Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  And I was thrilled. It was important to me that we were together. His aura was in total disrepair, and he needed to be in a world that was wholly new to him—a place where his aura might be free of memory and association and thus could heal. Moreover, our bodies were absolute canyons of want that week. Certainly the aura hungers, but so does the flesh. I used to dance; I know the pleasure the body can offer. And so yes, I wanted Stephen Drew with me.

  “THAT’S AN OSPREY,” Norman was mumbling, and I looked up from my tea at the picnic table that served as my sister and brother-in-law’s dining-room table in their log cabin. Stephen was staring at Norman’s shelves of ospreys with angel wings and the way the morning sun gave them an elysian glaze as it poured in through the wide, eastern-facing windows. Stephen had recognized right away the similarities to the raptor I had insisted on buying from my brother-in-law for my loft in the city.

  “It’s very good,” he said to Norman. The two men were standing together. Stephen’s hands were folded behind him, and Norman’s were jammed into the pockets of his ragged blue jeans. “Heather explained to me about the wings, how you allowed yourself to imagine what an angel’s wings might look like. It’s haunting. Very creative.” I don’t believe he had meant to sound condescending, but he had. And I knew instantly what was coming.

  “I didn’t have to imagine the wings,” Norman said, his voice low and curt. Then, his body hunched over, he stalked from the log cabin, and I knew he was going to find Amanda in the vegetable garden, where she was weeding.

  Stephen turned to me, trying to gauge either my reaction or the magnitude of his offense. He sat down beside me, his legs straddling the bench.

  “What was that about?” he asked.

  I slid my mug of tea toward him and offered him a sip. A little grudgingly he took one. “You came across a bit patronizing,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean to. Last night he seemed fragile to me, but not especially temperamental.”

  “Oh, I think you diagnosed that right. He is fragile. And I can tell he’s worried about Amanda. But he also takes his work seriously,” I said. I took back the mug and placed it on the picnic table and then wrapped his fingers in mine. “And he really didn’t need to imagine the wings,” I explained.

  “I do hope you’re going to tell me he had a beautiful painting as a model,” he said. “Something from the Renaissance, maybe.” By then he knew of my first face-to-face experience with an angel in the basement of my dormitory at college. He knew of the other times I had been blessed with encounters with angels as well. He was skeptical but patient.

  “Nope.”

  “If Norman has seen an angel, too, then why is he so … ”

  “Damaged?”

  “That’s a good word.”

  “We’re all mortal. We’re all damaged. We still need to be able to welcome the angel into our realm. We must be hospitable. We need to return the angel’s love and be willing to live our lives accordingly. He’s not there yet. He’s still too guarded. Too solitary. Angels are sociable. They rather like showboats.”

  “Where was he?”

  “When he saw the angel?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In Ray Brook.”

  “The correctional facility?”

  “That’s right. It’s about sixty miles from here. He was in for robbery. He needed money for drugs, and over the course of five days he hit a half dozen liquor stores and convenience stores in Albany. It was quite a visible rampage, and I still find it appalling that it took nearly a week before he was rounded up. He didn’t hurt anyone. He’s not the type who wants to hurt anyone. Nevertheless, he had a pretty violent method, and it could have ended very badly for someone behind those counters—or for Norman or a police officer. He would go in and smash a bottle on the counter in front of the kid at the register. That would be his weapon. It was, I gather, extremely intimidating, especially since it was evident that Norman was seriously strung out.”

  In the trees that bordered the yard, I saw a chickadee light on a branch and I watched a brown creeper spiraling up the side of a maple. I had told Stephen before we left Manhattan that Norman was bipolar, which was why as a younger man he had wound up on illegal drugs. There had been no one to diagnose and treat him and so he had treated himself in the only way he could imagine. Now, however, he was properly medicated.

  “And he saw this angel in prison?” Stephen was asking me.

  “Uh-huh. He came to his cell while the other prisoner was sound asleep. Lights were out, but still the small room grew brighter by far than it ever did during the day. I gather the one window they had was very small. And Norman saw perfectly the rows of feathers on the angel’s wings, as well as their shape.”

  “What did the angel say to him?”

  I thought for a long moment before answering. “In all of the things I have shared with you about angels, have I ever described a verbal exchange with one?”

  “I guess not.”

  “We can no more hear the voice of an angel—at least in a literal way—than we can see the face of God.”

  “Ah, but the angels spoke in the Bible. Think of Gabriel’s comforting words to Mary in Luke.”

  “Mary shared Gabriel’s visitation with the disciples many years later. I have no doubts that an angel came to her when she was a very young woman. But it has always seemed more likely to me either that Mary remembered the comforting presence in a fashion that grew more conventional as she grew older or that the men who wrote the Gospel put words into the angel’s mouth.”

  “There are a lot of Christians in this world who would seriously question that interpretation.”

  “And there are a lot of Christians in this world who nonetheless buy my books,” I told him, and he chuckled loudly. I hadn’t meant this as a joke, and I hadn’t meant to convey with it the sort of edge that he would tell me later he had heard in the remark and had caused him to laugh. I had simply meant that the historiography of Christianity is a subject worth discussing and there is a continuum of belief among Christians. I tried to rein in his smirk by reminding him that Baptists think very differently from Episcopalians and more people in this country believe in angels than in evolution.

