Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  I contemplated whether confessing to an affair could just, like, come up. And while that wasn’t likely, I did think that Katie’s instincts were sound: It seemed plausible enough that if Alice were angry at George for not attending a ritual that obviously meant so much to her—a ritual conducted by her former lover—it was conceivable that as the last fight of their lives escalated, she told him she’d been involved with her pastor. Perhaps she’d told George she’d loved this other man. Still, why hadn’t he gone after Stephen if that was the case? Why hadn’t he taken his gun and gone to the church or the parsonage after strangling his wife?

  “But until he found out—if he found out,” I said carefully to Katie, “the reality that your mom and Stephen had discovered each other actually made things better between your mom and your dad. For a time, anyway. That’s what you’re suggesting, right?”

  She nodded. “For a time. Maybe because she was a little more confident. But it didn’t last. I don’t know. They were fighting again in July. Well, Dad was fighting.”

  “How do you feel about Stephen?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “That’s a freaky one for me. I mean, how would you feel if you learned after your dad had killed your mom that she’d been having an affair with the minister? You might be really pissed off at the guy. You’d think, whoa—is he the reason my mom is dead? But then maybe you wouldn’t go there. Maybe you’d just think how he had made your mom happy. You know, maybe your dad would have killed your mom anyway, and so you think, well, at least the minister made her happy for a while.”

  “But that assumes the minister did make her happy. That he didn’t break her heart.”

  “Did he break yours?” We were almost back to the entrance to the school. My sense was that Katie had asked this quickly because once we were at the building and in the midst of the students and teachers, she wouldn’t have dared. Still, I stopped in my tracks. Tentatively I put my arm around her shoulders, wondering how she would respond to my touch. But her body didn’t tense, and she allowed her small frame to fall against me for a moment.

  “Be careful,” I said simply.

  “Like, in what way? Like around Stephen?”

  “Just be careful. Please. Promise me you will always keep your heart open to angels and you will always take care of yourself.” Then I gave her my cell-phone number and told her to call me whenever she’d like.

  HOURS LATER I found myself a little nauseous. I had just left the pathologist’s office in Vermont, and for a long moment I sat in the front seat of my car in the hospital parking lot. The vehicle was steaming inside from having baked in the sun with the windows rolled up, and so I opened them all and pressed hard on the button that rolled back the moonroof. It wasn’t that I had seen anything especially distressing in the mortuary—the bodies on the shelves in the walk-in refrigerator were the elderly who had passed away of natural causes that day on the hospital floors high above—and their faces looked downright beatific. They looked as if they were sleeping deeply and comfortably on their backs beneath blue hospital blankets. Rather, I think I was disturbed because now I could imagine precisely how my parents’ corpses had been autopsied. I saw concretely in my mind the way the medical examiner in our corner of New York had placed each of their bodies on the slanted steel table—slanted for drainage—and meticulously described aloud precisely the physical characteristics of each of my parents. I didn’t know who had gone first, but I found myself envisioning my mother’s corpse on the table, since I had seen her naked in the bathtub when I would keep her company as she bathed and in the changing room of the country club. Her face, in my mind, was intact, but I knew in reality that a large part of it had been obliterated completely by the bullet. And then I saw what the Vermont pathologist had described as the Y incision: a cut in the shape of a capital Y, a wishbone with the two prongs at the shoulders and the point extending from sternum to pubic bone. The incision, the pathologist had told me, was deep—you had to cut through the abdominal wall. Then all three of these great flaps of skin were pulled back.

  “The one over the upper chest,” I had asked. “You pulled that back over her face?”

  “That’s correct,” he had said calmly. “How do you know that?”

  I’d shrugged. “A college course. I really know very little.”

  Next, my mother’s ribs would have been cut apart and the anterior chest wall opened so the doctor could examine the organs underneath. Their connections to the body would be severed and each one carefully scrutinized and weighed. The intestines would be drained in the sink to see what undigested food and feces were present. The contents of the stomach would be noted. Samples from most organs would be preserved and then, in my mother’s case, the organs replaced back inside the cadaver.

