Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  But I did believe that Christ had died on the cross and then risen. And with an increasingly warm feeling—not exactly ardor, but certainly absorption—I began to see the possibility of a life of service in the ministry. I envisioned a country parish in New England, a congregation not unlike the Baptist church that my grandparents had attended in Vermont. Toward the end of my third and final year, the expressed needs of the pulpit committee from a little church in Haverill, Vermont, were paired with my expressed desires. There was some concern from the committee that I was unmarried: Like many churches, they wanted their pastor to have a wife, if only because a minister’s spouse actually does a good deal of the heavy lifting when it comes to running a church. But their instinct was that I would not cause them public scandal or betray their trust, and soon enough I would find a wife. The church was a little more than an hour from my grandparents’, and the pastor there assured the deacons and stewards in Haverill that the Drews were good people, essentially vouching for my character though he knew me only in the most distant way: as the grandson of Foster and Amy Drew, both newly departed, and the son of Richard Drew, who had left Vermont some four and a half decades earlier.

  Their instinct, of course, was wrong on both counts. But at the time it had looked like a reasonable match, and for fourteen years it had seemed to most of the world to have worked.

  “WHERE IS KATIE now?” Heather Laurent asked me that Tuesday afternoon, as we sat on the porch. The sun was finally burning its way through the milky shroud above and was just starting its slow descent to the west. The shadows from the trees began spreading like moss across my backyard.

  “She’s with Alice’s best friend, Ginny O’Brien. So are Alice’s parents—Katie’s grandparents. They drove here from Nashua on Monday morning as soon as they heard. They’ve been here ever since.”

  “They’ll be in Haverill through the funeral?”

  “Oh, most definitely. And probably beyond.”

  “And George’s family?”

  “They come from somewhere outside of Buffalo. They’re staying in Albany.”

  “Keeping their distance.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you spoken to the families?”

  “I have: both families.”

  “You know, Alice’s funeral service is going to be a circus,” she murmured, and she noticed for the first time the swallows that were nesting under a porch eave over my shoulder. The mother bird seemed content to allow me to share the space with her—she had, after all, built her nest right here—but only rarely did the male remain beside her when I wandered out onto the deck. A deacon who loved animals had nicknamed them Lil and Phil.

  “It will be large,” I agreed. “But the worst will be the presence of Katie’s friends. All those teenagers and the Youth Group. Though Alice’s friends will be sobbing, it will be the tears of the teenagers that will be hardest for me to see from the pulpit. But I wouldn’t expect it to be a circus.”

  “There will be media.”

  “True.”

  “It’s going to be a hard one for you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I’d say it will be rather unpleasant.”

  “When is it?”

  “Thursday. Day after tomorrow.”

  “I presume it will be at your church.”

  “Of course.”

  She took a breath and sighed. She rubbed her arms as if she were cold, but that wasn’t likely the reason on this particular afternoon. I noticed for the first time that she had a pianist’s fingers: slender and long, with impeccably manicured nails. She had coated them with a clear polish that picked up the sun when she held her hands the right way. “That poor child,” she said softly. “That poor, poor child.”

  “Young woman,” I corrected her. “She’s fifteen.”

  “Do you know her well?”

  “I do. She’s smart. Funny. She’s going places. She’s not really active in the Youth Group anymore. I wish she were. But she’s a good kid, a good student. She’s usually in the school dramas and musicals. Right now her major form of adolescent defiance is a small stud in her right nostril.”

  “Her father let her do that?”

  “It was a surprise to both parents. Her father did not take it well,” I said, though I knew he had punished only Alice.

  “I remember when I first pierced my ears.”

  “Rebellion?”

  “Emancipation.”

  “Katie will do okay. She’ll get through this.”

  “Yes, she will. But I still hate to see in my mind the things she’s probably witnessed in that home over the years. Has she been back to the house yet?”

  “No. Some of us—her friend Tina’s mom, Ginny, me—packed the clothes that seemed most useful. Shoes. Sneakers. A nightgown. Cosmetics, some jewelry. But I have no idea if we brought the items that really mattered to her. The right hoodie, for instance. The right jeans. The right teddy bear. Think back to your adolescence and what your room was like when you were fifteen—how many outfits you probably tried on before you found what you really wanted to wear. The piles of stuff on the floor were just unbelievable. The mounds of clothes. The piles of DVDs and CDs and books. The cords for iPods and cell phones and her laptop, as well as her laptop itself. I had no idea which music mattered to her and which didn’t—what she had already put on her iPod and what she was planning to download when she had some time to kill. She actually had a bureau drawer filled with nothing but trolls and tins of jewelry and rub-on tattoos. Maybe she hadn’t touched it since she was seven. But maybe it was the most important thing in the room to her. I just had no idea. None of us did. So at some point Katie probably will go back to the house. She won’t ever live there again, because she’s only fifteen. But she will have to go back inside.”

