Chris Bohjalian: Secrets of Eden

“I would if I had one.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Heather Laurent. “I think that’s why I came.”

The host of a radio show once asked me point-blank, “Do you really believe in magic? Honestly?”

“Honestly,” I said. “Really and truly.”

“Do you think the people who have bought your book do, too?”

I told him I couldn’t speak for the people who had bought my book. But it was clear both to me and to his listeners that this radio personality thought my extended discussions of magic in Angels and Aurascapes were the ramblings of a lunatic. Most people, in his opinion, were smart enough not to believe in magic .

And so I corrected him. “Most individuals on this planet have a religion they approach with some degree of earnestness,” I said. “And what is a religion but a belief in the unseen and a faith in the impossible? Remember what Jesus says in Mark? ‘For all things are possible with God.’ Magic is about the endless ways in this world that the impossible becomes possible-just like religion. Religion, in essence, is ritualized magic.”

I have lived a life with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better…

I went to Alice and George Hayward’s house when Ginny O’Brien called that Monday morning, I saw the bodies myself. After the state’s mobile crime lab had left, a number of us helped clean the place up-the blood on the wall, the fragments of skull and brain lodged in the mesh of the screen window beside the couch on which George had been sitting when he died-so neither Alice’s nor George’s families would have to. Everyone wanted to be sure that Katie would never have to see the piecemeal remains of her parents.

In the days immediately after the murder and the suicide, we learned small details about the couple’s last hours that seemed to matter a great deal at the time. Ginny O’Brien, though shaken, was still a chronological font whose memory was precise.

Apparently she saw George Hayward drinking on his porch late Sunday afternoon, the day I had baptized his wife, and he was in all likelihood drunk during dinner. It was certainly clear he was drunk after dinner: We counted thirteen open, empty beer bottles in the kitchen and the living room, only a few of which had been rinsed, and the house-and George Hayward’s corpse-reeked of alcohol. An investigator with the office of the medical examiner, a balding detective sergeant from the state police with a skull the shape of an egg, dusted each of the bottles for fingerprints. The Haywards’ last meal on this earth included a salad with plump peas and tender string beans from their vegetable garden, chicken salad that Alice probably had prepared that afternoon, and ice-cream scoops of coleslaw that she had bought at the general store in the village seconds before it closed for the day: five o’clock on summer Sundays, three P.M. on Sundays the rest of the year. There were plates in the sink that suggested this had been their menu, as well as leftovers in the refrigerator and (we would learn later) recognizable, undigested remains in Alice’s stomach.

Katie had left late that afternoon for a rock concert in Albany and then spent the night at the home of her friend, Tina Cousino, closer to the center of Haverill. Most people believed that if Katie had been home that night, it would not have prevented George from murdering Alice. The teen’s presence would merely have increased the number of bodies that Ginny O’Brien would have discovered the next day.

At some point after the two corpses had been removed from the house and the mobile van from the state crime lab had left, when many of us were still there cleaning in our rubber gloves-a little sickened, a little numb-a thought crossed my mind. An image. George strangling Alice once she was no longer capable of fighting back. Did their eyes meet for a moment before she blacked out? I had read somewhere that to kill someone by strangulation, you needed to retain your grip on the neck long after the victim had lost consciousness and ceased struggling, otherwise he or she might resume breathing and eventually wake up. But what of these two who had been married so long? What did they see in each other’s eyes as they grappled? Clearly George had kept his hands around her neck long after she had gone limp. Or had he? Was it possible that he had released her, presuming she was dead, but then she had started to come to and he actually had to go back to work? It seemed conceivable to me as I paused that afternoon in my blue gloves.

Regardless, before George would murder his wife, he would pass out himself for a time in front of the television set. This was around seven-thirty. The cordless telephone was pressed against Alice’s ear as she carried George’s and her dinner dishes to the kitchen sink and chatted with Ginny. Apparently it was not uncommon for Alice to wait for her husband to fall asleep before venturing a call to one of her friends-especially Ginny-though she was quick to insist that it was only a coincidence that more times than not George was either asleep or out when she spoke with the pastor or, far more frequently, with the various local women.

“Oh, somebody’s dropped off,” she’d said to her friend that evening, almost as if she were referring to a six-month-old baby who everyone agreed was really rather cute. Then the pair discussed George’s toy store, which Alice said was struggling, as high gas prices were decreasing the usual summer tourist traffic. He was also worried about declining interest in his ribs restaurant-the novelty had long worn off-but he had been more quiet than antagonistic as they ate. According to Ginny, they had also talked about Alice’s baptism that day, Ginny’s own two middle-school-aged sons and the different summer day camps in which they were involved, and the reality that Ginny’s mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years earlier, seemed to have gotten much worse. Ironically, Ginny did not bring up her belief that either George should get counseling-hadn’t he promised?-or Alice should leave him, or both. She did often. But not that night. They didn’t discuss Ginny’s frustration with her friend for never even showing up for the hearing after Alice had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order in February or her friend’s decision to reconcile with her husband in May.

Later Ginny would tell the police that she’d planned on discussing her fears with Alice again the next morning-reminding her that she shouldn’t fall under his sway just because he claimed he had changed-when she saw her friend at the Women’s Circle.

People who knew the Haywards only casually would never have imagined that he beat her. Alice hid well her cuts and bruises, and only rarely did he touch her face. People might have sensed the strain between them, they might have felt what Heather Laurent might have described as an aura of unease (or outright unhappiness), but I’m sure they would have attributed the tension to the fact that George was juggling a variety of retail businesses in an uncertain economy.

The fact is, he had been abusive and controlling for years, blaming Alice for whatever small speed bumps he encountered on what he believed was his right to cruise unencumbered through life. From the moment they wed, he had begun to wean her away from her family in New Hampshire and, later, from her co-workers at the bank. He would savage her cooking and cleaning whenever he could, or her inability to stretch the budget he gave her as far as he liked. He would tell her what kinds of clothes she could wear and what kinds she couldn’t: Stirrup pants and jeans that clung to her curves were out, as were Lycra bicycle shorts (even at her spin class at the gym), skimpy cotton dresses, and those camisole shirts with lingerie-like clasps that were popular that summer. Even though one of his stores sold inappropriately revealing tanks and tees and denim microskirts to teen girls, she was to dress like a schoolmarm.