A New Eden

by Quent Cordair

  Sophia had welcomed the change with only minimal unease. At the dinner table, she preferred the exhortations and enthusiasm for all things Flock to the seething and heavy silences punctuated with spewed anger. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that her daughter had jumped out of the frying pan and into – not the fire, but a vat of warm, sugary, liquid gelatin. The overt kindnesses and effervescent expressions of love for everyone and everything seemed to Sophia little more genuine or justified than the anger and venom. How long would this new spiritual high last? How long would the new medium buoy Julie up? How long before the gelatin would begin to solidify around her? How long before the spell broke?

  Less than six months, as it turned out. In the middle of the school year, Julie insisted on transferring from her private school to the Flock’s academy. Roger had refused initially, but with Sophia’s patient persistence and urging, he finally acquiesced.

  At the beginning of the summer break, Julie had traveled with a busload of Flock youth to a Church retreat at a campground in southern Idaho. When she returned, the effervescence and effusiveness had vanished. She wouldn’t talk, she wouldn’t open up, no matter what Sophia or Roger or Aaron tried. Once again, she shut everyone out. Through the locked bedroom door, her pillow-muffled, retching sobs could be heard late into the night. Surely, Sophia guessed, the problem was now a boy, perhaps even a girl – but she could get nothing out of her daughter.

  After a few days, Julie pulled herself together enough to continue attending church services and activities. She donned a brave smile but remained subdued. A few weeks later, Sophia came home at midday to meet with the electrician about the pool heater. Julie’s book-bag and purse were on her bed. Julie herself was nowhere to be found. On a mother’s hunch, Sophia drove to the back of the property.

  Julie was there on her swing, rocking herself gently, head leaning against one of the ropes. After a forlorn search of her mother’s eyes, the dam finally broke and the despair poured out. Julie was pregnant, of course. It had been a Flock boy, of course. She wouldn’t say which. She had gone to a church counselor that morning. He had informed her in gentle but firm terms that her only option was to have the baby – unless she wanted to lose her soul and go to hell for the murder of one of God’s children. Still hardly more than a child herself, Julie was distraught, devastated.

  Sophia was heartbroken for her daughter – and furious, not at Julie’s actions, but at the Church’s response. She pried the name of the counselor out of Julie and arranged a meeting. The counselor was polite and empathetic, but he wouldn’t back down. He insisted he would have told the same to his youngest daughter, a year younger than Julie: murder was murder. There was now a child of God in Julie’s womb, and Julie’s duty was to carry her God-given burden, to give birth, and to raise the child to adulthood. Julie’s life was no longer her own. Other young mothers had managed it – Julie would manage it as well. Fortunately she had Sophia to help her. God didn’t promise that our lives would be easy, only that it was our duty to carry whatever cross he gave us to bear on this earth, for which we would be rewarded in heaven.

  Sophia next stormed the parish, but Reverend Lundquist was away on a tour of the Flock’s missions in Central America. He couldn’t be reached, or so his secretary insisted. Sophia’s daily messages went unanswered.

  For two more agonizing weeks, Julie struggled. She struggled with her conscience and with her hopes for her future, with her hopes for her life and for her soul. When Julie allowed it, her mother was at her side. In the end, with her mother’s approval and escort, she made an appointment at the clinic and had the abortion.

  The drive home had been in a thick silence. Sophia reached out to hold her daughter’s hand. Julie pulled away, clasping her own hands in her lap, staring out of the window.

  She stopped going to church. Sliding back into her darkness, she began palliating her shame and grief with food – any and all food she could get her hands on, any she could keep down. After gaining thirty pounds, she suddenly stopped eating and lost all the weight – and then more weight. She returned to church and went to a different Flock counselor, this time a woman, who told her that God would forgive her, but only if she were truly and genuinely remorseful and ashamed for her grievous sins, for having sex out of wedlock and for murdering her unborn child. Given the severity of the transgressions, the counselor prescribed a six-month regimen of weekly personal and group counseling and prayer, supplemented by five hundred hours of voluntary duty in the orphanage, taking care of the babies that other young mothers, following God’s will, had given birth to. Julie asked her mother later what had happened to all the mothers of those babies. Sophia could only guess. A couple of them, she knew, had worked at the resort, but they had long since disappeared from the community.

  Long talks between mother and daughter and longer silences followed. Julie regretted having slept with the boy, or more accurately, having done so without protection, but she couldn’t bring herself, as hard as she tried, to feel wrong for having done so. She was chagrined at having made what she considered to be a serious mistake, but she simply was not ashamed of it, and she couldn’t make herself feel an emotion she didn’t feel. The act of lovemaking, she told her mother, had seemed neither wrong nor unnatural. She had been following a desire that God surely had given her for a reason. She had felt terrible about the abortion but she couldn’t bring herself to feel genuinely guilty for that either, given the alternative, which was simply unthinkable to her – and she was too honest to fake a remorse that didn’t and couldn’t exist.

