Secrets of Eden

  My depression, of course, was being fueled by far more than a fear that my professional dreams were starting to evaporate. I was eighteen, and the sad fact was that I was essentially alone in the world. I had been an orphan since high school, and my sister was falling apart even faster than I was. I simply didn't see anything that gave me hope or confidence that tomorrow just might be better than today.

  Now, the separation between depression and suicide is more crevasse than chasm. For months I had been working my way gingerly over the rocks along the ledge on the near side but studying how easy it would be to throw some ropes across the fissure and cross over. That whole autumn I was eating less and less, not consciously trying to starve myself the way Amanda was but simply incapable of making the effort most meals to pull myself together and go to the dining hall. I can recall lunches and dinners when I would just cry in my bed with the sheets pulled over my face. I wasn't sleeping, but I wasn't getting up, either. I would often just lie there, and my mind would drift to very dark places. On one occasion my roommate found me shivering in my parka on the floor by my bed at about three in the afternoon, naked other than that down jacket, and murmuring that I just couldn't do this--though I wasn't forthcoming about what "this" was, because even I wasn't sure whether I meant getting dressed or breathing with purpose. I couldn't explain to her quite what had happened, and I imagine if she had been more self-aware (and less self-absorbed), she would have reported me to the school's health services. But she attributed my funk (her word) either to boys or to the fact that I was the kid at college whose parents had died in that murder-suicide. I think she expected me always to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That autumn I would lose twenty-five pounds. There were classes where I would sit in the back row of the lecture hall and look around, oblivious to anything the professor was saying, and suddenly my eyes would be bleary and tears would bounce off the yellow pad on which I was supposed to be taking notes. (Invariably the page would be blank.) I would look at myself in the dorm's bathroom mirror, and even I could see that I was terrified and despairing and utterly lost. Some days I would sit at a library carrel and in my mind walk myself carefully through my aunt and uncle's home or across the university campus and try to imagine precisely the tools or the manner in which I might kill myself. There was that beam running across the steep twelve-by-twelve-pitch roof in my relatives' attic, a perfect spot to loop a rope if I decided to follow my father's lead and hang myself. There was their car and their garage. Or the antique bathtub with the lion-paw feet in the guest bathroom, where I could lie in soothing warm water with a paring or carving knife beside me and watch the clouds of my blood turn the bathwater pink. At the college there were tall buildings with glass windows, most locked but all easy to smash with those heavy wooden chairs, and I gazed out from the highest floors all the time. There was the bell tower in the chapel, and one day I went so far as to walk to the hardware store in the village beside the campus and finger the meticulously bundled lengths of clothesline. There was the train that passed along the edge of the college near the physical plant, just far enough away that only when our windows had been wide open in September had we heard its occasional whistle. One afternoon I clawed my way through the wild tangle of bushes and shrubs beside those tracks and crouched for long moments, awaiting the train and envisioning in my head the passage from Anna Karenina when that heroine throws herself under the shrieking metal wheels. At night when I was incapable of studying for a French test or writing a paper on the literature of the Great War, I would read what I could about what was euphemistically referred to as "self-deliverance." I saw that if I was going to kill myself, I seemed to be on the right path: Toy with the idea first. Touch the materials. Grow accustomed to your plan.

  I would contemplate who might find my body, and at first I would worry how it would affect them, but soon I was beyond caring. When you are as far down that path toward self-destruction as I was, you grow oblivious: not selfish, precisely, but insensible. Still, I decided finally that the best thing I could do was to choose a method that would make it likely that I was found by someone who did not know me well (if at all) and that my body would not be left in a condition that might leave that person with memories it would be hard to expunge. Consequently, I never seriously contemplated using a gun.

  And so the night before the first day of exams, while everyone was hunkering down in dorm rooms or the various libraries scattered across the campus, I dropped the small bottle of my roommate's sleeping pills into the dance bag that doubled as my book bag and slipped unnoticed into the basement of our dorm. I also packed a water bottle and some antihistamine tablets I had gotten from the infirmary to ensure that I wouldn't vomit back up the great handfuls of sleeping pills I was planning to ingest. I had caught a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror on my way out the door, and I was struck by how drawn my face seemed, even by the standards of that miserable autumn, and how my hair looked a bit like a crazy woman's: I hadn't washed it in four or five days--hygiene falls by the wayside when you're depressed--and it was hanging in strands that were long and oily and flat.

  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 tr
agic 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 creme), 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 sauteing 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 the
m 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.