Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  For a split second, I misconstrued what he’d said, misinterpreting “give up” for “give myself up,” and I thought he wanted to turn himself in. But his demeanor was too chilly, too confrontational for that. I realized then what he had actually meant. “You’ve been waiting for me?”

  He nodded. It was just cold enough that I could see his breath. “I waited yesterday, too, but I never saw you leave the building.”

  I had to restrain myself from saying something catty about how I’d never before met a pastor who was also a stalker, because I honestly didn’t know yet whether I was in danger. Instead I said simply, “I wasn’t in court yesterday afternoon.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know I can’t talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “And your lawyer would be furious if he knew you were trying to talk to me.”

  “My lawyer does not tell me what to do. I think we should chat.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I am not going to speak to you without your lawyer present.”

  “But you will if Aaron joins us?”

  “Aaron Lamb won’t let you talk to me. I promise.”

  His hands were burrowed deep inside his jacket pockets, and when he removed them suddenly, I must have flinched. He shook his head and said, smiling, “You really believe I killed both of them, don’t you?”

  “We’re not having this conversation,” I reiterated simply.

  And it was then that he started to tell me about crucifixion. The connection, in his mind, was injustice. At least that’s what he said. But he started talking about injustice and execution and the barbarity that always marks the human condition. It was erudite and hypnotic and deeply disturbing. If I lived alone, that night I would have pushed furniture against the front and back doors of my house. I was able to extricate myself only when another lawyer, one of the public defenders who had spent that afternoon at court coping with calendar calls before a judge, came up beside us. It was a friend of mine named Rosemary, and I immediately introduced her to Drew and then allowed myself to be led by her down the block until we had reached the bookstore and the reverend was behind us in the distance. Still, that evening I would insist that she walk with me to my car, and the following night I was careful to leave my office with another lawyer in the state’s attorney’s office.

  When Aaron called me the next day, he tried to feign fury that I had spoken with his client, but it was clear Drew had told him that he had initiated the conversation. I could also tell that Aaron wished that his client hadn’t decided to share with me in visceral detail what it must have been like to die on the cross.

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Jim Haas, Emmet Walker, and I spent nearly four hours in Waterbury with BCI—the Bureau of Criminal Investigations. David Dennison joined us from Burlington. We examined all of the evidence we had amassed and we analyzed all of the interviews we had conducted. And when Jim and Emmet and I sped back to Bennington in Emmet’s freakishly clean unmarked detective sedan, we were no closer to indicting Stephen Drew than we had been the day before. At the same time, we were no closer to finding a new direction—a new suspect—worth pursuing.

  We were on Route 7 in Wallingford when Emmet abruptly chuckled from behind the wheel. I was sitting in the backseat behind Jim and Emmet, and so I caught Emmet’s eye in the rearview mirror.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “You know, maybe this Stephen Drew did us all a favor,” he said. He was driving with one hand, and he shrugged. “Maybe we should just stop spending the taxpayers’ money.”

  “Yeah, it’s crossed my mind, too,” I admitted, and I didn’t have to glance at Jim to know he was glaring at us both from the corner of his eye.

  “I mean, think about it. If Drew hadn’t shot George Hayward, we really would have to try the bastard and jail him—and jail him for at least twenty years. Maybe longer. And a trial and two decades of incarceration doesn’t come cheap.”

  Jim wasn’t completely sure how serious the state trooper was. “There is a principle here, Emmet,” he said, his tone his professorial best. It was the voice he used when he was making his opening statement or closing remarks to a jury: patient and avuncular and wise.

  “Oh, I know, I know. George Hayward may have been the O. J. Simpson of Green Mountain batterers, but that still doesn’t mean someone had the right to shoot him in the head. But think about it: not a bad death, especially given what he did. He passes out drunk and never wakes up. And justice is done. Frankly, I think we should send the reverend a thank-you card and move on.”

