Secrets of Eden (27 page)

The dormitory was a Georgian monolith from the turn of the century, and the basement was a maze of thin corridors created by the rows of empty trunks and stacked cardboard boxes that belonged to the eighty of us who lived on the four floors above. There was a corner with our bicycles and a few pieces of decrepit furniture that not even a college student would use. I wanted no one to know I was in the basement, and so I navigated the stairs and the labyrinthine chaos on the cement floor by flashlight. I had pulled the door shut behind me. What I found most interesting as I searched for my own trunk was how the basement, which previously had been a source of terror—the abode of spiders and mice and demented men who lurked in
the shadows—seemed now to be merely a cold room jam-packed with the detritus of young adults. It wasn’t frightening at all.

And, soon enough, I found my trunk. It was wedged vertically between another first-year student’s chest and some supermarket cartons still filled with sheets. The trunk smelled a little mustier than when I had arrived back in late August, but otherwise it was downright comforting to find it. I dragged it to the corner of the basement nearest the massive closet with the dorm boilers, the warmest section of the room, and then took some of the sheets from one of those boxes. The chest was big, but I was still far too lanky to fit inside it, even curled up pathetically in the fetal position. But I could make myself comfortable if I viewed the trunk as a tub and dangled my legs over the edge and used those sheets as a pillow and a mattress. That was my plan. Reclining in the dark in the trunk of a dorm basement, I was going to find that great undiscovered country. I thought—and I know now this isn’t necessarily the case—that overdosing on sleeping pills would be a painless way to die. I would doze off and either never wake or wake to a reality I had never imagined.

I turned off the flashlight, but there were basement windows facing the road, and the streetlights allowed me to see reasonably well once my eyes had adjusted to the room.

For perhaps five or ten minutes, I procrastinated. I counted the sleeping pills (there were plenty), I lined them up like candy Pez in my palm or along the upside-down top of the trunk. I eyed the antihistamine tablets and took small sips from my water bottle, but only very small sips because I wanted to make sure that I had plenty remaining to wash down the pills. I listened to the sounds of my dormmates and fellow students, occasionally running along the corridors and stairs above me; I heard their laughter and bellowed greetings. I heard rock music from somewhere in the building, but I couldn’t pinpoint the source. Generally, however, the campus was quieter than on most
nights, because everyone was uncharacteristically focused. And as I listened, I cried. These were not sobs and wails but a steady stream of sniffles and tears as I wondered who the unlucky soul would be who would find me (an inevitability that did cause me to hesitate, but only briefly, and in the end was not the reason I am alive today), and I thought again of what a pathetic and tragic footnote to the world the whole Laurent family was. I was awash in self-loathing and self-pity and no small amount of anger toward my father (a murderer) and my mother (a victim) and even poor, troubled Amanda (like me, a deserter, a person who it seemed was also planning to escape this world soon enough). I clutched perhaps a half dozen pills in each of my hands, and slowly I lost myself in a memory of a moment when I had been a little girl in, I believed, the second grade. My mother was braiding my hair, which meant this was the one afternoon each week when I wouldn’t have had dance, because it was required that my hair was up when I was at the studio—we were not permitted to allow it to swing free in a braid. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a small ramekin of her homemade chocolate pudding (what she called with great affectation her
pot de crème
), and I was aglow with serenity and composure. Say what you will about aggressive dance training, it does wonders for a little girl’s poise. The sun was cascading in through the western window, brightening the whole room, and I was very, very content.

Still, it only made the fact that now I was crying in a trunk I was imagining as my coffin all the more pathetic—and me all the more likely to finally go through with my suicide. Really, I was not hoping to be discovered and saved. And so I brought my right hand to my mouth, wondering how many of the pills I could swallow at once. Two? Three? Perhaps even four? And it was as I looked down at my hand that I saw my hair had fallen across my breasts—in a braid. An absolutely perfect, elegant, tangle-free French braid. I dropped the pills and patted the crown of my head to be sure. Then I brought the braid to my face and
savored the aroma of the rose-scented shampoo my mother had used on my hair when I’d been a little girl.

