Chris Bohjalian: Secrets of Eden

The Tuesday that Heather Laurent came to Haverill, however, I hadn’t even tried to write a sermon. And I had no plans to go to a hospital. Somehow, instead of a sermon-which would have been trying enough that day, intellectually as well as emotionally-I had to find it inside me to pen some comforting remarks for Alice Hayward’s funeral, scheduled for that Thursday morning at the church. (George’s funeral was going to be a private family affair in upstate New York.) And I had failed: The comforting words had disappeared along with the uplifting ones.

When I realized that I was incapable, at least for the moment, of writing the eulogy, I had instead begun to tap out what was essentially a form e-mail that I thought I might-or might not-send to different friends across the country. Friends from seminary and friends from college. My friends who’d remained in the suburb of New York City in which I’d grown up and my friends from there who, like me, had chosen to build their lives in other, distant corners of the country. All but the second paragraph of each e-mail-that paragraph in which I dropped in select, idiosyncratic details about our joint histories-was identical. The letters were rich in anger and gloom and guilt. I told two of my friends that I was going to come see them soon. One was a friend from seminary with a parish in southern Illinois, and another was a friend from college who had grown rich in Dallas. I envisioned weeks alone in my car and all the scrambled eggs I could eat in places like Denny’s, the counters sticky, the lighting dolorous. I told everyone that I was leaving the church-no sabbatical, this, no hiatus or retreat-because I could no longer bear to throw the drowning victims of reason and birth, my congregation, life preservers with long ropes attached to nothing.

Dave Sadler, the deacon with pancreatic cancer, now had a tumor so large he couldn’t digest his food. He was starving to death in a hospice, and somehow I was supposed to reassure him that everything in the end would be all right. Caroline Pearce, three years old, had seen one of her little-girl legs sliced off by the metal that ripped through the side of her mother’s car when a pickup plowed into it as she and her mother were returning home from day care. Beside her bed in the children’s wing of the hospital-a room infinitely cheerier than the intensive-care unit where she had spent the first days after the accident, but still an awfully dark room for a toddler-I was supposed to smile. I was expected to console Nathan Bedard, a third-grader with a particularly virulent form of leukemia who’d be dead in two or three years, and I was supposed to inspirit his aunt and uncle, neither of whom had worked in almost a year and were in the process of selling the trailer in which they lived. Once the trailer was gone, they would bunk with friends and relatives-including Nathan’s parents-for a while, but they had no idea how or where they would live for the long haul.

And I was supposed to find comforting words for fifteen-year-old Katie Hayward. I was supposed to help the little girl I’d watched grow into a young woman-a wise and pretty reasonable young woman, it seemed to me, in spite of all that she’d seen and suffered-make sense of the fact that her father’s anger was boundless, and he was, in the end, capable of murdering her mother in a manner that was simultaneously intimate and violent.

From those letters I considered sending to my friends, mostly (but not all) discarded and deleted, I remember one paragraph perfectly: “I don’t think I have ever had a predilection for depression, but at the moment I feel as if a friend who has always provided me comfort and counsel has gone away. I no longer know quite what I should be saying to others and have never before felt so personally and spiritually alone.”

I tend to doubt that Heather Laurent ever saw that sentence, however, because the laptop was still on the porch when she appeared at my door, and though later we would stand beside it and listen to the murmur of the shallow river, she wasn’t the sort who would have leaned over and tried to read the words that were at least partly shrouded by the glare from the muggy, overcast sky. And when she arrived, initially she sat down in the chair at the wrought-iron table that was across from the seat in which I had been composing my e-mails.

“This is a beautiful little village,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“The tragedy doesn’t change that, you know. The tragedy doesn’t make it any less lovely.”

“Visit this place in mid-January. It gets pretty bleak.”

She smiled and ran two fingers along the chain around her neck, resting them for a moment on the small cross. “You know what I mean,” she said. “People understand the aura of a little place like this.”

Briefly it crossed my mind that this woman was a nun. It was possible, I decided, that I had just mistaken a Catholic nun for a cable celebrity. “Are you with the church?” I asked.

“The church. Is there only one?”

“Oh, this afternoon they’re all equally suspect.”

“You sound awfully disillusioned.”

“Maybe just awfully fed up.”

“Well,” she answered, “I’m not here with any church. I’m just a writer.”

“And you’re not with… anything?”

“I write books,” she said, and it was clear in the gentleness of her tone that the fact that I hadn’t a clue who she was didn’t bother her.

“Are you going to write a book about our tragedy?”

“I hope not.”

“That’s not why you’re here?” She shrugged. “Maybe you’re why I’m here. You. That girl. This town.”

My anger then was still embryonic, it was still merely in utero fury-a hostility toward the universe conceived roughly twenty-nine hours earlier. Had Heather arrived at my home a few weeks or even days later, I might have been unable to hold my tongue. I might have thrown her out of the house. On the other hand, had she arrived a few weeks or even days later, I might have been gone. I’ve no idea for sure where I’d have wound up-Texas, most likely, or southern Illinois-but I think there’s a good chance I would have pressed “send” on one (or more) of those e-mails and gotten the hell out of Vermont. Had Heather come even Saturday or Sunday of that week, she might have found an empty house and a stunned deacon or steward murmuring, “He left. He just up and left.”

But that afternoon I was able to satisfy my anger with essentially harmless morsels of sarcasm.

“Well,” I said evenly. “I guess I should be flattered.”

“Don’t be. Don’t give me that much credit. Do you have any family, Reverend Drew?”

“No. I’m alone.”

“No wife?”

“Nope.”

“A partner?”

“I date.” Usually I gave the inquisitive a bit more of a bone, but that afternoon I was in no mood to discuss the history and vagaries of my life choices. There were women in my past, but not a marriage.

“Are you from around here?” she asked.

“I’m not.”

“Have you been in Vermont-with this congregation-a long time? Or are you an interim minister?”

I looked longingly through the screen door at the pitcher with iced coffee on the kitchen table. “Are these questions the preface to a more extended inquiry, Ms. Laurent, or merely an attempt at conversation?”

“Please, call me Heather. I’d like that.”

“Next time I will,” I agreed. The first Heather I had ever known had taken off all her clothes for me. I was five, she was seven. She lived two houses away. We were upstairs in her bedroom on a summer afternoon, and she promised me she would strip if I could find her red bathing suit. It wasn’t a difficult search: I found it in the third dresser drawer I opened, wadded into a ball at the top of her underwear and T-shirts. She was the first female I ever saw naked. “And these questions?” I asked again.