Chris Bohjalian: Secrets of Eden

Oh, but it was she who had risen up and kicked him out of the house, sending him to that cottage on the lake to see how life felt without her. He had attacked her once too often, and now she was going to try to make a go of it on her own.

She had been one of his salesclerks at the original clothing store while getting a degree in business administration, and it was there that they had met and fallen in love. They married soon after he had promoted her to manager at the restaurant. By the time he was embarking on the toy store, however, she was securely ensconced as a customer-service representative at a bank branch in Bennington. Given the reality that they had a young daughter, even the fanatically controlling George Hayward saw the advantages to another small but steady income stream when you were juggling local retail ventures in a world of mass merchandisers and chain stores with very deep pockets.

When she took him back as Memorial Day approached, believing him when he assured her that he was going to embark upon counseling and this time things would be different, some of our neighbors greeted his return to Haverill with relief: A family was reconciled, and a marriage had been preserved.

Imagine, then, their surprise when they heard that one disastrously drunken Sunday night he had strangled his wife and taken his handgun-not a thirty-gauge deer rifle, as the earliest rumors suggested-and shot himself.

Heather Laurent had arrived in Manchester for a day and a half of appearances that Sunday evening: the very night the Haywards would die and about twelve hours before their bodies would be discovered in our little village. Haverill is a small hill town roughly halfway between Bennington and Manchester; the general store is almost exactly eight miles east of the border with New York State. It was therefore Tuesday morning when Heather was able to read about the grim discovery in the newspaper while she ate breakfast in her hotel room at the Equinox and the line of admirers outside the bookstore in Manchester grew long as they waited for the store to open its doors for the day. She was going to be there that morning from ten to eleven, and then she was going to speak at lunchtime at a fund-raiser for the Southern Vermont Arts Center. The day before, Monday, she had visited the NPR affiliate in Albany and given a speech at Bennington College. As she read the story in the newspaper, the final touches were added to the displays of her books: a waterfall of pink satin ribbon cascading over the neat piles of her paperback, Angels and Aurascapes , and vases of blue irises and yellow daylilies surrounding her hardcover, A Sacred While , which had been published the month before.

There were two articles about the carnage in the newspaper, and it was in that second story that I appeared. The previous afternoon I had rambled on to the reporter-a woman I pegged at about twenty-five, a decade and a half younger than I and perhaps ten years the junior of Heather Laurent-about what C. S. Lewis had termed the problem of pain. From nearly fifteen minutes of the Reverend Stephen Drew’s babbling, she had pulled two quotes.“Sometimes it seems as if there’s nothing guiding this world. Or if there is something out there, it’s powerless or uninterested in us-or downright mean. Even evil,” I’d said, paraphrasing what Lewis considered the pessimist’s view of the cosmos. I may have gotten to Lewis’s summary of the Christian’s more optimistic perspective-I’d certainly planned to as a courtesy to my parishioners, even if it was a view I no longer shared-but it’s very possible that I didn’t. It’s possible (perhaps even likely) that I became sidetracked and started addressing instead another of the questions she’d asked me: How was our town handling this awful tragedy?“She was a member of our congregation,” I’d said, referring to Alice. “She was a member of my church. I knew very well he was hurting her. I should have done more.”

The reporter may or may not have noticed my transition from the plural to the personal, but Heather Laurent certainly did. And so after she had finished her speech at the arts center that Tuesday afternoon, she came to see me-she came to see us, to see me and Katie and our stunned little village-either a marionette moved by an omniscient god in a puppet show or merely an upright series of cells compelled forward by something inscrutably deep inside her DNA. A gene. A meme. Her one conscious thought? Someone had to help those poor, sad, pathetic people in Haverill. Someone had to help that pastor.

HEATHER LAURENT LOOKED very much as she did in the photographs that graced the backs of her books, though I would realize that only days later when I actually picked them up at the bookstore in Bronxville. She had a professional woman’s short hair, manageable and fast in the morning, just a shade closer to blond than brown. A round, girlish face and a pixielike nose-though there was nothing spritelike about her stature. She was almost as tall as I am, and I am exactly six feet. Unlike my sister, however, who is also quite tall, she seemed comfortable with her height: She neither slouched nor averted her eyes, both tendencies I had noticed over the years in my sister. Later I would learn that she was a classically trained dancer. She was wearing a white button-down silk blouse with a gold chain suspending a modest cross against her collarbone and sunglasses that she removed as she first started speaking to me, sliding them onto the top of her head like a hair band. She seemed almost disconcertingly happy to meet me, an ease-given the pall that hung over Haverill that afternoon-that I ascribe to the fathomless hope that flourished inside her, her faith in (her words, not mine) angels and auras. Make no mistake: Heather Laurent believed every word that she wrote.

When she first appeared at the front door of the parsonage Tuesday afternoon, I assumed she was a television reporter from a network news program. I craned my head to see over her shoulder, expecting to see behind her a van and a young person with a heavy shoulder camera. Instead I saw simply a Saab that was ice blue, a little dried mud along the sides.

“Are you Reverend Drew?” she asked me as I pushed open the screen door. It was steaming, even for July, and I heard small children playing in the shade by the shallow river across the street.

“I am. And you’re with…?”

“No one.”

“You’re not with a magazine? A newspaper?”

“I’m Heather Laurent. I thought I would see if I could be of help.”

I nodded. I wondered if I was supposed to know who she was. I imagined her as an E! network Katie Couric or a columnist for a glossy weekly I didn’t read.

“May I come in?” she went on. “I don’t want to be an imposition.” I shrugged and led her through the kitchen and the living room and out onto the back porch. Usually this late in the day on a Tuesday, I’d have finished the first draft of my Sunday sermon. That’s what Tuesday afternoons were for. I would leave my church office about noon and wander to the general store, where I would buy a sandwich and eat it there, chatting with whoever happened to stroll by in the middle of the day. I might be there as long as an hour, especially if the lectionary suggested passages that weren’t among my favorites and I was looking for inspiration. Often I’ve used that time to help people in ways that were more prosaic than profound, but utterly meaningful to them: Over the years in those lunch hours, I helped milk a llama, found the local septic-tank cleaner for the local excavator (a real emergency, trust me), and made urgent repairs to the swing set at the cooperative preschool before the children awoke from their naps. Then I would go home, since it was always easier for me to work uninterrupted at the parsonage than it was at my church office. In the summer I would take my laptop to the back porch and work there. By three-thirty or four, I would usually have fifteen to twenty minutes of reasonably uplifting biblical commentary. If it wasn’t too late in the afternoon, I would visit the hospitals in Bennington and Rutland where my neighbors-members and nonmembers of the church alike-were recovering or dying or lying unsure on movable beds. Most weeks I went to the hospital two or three times. But Tuesday-afternoon hospital visits were always a balancing act, because I had to be back in town not too long after seven, since the trustees and the Board of Christian Education and the Pastoral-Relations Committee all had their monthly meetings on Tuesday nights (though, fortunately, not the same Tuesday nights), and I was expected to be present. I wanted to be present. Usually my deadline was three-thirty: If my sermon was in reasonable shape by then, I would go to one or the other of the hospitals. If not, I would forgo a hospital visit that afternoon and go instead the next day.