Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“Or less.”

“So it was possible my mother was buried without her brain?”

“It’s possible. But not likely,” he said. “Not from what you’ve told me of the circumstances of your mother’s death. It was a bullet. And your father left behind a confession.”

“Of sorts,” I agreed, and I sighed. For a moment I wondered why anyone had bothered to autopsy my parents, since it was painfully clear what had occurred: My father had shot my mother and then hanged himself.

But then a thought dawned on me, and I recall looking up from my steering wheel toward one of the old, Gothic buildings on the university campus adjacent to the hospital and mortuary: To the casual eye, it had also been rather apparent what had happened in the Haywards’ living room back in July. But, in fact, George Hayward hadn’t shot himself, and that only became clear when the medical examiner with whom I’d just met had autopsied the man’s body. And so it was just as important that my parents’ bodies had been examined as well.

“What color nightgown was Alice wearing when she died?” I’d asked the medical examiner as I was leaving. “I’m curious.”

“I would call it a nightshirt,” he’d said. “It only fell to midthigh.”

“Was it plaid?”

“No,” he had told me. “I’m quite sure it was solid red.”

IN THE WEEKS after I had returned to New York after my brief visit to Vermont, I thought of Stephen Drew all the time. I didn’t miss him, precisely. After all, as meaningful as our affair might have been, it had also been brief. But I did wonder about the ways that my intentions, which had only been kind, had led me astray. Initially I had hoped only that I could provide counsel and healing. Offer my experiences and share my access to the angels. Instead I had misread everything about the man and lost focus on the light and the wings that have guided me since that night I almost took my own life. That autumn I didn’t necessarily view the fallen minister as beyond salvation. But I did view him as poisonous to the stillness and equanimity that helps me to commune with the angels. And I knew that if our paths crossed ever again, it would be extremely difficult for me to trust him.

Still, he was often on my mind. How could he not have been? After all, I’d had the Vermont State Police in my home.

Day after day I would find myself living in two worlds in my head, one I knew well and one constructed entirely from my imagination. The first comprised all of those days and nights I had spent with Stephen in Haverill, Manhattan, and Statler. I would close my eyes, and a whole cyclorama of our experiences together would unfurl before me. I would feel again the warmth of his body beside me, and I would savor the scent of the skin on his neck. I would see his eyes and the way he would listen as I spoke, with his long, beautiful fingers steepled together, almost unmoving. I would recall the stories he had shared with me and the sound of his voice-as soothing as a warm bath-and how I had believed all he’d told me.

The second world was far more abstract to me and tended to have an uncertain fluidity to it, because I was crafting it entirely from things people had told me or I had manufactured for my mind’s eye. And that world was the final day-the final hours-of Alice and George Hayward. It would begin with the baptism on Sunday morning, with the images from the digital photos of the ritual that Ginny O’Brien had taken and shared with me at Alice’s funeral. With the pond, deserted when Stephen and I had driven past it.

No, it would commence even before that. I would imagine Alice getting dressed in the morning. Choosing her bathing suit in her bedroom at eight-fifteen or eight-thirty. Perhaps gazing at herself in the long mirror that hung on the inside of the white closet door in her and George’s bedroom. This wouldn’t be vanity on her part: After all, she was about to wear that Speedo before the whole congregation, and she needed to be sure that George’s handiwork was well hidden. At that moment she would have had just about twelve hours to live.

There was her emergence from the pond water itself. Roughly eleven-thirty now. She would have nine hours remaining. I would see her spooning macaroni salad onto a paper plate at the potluck (and macaroni salad is a guess founded on nothing, because no one ever said a word to me about what Alice might have eaten at that meal). Gardening in the middle of the afternoon, in the vegetable plot in the backyard, perhaps weeding among the rows of carrots and harvesting her string beans and peas. Racing to the general store just before it closed at five o’clock to buy a clear plastic container of coleslaw: her very last purchase on this planet. She now had barely three hours. Maybe three hours and a few minutes. Less time than it takes me to drive to my sister’s in Statler. Less time than it took my mother to roast a turkey when I was a child. And, finally, there was her last phone call with Ginny. Strong, sisterly, protective Ginny O’Brien (now, it seemed, sad, scarred, and struggling Ginny O’Brien). There it was, her last conversation with anyone in the world other than the man who would kill her. She had only minutes now, though how many we’ll never know. The medical examiner in Vermont said it was impossible to be that precise with the time of death. But it was clear that the time remaining to her would be calculated in minutes, not hours.

Still, the vision I kept returning to was this: Alice Hayward alone in her bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning as she studied her curves and her legs and her breasts in that bathing suit. Twelve hours. Half a day. That was about what she had left. What, I would wonder, would she have done differently if she had known that in half a day she would be dead? If the rules were such that there was no appeal to her predestined fate-she couldn’t leave; she couldn’t be somewhere else that Sunday night-but she understood that these were her last hours on earth, what conversations would she have initiated? What experiences would have mattered to her? What advice would she have shared with fifteen-year-old Katie?

But obviously she didn’t know what loomed before her. Stephen insisted to me that she had known-that it was clear to her she was going to die and that he, in turn, should have done something. He said she might not have known it was going to occur that Sunday evening, but she had been confident that her death was coming soon at the hands of her husband. And, indeed, it had been at his hands.

Yet I questioned whether Alice really had seen this coming. She had fought George. Struggled. She had not gone quietly to the angels. And according to Ginny, there had been nothing in that last phone call that might have suggested that Alice was either frightened or despondent. She had even joked about George. Infantilized him on the telephone. And, of course, Alice had Katie. I knew if I had a child, that would be reason enough for me to want to carry on. Parents may commit suicide every day, but nothing I had heard or learned about Alice suggested she was depressed.

Consequently I found myself wondering if Stephen’s long, desperate riffs on guilt and self-loathing were nothing but an act. There . That was the whole clue, he had said, that single word. Her response to her baptism. It began to seem more and more likely that Stephen had made the whole thing up: the word as prophecy. The word as message. Oh, he might have been feeling guilty, and indeed a measure of it might have been because Alice was dead. But he hadn’t killed his former lover. If Stephen Drew really was feeling remorse, it was because he had left Alice to her fate by breaking off their affair and then, months later, because he had murdered her husband.