Secrets of Eden

  There.

  I'd nodded when Alice had said it; I'd echoed her word. I'd known exactly what she'd meant. She wasn't referring to Romans or Colossians, to the letters of Peter or Paul. She wasn't thinking of any of the passages in the Bible explaining baptism that we'd discussed at a table outside my church office or in the living room of her house as her immersion approached.

  She was thinking of John, and of Christ's three words at the end of his torment on the cross; she was imagining that precise moment when he bows his head and gives up his spirit.

  It is finished, said Christ. There.

  And Alice Hayward was ready to die.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Vermont rarely has more than ten or fifteen homicides in any given year, and while the majority of them begin with domestic disputes, murder-suicides are blessedly uncommon: Usually a husband or ex-husband, boyfriend or ex-boyfriend, merely shoots or strangles the poor woman with whom he might have built a life and then goes to prison for the majority of what remains of his own. Frequently he turns himself in. We are conditioned to expect one dead at the scenes of our homicides, not two. And so the Haywards' story--a murder and a suicide together--was both horrific and exceptional.

  George Hayward had come to southern Vermont from Buffalo as an ambitious young retailer who saw that Manchester could use more than high-end designer outlets and shops that sold maple syrup and quaint Green Mountain trinkets. He was the first to see that a clothing store for teens and young adults and modeled on Abercrombie & Fitch--but stressing natural fibers and stocking Vermont-made clothing--could anchor a corner of the block near the town's busiest intersection and thrive though surrounded by national chains that sold clothes sewn together in sweatshops for less. There were just enough tourists and just enough locals and--when word filtered south to Bennington, half an hour away by car--just enough college students to keep the store afloat through its first year, and by its second it was an institution. It actually would become a destination for young adults as far away as Albany, Rutland, and Pittsfield. Eventually his magic touch would extend to a southern-style rib restaurant (skiers in the winter particularly loved it) and an upscale toy store that used retro toys as the marketing bait for baby boomers, but electronic gadgets to ensnare their kids and make the serious money. For a long time, the formula worked. In addition to the house that he built in Haverill, he acquired what he and Alice referred to as a cottage on Lake Bomoseen--a svelte stretch of water perhaps nine miles long that over the years had numbered among its guests the Marx Brothers, Alexander Woollcott, and Rebecca West. Based on the photos, however, the cottage was actually rather elegant: a post-and-beam barn frame with a wall of glass windows facing west to savor the sunsets over the rippling pinewoods.

  George had been a teen model in Buffalo, and he had grown into a dramatically handsome adult. He'd actually worn a wedding band before he was married to Alice to minimize the number of women who would hit on him on the streets and in the restaurants of first Buffalo and then Manchester and Bennington. Once when he was drunk, he told friends--famously, since this is Vermont, a state in which vanity and self-absorption are still viewed by the locals as character defects commensurate with gluttony, greed, and sloth--that his magnetism had helped to ensure that he found the requisite bankers and private investors to bankroll his big ideas before he had a track record. One of my parishioners said that he looked like Prince Valiant with a better haircut: His hair was a shade more terra-cotta than blond and was only beginning to thin now that he was on the far side of forty, and his skin barely showed the wear and tear of either retail risk or age. Some years he had a mustache that was the color of faded pumpkin pine, but he was clean-shaven the summer he murdered his wife. If he hadn't started drinking so heavily in his mid-thirties, I imagine his workout regimen would have kept even his slight, midlife paunch at bay. He was handsome and strong and could be charming and charismatic when he wanted. He had a chip on his shoulder (wholly unwarranted), and he was more savvy than smart, but he was far from humorless. He was a person of some renown in the southern Vermont business community. There were people who were firmly convinced that Alice, though pretty, was lucky to have him. Almost no one knew that she had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order against him that last winter of her life, and many people suspected that he had left her in those months they were separated.

  Oh, but it was she who had risen up and kicked him out of the house, sending him to that cottage on the lake to see how life felt without her. He had attacked her once too often, and now she was going to try to make a go of it on her own.

  She had been one of his salesclerks at the original clothing store while getting a degree in business administration, and it was there that they had met and fallen in love. They married soon after he had promoted her to manager at the restaurant. By the time he was embarking on the toy store, however, she was securely ensconced as a customer-service representative at a bank branch in Bennington. Given the reality that they had a young daughter, even the fanatically controlling George Hayward saw the advantages to another small but steady income stream when you were juggling local retail ventures in a world of mass merchandisers and chain stores with very deep pockets.

  When she took him back as Memorial Day approached, believing him when he assured her that he was going to embark upon counseling and this time things would be different, some of our neighbors greeted his return to Haverill with relief: A family was reconciled, and a marriage had been preserved.

  Imagine, then, their surprise when they heard that one disastrously drunken Sunday night he had strangled his wife and taken his handgun--not a thirty-gauge deer rifle, as the earliest rumors suggested--and shot himself.

