Secrets of Eden

by Chris Bohjalian

  In that image they were standing in front of our house on a summer evening, the convertible with red leather seats parked in the portico just to their left. One of our magnificent weeping willows is over their shoulders. When we sold the house, my aunt told me, the roots of those trees were just starting to burst through the cement floor of the cellar. She thought this was rather funny, an indication in her mind that Amanda and I were getting out of the house just in time. Although in hindsight the violation of the structure from the inside out and the bottom up can only be viewed as a metaphorical sledgehammer, it is nonetheless telling.

  But there was one more detail to that aging Kodachrome slide that caused me to sit forward on my couch and then, a moment later, to put the wine on the floor and approach the sheet. To actually run my fingers over the cotton. To press it flat, to understand if what I was seeing was merely a wrinkle in the fabric or an illusion caused by something behind the sheet. A picture hook in the wall, maybe, or a dimple in the Sheetrock. What was there? What was drawing me to the makeshift screen I had hung on a wall in my tiny apartment? There in the window of my childhood bedroom, standing in profile and gazing down at the corner of the room in which I knew had once sat my small white bed--absolutely oblivious to the slide picture being taken outside the house--was an angel. I could see the tips of the wings, her shoulders (and she was a female angel), and the hair the color of corn silk. I could not see her face because of the angle.

  Angels demand nothing from us but faith, and I should have known then that there was no reason to doubt the image on the wall. I had been saved by an angel five years earlier: What grounds had I to mistrust what I was seeing now? Why should I have wondered that she had been looking out for me even then, when I was a small child? But I did wonder, I did doubt. And that was my mistake. I took the slide from the carousel to see if I could see the angel on the actual slide. I turned on the lamp by the table, pulled off the shade, and held the slide near the bulb. Of course the angel was gone. Evaporated like a splash of water from the concrete lip of a swimming pool under a hot summer sun at midday. When I placed the slide back in the carousel, there was no longer a trace of her. The window was dark, and that little girl I had been long ago was, once again, all alone in that bedroom.

  THERE WERE MOMENTS when I was fascinated by the way Stephen's fertile mind worked. One morning when I awoke, he was still beside me in bed, but I could tell that he had been awake for a while. It wasn't quite seven-thirty, and the sun was turning the seraphim in my chandeliers the color of pearl. I burrowed into his chest and asked him what he was thinking, expecting perhaps an account of a dream or an analysis of the independent film we had seen the night before at the Angelika. He pulled me against him and said simply, "There were no secrets in Eden."

  I liked the idea that we were alone in my bed and he was contemplating Eden.

  "No," I agreed, "there weren't. What made you think of that?"

  "Eden? Isn't it enough that I have a beautiful woman curled up beside me?"

  "Thank you. And I'll accept that my presence was a part of the inspiration."

  "But only a part."

  "Yes."

  I rested my hand on his heart and watched it rise and fall on his chest.

  "Genesis is a blunt instrument," he said after a moment. "Especially the story of Adam and Eve. The symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. Obvious."

  "Is a sermon forming in your mind?" He shook his head. "No. I was just contemplating what an arduous burden a secret is. If I were the storyteller, I would have spent more time in what had to have been that nightmarishly stressful period between when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and when God confronted them with what they had done. Just imagine how oppressive the wait must have been. There the two of them are, cowering in the garden, just waiting to be discovered."

  "Genesis isn't known for character development."

  "No. But the beauty of Adam and Eve's nakedness? It's that they haven't any secrets at all. Not a one. And maybe that's the magic of Eden--and what we've lost forever."

  There was a ruefulness to his tone that was endearing. It made me want to hold him--and be held by him--forever.

  I HAD THE sense that the investigators wanted to find parallels between the ways my parents and the Haywards had died. Why not? It was, in part, those rudimentary similarities that had drawn me to Haverill that first July afternoon. But as I learned more and more about the Haywards' marriage, I was reminded that even batterers and drunks have their distinctions and quirks. The biggest difference, it seemed to me, was that although my father's behavior was indefensible--and I am not even referring to the reality that in the end he would murder the woman he'd married--my mother was no picnic to live with. She drank too much and had a tongue that was poisonous. She could be desperately loving with Amanda and me, but she seemed to take pleasure in the ways she could verbally emasculate our father. I remember the first time I saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I thought it was a home movie.

  From what I learned about the Haywards, Alice had spent her life trying her best not to antagonize the beast that was her husband. My mother, on the other hand, was poking hers with a sharp stick. That doesn't excuse the fact that my father would hit her. It isn't a justification for homicide. But the auras of both of my parents were sad and grim in ways that were unlike the auras that must have shrouded George and Alice Hayward and kept their particular angels at bay.

