Secrets of Eden

CHAPTER TWELVE

The cosmology of angels is neither problematic nor puzzling. Nor is it sectarian. Virtually all religions have spiritual messengers or escorts. Someone to take our hands when we need their grasp most, someone to pull us hard and fast from the fire. Someone to yank us off the pavement as that oncoming pickup truck whizzes past while we are strolling at dusk, so that the vehicle may transform our windbreakers into sails but we continue on unscathed. Or, just maybe, someone to yank from our fingers that orange vial of pills because it has become too painful to live. My father’s brother and an older cousin of mine had both spent time in McLean, and so depression had never been a taboo subject at the breakfast table in my home growing up.

In my case it was indeed going to be a prescription drug that I was contemplating for my last act. My roommate my first year at college had a prescription for sleeping pills, and between Thanksgiving and Christmas I fell into a funk deeper than any I had known since my parents had died. (And those initial months after their deaths had been a fog; I was so buffered by large dollops of shock and small ones of relief-yes, relief-that the first year had been considerably easier than the ones that immediately followed.) I had been deteriorating all semester, but it had begun to accelerate as the days grew precariously short. I had gone to my aunt and uncle’s home in Fairfield for Thanksgiving, and the four days there had been more dispiriting than usual, and already I could see the changes in Amanda-how caustic her humor had become, how dark. How she was intent, it seemed, on starving herself to death. So many of the things I cared for most or associated with moments of comfort in my childhood-dolls, a couch, my childhood bed, a teakettle my mother had cherished-were scattered to the attics of relatives and friends or had been sold in the estate sale. There was just no more debris from the sinking ship that had once been my life that I could cling to. And I was miserable at college. I was lonely, I was doing poorly in class, and I was grappling with the reality that I was enrolled in a university rather than a conservatory. Unfortunately, I was five-ten-at least two inches too tall for even the more statuesque dancers-and I had never completely recovered from a series of ankle and toe injuries that had dogged me as a junior and senior in high school. It had been clear for a couple of years that I was never going to be a ballerina. And though I was in the dance program at the school, I had begun to realize that my voice was going to be my undoing when I began to audition for Broadway shows. It was adequate at best, and that was after four years of work with vocal coaches and voice teachers. What did that leave? The Rockettes. And no one, in truth, makes a living as a Rockette. Perhaps I could be a choreographer. Or a dance teacher. But I was never going to be a performer.

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 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.

My mother appeared behind him in only her panties and blouse, barefoot, and her own hair-a great flaxen mane-was also in disarray. Her lipstick was smeared like a clown’s, and her mascara was dripping in rivulets down the right side of her face. (It’s possible, I imagine, that it was running from her left eye as well, but I recall noticing at the time that for some reason only her right cheek was streaked with makeup.) She was sobbing and she was furious and she threw herself at him, pounding her fists into his back and shoulders with such force that it looked for a split second as if he would hurtle over the side of the balustrade and fall either one flight into the living room or-worse-a full two flights if he tumbled over the section of balcony that was above the stairs that linked the living room with the finished basement.

“Stop it!” he yelled, grabbing her fists in his hands. “Settle the fuck down! You nearly fucking killed me!”

“You stop it, just stop everything!” she screamed back, a demand that, as unreasonable as it was, might have accomplished its intent if she hadn’t added, “You are pathetic. You are just the most pathetic loser.”

“Pathetic? I’m not so fucking drunk I-”

“‘Fucking’? Why don’t you swear some more in front of your children? Why don’t you tell them what you just called me? Heather, do you want to know what your father just called me?” I hadn’t any idea how to respond to this appeal, and so I murmured-not loud enough for them to hear over the din of the television and their own verbal pyrotechnics-“Don’t fight. Please. Don’t fight.” In my mind I see myself curled up on the couch in the red Christmas skirt from Saks Fifth Avenue and the turtleneck dotted with silver snowflakes I had worn that evening, a throw pillow clutched in my arms as if it were a stuffed animal. I’m sure I was crying, too.