  “Touché,” he agreed. Then: “So the angel said nothing to Norman.”

  “Not a word.”

  “What did Norman do?”

  “He fell asleep. This was his very first night in Ray Brook. Before that, he had been in either a psychiatric hospital or a county jail. But now his mental health had been stabilized and he had been convicted and sent to prison. A real prison. And he was going to be there for a while, and so he was scared. Absolutely petrified. And completely alone. And the angel came to him and knelt on the cement floor beside his cot and took his hand. Just held it. And Norman felt warm and, for the first time in a very long time, at peace. He felt comforted. He knew he would be fine, and he fell asleep with his fingers in the angel’s hands. When he awoke in the morning, he felt more serene than he ever had in his life. To this day he has never forgotten the details of that angel’s wings. Sometimes he has to work hard to recover that sense of well-being. He is still withdrawn, he still snaps at people. You saw that. But the wings? He’s a visual artist. They’re with him always.”

  Stephen seemed to think about this, to be imagining the angel in Norman’s cell.

  “Had he met you by then?” he asked me, and I had the sense that this man would have made a better lawyer than a minister. I didn’t mind, but I felt as if I were being cross-examined.

  “Nope.”

  “Amanda?”

  “No again. He wouldn’t meet her until after he was released. They were in the same halfway house together. That’s where they met,” I explained. I had told Stephen on one of our walks in Manhattan about Amanda’s history as a young adult. Despite a trust fund that was identical to mine, she was often living crammed into two-room apartments with nine or ten other people, sleeping on floors, depleting her assets, and taking jobs for a d
ay—motel housekeeper, most often—to scrounge up extra money for cocaine, methadone substitutes, and antianxiety drugs. “How’s that for an odd place to fall in love? Two basket cases holding each other together. But it’s also rather beautiful, isn’t it? They became friends when Amanda made a joke about her sister and angels and he told her the story of his prison-cell visitation.”

  “So Amanda has never met an angel.”

  “No, she hasn’t. Not yet. She doubts both Norman and me when we compare notes about our winged guardians. I am confident that her angel has tried to reach her—and will keep on trying. But as a mortal you have to be willing to meet them partway. Not necessarily halfway. But you have to be receptive. To know that you can’t do it all and be willing to open your mind to seraphic healing.”

  “Versus sexual healing?”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s an old Marvin Gaye song.”

  “You are such a cynic,” I told him, and I punched him lightly on the arm. “Sometimes I just can’t believe there was someone willing to ordain you.”

  “My sister would agree with you—as would, these days, a great many of my former parishioners.”

  “Don’t say ‘former.’ Really, I know you’ll go back,” I said, and at the time I honestly believed that. But he disagreed with me.

  “No. There’s too much blood on my hands.”

  “There’s no blood on your hands! You have to stop saying such things.”

  His head was bowed, and when he raised it, he raised an eyebrow as well. Then he stood and went to the window, where, with his back turned to me, he said—and it was the first time I had ever heard such daggers of condescension in his voice—“I can’t abide those people any longer. The whole congregation. The whole community. I know that’s horrible to admit, but it’s the truth. I’m sorry. We’re not really a very good fit. We never were. And, unfortunately, I know what used to go on at the Haywards’ house. I also know what I did and didn’t do, I know what Ginny O’Brien did and didn’t do, and I know what the whole congregation did and didn’t do. That’s the problem. And so I think it’s in my own best interests to steer clear. My health, mental and otherwise, depends upon it.”

  At the time I had thought he was being either melodramatic or, just maybe, metaphoric. It would be weeks later that I would recall this exchange and first contemplate the notion that he had meant every word.

  I LIKED TO check in with Amanda and Norman because they had nobody else—no mortals, that is—and they were both so profoundly wounded. Moreover, Amanda was unable to open her mind to the angels in our midst. Early one afternoon that week, when the sun was still high above the copse of evergreens to the west of their log cabin, I went skinny-dipping with Amanda in a secluded section of a nearby river we called the funnel. Amanda took pride in the fact that she lived in a spot that allowed her to swim naked whenever she pleased, and she had so few visitors who might want to swim that she didn’t even own a bathing suit. In truth, I think skinny-dipping was also her way of flaunting to Norman and me the state of her mental health: Either her weight was stable and she was fine or she was again shedding pounds and slowly killing herself. That week Stephen and I made love there twice.

  The water at the funnel cascaded through a flume of boulders the size of trailers, falling perhaps twenty-five feet, before emptying into a basin that was carved out of the earth like a gigantic cereal bowl. Occasionally Amanda and I would snowshoe there in the winter, and it always felt to the two of us as if we had just walked through the wardrobe into Narnia. The trees along the path from the log cabin to the river would form a silvery canopy, the boughs bending beneath the weight of the ice and snow like frosted palm fronds. Others would become elegant black-and-crystal sculptures: Willowy raven frames, layered with sky-blown glass. The forest that is filled with the music of the wood thrush and the warbler in June is almost preternaturally quiet in January, and even the falling water seems to have grown still. The icicles dangle like earrings.