  “Oh, I disagree. She may want to go back. But anyone in the world would understand if she didn’t—if she refused to go back in there. I’m sure you or her friends or other parents would be more than willing to pack everything up for her.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Where will she live?” She seemed to ask the question with great care, perhaps because she was afraid I had been offended when she’d corrected me. Actually, I hadn’t been bothered at all. She had made sense.

  “There are options,” I answered. “Her grandparents in Nashua are one possibility. But maybe she’ll live here in Haverill with the Cousinos—with her friend’s family. She might want to finish high school in Vermont and be with the kids she’s known since she was six.”

  “And this Cousino family is okay with that?”

  “So I gather.”

  “Have you talked with Katie?”

  “Yes.” This time I did find myself slightly affronted. As her pastor I had visited with Katie both yesterday and today, and so my answer may have sounded a little curt. Afterward I hoped I had sounded only surprised.

  “How would you say she was doing?”

  “She’s devastated, of course. In shock. But she’s doing what she needs to do,” I answered. It was the first thought that came into my mind. “She’s endured the questions the state police had about her parents, as well as the questions of a social worker and a therapist, and she’s volunteered all the information they could possibly want.”

  “Is she incredibly angry with her father?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  She nodded. “But I’m sure she also feels some anger toward her mother.”

  “For not getting out?”

  “For allowing it to happen. For being a victim.”

  “I imagine she’s feeling some of that, too.”

  “I’d like to talk to her. She’s one of the reasons I’m here. Do you think that would be possible?”

  “It’s certainly possible. But I’m not sure it’s appropriate. She already has a small army of grief counselors—amateurs and professionals—at her disposal,” I said.

  “Is the house still a—what’s the expression?—a crime scene?”

&n
bsp; “No. The state police and the investigators from the crime lab were done by the end of Monday afternoon. It was pretty obvious what had happened. A lot of yesterday is already a blur, but I think most of the official people were gone by four-thirty or five.”

  “Ah, the official people.”

  “You know what I mean. The medical examiner. The detectives.”

  “Can I see the house? Or is that inappropriate, too?”

  “The door’s locked. But I think Ginny has the key, if you’d like.”

  “I don’t think like is exactly the right word,” she said. “But I do want to see the inside of the house.”

  “A visit to the Book Depository while in Dallas?”

  “Something like that.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll call Ginny. The two of us can go for a visit.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You’ve been asking me questions for the last half an hour.”

  “Just why do you blame yourself for George and Alice Hayward’s deaths?”

  “I don’t blame myself precisely,” I told her, careful to keep my voice even, a monotone of reasonability. “But I do fear that I gave Alice permission.”

  “To die.”

  “Yes.”

  “At the baptism you told me about.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you marry them?”

  “No. They were married in Bennington years before I met them.”

  “Did you want her to leave him? Just kick him out—or get the heck out of that house herself and never go back?”

  Yes, I thought, in hindsight I did want her to get out of that house. Briefly, perhaps, I even wanted her to move into mine. Into this parsonage. But of course I didn’t say that. Because no one knew. Because Alice and I had barely even tiptoed around such a notion, even when we were alone in her home and content in the fog of a postcoital torpor—when, usually, all things seem possible and all lovers are optimists.

  “I did,” I answered simply. “I kept hoping she would take Katie and run. Go anywhere. Move in with her parents in Nashua. Move in with Ginny right here. Perhaps get a place of her own in Bennington.”

  “It’s not that easy. Not emotionally, not financially.”

  “I know. She was married to a reprehensible man. She would have needed someone willing to step up and protect her. Still, I wish … ”

  “What do you wish?”

  “I never want to see a marriage go belly-up.” It was not what I had planned to say, but I had to say something.

  “Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder?”

  “Something like that. And sometimes I’m afraid that she tried to preserve the marriage for Katie.”

  “That’s completely ridiculous, you know.”

  “I do. And sometimes I’m afraid that she clung to the marriage because she was afraid she didn’t know what would become of her if she didn’t.”

  “The devil she knew?”

  “Precisely.”

  “What about her friends? What did they want?”

  I understood what she was getting at, and she was correct. “I know Ginny wanted her to divorce him. She loathed George. Thought he was absolutely despicable. She was thrilled when Alice got a temporary relief-from-abuse order and he went to live in their cottage on Lake Bomoseen for a couple of months.”

  “When was that?”

  “Just before Valentine’s Day. He came back just before Memorial Day.”

  “Not all that long ago.”

  “No.”

  “So she got a restraining order—”

  “A temporary restraining order. The police served it while George was at his office one Monday afternoon. There was a hearing scheduled a week later. Neither Alice nor George ever showed up.”