  We wouldn’t move on, of course. At least not completely. For me it was always going to be a bit like the gnawing frustration we all experience when we misplace something and know it’s somewhere in the house—but where, we haven’t a clue. The cell-phone charger, the car keys, the cap to the felt-tip marker that will dry up if we don’t find it soon. It’s annoying as hell. But I think I knew at that moment in Emmet’s car, as he flipped on the directional and accelerated into the passing lane to get ahead of a lumbering milk tanker, that if we solved either of the homicides in Haverill—found something to link Stephen Drew definitively to the murder of George Hayward—it would be more the result of very good luck than very good work. We had done our best, and, it seemed, we’d been outdone by a country pastor.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The cosmology of angels is neither problematic nor puzzling. Nor is it sectarian. Virtually all religions have spiritual messengers or escorts. Someone to take our hands when we need their grasp most, someone to pull us hard and fast from the fire. Someone to yank us off the pavement as that oncoming pickup truck whizzes past while we are strolling at dusk, so that the vehicle may transform our windbreakers into sails but we continue on unscathed. Or, just maybe, someone to yank from our fingers that orange vial of pills because it has become too painful to live. My father’s brother and an older cousin of mine had both spent time in McLean, and so depression had never been a taboo subject at the breakfast table in my home growing up.

  In my case it was indeed going to be a prescription drug that I was contemplating for my last act. My roommate my first year at college had a prescription for sleeping pills, and between Thanksgiving and Christmas I fell into a funk deeper than any I had known since my parents had died. (And those initial months after their deaths had been a fog; I was so buffered by large dollops of shock and small ones of relief—yes, relief—that the first year had been considerably easier than the ones that immediately followed.) I had been deteriorating all semester, but it had begun to accelerate as the days grew precariously short. I had gone to my aunt and uncle’s home in Fairfield for Thanksgiving, and the four days there had been more dispiriting than usual, and already I could see the changes in Amanda—how caustic her humor had become, how dark. How she was intent, it seemed, on starving herself to death. So many of the things I cared for most or associated with moments of comfort in my childhood—dolls, a couch, my childhood bed, a teakettle my mother had cherished—were scattered to the attics of relatives and friends or had been sold in the estate sale. There was just no more debris from the sinking ship that had once been my life that I could cling to. And I was miserable at college. I was lonely, I was doing poorly in class, and I was grappling with the reality that I was enrolled in a university rather than a conservatory. Unfortunately, I was five-ten—at least two inches too tall for even the more statuesque dancers—and I had never completely recovered from a series of ankle and toe injuries that had dogged me as a junior and senior in high school. It had been clear for a couple of years that I was never going to be a ballerina. And though I was in the dance program at the school, I had begun to realize that my voice was going to be my undoing when I began to audition for Broadway shows. It was adequate at best, and that was after four years of work with vocal coaches and voice teachers. What did that leave? The Rockettes. And no one, in truth, makes a living as a Rockette. Perhaps I could be a choreographer. Or a dance teacher. But I was never
going to be a performer.

  My depression, of course, was being fueled by far more than a fear that my professional dreams were starting to evaporate. I was eighteen, and the sad fact was that I was essentially alone in the world. I had been an orphan since high school, and my sister was falling apart even faster than I was. I simply didn’t see anything that gave me hope or confidence that tomorrow just might be better than today.

