displaying litters of children on TV—but it seemed ungrateful, a greedy bit of luck-pushing fate would surely punish.
When she thought of her previous life—“in the garden” as she referred to it in her mind—it was in one of two ways: as a suspended parallel life—with two growing sons—to which she would have to return after this pleasant sojourn in Florida (in fact, she had terrible dreams to this effect, the most awful part of which was always Abel's return from the grave, an accusing corpse) or as something so remote, of such unimaginable antiquity as to lapse into legend and come into doubt as actual fact. There had been no communication between her and Adam or Cain for a long time. (Adam's silence had a quality of respect and contrition, but Cain's was tinged with disappointment and anger.) Once, all alone in the house and in a strange mood, when, through brooding, this feeling became unbearable, she picked up the phone and called her old house. The house of Adam and Eve. Not even an answering machine. The phone simply rang and rang.
Okay, so still not mind-blowing. You might even say it's inevitable—two young people so named, in a period of their lives when both are dating furiously . . . .
Furthermore, the unimpressible would say, her name was Eva, not Eve. But that is a tiny, desperate distinction indicative of a very small soul.
So, then, what were the chances that they would marry? Because they did. After dating for six months, it began to seem foolish to them that they weren't married, so life-changingly, unalterably in love were they. So they moved in together, got engaged, and—six months later, when Adam had finished his Master's in chemical engineering—got married. And when Eva filled out the forms to change her last name to Adam's, she changed the first name as well. Her friends and family, with the touching enthusiasm with which people seem to make the most obvious jokes about other people's names, had begun calling her Eve as soon as she began dating Adam. This lapsed into habit, and, one day, when she was at the bank, endorsing a check made out to “Eve,” she realized that she had had her name effectively changed for her. This annoyed Eva/Eve at first; after all, she was her own person and, love him as she may, she was not defined by her relationship to her boyfriend/fiance/husband. But it was a single letter, in fact almost the same letter, and it would have been more trouble than it was worth to ask people to call her by her given name. (She tried it a couple of times and had seen in the faces of her interlocutors that she was coming off as difficult.) Eventually she had begun to introduce herself to new acquaintances as Eve. And by the time of the wedding, she was settled into her new name.
Soon after the wedding, they moved to a different city—Adam had accepted a job with a company that manufactured food dyes—and then none of their everyday acquaintances knew them as anything other than “Adam and Eve.” No one in their new town had known Adam when his name wasn't a funny coincidence that denoted (another well-worn joke) a “match made in heaven.” No one knew Eve when she was Eva.
One morning, Eve was picking out some tenacious bits of pulp in Adam's sticky orange-juice glass. (He had a habit of nursing an immense glass of orange juice, his only breakfast, throughout his morning rituals—from newspaper to dog walking to shower to shaving to dressing to garage—leaving the empty glass wherever he happened to finish his juice that day, so that, sometimes, it was a bit of an Easter-egg hunt with the orange juice glasses, as they would sit for days undiscovered in an improbable nook. She had found a glass on the high shelf in their closet, thin dust overlying the orange film of juice residue. She had found one in the yard; the sun had hardened the juice residue into a hard lacquer. This one she just threw away.) When, this morning, she put down the butter knife with which she was attempting to scrape orange pulp out of the glass and quietly threw up in the sink, she suddenly felt very biblical—not as Eve, though, but as Mary. Renaissance annunciations flashed into view in her mind as they had in the slides she'd seen in her art history classes in college. (She'd only had another semester to go to finish her art history degree, but she had stopped going to class when planning for the wedding began to take all of her time. She had vague plans of continuing her degree after they were married.) Her secular, agnostic imagination could not conjure an angel, so this gastric spasm would have to do. Either way, she had been visited in secret, while her husband was away, and been made aware that she was pregnant.
She went to their bedroom, took off her clothes, and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She had long, curly hair then, and she untied it and let it fall over her. She cupped her belly—was it already sticking out a bit?—and gazed at herself. Though renaissancy (in addition to the long hair, she had a high forehead, pale skin, and a trim voluptuousness that would have made her a popular model in Florence or Bruges), the effect was definitely more along the lines of her namesake than of the mother of God. And, although they hadn't been trying to get pregnant, they had grown more cavalier about birth control now that Adam had a job, they had a house, a family. There was nothing immaculate about it.
Naming their son Cain wasn't a conscious decision; Adam had said it as soon as the swirling gray pixels of the sonogram image had resolved into a recognizable fetus shape. “There's little Cain,” he had joked. “You're right,” the sonogram lady had said, “It's a boy.” They continued to refer to him as “little Cain” throughout the pregnancy and saw no need to change his name when he was born.
What were the chances of that?
So, you would think that's enough, right? A joke's a joke.
When she became pregnant again, Eve hoped for a girl, partly because she wanted one of each and partly because she knew that if she had a boy, they would name him Abel. There was just that kind of momentum behind the name thing. She didn't want two boys named Cain and Abel, but she was powerless to stop it if it happened.
