Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

But it is often how Mom played the game, and sometimes it worked. No fighting in the night, and the next morning there would be peace on earth and my dad would apologize for being such a jerk. My guess is that is exactly what my mom does that Sunday night. She leaves him alone on the front steps and finishes eating inside. In the kitchen, reading the newspaper, maybe. Lula is sitting beside her and wagging her tail, waiting for Mom to hand her a few pieces of chicken or cut some up and drop the meat into her dish. The picture to someone who doesn’t know what’s really going on? It’s like Mom lives alone with her dog. Except there’s this teeny-tiny detail that she is scared to death her husband is about to come in and belt her.

Based on the plates that would be found in the sink and how much of the dinner had been cleaned up and put away-at some point I overheard someone saying that the bowls with coleslaw and peas both had plastic covers on them-the strategy worked for a while. I see my dad sitting on the steps, stewing. Drinking. Maybe for a while he goes back to the garage and drinks some more.

But at some point he comes inside, plops himself down on the living-room couch, and turns on the TV set. Is he watching 60 Minutes ? Maybe. Sometimes he would turn it on. But he is so drunk by now that he really isn’t watching anything. And pretty quickly he conks out. Falls asleep and isn’t making a sound. It’s the darnedest thing: He never seems to snore. My mom once told me that the only time she could recall him snoring was when he had a sinus infection years ago. (Not snoring is also something he takes weird pride in. I actually heard him brag to people at the annual Father’s Day volunteer firefighters’ barbecue that he never snores. He made it sound like it was some amazing athletic accomplishment.) My mom makes that phone call to Ginny, a conversation that led lots of people to tell me that Ginny was the very last person my mom would talk to. (One time I considered reminding them that they were mistaken: The very last person my mom would talk to was pretty obviously my dad, as she begged him or screamed at him until she could no longer breathe to stop killing her.) My mom peeks into the living room, sees Dad is still out like a light, and changes into her nightgown. The red nightgown.

And then, not too long after Mom has said good night to Ginny and gotten ready for bed, Dad wakes up. Some people say he killed Mom that night because she dropped the bombshell on him that she was leaving. The fight they’d been having outside resumed, but at some point it took a new course and ended with my mom informing him that the marriage was over and she was getting out. Literally. She was leaving him. Leaving the premises. She probably didn’t tell him to get out that night, because how could he? He was drunk. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have cared if he’d killed his own sorry self by driving into a maple tree at sixty or seventy miles an hour, but she wouldn’t have wanted him to bring some innocent person down with him. She really did worry like crazy about cars. And so she tells him that she is out the door. So long. She is going to get dressed, pack a bag, and split.

And maybe people are right and that is exactly what she said that caused the fight to go nuclear.

But maybe not. Or maybe not right away. I think she had to be driven just a little further before she would say that. When I’m trying and failing to fall asleep at night, I see it continue like this. I see my dad trying hard to get a rise out of Mom, and even if he doesn’t know that she’d been hooking up with Stephen, he knows for a while they were pretty tight. And so he says something about Stephen and manages, if only by accident, to hit just the right nerve in just the right tooth-especially since, maybe, Stephen was the one who ended their affair. I’ve always wondered if maybe she only took Dad back because Stephen broke up with her. All those flowers Dad sent? They only worked because Stephen wasn’t around anymore. I also think that’s the reason Stephen felt so guilty after Mom died. The baptism? Yeah, right. He said that he felt responsible because he’d missed all these signals about how she was ready to die, but that was totally ridiculous. We’re talking fairy tale. More likely Stephen felt like a louse because he’d told my mom early in May that he didn’t want their thing to go public or he didn’t want it to continue. Whatever. And so she takes back her own husband on the rebound, he kills her a couple of months later, and Stephen winds up feeling horrible. As he should.

Anyway, my dad is getting a beer out of the refrigerator, and he says something stupid about Stephen’s sexual orientation. Among my dad’s more pathetic prejudices? Homophobia, big-time. I’d heard him make cracks before about why Stephen wasn’t married. And maybe that night Mom has had just enough of this lunacy, and so she tells Dad that she knows for a fact that Stephen is straight. Very. Remember, I’m not home, so the sexual volleys might be racier and nastier than usual.

The result? Dad is confronted for the first time with the news that Mom has been with someone other than him, and it is-how’s this for an irony?-the leader of those so-called Holy Rollers who Dad thinks are just such total losers. Moreover, for all he knows, Mom has been with Stephen awhile. Maybe not merely when Dad was living out at the lake. Maybe before he left. Maybe even when he was living right here in little old Haverill. It’s around eight o’clock at night. That old school professor’s voice of his is swamped by serious rage: Mom’s latest infraction isn’t just wearing a top that’s too revealing or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. She has tossed a hand grenade down the front of his pants.

You what? I hear him yelling in my head, and she repeats whatever it was that she said the first time about Stephen and her and how they’d been sleeping together. Or how they’d been lovers. I honestly can’t decide the precise wording of the bombshell, because as well as I knew my mom, there were just some things we never talked about. I mean, she had never told me that she and Stephen had been hooking up. But I’m sure there is a moment when my dad can’t believe what he’s hearing and has her repeat herself.

And so my mom does.

And when you repeat things, you add things. The adviser for the school newspaper, Mr. Fisher, taught us that. And so I see my mom realizing that for the first time ever, she has wounded Dad, really smacked him back hard, and so she starts piling it on. She tells him whatever it was that Stephen gave her that marriage to my dad doesn’t. She talks about how intelligent and well educated Stephen is (an incredibly sharp dagger for Dad, since he never went to college). Or how tender. Or how gentle. But she always brings it back to the fact that they were lovers, because she has seen that this really ticks him off.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t have a death wish. I really believe that, too. I really don’t think she thought for even a split second that my dad was going to kill her. Hit her? Sure. Pound her a couple of times? Hell, yes. But I am absolutely convinced that she didn’t see him taking his hands and strangling her. Stephen is very smart, but he was wrong about that.

First, of course, my dad probably slugs her. For one of the only times ever, he even hits her in the face. Open hand, backhand, a fist. I don’t know. No one told me a lot about what the medical examiner said about the condition of their bodies, and I don’t even know if you can tell in the end whether a bruise was caused by knuckles or palm. I never asked. Heather would tell me later that she hadn’t asked, either: She hadn’t asked anyone what had gone down when her dad killed her mom. And she told me that she regretted that. But still I didn’t ask. I mean, how could I?