Secrets Of Eden (2010)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "This is a beautiful little village," she said.

  "Thank you."

  "The tragedy doesn't change that, you know. The tragedy doesn't make it any less lovely."

  "Visit this place in mid-January. It gets pretty bleak."

  She smiled and ran two fingers along the chain around her neck, resting them for a moment on the small cross. "You know what I mean," she said. "People understand the aura of a little place like this."

  Briefly it crossed my mind that this woman was a nun. It was possible, I decided, that I had just mistaken a Catholic nun for a cable celebrity. "Are you with the church?" I asked.

  "The church. Is there only one?"

  "Oh, this afternoon they're all equally suspect."

  "You sound awfully disillusioned."

  "Maybe just awfully fed up."

  "Well," she answered, "I'm not here with any church. I'm just a writer."

  "And you're not with ... anything?"

  "I write books," she said, and it was clear in the gentleness of her tone that the fact that I hadn't a clue who she was didn't bother her.

  "Are you going to write a book about our tragedy?"

  "I hope not."

  "That's not why you're here?" She shrugged. "Maybe you're why I'm here. You. That girl. This town."

  My anger then was still embryonic, it was still merely in utero fury--a hostility toward the universe conceived roughly twenty-nine hours earlier. Had Heather arrived at my home a few weeks or even days later, I might have been unable to hold my tongue. I might have thrown her out of the house. On the other hand, had she arrived a few weeks or even days later, I might have been gone. I've no idea for sure where I'd have wound up--Texas, most likely, or southern Illinois--but I think there's a good chance I would have pressed "send" on one (or more) of those e-mails and gotten the hell out of Vermont. Had Heather come even Saturday or Sunday of that week, she might have found an empty house and a stunned deacon or steward murmuring, "He left. He just up and left."

  But that afternoon I was able to satisfy my anger with essentially harmless morsels of sarcasm.

  "Well," I said evenly. "I guess I should be flattered."

  "Don't be. Don't give me that much credit. Do you have any family, Reverend Drew?"

  "No. I'm alone."

  "No wife?"

  "Nope."

  "A partner?"

  "I date." Usually I gave the inquisitive a bit more of a bone, but that afternoon I was in no mood to discuss the history and vagaries of my life choices. There were women in my past, but not a marriage.

  "Are you from around here?" she asked.

  "I'm not."

  "Have you been in Vermont--with this congregation--a long time? Or are you an interim minister?"

  I looked longingly through the screen door at the pitcher with iced coffee on the kitchen table. "Are these questions the preface to a more extended inquiry, Ms. Laurent, or merely an attempt at conversation?"

  "Please, call me Heather. I'd like that."

  "Next time I will," I agreed. The first Heather I had ever known had taken off all her clothes for me. I was five, she was seven. She lived two houses away. We were upstairs in her bedroom on a summer afternoon, and she promised me she would strip if I could find her red bathing suit. It wasn't a difficult search: I found it in the third dresser drawer I opened, wadded into a ball at the top of her underwear and T-shirts. She was the first female I ever saw naked. "And these questions?" I asked again.

  "I haven't a clue. Really and truly. I'm just giving them voice as they come to me."

  "In that case, I'm going to get some more iced coffee--though it's been sitting out so long by now it will merely be watered-down tepid coffee. Still, you are welcome to have some. In my current state of mind, this is an act of courtesy that has demanded a herculean resiliency. If I rise to that occasion, will you tell me why you've come to see me?"

  "I drink tea."

  "Then you're out of luck. I don't drink tea."

  "Have I come at a bad time?"

  I leaned forward in my chair and looked deep into her face. The edges of her lips, adorned with a lipstick so lustrous and red that I thought of the vestments I wore when I'd preach on Pentecost or Palm Sunday, were curled into a smile, and I realized that she had meant this as a joke. She understood there had been few worse times in my life.

  "I think this counts as one, yes."

  "Pour yourself that coffee," she said. "I don't need any. But I would like to stay and visit. May I?"

  I rarely saw lipstick like that in Haverill. I rarely saw a silk blouse.

  "I have nowhere to go," I answered.

  "No meetings? No parishioners?"

  "There are always meetings. There are always parishioners."

  "But you have some time."

  I nodded as I stood up and listened to her as I opened the screen door and retrieved the pitcher.

  "I have nothing at all on my calendar this afternoon or evening," she said. "And I have a sense you can appreciate how liberating that sensation is. I just finished one of the world's longest book tours." Then she rose, too, and followed me inside.

  "What's your book about?"

  "My new one?"

  "Yes. Your ... new one."

  "The world's aura and the way we are degrading it environmentally and ecologically."

  "I suppose aura, in this case, isn't simply another word for icecap. Or rain forest."

  "No, it's not. But certainly there's a connection."

  "And your other books?"

  "Other book. Singular. I've only written two."