  Heather Laurent had arrived in Manchester for a day and a half of appearances that Sunday evening: the very night the Haywards would die and about twelve hours before their bodies would be discovered in our little village. Haverill is a small hill town roughly halfway between Bennington and Manchester; the general store is almost exactly eight miles east of the border with New York State. It was therefore Tuesday morning when Heather was able to read about the grim discovery in the newspaper while she ate breakfast in her hotel room at the Equinox and the line of admirers outside the bookstore in Manchester grew long as they waited for the store to open its doors for the day. She was going to be there that morning from ten to eleven, and then she was going to speak at lunchtime at a fund-raiser for the Southern Vermont Arts Center. The day before, Monday, she had visited the NPR affiliate in Albany and given a speech at Bennington College. As she read the story in the newspaper, the final touches were added to the displays of her books: a waterfall of pink satin ribbon cascading over the neat piles of her paperback, Angels and Aurascapes, and vases of blue irises and yellow daylilies surrounding her hardcover, A Sacred While, which had been published the month before.

  There were two articles about the carnage in the newspaper, and it was in that second story that I appeared. The previous afternoon I had rambled on to the reporter--a woman I pegged at about twenty-five, a decade and a half younger than I and perhaps ten years the junior of Heather Laurent--about what C. S. Lewis had termed the problem of pain. From nearly fifteen minutes of the Reverend Stephen Drew's babbling, she had pulled two quotes."Sometimes it seems as if there's nothing guiding this world. Or if there is something out there, it's powerless or uninterested in us--or downright mean. Even evil," I'd said, paraphrasing what Lewis considered the pessimist's view of the cosmos. I may have gotten to Lewis's summary of the Christian's more optimistic perspective--I'd certainly planned to as a courtesy to my parishioners, even if it was a view I no longer shared--but it's very possible that I didn't. It's possible (perhaps even likely) that I became sidetracked and started addressing instead another of the questions she'd asked me: How was our town handling this awful tragedy?"She was a member of our congregation," I'd said, referring to Alice. "She was a member of my church. I knew very well he was hurting her. I should have done mo
re."

  The reporter may or may not have noticed my transition from the plural to the personal, but Heather Laurent certainly did. And so after she had finished her speech at the arts center that Tuesday afternoon, she came to see me--she came to see us, to see me and Katie and our stunned little village--either a marionette moved by an omniscient god in a puppet show or merely an upright series of cells compelled forward by something inscrutably deep inside her DNA. A gene. A meme. Her one conscious thought? Someone had to help those poor, sad, pathetic people in Haverill. Someone had to help that pastor.

  HEATHER LAURENT LOOKED very much as she did in the photographs that graced the backs of her books, though I would realize that only days later when I actually picked them up at the bookstore in Bronxville. She had a professional woman's short hair, manageable and fast in the morning, just a shade closer to blond than brown. A round, girlish face and a pixielike nose--though there was nothing spritelike about her stature. She was almost as tall as I am, and I am exactly six feet. Unlike my sister, however, who is also quite tall, she seemed comfortable with her height: She neither slouched nor averted her eyes, both tendencies I had noticed over the years in my sister. Later I would learn that she was a classically trained dancer. She was wearing a white button-down silk blouse with a gold chain suspending a modest cross against her collarbone and sunglasses that she removed as she first started speaking to me, sliding them onto the top of her head like a hair band. She seemed almost disconcertingly happy to meet me, an ease--given the pall that hung over Haverill that afternoon--that I ascribe to the fathomless hope that flourished inside her, her faith in (her words, not mine) angels and auras. Make no mistake: Heather Laurent believed every word that she wrote.

  When she first appeared at the front door of the parsonage Tuesday afternoon, I assumed she was a television reporter from a network news program. I craned my head to see over her shoulder, expecting to see behind her a van and a young person with a heavy shoulder camera. Instead I saw simply a Saab that was ice blue, a little dried mud along the sides.

  "Are you Reverend Drew?" she asked me as I pushed open the screen door. It was steaming, even for July, and I heard small children playing in the shade by the shallow river across the street.

  "I am. And you're with ... ?"

  "No one."

  "You're not with a magazine? A newspaper?"

  "I'm Heather Laurent. I thought I would see if I could be of help."

  I nodded. I wondered if I was supposed to know who she was. I imagined her as an E! network Katie Couric or a columnist for a glossy weekly I didn't read.

