Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“Oh, I disagree. She may want to go back. But anyone in the world would understand if she didn’t-if she refused to go back in there. I’m sure you or her friends or other parents would be more than willing to pack everything up for her.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Where will she live?” She seemed to ask the question with great care, perhaps because she was afraid I had been offended when she’d corrected me. Actually, I hadn’t been bothered at all. She had made sense.

“There are options,” I answered. “Her grandparents in Nashua are one possibility. But maybe she’ll live here in Haverill with the Cousinos-with her friend’s family. She might want to finish high school in Vermont and be with the kids she’s known since she was six.”

“And this Cousino family is okay with that?”

“So I gather.”

“Have you talked with Katie?”

“Yes.” This time I did find myself slightly affronted. As her pastor I had visited with Katie both yesterday and today, and so my answer may have sounded a little curt. Afterward I hoped I had sounded only surprised.

“How would you say she was doing?”

“She’s devastated, of course. In shock. But she’s doing what she needs to do,” I answered. It was the first thought that came into my mind. “She’s endured the questions the state police had about her parents, as well as the questions of a social worker and a therapist, and she’s volunteered all the information they could possibly want.”

“Is she incredibly angry with her father?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

She nodded. “But I’m sure she also feels some anger toward her mother.”

“For not getting out?”

“For allowing it to happen. For being a victim.”

“I imagine she’s feeling some of that, too.”

“I’d like to talk to her. She’s one of the reasons I’m here. Do you think that would be possible?”

“It’s certainly possible. But I’m not sure it’s appropriate. She already has a small army of grief counselors-amateurs and professionals-at her disposal,” I said.

“Is the house still a-what’s the expression?-a crime scene?”

“No. The state police and the investigators from the crime lab were done by the end of Monday afternoon. It was pretty obvious what had happened. A lot of yesterday is already a blur, but I think most of the official people were gone by four-thirty or five.”

“Ah, the official people.”

“You know what I mean. The medical examiner. The detectives.”

“Can I see the house? Or is that inappropriate, too?”

“The door’s locked. But I think Ginny has the key, if you’d like.”

“I don’t think like is exactly the right word,” she said. “But I do want to see the inside of the house.”

“A visit to the Book Depository while in Dallas?”

“Something like that.”

I shrugged. “I’ll call Ginny. The two of us can go for a visit.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You’ve been asking me questions for the last half an hour.”

“Just why do you blame yourself for George and Alice Hayward’s deaths?”

“I don’t blame myself precisely,” I told her, careful to keep my voice even, a monotone of reasonability. “But I do fear that I gave Alice permission.”

“To die.”

“Yes.”

“At the baptism you told me about.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you marry them?”

“No. They were married in Bennington years before I met them.”

“Did you want her to leave him? Just kick him out-or get the heck out of that house herself and never go back?”

Yes , I thought, in hindsight I did want her to get out of that house. Briefly, perhaps, I even wanted her to move into mine. Into this parsonage . But of course I didn’t say that. Because no one knew. Because Alice and I had barely even tiptoed around such a notion, even when we were alone in her home and content in the fog of a postcoital torpor-when, usually, all things seem possible and all lovers are optimists.

“I did,” I answered simply. “I kept hoping she would take Katie and run. Go anywhere. Move in with her parents in Nashua. Move in with Ginny right here. Perhaps get a place of her own in Bennington.”

“It’s not that easy. Not emotionally, not financially.”

“I know. She was married to a reprehensible man. She would have needed someone willing to step up and protect her. Still, I wish… ”

“What do you wish?”

“I never want to see a marriage go belly-up.” It was not what I had planned to say, but I had to say something.

“Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder?”

“Something like that. And sometimes I’m afraid that she tried to preserve the marriage for Katie.”

“That’s completely ridiculous, you know.”

“I do. And sometimes I’m afraid that she clung to the marriage because she was afraid she didn’t know what would become of her if she didn’t.”

“The devil she knew?”

“Precisely.”

“What about her friends? What did they want?”

I understood what she was getting at, and she was correct. “I know Ginny wanted her to divorce him. She loathed George. Thought he was absolutely despicable. She was thrilled when Alice got a temporary relief-from-abuse order and he went to live in their cottage on Lake Bomoseen for a couple of months.”

“When was that?”

“Just before Valentine’s Day. He came back just before Memorial Day.”

“Not all that long ago.”

“No.”

“So she got a restraining order-”

“A temporary restraining order. The police served it while George was at his office one Monday afternoon. There was a hearing scheduled a week later. Neither Alice nor George ever showed up.”

“That’s common.”

“I gather. Tell me, are you married? I presume not, because you’re not wearing a wedding ring.” I think I inquired largely because I wanted a respite from her questions. But it’s also possible that on some level I still felt the need to be pastoral-to give her the chance to talk about herself for a moment. I may have been phoning it in by then-I may have been phoning it in for months-but old habits die hard.

“I’m not. But someday I will be, if only because I have a six-year-old girl’s obsession with weddings,” she said, and she shook her head as if she were in the midst of some small, odd moment of rapture. “Of all the rites of passage a culture creates for itself, weddings are perhaps the most beautiful. And, perhaps, the most mysterious.”

“Well, I certainly preferred doing marriages to funerals.”

“Preferred? Why the past tense? Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

“No.”

“You really think you’re finished?” She smiled. “Come on, your faith is that fragile?”

I sighed. Across the street the small river burbled and one of the children there squealed. The swallow adjusted herself on her eggs, using her beak to pick at something invisible to me on her wing. And somewhere not all that far away, a dog barked. Years earlier, I recalled, when I had been a junior in college and a member in good standing of what some students dismissively called the God Squad, I had been asked-challenged, more precisely-by a classmate who viewed himself as an atheist to explain Auschwitz and cancer and typhoons in Bangladesh that drowned tens of thousands of people. As I sat on my porch that first afternoon with Heather Laurent, I wondered what I’d said; my world had shrunk to such a degree that I honestly couldn’t remember how I had responded. I wasn’t sure what I’d felt-other, of course, than any sentient person’s reasonable sadness-at all the funerals over which I had officiated and all the times I had sat beside beds in hospitals and homes and held people’s hands as they died. As my own father had expired in a hospital room and spoke his last words before he sank into unconsciousness: “Go. Just… go.” (I didn’t. My mother, my sister, and I would stay till the end.) I had watched them all depart with what must have seemed to them as confidence and composure, my faith as solid and intact as the heavy pasta pot that hung on a hook above the parsonage stove. But something was different now: It was as if age or rust had worn a great hole in the bottom of that pot and my faith had trickled out like warm water. There were no answered prayers here. And so instead of addressing Heather’s question, I observed, “With everything that must be going on in your life right now, you’ve come here.”