  "And it's about?"

  She smiled as if she knew I couldn't possibly take seriously what she was about to tell me. "Angels. Auras. The quality of vibrations we emit and how they affect our relationship with the divine."

  "I'm sure those vibrations really matter."

  "You're not sure at all, but that's okay."

  "Let me guess. You were at the bookstore in Manchester last night?"

  "This morning, actually. Then I gave a talk at that beautiful arts center up on the hill. Yesterday I was at Bennington College and the NPR station in Albany."

  "And now you're finishing your day with an appearance in scenic little Haverill."

  "You're having a real hard time with that, aren't you?"

  "Well, do you visit every village that achieves our sort of notoriety?"

  "Nope."

  "Just ours."

  She nodded and then turned her gaze toward the open shelves and kitchen counters that were filled with the detritus of a single man's--a single pastor's--life. There were the odd, mismatched knickknacks given to me by dotty parishioners over the years: porcelain cookie jars (originally filled, of course, with freshly baked cookies with ridiculous names like snickerdoodles and choc-a-roos), one shaped like a potbellied elf and one like a plump, sitting beagle (that had, alas, lost an ear over the years); an earthenware butter dish I never used that resembled a submarine, a gift from a couple in the congregation after I gave a sermon with references to a 1960s television program I had seen that week on TV Land called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; a tin container for straws, empty, that was crafted from a Coca-Cola can; and a plastic paper-napkin holder that was shaped like a rather flat, two-dimensional log cabin. And then there were the pots and pans that once had belonged to my mother but now dangled--a little tarnished, a little dinged--like old meat from hooks above the stove, as well as the juice and water glasses from her bridal registry, not old enough yet to be interesting but still discolored with age. (When my father died, she had chosen to sell the house and move to a condominium apartment in a brick building in the village, and in her downsizing my sister and I had wound up with a sizable percentage of the contents from the pantry, the hutch, and the kitchen cabinets.) There were coffee mugs, two rows of them, many stained brown and some visibly cracked. And there were the four matching tins for flour and sugar and coffee and rice that were meant to look like miniatures of the sort
of antique barrels one might have found once in a country store--or, at any rate, in a country store on a movie set--but each of them now looked only bulbous and bloated and tired. I was always a little embarrassed when a woman saw my kitchen for the first time. It wasn't often, but invariably I was left with the sensation that I had either remarkably bad taste or an awful lot to explain.

  Moreover, I rarely cooked, since so much food came to me from parishioners and friends and since I was expected to attend so many meetings at night. Besides, I lived alone, and relatively few people actually like to cook for themselves. As a result there was an antiseptic odorlessness to the room, an aura of benign disuse. In a typical year, I must have prepared no more than two dozen dinners for myself in that kitchen.

  Had she looked through the open door into the den, she would have seen an ironing board strategically placed before my television set and the pile of my shirts and pants that seemed always to be the size of a beanbag chair. I ironed just enough to keep up, but not frequently enough ever to shrink the mound. She would have seen the DVDs more appropriate in the bedroom of a fifth-grade boy than a minister flirting with middle age: an account of a Red Sox World Series championship, two-thirds of the Star Wars saga. She might have noticed the books I was reading, some on the floor and some on the coffee table and some on the television itself. There were books of inspiration and biblical interpretation, as well as the novels set in courtrooms and police stations and law offices--the mysteries that I savor the way some people appreciate science fiction.

  It struck me, as it did always when a person saw the inside of my house, as rather pathetic. And while the homes of most single men are rather pathetic--testimonies in some cases to a stunted childhood, sad little museums of loneliness--mine seemed more so. I was, after all, a minister. It seemed to me that I should have transcended the pitiable curiosities of the single life. Usually I took comfort that at least my house wasn't rife with porn and NASCAR magazines, but that seemed like a small consolation that afternoon.

  "How did you learn about us?" I asked. "The newspaper?"

  "Initially. And then the television news. And then the Internet."

  "Ah, Haverill's fifteen minutes of fame. Our chance to bask in the glow of the press. Lovely."

  She picked up the butter dish in the shape of a science-fiction submarine. It looked vaguely like a stingray with a school bus behind it. "You sound so angry about the media," she murmured, her eyes scanning the vessel. "From the newspaper I would have guessed it was something else."

  "And that was?"

  She looked up at me, her mouth open the tiniest bit. "I'm really not that presumptuous," she answered. "And I hope not that arrogant."

  "No, you can tell me. I'm interested."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "I thought you blamed yourself for Alice and George Hayward's deaths."

  "I do."

  "And I thought you blamed your God."

  "I would if I had one."

  "That's what I thought," said Heather Laurent. "I think that's why I came."

  FROM THE PREFACE TO A SACRED WHILE BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. VI)

  The host of a radio show once asked me point-blank, "Do you really believe in magic? Honestly?"

