Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“Not a word.”

“What did Norman do?”

“He fell asleep. This was his very first night in Ray Brook. Before that, he had been in either a psychiatric hospital or a county jail. But now his mental health had been stabilized and he had been convicted and sent to prison. A real prison. And he was going to be there for a while, and so he was scared. Absolutely petrified. And completely alone. And the angel came to him and knelt on the cement floor beside his cot and took his hand. Just held it. And Norman felt warm and, for the first time in a very long time, at peace. He felt comforted. He knew he would be fine, and he fell asleep with his fingers in the angel’s hands. When he awoke in the morning, he felt more serene than he ever had in his life. To this day he has never forgotten the details of that angel’s wings. Sometimes he has to work hard to recover that sense of well-being. He is still withdrawn, he still snaps at people. You saw that. But the wings? He’s a visual artist. They’re with him always.”

Stephen seemed to think about this, to be imagining the angel in Norman’s cell.

“Had he met you by then?” he asked me, and I had the sense that this man would have made a better lawyer than a minister. I didn’t mind, but I felt as if I were being cross-examined.

“Nope.”

“Amanda?”

“No again. He wouldn’t meet her until after he was released. They were in the same halfway house together. That’s where they met,” I explained. I had told Stephen on one of our walks in Manhattan about Amanda’s history as a young adult. Despite a trust fund that was identical to mine, she was often living crammed into two-room apartments with nine or ten other people, sleeping on floors, depleting her assets, and taking jobs for a day-motel housekeeper, most often-to scrounge up extra money for cocaine, methadone substitutes, and antianxiety drugs. “How’s that for an odd place to fall in love? Two basket cases holding each other together. But it’s also rather beautiful, isn’t it? They became friends when Amanda made a joke about her sister and angels and he told her the story of his prison-cell visitation.”

“So Amanda has never met an angel.”

“No, she hasn’t. Not yet. She doubts both Norman and me when we compare notes about our winged guardians. I am confident that her angel has tried to reach her-and will keep on trying. But as a mortal you have to be willing to meet them partway. Not necessarily halfway. But you have to be receptive. To know that you can’t do it all and be willing to open your mind to seraphic healing.”

“Versus sexual healing?”

“Come again?”

“It’s an old Marvin Gaye song.”

“You are such a cynic,” I told him, and I punched him lightly on the arm. “Sometimes I just can’t believe there was someone willing to ordain you.”

“My sister would agree with you-as would, these days, a great many of my former parishioners.”

“Don’t say ‘former.’ Really, I know you’ll go back,” I said, and at the time I honestly believed that. But he disagreed with me.

“No. There’s too much blood on my hands.”

“There’s no blood on your hands! You have to stop saying such things.”

His head was bowed, and when he raised it, he raised an eyebrow as well. Then he stood and went to the window, where, with his back turned to me, he said-and it was the first time I had ever heard such daggers of condescension in his voice-“I can’t abide those people any longer. The whole congregation. The whole community. I know that’s horrible to admit, but it’s the truth. I’m sorry. We’re not really a very good fit. We never were. And, unfortunately, I know what used to go on at the Haywards’ house. I also know what I did and didn’t do, I know what Ginny O’Brien did and didn’t do, and I know what the whole congregation did and didn’t do. That’s the problem. And so I think it’s in my own best interests to steer clear. My health, mental and otherwise, depends upon it.”

At the time I had thought he was being either melodramatic or, just maybe, metaphoric. It would be weeks later that I would recall this exchange and first contemplate the notion that he had meant every word.

I LIKED TO check in with Amanda and Norman because they had nobody else-no mortals, that is-and they were both so profoundly wounded. Moreover, Amanda was unable to open her mind to the angels in our midst. Early one afternoon that week, when the sun was still high above the copse of evergreens to the west of their log cabin, I went skinny-dipping with Amanda in a secluded section of a nearby river we called the funnel. Amanda took pride in the fact that she lived in a spot that allowed her to swim naked whenever she pleased, and she had so few visitors who might want to swim that she didn’t even own a bathing suit. In truth, I think skinny-dipping was also her way of flaunting to Norman and me the state of her mental health: Either her weight was stable and she was fine or she was again shedding pounds and slowly killing herself. That week Stephen and I made love there twice.

The water at the funnel cascaded through a flume of boulders the size of trailers, falling perhaps twenty-five feet, before emptying into a basin that was carved out of the earth like a gigantic cereal bowl. Occasionally Amanda and I would snowshoe there in the winter, and it always felt to the two of us as if we had just walked through the wardrobe into Narnia. The trees along the path from the log cabin to the river would form a silvery canopy, the boughs bending beneath the weight of the ice and snow like frosted palm fronds. Others would become elegant black-and-crystal sculptures: Willowy raven frames, layered with sky-blown glass. The forest that is filled with the music of the wood thrush and the warbler in June is almost preternaturally quiet in January, and even the falling water seems to have grown still. The icicles dangle like earrings.

Nevertheless, it was obviously only in the summer when we would spend whole afternoons at the funnel. Soon after my sister had bought the log cabin and the surrounding property, Norman had taken his chain saw and cut down a swath of the westernmost maples and cedar and pine at the swimming hole so the water would be warmed as much as possible by the afternoon sun. Still, it was never going to be more than sixty-six or sixty-seven degrees, and I wondered how my wraithlike sister could handle the temperature with absolutely no body fat under her skin. That day as we floated on our backs in the shallow pool-the water there was no more than four feet deep-or sat on the boulders that had been warmed by the sun, I stared at my sister’s reedy physique: The sharp tips of her collarbone and shoulder blades, the brittle rods that passed for her arms. When she reclined on her towel on the rock, I counted the ribs along the sides of her chest and the points on the hard square of her hip bones. Her breasts were the small hillocks of a middle-school girl.

She was in a bad phase, I saw, and whatever progress she had made in the spring had been undone by days in which she would consume nothing but diet soda and carrot coins from her garden. She was smoking once more like a chimney and had brought her cigarettes with her to the funnel.

“Are you seeing Karen?” I asked her, referring to her therapist perhaps an hour distant in Watertown.

“I am.”

“And the nutritionist?” I couldn’t remember that woman’s name.

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“She seemed to know how to get under my skin.”

It was always a balancing act with Amanda. I knew the questions I didn’t dare ask as well as the things I didn’t dare say. You really can’t afford to lose any more weight. You look fine now-don’t drop another ounce. For God’s sake, Amanda, you have to eat! What further complicated our conversations when she was in one of these periods was my knowledge that it really wasn’t about body image in my sister’s case: It was about suicide. She believed much more deeply than I ever had-even when I was curled up in that trunk that night in my first-year dorm-in the utter meaninglessness of life. And as much as I might have wanted her hospitalized, I knew that she would never have stood for it. Once, four years earlier, Norman and I had tried and failed.