Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  “I’m listening,” I said simply.

  “Well, here’s the thing: I don’t think Stephen ever saw my mom in her plaid flannel nightgown. Her winter one. I mean, if they were sleeping together, it was during the day when I was at school, because they sure weren’t doing it when I was home at night. And so she wouldn’t have been wearing her nightgown at, like, eleven in the morning or when she came home from the bank to be with him. She would have been wearing clothes. Casual clothes or work clothes. But clothes. Besides, that nightgown is sort of grungy. It’s got weird tears and coffee stains. My mom really liked it. But there is no way she would have let anyone other than my dad or me ever see her in it. Especially … ”

  “Especially what?”

  “I’m a virgin. Okay? I’m a virgin. But I’m not totally naïve. And if you’re having sex with a guy for the first couple of times, you want to look as hot as you can, even if you’re, like, middle-aged. And I know my mom. There is no way she would ever have let Stephen see her in that plaid flannel nightgown.”

  “And so you’re suggesting he saw the nightgown for the first time when he got the gun.”

  “I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” she said, her voice growing more animated, more urgent. “But I just can’t see how else Stephen could have known about the nightgown.”

  “Do you know if he knew the gun was in one of those tubs? Did your mom ever tell you that she’d told him she kept the pistol there?”

  “You sound like a detective.”

  “I’m sorry. But my head is spinning a little bit. Have you told the police any of this?”

  “They didn’t ask me any questions about the gun. Or about Lula. And it was only when I had the dream about Lula that the whole nightgown thing even crossed my mind. See, in the dream my mom was wearing that ridiculous plaid nightgown. And that image made the rest really, really clear.”

  “I’m going to tell you three things,” I said. “First of all, grown-ups are strange, and sometimes we get comfortable with one another pretty quickly. Your mother and Stephen were intimate in the winter. And so I wouldn’t discount completely the idea that your mother wore that grungy plaid nightgown around him at some point. Then, in the midst of whatever else Stephen is experiencing right now, he confused the nightgowns in his mind when he spoke with you. But here is the second thing: You might be onto something, and you should share your conjectures with the police. I would call them myself—and if you want me to, I will be happy to. But they’re going to want to talk to you anyway after that, so you might as well just pick up the phone and call them yourself. Call that state trooper who interviewed us or call the deputy state’s attorney. I believe her name is Catherine. I’ll get you both numbers—or Josie can. That social worker. Let them decide if there’s anything to it.”

  “And the third? You said there were three things.”

  “Don’t tell anyone else what you told me.”

  “Not even Tina or Ginny?”

  “No, not even Tina or Ginny,” I said. And then, because I wanted to leave nothing to chance when it came to Katie Hayward’s safety, I added, “And not Stephen. Under no circumstances tell Stephen what you just told me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “he would be the last person I’d tell.”

  I STARTED READING the Vermont newspapers online that autumn, peeking at them every day to see if there was any news about Stephen or any quotes from his attorney, Aaron Lamb—a name that struck me at some moments as appropriate, others as ironic. I watched to see if Katie’s revelations about the gun and the nightgown would appear in the papers, but they didn’t. A friend of mine who is a lawyer for the City of New York told me that unless the case went to trial, I wouldn’t read about them. She said that didn’t mean that the information wasn’t being used as part of the investigation into Stephen Drew or that detectives weren’t trying to (her words, not mine) turn up the heat on the now officially retired minister. But she said that from everything I had shared with her, unless they could link him to the gun, an indictment wasn’t likely.

  “But it’s so clear that he did it,” I told her one evening over a glass of wine at a bar at the South Street Seaport just after Columbus Day weekend. Outside, the shoes of the businesswomen and-men clattered along the cobblestones as, invariably, they chatted on their headsets and PDAs.

  “Well, maybe it’s clear to you,” she corrected me. “But it sounds to me that unless he confesses, he’s going to get away with it.”

