Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

George’s body-its eternal resting place was of great interest to Alice’s mother and father-was going to be buried back in Buffalo, which mattered because Alice’s family wanted to be sure that she was nowhere near the man who had killed her. Ginny, too. Ginny, however, had recommended cremating George Hayward, “since that vicious bastard’s soul is already roasting in hell, anyway.”

Still, I could tell by Ginny’s puffy eyes that she had cried again that afternoon, suggesting to me that her anger was being subsumed by far healthier grief. She had found the strength to pull a comb through her hair and don a clean, creased polo shirt. Behind the house I could hear the growl of a lawn mower and the almost hypnotic way the noise waxed and waned like a wave.

“How are the boys?” I asked as we stood in the front hallway.

“Dan’s doing a little better than Walter. I sent Walter to the movies with everyone else,” she told me.

“That was a good idea.” Both children were in middle school. Dan was eleven and Walter thirteen. I knew both boys well, and I wasn’t surprised that Walter was taking the Hayward tragedy hard. He was a little closer to Katie’s age and he was, by nature, more sensitive than most teenage males. I wondered how I would have responded at thirteen if my mother’s best friend had been strangled by her husband.

“Yes. Anything to get him out of here for a while,” said Ginny. Then she added, “That’s Dan back there. He said he wanted to do something, so Walter showed him how to cut the grass. It’s his first time.”

After we had the key, Heather signed Ginny’s copy of Angels and Aurascapes . The dust jacket was a carefully blurred photograph of a woman with windblown hair emerging nude from the sea, with what I presumed at first glance was a large beach umbrella behind her. It was only on the second look that I realized the umbrella was actually a seashell the size of a schooner sail and the sylph was a modern-day Venus. As we left, Heather told Ginny she would stop by later so she could chat with Katie and, if they were interested, her grandparents. I suppose I should have felt threatened. Mostly I was bemused.

Then Heather and I went to the house where not two full days earlier George and Alice had died. We had taken my car, an American-made compact with camel-colored seats that felt awfully shabby compared to her Saab, and we drove up into the hills that circle the village of Haverill like an amphitheater. We passed the library and the grange and the volunteer fire department, where a group of boys in knee pads and shorts were riding their in-line skates and skateboards on the sloping asphalt before the company’s three-bay garage. We passed a sugarhouse, dormant since the first week in April, where two attractive but slightly dim yellow Labs that belonged to a family named McKenna were barking at the remnants of a fallen tree, as if the gnarled, rotting trunk were a crocodile. Occasionally, despite my frustration and grief, I found myself stealing a surreptitious glance at Heather’s legs as she sat in the passenger seat beside me. Her skirt had ridden up high on her thigh. Her stockings were nude, the type Alice had worn to the bank in the spring and, I assumed, in the early autumn-though I had never watched Alice dress in the early autumn.

We even passed the Brookners’ pond, where I had baptized Alice, a shallow bowl of brown water no more than forty or fifty yards from the road. Over the years the occasional car had driven by while I’d been in the midst of those infrequent baptisms. The vehicles always made the immersion more moving to me, because they made it such a powerfully public statement: strangers passing by behind glass, perhaps unbelievers, witnesses to the short but unfathomable statement each soul was making that moment in the water- I believe . Now joined with Christ Jesus by baptism, just as Christ was raised from the dead, someday so shall I.

There.

And we passed the cemetery at the top of the hill, with its markers and headstones and underground boxes of ash, the souls, it seemed to me that afternoon, gone not to heaven but merely to seed.

“This really is a pretty corner of New England,” Heather said as I drove, and her voice pulled me from my little reverie of self-pity and gloom. I turned from the cemetery to her. Her earrings, I noticed, were gold studs with a small blue stone in each. “I hope you appreciate the aura of intimacy that envelops it.”

I had absolutely no idea what to say to that and so I simply nodded and turned my eyes back to the road.

“AND YOU WERE here Monday morning?” Heather asked me. There was a slight torpor to her voice, but her eyes were moving like the pendulum on a metronome as she carefully surveyed the living room.

“Oh, I was here through early Monday evening.” The investigators from the state’s crime lab had taken what they needed and left. And while they had scrubbed away a good portion of the tumult in their work, there was still plenty left for those of us who wanted to help. Beside a window next to the couch where George’s body was found, was a small china cabinet with beveled-glass doors. With my hands in thick rubber gloves, I had used a sponge to wipe skull and brain from one long pane of glass. Then I had pulled bone chips and hair from the screen window just above it. The bullet, after perforating the skull and traveling through the cranium, had been extracted from the wall not far from that window by a member of the crime lab.

“And this was the room where it happened?” she went on. The fact she had to ask was a testimony to our work.

“Indeed.”

“You know,” she said, “in books and movies, couples always fight in their bedrooms. Isn’t that something? It’s as if writers and filmmakers want to vilify the domestic center of love. But, in my opinion, that’s one of those great artistic conventions that’s absolutely wrong.”

“Is this wisdom gleaned from your parents’ history or your conversations with readers?”

She picked up a small pile of compact discs that were lying on the floor beside a particleboard entertainment center. I recognized the artists that Alice liked best and presumed that the rest of the discs had been selected by George. I realized I knew which ones she had transferred onto her own iPod. “Both,” Heather said as she flipped through the discs the way, once, I would have looked through a pack of baseball cards.

“If people don’t fight in their bedrooms, where do they battle?”

As if they were delicate antique plates, Heather placed the discs back on the floor where she had found them. “You really have led a sheltered life. You’ve never lived with anyone, have you? Not ever?” She said it with good humor, as if she were making fun of a costume I might have chosen for a Halloween party or a souvenir T-shirt I had brought back from Cape Cod. It was as if she were commenting upon something that was really of little importance to me.

“Not ever,” I said simply. Then, a bit defensively, I added, “As Ire-call, my parents didn’t have a special room to work out their issues. They bickered everywhere they felt like it.”

A line of photo albums sat on a shelf like volumes from that most dispensable of books in the digital age, an encyclopedia. Heather stared at them for a long moment, clearly desirous of reaching for one and opening it.

“So where do most people fight?” I asked again.

“The kitchen. Followed by the rooms that have the television sets. In some homes that’s a living room. In others it’s a den.”

“The TV’s a bad influence?”

“Oh, I don’t think TV is a good influence. But it’s not the reason. It just happens to be in those rooms that people inhabit the most often.” She finally gave in to her desire to see the pictures of George and Alice Hayward that were more revealing than the small head shots of each that had been in the newspapers, on television, and on the Web the past two days. She pulled the album that was most accessible from the shelf and began to flip through the pages. And then, much to my surprise, the smallest of whimpers-barely more than a sigh-escaped her lips, and she sat down in the chair opposite the couch where George’s body had been found. Her knees almost seemed to buckle like the legs of a portable card table. She wiped at her eyes, but it was too late. She was crying, and it was obvious.