“You’re a drunk, you know that?” my father told her, and he released her fingers as if they were a fish he was tossing with two hands into a lake, his arms upraised when the movement was done. “You’re a fucking drunk and the poorest fucking excuse for a mother I’ve ever seen. You’re a shrew and-”

He never finished the sentence, because my mother, her hands newly freed, slapped him, and the stinging thwap was so loud that his ears must have been ringing. He brought his palm to his cheek and held it there for a moment. And then he slapped her back, so hard that she toppled backward and landed on the carpet near the top step of the stairway, one of her legs beneath her and the other splayed out as if she were a dancer trying and failing to perform a split. Her panties, I saw, were soaked through with her blood, and for a second I was terrified she was badly hurt. But then I remembered: My older sister had just started menstruating and our mother had hoped to demystify the notion of a monthly cycle for both of her girls by telling us that she, too, was in the midst of her period. That night she was so profoundly inebriated that when she had removed her tampon when we’d gotten home, she had forgotten to put in a fresh one.

“You’re drunk,” my father scolded her.

“You’re drunk!” she shouted back. “And you’re a drunk, too! You’re a wretched and feeble excuse for a man! Your own father knows it, your mother knows it, your daughters know it. They know. They know.”

She pushed off against the wall and stood to face him. “They know,” she mocked him one more time, and she glanced down at me for the merest of seconds. And so my father smacked her again, but this time she was prepared for the blow and remained on her feet, though her body fell hard against the wall, her head bouncing like a basketball off the Sheetrock and causing the small framed print of a rosebush near her to quiver.

“They know their mother’s a shrew!” he yelled. “That’s what they know! She’s a fucking, bleeding, harpy shrew who can’t even keep her goddamn underwear clean!”

She dropped her hands to her sides in a posture of absolute submissiveness and hissed, “Hit me again, you drunken fool! Hit me again.”

And so he did.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Initially Stephen didn’t tell me why the deputy state’s attorney or those state troopers from Vermont seemed to suspect him of some involvement in that tragic murder and suicide in his community. He had shared with me a very great deal about Alice our first days together in Manhattan, but somehow he had missed that one small detail that they’d been lovers. He had had many opportunities when it would have made sense to tell me, beginning with the day we met right up until the day that we left Statler-especially when we reached the highway on our way back to New York City and he discovered that his cell phone had a series of messages from the Vermont State Police. Weeks later his defense would be that I would have misconstrued what had happened in those months and who he was as a person. Likewise, he said, I wouldn’t understand what had really occurred that July night in Haverill and why it had ended so horribly.

The reality is that had he told me at any point in those first days we were together, I wouldn’t have felt the need later on to withdraw. He could have told me in Haverill, and he could have told me in Manhattan. He could have told me in the hours and hours we spent in the car driving to and from the Adirondacks. He could have told me on our hikes in the mountains or after we had made love in the woods, in those moments of postcoital intimacy when we shared so much of our personal histories. We spoke of so many of our lovers, I wouldn’t have minded. I would have understood. I had felt that the angels were with us those days.

I was, quite obviously, mistaken. I had allowed my mortal judgment to cloud my celestial instincts.

FOR YEARS I had worn a small gold cross around my neck. It really wasn’t much bigger than a thumbnail. It was a gift I had been given by my aunt when I was born, with the assumption that I would grow into it. When my mother finally shared it with me, I must have been seven, and I had little regard for it. It sat in the bottom of my elementary-school jewelry box, along with plastic hoops and clip-on seashell earrings and pretend pearl necklaces. And this was fine with my mother. The cross wasn’t costly, and the church played virtually no role in our household (which, looking back, might have been precisely why my aunt gave me that piece of jewelry).

