Secrets of Eden (23 page)
Authors: Chris Bohjalian
STEPHEN’S MOTHER AND
his sister had no idea that he’d been involved with a parishioner named Alice Hayward. They had never heard of most of the women he’d dated in Vermont. The only name that rang a bell was the name of the woman he had asked to marry him, but no one in Stephen’s family realized that the relationship had progressed so far. No one, it seemed, even suspected that it was more than a friendship.
“I always thought he was gay and just didn’t want to tell me,” his mother said. “I wouldn’t have been upset.”
His sister had disagreed. “Gay? Stephen? No, he’s into women. He’s just not into relationships. He’s really not into people. What he’s doing as a minister is a complete mystery to me.”
I KNOW THE
difference between mourning and grief. I have seen enough of death—in my own life and professionally—to know that the differences aren’t subtle at all. My brother-in-law, who in some ways I was as close to as my own brother, died when he was only thirty-one. He was commuting to work on his bicycle. He was at the very end of his training as a cardiologist. According to a witness, he was riding his bicycle on the shoulder of the two-lane road that linked his small house with the four-lane road that led to the hospital and adjacent medical school where he worked, when he was nipped by the wide side mirror of a pickup truck. The truck never stopped, and the witness, another physician in a car behind the pickup who was also commuting to work, was too focused on my brother-in-law’s body as it careened through the air like a crash-test dummy to register the
license plate. He was thrown from the bike into the trunk of a thick maple tree and then back onto the pavement. His skull slammed into both, shattering his helmet like a ripe pumpkin rind, and he died from massive head trauma. In hindsight this was clearly for the best, because his neck had also been broken and in all likelihood he would have been paralyzed from the chin down if somehow he had survived. My brother-in-law would not have done well as a quadriplegic.
And my college roommate died of cancer as a relatively young mother, leaving behind two daughters, each of whom is only a year or so older than each of my boys. For months I saved the last message she left on my cell phone when she had tried to reach me in her final days in the hospital:
Hi, Catherine, it’s me. They can’t do anything more. I love you
. She sounded tired, but in no way relieved. I was in a conference in San Francisco, and she was dying in Maryland. I went right away, but she deteriorated so quickly that she never made it to the hospice. By the time I arrived, she was already so doped up on morphine that she never even had a clue I was in the room.
And, of course, I have seen the children of women who were murdered by their boyfriends and husbands, and the parents of women who were slaughtered by strangers, their bodies left unceremoniously in the woods. I have seen the mothers of little girls who were raped and smothered. (Smothering seems to be the method preferred by uncles and stepfathers when they want to kill the elementary- or middle-school girl they have just sodomized. They seem to desire plastic bags.)
Sometimes you just expect the waves and waves of sorrow to wash over you. Swamp you completely. That, in my mind, is real grief. And mourning? That’s when you’ve reached the stage where you can build a stout seawall against those colossal breakers and go about your life. You might be sprayed by the surf, but you are not incapacitated. In the days after my brother-in-law died, my sister and her in-laws were
grieving. They were shell-shocked and disconsolate and incapable of doing little more than getting dressed in the morning. My roommate’s husband hadn’t that luxury because of his daughters. He wasn’t allowed to grieve. And so he had to make do with mere slow-motion mourning.
On the other hand, he’d had time to prepare for what was coming. My sister and her in-laws hadn’t.
That’s the thing about the families who lose someone to a homicide or a violent accident: There’s no time to build that seawall. There’s no time even for sandbags.
I thought about this whenever my mind wandered to poor Katie Hayward. I wondered what it must be like suddenly to be so completely and utterly alone. The kid didn’t even have siblings. Sometimes I wish I could do the interviewing myself. I can’t, for the simple reason that it could result in my having to testify in court, which would compromise the prosecution. But Katie was one of those people I would have wanted to speak with as a parent as well as a prosecutor. Do it myself so I could talk to her as a mom. Apparently she was continuing to hold up reasonably well. There had been a few sleepless nights in September and some long days when she ate little and spoke less. Once a teacher found her sobbing in a school bathroom stall. But she was doing her schoolwork, melding well with the Cousino family, and she had auditioned for and been cast in the school musical. She had written an op-ed for the school newspaper condemning what she called the administration’s cavalier energy policy.
