Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  LATER I SHOWED her Alice and George’s bedroom, a room with which I did have some familiarity, and Katie’s room, with which I had almost none. I knew its location, little else, because Alice respected her daughter’s privacy. The first time I really had been in there had been the day before, when that group of us had rounded up the sorts of things we thought Katie would want or would need.

  And then I drove the two of us back to the parsonage, and she climbed into her Saab and returned to Ginny’s house to wait for Katie. Later I would learn that she had stayed for dinner and she and Katie had taken one of those long walks at sunset that Heather claimed in her books were so healing. Ginny would tell me—realizing only when she was done speaking that such tidings might have been hurtful—that Heather’s effect on Katie Hayward had been almost transformative. Apparently Heather had known precisely how to comfort the girl; she had said whatever it was that Katie needed to hear to be reassured that she would get through this, she would survive, she would never be alone. She would be held up by an angel, her sagging soul kept aloft by wings that might be invisible but were nonetheless as strong and tangible as an eagle’s.

  “Of course, you’ve helped Katie, too!” Ginny said when she was done, an afterthought that was awkward but still very well intentioned. “Heather has just … you know, lived through this. She can relate to what Katie is experiencing.”

  “I’m fine,” I told Ginny, because I was. Ginny was right. Heather could provide Katie much better therapy than I, and not simply because—like Katie—she was an orphan whose father had murdered her mother. Unlike me, Heather still saw poetry in thunderheads and divinity in coincidence. The world, for her, still offered promise. “I’m glad Heather was here for Katie,” I added. “And I’m glad she was here for you, too.”

  AFTER LEAVING GINNY’S, Heather returned to the loft in which she lived in Manhattan. It was, she had insisted earlier that afternoon, a pretty modest place, a condo she had chosen that offered little in the way of amenities or style but was rich in memory and aura. I had the sense she was being coy: I knew that part of SoHo. She must have gotten home after midnight.

  I resolved that I would remain in Haverill through Alice’s funeral. I would carry out my responsibilities as best I could for the next forty-eight hours, helping the town in the manner that was expected of me. I would talk more with Katie and her grandparents, as well as with George’s mother and father, who as far as I knew would be in Albany and southern Vermont at least one more night. I would greet people at the funeral home during the calling hours on Wednesday evening. I would pray with the people who wanted me to pray with them, and I would visit the sick and the dying and the parishioners who were confused by the carnage that had occurred in our midst. I would offer comfort and counsel.

  As soon as Heather’s car had disappeared down the road to Ginny’s, I went to my office at the church and sat down with the church secretary, a remarkable woman named Betsy Storrs who had been working at the church a full decade before I arrived and had the demeanor of a grandmother (which she was) and the efficiency of a presidential secretary. At fifty-eight she learned to design websites, and our church’s site was the envy of the Baptist churches in our corner of New England. Together Betsy and I determined which meetings I should attend in the coming days and which ones I could miss, as well as which parishioners were most needy at the moment—the most distraught at what had occurred, the most shaken—and which ones were merely whiners hoping to leverage a murder-suicide for a little extra TLC.

  I should note that although Betsy helped with the triage, she never viewed her fellow parishioners in quite so misanthropic a fashion, especially in those days before I disappeared. I should also note that I was not always such a brooding, unsympathetic soul. Did I always have exactly the wrong constitution for a country pastor? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Though I had slid into my calling, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right path. At least initially. At least for a time. The fact is, it would be a very long while before I would view anyone in my flock as a whiner.

  When I was about to leave the church, I peered into the sanctuary and saw Joanie Gaylord kneeling alone in prayer before the chancel rail. We don’t kneel in prayer in my church, but Joanie—seventy-three that summer, an age and a birthday I knew well because Joanie was a prayer warrior and I never once missed one of her birthday parties—was on her knees that evening. I found this interesting and went to kneel beside her. The Women’s Circle had met that week at her home.

  “Would you pray with me?” she asked.

  “Of course I will,” I said softly, and I took her arthritic hand in mine while she prayed in silence beside me. We stayed like that for easily ten minutes, my mind straying into its more despairing alcoves despite my efforts to focus, before she cleared her throat and I opened my eyes.

  “I wish I had known,” she said.

  “About George?”

  “Yes. I wish she had told us. I wish Ginny had told us. I would have done something.”

  “Do you think it might have ended differently?”

  She reached for the rail and with what looked like a great effort pushed herself to her feet, and so I stood up as well. “I do. I really do.”

  “You were there for her in more ways than you know,” I reassured her. “You meant a lot to her.”

  “Do you think?”

  “I know,” I said, drawing the verb out with practiced pastoral emphasis. The last thing Joanie Gaylord either needed or deserved was to shoulder the sort of guilt that would be mine for as long as I lived.

