Secrets of Eden

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Touche," he agreed. Then: "So the angel said nothing to Norman."

  "Not a word."

  "What did Norman do?"

  "He fell asleep. This was his very first night in Ray Brook. Before that, he had been in either a psychiatric hospital or a county jail. But now his mental health had been stabilized and he had been convicted and sent to prison. A real prison. And he was going to be there for a while, and so he was scared. Absolutely petrified. And completely alone. And the angel came to him and knelt on the cement floor beside his cot and took his hand. Just held it. And Norman felt warm and, for the first time in a very long time, at peace. He felt comforted. He knew he would be fine, and he fell asleep with his fingers in the angel's hands. When he awoke in the morning, he felt more serene than he ever had in his life. To this day he has never forgotten the details of that angel's wings. Sometimes he has to work hard to recover that sense of well-being. He is still withdrawn, he still snaps at people. You saw that. But the wings? He's a visual artist. They're with him always."

  Stephen seemed to think about this, to be imagining the angel in Norman's cell.

  "Had he met you by then?" he asked me, and I had the sense that this man would have made a better lawyer than a minister. I didn't mind, but I felt as if I were being cross-examined.

  "Nope."

  "Amanda?"

  "No again. He wouldn't meet her until after he was released. They were in the same halfway house together. That's where they met," I explained. I had told Stephen on one of our walks in Manhattan about Amanda's history as a young adult. Despite a trust fund that was identical to mine, she was often living crammed into two-room apartments with nine or ten other people, sleeping on floors, depleting her assets, and taking jobs for a day--motel housekeeper, most often--to scrounge up extra money for cocaine, methadone substitutes, and antianxiety drugs. "How's that for an odd place to fall in love? Two basket cases holding each other together. But it's also rather beautiful, isn't it? They became friends when Amanda made a joke about her sister and angels and he told her the story of his prison-cell visitation."

  "So Amanda has never met an angel."

  "No, she hasn't. Not yet. She doubts both Norman and me when we compare notes about our winged guardians. I am confident that her angel has tried to reach her--and will keep on trying. But as a mortal you have to be willing to meet them partway. Not necessarily halfway. But you have to be receptive. To know that you can't do it all and be willing to open your mind to seraphic healing."

  "Versus sexual healing?"

  "Come again?"

  "It's an old Marvin Gaye song."

  "You are such a cynic," I told him, and I punched him lightly on the arm. "Sometimes I just can't believe there was someone willing to ordain you."

  "My sister would agree with you--as would, these days, a great many of my former parishioners."

  "Don't say 'former.' Really, I know you'll go back," I said, and at the time I honestly believed that. But he disagreed with me.

  "No. There's too much blood on my hands."

  "There's no blood on your hands! You have to stop saying such things."

  His head was bowed, and when he raised it, he raised an eyebrow as well. Then he stood and went to the window, where, with his back turned to me, he said--and it was the first time I had ever heard such daggers of condescension in his voice--"I can't abide those people any longer. The whole congregation. The whole community. I know that's horrible to admit, but it's the truth. I'm sorry. We're not really a very good fit. We never were. And, unfortunately, I know what used to go on at the Haywards' house. I also know what I did and didn't do, I know what Ginny O'Brien did and didn't do, and I know what the whole congregation did and didn't do. That's the problem. And so I think it's in my own best interests to steer clear. My health, mental and otherwise, depends upon it."

  At the time I had thought he was being either melodramatic or, just maybe, metaphoric. It would be weeks later that I would recall this exchange and first contemplate the notion that he had meant every word.

  I LIKED TO check in with Amanda and Norman because they had nobody else--no mortals, that is--and they were both so profoundly wounded. Moreover, Amanda was unable to open her mind to the angels in our midst. Early one afternoon that week, when the sun was still high above the copse of evergreens to the west of their log cabin, I went skinny-dipping with Amanda in a secluded section of a nearby river we called the funnel. Amanda took pride in the fact that she lived in a spot that allowed her to swim naked whenever she pleased, and she had so few visitors who might want to swim that she didn't even own a bathing suit. In truth, I think skinny-dipping was also her way of flaunting to Norman and me the state of her mental health: Either her weight was stable and she was fine or she was again shedding pounds and slowly killing herself. That week Stephen and I made love there twice.

  The water at the funnel cascaded through a flume of boulders the size of trailers, falling perhaps twenty-five feet, before emptying into a basin that was carved out of the earth like a gigantic cereal bowl. Occasionally Amanda and I would snowshoe there in the winter, and it always felt to the two of us as if we had just walked through the wardrobe into Narnia. The trees along the path from the log cabin to the river would form a silvery canopy, the boughs bending beneath the weight of the ice and snow like frosted palm fronds. Others would become elegant black-and-crystal sculptures: Willowy raven frames, layered with sky-blown glass. The forest that is filled with the music of the wood thrush and the warbler in June is almost preternaturally quiet in January, and even the falling water seems to have grown still. The icicles dangle like earrings.