All of this meant that I couldn’t wait to find out what Heather Laurent had said to Katie when she had returned to Vermont in September. I wanted to know what Mother Angel had been doing in Haverill before she had decided to drop in on David. In two days Emmet and another trooper were taking an overnight road trip: first to meet Amanda Laurent in Statler, New York, and then to Manhattan to
formally interview Heather herself. But that afternoon Emmet had gone back to the Cousino house in Haverill with Katie’s social worker, Josie, a powerhouse of a woman with dreadlocks and tats, to speak to the teenager about her most recent chat with the Queen of the Seraphim. I didn’t want us to push too hard after what the poor kid had been through—and I doubt that Josie would have let us—but I had to know what Heather had said to the teenager and what the woman had asked.
E
MMET
W
ALKER
: And so Ms. Laurent came by your school.
K. H
AYWARD
: Uh-huh. She came to my lunch table with Mrs. Degraff.
W
ALKER
: Who is that?
K. H
AYWARD
: My guidance counselor. Heather—it’s, like, okay if I call her Heather, right?
W
ALKER
: Yes.
K. H
AYWARD
: Because she wants me to.
W
ALKER
: Did Mrs. Degraff know Ms. Laurent?
K. H
AYWARD
: No. But she had heard of her. Heather writes books. Anyway, you have to get a visitor’s pass to walk around the school, and you get those at the front office. That’s so some crazy doesn’t walk around with a gun and get all Columbine on us.
W
ALKER
: I understand.
K. H
AYWARD
: And Mrs. Degraff was called in when Heather said she had come to see me. She told Mrs. Degraff she was good friends
with Ginny O’Brien—which, if Ginny had heard, would have caused her to, like, totally soak through her pan—
W
ALKER
: Go ahead.
K. H
AYWARD
: It would have made Ginny crazy happy.
W
ALKER
: And so you and Heather and Mrs. Degraff chatted.
K. H
AYWARD
: Uh-huh. But Mrs. Degraff wasn’t there most of the time.
J
OSIE
M
ORRISON
: I would have been present, but no one called me. And I think Heather Laurent was probably very helpful. I’ve read her books.
W
ALKER
: What did you talk about?
K. H
AYWARD
: I don’t know. Stuff.
W
ALKER
: No specific recollections?
K. H
AYWARD
: Mostly just how my life totally sucks, I guess. And how it’s okay to feel that way. She’s been through this, you know. She knows better than most people what I’m going through.
W
ALKER
: What did she ask you?
K. H
AYWARD
: You know. The usual. Like, how was I doing? What was I feeling? She asked what everyone asks. And she gave me her cell-phone number, so I can call her if I’m about to wig out.
M
ORRISON
: And remember, Katie: You have plenty of support right here, too. You can always call me, too. Daytime. Nighttime.
K. H
AYWARD
: I know.
W
ALKER
: How
are
you doing?
K. H
AYWARD
: Okay. I guess.
W
ALKER
: What did you tell her—Ms. Laurent?
K. H
AYWARD
: Look, do I have to talk about this? It was one thing to talk to Heather. She knows what I’m going through. It’s one thing to talk to Josie. If everyone else would just leave me alone…
W
ALKER
: I’m sorry. Did Heather tell you why she was in Haverill?
K. H
AYWARD
: Well, at first I thought she had been with Stephen.
W
ALKER
: Your pastor.
K. H
AYWARD
: Well, the pastor. I don’t know if he’s my pastor. I guess he’s back in Vermont, but he’s not back in church. And it’s not like I’m real involved with the church these days, anyway.
W
ALKER
: Did she say what she was doing with the minister?
K. H
AYWARD
: The rumor is she was doing the minister.
W
ALKER
: Pardon me, ma’am?
M
ORRISON
: Katie, you really need to save that tone for me. That was a joke, Sergeant.
W
ALKER
: I see.
K. H
AYWARD
: No, she didn’t say much. And she wasn’t there to see him, anyway. I’d thought she was, but I was wrong.
W
ALKER
: Did she say anything?
K. H
AYWARD
: She used to like him. That’s what the rumor is. But she doesn’t anymore.
W
ALKER
: How do you know that?
K. H
AYWARD
: Well, I don’t know it. Not for sure, anyway.
W
ALKER
: But why would you suspect it—that she and Stephen are no longer seeing each other?
K. H
AYWARD
: Because she is totally into angels and she said he isn’t.
W
ALKER
: She told you that Stephen Drew doesn’t like angels?
K. H
AYWARD
: Sort of. She said he had built a wall against angels.
W
ALKER
: Do you know what she meant by that?
K. H
AYWARD
: No idea. But look. Everyone says he was sleeping with my mom. Everyone. Then everyone says he was sleeping with Heather. That’s probably what she meant.
W
ALKER
: You told me the first time we spoke that you didn’t believe that your mother and Reverend Drew were intimate. Have you changed your mind?