I reached for the flashlight so I could be sure of what I was seeing. Indeed, I wasn’t making this up or seeing something that wasn’t there in the gloaming light of the basement. My hair was clean and had been arranged in a French braid that was faultless. And then I felt the most unimaginable calmness envelop me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the perfume of the soap that had magically cleansed my hair, and I allowed myself to relive the quietude and peacefulness that had marked those moments when my mother had braided it. When I finally opened my eyes, for a fleeting second I saw a woman there in the basement. I saw her beatific smile, and I saw, just over her shoulders, the tips of her luminescent wings. And then she was gone.

I gathered my roommate’s pills from the floor of the trunk and from the creases in the sheets, and I gathered myself. I was, I realized, laughing, and I wouldn’t stop for a long time that night. I laughed and I smiled as I packed up the trunk and the sheets and then started up the steps to the first floor of the dormitory.

And while it is possible to doubt or explain away so much of my first encounter with an angel, here is one absolute that I have never lost sight of and that has reinforced in my mind the concrete stolidity of this vision: My mother had never taught me how to French-braid my own hair. I had never done it myself. And I hadn’t had a French braid since at least two years before my mother had died.

THE FIRST DINNER
that Stephen and I had together was a warm caponata salad in my loft: roasted eggplant and peppers and onions tossed on a bed of mesclun and served with perfectly round medallions of goat cheese. The man, it was clear, had usually eaten badly, both because he was single and because the parishioners who wanted
to feed him were allergic to vegetables. While I was sautéing the eggplant in olive oil, he insisted on putting together a tray of hors d’oeuvres he had bought, and it was an angioplasty-inducing array of chips and cheeses and dips that seemed to belong in a frat house on Super Bowl Sunday. I didn’t really need it or want it, but it was very well intentioned. We drank a bottle of wine from Bordeaux that he had purchased on the walk around Manhattan we had taken that afternoon and that he said had always been a favorite vineyard of his father’s. I thought that was very sweet. Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially—romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory. It was why I had wanted us to eat in rather than go to a restaurant or order something that someone else had made delivered to my home in greasy cardboard containers.

Stephen had arrived outside my apartment building around lunchtime that Saturday, and while he felt he was just dropping in out of the blue, I had suspected he would come. And yes, I had expected him that very day.

I almost told him that, but he would have thought I was mad—rather than merely eccentric, which I could see early on was the way he had pegged me. (He wasn’t the first.)

And I knew he was coming because I knew by then how much he needed me and I, in turn, needed him. I understood what my responsibilities were. I had known for almost a week, since I had arrived in Vermont. I was drawn to the Haywards’ story, but I was drawn as well to the newspaper photos of a young pastor whose eyes were themselves somber verse.

Certainly there were variables; there always are. I hadn’t planned on taking Stephen with me to Amanda’s home in the Adirondacks, I hadn’t anticipated introducing him to Norman’s wooden birds. But as I have matured, I have become increasingly comfortable with my place in God’s world and with my sense that I don’t have to understand
everything—though, obviously, I am not perfect at this, and doubts find their way into my aura. I couldn’t save Stephen, as much as I wished that I could and wanted to try.

But that Saturday night when Stephen and I dined in my loft, eating by candlelight on the daybed with our plates in our laps, my mind was open and receptive to whatever was needed of me. I cannot always subsume my ego the way I know that I should, but that evening I did. I shouldered my wings and waited. For a month we were happy and in love. At least I was. I shouldn’t speak for him.

“HIT ME AGAIN
, you drunken fool! Hit me again!”