  Nevertheless, it was obviously only in the summer when we would spend whole afternoons at the funnel. Soon after my sister had bought the log cabin and the surrounding property, Norman had taken his chain saw and cut down a swath of the westernmost maples and cedar and pine at the swimming hole so the water would be warmed as much as possible by the afternoon sun. Still, it was never going to be more than sixty-six or sixty-seven degrees, and I wondered how my wraithlike sister could handle the temperature with absolutely no body fat under her skin. That day as we floated on our backs in the shallow pool--the water there was no more than four feet deep--or sat on the boulders that had been warmed by the sun, I stared at my sister's reedy physique: The sharp tips of her collarbone and shoulder blades, the brittle rods that passed for her arms. When she reclined on her towel on the rock, I counted the ribs along the sides of her chest and the points on the hard square of her hip bones. Her breasts were the small hillocks of a middle-school girl.

  She was in a bad phase, I saw, and whatever progress she had made in the spring had been undone by days in which she would consume nothing but diet soda and carrot coins from her garden. She was smoking once more like a chimney and had brought her cigarettes with her to the funnel.

  "Are you seeing Karen?" I asked her, referring to her therapist perhaps an hour distant in Watertown.

  "I am."

  "And the nutritionist?" I couldn't remember that woman's name.

  "Nope."

  "How come?"

  "She seemed to know how to get under my skin."

  It was always a balancing act with Amanda. I knew the questions I didn't dare ask as well as the things I didn't dare say. You really can't afford to lose any more weight. You look fine now--don't drop another ounce. For God's sake, Amanda, you have to eat! What further complicated our conversations when she was in one of these periods was my knowledge that it really wasn't about body image in my sister's case: It was about suicide. She believed much more deeply than I ever had--even when I was curled up in that trunk that night in my first-year dorm--in the utter meaninglessness of life. And as much as I might have wanted her hospitalized, I knew that she would never have stood for it. Once, four years earlier, Norman and I had tried and failed.

  "So tell me about your new man," she said to me after a moment. She was smiling, but I knew there was a serrated edge to her
question.

  "What's to say? What do you want to know?"

  "Oh, I don't know. Is the plan to pull him back from the abyss, too? Help him see some angelic meaning in the way his parishioners imitated Mom and Dad?"

  It always struck me that Amanda could still refer to those two individuals as Mom and Dad. It was a linguistic nearness that now evaded me. They would, at best, be my parents. My mother. My father. I saw them largely through the formal prism of how they had fought and died or (on good days) the ways they had seemed so glamorous when I was young.

  "I think that's how it started," I admitted. "That is why I first went to Haverill. I went for him. The girl. The town."

  "But now it's just him."

  "We have a connection."

  "The angels have whispered in each of your ears?"

  "They have in mine. I can't speak for him."

  "Interesting choice in people to help," she murmured, and she draped one of her skeletal arms over her eyes.

  "Meaning?"

  "He seems pretty damn self-sufficient."

  "Maybe that's his problem."

  "I'd focus on the girl. The teenager. She's the one who could end up like us," said my sister.

  "Katie."

  "Uh-huh."

  I considered correcting her: I didn't think that Amanda and I had wound up similarly. But so much of life is about forgiveness and healing--restraining that urge to tweak or lash out or get in the last word--that I said simply, "I don't think it's an either/or proposition. At least I hope it isn't."

  "How much do you like him?"

  "So far? Plenty."

  "Do you trust him?"

  "Excuse me?"

  She yawned, and I noticed when she went to cover her mouth that she was no longer wearing either of the two silver bracelets that usually adorned her wrists. I feared that either they no longer fit or they hurt. My sister was disappearing once again into a wisp of a woman, frightening in her calculated emaciation, and I made a mental note to call her doctors as soon as Stephen and I had left.

  "I said, do you trust him? Don't you worry that this country pastor sees you as his new meal ticket? All of a sudden, a rich, pretty lady drops into his life like an angel--and, please, sis, I only used that word because the simile was irresistible--and he sees in her an opportunity. A retirement plan, if you will."

  "He clearly has assets of his own."

  "Not like yours, I promise. One of these days, you will branch out into angel merchandise. Angel baubles and angel jewelry boxes. Angel note cards. Angel figurines and Christmas ornaments. Angel rainbow catchers for kitchen windows. Angel vacation cruises."

  The sun had warmed the rock beneath me, and I gingerly rolled off my towel so I could feel the heat on all of my skin. My sister was enjoying herself, having a little fun at my expense. "What would occur on an angel cruise?" I asked, in part to change the subject but also in some way to indulge her.

  "Oh, you'd give your lectures," she said. "Everyone would watch the stars from the middle of the ocean. They'd tell stories of the angels who had saved their lives. There would be yoga. Meditation. Angel food cake at all the buffets."

  "You've really thought this through."

  "No I haven't. I was just being glib."

  I smiled at her, but she couldn't see me because her eyes were still covered by her arm. I said a silent prayer that either she would open her heart to an angel or that an angel would do for my sister what clearly I could not: encourage her to save her own life.

  THERE WERE A half dozen boxes of familial history that wouldn't be sold in the estate sale that followed my parents' deaths. There was their wedding album and a long shelf of college and high-school yearbooks. There were scrapbooks and photo albums. And there were the long trays of slides, many of which had belonged originally to my grandparents: my father's mother and father. These cartons, after the house in upstate New York had been sold, were stored in the attic in my aunt and uncle's home in Fairfield, Connecticut.