Years later, when my parents were dead and I was sifting through the rubble that remained of my childhood, I found the cross and brought it with me to college. But I only started wearing it after my angel saved me from death in the dormitory basement. It was never in my mind an amulet, but its aura was numinous and its presence was comforting. I have been told that I touch it on occasion when I seem to be lost in thought.

An indication of how quickly and how deeply I was beguiled by Stephen is this: Of all the gifts I have been given by lovers over the years, the only time I replaced that cross around my neck was when Stephen gave me a gold chain with a gold angel. He found it in the estate case of a jewelry store in the Village when he was walking alone on the day before we would leave for my sister’s in Statler. It was an art nouveau design and perhaps twice as large as the cross-which meant it was still rather delicate. The angel was female and typically eroticized for the period. Her hair was a long and luscious waterfall, her breasts were exposed, and her wings had been tapered more for seduction than flight. She was absolutely beautiful, and it was clear that when she moved, she moved like a ballerina. She was gazing up at a pigeon’s blood ruby balanced at the end of her fingers.

It was a striking piece with an aura that was as alluring as it was inspiriting, and as long as Stephen and I were together, I wore it and cherished it. I have it even now. The fact that it was given to me by Stephen affects the associations but not the aura that was a part of the angel before she came into my life and will be an element of the angel when she is a part of someone else’s. I keep it because it reminds me both of the wonder and the wistfulness of being bewitched. But I can’t bear to wear it.

IT SEEMED TO matter greatly to the state troopers from Vermont whose idea it had been to go to Statler the week after Stephen Drew had arrived at my home. I told them that I had been planning to visit Amanda for a while. The truth is that Amanda and I see each other at least every other month, either because I venture to Statler or she is in Manhattan meeting with galleries. I am confident that on one of these visits my angel will reach hers and my wounded but no less remarkable sister will begin to heal. Ah, but whose idea had it been for Stephen to come along with me, the troopers kept asking? I could see how pleased they were when I admitted that it had been Stephen’s. I had proffered the invitation, I said, but he had been hinting. He had been fascinated by Norman’s osprey when he’d been at my loft in Manhattan; he had wondered about how Amanda had handled the deaths of our parents. He had remarked on the beauty of the Adirondacks and how-despite his proximity-he rarely seemed to visit those rugged mountains. He even told me how he could go for a Michigan, a Plattsburgh, New York-based concoction consisting of a steamed hot dog on a steamed bun smothered in meat sauce and onions. And so I suggested that he join me, and he agreed without hesitation. He didn’t offer even token resistance, not a single “Oh, I couldn’t,” just to be polite.

And I was thrilled. It was important to me that we were together. His aura was in total disrepair, and he needed to be in a world that was wholly new to him-a place where his aura might be free of memory and association and thus could heal. Moreover, our bodies were absolute canyons of want that week. Certainly the aura hungers, but so does the flesh. I used to dance; I know the pleasure the body can offer. And so yes, I wanted Stephen Drew with me.

“THAT’S AN OSPREY,” Norman was mumbling, and I looked up from my tea at the picnic table that served as my sister and brother-in-law’s dining-room table in their log cabin. Stephen was staring at Norman’s shelves of ospreys with angel wings and the way the morning sun gave them an elysian glaze as it poured in through the wide, eastern-facing windows. Stephen had recognized right away the similarities to the raptor I had insisted on buying from my brother-in-law for my loft in the city.

“It’s very good,” he said to Norman. The two men were standing together. Stephen’s hands were folded behind him, and Norman’s were jammed into the pockets of his ragged blue jeans. “Heather explained to me about the wings, how you allowed yourself to imagine what an angel’s wings might look like. It’s haunting. Very creative.” I don’t believe he had meant to sound condescending, but he had. And I knew instantly what was coming.

“I didn’t have to imagine the wings,” Norman said, his voice low and curt. Then, his body hunched over, he stalked from the log cabin, and I knew he was going to find Amanda in the vegetable garden, where she was weeding.