  "Honestly," I said. "Really and truly."

  "Do you think the people who have bought your book do, too?"

  I told him I couldn't speak for the people who had bought my book. But it was clear both to me and to his listeners that this radio personality thought my extended discussions of magic in Angels and Aurascapes were the ramblings of a lunatic. Most people, in his opinion, were smart enough not to believe in magic.

  And so I corrected him. "Most individuals on this planet have a religion they approach with some degree of earnestness," I said. "And what is a religion but a belief in the unseen and a faith in the impossible? Remember what Jesus says in Mark? 'For all things are possible with God.' Magic is about the endless ways in this world that the impossible becomes possible--just like religion. Religion, in essence, is ritualized magic."

  I have lived a life with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better ...

  CHAPTER THREE

  I went to Alice and George Hayward's house when Ginny O'Brien called that Monday morning, I saw the bodies myself. After the state's mobile crime lab had left, a number of us helped clean the place up--the blood on the wall, the fragments of skull and brain lodged in the mesh of the screen window beside the couch on which George had been sitting when he died--so neither Alice's nor George's families would have to. Everyone wanted to be sure that Katie would never have to see the piecemeal remains of her parents.

  In the days immediately after the murder and the suicide, we learned small details about the couple's last hours that seemed to matter a great deal at the time. Ginny O'Brien, though shaken, was still a chronological font whose memory was precise.

  Apparently she saw George Hayward drinking on his porch late Sunday afternoon, the day I had baptized his wife, and he was in all likelihood drunk during dinner. It was certainly clear he was drunk after dinner: We counted thirteen open, empty beer bottles in the kitchen and the living room, only a few of which had been rinsed, and the house--and George Hayward's corpse--reeked of alcohol. An investigator with the office of the medical examiner, a balding detective sergeant from the state police with a skull the shape of an egg, dusted each of the bottles for fingerprints. The Haywards' last meal on this earth included a salad with plump peas and tender string beans from their vegetable garden, chicken salad that Alice probably had prepared that afternoon, and ice-cream scoops of coleslaw that she had bought at the general store in the village seconds before it closed for the day: five o'clock on summer Sundays, three P.M. on Sundays the rest of the year. There were plates in the sink that suggested this had been their menu, as well as leftovers in the refrigerator and (we would learn later) recognizable, undigested remains in Alice's stomach.

  Katie had left late that afternoon for a rock concert in Albany and then spent the night at the home of her friend, Tina Cousino, closer to the center of Haverill. Most people believed that if Katie had been home that night, it would not have prevented George from murdering Alice. The teen's presence would merely have increased the number of bodies that Ginny O'Brien would have discovered the next day.

  At some point after the two corpses had been removed from the house and the mobile van from the state crime lab had left, when many of us were still there cleaning in our rubber gloves--a little sickened, a little numb--a thought crossed my mind. An image. George strangling Alice once she was no longer capable of fighting back. Did their eyes meet for a moment before she blacked out? I had read somewhere that to kill someone by strangulation, you needed to retain your grip on the neck long after the victim had lost consciousness and ceased struggling, otherwise he or she might resume breathing and eventually wake up. But what of these two who had been married so long? What did they see in each other's eyes as they grappled? Clearly George had kept his hands around her neck long after she had gone limp. Or had he? Was it possible that he had released her, presuming she was dead, but then she had started to come to and he actually had to go back to work? It seemed conceivable to me as I paused that afternoon in my blue gloves.

  Regardless, before George would murder his wife, he would pass out himself for a time in front of the television set. This was around seven-thirty. The cordless telephone was pressed against Alice's ear as she carried George's and her dinner dishes to the kitchen sink and chatted with Ginny. Apparently it was not uncommon for Alice to wait for her husband to fall asleep before venturing a call to one of her friends--especially Ginny--though she was quick to insist that it was only a coincidence that more times than not George was either asleep or out when she spoke with the pastor or, far more frequently, with the various local women.

  "Oh, somebody's dropped off," she'd said to her friend that evening, almost as if she were referrin
g to a six-month-old baby who everyone agreed was really rather cute. Then the pair discussed George's toy store, which Alice said was struggling, as high gas prices were decreasing the usual summer tourist traffic. He was also worried about declining interest in his ribs restaurant--the novelty had long worn off--but he had been more quiet than antagonistic as they ate. According to Ginny, they had also talked about Alice's baptism that day, Ginny's own two middle-school-aged sons and the different summer day camps in which they were involved, and the reality that Ginny's mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer's two years earlier, seemed to have gotten much worse. Ironically, Ginny did not bring up her belief that either George should get counseling--hadn't he promised?--or Alice should leave him, or both. She did often. But not that night. They didn't discuss Ginny's frustration with her friend for never even showing up for the hearing after Alice had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order in February or her friend's decision to reconcile with her husband in May.