  She attended another few church services. Of course they knew. Everyone knew. One of the girls working at the clinic probably had a friend of a friend who was an Obadite. The only secrets in Aurum Valley were the ones nobody cared about. As she told her mother afterwards, she felt as if the whole congregation were watching her. Many had gone out of their way to express sympathy and understanding, seeming almost grateful for something they wouldn’t come out and name, as though they were somehow relieved at what she had done – that she, Julie Hale, was a sinner – that she, of all the girls in the valley, had sinned.

  Sophia accompanied Julie to church the next Sunday, and she experienced it too. She was approached and greeted eagerly with a fresh, enthusiastic acceptance, as though the Flock members were appreciative that Sophia and her family had been brought down to a status as low – perhaps even lower – than their own. God had revealed that the Hales, too, were subject to human fallibilities and carnal hungers; their weakness and true nature had finally been revealed; they had been brought down to a position from which only God could raise them up again, up to the more humble plane of the Flock.

  Julie lost another twenty pounds she couldn’t afford to lose before waking in the hospital with an IV in her arm, having fainted in her room while the rest of the family ate dinner. As her daughter was being released, three days later, Sophia had choked back tears on catching a glimpse of Julie’s back when she was changing into her street clothes. She looked like a concentration-camp victim, all skin and bones. It was less than a month later, on another spring day as faultless and beautiful as this Easter afternoon, that the housekeeper found Julie hanging in her bedroom closet, the belt from her Procession robe around her neck.

  Julie had never had a chance to wear the robe. She had been so pleased and excited when she bought it, months ahead of time. She was so looking forward to her first Procession. Sophia had left the robe hanging in the closet.

  She remembered little of the summer that followed: a stream of routine tasks and activities completed habitually, joylessly. In the late autumn, she began attending Sunday church services again herself, walking down the aisle with her head erect, eyes ahead, to the very seat where she had last sat next to her daughter. It thoroughly perplexed her as to how she could have anything to do with the Church or religion again. She had attended only sporadically before, out of curiosity more than anything. She certainly wasn’t blind to the role the inst
itution had played in her daughter’s death, yet other than in her rose garden, she hadn’t been able to find peace anywhere else.

  The music from the organ and the choir enveloped and bathed her, lifting and sifting her grief and pain, like lapping waves taking the sand from the seashore, grain by grain, floating it away on an ebbing tide. The songs of a promised life in the hereafter granted the impossible hope that she might see her Julie again. That was something at least, something to hold on to, as unlikely and fantastic as the prospect seemed. It was the only way Sophia could find of not letting go, which she couldn’t bring herself to do, not yet, not completely. And when Skye Emberly sang, there was something sacred, something unspeakably dear and pure in the young woman’s voice that was the essence of Julie’s laughter when she would swing, head and curls thrown back, legs flying high in the air. It was Skye who kept Julie alive, Skye who kept Sophia alive, kept her coming back for more of what she needed to live – the lifesaving medication carried from the stage in note after precious note to where Sophia sat in her pew. Drop after drop of critical infusion that kept the patient from flat-lining. . . .

  It had been a year and seventeen days. Her heart was still broken. On this Easter afternoon, the breeze had died and the swing hung silent and still, but the clover and wild flowers were there, growing up around the engraved stone, promising life anew after the winter’s long, dark cold.

  From the oak’s branches came a birdsong.

  The birds never sang of pain or of loss or of promise. They knew nothing of yesterday or tomorrow. They sang in the moment, of the moment, for the moment. Being ever in the present was a kind of eternity, wasn’t it? Sophia clung to the impossible hope. In truth, she couldn’t bring herself to actually believe in heaven or in life after death, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of the notion either, that it might conceivably be so, that somewhere her dear Julie might still be alive in some way, might still be laughing her inimitable joyous laugh somewhere – that it might still be possible, someday, someway, for a mother’s heart to be whole again, to be healed, to be full, to be unbroken, to be complete.

  She had been doing better, she thought, but then came the funeral for the Flock boy, and on an Easter morning no less.

  It had been entirely unexpected. Sophia, unprepared, had been sucked down below the surface again by an inescapable maelstrom. She had been horribly upset with Lundquist that morning, angry at the whole Church, angry at every single worshiper in the auditorium. Someone should have had the forethought and decency to warn her. They all knew. Had they forgotten so soon? She could have stayed home that morning. She certainly would have stayed home, had she known. She was already unsettled by the Angels’ recent intrusions on the hotel property, the environmentalists’ attacks on the developments, the Procession forcing their way past the gate guard on Friday. Lundquist’s militant reference to the gate in his sermon that morning had only further exacerbated her dark mood, her defensiveness.

  In truth, there was nothing terribly serious about any of it, certainly nothing worse than what the Hales had endured and overcome before. There was no reason to think that the individual threats were directly connected or concerted in any way. Taken in parts and pieces, it all was relatively minor really, quite manageable. Context, Sophia, context, she kept reminding herself. But the totality left her feeling as though she were hearing the faint call of battle trumpets, the distant rumble of approaching armies converging to lay siege to her castle, to all she held dear and sacred – or to what was left of it.

  She was still holding the Easter lilies. She looked at the gravestone. Since Julie’s death, she couldn’t trust her emotional state. She was simply being paranoid, she told herself. The storm clouds would pass, as they always did. Wouldn’t they? She searched the sky. The only cloud in the great dome of blue was a single white puff, no larger than her hand, hanging just over the Garnets. There was nothing to fear.

