Secrets of Eden

by Chris Bohjalian

  I pushed my chair away from my desk and turned to him. "Anything interesting?" I asked softly, though it was evident to me that there was.

  He cleared his throat before speaking. "I'm not sure interesting is the right word," he said carefully. "It may be interesting for uninvolved parties. The prurient who have followed one family's nightmare in the media. But for me? I'm not sure I would use the word interesting."

  "What word would you use?"

  He had remained on his feet, and his fingers were still at his face. "Let's see. Disturbing, perhaps. Disquieting. Problematic."

  "Sit down. Tell me: What did he have to say this time?"

  He didn't sit, and so I stood and went to him. I pulled his arms from his body to mine and rested them on my hips. For the briefest of seconds, he seemed to resist. I noticed the room wasn't as bright this time of the morning as it had been only days earlier, and I realized we had reached a stage in the season when the sun no longer rose quite as high over the surrounding buildings.

  "Tell me," I said again.

  "Well, where to begin ... " He was frowning.

  "Aaron told you something. Begin there."

  "He did."

  I was growing restless at the protracted way he was sharing his news. I wanted to know what he had learned so I could offer comfort and counsel. And though I no longer presumed it would be essentially nothing and he would need from me only reassurance, still I hoped. As we stood together in silence, I sent a short, brief petition to my angel that my misgivings were unwarranted. That nothing had changed. "Are you going to tell me?" I asked finally, careful to keep my voice light.

  He took a breath and looked out the window over my shoulder. "Alice kept a journal," he said, his voice a little clipped.

  Instantly my anxiety was transformed into dread, and I felt as if I were sliding underwater. For the rest of that conversation, his voice would sound slightly muffled to me, as if my ears were beneath the smooth plane of a very still lake. I understood from the moment he had said there was a journal that we were moving inexorably toward separation. If I didn't know precisely what he was about to tell me, I had a feeling. The gifts of prophecy and fear? Trifles compared to the insight an angel will give a receptive mind. I didn't yet remove his hands from my body, but only because I clung to the tiniest strip of kindling that I was mistaken.

  "Go on," I said.

  "In all likelihood I am in that journal."

  "As her pastor?"

  "As her ... "

  "For God's sake, Stephen, just tell me."

  He sighed. "There is an element to the story--a little background, if you will--that I didn't share with you. Arguably, I should have. But I made the calculated decision that it would only distress you if I did. I think, in some way, I thought I was shielding you."

  "From what? The idea you're a killer? I think you have grave demons, Stephen, but I promise you: I don't see you as a killer."

  "I'm glad. Thank you," he said, and I am convinced he added that only because it gave him an extra second to stall. To frame his thoughts. Then he continued, "For a time Alice and I were lovers." He looked into my eyes, but I looked away, and after a brief second I pushed myself off him. I may have seen something like this coming, but the sensation of betrayal was nonetheless palpable, and I could hear my heart thrumming in the back of my head.

  "We were lovers, and--"

  "I heard you the first time."

  "And I should have told you."

  "When were you two together?" I asked. It seemed the first of a great many pieces of very basic information I needed to gather.

  "Late last year. Early this year."

  "How early? It's currently September. Was this two nights? Two weeks? Two months?" Outside my window I watched a double-decker tour bus lurch to a stop at the traffic light.

  "Two seasons."

  "Winter and spring."

  "Yes. Through the second week in May."

  "And in all of our conversations about the murder and the suicide and your guilt, you never told me this ... why?"

  "I don't know. I thought I was protecting you. And it didn't seem relevant."

  "I think the fact you fucked her is as relevant as the fact you baptized her," I said, though I was able to restrain myself from raising my voice.

  "I deserved that."

  I tried to remind myself that hostility invariably boomerangs back. In the end we wound ourselves, too, when we lash out.

  "I imagine I was concerned that you would get the wrong idea about Alice's and my relationship," he went on when I remained silent. "Or, perhaps, that you might presume I was at her house that evening."

  "The evening they were killed?"

  "Yes."

  "Is there anything else you haven't told me?" I asked him.

  "About Alice?"

  "About anything."

  "No. But things are changing. I am going to have to return to Vermont and give them what they call a DNA swab. I am going to have to give them some fingerprints and turn over my laptop."

  "Are you being arrested?"

  "No. Not yet, anyway."

  I took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. "Are you scared?"

  "Of?"

  "Oh, I don't know. I would think being a suspect in a murder investigation just might unnerve a person."

  "I can't tell: Are you being sarcastic?"

  "Yes, Stephen. I am being sarcastic."

  "That doesn't seem like you."

  "I just asked you if you were frightened, and you asked me what of. The moment seemed to call for sarcasm."