Stephen turned to me, trying to gauge either my reaction or the magnitude of his offense. He sat down beside me, his legs straddling the bench.

“What was that about?” he asked.

I slid my mug of tea toward him and offered him a sip. A little grudgingly he took one. “You came across a bit patronizing,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to. Last night he seemed fragile to me, but not especially temperamental.”

“Oh, I think you diagnosed that right. He is fragile. And I can tell he’s worried about Amanda. But he also takes his work seriously,” I said. I took back the mug and placed it on the picnic table and then wrapped his fingers in mine. “And he really didn’t need to imagine the wings,” I explained.

“I do hope you’re going to tell me he had a beautiful painting as a model,” he said. “Something from the Renaissance, maybe.” By then he knew of my first face-to-face experience with an angel in the basement of my dormitory at college. He knew of the other times I had been blessed with encounters with angels as well. He was skeptical but patient.

“Nope.”

“If Norman has seen an angel, too, then why is he so… ”

“Damaged?”

“That’s a good word.”

“We’re all mortal. We’re all damaged. We still need to be able to welcome the angel into our realm. We must be hospitable. We need to return the angel’s love and be willing to live our lives accordingly. He’s not there yet. He’s still too guarded. Too solitary. Angels are sociable. They rather like showboats.”

“Where was he?”

“When he saw the angel?”

“Uh-huh.”

“In Ray Brook.”

“The correctional facility?”

“That’s right. It’s about sixty miles from here. He was in for robbery. He needed money for drugs, and over the course of five days he hit a half dozen liquor stores and convenience stores in Albany. It was quite a visible rampage, and I still find it appalling that it took nearly a week before he was rounded up. He didn’t hurt anyone. He’s not the type who wants to hurt anyone. Nevertheless, he had a pretty violent method, and it could have ended very badly for someone behind those counters-or for Norman or a police officer. He would go in and smash a bottle on the counter in front of the kid at the register. That would be his weapon. It was, I gather, extremely intimidating, especially since it was evident that Norman was seriously strung out.”

In the trees that bordered the yard, I saw a chickadee light on a branch and I watched a brown creeper spiraling up the side of a maple. I had told Stephen before we left Manhattan that Norman was bipolar, which was why as a younger man he had wound up on illegal drugs. There had been no one to diagnose and treat him and so he had treated himself in the only way he could imagine. Now, however, he was properly medicated.

“And he saw this angel in prison?” Stephen was asking me.

“Uh-huh. He came to his cell while the other prisoner was sound asleep. Lights were out, but still the small room grew brighter by far than it ever did during the day. I gather the one window they had was very small. And Norman saw perfectly the rows of feathers on the angel’s wings, as well as their shape.”

“What did the angel say to him?”

I thought for a long moment before answering. “In all of the things I have shared with you about angels, have I ever described a verbal exchange with one?”

“I guess not.”

“We can no more hear the voice of an angel-at least in a literal way-than we can see the face of God.”

“Ah, but the angels spoke in the Bible. Think of Gabriel’s comforting words to Mary in Luke.”

“Mary shared Gabriel’s visitation with the disciples many years later. I have no doubts that an angel came to her when she was a very young woman. But it has always seemed more likely to me either that Mary remembered the comforting presence in a fashion that grew more conventional as she grew older or that the men who wrote the Gospel put words into the angel’s mouth.”

“There are a lot of Christians in this world who would seriously question that interpretation.”

“And there are a lot of Christians in this world who nonetheless buy my books,” I told him, and he chuckled loudly. I hadn’t meant this as a joke, and I hadn’t meant to convey with it the sort of edge that he would tell me later he had heard in the remark and had caused him to laugh. I had simply meant that the historiography of Christianity is a subject worth discussing and there is a continuum of belief among Christians. I tried to rein in his smirk by reminding him that Baptists think very differently from Episcopalians and more people in this country believe in angels than in evolution.