When the sonogram pixels whirled around again and settled into the shape of another boy, the sonogram lady (it was the same lady) joked, “You're not gonna name this one Abel, are you?” Adam and Eve smiled weakly but didn't respond. The sonogram lady scanned Eve's belly from different angles. She had trouble finding the kidneys, and then thought the heart seemed to be in a strange place. She brought in a doctor, who commandeered the sonogram machine but had no more success than the sonogram lady had. The doctor gave Eve some tissues with which to wipe the sonic goo from her belly and talked to them about the possibility of birth defects, the need for vigilance with this pregnancy, the fact that, if they were planning to have a “natural” childbirth, they could forget it.
In the car, Eve felt the breaking of a feeling that had been welling up since the sonogram lady failed to find the baby's kidneys, and, once it broke, she could identify it: she was overcome by impotence. The process going on inside her was going off the rails, but there was nothing she could do about it. She wanted to reach inside herself and cup her baby's heart and nurture it and make it grow strong. She wanted to take one of her own kidneys and fashion two normal, complete kidneys for her baby. She did not tell Adam any of this, because she knew that he would try to soothe her in the clumsy way he had that simply smothered her expressions of frustration or anxiety. At home, after Adam went back to work and Cain went down for a nap, Eve wept angrily.
Throughout the pregnancy, they referred to the baby simply as “the baby.” During labor, the baby's heart fluctuated like an unpredictable stock, and the Doctor decided she didn't like what she saw and ended up performing a C-section on Eve because, she said, the baby's heart couldn't stand the stress of labor, and Eve wept again on the operating table, though now less angrily and more with relief. When, in the recovery room, a man came to fill out a birth certificate, Adam said, “Abel,” when asked what the baby's first name was to be. And that settled it.
Abel was a delicate child; he was prohibited from playing rough contact sports like football or boxing, as a strong blow to the abdomen could cause severe damage to his internal organs. He had little to moderate stamina, and was easily winded. But Adam and Eve decided as much as possible not to treat him differently from his brother. This policy played out differently, however, as executed by each of them. Adam turned out to be a coach kind of dad, and displayed a contempt for weakness and any injury that the boys couldn't just “walk off,” while Eve plied Abel with little secret affections and preferences, which Abel, more often than not rebuffed, being a child with a large requirement of personal space and a strong sense of boundaries.
Two factors kept Cain and Abel apart. One was that Cain was always forgetting himself and tackling or karate kicking his brother, which brought down a rain of corrective exhortations from his parents that jarred him back into himself from whatever pleasurable fantasy persona he happened to be inhabiting that decided to attack his brother. When he began playing with other children that he could wrestle or sit on with relative impunity, he generally forsook his brother as a playmate. When the time came for them to attend middle school, the boys begged their parents to send them to different schools, as they were continually teased about their names. They didn't tell their parents about the comments they heard and overheard from many children and some teachers about how their parents must be crazy and bad parents to name their children Cain and Abel. Neither did they tell them about the few occasions when they had been egged on to fight, a spontaneous circle of children forming around them during an argument between the two, with some of them chanting “Kill him! Kill him!”
So the boys were sent to different schools. Cain was pronounced academically gifted and evinced a talent for track sports. Abel was not pronounced anything and was even a little deficient in academics, despite the fact that his medical exemption from P.E. bought him a free study period; he spent this looking at car magazines. Nobody ever said anything to them about their names.
(However, they were listed once, alongside Zoot and Crunchberry, in a filler piece in the local newspaper about unusual names registered on county birth certificates.)
Abel did develop a talent for sardonic humor that endeared him to a stratum of boys who were slight of build and geeky but not actually smart. Over the course of a year, Abel's increasingly pithy and sour epithets bore him to the top of this group of boys, two of the defining characteristics of which were their lack of academic, athletic, or social distinction and their derision of those who did distinguish themselves in these ways. That and a fondness for “classic rock.” The summer between tenth and eleventh grades gave Abel's friends downy mustaches, a generous addition of vertical inches, and surprising heft. These came with some startling life experiences that added up to much less geeky, much more imposing personae. Though still sweet faced and barely five feet tall himself, Abel absorbed his friends' newfound thuggish gravitas as well as their enthusiasm for drugs and petty crime. He became distant from his family. His grades went from matter of concern to lost cause. He stayed out all hours and came home only to eat and sleep. He became repugnant to the clean-cut, exemplary Cain. His parents, after years of giving him special consideration, did not know how to deal with this, though Eve suspected that Adam had secretly given up and no longer really cared what happened to Abel. She even sensed a certain amount of relief.
By the time Cain graduated and left for college, Abel had unceremoniously left home and moved into a friend's trailer on the south side of town, and Adam and Eve were once again alone. They marveled at the intactness of their house, their lives, as if after an eighteen-year hurricane. The boys had set off into the world, in mutually exclusive directions, and they felt they had averted disaster.
