Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“Hi, stranger,” I said, and I leaned against the wall of the dressing room. I turned up the volume on my phone so I could hear him over the throbbing bass of the store’s sound system. “How are you doing?”

“We need to talk.”

There was an urgency to his voice that I had never heard before. I was aware of the way his mood could vacillate between brooding and playful; I had seen him despairing to the point where there was an edge of meanness to his tone. But the insistence I noted in those four words was new to me.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“In a stall that could seriously use some Febreze.” He went silent, and I realized that my lame little joke had given him the wrong idea of where I was. “I’m in a dressing room in a clothing store. A shop that has some great dresses. I think I’m too old for the one I’m wearing, but it was still fun to try it on. I-”

“When can I call you so we can talk?”

“Well, we’re talking now. But it sounds like this is serious.”

“It is.”

I thought about the things he might want to discuss that would make him sound so grim, and the obvious one was that he wanted to-as he might have put it-break up with me. That he wasn’t going to come back to New York after all. I wasn’t precisely sure how far along our relationship was, but I did know that I wanted it to continue. Initially I had presumed that I’d been dropped into his life by his angel because he needed me after the Haywards had died, but as we spent more and more time together, I had begun to wonder if, perhaps, our angels-mine and his-had been in collusion and had consciously brought us together.

“We can’t talk now?” I asked. He was, quite obviously, stalling. Whatever he wanted to discuss, he was hoping he wouldn’t have to broach the subject while I was in a slightly rank dressing room in clothes I didn’t own.

“I’d rather you were alone.”

“I am alone.”

“I’d rather you were home.”

“Do I need to be sitting down?” I asked, teasing him.

“Please,” he said, and his voice softened the tiniest bit. “I need to tell you something, and it’s important you understand that this isn’t a moment to be light.”

“‘Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.’”

“What?”

“That’s a quote from G. K. Chesterton.”

“Heather, I just came from a state police barracks. For the last forty-five minutes, I was interrogated by two very curt troopers.”

I realized I had misread the signals in his voice. This was not urgency so much as it was outrage. He was indignant. “Go on,” I said.

“Now?”

“Now. It’s fine.”

“They think I killed them. Maybe just him. George.”

I slid down onto the thin wooden board that served as a seat and went completely still. I actually did need to sit down. “Why would they think that?” I asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. And appalling. Obviously I didn’t kill the two of them. I offered to take a lie-detector test. But they’re serious enough about this that I’m going to have to get a lawyer.”

“Where did they get this idea? They certainly didn’t think you’d had anything to do with this tragedy when it first happened.”

“I know.”

“Why, then?”

“I don’t know. I just know I’m furious.”

“It does sound a little absurd.”

“Trust me: It is.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the feet of teen girls and women younger than me walking beneath the drape, but the world went eerily silent. I was no longer aware of the pulsating music the store had been playing or the conversations between customers just outside the dressing room. I stared down at the black wool of the dress, bunched up a little bit in my lap, and rested my forehead in my hand. My ears were ringing. On the floor of the dressing room was a torn sliver of bathroom tissue, and I couldn’t imagine why it was there.

“Heather?”

“I’m here,” I said. Then: “So you’re getting a lawyer?”

“I am.”

“Well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. I know that’s not universally true. But have a little faith in your angel,” I said, and a memory came to me. I thought you were my angel . It was what he had said that first Saturday morning when he’d come to my loft and I’d told him that I wanted to show him an angel. He had called me his angel at least three times since then, and I expected him to say those words to me now. But he didn’t.

“I expect I’ll depend mostly on my lawyer,” he said instead. “But thank you very much.”

“You’re still coming to New York?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I just might be a day later than planned. It depends on who is representing me and when he or she can get together with me.”

I was relieved, though not completely. From the other side of the drape, I heard teen girls giggling about the scatological drawing and the sexual double entendre on a T-shirt. They sounded too young to be so knowledgeable, and that only unnerved me further. I was engulfed in an aura of demonstrable unease.

“When you know when you’re coming,” I said, “please call.”

“You sound annoyed.”

“No. Anxious would be a better word.”

“I didn’t know you got anxious,” he said, and I wondered if I had heard a ripple of challenge in his tone or whether he had meant this only as a small jest.

“Oh, I get anxious,” I told him. “As you get to know me, you’ll see I have a whole cauldron of emotions.” Still, I don’t believe I expected at the time that he would see hurt and anger and, worst of all, betrayal.

AS SOON AS Stephen returned to Manhattan, I insisted we stroll into the West Village and stretch our legs along the narrow, oddly angled streets bordered by manicured brownstones. He had arrived near dinnertime because he’d met with a lawyer in Vermont over lunch. Eventually, I thought, we might get as far as the Hudson, where we could watch the late-summer sun descend in the horizon beyond the river, and on the way there I might show him an angel that warmed me near St. Luke’s Church. But mostly I just wanted to talk and savor the first small wisps of autumn in the air.

Initially he was guarded and resistant to my inquiries. It was as if we were back on his porch in Haverill the Tuesday just after the tragedy. The conversation was unsatisfying, and I felt a stab of apprehension that we might not be able to recover what we had had. But that didn’t seem reasonable to me that evening since-then-I believed everything he had told me and thus the inquiries of the police were unfounded. Ludicrous. A strange comet that would streak across the night sky, cause a little disconcerting befuddlement, and be gone. And eventually his resentment and pique did fade and the distance between us narrowed. When we left my loft, we might have been mistaken on the street for a brother and sister who were not especially close: We walked without touching, and our eyes never met. But by the time we reached St. Luke’s, we were holding hands. And when we returned to Greene Street later that night, I was burrowed against him and his arm was around my shoulders. We would be fine, I decided. We were laughing, and his wit had lost that caustic bite that dogged him when he was irritated.

And for a week we were fine. Occasionally after talking to his lawyer-with whom he seemed to speak daily-he would breathe deeply through his nose and sigh and stare for long moments at either my osprey or my angels or the passersby on the street below us. Never would he tell me what he and his lawyer had discussed, and usually the conversations were brief. Still, it was clear he was exasperated, and one time I said to him, “Those little phone consultations with your lawyer can’t be cheap. This is a nonissue-he’ll make it disappear. Let it go.” And after a few minutes he would, and our vacation from real life would resume. We would walk and read and eat and make love. I did a radio interview with a program that broadcast from Manhattan’s City Hall, and he made faces at me through the glass when the host wasn’t looking. I wrote a bit, did a few online q &a’s, and responded to the occasional request from my publisher. But I did little else that week that could possibly have been construed as work. We saw no movies and no shows, because we were content-at least I was-to bask in a world that wasn’t much bigger than the alcove and daybed in my loft.