  I WAS IN a vintage-clothing shop on lower Broadway when Stephen called me on my cell phone. I was in the dressing room--a dark and musty little cubicle with a fraying curtain the color of subway-track muck--wondering if I was still young enough to pull off a sleeveless black sheath from the 1960s or whether it made me look like an amazon. I was in a very good mood, a little giddy even. It was late afternoon, and when I saw that it was Stephen causing my phone to chirp, I may even have allowed myself a little extra sigh of contentment. We hadn't been apart long, but already I missed him madly, and our tentative plan was that he would return to Manhattan that weekend and stay with me. We had ruled out my coming to Vermont until he had a better sense of whether he was capable of resuming his duties in the pulpit. The idea that he was continuing to live in the parsonage though he was no longer serving as the minister was a source of great consternation to him. I don't think his parishioners cared then--though they would soon--but he did. It was one more thing, it seemed to me at the time, over which he felt needless and un reasonable guilt. Already he was looking for a place he could rent in Bennington.

  "Hi, stranger," I said, and I leaned against the wall of the dressing room. I turned up the volume on my phone so I could hear him over the throbbing bass of the store's sound system. "How are you doing?"

  "We need to talk."

  There was an urgency to his voice that I had never heard before. I was aware of the way his mood could vacillate between brooding and playful; I had seen him despairing to the point where there was an edge of meanness to his tone. But the insistence I noted in those four words was new to me.

  "Okay," I said. "What's up?"

  "Where are you?"

  "In a stall that could seriously use some Febreze." He went silent, and I realized that my lame little joke had given him the wrong idea of where I was. "I'm in a dressing room in a clothing store. A shop that has some great dresses. I think I'm too old for the one I'm wearing, but it was still fun to try it on. I--"

  "When can I call you so we can talk?"

  "Well, we're talking now. But it sounds like this is serious."

  "It is."

  I thought about the things he might want to discuss that would make him sound so grim, and the obvious one was that he wanted to--as he might have put it--break up with me. That he wasn't going to come back to New York after all. I wasn't precisely sure how far along our relationship was, but I did know that I wanted it to continue. Initially I had presumed that I'd been dropped into his life by his angel because he needed me after the Haywards had died, but as we sp
ent more and more time together, I had begun to wonder if, perhaps, our angels--mine and his--had been in collusion and had consciously brought us together.

  "We can't talk now?" I asked. He was, quite obviously, stalling. Whatever he wanted to discuss, he was hoping he wouldn't have to broach the subject while I was in a slightly rank dressing room in clothes I didn't own.

  "I'd rather you were alone."

  "I am alone."

  "I'd rather you were home."

  "Do I need to be sitting down?" I asked, teasing him.

  "Please," he said, and his voice softened the tiniest bit. "I need to tell you something, and it's important you understand that this isn't a moment to be light."

  "'Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.'"

  "What?"

  "That's a quote from G. K. Chesterton."

  "Heather, I just came from a state police barracks. For the last forty-five minutes, I was interrogated by two very curt troopers."

  I realized I had misread the signals in his voice. This was not urgency so much as it was outrage. He was indignant. "Go on," I said.

  "Now?"

  "Now. It's fine."

  "They think I killed them. Maybe just him. George."

  I slid down onto the thin wooden board that served as a seat and went completely still. I actually did need to sit down. "Why would they think that?" I asked. "That's ridiculous."

  "It is ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. And appalling. Obviously I didn't kill the two of them. I offered to take a lie-detector test. But they're serious enough about this that I'm going to have to get a lawyer."

  "Where did they get this idea? They certainly didn't think you'd had anything to do with this tragedy when it first happened."

  "I know."

  "Why, then?"

  "I don't know. I just know I'm furious."

  "It does sound a little absurd."

  "Trust me: It is."

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the feet of teen girls and women younger than me walking beneath the drape, but the world went eerily silent. I was no longer aware of the pulsating music the store had been playing or the conversations between customers just outside the dressing room. I stared down at the black wool of the dress, bunched up a little bit in my lap, and rested my forehead in my hand. My ears were ringing. On the floor of the dressing room was a torn sliver of bathroom tissue, and I couldn't imagine why it was there.

  "Heather?"

  "I'm here," I said. Then: "So you're getting a lawyer?"

  "I am."

  "Well, if you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. I know that's not universally true. But have a little faith in your angel," I said, and a memory came to me. I thought you were my angel. It was what he had said that first Saturday morning when he'd come to my loft and I'd told him that I wanted to show him an angel. He had called me his angel at least three times since then, and I expected him to say those words to me now. But he didn't.

  "I expect I'll depend mostly on my lawyer," he said instead. "But thank you very much."