  I thought of the names of the tools he had mentioned: Bone saw. Scalpel. Skull chisel.

  “And the brain?” I wondered, because I realized abruptly that the bullet wound might have affected how the brain would be autopsied. “How would the way my mother was killed affect how the brain was autopsied?”

  “Well,” the medical examiner began, clearly choosing his words with care to minimize my discomfort, “what might have happened would have depended on what sorts of conversations had occurred between the pathologist and your adult relatives: an aunt and uncle, maybe, or your grandparents. A fresh brain can be difficult to study, and so on occasion it will be fixed for as much as two weeks in formalin. It would depend upon what the officials investigating the case needed to learn.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “Or less.”

  “So it was possible my mother was buried without her brain?”

  “It’s possible. But not likely,” he said. “Not from what you’ve told me of the circumstances of your mother’s death. It was a bullet. And your father left behind a confession.”

  “Of sorts,” I agreed, and I sighed. For a moment I wondered why anyone had bothered to autopsy my parents, since it was painfully clear what had occurred: My father had shot my mother and then hanged himself.

  But then a thought dawned on me, and I recall looking up from my steering wheel toward one of the old, Gothic buildings on the university campus adjacent to the hospital and mortuary: To the casual eye, it had also been rather apparent what had happened in the Haywards’ living room back in July. But, in fact, George Hayward hadn’t shot himself, and that only became clear when the medical examiner with whom I’d just met had autopsied the man’s body. And so it was just as important that my parents’ bodies had been examined as well.

  “What color nightgown was Alice wearing when she died?” I’d asked the medical examiner as I was leaving. “I’m curious.”

  “I would call it a nightshirt,” he’d said. “It only fell to midthigh.”

  “Was it plaid?”

  “No,” he had told me. “I’m quite sure it was solid red.”

  IN THE WEEKS after I had returned to New York after my brief visit to Vermont, I thought of Stephen Drew all the time. I didn’t miss him, precisely. After all, as meaningful as our affair might have been, it had also been brief. But I did wonder about the ways that my intentions, which had only been kind, had led me astray. Initially I had hoped only that I could provide counsel and healing. Offer my experiences and share my access to the angels. Instead I had misread everything about the man and lost focus on the light and the wings that have guided me since that night I almost took my own life. That autumn I didn’t necessarily view the fallen minister as beyond salvation. But I did view him as poisonous to the stillness and equanimity that helps me to commune with the angels. And I knew that if our paths crossed ever again, it would be extremely difficult for me to trust him.

  Still, he was often on my mind. How could he not have been? After all, I’d had the Vermont State Police in my home.

  Day after day I would find myself living in two worlds in my head, one I knew well and one constructed entirely from my imagination. The fi
rst comprised all of those days and nights I had spent with Stephen in Haverill, Manhattan, and Statler. I would close my eyes, and a whole cyclorama of our experiences together would unfurl before me. I would feel again the warmth of his body beside me, and I would savor the scent of the skin on his neck. I would see his eyes and the way he would listen as I spoke, with his long, beautiful fingers steepled together, almost unmoving. I would recall the stories he had shared with me and the sound of his voice—as soothing as a warm bath—and how I had believed all he’d told me.

  The second world was far more abstract to me and tended to have an uncertain fluidity to it, because I was crafting it entirely from things people had told me or I had manufactured for my mind’s eye. And that world was the final day—the final hours—of Alice and George Hayward. It would begin with the baptism on Sunday morning, with the images from the digital photos of the ritual that Ginny O’Brien had taken and shared with me at Alice’s funeral. With the pond, deserted when Stephen and I had driven past it.

