Secrets of Eden

by Chris Bohjalian

  Unfortunately, it wasn't long after that when, for whatever the reason, her affair with Stephen began winding down. And then, a little later, the flowers from Dad started coming. It was like he knew that now was the perfect time to wedge the toe of his boot back in the door.

  It's funny, but I have a childhood memory of Mom reading to me in the apartment we had lived in when I was a little girl in Bennington that I link in my mind with that spring. Mom is reading to me from Blueberries for Sal, which I still have, incidentally, and I'm curled up in her arms in this massive rocking chair that she told me once was the chair in which she liked to nurse me when I was a baby. I guess I'm, like, four. The chair went with us when we moved to Haverill. And one Sunday afternoon that spring when Dad was gone, I saw Mom sitting in that chair and reading a novel. The dust jacket had the same blues and yellows as the cover of Blueberries for Sal, and the afternoon sun was coming in through the window just the way it had that day long ago when I was curled up in her lap in Bennington. And just like that day when I was four, I felt totally at peace and totally secure. That's what that spring had felt like when Dad was gone. And that feeling, I guess, is what my dad had taken away from me for most of my life.

  BETWEEN THE FIRST days of February and the last half of May, I never saw my parents together. They had a colossal fight the Sunday night after Groundhog Day. (Looking back, Sunday might have been the night they were most likely to collide. Maybe, like me, my dad just found Sunday nights totally depressing. You know, it's the end of the weekend and school and work are all you have to look forward to for the next five days. And even though my mom had Mondays off, it's possible she felt those same end-of-the-weekend blahs, too, because for the rest of the world the weekend was ending.) Nearly three and a half months would pass between the fight that led Mom to get the temporary restraining order and the day I came home from school and there was Dad at the kitchen table. I was living with my mom that whole time, but by the end of March I was seeing my dad again, either in Manchester or one time at our cottage on the lake.

  I'm not sure why my dad started that fight in February. Actually, I'm not sure why he started most of their fights. There was never a good reason. Usually he was drunk, but not that Sunday night. I mean, he had been drinking. That I know. But he wasn't so drunk that he couldn't drive. After all, he got in his car and drove away on his own when Mom told him to get out. At first he'd said there was no way he was leaving his own house. He reminded Mom that her salary at the bank sure didn't cover the mortgages on the house or the cottage or the car payments. (I must admit, until that night I didn't even know we had car payments. I knew we had mortgages. But I hadn't really thought about how we might not own Dad's BMW or Mom's Accord outright.) But she held her ground. She had rolled up the sleeve of her sweater and her turtleneck so she could hold an ice pack on her elbow. Dad had, for reasons that probably didn't make any sense and certainly no longer matter, pushed her down the stairs. I saw him do it. And, worse, he saw that I had witnessed it. I think we all thought he had broken her arm. He hadn't, but despite the ice pack it would swell up like she was Popeye. She also had a bruise on her hip that was so black and blue it looked like a screen saver of outer space. I think Dad was torn when Mom told him to get out. Should he get out, like his wife was demanding, or should he take her to the hospital? Mom would say to me later that night that his big concern was his reputation. It wouldn't look good for him if he had broken his wife's arm pushing her down the stairs. But my mom also thought it wouldn't have looked good for her, either. She would go to the hospital the next morning, just in case. But I don't think she would have gone if Monday hadn't been her day off. Still, she did get her arm and her back X-rayed. Nothing was broken. But someone at the hospital must have said something to her, because it was on the way back to Haverill that she detoured to the courthouse and got what is called a relief-from-abuse order and had the papers served to Dad before he could come home.

  Dad, I assume, had thought he was just leaving for the night. And so it must have been quite the shocker when the police showed up at his little suite of offices above the toy store. I don't know what he told his secretary or his accountant or anyone else who might have been present about why a couple of policemen were there. But I'm sure he figured out something. He was pretty fast on his feet when he was sober. And, like I said, I'm sure a lot of the world thought he had left Mom, not the other way around. He was, in many people's eyes, a pretty solid catch.