  "You have every right to be angry with me. I should have told you about Alice."

  "Were you two in love?"

  He went quiet, and I couldn't decide whether it was because they had been and for some reason he didn't want to admit this or whether he honestly couldn't decide. Finally: "I'm not completely sure what that means."

  "It's not a hard question. I didn't ask you to list for me the contents of the periodic table. Were you two in love?"

  "I think she might have loved me. For a time."

  "And you?"

  "I enjoyed her company."

  "And you enjoyed sleeping with her."

  "Yes."

  "Why did you stop?"

  "Her husband wanted to come home. He insisted he'd changed; he said things would be different. It seemed to me that if I told her not to take him back, I would have an obligation to marry her myself."

  "Or tell her that you didn't love her enough to marry her."

  "In all fairness, I didn't want to be responsible for breaking up a marriage that might have a second life."

  "Even a marriage that bad?"

  "So it would seem."

  "But you didn't care enough for Alice to fight for her. To make a serious commitment. You left her to fend for herself with George."

  "Apparently."

  My eyes were growing moist, and I tried to regain perspective. To imagine this conversation both from God's vantage point and from an angel's. I heard in my head the word forgiveness, and I thought about Jesus Christ's admonition to Peter: Be prepared to forgive someone not merely seven times, but seventy times seven. I might have mastered myself completely, but I was so unnerved by those last lackadaisical responses--So it would seem. Apparently.--that I made the mistake of asking him one more question.

  "Well, then: Did you kill him? Either of them?"

  "Or both?"

  "Yes. Or both."

  I was just beginning to wonder why Stephen wasn't answering my question and whether he would when he said, his teeth seemingly clenched in exasperation, "I can't believe you would even ask. Has it really come to that?"

  I considered pressing him, but I knew by the glacial disgust in his tone that I didn't dare. Besides: I had my answer.

  "There's another thing," he said.

  "Yes?"

  "Aaron said you might want to get some coaching from a lawyer."

  "Me?"

  "That's righ
t--but only so you'll be prepared when the Vermont State Police come to interview you."

  "I'll take that under advisement," I agreed. But still I didn't turn around, because I didn't want him to see that I was no longer able to bridle my tears. I didn't turn around when I told him that I thought he should go.

  "Thank you," he said, misunderstanding me completely, perhaps because he couldn't see my face. "I'll return as soon as I can."

  "No," I told him. "Please don't. I'd rather you didn't ever come back."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  People often share with me stories of the angels who have dropped into their lives and how they have been saved by them. When the tale comes via e-mail or the postal service and the writer seems to need a response, either my assistant or I will answer it. Usually it is my assistant who pens the first draft, and the year that the Haywards would die my assistant was a young Columbia grad student named Rick who once was less than a second away from qualifying for the Olympics in the four-hundred-meter freestyle and still looked an awful lot like a lifeguard. His fiancee, two years his senior, was already an assistant editor in publishing (though not at my house), and I expected that eventually Rick would follow her into the profession.

  About an hour after I had broken up with Stephen--and this was, in my mind, an irrevocable break--Rick came by with some letters and e-mails from readers that were hauntingly beautiful and precisely what I needed at that moment. There were encounters that were stirring, and there were encounters that were poignant. A young soldier in Afghanistan e-mailed me that he had been driving a jeep with three comrades in a mountainous stretch of Uruzgan when a female angel stood in the path of the vehicle. He veered around the spirit and wound up careening into the grass off to the side. No one was hurt, and when the soldiers went to the spot on the road where the driver insisted he had seen the angel, they discovered an IED that would have detonated like a mine had they driven over it. Another reader shared with me that at the precise moment when her much-beloved mother expired in a hospice, an angel was sitting calmly on the mattress beside the older woman and lifted the hands of the two generations of women, one already cold, and clasped them together for a brief moment. Then the room filled with light, causing two of the aides at the hospice to race there because they feared that the building was on fire, and thus there were three witnesses to the sight of the angel gently lifting the soul from the dead woman's body and carrying it like a honey moon bride off to heaven.

  That evening I felt that I needed an angel rather badly. My despair wasn't simply that Stephen had been sleeping with someone and hadn't told me; that alone wouldn't have sent me into such a funk. People have secrets. Certainly I do. It was that withholding this particular piece of information about Alice Hayward, given how paramount the woman's life and desperately sad end had been in our brief time together, was a breach of faith that made tawdry our supposed intimacy. I was hurt: There is no getting around that detail. Moreover, it had caused me to question so much else of what he'd told me. If he could withhold this facet of his involvement with the Haywards, what else wasn't he telling me? The reality is that I suspected he really had murdered at least one of the Haywards, and so I needed to separate myself from him while I prayed for guidance and tried to understand what I was feeling.