  No, it would commence even before that. I would imagine Alice getting dressed in the morning. Choosing her bathing suit in her bedroom at eight-fifteen or eight-thirty. Perhaps gazing at herself in the long mirror that hung on the inside of the white closet door in her and George’s bedroom. This wouldn’t be vanity on her part: After all, she was about to wear that Speedo before the whole congregation, and she needed to be sure that George’s handiwork was well hidden. At that moment she would have had just about twelve hours to live.

  There was her emergence from the pond water itself. Roughly eleven-thirty now. She would have nine hours remaining. I would see her spooning macaroni salad onto a paper plate at the potluck (and macaroni salad is a guess founded on nothing, because no one ever said a word to me about what Alice might have eaten at that meal). Gardening in the middle of the afternoon, in the vegetable plot in the backyard, perhaps weeding among the rows of carrots and harvesting her string beans and peas. Racing to the general store just before it closed at five o’clock to buy a clear plastic container of coleslaw: her very last purchase on this planet. She now had barely three hours. Maybe three hours and a few minutes. Less time than it takes me to drive to my sister’s in Statler. Less time than it took my mother to roast a turkey when I was a child. And, finally, there was her last phone call with Ginny. Strong, sisterly, protective Ginny O’Brien (now, it seemed, sad, scarred, and struggling Ginny O’Brien). There it was, her last conversation with anyone in the world other than the man who would kill her. She had only minutes now, though how many we’ll never know. The medical examiner in Vermont said it was impossible to be that precise with the time of death. But it was clear that the time remaining to her would be calculated in minutes, not hours.

  Still, the vision I kept returning to was this: Alice Hayward alone in her bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning as she studied her curves and her legs and her breasts in that bathing suit. Twelve hours. Half a day. That was about what she had left. What, I would wonder, would she have done differently if she had known that in half a day she would be dead? If the rules were such that there was no appeal to her predestined fate—she couldn’t leave; she couldn’t be somewhere else that Sunday night—but she understood that these were her last hours on earth, what conversations would she have initiated? What experiences would have mattered to her? What advice would she have shared with fifteen-year-old Katie?

  But obviously she didn’t know what loomed before her. Stephen insisted to me that she had known—that it was clear to her she was going to die and that he, in turn, should have done something. He said she might not have known it was going to occur that Sunday evening, but she had been confident that her death was coming soon at the hands of her husband. And, indeed, it had been at his hands.

  Yet I questioned whether Alice really had seen this coming. She had fought George. Struggled. She had not gone quietly to the angels. And according to Ginny, there had been nothing in that last phone call that might have suggested that Alice was either frightened or despondent. She had even joked about George. Infantilized him on the telephone. And, of course, Alice had Katie. I knew if I had a child, that would be reason enough for me to want to carry on. Parents may commit suicide every day, but nothing I had heard or learned about Alice suggested she was depressed.

  Consequently I found myself wondering if Stephen’s long, desperate riffs on guilt and self-loathing were nothing but an act. There. That was the whole clue, he had said, that single word. Her response to her baptism. It began to seem more and more likely that Stephen had made the whole thing up: the word as prophecy. The word as message. Oh, he might have been feeling guilty, and indeed a measure of it might have been because Alice was dead. But he hadn’t killed his former lover. If Stephen Drew really was feeling remorse, it was because he had left Alice to her fate by breaking off their affair and then, months later, because he had murdered her husband.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When my cell phone rang, I was home, rolling a yoga mat into a tube. It was raining outside, but it was a warm, Indian-summer sort of rain, and my windows overlooking Greene Street were open. I had finished my yoga for the day, and I was as close to content as I was in those weeks: not as serene as I was accustomed to being, but through prayer and meditation I was confident that eventually my aura would lose the toxicity that was causing me to see the world through an enervating smog. I felt that my angel was with me, ensuring that I would endure this strange autumn, as I had far worse crises—spiritual and physical—in my life.

