Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

So my dad hits Mom. Does she hit him back? No way. My mom was never going to hit back. Besides, she has just had the wind knocked out of her. Or she has fallen to the floor. Or she has banged into something (that seemed to happen a lot). I see her on the floor in the living room, Dad standing over her. And when she gets her breath back or she gets back in control, she says something more about Stephen. As my grandfather-my dad’s dad-always says, in for a nickel, in for a dime. And Dad is thinking the same thing. I hit her in the head and the sky didn’t fall in. And my wife was sleeping with some dude I don’t really like. Maybe she’s sleeping with him even now . So he beats on her some more. Whacks her in the nose.

And then- then -Mom tells him she’s leaving. That’s what I mean about having to drive my dad to that point. She had to seriously get under his skin. Even my dad needs a little motivation to wrap his hands around Mom’s neck and squeeze till she’s dead. I see my mom holding her nose (because he has hit her there, not because she smells something bad) and wiping away the blood that is trickling slowly over and around her lips. She straightens her back and rises to her full height (which is still shorter than Dad) and announces that he has hit her for the last time. This time there will be no backing down when the day comes to show up in court.

Which is when he kills her. He loses all control. He has his hands around her neck, and he is shaking her, maybe not realizing that this is it-that he has passed the line of all reason-but shaking her and pressing his thumbs against her esophagus. I have tried to see what it must have felt like. One time I even had Tina squeeze my neck till I said, “Enough, I get it.” (She was creeped out, but she understood what I wanted to know, and so she did it.) It must have hurt like crazy. Agony. But here is that expression again: in for a nickel, in for a dime. Once you’ve started to kill your wife, how do you stop?

And so my dad didn’t, even though my mom had to have been trying to get him to. Although I have never asked, I’m sure she fought back, if only because it must have hurt so much. She must have tried to push him away or get his fingers off her neck. She must have tried to hit him or scratch him hard enough that he’d release her, if only for a second.

And then, before he knew it, she was dead in his hands. And that’s the thing about the way he killed her: One minute she was alive in his hands, and the next she was dead. One minute she was struggling, and the next she wasn’t. Fighting. Not fighting. Breathing. Not breathing.

And that, in my opinion, is when my dad polished off the rest of the beers that we had in the house. He was drunk when he killed her, but not nearly as drunk as he’d be when he died.

AND YET ONLY a little more than two months before that nightmare, Mom had taken him back. Had him move in with us again. I thought this was nuts even then and told her that I thought this was a very bad idea. But it’s funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just believe whatever we want. And I guess my mom wanted to believe that everything would be different.

I really wasn’t all that surprised when she sat me down one night in May and said Dad was coming home. There had been plenty of signals-Exhibit A, all those flowers. And Dad had been getting goopier and goopier on the telephone, telling me that he was convinced we would soon be reunited as a family and how much this meant to him, since in a few years I would be off to college and he didn’t have a lot of time left with me. (He sure was right about that one.) He had also been saying for weeks that he knew he would still make mistakes in his life because he wasn’t perfect, but he was positive that the worst was behind him. (Okay, he was wrong there.) And he did sound better. Happier. He said he wasn’t drinking.

But there had been signals from Mom, too. The biggest one was that sometime in the late spring something happened between Stephen and her. I don’t know for sure when they first started hooking up, but I think it was before Christmas, when Dad was still living at home. And you could just see Mom opening up like one of her roses that winter. She was less nervous, more confident. She was laughing a lot more. Suddenly anything and everything could be funny. My big worry in the beginning? Dad would figure out something was up and that fight would be the sort they would eventually have in July. (I mean, I don’t think I ever thought he would kill her. But I thought it would be bad with a capital B.) But in early May she started retreating again. Our dinners got quiet. She suggested we eat supper in the living room in front of DVDs of the TV shows I liked, which I knew she did when she didn’t want to talk-when she couldn’t cope. I had been making my own lunch for school for years, but when she was happy that winter and spring, she would insist on offering me advice: She would throw in an apple or a clementine, she would surprise me with the macaroon cookies I liked from the bakery. That changed, too. She might still be in the kitchen when I was making my lunch, but she would sit at the table sipping her coffee, not exactly a zombie, because sometimes she would be toying with a crossword puzzle, but not exactly present, either. She would be dressed for work by then, because a lot of days she would drive me to school before continuing on to the bank. And what she considered dressed for work changed, too. In the winter she had started dressing a lot cooler, especially after Dad was gone. The jeans were a little tighter on Monday, when she didn’t have work, and the skirts were a little tighter the rest of the week. No more of those I’m-running-for-Congress pants suits. Sometimes she even allowed her blouses to show a little cleavage, a hint of bra. After Dad was out the door in February, it was like she had bought a whole new wardrobe. Unfortunately, those clothes went the way of her laughter as summer approached.

I asked her about this once, but she was pretty cagey. That’s one thing I have learned about women like my mom: There are no people in the world who are better at keeping secrets. You want to find a good spy? Pick a battered woman. There are things they won’t tell a soul. And they can really take a punch.

Anyway, Mom sat me down one evening, and I knew instantly what was coming. It was May, so the days were getting long, and I remember there were a ton of birds at the feeders. Mom had three, and they were all on the opposite side of the house from her vegetable garden, because she loved birds, but she loved her garden, too, and she didn’t want the robins or the blue jays eating her seeds. And she had just planted most of the garden and put her freaky clear plastic tepees over her tomato-and pepper-plant seedlings. The tepees always looked like they belonged in a science-fiction movie or video game: You know, the way the human colony grew things on some faraway planet. We were sitting on the steps (the same steps where I have always imagined they ate their last meal together), one of us occasionally stroking Lula behind her ears. Mom sort of beat around the bush for a few minutes, asking about school and what sorts of things Dad and I had been talking about lately when he phoned or at lunch. Then she went on this riff about how complicated adult relationships are, which would have been the absolute perfect moment for me to bring up Stephen. But I didn’t, and that will always be a regret I’ll live with, because now I’ll never know for sure what she was thinking. At any rate, I acted surprised when she said Dad was coming home, because I figured I was supposed to. Then I told her that I really didn’t think this was such a good plan and reminded her of some of the worst fights they’d had in the months before he moved out. But she said things were going to be different now because Dad was going to be different now. She said this had been a real wake-up call for him and he had learned from his mistakes-which was not unlike what my dad had said to me, too, though he’d also said he was still going to make plenty of them. (Yup, that was my dad: a real lifelong learner.)