  Now, the separation between depression and suicide is more crevasse than chasm. For months I had been working my way gingerly over the rocks along the ledge on the near side but studying how easy it would be to throw some ropes across the fissure and cross over. That whole autumn I was eating less and less, not consciously trying to starve myself the way Amanda was but simply incapable of making the effort most meals to pull myself together and go to the dining hall. I can recall lunches and dinners when I would just cry in my bed with the sheets pulled over my face. I wasn’t sleeping, but I wasn’t getting up, either. I would often just lie there, and my mind would drift to very dark places. On one occasion my roommate found me shivering in my parka on the floor by my bed at about three in the afternoon, naked other than that down jacket, and murmuring that I just couldn’t do this—though I wasn’t forthcoming about what “this” was, because even I wasn’t sure whether I meant getting dressed or breathing with purpose. I couldn’t explain to her quite what had happened, and I imagine if she had been more self-aware (and less self-absorbed), she would have reported me to the school’s health services. But she attributed my funk (her word) either to boys or to the fact that I was the kid at college whose parents had died in that murder-suicide. I think she expected me always to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That autumn I would lose twenty-five pounds. There were classes where I would sit in the back row of the lecture hall and look around, oblivious to anything the professor was saying, and suddenly my eyes would be bleary and tears would bounce off the yellow pad on which I was supposed to be taking notes. (Invariably the page would be blank.) I would look at myself in the dorm’s bathroom mirror, and even I could see that I was terrified and despairing and utterly lost. Some days I would sit at a library carrel and in my mind walk myself carefully through my aunt and uncle’s home or across the university campus and try to imagine precisely the tools or the manner in which I might kill myself. There was that beam running across the steep twelve-by-twelve-pitch roof in my relatives’ attic, a perfect spot to loop a rope if I decided to follow my father’s lead and hang myself. There was their car and their garage. Or the antique bathtub with the lion-paw feet in the guest bathroom, where I could lie in soothing warm water with a paring or carving knife beside me and watch the clouds of my blood turn the bathwater pink. At the college there were tall buildings with glass windows, most locked but all easy to smash with those heavy wooden chairs, and I gazed out from the highest floors all the time. There was the bell tower in the chapel, and one day I went so far as to walk to the hardware store in the village beside the campus and finger the meticulously bundled lengths of clothesline. There was the train that passed along the edge of the college near the physical plant, just far enough away that only when our windows had been wide open in September had we heard its occasional whistle. One afternoon I clawed my way through the wild tangle of bushes and shrubs beside those tracks and crouched for long moments, awaiting the train and envisioning in my head the passage from Anna Karenina when that heroine throws herself under the shrieking metal wheels. At night when I was incapable of studying for a French test or writing a paper on the literature of the Great War, I would read what I could about what was euphemistically referred to as “self-deliverance.” I saw that if I was going to kill myself, I seemed to be on the right path: Toy with the idea first. Touch the materials. Grow accustomed to your plan.

  I would contemplate who might find my body, and at first I would worry how it would affect them, but soon I was beyond caring. When you are as far down that path toward self-destruction as I was, you grow oblivious: not selfish, precisely, but insensible. Still, I decided finally that the best thing I could do was to choose a method that would make it likely that I was found by someone who did not know me well (if at all) and that my body would not be left in a condition that might leave that person with memories it would be hard to expunge. Consequently, I never seriously contemplated using a gun.

  And so the night before the first day of exams, while everyone was hunkering down in dorm rooms or the various libraries scattered across the campus, I dropped the small bottle of my roommate’s sleeping pills into the dance bag that doubled as my book bag and slipped unnoticed into the basement of our dorm. I also packed a water bottle and some antihistamine tablets I had gotten from the infirmary to ensure that I wouldn’t vomit back up the great handfuls of sleeping pills I was planning to ingest. I had caught a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror on my way out the door, and I was struck by how drawn my face seemed, even by the standards of that miserable autumn, and how my hair looked a bit like a crazy woman’s: I hadn’t washed it in four or five days—hygiene falls by the wayside when you’re depressed—and it was hanging in strands that were long and oily and flat.

  The dormitory was a Georgian monolith from the turn of the century, and the basement was a maze of thin corridors created by the rows of empty trunks and stacked cardboard boxes that belonged to the eighty of us who lived on the four floors above. There was a corner with our bicycles and a few pieces of decrepit furniture that not even a college student would use. I wanted no one to know I was in the basement, and so I navigated the stairs and the labyrinthine chaos on the cement floor by flashlight. I had pulled the door shut behind me. What I found most interesting as I searched for my own trunk was how the basement, which previously had been a source of terror—the abode of spiders and mice and demented men who lurked in the shadows—seemed now to be merely a cold room jam-packed with the detritus of young adults. It wasn’t frightening at all.