  “Hi, Heather, it’s me,” said a little voice, and I knew instantly that it was Katie Hayward. I sat down on the daybed so I could focus on her. I asked her where she was and how she was faring. There was a ripple of anxiety in her tone, and instantly I was worried. She was calling from the bedroom that was now hers and Tina’s at the Cousino family’s house, and the disquiet I heard was fueled, she said, by another dream she’d had the night before and she’d been thinking about all day at school. The dream—a nightmare, really—had taken place the evening when her parents had died.

  “And Lula was inside the house, and my mom and dad’s bodies were there in the living room,” Katie was saying now.

  “Lula was inside the house?” I asked. I remembered that someone had told me that the dog had been outside when Ginny O’Brien had arrived Monday morning.

  “Yeah. And she was … ”

  “Go on.”

  “She was drinking my dad’s blood off his head. Lapping at it. Sort of nibbling at the hole where the bullet went in. Isn’t that gross? I feel like I’m really sick to even think of such a thing.”

  “No, you’re not sick at all. But remember: Lula hadn’t been in the living room. It was just a dream. Lula had probably been out all night. Your mom or dad let her out before they … fought.”

  “But that’s just it: They didn’t let Lula out! She was a shelter dog, and she’s always been a bit of a kook. Like a total lunatic. So either we walked her on a leash or we let her out when we could watch her. You know, keep an eye on her. We never just opened the door and let her out. Never. And let me tell you, she hasn’t changed a bit here at Tina’s. There is no way you just open the door and let that dog rock. I think it’s a miracle she was sitting on the front porch when Ginny got to my house the next day.”

  Did Katie understand the ramifications of what she was saying? I thought she did, which would explain the fretfulness in her voice. But I wasn’t sure, and so I pressed her just a bit. “Your father had been drinking. Maybe he—”

  “He didn’t let her out. I don’t care how drunk he was, he wouldn’t have let her out. I mean, like, why would he?”

  “Perhaps your mother tried to leave. And Lula left then. Maybe she just ran out the door.”

  “No. That’s what hit me because of the dream. As awful as the nightmare was, it made something really, really clear to me that I hadn’t thought about: Someone else let Lula out the door that night, either on purpose or by mistake. Now, som
etimes, if something has totally freaked her out, she’ll just zoom out the front door. But she really does have to be totally freaked. Totally scared.”

  The implication, and neither of us said anything for a moment, was that whoever had killed her father—assuming that he hadn’t killed himself—had let the dog out.

  “Was Lula ever scared of your father?” I asked.

  “No way. He treated Lula a lot better than he treated Mom.”

  “But she was scared of strangers, I presume.”

  “She was scared of men—except for Dad, who won her over. But other men scared the crap out of her. Even Stephen.”

  “Why do you say ‘even Stephen’?”

  “Well, he’s, like, a minister. Isn’t he supposed to be all about peace?”

  “Do you think Stephen was at your house on Sunday night? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “They’re selling the house, you know. It will pay for my college.”

  I repeated the question: “Do you think Stephen was at your house on Sunday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Lula was out.”

  “There has to be more to it than that.”

  She exhaled so profoundly that I could hear it clearly over the phone. “Remember when you called me the day after you visited the coroner guy?” she said after a moment. “You told me he said Mom had been wearing her red nightgown.”

  “Go on.”

  “I mean, I don’t know if any of this is what happened. But I keep thinking about it a lot. When my mom sent my dad away last winter, he didn’t take the handgun with him. He made a big deal about this. My mom didn’t even want to touch it, but he insisted she hang on to it, because she was going to be the only parent in the house looking out for me. And our house is sort of isolated. Two women and all. So he left her the gun and the bullets, and then he went to go live at the lake. And Mom put the gun in one of these big plastic tubs she uses to swap out her clothes. She puts her summer clothes in them in the winter and her winter clothes in them in the summer. And as far as I know, the gun was still in one of the tubs in July, even though the summer clothes had been replaced with the winter ones. She’d kept the gun where it was. See?”