K. H
AYWARD
: Intimate?
M
ORRISON
: Sleeping together, Sweetie.
K. H
AYWARD
: Oh, I get it. Yeah, I’ve been following what people are saying. You can’t help it, you know? And I guess I was wrong. Way wrong. Maybe they were sleeping together. Everyone in the whole world seems to think so.
W
ALKER
: What else did Heather say?
K. H
AYWARD
: She told me to keep my heart open to angels. To take care of myself. And to be careful.
W
ALKER
: Be careful?
K. H
AYWARD
: Uh-huh. That’s why she came to the school. Don’t you think? To warn me and to, like, let me know I could call her whenever.
W
ALKER
: It felt like a warning?
K. H
AYWARD
: Uh-huh. It definitely felt like a warning.
W
ALKER
: A warning about what? Or whom?
K. H
AYWARD
: I don’t know. Maybe some evil angel—if there is such a thing. Maybe grown men in general. It’s not like she and my mom have had great success with your gender. I’m just saying…
W
ALKER
: Just saying what?
K. H
AYWARD
: I don’t know. Look, this is all totally confusing. But you know what? If my mom did have an affair with Stephen, I’m glad. She needed something nice in her life. At least I think I’m glad.
W
ALKER
: Why the doubt?
K. H
AYWARD
: Well, we’ll never know if that’s why my dad…um, you know.
W
ALKER
: No, I don’t know.
M
ORRISON
: Killed her mother, Sergeant. We’ll never know if that’s why Katie’s dad killed her mom.
A SACRED WHILE
BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. 129)
In 2006, Florida lawmakers passed a law that protected the billboard from one of the great environmental threats to its existence: the tree. During the debate a state representative in favor of the bill testified, “Tourism depends on billboards, not on trees.”
This is one of the biggest differences between the Northeast, where I grew up, and Florida. Our tourism depends on trees. Vermont, for example, doesn’t even allow billboards
.
Roughly 4 million tourists descend upon the Green Mountains alone each and every autumn to peep at the leaves and savor what poets like to call “the fire in the trees.” There are a great many reasons people celebrate the fall foliage, not the least of which is that it is indeed very pretty. For a few weeks in late September and early October, the New England maple blushes a shade of cherry far more vibrant than a preschooler’s most colorful Magic Marker, the ash glows as purple as the billboards on Broadway, and the birch trees bloom into a neon that’s downright phosphorescent. The woods grow more scenic, more lush, and more visually arresting—especially when the sky above is Wedgwood and the vista is framed by the rising wisps of our own autumnal breath
.
But here’s a reality that fascinated me as a young adult: Fall foliage is not the Grand Canyon. Or Yosemite. Or even Niagara Falls. It’s not jaw-dropping, pull-me-away-from-the-edge-of-the-cliff, never-seen-anything-like-it spectacular
.
So why the attraction? Why the cars, the crowds, the buses lumbering like moose up and over each mountain gap? At least part of what draws us is this: death. Not all of it, certainly. Some of the pull is romance in a four-poster bed
and an inn with a dog and a fireplace. The leaves are a pretext to escape an urban condo with a view of another urban condo
.
But we also understand that the phantasmagoric colors we see in the trees are millions (billions?) of leaves slowly dying. We might not know the biology behind the change, but we realize that the leaf is turning from green to red because imminently it will fall to the ground, where it will sink into the forest floor on its way to becoming humus
.
The science is actually pretty simple: The tree is aware that the cold is coming and the leaves haven’t a prayer. Consequently it produces a wall of cells at the base of the leaf, precisely where the stem meets the twig, thus preventing fluids from reaching the leaf. At the same time, the leaf stops producing chlorophyll, the chemical behind photosynthesis and the reason leaves are green. Without the chlorophyll, the leaf’s other chemicals become obvious, such as the maple’s red carotenoids. Soon the leaf withers and dies
.
But what a handsome death it is. No dementia, no incontinence, no children or loved ones bickering over whether to pull the plug or order one last round of chemo cocktails. Humans should be so lucky as to turn the kaleidoscopic colors of the forest when we pass
.
Of course, the whole of autumn is about transience. The entire natural world seems to be shutting down, moldering, growing still. The days are short, the nights are long, and everything looks a little bleak—except for those leaves. Those kaleidoscopically lovely maples and birches and oaks allow us to gaze for a moment at the wonder of nature and to accept the inevitable quiescence of our own aura. Like so much else around us, it’s not the leaves’ beauty that moves us: It’s the fact their beauty won’t last
.