Of all the things my parents hissed and screamed and snarled at each other over the years, it is the way my mother sneered those words at my father one Christmas Eve when Amanda and I were in elementary school that comes back to haunt me most often and compels me to pray to my angel for solace and peace. I was ten and Amanda was twelve, and neither of us believed any longer in Santa Claus. The four of us had been with friends of my parents’ for Christmas Eve, an annual gathering of four distant families that always involved massive amounts of drinking among the parents and desperately awkward silences among the children because we all went to different schools. Shortly after midnight my family left, and we were, as usual, the last to leave. In hindsight I have come to realize, my parents were always the last to leave because they were terrified of being alone together in that rambling house and especially in the confined space of the bedroom they were compelled to share.

Our drive home took about an hour, which was how long it would have taken if my father had traveled the two-lane roads at a steady, reasonable speed. Instead, however, as inevitably occurred when he was far too drunk to drive, he would creep along perhaps ten or fifteen
miles below the posted speed limit and then accelerate wildly when my mother would say—her breath a nauseating and perhaps flammable blowtorch of Johnnie Walker scotch and Eve cigarettes—that he drove like a granny. A ninny. Or she would goad him on by telling him that she had to pee. And so he would accelerate. He would show her. He would drive like a wild man for the next three or four miles, the car careening across the double yellow line in the center of the black pavement or swerving off the shoulder so the side panels or the roof of the car would be brushed (or scratched) by the leafless tree branches. He would race at sixty and seventy miles an hour on those tortuous roads, decelerating abruptly only when he had narrowly avoided a collision with an oncoming car or he had navigated a turn with only the barest of clearances. That Christmas Eve we lost a hubcap from the right rear tire when he grazed a farmer’s old stone wall a good ten feet off the road—our white Cutlass Supreme traversing in a blink the frozen ground with its patches of rock-hard ice and snow—and I think only Amanda and I understood how close the call had been. (The next day it would be my grandmother, a guest at our house for Christmas, who would inform my parents that the hubcap was gone when she innocently asked them where it was. They were, as they were most Christmas days, enduring such excruciating hangovers that they didn’t even bother to venture outside to the driveway to take a look.) All the while Amanda prayed beside me in the backseat, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips silently moving. It has crossed my mind numerous times over the years that the only reason we survived that night was my sister’s terrified entreaties to either an angel or God.

When we got home, I presumed that the worst was over. Given my parents’ relationship, there was absolutely no reason to make that assumption. But I did. Amanda went directly to her room, and I went to the den to see if there was anything at all on television other than the Yule log: essentially a televised fireplace with Christmas carols in
the background. My mother sat down with me on the couch and tried to wrap her arm around my shoulders, but that night I was resistant to her embraces. She tried to win me over with a remark about how only a year or two earlier I might have been putting out cookies for Santa and then racing upstairs to bed so I would be asleep when he arrived with his reindeer. But I was in no mood to try to add a patina to what had always been a childhood of Christmas Eves marked by my parents’ verbal and, on occasion, physical brawls. Quickly my mother sensed my frame of mind, and even though she was still very drunk, she left. She kissed me on the forehead and stumbled to her feet on shaky legs. She had kicked off her boots as soon as she had walked in the door, but even in her stocking feet she was having trouble negotiating the plush living-room carpet. And then, all alone, I clicked back and forth among the four or five television stations we had.

It was perhaps fifteen minutes later that my parents began to argue. I will never know precisely what triggered that one, but it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that soon after they started, I heard the sound of a great amount of glass shattering, and I knew it was the beveled mirror that was suspended by two oak arms above my mother’s dresser—a Victorian piece that I know now was well over one hundred years old. Then my father emerged from the bedroom and stomped toward the top of the stairs, where he paused for a moment at the balcony that ran perhaps fifteen feet along the corridor, his hands in fists at his sides as he surveyed the first floor. I gazed up at him, but our eyes never met and I wasn’t altogether sure that he had registered I was there on the living-room couch. He was still in the clothes he had worn that evening, though his shirt was untucked and the top three or four buttons were open. His T-shirt was the color of a peach. His wonderful, creosote-black hair, which had been slicked back at the party, looked now as if he had teased it with spaghetti tongs.