Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

And while I am well aware that there is indeed all manner of malevolence in the ether, there is benevolence there, too. And just as there is random horror-murder, suicide, child abuse, car accidents, disease, famine, war, ethnic cleansing-there is also indiscriminate kindness. Not merely miracles, though I have experienced them. But simple human connection, either brokered by an angel or sourced by one. That is why I try to encourage people to be receptive to that new person who seems to have appeared in their life out of nowhere .

When I was a kid, I used to pull down a trapdoor in the ceiling hallway along the second floor of my grandparents’ house and climb up into the attic. I did it all the time when I was seven and eight years old, because my grandparents lived only about fifteen miles away, and so my family was visiting them all the time. I wasn’t supposed to be up there, but when my parents were having coffee with them after dinner or brunch or sitting in their backyard on these ancient wooden lawn chairs that must have weighed as much as a small car, it’s where I would go. My brother and sister never joined me. When they were there, too, they’d park themselves in front of the TV. What was up there that interested me so much? Old magazines. My grandfather-my mom’s father-had been an editor for Vermont Life , and he had boxes of dusty copies of that magazine, as well as plenty of Time and Life and True Detective . Sometimes I would try to entice my brother to join me by making a very big deal about some vaguely provocative photos of Marilyn Monroe I’d found in an old Life and some even more suggestive photos of female hippies at Woodstock in an issue of Time . But he never took the bait, and so I was always up there alone.

By dragging a small upholstered easy chair from my grandparents’ bedroom to a spot just below the trapdoor, I was able to stretch just enough to reach the cord that opened it. Attached to the door were a series of clunky wooden steps, and they always reminded me of the basement stairs at my own family’s house. The attic had windows along three of its walls, and so even though there was no electricity up there, there was enough light to thumb through the old magazines and look at the pictures. I would usually sit on an old rocking horse with pretend stirrups because I was afraid there were mice up there and I didn’t want my feet touching the floor, and I would read what I could understand and simply study the pictures beside those articles that either bored me or were way over my head. Obviously, most of what I came across was way over my head.

But the articles that I believe I spent the most time with-and the ones that have stayed with me ever since-were the ones about violent crime in New York and San Francisco and Miami, Florida. Stories about husbands who murdered their wives, drug dealers who machine-gunned federal agents, serial killers who had children buried in their basements and backyards. Scared the crap out of me-but I was totally fascinated. My grandfather’s Vermont Life s with their pictures of bright red barns and rustic sugarhouses? Those stories about apple orchards and fiddlers and ice fishing? They were of less interest to me at that age. So there I was some Sunday afternoons in a velvet dress and crimson tights, my hair no doubt in a ponytail, studying black-and-white photos that would have made Weegee proud. Who can say what drew me to that sort of thing so early on, but I couldn’t keep away. When I’d had enough-when I was almost too scared-I’d run like a racehorse out of there. I couldn’t wait to rejoin my siblings by the TV or my parents outside in the sun. Later, when Paul and I were dating and the relationship was growing serious, I brought him to that house to meet my grandmother. (My grandfather had passed away years earlier.) While we were there, I brought him upstairs to the attic and showed him the magazines-ostensibly so he could see the issues of Vermont Life that my grandfather had worked on. My grandmother was going to be selling the house soon, and she surprised me by asking me if I wanted the magazines. Not the Vermont Life s, which she said were going to the state historical society. The issues of Time and Life and True Detective . I passed. But to this day I have no idea how she knew that I was attracted to them.

AT BREAKFAST MY boys can be holy freaking terrors. Not every day, but often enough that Paul once put a shower curtain on the kitchen floor beneath their chairs to try to make a point. Another time I made them eat their cereal without milk-no fluids at all in the bowls-for a week. Yup, I’m the mom who punished her kids by denying them milk. Very nice, I know. I can just see the headlines when the Department for Children and Families comes to take them away. The problem is that Lionel, my three-year-old, drives Marcus, my first-grader, crazy because he doesn’t understand why the other males in the house get to go to school and he doesn’t.

“Toddler Town is just like a school,” Marcus will tell him patiently, a real little diplomat, but Lionel somehow sees a big difference between his day care and his brother’s elementary school and Paul’s high school. And so either he will take his cereal spoon and smash it into Marcus’s bowl so it catapults the Cocoa Fobs or Pepperoni Clusters (or whatever presweetened nightmare we’re feeding them that day) into the air or he will use his fingers like a shovel and start scooping the stuff out onto the table as if he’s trying to build a sand castle with his bare hands on Cape Cod. And, of course, Paul and I are trying to get out the door-and get the two boys out the door-and that only adds to the chaos.

The Haywards were murdered at the end of July, and so in the days when the investigation was starting to ramp up, Lionel had his usual Toddler Town, Marcus had a summer day camp called Kid-Friendly Arts or (I swear, I am not making this up) K-FARTS for short. No one officially associated with the organization ever calls it that, and the letterhead and materials never use that acronym, but all of the parents refer to it with that enticing little shorthand. Apparently the organization is in the process of changing its name. In any case, the timing of the murder of the Haywards meant that Paul and I didn’t have to get the boys to school, but most mornings we still had to move things along at breakfast. Usually Paul would drop the boys off at Toddler Town and K-FARTS, since he didn’t have to be anywhere ever in the summer (no, I’m not bitter). One morning in August when Emmet called, I was in the midst of sponging off the kitchen table and making sure there wasn’t visual evidence of the crap I feed my kids on their mouths. He was on his cell, and he wanted to know if I had reviewed the papers and the materials he’d left at my office the day before. I hadn’t, because I’d left work a little early to take a deposition in a case involving a drunken speedboat driver and a water-skier who-as a result of the driver’s recklessly downing margaritas on the dock-was never going to water-ski or walk again.

When I think about how I spend most of each day, it’s a wonder I ever let my kids out of my sight.

“Well, it’s all pretty interesting,” Emmet said.

“Oh?”

“We brought back a carton of stuff for the crime lab. But the main thing I wanted to tell you is this: Alice Hayward kept a journal. It’s one of those books with blank pages that really isn’t much bigger than an address book. As a matter of fact, that’s what I thought it was when I found it-though I didn’t understand at first why an address book would be way in the back of the woman’s underwear drawer. But as soon as I opened it up, I knew what it was.”