Secrets of Eden (6 page)

As a teenager I listened to a lot of heavy-metal and punk music, and I papered my bedroom walls with posters of athletes and rock stars. I had girlfriends, but, in a pattern that would continue through college and into my adult life, I withdrew as soon as it became evident that the relationship was reaching what airline pilots call the V1 point, that point of decision: Either we lifted off and became a very serious couple or we aborted the takeoff and went our separate ways. Invariably I chose to slow the engines if my girlfriend showed no sign of decelerating first.

At some point in high school, when my history class was focused on the Roman Empire, my interest in all things Grand Guignol and sensational found a new fixation: the Crucifixion. My father had been raised a Baptist in southern Vermont—one of the reasons, I imagine, that I wound up here—and my mother was a Presbyterian from a nearby suburb in Westchester. I had gone to Sunday school at the local Baptist church along with my older sister until I was seven, but by the time I was in second grade, we stopped attending church with any regularity. My parents had been worn down by their bickering, their constant late nights on Fridays and Saturdays, my father’s job, and the simple demands of raising their two children. We became
Easter and Christmas Christians, making it to church roughly twice a year, and my spiritual quest as a Christian was stalled somewhere between second grade and my adolescent desire to sleep till noon most Sunday mornings.

The Crucifixion changed that. The whole idea that an empire as seemingly civilized as Rome’s—in the movies that formed my conception of the ancient world, the Romans were always extremely mannered and would have passed easily in Bronxville or Pelham—saw crucifixion as a reasonable and relatively common form of justice mesmerized me. I was appalled, but I was also fascinated. We’ll never know exactly how many men were crucified when the revolt of Spartacus the slave was finally suppressed, but one account suggests that six thousand crosses lined the road between Capua and Rome. Of course, it wasn’t the sheer numbers that made crucifixion at once abominable and hypnotic, it was the grotesque particulars of the execution. Nails as thick as Magic Markers and about five inches in length pounded through the bones in the palms of one’s hands or—after the Romans had perfected their technique—through the bones in the wrists. Another, even longer nail, a shade under seven inches in the case of the crucified skeleton excavated at Giv’at ha-Mivtar—was banged through the heels of both feet. Or the ankles. Or the metatarsals traversing the arch. (Wander for even half an hour through the Uffizi in Florence: For nearly a millennium, the great artists in Europe were drawn to those nails.) Bodies would hang on a cross in the Mediterranean heat for hours or—not infrequently—two and three days, the criminal or the prisoner wide awake, in unspeakable agony.

And yet it wasn’t usually those nails that killed the victim. It was asphyxiation. Eventually neither the victim’s arms nor his legs could support his chest a moment longer, and the weight of his own body conspired with gravity to press shut his lungs.

This was torture of a most grisly sort, the kind of violence against the flesh that in my opinion novelists and filmmakers rarely have equaled. Only people (and by that I mean both individuals and groups of individuals working in concert as mobs and, alas, as nations) of a strikingly malevolent disposition are capable of such madness. Such cruelty. Such evil. The idea that someone, Jesus Christ, would subject himself to it willingly haunted me. I remember one Easter weekend I rented all the biblical epics the video store had in stock and watched them for hours on end. That month I pored over the different accounts I had found of the day Christ died. Bishop, Bouquet, and William; Morton and Zeitlin and the writers—four or forty or four hundred in number, we’ll never know for sure—behind the Synoptic Gospels and that especially mystical fourth one, the Gospel According to John.

