Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  I wanted to drive my friends to my house, and I wanted them all to sit with me on the front porch without fearing that my father would embarrass me with his temper or my mother with her drinking.

  That, I realized, was what I wanted to do.

  And, fortunately, those images of not-unconventional teenage taste crowded out the reality of what had actually happened to my mother at the hands of my father.

  Still, I hadn’t spoken aloud any of this, I hadn’t answered the head of the school’s question. Finally, after the sort of conversational lull that’s polite only after someone has died, he turned to my sister and asked Amanda what she wanted to do.

  “I want to go home,” I heard Amanda tell him, her voice appropriately subdued. She was an aspiring painter at the time and even then savored her solitude.

  The head of the school nodded and smiled gently. This was the right response, even if home—technically still that cold and massive Victorian, which, despite the resources of both my parents’ families, was in desperate need of a good scraping and painting—was about to become a pretty vague place.

  “And you, Heather?” he asked again. “What would you like?”

  “A shirt with spaghetti straps,” I answered. “And pierced ears.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  That afternoon Heather shared with me an abbreviated but nonetheless harrowing account of her parents’ sordid and, in the end, horrific marriage. In some ways its trajectory was eerily similar to the Haywards’. But, of course, in other ways it had its own idiosyncrasies and detours. Tolstoy was right about families. The most salient feature of her parents’ marriage was money: Both Alex and Courtney Laurent came from what my mother would refer to as “families with means,” though I am not sure that expression does justice to the veritable bank vaults that subsidized the Laurents. Apparently Alex and Courtney had grown accustomed to getting everything, needing nothing, and behaving in a fashion that suggested a complete uninterest in the responsibilities that came with all those advantages. The result, in Heather’s opinion, is that her father was selfish and spoiled, while her mother was entitled and helpless. It was, in her mother’s case, almost a learned helplessness. And so while Courtney Laurent had the fiscal resources at her disposal that most abused women lack, she would have needed someone to remind her of the reality that she had alternatives. Options. But Alex, in the tradition of most batterers, had seen to it by then that she was more or less entombed in the marriage: cut off from her family, out of touch with her closest friends. The Laurents had more money and more connections than the Haywards (though the Haywards were, by any fiscal barometer, extremely comfortable) and thus made a much bigger media splash when Alex Laurent shot his wife in the living room and then killed himself, but otherwise the scaffolding of the tragedy was not dissimilar.

  Later Heather and I ventured to Ginny O’Brien’s to retrieve the key to the Hayward house. Unlike me, Ginny knew exactly who Heather Laurent was, and in the woman’s presence her demeanor was transformed from shaken and grieving to a little giddy. She was suddenly a bit like a hyperactive puppy, and I was reminded of the Haywards’ affectionate but needy springer spaniel. Ginny had read Angels and Aurascapes, and when I introduced them, she told the author how much the book had meant to her—and how she had already marked A Sacred While as “to read” on all her online book forums and discussion groups, and suggested to the church book group that they tackle the new one together that autumn. (My sense, now having read both of Heather’s books, is that Ginny most likely was made deeply uncomfortable by Heather’s chapters on the “auras of death” but saw the logic and importance of, once in a while, taking a long walk in the woods with an angel.) We did not see either Katie or her grandparents, but I hadn’t expected we would. I had spent a part of the morning with the three of them in my office at the church, and I knew they had a variety of errands that afternoon that ranged from the merely unpleasant to the downright ghoulish. They were seeing the mortician in Bennington, for instance, to pick out a casket, and deciding whether Alice should be buried in the cemetery in Haverill or with other members of her family in Nashua. I knew that her parents were going to choose Nashua soon enough and were simply trying to spare the feelings of Alice’s friends and her pastor in Vermont. But they were nonetheless taking the time to visit the cemetery, an act of due diligence that couldn’t have been easy.

  George’s body—its eternal resting place was of great interest to Alice’s mother and father—was going to be buried back in Buffalo, which mattered because Alice’s family wanted to be sure that she was nowhere near the man who had killed her. Ginny, too. Ginny, however, had recommended cremating George Hayward, “since that vicious bastard’s soul is already roasting in hell, anyway.”

  Still, I could tell by Ginny’s puffy eyes that she had cried again that afternoon, suggesting to me that her anger was being subsumed by far healthier grief. She had found the strength to pull a comb through her hair and don a clean, creased polo shirt. Behind the house I could hear the growl of a lawn mower and the almost hypnotic way the noise waxed and waned like a wave.

  “How are the boys?” I asked as we stood in the front hallway.

  “Dan’s doing a little better than Walter. I sent Walter to the movies with everyone else,” she told me.

  “That was a good idea.” Both children were in middle school. Dan was eleven and Walter thirteen. I knew both boys well, and I wasn’t surprised that Walter was taking the Hayward tragedy hard. He was a little closer to Katie’s age and he was, by nature, more sensitive than most teenage males. I wondered how I would have responded at thirteen if my mother’s best friend had been strangled by her husband.

  “Yes. Anything to get him out of here for a while,” said Ginny. Then she added, “That’s Dan back there. He said he wanted to do something, so Walter showed him how to cut the grass. It’s his first time.”