  She heard footsteps behind her. She didn’t need to turn to know it was Aaron. Sam would have politely announced himself, as would have Roger, but Sophia and Aaron had never needed to speak in moments such as these. He knew, and she knew. When he reached her, he wrapped his arms around her waist and held her. He missed their Julie too. She leaned back into him. What a strong and sturdy young man her son had become.

  A honeybee worked the blossoms of the wild flowers, flitting from one to the next. Other than the hum of its wings and the rustle of a new breeze rising in the leaves, the only sound was the squeak of Sam’s handkerchief polishing the car’s chrome.

  It was Aaron who broke the silence, as Sophia knew he would.

  “Why don’t you come up the Hill with me tonight, Mom?”

  “Tonight? Why – ? Oh, tomorrow is Rising Day, isn’t it? I had forgotten. Isn’t your father going up?”

  “He has business to work on, he says. I’m sure that’s true, but – has he been feeling well? He seems off lately, tired maybe.”

  “It’s just stress, I think. I hope. He’s been working hard. Traveling a lot. The delays here aren’t helping. But he’s always gone up for Rising Eve.” To her recollection, the only year he’d ever missed was when she was in labor with Julie. Sam had accompanied Aaron to the summit that year.

  “You should come up with me, Mom. It’s been awhile.”

  “I would love to, but I should probably stay with your father if he might not be feeling well. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Ian might enjoy going up again. Or Harris.”

  “Ian is working a fence line tonight. The professor has been slipping away somewhere on the weekends. I won’t mind being alone.”

  She followed his gaze to the slope of the Hill, just visible above the tree line. “It will be a beautiful evening. A night beneath the stars . . . Yes, it has been too long for me. Next year, hopefully.”

  “I would love that.” He gave her a squeeze and a kiss on her temple. “Let’s plan on it then. Next year?”

  She turned and kissed his cheek. He always knew what she needed. Her son was going to make someone a wonderful husband someday. She had done well, she thought – at least with one of her children. “Be careful tonight, Aaron.”

  He might have questioned or protested, but he only let his head come to rest on her shoulder again. She leaned back into him.

  She knew it sounded absurd, irrational even. It sounded silly even to her. Be careful? There couldn’t be anything remotely dangerous about a spring night on the Hill, not on their Hill, of all places. During a storm, perhaps, there might be lightning, but there was still the old lightning rod left on the summit by Aaron’s grandfather, which could always be raised if needed. And yet –

  She left his arms and slowly approached the gravestone. Kneeling in the grass, she laid the stem of lilies above where Julie’s heart would be. Forgive me, dearest daughter of mine. I should have found a way. Should have found a way. . . .

  She willed herself to stand again, to turn and walk erectly and purposefully back to the car, arm in arm with her son, smiling for his sake as much as for her own, holding his arm a little too tightly, she knew, while swearing to herself from the depths of her soul that if Death ever so much as glanced sideways at her beloved boy, she would throw herself between them and stand toe to toe with the black bastard, fighting him and his cold sickle with all she had, tooth and nail, to her last breath if necessary. She wouldn’t lose that battle again. She simply couldn’t.

  * * *

  The afternoon before, the professor had coaxed his rusted, sputtering hatchback up the rutted mountain road and had left it by the trailhead unlocked. There were days when he thought the car being stolen would be more a relief than not, but his faithful steed, having long outlived its years, limped along on sheer loyalty it seemed, refusing to die. Aaron had offered more than once to replace it with one of the family’s used vehicles, but the professor and old Bucket had been through a lot together. He hadn’t found the heart to put it down.
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  With his rucksack on his back and walking stick in hand, he had hiked the two miles up the narrow foot trail, then turned onto the deer track that climbed and switched back, following the creek running fat with snow melt. A mile higher, the track ended abruptly on a jagged horizon of sky. Picking his way along the exposed ridge, he came to the ledge jutting out over the cliff, a third of the way up the easterly face of the Garnet Range. From the ledge’s edge, the drop was a sheer eight hundred feet to the boulders below. It was another nine hundred feet of thinly wooded, rocky slope down to the valley floor.

  From this elevation one could see, over the hills to the east, as far as Utah on a clear day. On a clear night, as tonight promised to be, there would be a bottomless ocean of stars above. The view of the valley below was uninterrupted, north to south. From here, one could enjoy the simple forms and broader shapes without being subjected to the messy imperfections or the natural decay or the crumblings. From here, there were no potholes, no loose nails, no cracked glass, no faded paint, no uncut weeds – no teacher’s desk with chipped edges, no dirty windows fogged with moisture from too many damp lungs packed too closely into a classroom too poorly ventilated. There was no sickly fluorescent lighting, no hopelessly unambitious, unintelligent students with glazed eyes and unformed, malformed, muddled minds. From here, there was only the idea of the valley, the straight lines and the curves, the grouped masses composed and laid out over the expansive, abstracted setting. It was a lovely painting on a grand canvas. Almost anything can be romantic, given enough distance.