  Months and months later, Josie explained to me that the police had probably told Mom that they could arrest him, if she wanted. But she didn't want that. She just wanted him out. She just wanted a little peace. And, maybe, she just wanted to be with Stephen.

  Anyway, she never went to court when she had the chance.

  JUST AS THERE were times when my dad wasn't a total jerk to my mom, I have memories of him trying to be a pretty good dad with me. (Sometimes he even succeeded.) I used to love to visit him at his stores or that restaurant of his when I was younger. He seemed extremely important, and so that made me feel important. His employees treated me like a princess. He used to do a lot of paperwork for the restaurant at a table near the door to the kitchen, because when it was quiet, he could get work done and when it was crazy busy (which sometimes it was), he could see the whole dining room and get a sense of what worked in the restaurant and what didn't. He could see how his servers moved in and around the tables. (And, just maybe, he knew that they knew he was watching, and he liked that idea. I mean, if he liked controlling Mom, why wouldn't he like controlling his employees?) I remember a couple of times doing homework there when I was in the fifth grade, and it made math and geography a lot more fun. The work wasn't hard, and I ate tons of cornbread with butter and dirty rice. And more than that, Dad seemed to be in a good mood on those occasions, and that always boded well for my mom and for a quiet evening at the house when we got home.

  My dad never drank at work, at least on those times when I visited him. Even as a kid I had figured out the connection between the beer and the beatings. That doesn't excuse it, of course, but my mom used to insist that Dad loved her and things would be fine if it weren't for the alcohol. I don't believe that, personally. I know there were times when he was horrible to her when he was completely sober. He may have been worse when he'd had a couple of beers, but there was always the chance he'd be a bastard regardless of whether he'd been drinking.

  I MAY HAVE been a little wild that autumn, but in late September I also got coaxed back into the church Youth Group. I liked the older man who was the interim pastor, and I liked the young woman the church had brought in as a special youth pastor. Sometimes I think they brought her in just for me. She had a stud in her nose, too, and she thought my tattoo was beautiful. Her name was Julie. She wouldn't be around long, because soon she would move on to a much bigger church in Burlington. But she was only, like, twenty-two or twenty-three, and we talked a lot. I remember the third Sunday in October really well. She convinced me to spend the afternoon helping to chaperone the little kids in Haverill who were carving pumpkins. It was the two of us and Tina and a couple of deacons in this big hay field near the center of the village. A few of the parents stayed, but most of them dropped off their kids and ran. And while a lot of the children were in the fourth and fifth grades and were helping their younger brothers and sisters, many of the kids came up to my waist and shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near knives the lengths of their forearms. And there must have been eighty children there.

  A fellow in the church named Mr. Humphrey had donated the pumpkins, and he was one of the grown-ups who stayed. He was a little older than my parents had been, and his real business was this beautiful bed-and-breakfast that he and his wife owned. There seemed to be weddings there all the time. They had things like a pumpkin patch and strawberry fields and blueberry bushes, but they were mostly so the guests would feel they were staying on this working farm.

  Anyway, the plan that Sunday was that each k
id would carve a pumpkin and then Mr. Humphrey was going to stand up on this hay wagon and name them. He did this every year, and he was really pretty funny. Sometimes he'd give the jack-o'-lanterns names that a five-year-old would think were hysterical: Oogly-Boogly if it had massive eyes or Bobby Booger if its most obvious feature was its nose. And sometimes he would name the pumpkin after someone who had been in the news a lot that autumn, and so election years were always easier for him than other years. I mean, he wasn't Jon Stewart, but he was pretty fast on his feet. And all of the children would howl with laughter no matter what, because they were tanked up on cookies and brownies the Women's Circle had baked, and no matter what they were going to get a coupon worth a dollar at the Haverill General Store as a prize.