“Touché,” he agreed. Then: “So the angel said nothing to Norman.”

“Not a word.”

“What did Norman do?”

“He fell asleep. This was his very first night in Ray Brook. Before that, he had been in either a psychiatric hospital or a county jail. But now his mental health had been stabilized and he had been convicted and sent to prison. A real prison. And he was going to be there for a while, and so he was scared. Absolutely petrified. And completely alone. And the angel came to him and knelt on the cement floor beside his cot and took his hand. Just held it. And Norman felt warm and, for the first time in a very long time, at peace. He felt comforted. He knew he would be fine, and he fell asleep with his fingers in the angel’s hands. When he awoke in the morning, he felt more serene than he ever had in his life. To this day he has never forgotten the details of that angel’s wings. Sometimes he has to work hard to recover that sense of well-being. He is still withdrawn, he still snaps at people. You saw that. But the wings? He’s a visual artist. They’re with him always.”

Stephen seemed to think about this, to be imagining the angel in Norman’s cell.

“Had he met you by then?” he asked me, and I had the sense that this man would have made a better lawyer than a minister. I didn’t mind, but I felt as if I were being cross-examined.

“Nope.”

“Amanda?”

“No again. He wouldn’t meet her until after he was released. They were in the same halfway house together. That’s where they met,” I explained. I had told Stephen on one of our walks in Manhattan about Amanda’s history as a young adult. Despite a trust fund that was identical to mine, she was often living crammed into two-room apartments with nine or ten other people, sleeping on floors, depleting her assets, and taking jobs for a day-motel housekeeper, most often-to scrounge up extra money for cocaine, methadone substitutes, and antianxiety drugs. “How’s that for an odd place to fall in love? Two basket cases holding each other together. But it’s also rather beautiful, isn’t it? They became friends when Amanda made a joke about her sister and angels and he told her the story of his prison-cell visitation.”

“So Amanda has never met an angel.”

“No, she hasn’t. Not yet. She doubts both Norman and me when we compare notes about our winged guardians. I am confident that her angel has tried to reach her-and will keep on trying. But as a mortal you have to be willing to meet them partway. Not necessarily halfway. But you have to be receptive. To know that you can’t do it all and be willing to open your mind to seraphic healing.”

“Versus sexual healing?”

“Come again?”

“It’s an old Marvin Gaye song.”

“You are such a cynic,” I told him, and I punched him lightly on the arm. “Sometimes I just can’t believe there was someone willing to ordain you.”

“My sister would agree with you-as would, these days, a great many of my former parishioners.”

“Don’t say ‘former.’ Really, I know you’ll go back,” I said, and at the time I honestly believed that. But he disagreed with me.

“No. There’s too much blood on my hands.”

“There’s no blood on your hands! You have to stop saying such things.”

His head was bowed, and when he raised it, he raised an eyebrow as well. Then he stood and went to the window, where, with his back turned to me, he said-and it was the first time I had ever heard such daggers of condescension in his voice-“I can’t abide those people any longer. The whole congregation. The whole community. I know that’s horrible to admit, but it’s the truth. I’m sorry. We’re not really a very good fit. We never were. And, unfortunately, I know what used to go on at the Haywards’ house. I also know what I did and didn’t do, I know what Ginny O’Brien did and didn’t do, and I know what the whole congregation did and didn’t do. That’s the problem. And so I think it’s in my own best interests to steer clear. My health, mental and otherwise, depends upon it.”

At the time I had thought he was being either melodramatic or, just maybe, metaphoric. It would be weeks later that I would recall this exchange and first contemplate the notion that he had meant every word.