  “That’s common.”

  “I gather. Tell me, are you married? I presume not, because you’re not wearing a wedding ring.” I think I inquired largely because I wanted a respite from her questions. But it’s also possible that on some level I still felt the need to be pastoral—to give her the chance to talk about herself for a moment. I may have been phoning it in by then—I may have been phoning it in for months—but old habits die hard.

  “I’m not. But someday I will be, if only because I have a six-year-old girl’s obsession with weddings,” she said, and she shook her head as if she were in the midst of some small, odd moment of rapture. “Of all the rites of passage a culture creates for itself, weddings are perhaps the most beautiful. And, perhaps, the most mysterious.”

  “Well, I certainly preferred doing marriages to funerals.”

  “Preferred? Why the past tense? Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

  “No.”

  “You really think you’re finished?” She smiled. “Come on, your faith is that fragile?”

  I sighed. Across the street the small river burbled and one of the children there squealed. The swallow adjusted herself on her eggs, using her beak to pick at something invisible to me on her wing. And somewhere not all that far away, a dog barked. Years earlier, I recalled, when I had been a junior in college and a member in good standing of what some students dismissively called the God Squad, I had been asked—challenged, more precisely—by a classmate who viewed himself as an atheist to explain Auschwitz and cancer and typhoons in Bangladesh that drowned tens of thousands of people. As I sat on my porch that first afternoon with Heather Laurent, I wondered what I’d said; my world had shrunk to such a degree that I honestly couldn’t remember how I had responded. I wasn’t sure what I’d felt—other, of course, than any sentient person’s reasonable sadness—at all the funerals over which I had officiated and all the times I had sat beside beds in hospitals and homes and held people’s hands as they died. As my own father had expired in a hospital room and spoke his last words before he sank into unconsciousness: “Go. Just … go.” (I didn’t. My mother, my sister, and I would stay till the end.) I had watched them all depart with what must have seemed to them as confidence and composure, my faith as solid and intact as the heavy pasta pot that hung on a hook above the parsonage stove. But something was different now: It was as if age or rust had worn a great hole in the bottom of that pot and my faith had trickled out like warm water. There were no answered prayers here. And so instead of addressing Heather’s question, I observed, “With everything that must be going on in your life right now, you’ve come here.”

  “And that surprises you.”

  “It astonishes me.”

  “It shouldn’t,” she said.

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “Not at all. My father used to beat the living hell out of my mother.”

  My stomach lurched a little bit at the revelation, but years of pastoral hand-holding kept me from reacting in any visible way, and I mouthed the words I’d probably said hundreds of times every year of my ministerial life: “I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You weren’t the one who hit her.”

  “Still … I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, no. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dropped the bombshell on you like that. I’m used to most people knowing.”

  “Knowing?”

  “A lot of their story is in Angels and Aurascapes.”

  “Are they divorced?”

  She gazed out at the maples behind my house and then looked me squarely in the eye. “They’re dead. When I was fourteen, a few months after my sister and I were sent away to boarding school, my father killed my mother—and then killed himself.”

  FROM ANGELS AND AURASCAPES BY HEATHER LAURENT (PP. 51–52)

  … and then killed himself.

  The head of the school, who had been deferring to the school psychiatrist for most of the past half hour, finally spoke. He asked my sister and me what we wanted to do, but neither of us answered him. We couldn’t, because neither of us was capable of giving him the answers he needed. What did I want to do? My God, I was fourteen years old. I wanted to bring my mothe
r back. I wanted to go back in time. I wanted to know where I was going to live—who was going to take care of me. I wanted to learn how to drive. Those were the things that crossed my mind in response to his question, those were the first desires that came to me. And what did my sister want? She was sixteen, she probably wanted pretty much the same things and to have the same sorts of answers. And the headmaster could grant us absolutely none of our desires or answer our most basic questions.

  I understood, of course, that traveling back in time and getting my mother back were implausible wishes and never going to happen. But as we sat in the headmaster’s office, I imagined quite concretely what I would do if I could drive—what, to go back to that initial question of his, I wanted.

  And I understood I wanted this: I wanted to drive to my grandmother’s house in upstate New York and explain to her that I was all finished with this fine school in New England. And then I wanted to go to one of the huge shopping malls near the old air force base in Plattsburgh, the ones kept in business by the Canadians, and buy all the clothes that my father had forbidden me from wearing and that my mother said I didn’t dare bring into the house. I wanted, in essence, to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps that revealed my shoulders and tight-fitting shorts made from blue jeans that had been faded almost to a robin’s egg blue. I wanted to get my ears pierced at the kiosk in the corridor by the poster-and-frame shop in the mall, and then I wanted to buy earrings. Lipstick. Mascara.