  Counting the parents who hung around and Mr. Humphrey, who was mostly just surveying the scene like a rock star, there were about ten adults or young adults looking out for those eighty elementary-school kids. That's not a bad ratio if the ten adults are schoolteachers who know what they're doing and the young adults aren't that young. But it's not terrific if two of the chaperones are teenagers like Tina and me and two are deacons somewhere between the ages of seventy-five and death.

  And then, of course, one of those two teenagers would lose it. That would be me. For about twenty-five minutes, Julie and one of the few moms who stuck around had to care for me off to the side of the field and watch me sit in the mown grass sobbing and sipping apple cider from a paper cup. One minute I would be howling like a kindergartner who was left behind on the school bus, and the next I would be unable to breathe. It was like I had forgotten how. And sobbing without breathing is no easy trick. At one point, Tina told me later, I was braying sort of like a donkey.

  What set me off? It was this carving knife that a girl named Alicia was using. Alicia was, I think, five. And the knife had this brown wooden handle with rivets and this long row of ovals along the blade. The ovals didn't get smaller as the blade narrowed, they simply took up more of the blade. And for a few seconds I watched her struggle to poke the knife through the thick rind of her pumpkin, twisting it sometimes and stabbing it others. (See what I mean about what a disaster just waiting to happen that whole day was? It's a miracle that none of the kids gouged out one of their own eyes or took off one of their own tiny fingers.) She was bringing her little arm up and down, up and down, but she wasn't very strong and so the tip never punctured the pumpkin. It kept bouncing off the gourd like it was Super Pumpkin.

  And that's when I had this weird image, which I realized was actually a weird memory. When I was five, I had done something sort of like that with a knife that looked exactly like the one Alicia was using. It had the same rivets on the handle and it had those same ovals along the blade. In my memory I was on the tile floor of our apartment in Bennington, a place I remembered in some ways only because of the pictures in the photo albums and a couple of old videos my mom had transferred onto a disc. And I was trying to puncture something with the knife. A basketball. I was trying to pop my dad's basketball. When we lived in Bennington and he was younger, he played pretty often with some friends at a school playground with a couple of hoops not far from our apartment. And then there was this memory: I was trying to destroy my dad's basketball with that knife, because the night before I had seen him threatening my mom. And the knife he'd been using was the very same kind Alicia was using now. It was dark out, and I'd heard a commotion in the kitchen. I came out of the bedroom, and there was my mom in her nightgown pressed up against the cabinet that held the broom and the vacuum and the cleaning stuff (all of which had these labels Mom had put on them that said something like "Mr. Yuck," so I wouldn't start guzzling the toilet-bowl cleaner), and my dad had one hand around her neck and was practically lifting her off the floor. In his other hand was the knife, and he was holding it near her cheek. He was talking in such a low voice that I couldn't hear a word he was saying, but I could tell by the tone it was pretty darn menacing. Looking back, I don't imagine he was threatening to kill her. When I think about where he was holding the point of the knife, I guess he was only threatening to disfigure her. Scar forever that pretty face.

  I must have said something, because Mom saw me out of the corner of her eye--she really couldn't turn her head--and she must have managed to mumble something to Dad. Because he turned and saw me. And when he did, he looked at the knife in his hand like he didn't know what it was or how it had even gotten there. He let go of Mom and tossed the knife on the kitchen table, and then he rumpled my hair as he started past me to their bedroom. He was shaking his head, but at what, I couldn't have said. Meanwhile my mom slid to the kitchen floor, her back still against the cabinet, and she was crying so desperately that for a minute she wasn't even able to scoot across the tile floor to me. And so I went to her.

  It was the next day that I started trying to destroy my dad's basketball. I didn't have any more success with the rubber than Alicia was having with the pumpkin rind, but Mom found me before I managed to slice through an artery or cut off a leg. And that night Dad took Mom out to some fancy dinner and I had a baby-sitter. And soon after that they started to build the house in Haverill.