  "May I come in?" she went on. "I don't want to be an imposition." I shrugged and led her through the kitchen and the living room and out onto the back porch. Usually this late in the day on a Tuesday, I'd have finished the first draft of my Sunday sermon. That's what Tuesday afternoons were for. I would leave my church office about noon and wander to the general store, where I would buy a sandwich and eat it there, chatting with whoever happened to stroll by in the middle of the day. I might be there as long as an hour, especially if the lectionary suggested passages that weren't among my favorites and I was looking for inspiration. Often I've used that time to help people in ways that were more prosaic than profound, but utterly meaningful to them: Over the years in those lunch hours, I helped milk a llama, found the local septic-tank cleaner for the local excavator (a real emergency, trust me), and made urgent repairs to the swing set at the cooperative preschool before the children awoke from their naps. Then I would go home, since it was always easier for me to work uninterrupted at the parsonage than it was at my church office. In the summer I would take my laptop to the back porch and work there. By three-thirty or four, I would usually have fifteen to twenty minutes of reasonably uplifting biblical commentary. If it wasn't too late in the afternoon, I would visit the hospitals in Bennington and Rutland where my neighbors--members and nonmembers of the church alike--were recovering or dying or lying unsure on movable beds. Most weeks I went to the hospital two or three times. But Tuesday-afternoon hospital visits were always a balancing act, because I had to be back in town not too long after seven, since the trustees and the Board of Christian Education and the Pastoral-Relations Committee all had their monthly meetings on Tuesday nights (though, fortunately, not the same Tuesday nights), and I was expected to be present. I wanted to be present. Usually my deadline was three-thirty: If my sermon was in reasonable shape by then, I would go to one or the other of the hospitals. If not, I would forgo a hospital visit that afternoon and go instead the next day.

  The Tuesday that Heather Laurent came to Haverill, however, I hadn't even tried to write a sermon. And I had no plans to go to a hospital. Somehow, instead of a sermon--which would have been trying enough that day, intellectually as well as emotionally--I had to find it inside me to pen some comforting remarks for Alice Hayward's funeral, scheduled for that Thursday morning at the church. (George's funeral was going to be a private family affair in upstate New York.) And I had failed: The comforting words had disappeared along with the uplifting ones.

  When I realized that I was incapable, at least for the moment, of writing the eulogy, I had instead begun to tap out what was essentially a form e-mail that I thought I might--or might not--send to different friends across the country. Friends from seminary and friends from college. My friends who'd remained in the suburb of New York City in which I'd grown up and my friends from there who, like me, had chosen to build their lives in other, distant corners of the country. All but the second paragraph of each e-mail--that paragraph in which I dropped in select, idiosyncratic details about our joint histories--was identical. The letters were rich in anger and gloom and guilt. I told two of my friends that I was going to come see them soon. One was a friend from seminary with a parish in southern Illinois, and another was a friend from college who had grown rich in Dallas. I envisioned weeks alone in my car and all the scrambled eggs I could eat in places like Denny's, the counters sticky, the lighting dolorous. I told everyone that I was leaving the church--no sabbatical, this, no hiatus or retreat--because I could no longer bear to throw the drowning victims of reason and birth, my congregation, life preservers with long ropes attached to nothing.

  Dave Sadler, the deacon with pancreatic cancer, now had a tumor so large he couldn't digest his food. He was starving to death in a hospice, and somehow I was supposed to reassure him that everything in the end would be all right. Caroline Pearce, three years old, had seen one of her little-girl legs sliced off by the metal that ripped through the side of her mother's car when a pickup plowed into it as she and her mother were returning home from day care. Beside her bed in the children's wing of the hospital--a room infinitely cheerier than the intensive-care unit where she had spent the first days after the accident, but still an awfully dark room for a toddler--I was supposed to smile. I was expected to console Nathan Bedard, a third-grader with a particularly virulent form of leukemia who'd be dead in two or three years, and I was supposed to inspirit his aunt and uncle, neither of whom had worked in almost a year and were in the process of selling the trailer in which they lived. Once the trailer was gone, they would bunk with friends and relatives--including Nathan's parents--for a while, but they had no idea how or where they would live for the long haul.

  And I was supposed to find comforting words for fifteen-year-old Katie Hayward. I was supposed to help the little girl I'd watched grow into a young woman--a wise and pretty reasonable young woman, it seemed to me, in spite of all that she'd seen and suffered--make sense of the fact that her father's anger was boundless, and he was, in the end, capable of murdering her mother in a manner that was simultaneously intimate and violent.

  From those letters I considered sending to my friends, mostly (but not all) discarded and deleted, I remember one paragraph perfectly: "I don't think I have ever had a predilection for depression, but at the moment I feel as if a friend who has always provided me comfort and counsel has gone away. I no longer know quit
e what I should be saying to others and have never before felt so personally and spiritually alone."

  I tend to doubt that Heather Laurent ever saw that sentence, however, because the laptop was still on the porch when she appeared at my door, and though later we would stand beside it and listen to the murmur of the shallow river, she wasn't the sort who would have leaned over and tried to read the words that were at least partly shrouded by the glare from the muggy, overcast sky. And when she arrived, initially she sat down in the chair at the wrought-iron table that was across from the seat in which I had been composing my e-mails.

  "This is a beautiful little village," she said.

  "Thank you."

  "The tragedy doesn't change that, you know. The tragedy doesn't make it any less lovely."