In college, the sort of small liberal-arts school where many of us from Bronxville would go, it was only natural that I would continue what had been my solitary and ill-defined studies in a more structured manner. I majored in religion. I started going to chapel. Then, when I pondered career choices as a senior, I kept coming back to the reality that what had interested me most for the past eight years had been religion, and why one man—a man who without a doubt in my mind had indeed walked this earth some two thousand years ago, regardless of whether he really was who he said he was—would be willing to die on the cross. I applied to a variety of divinity schools and seminaries and chose one known for its liberal theology and worldliness, just outside Boston. I wasn’t notably zealous when I arrived at the seminary and for a time regretted that I hadn’t simply joined the Peace Corps or become a schoolteacher in (pick one) an inner city or Appalachia or on a Navajo reservation: Either path, Peace Corps or public-school teacher, it seemed to me, would have been a far better way to make a meaningful difference in the world. This was especially true since
initially I imagined that my studies in divinity school were most likely to result in my teaching religion someday at precisely the sort of college from which I had graduated. That, in a vague way, was my plan.

But I did believe that Christ had died on the cross and then risen. And with an increasingly warm feeling—not exactly ardor, but certainly absorption—I began to see the possibility of a life of service in the ministry. I envisioned a country parish in New England, a congregation not unlike the Baptist church that my grandparents had attended in Vermont. Toward the end of my third and final year, the expressed needs of the pulpit committee from a little church in Haverill, Vermont, were paired with my expressed desires. There was some concern from the committee that I was unmarried: Like many churches, they wanted their pastor to have a wife, if only because a minister’s spouse actually does a good deal of the heavy lifting when it comes to running a church. But their instinct was that I would not cause them public scandal or betray their trust, and soon enough I would find a wife. The church was a little more than an hour from my grandparents’, and the pastor there assured the deacons and stewards in Haverill that the Drews were good people, essentially vouching for my character though he knew me only in the most distant way: as the grandson of Foster and Amy Drew, both newly departed, and the son of Richard Drew, who had left Vermont some four and a half decades earlier.

Their instinct, of course, was wrong on both counts. But at the time it had looked like a reasonable match, and for fourteen years it had seemed to most of the world to have worked.

“WHERE IS KATIE
now?” Heather Laurent asked me that Tuesday afternoon, as we sat on the porch. The sun was finally burning its way through the milky shroud above and was just starting its slow descent
to the west. The shadows from the trees began spreading like moss across my backyard.

“She’s with Alice’s best friend, Ginny O’Brien. So are Alice’s parents—Katie’s grandparents. They drove here from Nashua on Monday morning as soon as they heard. They’ve been here ever since.”

“They’ll be in Haverill through the funeral?”

“Oh, most definitely. And probably beyond.”

“And George’s family?”

“They come from somewhere outside of Buffalo. They’re staying in Albany.”

“Keeping their distance.”

“Yes.”

“Have you spoken to the families?”

“I have: both families.”

“You know, Alice’s funeral service is going to be a circus,” she murmured, and she noticed for the first time the swallows that were nesting under a porch eave over my shoulder. The mother bird seemed content to allow me to share the space with her—she had, after all, built her nest right here—but only rarely did the male remain beside her when I wandered out onto the deck. A deacon who loved animals had nicknamed them Lil and Phil.

“It will be large,” I agreed. “But the worst will be the presence of Katie’s friends. All those teenagers and the Youth Group. Though Alice’s friends will be sobbing, it will be the tears of the teenagers that will be hardest for me to see from the pulpit. But I wouldn’t expect it to be a circus.”

“There will be media.”

“True.”

“It’s going to be a hard one for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I’d say it will be rather unpleasant.”

“When is it?”

“Thursday. Day after tomorrow.”

“I presume it will be at your church.”

“Of course.”

She took a breath and sighed. She rubbed her arms as if she were cold, but that wasn’t likely the reason on this particular afternoon. I noticed for the first time that she had a pianist’s fingers: slender and long, with impeccably manicured nails. She had coated them with a clear polish that picked up the sun when she held her hands the right way. “That poor child,” she said softly. “That poor, poor child.”

“Young woman,” I corrected her. “She’s fifteen.”

“Do you know her well?”

“I do. She’s smart. Funny. She’s going places. She’s not really active in the Youth Group anymore. I wish she were. But she’s a good kid, a good student. She’s usually in the school dramas and musicals. Right now her major form of adolescent defiance is a small stud in her right nostril.”

“Her father let her do that?”