  After we had the key, Heather signed Ginny’s copy of Angels and Aurascapes. The dust jacket was a carefully blurred photograph of a woman with windblown hair emerging nude from the sea, with what I presumed at first glance was a large beach umbrella behind her. It was only on the second look that I realized the umbrella was actually a seashell the size of a schooner sail and the sylph was a modern-day Venus. As we left, Heather told Ginny she would stop by later so she could chat with Katie and, if they were interested, her grandparents. I suppose I should have felt threatened. Mostly I was bemused.

  Then Heather and I went to the house where not two full days earlier George and Alice had died. We had taken my car, an American-made compact with camel-colored seats that felt awfully shabby compared to her Saab, and we drove up into the hills that circle the village of Haverill like an amphitheater. We passed the library and the grange and the volunteer fire department, where a group of boys in knee pads and shorts were riding their in-line skates and skateboards on the sloping asphalt before the company’s three-bay garage. We passed a sugarhouse, dormant since the first week in April, where two attractive but slightly dim yellow Labs that belonged to a family named McKenna were barking at the remnants of a fallen tree, as if the gnarled, rotting trunk were a crocodile. Occasionally, despite my frustration and grief, I found myself stealing a surreptitious glance at Heather’s legs as she sat in the passenger seat beside me. Her skirt had ridden up high on her thigh. Her stockings were nude, the type Alice had worn to the bank in the spring and, I assumed, in the early autumn—though I had never watched Alice dress in the early autumn.

  We even passed the Brookners’ pond, where I had baptized Alice, a shallow bowl of brown water no more than forty or fifty yards from the road. Over the years the occasional car had driven by while I’d been in the midst of those infrequent baptisms. The vehicles always made the immersion more moving to me, because they made it such a powerfully public statement: strangers passing by behind glass, perhaps unbelievers, witnesses to the short but unfathomable statement each soul was making that moment in the water—I believe. Now joined with Ch
rist Jesus by baptism, just as Christ was raised from the dead, someday so shall I.

  There.

  And we passed the cemetery at the top of the hill, with its markers and headstones and underground boxes of ash, the souls, it seemed to me that afternoon, gone not to heaven but merely to seed.

  “This really is a pretty corner of New England,” Heather said as I drove, and her voice pulled me from my little reverie of self-pity and gloom. I turned from the cemetery to her. Her earrings, I noticed, were gold studs with a small blue stone in each. “I hope you appreciate the aura of intimacy that envelops it.”

  I had absolutely no idea what to say to that and so I simply nodded and turned my eyes back to the road.

  “AND YOU WERE here Monday morning?” Heather asked me. There was a slight torpor to her voice, but her eyes were moving like the pendulum on a metronome as she carefully surveyed the living room.

  “Oh, I was here through early Monday evening.” The investigators from the state’s crime lab had taken what they needed and left. And while they had scrubbed away a good portion of the tumult in their work, there was still plenty left for those of us who wanted to help. Beside a window next to the couch where George’s body was found, was a small china cabinet with beveled-glass doors. With my hands in thick rubber gloves, I had used a sponge to wipe skull and brain from one long pane of glass. Then I had pulled bone chips and hair from the screen window just above it. The bullet, after perforating the skull and traveling through the cranium, had been extracted from the wall not far from that window by a member of the crime lab.

  “And this was the room where it happened?” she went on. The fact she had to ask was a testimony to our work.

  “Indeed.”

  “You know,” she said, “in books and movies, couples always fight in their bedrooms. Isn’t that something? It’s as if writers and filmmakers want to vilify the domestic center of love. But, in my opinion, that’s one of those great artistic conventions that’s absolutely wrong.”

  “Is this wisdom gleaned from your parents’ history or your conversations with readers?”

  She picked up a small pile of compact discs that were lying on the floor beside a particleboard entertainment center. I recognized the artists that Alice liked best and presumed that the rest of the discs had been selected by George. I realized I knew which ones she had transferred onto her own iPod. “Both,” Heather said as she flipped through the discs the way, once, I would have looked through a pack of baseball cards.

  “If people don’t fight in their bedrooms, where do they battle?”

  As if they were delicate antique plates, Heather placed the discs back on the floor where she had found them. “You really have led a sheltered life. You’ve never lived with anyone, have you? Not ever?” She said it with good humor, as if she were making fun of a costume I might have chosen for a Halloween party or a souvenir T-shirt I had brought back from Cape Cod. It was as if she were commenting upon something that was really of little importance to me.

  “Not ever,” I said simply. Then, a bit defensively, I added, “As Ire-call, my parents didn’t have a special room to work out their issues. They bickered everywhere they felt like it.”

  A line of photo albums sat on a shelf like volumes from that most dispensable of books in the digital age, an encyclopedia. Heather stared at them for a long moment, clearly desirous of reaching for one and opening it.

  “So where do most people fight?” I asked again.

  “The kitchen. Followed by the rooms that have the television sets. In some homes that’s a living room. In others it’s a den.”

  “The TV’s a bad influence?”