  "You're still coming to New York?" I asked.

  "Yes, of course. I just might be a day later than planned. It depends on who is representing me and when he or she can get together with me."

  I was relieved, though not completely. From the other side of the drape, I heard teen girls giggling about the scatological drawing and the sexual double entendre on a T-shirt. They sounded too young to be so knowledgeable, and that only unnerved me further. I was engulfed in an aura of demonstrable unease.

  "When you know when you're coming," I said, "please call."

  "You sound annoyed."

  "No. Anxious would be a better word."

  "I didn't know you got anxious," he said, and I wondered if I had heard a ripple of challenge in his tone or whether he had meant this only as a small jest.

  "Oh, I get anxious," I told him. "As you get to know me, you'll see I have a whole cauldron of emotions." Still, I don't believe I expected at the time that he would see hurt and anger and, worst of all, betrayal.

  AS SOON AS Stephen returned to Manhattan, I insisted we stroll into the West Village and stretch our legs along the narrow, oddly angled streets bordered by manicured brownstones. He had arrived near dinnertime because he'd met with a lawyer in Vermont over lunch. Eventually, I thought, we might get as far as the Hudson, where we could watch the late-summer sun descend in the horizon beyond the river, and on the way there I might show him an angel that warmed me near St. Luke's Church. But mostly I just wanted to talk and savor the first small wisps of autumn in the air.

  Initially he was guarded and resistant to my inquiries. It was as if we were back on his porch in Haverill the Tuesday just after the tragedy. The conversation was unsatisfying, and I felt a stab of apprehension that we might not be able to recover what we had had. But that didn't seem reasonable to me that evening since--then--I believed everything he had told me and thus the inquiries of the police were unfounded. Ludicrous. A strange comet that would streak across the night sky, cause a little disconcerting befuddlement, and be gone. And eventually his resentment and pique did fade and the distance between us narrowed. When we left my loft, we might have been mistaken on the street for a brother and sister who were not especially close: We walked without touching, and our eyes never met. But by the time we reached St. Luke's, we were holding hands. And when we returned to Greene Street later that night, I was burrowed against him and his arm was around my shoulders. We would be fine, I decided. We were laughing, and his wit had lost that caustic bite that dogged him when he was irritated.

  And for a week we were fine. Occasionally after talking to his lawyer--with whom he seemed to speak daily--he would breathe deeply through his nose and sigh and stare for long moments at either my osprey or my angels or the passersby on the street below us. Never would he tell me what he and his lawyer had discussed, and usually the conversations were brief. Still, it was clear he was exasperated, and one time I said to him, "Those little phone consultations with your lawyer can't be cheap. This is a nonissue--he'll make it disappear. Let it go." And after a few minutes he would, and our vacation from real life would resume. We would walk and read and eat and make love. I did a radio interview with a program that broadcast from Manhattan's City Hall, and he made faces at me through the glass when the host wasn't looking. I wrote a bit, did a few online q&a's, and responded to the occasional request from my publisher. But I did little else that week that could possibly have been construed as work. We saw no movies and no shows, because we were content--at least I was--to bask in a world that wasn't much bigger than the alcove and daybed in my loft.

  WE HAD BEEN together again for a week, and as far as I was concerned, nothing in our world needed to change. I knew it would, of course. But I was very, very happy. Sometimes when I look back at the period when Stephen and I were involved, I find myself doubting that we could ever have been so perfectly mated, so finely attuned to each other's cravings and desires. It is as if that varied collection of memories we store--some precisely rendered and accurate, others modified by the caprices and needs of an aura, some gifts from an angel--in my case has a series embedded there that is more fiction than fact. That is, perhaps, all fiction. A string of pearls that turn out to be bath beads when you squeeze them.

  And a part of my later sadness would stem from the reality that so many of our long talks together had been total fiction. I discovered I had been lied to for nearly five weeks.

  But for those five weeks I had been as content as I have ever been in my life.

  It all came apart after one more of his conversations with his attorney. As he did always when he spoke to this Aaron Lamb, he took his cell phone and stood at the corner window, retreating to the section of my loft I lived in least. He spoke softly, and while I might hear an occasional word--investigation, allegations, evidence, office--I never knew precisely what they were talking about. I heard no specifics. And that last phone call was real
ly no different, though I did hear two words that struck me in a way that none had in any of their previous conversations: diary. And DNA. I honestly think I knew before Stephen had ended the call that something different and new had transpired, and it boded ill for our affair.

  After he slipped his phone into his pants pocket, he folded one arm around his chest and rubbed at his chin with the other. He hadn't shaved yet--that week he tended to shave just before lunch--and he seemed to be toying with the stubble along his jawline. It was obvious that this call had agitated him more than most.