  TOWARD DINNERTIME, WHEN I thought Ron Dobson and Illa Gove would be back from their jobs in Bennington and Manchester, I phoned each of them. Ron chaired the Church Council and had been one of my closest friends since I’d come to Haverill. He had been my assistant coach those years I’d coached Little League, and his older son—now a shortstop on the high-school team and an active leader in the church Youth Group—had been our lone athletic bright spot. Good hitter, good fielder, good speed. Our team was never especially talented, and we never won more than four or five games a season, but I believe we always had massive amounts of fun. Illa was the leader of the Board of Deacons and Stewards that met at the church on Wednesday nights and a counselor by day at the shelter for teens at risk, in Bennington. I told Ron I’d like to drop by his house after supper, if it wouldn’t be an inconvenience, and then I asked Illa if she’d mind leading her board meeting alone. I explained that I would be greeting guests at the funeral home about that time. She said she would be happy to.

  Later, while Ron’s wife was upstairs reading aloud to their young son and daughter, I told him without preamble that I was going to leave Haverill. I told him I was having a breakdown of sorts—not exactly a nervous breakdown, but a spiritual one. And in my profession a spiritual breakdown was every bit as debilitating as a nervous one. Maybe more. And so I was taking an emergency leave, I was going away. It might be for a week, it might be for a month. It might be forever. But I would be gone not long after the last of the mourners had left the sanctuary on Thursday.

  At first Ron simply listened and nodded, occasionally rubbing his lantern of a jaw or adjusting the massive inner-tube-size doughnut that stretched tight the thin fabric of his short-sleeved summer shirt. He asked, more as my friend than as a trustee, whether I was planning to check myself into a hospital or a retreat, and then he wanted to know how to reach me when I told him I wasn’t. It was clear that he was struggling with his dual role as friend and church leader, and he began to worry about the concrete logistics that affected the congregation.

  “I’ll make sure there’s a substitute pastor in the pulpit on Sunday,” I said. “And I’ll make sure there’s someone here in town on a more permanent basis by early next week.”

  “Permanent?”

  “Interim, I guess. Someone who can be here for a … while.”

  “What about Ken?” he asked, referring to the deacon who was dying of cancer. “What if he dies when y
ou’re gone?”

  “If there’s a heaven, I’ll see him there. If there isn’t? Well, then, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “I meant the funeral. The family will need you to do it, not some substitute they don’t know.”

  He was right, and I found myself wondering if, when that time came, I would have it in me to do what I had to do and not let down that kind and pious family. “We’ll see,” I said simply.

  “That’s not very helpful.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m more sorry than you know. But that’s my point. I can’t be very helpful right now. I can’t be helpful at all.”

  “Look, I just don’t want you to burn any bridges. I just don’t want there to be any hard feelings when you decide to come back.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “One return at a time,” he said, shrugging. Dobson was an accountant with a small firm of his own. “One return at a time” was his mantra in March and April, when he and his partner were swamped by wave upon wave of returns. “My guess is we won’t put anybody else in the parsonage while you’re gone.”

  “I will understand if you do.”

  He shook his head. “This Hayward thing is tough on everyone. For all you know, you’re just tired.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’ll bet if you thought about it, you’d realize you felt a lot like this when some other people had died.”

  “You’d lose that bet,” I said, and the moment the words were out there in the air between us—harsh words, needless and abrupt—I knew it was time to leave. I apologized, but it was too late. We stood almost at the same second, embraced awkwardly, and when I walked into the still-balmy night air, the only emotion I felt was relief.

  IF, ON THE surface, I was not at my best the rest of that week, I was adequate. I did my job. I found time after the calling hours at the funeral home to meet with a half dozen teens in the Youth Group who wanted to talk, and though the group was somber and troubled, by the time they left my living room near eleven P.M., their faith was on considerably surer footing than mine. I had two breakfasts that Thursday morning, an early one with the deacons to make sure that the transition to the interim pastor would be smooth and then a later one with Katie Hayward, her grandparents, Ginny and Harry O’Brien, and the Cousino family. The purpose of that meal? Comfort and connection and communion of a more secular sort.

  Alice’s body was in its casket at the church that Thursday morning, though she was not going to be buried in Haverill. As I suspected, Alice went home to New Hampshire. And though the local mortician, an eccentric elderly gentleman whose funeral parlor was known for the exotic birds he kept, had been able to make her corpse presentable, Alice’s family had decided upon a closed casket. (George’s face, he would confess to me later, could have been reconstructed and made viewable, but he said he was just not inclined to do what he called his “best work” on it, and so that would be a closed casket, too.)