  “Oh, I don’t think TV is a good influence. But it’s not the reason. It just happens to be in those rooms that people inhabit the most often.” She finally gave in to her desire to see the pictures of George and Alice Hayward that were more revealing than the small head shots of each that had been in the newspapers, on television, and on the Web the past two days. She pulled the album that was most accessible from the shelf and began to flip through the pages. And then, much to my surprise, the smallest of whimpers—barely more than a sigh—escaped her lips, and she sat down in the chair opposite the couch where George’s body had been found. Her knees almost seemed to buckle like the legs of a portable card table. She wiped at her eyes, but it was too late. She was crying, and it was obvious.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know quite how this happened.”

  Usually I am fairly competent when it comes to crying women—or, for that matter, with crying men. A minister, even an unmarried one, embraces with impunity. But I wasn’t myself those days; the truth was, even now I’m not wholly sure whom I had become. And so I allowed her to regain a semblance of her usual composure—a demeanor, I had concluded, that was at once so unflappably serene (I would say ethereal, but, given her interest in angels, that would suggest I attributed a layer of autobiography to her books that she never intended) and so completely earnest that I had begun to understand her popularity. Certainly she was beautiful, but there are lots of beautiful women in this world. It was that she was telegenic: an individual whose competence was manifest and whose sincerity was phosphorescent. Her charisma was high-definition. She was the perfect pitchwoman for celestial guardians in the digital world.

  Finally I leaned over and glanced at the pictures that had set her off. They were of Katie alone and of Katie and Alice together.

  “She’s going to be so pretty,” she sniffled, referring to the now-orphaned fifteen-year-old.

  “She already is,” I said, but mostly I was focused on Heather. On how, despite my despair and my culpability and my innumerable failures as a minister and as a man, I could appreciate how lovely this woman was. I thought she might be a bit of a lunatic. But I also felt an undeniable attraction to her that managed to bob safely in the maelstrom of other emotions that would have taken precedence in a person of character—or at least in a person not unmoored—and sent it corkscrewing slowly but ceaselessly to the very bottom of the ocean.

  She was studying a group of photos, some of which I had already seen on the Facebook and MySpace pages of teens in the Youth Group. (I should tell you that I only visited those pages with the teenagers themselves, when they wanted to share a digital album with me at Youth Group or, for one reason or another, after school.) There was Katie with some of her friends making faces beneath a Broadway marquee in Manhattan; there she and her mother were—again, making silly faces—in bathing suits somewhere near their cottage on Lake Bomoseen. There she was with her grandparents from Nashua, a whole page of photos taken the previous Christmas. There was a series of Katie on the church van: literally, sitting on top of it with some members of the Youth Group, a Red Sox cap shading much of her face. It was one of the last times I would recall her going anywhere with the Youth Group.

  “You told me you’ve never been married,” I said. “I assume you don’t have any children.”

  “No, I don’t. But I’d love to someday.”

  “Think it’s in the cards?”

  “If the right man is, maybe. But I have no interest in being a heroic single mother.”

  She flipped some more pages, and there was Katie beside her friend Tina Cousino’s ancient gray Appaloosa. The horse had gone blind and lame and been euthanized a little over a year ago and was buried in a field by the Cousinos’ house. Tina and Katie had choreographed a small service that had left me both moved and impressed. They had asked me to eulogize the animal, and I had. And there were Katie and Alice together approaching the summit of Mount Equinox, a hike they had taken with a woman from Alice’s bank toward the very end of that period when Alice and George had been estranged. Mid-May, I recalled.

  “There aren’t very many of Alice and George together, are there?” she murmured.

  “Well, not in this album, anyway.”

  “I’d wager there aren’t many of George Hayward, period. If the pattern holds, h
e controlled the camera in the early years of the marriage, and so he took most of the pictures. Then, as their marriage deteriorated, they spent less time together in the sorts of situations that … someone would want to photograph.”

  “That’s probably true. Most people rarely saw them together over the last few years. Maybe at a parade. Maybe at the volunteer firefighters’ annual chicken barbecue. Maybe at a business fete of some sort in Manchester.”

  “George was a volunteer firefighter?”

  “He was for a while. He quit a few years ago, when he opened his third business. But he was still friends with some of the guys.”

  The room smelled of cleanser and disinfectant. It was a bad smell to me at that moment, almost a little sickening, and so I opened another window.

  “Who gardened?”

  “Alice.”

  “These pictures of tomatoes should be on seed packets.”

  “She was a good gardener, no doubt about it. You should peek at her garden before you leave.”

  Heather started to nod and then stopped. She was staring at old Easter photos, and George was in these. He was sitting between Katie and Alice on the very couch on which he would die, and for the briefest of seconds I presumed she had paused simply because here, at last, was a photo of George Hayward. But that wasn’t it, and I understood this almost instantly. It was, of course, the couch. She stared across the room at the wall where two days earlier there had been a couch. Now there was only a side table we had pressed against the Sheetrock to fill the void.

  “You removed the couch,” she said, and the idea seemed to horrify her.

  “We couldn’t clean it,” I said. “And so Ginny suggested we just haul it in a pickup truck to the dump.”