  Nevertheless, it was obviously only in the summer when we would spend whole afternoons at the funnel. Soon after my sister had bought the log cabin and the surrounding property, Norman had taken his chain saw and cut down a swath of the westernmost maples and cedar and pine at the swimming hole so the water would be warmed as much as possible by the afternoon sun. Still, it was never going to be more than sixty-six or sixty-seven degrees, and I wondered how my wraithlike sister could handle the temperature with absolutely no body fat under her skin. That day as we floated on our backs in the shallow pool—the water there was no more than four feet deep—or sat on the boulders that had been warmed by the sun, I stared at my sister’s reedy physique: The sharp tips of her collarbone and shoulder blades, the brittle rods that passed for her arms. When she reclined on her towel on the rock, I counted the ribs along the sides of her chest and the points on the hard square of her hip bones. Her breasts were the small hillocks of a middle-school girl.

  She was in a bad phase, I saw, and whatever progress she had made in the spring had been undone by days in which she would consume nothing but diet soda and carrot coins from her garden. She was smoking once more like a chimney and had brought her cigarettes with her to the funnel.

  “Are you seeing Karen?” I asked her, referring to her therapist perhaps an hour distant in Watertown.

  “I am.”

  “And the nutritionist?” I couldn’t remember that woman’s name.

  “Nope.”

  “How come?”

  “She seemed to know how to get under my skin.”

  It was always a balancing act with Amanda. I knew the questions I didn’t dare ask as well as the things I didn’t dare say. You really can’t afford to lose any more weight. You look fine now—don’t drop another ounce. For God’s sake, Amanda, you have to eat! What further complicated our conversations when she was in one of these periods was my knowledge that it really wasn’t about body image in my sister’s case: It was about suicide. She believed much more deeply than I ever had—even when I was curled up in that trunk that night in my first-year dorm—in the utter meaninglessness of life. And as much as I might have wanted her hospitalized, I knew that she would never have stood for it. Once, four years earlier, Norman and I had tried and failed.

  “So tell me about your new man,” she said to me after a moment. She was smiling, but I knew there was a serrated edge to her question.

  “What’s to say? What do you want to know?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Is the plan to pull him back from the abyss, too? Help him see some angelic meaning in the way his parishioners imitated Mom and Dad?”

  It always struck me that Amanda could still refer to those two individuals as Mom and Dad. It was a linguistic nearness that now evaded me. They would, at best, be my parents. My mother. My father. I saw them largely through the formal prism of how they had fought and died or (on good days) the ways they had seemed so glamorous when I was young.

  “I think that’s how it started,” I admitted. “That is why I first went to Haverill. I went for him. The girl. The town.”

  “But now it’s just him.”

  “We have a connection.”

  “The angels have whispered in each of your ears?”

  “They have in mine. I can’t speak for him.”

  “Interesting choice in people to help,” she murmured, and she draped one of her skeletal arms over her eyes.

  “Meaning?”

  “He seems pretty damn self-sufficient.”

  “Maybe that’s his problem.”

  “I’d focus on the girl. The teenager. She’s the one who could end up like us,” said my sister.

  “Katie.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I considered correcting her: I didn’t think that Amanda and I had wound up similarly. But so much of life is about forgiveness and healing—restraining that urge to tweak or lash out or get in the last word—that I said simply, “I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. At least I hope it
isn’t.”

  “How much do you like him?”

  “So far? Plenty.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She yawned, and I noticed when she went to cover her mouth that she was no longer wearing either of the two silver bracelets that usually adorned her wrists. I feared that either they no longer fit or they hurt. My sister was disappearing once again into a wisp of a woman, frightening in her calculated emaciation, and I made a mental note to call her doctors as soon as Stephen and I had left.

  “I said, do you trust him? Don’t you worry that this country pastor sees you as his new meal ticket? All of a sudden, a rich, pretty lady drops into his life like an angel—and, please, sis, I only used that word because the simile was irresistible—and he sees in her an opportunity. A retirement plan, if you will.”

  “He clearly has assets of his own.”

  “Not like yours, I promise. One of these days, you will branch out into angel merchandise. Angel baubles and angel jewelry boxes. Angel note cards. Angel figurines and Christmas ornaments. Angel rainbow catchers for kitchen windows. Angel vacation cruises.”

  The sun had warmed the rock beneath me, and I gingerly rolled off my towel so I could feel the heat on all of my skin. My sister was enjoying herself, having a little fun at my expense. “What would occur on an angel cruise?” I asked, in part to change the subject but also in some way to indulge her.

  “Oh, you’d give your lectures,” she said. “Everyone would watch the stars from the middle of the ocean. They’d tell stories of the angels who had saved their lives. There would be yoga. Meditation. Angel food cake at all the buffets.”

  “You’ve really thought this through.”

  “No I haven’t. I was just being glib.”

  I smiled at her, but she couldn’t see me because her eyes were still covered by her arm. I said a silent prayer that either she would open her heart to an angel or that an angel would do for my sister what clearly I could not: encourage her to save her own life.