  I considered calling that Vermont state trooper who had interviewed me, and periodically I found myself fiddling with his card, which, for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint, I kept in my purse. I considered making another statement, a second one, but what more really could I say? Stephen refused to own up to his guilt to me and had told me nothing I could add. I could make sure that Katie had shared her ideas with the investigators, but there really wasn’t any doubt in my mind that she had. By now they knew about the gun and the nightgown and the dog.

  Stephen did try to reconcile with me that autumn, but only one time with real effort. He called twice and left messages, and he e-mailed me once asking me whether it might be possible to have a conversation. The messages were not insincere, but nor were they impassioned. They were a little chilly and a little tame. Only in one instance did he make an effort in which I glimpsed the iridescence that hovers like a halo amid an aura, and even that was but a passing glance. It was in a handwritten note on a piece of yellow legal paper that he mailed me. Most of the individual letters on each line were so small and controlled that I wondered if he had had a contest with himself to see how many words he could wedge onto the page. He began by reiterating how I should, at the very least, see him once more. Face-to-face. See what it felt like for the two of us to be together, see if there was a hint of the fire we had once felt in each other’s presence. He had moved out of the parsonage by then and was renting an apartment in Bennington while he decided what to do next with his life. He never came right out and said that he was confident he was never going to be tried for murder, but it seemed to me that he was behaving that way. He was almost arrogant. I think he had moved to Bennington, rather than anywhere else, to flaunt his freedom before the very criminal-justice system that wanted to arrest him. Still, it was clear he didn’t plan to settle there. He said the lease was short-term because he was contemplating a move to Manhattan, where he would try to find a new career. He wrote that he thought he was going to become a social worker and, if necessary, he would return to school to get his M.S.W. He claimed that he wanted to work with the homeless. He had visions of himself rolling up his sleeves and doing the sorts of work he should have been doing when he had been in the pulpit. He insisted this wasn’t atonement. Altogether, it was a lot of information, and at first it felt rather formulaic to me. But then I came to a paragraph in which I saw his relentless self-control quiver: “If I make it to eighty, I wonder who will look back with me at the footprints I’ve left on the beach. I presume both that I will be the only one gazing at them and there will be but one set. This isn’t another plea for you to hear me out (I’ve already done that) or a plea wrapped in the most transparent of gauze that you’ll reconsider your distance; it is merely an acknowledgment that I am conscious of the tendency I have to wall myself off from others and that this inclination may not serve me well in the end.” I might have been more sympathetic if he had used the word fear instead of the word presume. But he hadn’t. Stephen Drew really didn’t know from fear, and whatever vulnerability he might briefly or inadvertently reveal, he would mask the moment he understood what he had done. I never responded to his phone calls or missives, until eventually they stopped coming. Like all things mortal, they simply disappeared.

  IT WAS AMANDA who said most firmly that I was being ridiculous about Stephen. She came to New York to meet with a gallery owner who represented Norman’s birds, and as she does always when she visits, she stayed on the daybed in my loft. That evening, while smoking a cigarette and
sipping a diet soda watered down by melted ice, she told me, “You took in too much of our parents’ quarrels. You’re thinking too much about the fights that young girl must have seen over the years in Vermont. You’re looking for a reason not to commit.”

  She was wearing a smock dress that fell to midthigh and a cardigan sweater that was navy blue. But I could see from her knees that she had put on a little weight. Not a lot, but some. Clearly she was in a better phase than she had been back in August. Somehow she had learned that I’d called both her therapist and her nutritionist, but she hadn’t been angry with me. Her hair had regained a bit of its natural luster.

  “He had been sleeping with Alice Hayward and hadn’t told me,” I reminded her.

  “So what? Think of all the angels and devils you’ve slept with.”

  “And he killed a man.”

  “He killed a man who had beaten his wife for years and just strangled her with his bare hands. Not a great loss for humanity.”

  “I could never feel safe with him,” I said.

  “You spend too much time reliving our childhood and adolescence.”

  “Funny. I told Katie Hayward just the opposite. I told her I don’t.”