  And, soon enough, I found my trunk. It was wedged vertically between another first-year student’s chest and some supermarket cartons still filled with sheets. The trunk smelled a little mustier than when I had arrived back in late August, but otherwise it was downright comforting to find it. I dragged it to the corner of the basement nearest the massive closet with the dorm boilers, the warmest section of the room, and then took some of the sheets from one of those boxes. The chest was big, but I was still far too lanky to fit inside it, even curled up pathetically in the fetal position. But I could make myself comfortable if I viewed the trunk as a tub and dangled my legs over the edge and used those sheets as a pillow and a mattress. That was my plan. Reclining in the dark in the trunk of a dorm basement, I was going to find that great undiscovered country. I thought—and I know now this isn’t necessarily the case—that overdosing on sleeping pills would be a painless way to die. I would doze off and either never wake or wake to a reality I had never imagined.

  I turned off the flashlight, but there were basement windows facing the road, and the streetlights allowed me to see reasonably well once my eyes had adjusted to the room.

  For perhaps five or ten minutes, I procrastinated. I counted the sleeping pills (there were plenty), I lined them up like candy Pez in my palm or along the upside-down top of the trunk. I eyed the antihistamine tablets and took small sips from my water bottle, but only very small sips because I wanted to make sure that I had plenty remaining to wash down the pills. I listened to the sounds of my dormmates and fellow students, occasionally running along the corridors and stairs above me; I heard their laughter and bellowed greetings. I heard rock music from somewhere in the building, but I couldn’t pinpoint the source. Generally, however, the campus was quieter than on most nights, because everyone was uncharacteristically focused. And as I listened, I cried. These were not sobs and wails but a steady stream of sniffles and tears as I wondered who the unlucky soul would be who would find me (an inevitability that did cause me to hesitate, but only briefly, and in the end wa
s not the reason I am alive today), and I thought again of what a pathetic and tragic footnote to the world the whole Laurent family was. I was awash in self-loathing and self-pity and no small amount of anger toward my father (a murderer) and my mother (a victim) and even poor, troubled Amanda (like me, a deserter, a person who it seemed was also planning to escape this world soon enough). I clutched perhaps a half dozen pills in each of my hands, and slowly I lost myself in a memory of a moment when I had been a little girl in, I believed, the second grade. My mother was braiding my hair, which meant this was the one afternoon each week when I wouldn’t have had dance, because it was required that my hair was up when I was at the studio—we were not permitted to allow it to swing free in a braid. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a small ramekin of her homemade chocolate pudding (what she called with great affectation her pot de crème), and I was aglow with serenity and composure. Say what you will about aggressive dance training, it does wonders for a little girl’s poise. The sun was cascading in through the western window, brightening the whole room, and I was very, very content.

  Still, it only made the fact that now I was crying in a trunk I was imagining as my coffin all the more pathetic—and me all the more likely to finally go through with my suicide. Really, I was not hoping to be discovered and saved. And so I brought my right hand to my mouth, wondering how many of the pills I could swallow at once. Two? Three? Perhaps even four? And it was as I looked down at my hand that I saw my hair had fallen across my breasts—in a braid. An absolutely perfect, elegant, tangle-free French braid. I dropped the pills and patted the crown of my head to be sure. Then I brought the braid to my face and savored the aroma of the rose-scented shampoo my mother had used on my hair when I’d been a little girl.

  I reached for the flashlight so I could be sure of what I was seeing. Indeed, I wasn’t making this up or seeing something that wasn’t there in the gloaming light of the basement. My hair was clean and had been arranged in a French braid that was faultless. And then I felt the most unimaginable calmness envelop me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the perfume of the soap that had magically cleansed my hair, and I allowed myself to relive the quietude and peacefulness that had marked those moments when my mother had braided it. When I finally opened my eyes, for a fleeting second I saw a woman there in the basement. I saw her beatific smile, and I saw, just over her shoulders, the tips of her luminescent wings. And then she was gone.