  That afternoon at the pumpkin carving, it all grew connected in my mind: the flashback of Dad scaring the hell out of Mom, my getting medieval on a basketball, and the whole path that would lead us from Bennington to Haverill and to the two of them dead in the living room. I think that's why I lost it that afternoon. I mean, I had plenty of other reasons to lose it that autumn. But I attribute my mini-breakdown at the pumpkin carving to that flashback. Eventually Tina and Julie and that mom got me calmed down, and I returned to the carving. But I'm pretty sure no one handed me a knife, and I helped mostly by scooping out pumpkin guts for the kids, because no seven-or eight-year-old likes pulling out the cold, mealy crap inside a pumpkin.

  SOMETIMES I WONDERED if Stephen saw something in Heather that he didn't see in my mom. When I try to be objective, I guess Heather was a little bit prettier, but my mom was no slouch. I mean that. And while my mom may have put up with more from my dad than she should have, at least she wasn't seeing angels in parking lots the way most people spy seagulls. And I always try to remind myself of this: Stephen did not dump my mom for Heather. If I were to guess, he and Mom had separated early in May. Stephen wouldn't even meet Heather until the end of July. Two days after my parents had died.

  But my relationship with Heather, distant as it was, was weirdly complicated, too. On the one hand, I really couldn't help but see her as my mom's competitor for Stephen's affections, even though my mom was gone. What did she have that Mom didn't? And so that would make me want to push her away out of loyalty. But then there was the fact that she understood more about what I was experiencing than any of the social workers or therapists that everyone kept parading before me. She knew what it was like to suddenly be an orphan (and I am an orphan) and to feel all the time like you're an imposition. And that is what I felt like: If you're a kid without parents, even a teenager, you're always forced to depend on the kindness of other people. You feel indebted to everyone. I had known the Cousinos forever, but it's not like I was their kid. But there I was, living under their roof and eating their food and using their bathrooms. I could have lived with my grandparents in New Hampshire (for obvious reasons, my dad's parents were never really an option in my mind), but I had lived in the same village since I was six and been friends with the same group of kids for almost a decade. Does any kid really want to move when she only has two years of high school left? No, of course not. So I chose to be a nuisance.

  Heather also understood what it was like to see your mom bullied by your dad and be totally powerless to stop it. Sometimes we talked about all the fights we had witnessed. It seemed like her dad would say the same sorts of things as mine and her mom would sometimes hide out in the same ridiculous world of denial. Who knows? Maybe wife beaters really are one-trick ponies. They're bullies, but about as creative as the bullies you hear about all the
time these days who are my age.

  And, of course, Heather was famous. Not famous to me, at least not at first. But soon I figured out that she was very well known to a lot of adults. Ginny, for instance, thought she was totally amazing. And there were at least fifteen videos of her that I found on YouTube. She had been on lots of talk shows and seemed right at home on those comfy couches with the beautiful hostesses. And I loved reading what people said about her books at the online bookstores. Some readers thought she was brilliant, and some thought she was in serious need of medication. Anyway, I would be lying if I said that her celebrity didn't appeal to me. It did. I thought it was very, very cool.

  But I kept reminding myself that there's more to life than being on talk shows and having lots of clips of yourself on YouTube. There's more to life than selling a boatload of books.

  And even after reading both of her books--and I read them carefully--I still didn't believe there were angels. I'd seen my mom's bruises, and there was no way I could reconcile those marks with angel wings.

  Sometimes I'd wonder if she and Stephen would ever get back together. I didn't see it happening, but Tina did. When we talked about it, she said I was like that old Aerosmith song "Jaded." She was wrong (and she was wrong about the song, too, because, I think it's more about a girl who is spoiled than a girl who is totally cynical), but I understood what she was getting at. She thought Stephen and Heather would be a good pair because they would, like, balance each other out. Maybe. But it would mean that Heather would have to get over the idea that Stephen had killed my dad, and for a million reasons that's never going to happen. And Stephen? I don't know. But I think he's built to live alone.