  “And these days it’s not just ours you relive. It’s hers, too.”

  “Hers? Katie’s?”

  “Yup, that orphan. The kid.”

  I thought about this. “Actually, it’s Alice I seem to think about most.”

  “Maybe. But I know you. You’re fixated on the Haywards and you’re fixated on the Laurents. You think about us. You and me and—I don’t know—pick a night. Pick the night we cowered behind the living-room couch.”

  I sipped my wine. Here was a memory that—try as I might—I was never going to repress. I was in the third grade at the time, and so Amanda had been in the fifth. It was a weekend, probably a Saturday night. Our parents had been out that evening, and our father had just returned from driving the baby-sitter home. Both our mother and father had been drinking heavily, and there must have been an angel looking out for that baby-sitter that night, because otherwise I can’t imagine how she would have survived the three-and-a-half-mile drive to her house. Our mother had kissed each of us sloppily as she had checked in on us in our bedrooms, accidentally waking us both with her awkwardness, and then stumbled back down the stairs. I remember vividly how it sounded as if she’d fallen the last few steps. Amanda and I hadn’t planned to get out of our beds when our parents returned, but we had both heard the slight tumble and gone to investigate. We saw that our mother was already up. She was standing in the kitchen between the sink and the dishwasher, leaning against the counter the color of fossils. She had a juice glass in her hand, half filled with scotch. She was in her own world and didn’t realize we were watching. When we heard our father pulling in to the driveway—squealing to a stop and splintering one of the wood panels on the garage door with the sedan’s bumper—my instinct was to race back upstairs to my bedroom, but Amanda grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me into the living room.

  Their struggle that evening was about our mother’s drinking. At least that was what on the most obvious level had led our father to start in on her. On another level he had undoubtedly been angry at himself for dinging the garage door. And while I expected my mother to fight back by observing that he wasn’t exactly a teetotaler, instead she brought up some woman from his office with whom, she implied, he was having an affair. In reality I have no doubt that her language was far more specific and colorful. Sufficiently specific and colorful that he said she had a sewer for a mouth and he couldn’t believe he had ever once kissed it or (and Amanda insists that we have not made this up, our father really did say this) stuck his penis in it—though, again, he did not use so clinical a word as penis.

  At first we listened in on our parents’ fight from a perch atop the couch, but when we heard the rapid-fire sound of her open palm on his cheek and then the grunt as he punched her hard in (we would learn later) the abdomen, we dove over the back of the couch and hid underneath the table behind it. A moment later, our parents moved from the kitchen to the living room. Amanda and I have deconstructed what happened next any number of times in our adult lives, trying to make sense of what we heard or thought we heard in light of what we would discover later about the confusing and disturbing place where violence and adult sexuality sometimes intersected. Had our father sodomized our mother against her will that night over the front cushions of the couch? Had she asked him as he worked hard to hurt her whether he did this to his girlfriend, too? Had he told her, as the couch shoved the table against the wall and I almost cried out myself as one of its wooden legs tore a strip of skin off my pinkie, that she was a completely unfit mother and everyone would have been better off if he’d only fucked her there all these years?

  There. The word that decades later Stephen Drew would insist symbolized everything for him one tragic summer and autumn.

  “You know,” Amanda was saying now, “those troopers acted like they suspected Norman and me.”

  “You? Why?”

  “Well, Norman and I don’t make the best presentation, if you get my drift.”

  “I thought they were just checking Stephen’s and my story.”

  She chuckled and took a small sip of her soft drink. I noticed how carefully she nursed it, and I presumed this was a habit from drinking beverages that might have actual calories. I had drained my second glass of wine, and she had barely made a dent into her first diet soda. “Oh, they were. But when you meet a fellow with a criminal record who is as badly socialized as my Norman and a woman with my”—and here she paused, choosing her words carefully—“issues, you think they might be capable of anything. Anything bad, that is.”

