Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“Go on.”

“He was mean to Mom. I know you know that. He would hit her.”

“You heard their fights?”

“Didn’t you hear your parents’?”

“Yes.”

“So you know how much it all just sucks,” she said, and she wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something unpleasant. “So, like, what did it matter if my mom and Stephen had something? It didn’t hurt anyone. It’s like the two of you-who does it hurt if you two have something going on?” I considered correcting her-reminding her that have should be had . But I restrained the impulse, and she continued, “When my dad came back, things seemed to be a little better. At least for a while. They were like newlyweds for the first weeks of June. And so, maybe, my mom’s… relationship… with Stephen had the potential to make things better between her and Dad. In the end it didn’t. But maybe it could have.”

“Do you think your father knew that your mother had been involved with Stephen?”

She turned to me, and she looked so intense that the world seemed to grow quiet. Suddenly the students at the soccer field in the distance were a television image with the volume muted. It was as if there were no birds and no breeze as we circled the perimeter of the school. “I think he found out the night they died,” she said carefully. “I’ve thought about this a lot the last couple of days, what with all the stuff on the Internet and a conversation I had with Ginny. I sure don’t think my dad knew when he came home in May. I don’t think he knew at the start of the summer. I think somehow he learned what was going on when I was at the concert in Albany.”

“That Sunday night.”

“Yeah. Uh-huh. I mean, she had been baptized that day, and Dad didn’t go. I know she was a little angry at him about that. A little disappointed. And so maybe that night they were talking about the baptism and she was talking about Stephen and it just, like, came up.”

I contemplated whether confessing to an affair could just, like, come up. And while that wasn’t likely, I did think that Katie’s instincts were sound: It seemed plausible enough that if Alice were angry at George for not attending a ritual that obviously meant so much to her-a ritual conducted by her former lover-it was conceivable that as the last fight of their lives escalated, she told him she’d been involved with her pastor. Perhaps she’d told George she’d loved this other man. Still, why hadn’t he gone after Stephen if that was the case? Why hadn’t he taken his gun and gone to the church or the parsonage after strangling his wife?

“But until he found out-if he found out,” I said carefully to Katie, “the reality that your mom and Stephen had discovered each other actually made things better between your mom and your dad. For a time, anyway. That’s what you’re suggesting, right?”

She nodded. “For a time. Maybe because she was a little more confident. But it didn’t last. I don’t know. They were fighting again in July. Well, Dad was fighting.”

“How do you feel about Stephen?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

“That’s a freaky one for me. I mean, how would you feel if you learned after your dad had killed your mom that she’d been having an affair with the minister? You might be really pissed off at the guy. You’d think, whoa-is he the reason my mom is dead? But then maybe you wouldn’t go there. Maybe you’d just think how he had made your mom happy. You know, maybe your dad would have killed your mom anyway, and so you think, well, at least the minister made her happy for a while.”

“But that assumes the minister did make her happy. That he didn’t break her heart.”

“Did he break yours?” We were almost back to the entrance to the school. My sense was that Katie had asked this quickly because once we were at the building and in the midst of the students and teachers, she wouldn’t have dared. Still, I stopped in my tracks. Tentatively I put my arm around her shoulders, wondering how she would respond to my touch. But her body didn’t tense, and she allowed her small frame to fall against me for a moment.

“Be careful,” I said simply.

“Like, in what way? Like around Stephen?”

“Just be careful. Please. Promise me you will always keep your heart open to angels and you will always take care of yourself.” Then I gave her my cell-phone number and told her to call me whenever she’d like.

HOURS LATER I found myself a little nauseous. I had just left the pathologist’s office in Vermont, and for a long moment I sat in the front seat of my car in the hospital parking lot. The vehicle was steaming inside from having baked in the sun with the windows rolled up, and so I opened them all and pressed hard on the button that rolled back the moonroof. It wasn’t that I had seen anything especially distressing in the mortuary-the bodies on the shelves in the walk-in refrigerator were the elderly who had passed away of natural causes that day on the hospital floors high above-and their faces looked downright beatific. They looked as if they were sleeping deeply and comfortably on their backs beneath blue hospital blankets. Rather, I think I was disturbed because now I could imagine precisely how my parents’ corpses had been autopsied. I saw concretely in my mind the way the medical examiner in our corner of New York had placed each of their bodies on the slanted steel table-slanted for drainage-and meticulously described aloud precisely the physical characteristics of each of my parents. I didn’t know who had gone first, but I found myself envisioning my mother’s corpse on the table, since I had seen her naked in the bathtub when I would keep her company as she bathed and in the changing room of the country club. Her face, in my mind, was intact, but I knew in reality that a large part of it had been obliterated completely by the bullet. And then I saw what the Vermont pathologist had described as the Y incision: a cut in the shape of a capital Y, a wishbone with the two prongs at the shoulders and the point extending from sternum to pubic bone. The incision, the pathologist had told me, was deep-you had to cut through the abdominal wall. Then all three of these great flaps of skin were pulled back.

“The one over the upper chest,” I had asked. “You pulled that back over her face?”

“That’s correct,” he had said calmly. “How do you know that?”

I’d shrugged. “A college course. I really know very little.”

Next, my mother’s ribs would have been cut apart and the anterior chest wall opened so the doctor could examine the organs underneath. Their connections to the body would be severed and each one carefully scrutinized and weighed. The intestines would be drained in the sink to see what undigested food and feces were present. The contents of the stomach would be noted. Samples from most organs would be preserved and then, in my mother’s case, the organs replaced back inside the cadaver.

I thought of the names of the tools he had mentioned: Bone saw. Scalpel. Skull chisel.

“And the brain?” I wondered, because I realized abruptly that the bullet wound might have affected how the brain would be autopsied. “How would the way my mother was killed affect how the brain was autopsied?”

“Well,” the medical examiner began, clearly choosing his words with care to minimize my discomfort, “what might have happened would have depended on what sorts of conversations had occurred between the pathologist and your adult relatives: an aunt and uncle, maybe, or your grandparents. A fresh brain can be difficult to study, and so on occasion it will be fixed for as much as two weeks in formalin. It would depend upon what the officials investigating the case needed to learn.”

“Two weeks?”