Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

TINA COUSINO, KATIE Hayward’s best friend, was a very cool customer. Emmet said he had no idea that eyelids could hold the weight of so much shadow and liner or that there were parents in this world who would allow their sixteen-year-old daughters to wear so much mascara. The result was a pair of eyes that belonged, he said, to a clown that either wanted to look very scary or happened to be very sleepy. Her hair had been dyed the color of root beer and fell in a single flat wave halfway down her back. She had dozens of bracelets on each arm between her wrist and her elbow, some made of silver and some made of rubber and some made of tin. She had a sickle moon of metal studs running along the helix of each ear. Most of her answers were monosyllabic, but eventually Emmet was able to get what he needed. According to Tina, Katie knew well that her father had abused her mother and she didn’t have especially fond feelings toward the man. But she also didn’t talk about her parents all that much. From the few times she had, Tina had gotten the impression that Katie viewed her father as far more pathetic than terrifying. Katie was aware of the contrition that followed his bouts of violence and had even seen some of her father’s poetry. One night she had made fun of it with Tina. But she had never given her friend the impression that her mother was capable of sleeping with someone other than George, and the idea that Alice Hayward had been involved with Stephen Drew came as a complete shock to Tina. Among her longer responses? She found it “totally weird, totally disturbing” that her friend’s parents had died while she and Katie had been thirty-nine miles away at a Fray concert in Albany. She knew the mileage, she volunteered, because the next day when she heard what had happened, she’d gone to MapQuest. The distance, she said, seemed to matter.

STEPHEN’S MOTHER AND his sister had no idea that he’d been involved with a parishioner named Alice Hayward. They had never heard of most of the women he’d dated in Vermont. The only name that rang a bell was the name of the woman he had asked to marry him, but no one in Stephen’s family realized that the relationship had progressed so far. No one, it seemed, even suspected that it was more than a friendship.

“I always thought he was gay and just didn’t want to tell me,” his mother said. “I wouldn’t have been upset.”

His sister had disagreed. “Gay? Stephen? No, he’s into women. He’s just not into relationships. He’s really not into people. What he’s doing as a minister is a complete mystery to me.”

I KNOW THE difference between mourning and grief. I have seen enough of death-in my own life and professionally-to know that the differences aren’t subtle at all. My brother-in-law, who in some ways I was as close to as my own brother, died when he was only thirty-one. He was commuting to work on his bicycle. He was at the very end of his training as a cardiologist. According to a witness, he was riding his bicycle on the shoulder of the two-lane road that linked his small house with the four-lane road that led to the hospital and adjacent medical school where he worked, when he was nipped by the wide side mirror of a pickup truck. The truck never stopped, and the witness, another physician in a car behind the pickup who was also commuting to work, was too focused on my brother-in-law’s body as it careened through the air like a crash-test dummy to register the license plate. He was thrown from the bike into the trunk of a thick maple tree and then back onto the pavement. His skull slammed into both, shattering his helmet like a ripe pumpkin rind, and he died from massive head trauma. In hindsight this was clearly for the best, because his neck had also been broken and in all likelihood he would have been paralyzed from the chin down if somehow he had survived. My brother-in-law would not have done well as a quadriplegic.

And my college roommate died of cancer as a relatively young mother, leaving behind two daughters, each of whom is only a year or so older than each of my boys. For months I saved the last message she left on my cell phone when she had tried to reach me in her final days in the hospital: Hi, Catherine, it’s me. They can’t do anything more. I love you . She sounded tired, but in no way relieved. I was in a conference in San Francisco, and she was dying in Maryland. I went right away, but she deteriorated so quickly that she never made it to the hospice. By the time I arrived, she was already so doped up on morphine that she never even had a clue I was in the room.

And, of course, I have seen the children of women who were murdered by their boyfriends and husbands, and the parents of women who were slaughtered by strangers, their bodies left unceremoniously in the woods. I have seen the mothers of little girls who were raped and smothered. (Smothering seems to be the method preferred by uncles and stepfathers when they want to kill the elementary-or middle-school girl they have just sodomized. They seem to desire plastic bags.)

Sometimes you just expect the waves and waves of sorrow to wash over you. Swamp you completely. That, in my mind, is real grief. And mourning? That’s when you’ve reached the stage where you can build a stout seawall against those colossal breakers and go about your life. You might be sprayed by the surf, but you are not incapacitated. In the days after my brother-in-law died, my sister and her in-laws were grieving. They were shell-shocked and disconsolate and incapable of doing little more than getting dressed in the morning. My roommate’s husband hadn’t that luxury because of his daughters. He wasn’t allowed to grieve. And so he had to make do with mere slow-motion mourning.

On the other hand, he’d had time to prepare for what was coming. My sister and her in-laws hadn’t.

That’s the thing about the families who lose someone to a homicide or a violent accident: There’s no time to build that seawall. There’s no time even for sandbags.

I thought about this whenever my mind wandered to poor Katie Hayward. I wondered what it must be like suddenly to be so completely and utterly alone. The kid didn’t even have siblings. Sometimes I wish I could do the interviewing myself. I can’t, for the simple reason that it could result in my having to testify in court, which would compromise the prosecution. But Katie was one of those people I would have wanted to speak with as a parent as well as a prosecutor. Do it myself so I could talk to her as a mom. Apparently she was continuing to hold up reasonably well. There had been a few sleepless nights in September and some long days when she ate little and spoke less. Once a teacher found her sobbing in a school bathroom stall. But she was doing her schoolwork, melding well with the Cousino family, and she had auditioned for and been cast in the school musical. She had written an opened for the school newspaper condemning what she called the administration’s cavalier energy policy.

All of this meant that I couldn’t wait to find out what Heather Laurent had said to Katie when she had returned to Vermont in September. I wanted to know what Mother Angel had been doing in Haverill before she had decided to drop in on David. In two days Emmet and another trooper were taking an overnight road trip: first to meet Amanda Laurent in Statler, New York, and then to Manhattan to formally interview Heather herself. But that afternoon Emmet had gone back to the Cousino house in Haverill with Katie’s social worker, Josie, a powerhouse of a woman with dreadlocks and tats, to speak to the teenager about her most recent chat with the Queen of the Seraphim. I didn’t want us to push too hard after what the poor kid had been through-and I doubt that Josie would have let us-but I had to know what Heather had said to the teenager and what the woman had asked.