Cain was a dutiful son; he came home from college most weekends and mowed the lawn or washed his mom's car when he wasn't studying or jogging. Late in his first year of college, he began dating the girl he would eventually marry. Her name was Thomasin; she went by Tommy and did not look unlike his mother, which was a little disturbing at first, but the resemblance dissipated the better Cain got to know her. She was an art student, a sculptor, and unlike his mother, a conscientious feminist and very political. He loved her physicality—not only her body and the intimacy she had allowed him, but her sheer enthusiasm for the physical, the “concrete,” as she called it. This had something to do with being an artist. She touched him with awe and it made him feel like the “what a piece of work is man” speech from Hamlet they had somehow spent an entire two classes talking about in his English lit class. He immersed himself in thoughts and sense memories of her in bed at night to cleanse himself of the anxieties or annoyances of the day.
This is what he was doing one night in his parents' house when a chill made him pull up his covers and realize pleasantly that he had fallen asleep. But the thick comforter somehow did not abate the cold, and, annoyed, he floated back up to nearly full consciousness. Looking across the room, he saw the curtain flutter. Had he left the window open? He rose and walked across the room to shut it, thinking it more odd as he progressed across the room, when he bumped into someone. Putting two and two together about the window and this unexpected presence, and suddenly awash in fear, anger, and, strangely, thoughts of Thomasin, he steadied himself against a bedpost and punched with most of the considerable force in his large right arm. He struck an abdomen and a body collapsed at his feet.
Of course—what were the chances—it was Abel.
The atmosphere in the hospital room was charged with a volatile combination of anger and solicitude. Surgery stanched the internal bleeding and found surprisingly little damage to Abel's internal organs. Adam, Eve, and Cain, on entering Abel's recovery room, saw what looked like a little boy sleeping, and allowed themselves again to feel uncomplicated love for the infuriating Abel. When consciousness began to seep back into him, Abel threatened Cain with murder charges, lawsuits. Abel offered to call the police into the room right then and tell them how Abel was caught breaking and entering. As morning broke, Abel no longer seemed like a small boy, and a bill was brought to Adam and Eve for Abel's treatment. They all left without saying goodbye to Abel, who was asleep again.
Back at college two months later, Cain got a phone call from his father telling him that Abel had received an aluminum-baseball-bat whack to the stomach during an attempted robbery of a convenience store. The other guy had run. Apparently, Abel had been wielding a gun, so the guy with the baseball bat was not charged with anything. Self defense.
Cain was stoic during most of the funeral, but when they began to throw dirt on the coffin, his face broke into an awful grimace and he wept explosively. He stepped away from the group surrounding the grave to hide his face, a suddenly vividly red fountain of tears and mucus. This happened to him regularly for a little over a year after the funeral. He almost always managed to keep it from Tommy, but when he could not, her response to it struck him as so precisely right, so helpful, that it became a deciding factor in Cain's asking her to marry him. Another was that he could not abide the thought of someone who had seen him break down like that lapsing into mere acquaintance.
Two weeks after the funeral, Eve asked Adam for a divorce. She saw his face and body stiffen in reaction, in resistance, then relax as he did a quick accounting of his responsibilities and what he had to lose. Ruefully, almost sweetly—so that she remembered the days of the constant jokes about “Adam and Eve”—he granted her an easy divorce.
Eve moved to Florida, reverted to her maiden name, and changed her first name to Jennifer, the most unremarkable name she could think of. Working the third shift at a call center, which gave her time to study between calls, she took classes part time and finished her degree. She found a job teaching at a private girls' school, where she met her second husband, Barry, the head of the math department, a widower with a 13-year-old daughter named Carly. Barry, though not as handsome or confident as Adam, was considerate and utterly devoted to her, and he lit up the household with a sense of humor that she recognized as an element that had been almost totally absent from her previous life. She was surprised to find herself angry with Adam after the fact for not having made her laugh more often. Carly was a bright and trusting child who took to her promptly; love developed between them almost as quickly and thoroughly as it had between Jennifer/Eve and Barry and had a quality of calmness and understanding she had never experienced with the boys. She rolled the idea of having a child with Barry around in her mind—she was not so terribly old; she had seen older women pumped up with fertility drugs displaying litters of children on TV—but it seemed ungrateful, a greedy bit of luck-pushing fate would surely punish.
When she thought of her previous life—“in the garden” as she referred to it in her mind—it was in one of two ways: as a suspended parallel life—with two growing sons—to which she would have to return after this pleasant sojourn in Florida (in fact, she had terrible dreams to this effect, the most awful part of which was always Abel's return from the grave, an accusing corpse) or as something so remote, of such unimaginable antiquity as to lapse into legend and come into doubt as actual fact. There had been no communication between her and Adam or Cain for a long time. (Adam's silence had a quality of respect and contrition, but Cain's was tinged with disappointment and anger.) Once, all alone in the house and in a strange mood, when, through brooding, this feeling became unbearable, she picked up the phone and called her old house. The house of Adam and Eve. Not even an answering machine. The phone simply rang and rang.
