Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

I must have said something, because Mom saw me out of the corner of her eye-she really couldn’t turn her head-and she must have managed to mumble something to Dad. Because he turned and saw me. And when he did, he looked at the knife in his hand like he didn’t know what it was or how it had even gotten there. He let go of Mom and tossed the knife on the kitchen table, and then he rumpled my hair as he started past me to their bedroom. He was shaking his head, but at what, I couldn’t have said. Meanwhile my mom slid to the kitchen floor, her back still against the cabinet, and she was crying so desperately that for a minute she wasn’t even able to scoot across the tile floor to me. And so I went to her.

It was the next day that I started trying to destroy my dad’s basketball. I didn’t have any more success with the rubber than Alicia was having with the pumpkin rind, but Mom found me before I managed to slice through an artery or cut off a leg. And that night Dad took Mom out to some fancy dinner and I had a baby-sitter. And soon after that they started to build the house in Haverill.

That afternoon at the pumpkin carving, it all grew connected in my mind: the flashback of Dad scaring the hell out of Mom, my getting medieval on a basketball, and the whole path that would lead us from Bennington to Haverill and to the two of them dead in the living room. I think that’s why I lost it that afternoon. I mean, I had plenty of other reasons to lose it that autumn. But I attribute my mini-breakdown at the pumpkin carving to that flashback. Eventually Tina and Julie and that mom got me calmed down, and I returned to the carving. But I’m pretty sure no one handed me a knife, and I helped mostly by scooping out pumpkin guts for the kids, because no seven-or eight-year-old likes pulling out the cold, mealy crap inside a pumpkin.

SOMETIMES I WONDERED if Stephen saw something in Heather that he didn’t see in my mom. When I try to be objective, I guess Heather was a little bit prettier, but my mom was no slouch. I mean that. And while my mom may have put up with more from my dad than she should have, at least she wasn’t seeing angels in parking lots the way most people spy seagulls. And I always try to remind myself of this: Stephen did not dump my mom for Heather. If I were to guess, he and Mom had separated early in May. Stephen wouldn’t even meet Heather until the end of July. Two days after my parents had died.

But my relationship with Heather, distant as it was, was weirdly complicated, too. On the one hand, I really couldn’t help but see her as my mom’s competitor for Stephen’s affections, even though my mom was gone. What did she have that Mom didn’t? And so that would make me want to push her away out of loyalty. But then there was the fact that she understood more about what I was experiencing than any of the social workers or therapists that everyone kept parading before me. She knew what it was like to suddenly be an orphan (and I am an orphan) and to feel all the time like you’re an imposition. And that is what I felt like: If you’re a kid without parents, even a teenager, you’re always forced to depend on the kindness of other people. You feel indebted to everyone. I had known the Cousinos forever, but it’s not like I was their kid. But there I was, living under their roof and eating their food and using their bathrooms. I could have lived with my grandparents in New Hampshire (for obvious reasons, my dad’s parents were never really an option in my mind), but I had lived in the same village since I was six and been friends with the same group of kids for almost a decade. Does any kid really want to move when she only has two years of high school left? No, of course not. So I chose to be a nuisance.

Heather also understood what it was like to see your mom bullied by your dad and be totally powerless to stop it. Sometimes we talked about all the fights we had witnessed. It seemed like her dad would say the same sorts of things as mine and her mom would sometimes hide out in the same ridiculous world of denial. Who knows? Maybe wife beaters really are one-trick ponies. They’re bullies, but about as creative as the bullies you hear about all the time these days who are my age.

And, of course, Heather was famous. Not famous to me, at least not at first. But soon I figured out that she was very well known to a lot of adults. Ginny, for instance, thought she was totally amazing. And there were at least fifteen videos of her that I found on YouTube. She had been on lots of talk shows and seemed right at home on those comfy couches with the beautiful hostesses. And I loved reading what people said about her books at the online bookstores. Some readers thought she was brilliant, and some thought she was in serious need of medication. Anyway, I would be lying if I said that her celebrity didn’t appeal to me. It did. I thought it was very, very cool.

But I kept reminding myself that there’s more to life than being on talk shows and having lots of clips of yourself on YouTube. There’s more to life than selling a boatload of books.

And even after reading both of her books-and I read them carefully-I still didn’t believe there were angels. I’d seen my mom’s bruises, and there was no way I could reconcile those marks with angel wings.

Sometimes I’d wonder if she and Stephen would ever get back together. I didn’t see it happening, but Tina did. When we talked about it, she said I was like that old Aerosmith song “Jaded.” She was wrong (and she was wrong about the song, too, because, I think it’s more about a girl who is spoiled than a girl who is totally cynical), but I understood what she was getting at. She thought Stephen and Heather would be a good pair because they would, like, balance each other out. Maybe. But it would mean that Heather would have to get over the idea that Stephen had killed my dad, and for a million reasons that’s never going to happen. And Stephen? I don’t know. But I think he’s built to live alone.

Anyway, in the end I remained most loyal to my mom when it came to that whole weird Stephen thing. Even if by any standard my mom wasn’t as hip as Heather Laurent, she was still the woman who had raised me and read to me and, until Dad killed her, was going to be there for me no matter what.

WHEN I WENT to the parsonage that Sunday night, Stephen told me to go back to Tina’s house right away and he would deal with the nightmare in my living room. He told me not to tell anyone anything, not even Tina. Later, of course, I did tell Tina. I told her a ton. Not everything. But almost everything. Stephen offered to drive me to Tina’s, but I told him that I had driven to my house and then to his in the Cousinos’ wagon. Aren’t you fifteen? he asked. I said yeah, but then he must have realized that underage driving was the least of my problems that night and sort of shrugged. I think he was in shock, too. In all fairness, when I went from my house to Stephen’s I’d figured that we would go to the police or call for help or do the sorts of things that I had seen on TV. He seemed like the right person, because even though I hadn’t been real good about Youth Group over the last year and a half, he was a minister and I knew he liked me. And I knew he had liked my mom. Now, I’m not sure I would have gone to him if I’d known he would actually go to my house and, as he put it, clean things up. I mean, I thought the two of us were just going to, like, call 911. It was horrible enough for me to see my mom dead that way. I really didn’t want Stephen, who may have loved her for a while, to have to see her that way, too.

The thing is, I had only gone home after the concert to get my laptop. Tina and I wanted to be online at the same time, and that meant that we needed two computers. We wanted to be on Facebook, and we wanted to buy new songs for our iPods, and there were concert videos on YouTube we wanted to find, and so I said I would go get my laptop. It would take ten minutes. And Tina didn’t even offer to drive. She didn’t need to, because I was just going like a mile to my house. She just tossed me her keys from the bottom of her purse.