  As Heather had predicted, Alice’s funeral was so crowded that one of the stewards had to set up a video feed so the overflow of mourners in the common room below the sanctuary could watch, and we sat people in the choir loft behind me. The sanctuary was packed well beyond the capacity of our two sluggish ceiling fans, and I saw people sweating through their short-sleeved summer shirts (and others, undoubtedly, beneath their blazers), and I watched beads of perspiration run down some of their faces and mingle with tears. I think there must have been forty students from the high school alone in the church, many for the first time, and their faces—so guileless and sweet, despite the girls who were wearing too much eye shadow and lipstick and the boys who were struggling mightily to be too tough for tears—were the hardest for me to watch. Katie, of course, was a source of particular sadness for me. She wore a sleeveless, somewhat slinky black dress that might have been more appropriate at a cocktail party than at her mother’s funeral, but how many black dresses does a teenage girl in rural Vermont own? I was surprised she had even one, and my sense was that in the past she had worn it surreptitiously. George Hayward probably hadn’t even known it existed, though it was the sort of thing he sold without irony to teenage girls and college students at his store in Manchester Center. Her hair was pulled off her face, and she looked pale and a little blank to me. Numb. Her friends cried, but she didn’t, and I realized later it was because Ginny had given her a tranquilizer. She sat impassively as I spoke and Alice’s sister spoke and the choir sang and different people in the sanctuary stood up to offer their memories, mostly of Alice but twice of George. Alice’s father, a sickly-looking old man with skin that struck me as fishlike and was riddled with age spots the size of dimes, flinched when one of the volunteer firefighters reminded us of the countless hours George had devoted to the company and how he hoped that the man’s soul might, at last, find peace. George’s secretary, a svelte and powerfully built young woman who could have moonlit as a fitness trainer, said he had always been a good boss and that no one in his small empire would ever have thought he was capable of such violence. (Instantly I was struck by the salacious and unfounded notion that she and George had been lovers.) No one, in my opinion, tried to grandstand for the media.

  And among that great crowd of mourners in the church? Heather Laurent. Yes, she did return. She got home after midnight on Tuesday, yet still drove back to Vermont first thing Thursday morning.

  But when I left Haverill on Thursday evening—not like a thief in the night, in all fairness, since the deacons and Ron Dobson and I had made sure that an interim pastor would be there to hold the hands of the congregation after their minister had ostensibly had a nervous breakdown—I did not leave with Heather. Though later there would be gossip to that effect, we most assuredly did not decamp together. I knew how that would look. And I hadn’t known that she was coming back for the funeral. We did not meet up again until Saturday morning, when I showed up in the dark, warehouselike lobby of her building on Greene Street and pressed the ivory-colored call button beside her name. Upstairs she would tell me that she had hoped I would visit, but she hadn’t expected it. She told me she honestly hadn’t realized that I was still so willing to give myself over to my angel.

  FROM ANGELS AND AURASCAPES BY HEATHER LAURENT (PP. 79–80)

  My father shot my mother on the night of the day that he learned she had taken a lease on another house, one that would be large enough for my sister and me when we were home from school. This was as clear a signal as he needed that this time she really was going to leave him. And so, late that night, he shot her and then killed himself. But he didn’t use the same gun. In fact, he didn’t use a gun, period, when he took his own life. Instead, after murdering my mother, he walked next door to our neighbors’ and left a note on the windshield of the car that the husband drove each morning to work. The note instructed the fellow to call the police immediately and to direct them to the Laurents’ house. He wasn’t to go there himself, and under no circumstances was he to call Heather or Amanda at boarding school. Then, after leaving the note pinned to the glass by the wiper blade, he went home, climbed the stairs to our attic, and hanged himself from an inner beam across the peak of our twelve-by-twelve-pitch roof.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Some months later that deputy state’s attorney with those lovely blue eyes and the name of a saint would tell me that she had thought I was a pretty cold fish from the moment we’d met that Monday morning after I had baptized Alice Hayward. This might have been posturing to elicit some sort of reaction from me, but it may also have been an honest and legitimate first impression. Certainly I had been anesthetized that day by guilt and despair: guilt that I had not realized why baptism had been so important to Alice the previous morning and despair at her death. Make no mistake: I was grieving as her former lover as well as her minister.

  But in all fairness to Catherine Benincasa, I know also that there were parishioners who thought I was distant. Or, perhaps, that I had secrets. Cards that I was loath to reveal. No one verbalized such thing
s prior to my departure, of course. It was only after I left that people’s secret doubts became rumor and gossip and innuendo.

  I will be the first to admit that a pastor in a small town has enormous power over the people who come to church and even a fair amount over those who don’t. The directors or coordinators of easily a dozen organizations across the county—the dental clinic for low-income Vermonters, for example, the hospice, the women’s crisis center—would ask me to stand up for them at the town meeting the first Tuesday in March and thereby ensure that Haverill would vote to approve their budget requests.

  And we have power in other, more invidious ways as well. There were temptations throughout the congregation, women—some half my age—whose eyes I would meet as I spoke Sunday mornings and whose gaze I would hold a second longer than was probably right. There were single women in the congregation who I know would have been happy to date me and married ones who would have risked the wrath of our small town had I shown any interest at all. Like any minister—not merely the Dimmesdales of fiction—in my little pond, I could have been either a big moral fish or a more complex sort of predator. Many of the parishioners I counseled were female and in a condition that could only be called vulnerable. And, because I am male, that ingrained desire to protect them invariably would kick in. Nevertheless, in most of my dealings, I strove for a moral compass that was sound. There were some women with whom I would flirt more shamelessly than with others, but they were always the parishioners who were happily married and understood that our flirations would never progress beyond vague intimations. In my fourteen years in Haverill, I had dated three women seriously, all of whom, it seemed to me, were unsuited to the life of a country pastor’s wife. None of them were from Haverill: One was from Albany, one was from Manchester, and one lived far to the north in Burlington. The woman from Manchester grew close to my congregation, and I think they were hurt—and saddened for me—when we did not walk down the aisle of my church together.