  As he did every day that he came to my loft, Rick had prioritized the letters and e-mails that were most important. Usually these were from my editor or my literary or speaking agents, or they were from journalists. But the chaos that surrounds the launch of a book had settled down, and so when I was alone that evening, there were mostly e-mails and letters from readers. Among them were those stories from the soldier in Afghanistan and the woman who had witnessed an angel cradle her mother's soul. But the one that caused me to think about what was most important in my life--what I really needed to do next--was from a fifteen-year-old girl in Ohio whose father had died a year earlier after a brief battle with brain cancer. The teenager shared with me that she was an only child and she and her father had been very close. For months after her father's death, both she and her mother had been nearly catatonic. Her mother, an accountant in Columbus, had returned to work in the small firm where she was employed, and the teen had resumed her schooling after three weeks away. But neither was functioning especially well, and separately they both had begun seeing therapists who specialized in grief counseling.

  "I know from your book that angels often have real halos and wings," the young woman wrote to me in her e-mail, "but my mother and I both believe that Dr. Noel is an angel, too." I Googled Dr. Noel and found that she was a psychiatrist whose first name was Corona. Corona Noel. Is there a more perfect name for an angel? The teenager said that she and her mother were getting better now, and she wanted to know if I thought angels sometimes took on the guise of a mortal and whether she might have been correct that her therapist was a celestial being. She also wanted to know more about how I had handled the deaths of my own parents and what it had been like to see their bodies after they had died. Apparently it was soothing to her to have seen her father's face at peace after the physical and emotional agony he had endured in the last months of his life.

  The e-mail, I realized, was both a responsibility--as is much of the correspondence I receive--and a message for me. This young woman, wise beyond her years, may not have met her own angel yet (though it did indeed seem possible to me that this Corona Noel had celestial connections), but I found myself contemplating the notion that she herself was being inspired by an angel. By my angel. Alone at my desk, I found myself sniffling back real tears because I hadn't seen my parents' bodies after they had died, and I grew alarmed at what I had missed. What, I wondered, had happened to them? How had they been handled and treated by the pathologist?

  Moreover, I concluded that in my self-absorption--my interest in Stephen and my misguided concern for the man--I had lost sight of someone very, very important: Katie. My sister had been right that afternoon when we'd gone skinny-dipping at the funnel. I should have been focusing more on the girl. And so I looked at my calendar and I pinpointed a row of blank days. I decided I would return to Vermont and visit the newly orphaned daughter of George and Alice Hayward.

  I AM NOT sure how Stephen had expected me to respond to his confession that he'd been sleeping with Alice Hayward. Had he anticipated that my heart would be so resilient that I wouldn't be hurt? I know he didn't believe that I would have an angel to care for my wounds, because he had no faith in angels at all. He had no faith in anything. But did he presume that I would--and here is a word that is too often misused by therapists and self-help gurus who believe we can be healed with mortal counseling alone--understand? Did he think either that I would understand that he'd had an affair with a parishioner or that I would understand his reluctance to tell me? In hindsight it was the latter that disturbed me far more. People--therapists and pastors alike--sometimes succumb to temptation and move from healing to hurting. The preacher becomes the predator. We are all flawed, and I could have forgiven that. In my mind I imagine Stephen telling me about the affair our first afternoon together on the parsonage porch. (And though the prosecutor from Vermont, at least in the early weeks of her investigation, didn't believe that that Tuesday afternoon was the first time Stephen and I had met, it was.) Or, more likely, I hear him telling me about his intimate and inappropriate relationship with the poor woman our first Saturday in my loft in the city. He certainly could have told me then. He had ample opportunities that afternoon and evening.

  But he didn't.

  The fact was, I realized, he was never going to tell me. He only confessed when he did because he had to: because that investigator with the state police had learned that he had been sleeping with Alice Hayward and he was a suspect in the murder of one or both of the Haywards--and now, it seemed, I might be, too.

  It all left me a little sick and despairing in ways that I hadn't experienced in a very long time. I honestly wasn't sure what I found more troubling: the reality that
Stephen Drew was comfortable keeping such a secret to himself or the possibility that he was capable of murder.

  And as the days passed, it seemed more and more conceivable to me that he had indeed killed George Hayward. Alice? No, not really. I saw the horror unfolding in the same conventional manner as, in the end, would that state's attorney. Stephen had gone to the house that Sunday night in July and found Alice already dead and George passed out drunk on the couch. And so he had taken the fellow's handgun and murdered him.

  The world is filled with human toxins--not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actual people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous--and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light. As scarred and as wounded as my sister had been by the thorns that mark our paths through this world, Stephen Drew was even more seriously damaged: Unlike Amanda, he had become a thorn himself.