  I had been out of college and living alone in a small studio in a corner of Brooklyn not quite a dozen subway stops from lower Manhattan when I came across a Bell & Howell slide projector with a carousel in the window of an antique shop in Bay Ridge. It was twenty-five dollars, which seemed like a lot of money for a piece of technology so profoundly useless in the advent of the digital age. But I recalled those yellow-and-blue cartons of slides in the attic in Fairfield, some holding thirty images and some holding forty, and how I hadn't looked at any of them since one New Year's Eve when I'd been in the sixth grade. It had been at a dinner party, and my mother had decided in the period between dessert and the moment when the grown-ups would all stand in front of the television with champagne flutes in their hands to watch the ball drop in Times Square that it might be fun to savor the fading Kodachrome images. In all fairness, a great many of the slides would include my parents' friends who were with them that evening, so the idea wasn't as self-absorbed and egocentric as it might sound.

  And it proved to be a lovely idea. The grown-ups were just tipsy enough to be moved, but not so drunk that they would pass out in the dark. My father set up the white screen in front of the bay window, and we--a dozen grown-ups and the two Laurent daughters--positioned ourselves on the couch and the floor and the dining-room chairs that we carried into the living room. We stopped watching a few minutes before midnight only because the adults felt a moral obligation to bear witness to the precise second that the New Year was commemorated on Broadway.

  And so I decided there on the street in Brooklyn to buy the projector and carry it back to my studio. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds, and my apartment was on the fifth floor of a five-story walk-up. The five flights were, in my mind, a great gift: They helped keep me in shape, and the apartment that awaited me at the top was high enough that I could see a part of the bay (though not the Statue of Liberty) through a sliver between two taller buildings to the west.

  A few weeks after I bought the slide projector, I went to my aunt and uncle's for Thanksgiving. When I returned that evening to Brooklyn, I brought with me a dozen trays of slides in a canvas bag. Amanda, who was living in Boston at the time, hadn't come to Connecticut that year. None of the slide trays had been labeled, but my selection hadn't been entirely random. I'd made sure that I had images that covered the early years of my parents' marriage as well as ones highlighting Amanda and me as little girls. (By the time we were in elementary school, even my father--who had savored his use of slides as the family documentarian--had boxed away his slide camera and was using only film.) And then the next evening, completely alone, I allowed myself to study for long moments the man who had murdered my mother and then killed himself; the woman who would die at the hands of a man whom, I have to assume, she had once loved and with whom she had expected to grow old; and their two little girls, each of whom was transformed by their parents' deaths in ways it would take years to fully comprehend. That night I used a white bedsheet for a screen.

  What struck me most as I sipped a glass of wine and studied the images was how charismatic and elegant my parents had been. The colors were faded, which gave the two of them an even more retro sort of allure: Rock Hudson and Doris Day. My father was more robust than I usually thought of him, though my mother was exactly as beautiful. In some of the slides, when she was just about my age then, she was decked out in dresses with pointed collars and cuffed sleeves. In others, as the 1960s became the 1970s, she was in gold-sequined bathing suits on the white sands of Palm Beach and the farthest tip of Long Island, her skin nearly the red of a lobster. Meanwhile my father, who appeared in considerably fewer photos than my mother, would be decked out in beige trench coats and black wing tips, in charcoal gray business suits, or in tennis shorts and navy blue sweaters. In one shot, years before I was born, he was wearing a salmon-colored Nehru shirt and a peace medallion the size of a coaster, and my sense was that he was at a Halloween costume party. My father with a peace medallion? Had to be his idea of irony.


  And there were the cars with their fins and the convertible my mother had loved when I'd been so very small and remembered now only in terms of its inviting red leather seats and how invigorating the breeze had felt in my hair in the summer. And there were my sister and me. In prams. In matching bathing suits (but never gold-sequined). On, I have to assume, Amanda's first day of school: I am beside her, looking up at her, and my face is a combination of longing and awe. She has a lunch box and a small backpack that is shaped like a monkey. Curious George? Perhaps, though I have never had any recollection of either of us having had a special fondness for those yellow books, and when I asked Amanda about it, she was characteristically evasive, clutching her memories close to her heart. I was pleased that her hair had been brushed before school. Our mother was mercurial, and some mornings she simply couldn't cope--all the energy she had expended the night before battling with our father would leave her a rag doll--and our hair had been rats' nests.

  Ah, but in the evenings? That was when both of our parents would experience their strange and unpredictable transformations--their all-too-frequent transmogrifications. They were vampires. Werewolves. The night changed them. But they didn't instantly become monstrous. Often there was, first, those long hours of celebrity-like glamour. That night in Brooklyn, I held the stem of my wineglass between my fingers and gazed at a slide of my parents arm in arm on their way to a black-tie dinner, my father in a tuxedo and my mother in a strapless gown that shadowed her collarbone. They were in control--of their lives and of their emotions. They were in charge. They could have been movie stars.