Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know quite how this happened.”

Usually I am fairly competent when it comes to crying women-or, for that matter, with crying men. A minister, even an unmarried one, embraces with impunity. But I wasn’t myself those days; the truth was, even now I’m not wholly sure whom I had become. And so I allowed her to regain a semblance of her usual composure-a demeanor, I had concluded, that was at once so unflappably serene (I would say ethereal , but, given her interest in angels, that would suggest I attributed a layer of autobiography to her books that she never intended) and so completely earnest that I had begun to understand her popularity. Certainly she was beautiful, but there are lots of beautiful women in this world. It was that she was telegenic: an individual whose competence was manifest and whose sincerity was phosphorescent. Her charisma was high-definition. She was the perfect pitchwoman for celestial guardians in the digital world.

Finally I leaned over and glanced at the pictures that had set her off. They were of Katie alone and of Katie and Alice together.

“She’s going to be so pretty,” she sniffled, referring to the now-orphaned fifteen-year-old.

“She already is,” I said, but mostly I was focused on Heather. On how, despite my despair and my culpability and my innumerable failures as a minister and as a man, I could appreciate how lovely this woman was. I thought she might be a bit of a lunatic. But I also felt an undeniable attraction to her that managed to bob safely in the maelstrom of other emotions that would have taken precedence in a person of character-or at least in a person not unmoored-and sent it corkscrewing slowly but ceaselessly to the very bottom of the ocean.

She was studying a group of photos, some of which I had already seen on the Facebook and MySpace pages of teens in the Youth Group. (I should tell you that I only visited those pages with the teenagers themselves, when they wanted to share a digital album with me at Youth Group or, for one reason or another, after school.) There was Katie with some of her friends making faces beneath a Broadway marquee in Manhattan; there she and her mother were-again, making silly faces-in bathing suits somewhere near their cottage on Lake Bomoseen. There she was with her grandparents from Nashua, a whole page of photos taken the previous Christmas. There was a series of Katie on the church van: literally, sitting on top of it with some members of the Youth Group, a Red Sox cap shading much of her face. It was one of the last times I would recall her going anywhere with the Youth Group.

“You told me you’ve never been married,” I said. “I assume you don’t have any children.”

“No, I don’t. But I’d love to someday.”

“Think it’s in the cards?”

“If the right man is, maybe. But I have no interest in being a heroic single mother.”

She flipped some more pages, and there was Katie beside her friend Tina Cousino’s ancient gray Appaloosa. The horse had gone blind and lame and been euthanized a little over a year ago and was buried in a field by the Cousinos’ house. Tina and Katie had choreographed a small service that had left me both moved and impressed. They had asked me to eulogize the animal, and I had. And there were Katie and Alice together approaching the summit of Mount Equinox, a hike they had taken with a woman from Alice’s bank toward the very end of that period when Alice and George had been estranged. Mid-May, I recalled.

“There aren’t very many of Alice and George together, are there?” she murmured.

“Well, not in this album, anyway.”

“I’d wager there aren’t many of George Hayward, period. If the pattern holds, he controlled the camera in the early years of the marriage, and so he took most of the pictures. Then, as their marriage deteriorated, they spent less time together in the sorts of situations that… someone would want to photograph.”

“That’s probably true. Most people rarely saw them together over the last few years. Maybe at a parade. Maybe at the volunteer firefighters’ annual chicken barbecue. Maybe at a business fete of some sort in Manchester.”

“George was a volunteer firefighter?”

“He was for a while. He quit a few years ago, when he opened his third business. But he was still friends with some of the guys.”

The room smelled of cleanser and disinfectant. It was a bad smell to me at that moment, almost a little sickening, and so I opened another window.

“Who gardened?”

“Alice.”

“These pictures of tomatoes should be on seed packets.”

“She was a good gardener, no doubt about it. You should peek at her garden before you leave.”

Heather started to nod and then stopped. She was staring at old Easter photos, and George was in these. He was sitting between Katie and Alice on the very couch on which he would die, and for the briefest of seconds I presumed she had paused simply because here, at last, was a photo of George Hayward. But that wasn’t it, and I understood this almost instantly. It was, of course, the couch. She stared across the room at the wall where two days earlier there had been a couch. Now there was only a side table we had pressed against the Sheetrock to fill the void.

“You removed the couch,” she said, and the idea seemed to horrify her.

“We couldn’t clean it,” I said. “And so Ginny suggested we just haul it in a pickup truck to the dump.”

LATER I SHOWED her Alice and George’s bedroom, a room with which I did have some familiarity, and Katie’s room, with which I had almost none. I knew its location, little else, because Alice respected her daughter’s privacy. The first time I really had been in there had been the day before, when that group of us had rounded up the sorts of things we thought Katie would want or would need.

And then I drove the two of us back to the parsonage, and she climbed into her Saab and returned to Ginny’s house to wait for Katie. Later I would learn that she had stayed for dinner and she and Katie had taken one of those long walks at sunset that Heather claimed in her books were so healing. Ginny would tell me-realizing only when she was done speaking that such tidings might have been hurtful-that Heather’s effect on Katie Hayward had been almost transformative. Apparently Heather had known precisely how to comfort the girl; she had said whatever it was that Katie needed to hear to be reassured that she would get through this, she would survive, she would never be alone. She would be held up by an angel, her sagging soul kept aloft by wings that might be invisible but were nonetheless as strong and tangible as an eagle’s.

“Of course, you’ve helped Katie, too!” Ginny said when she was done, an afterthought that was awkward but still very well intentioned. “Heather has just… you know, lived through this. She can relate to what Katie is experiencing.”

“I’m fine,” I told Ginny, because I was. Ginny was right. Heather could provide Katie much better therapy than I, and not simply because-like Katie-she was an orphan whose father had murdered her mother. Unlike me, Heather still saw poetry in thunderheads and divinity in coincidence. The world, for her, still offered promise. “I’m glad Heather was here for Katie,” I added. “And I’m glad she was here for you, too.”

AFTER LEAVING GINNY’S, Heather returned to the loft in which she lived in Manhattan. It was, she had insisted earlier that afternoon, a pretty modest place, a condo she had chosen that offered little in the way of amenities or style but was rich in memory and aura. I had the sense she was being coy: I knew that part of SoHo. She must have gotten home after midnight.

I resolved that I would remain in Haverill through Alice’s funeral. I would carry out my responsibilities as best I could for the next forty-eight hours, helping the town in the manner that was expected of me. I would talk more with Katie and her grandparents, as well as with George’s mother and father, who as far as I knew would be in Albany and southern Vermont at least one more night. I would greet people at the funeral home during the calling hours on Wednesday evening. I would pray with the people who wanted me to pray with them, and I would visit the sick and the dying and the parishioners who were confused by the carnage that had occurred in our midst. I would offer comfort and counsel.