  After our father had finished with our mother, he slapped her one last time on her rear, and the sound was so sharp it echoed. Later I would think his hand must have hurt, too. Amanda and I wouldn’t go upstairs until our mother had lurched disconsolately into the bathroom (powder room in her vernacular) to clean up. We moved quickly but silently, because we understood that neither parent could ever know all that we had overheard. The next morning there would still be a small Rorschach of blood—a tree leaf, maybe, perhaps that of an oak—on the rug by the base of the couch, and the slipcover from one of the cushions would be in the laundry.

  “I knew they thought I might have been involved,” I said. “But the two of you? That’s absurd.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. But I can see them looking at either you or me. Let’s face it: We’re both pretty damaged goods.”

  Had she meant to be hurtful? It was possible. She knew that I didn’t view myself as any more damaged than most mortals. She knew that I took comfort in the way I was held close now by angels. When I said nothing, unsure how to respond, my older sister continued, “Seriously, Heather, just because our parents’ marriage was a disaster in every conceivable way, you shouldn’t assume all relationships are. My advice? Spend less time with your cherubim and seraphim. Spend more time with real people.”

  “You’re the one living in the woods with the world’s quietest man,” I reminded her.

  “And I’m a disaster. I’m nobody’s role model, least of all yours. But until you cut bait once again on what had the potential to be a terrifically normal—perhaps even healthy—relationship, I always presumed you were doing a lot better than me.”

  There was never going to be anything normal or healthy about my involvement with Stephen Drew, but I was not going to argue that evening with Amanda. I remembered that Tuesday at the end of July when I had first met him: Originally I thought that I had gone to see the pastor of a small country church, because he’d seemed so lost to me in the newspaper and I presumed my history could help him. Could help his community. Only later would I admit to myself that my motivation may have been slightly different—or, at least, more involved. On some level it was likely that I had been drawn to Haverill that afternoon by the inexorable gravity of memory. By my own fathomle
ss scars. We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven. When we were in grade school and hiding behind the couch. It’s why we need angels.

  And there was something else that was always going to preclude any rapprochement with Stephen: There was that small detail that he was capable of murder. I understood the justification, and I appreciated the fury he must have experienced when he came upon the scene—when he saw his former lover dead on the floor in her nightgown. I was not unsympathetic. But I also knew that I wanted nothing to do with him ever again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The fights were horrible, but the silences might have been even worse. No one could do silence like Mom and Dad. Especially Mom. We’re talking plasma TV with the mute button on. It was her way of fighting back, and it just drove Dad crazy. Because the thing was, after he’d hit her, he’d be all contrite and sorry and want to make it up to her. Breakfast in bed, sit with her on the couch and watch whatever she wanted—even Sex and the City reruns (which he hated), if that’s what was on. And that was the time when Mom was in the driver’s seat. Of course, it also meant that the fighting could drag on for days. Dad would hit Mom, Mom would clam up, and Dad would go from sorry to sulking to pissed. Not a promising cycle, if you get my drift.

  Now, they had friends. My dad had his buddies in the volunteer fire company and people who worked at his stores and his restaurant. I think he was probably a pretty good boss. And Mom had chums, too. Some people said Dad took away Mom’s friends, and there were definitely some women he didn’t want her hanging around with. That’s true. But he didn’t stop her from seeing everyone. Mom still had the crumblies in the Women’s Circle and Ginny O’Brien—who was also in the Women’s Circle but was a couple generations short of crumbly. And there is nothing that Ginny wouldn’t have done for Mom. Nothing. And I guess she had her friends at the bank. But the thing is this: Even if my mom had had lots of gal pals, the last thing she wanted was for people to think that her marriage was a failure and she was, like, a total victim. A total loser—because she wasn’t a loser, at least in my opinion. This was really clear when I would visit her at the bank branch on Saturday mornings, which I did pretty often by the time I was in middle school, because it was near stores and it was a chance to get out of Haverill. I saw her with the tellers and a man named Frank Albertson who was a commercial loan officer there. She was totally professional. She was completely different from the way she was at home. I wish she had known how good she was.