“It was a surprise to both parents. Her father did not take it well,” I said, though I knew he had punished only Alice.

“I remember when I first pierced my ears.”

“Rebellion?”

“Emancipation.”

“Katie will do okay. She’ll get through this.”

“Yes, she will. But I still hate to see in my mind the things she’s probably witnessed in that home over the years. Has she been back to the house yet?”

“No. Some of us—her friend Tina’s mom, Ginny, me—packed the clothes that seemed most useful. Shoes. Sneakers. A nightgown. Cosmetics, some jewelry. But I have no idea if we brought the items that really mattered to her. The right hoodie, for instance. The right jeans. The right teddy bear. Think back to your adolescence and what your
room was like when you were fifteen—how many outfits you probably tried on before you found what you really wanted to wear. The piles of stuff on the floor were just unbelievable. The mounds of clothes. The piles of DVDs and CDs and books. The cords for iPods and cell phones and her laptop, as well as her laptop itself. I had no idea which music mattered to her and which didn’t—what she had already put on her iPod and what she was planning to download when she had some time to kill. She actually had a bureau drawer filled with nothing but trolls and tins of jewelry and rub-on tattoos. Maybe she hadn’t touched it since she was seven. But maybe it was the most important thing in the room to her. I just had no idea. None of us did. So at some point Katie probably will go back to the house. She won’t ever live there again, because she’s only fifteen. But she will have to go back inside.”

“Oh, I disagree. She may want to go back. But anyone in the world would understand if she didn’t—if she refused to go back in there. I’m sure you or her friends or other parents would be more than willing to pack everything up for her.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Where will she live?” She seemed to ask the question with great care, perhaps because she was afraid I had been offended when she’d corrected me. Actually, I hadn’t been bothered at all. She had made sense.

“There are options,” I answered. “Her grandparents in Nashua are one possibility. But maybe she’ll live here in Haverill with the Cousinos—with her friend’s family. She might want to finish high school in Vermont and be with the kids she’s known since she was six.”

“And this Cousino family is okay with that?”

“So I gather.”

“Have you talked with Katie?”

“Yes.” This time I did find myself slightly affronted. As her pastor I had visited with Katie both yesterday and today, and so my answer
may have sounded a little curt. Afterward I hoped I had sounded only surprised.

“How would you say she was doing?”

“She’s devastated, of course. In shock. But she’s doing what she needs to do,” I answered. It was the first thought that came into my mind. “She’s endured the questions the state police had about her parents, as well as the questions of a social worker and a therapist, and she’s volunteered all the information they could possibly want.”

“Is she incredibly angry with her father?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

She nodded. “But I’m sure she also feels some anger toward her mother.”

“For not getting out?”

“For allowing it to happen. For being a victim.”

“I imagine she’s feeling some of that, too.”

“I’d like to talk to her. She’s one of the reasons I’m here. Do you think that would be possible?”

“It’s certainly possible. But I’m not sure it’s appropriate. She already has a small army of grief counselors—amateurs and professionals—at her disposal,” I said.

“Is the house still a—what’s the expression?—a crime scene?”

“No. The state police and the investigators from the crime lab were done by the end of Monday afternoon. It was pretty obvious what had happened. A lot of yesterday is already a blur, but I think most of the official people were gone by four-thirty or five.”

“Ah, the official people.”

“You know what I mean. The medical examiner. The detectives.”

“Can I see the house? Or is that inappropriate, too?”

“The door’s locked. But I think Ginny has the key, if you’d like.”

“I don’t think
like
is exactly the right word,” she said. “But I do want to see the inside of the house.”

“A visit to the Book Depository while in Dallas?”

“Something like that.”

I shrugged. “I’ll call Ginny. The two of us can go for a visit.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You’ve been asking me questions for the last half an hour.”

“Just why do you blame yourself for George and Alice Hayward’s deaths?”

“I don’t blame myself precisely,” I told her, careful to keep my voice even, a monotone of reasonability. “But I do fear that I gave Alice permission.”

“To die.”