I LIKED TO check in with Amanda and Norman because they had nobody else-no mortals, that is-and they were both so profoundly wounded. Moreover, Amanda was unable to open her mind to the angels in our midst. Early one afternoon that week, when the sun was still high above the copse of evergreens to the west of their log cabin, I went skinny-dipping with Amanda in a secluded section of a nearby river we called the funnel. Amanda took pride in the fact that she lived in a spot that allowed her to swim naked whenever she pleased, and she had so few visitors who might want to swim that she didn’t even own a bathing suit. In truth, I think skinny-dipping was also her way of flaunting to Norman and me the state of her mental health: Either her weight was stable and she was fine or she was again shedding pounds and slowly killing herself. That week Stephen and I made love there twice.

The water at the funnel cascaded through a flume of boulders the size of trailers, falling perhaps twenty-five feet, before emptying into a basin that was carved out of the earth like a gigantic cereal bowl. Occasionally Amanda and I would snowshoe there in the winter, and it always felt to the two of us as if we had just walked through the wardrobe into Narnia. The trees along the path from the log cabin to the river would form a silvery canopy, the boughs bending beneath the weight of the ice and snow like frosted palm fronds. Others would become elegant black-and-crystal sculptures: Willowy raven frames, layered with sky-blown glass. The forest that is filled with the music of the wood thrush and the warbler in June is almost preternaturally quiet in January, and even the falling water seems to have grown still. The icicles dangle like earrings.

Nevertheless, it was obviously only in the summer when we would spend whole afternoons at the funnel. Soon after my sister had bought the log cabin and the surrounding property, Norman had taken his chain saw and cut down a swath of the westernmost maples and cedar and pine at the swimming hole so the water would be warmed as much as possible by the afternoon sun. Still, it was never going to be more than sixty-six or sixty-seven degrees, and I wondered how my wraithlike sister could handle the temperature with absolutely no body fat under her skin. That day as we floated on our backs in the shallow pool-the water there was no more than four feet deep-or sat on the boulders that had been warmed by the sun, I stared at my sister’s reedy physique: The sharp tips of her collarbone and shoulder blades, the brittle rods that passed for her arms. When she reclined on her towel on the rock, I counted the ribs along the sides of her chest and the points on the hard square of her hip bones. Her breasts were the small hillocks of a middle-school girl.

She was in a bad phase, I saw, and whatever progress she had made in the spring had been undone by days in which she would consume nothing but diet soda and carrot coins from her garden. She was smoking once more like a chimney and had brought her cigarettes with her to the funnel.

“Are you seeing Karen?” I asked her, referring to her therapist perhaps an hour distant in Watertown.

“I am.”

“And the nutritionist?” I couldn’t remember that woman’s name.

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“She seemed to know how to get under my skin.”

It was always a balancing act with Amanda. I knew the questions I didn’t dare ask as well as the things I didn’t dare say. You really can’t afford to lose any more weight. You look fine now-don’t drop another ounce. For God’s sake, Amanda, you have to eat! What further complicated our conversations when she was in one of these periods was my knowledge that it really wasn’t about body image in my sister’s case: It was about suicide. She believed much more deeply than I ever had-even when I was curled up in that trunk that night in my first-year dorm-in the utter meaninglessness of life. And as much as I might have wanted her hospitalized, I knew that she would never have stood for it. Once, four years earlier, Norman and I had tried and failed.

“So tell me about your new man,” she said to me after a moment. She was smiling, but I knew there was a serrated edge to her question.

“What’s to say? What do you want to know?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Is the plan to pull him back from the abyss, too? Help him see some angelic meaning in the way his parishioners imitated Mom and Dad?”

It always struck me that Amanda could still refer to those two individuals as Mom and Dad. It was a linguistic nearness that now evaded me. They would, at best, be my parents. My mother. My father. I saw them largely through the formal prism of how they had fought and died or (on good days) the ways they had seemed so glamorous when I was young.

“I think that’s how it started,” I admitted. “That is why I first went to Haverill. I went for him. The girl. The town.”

“But now it’s just him.”

“We have a connection.”

“The angels have whispered in each of your ears?”

“They have in mine. I can’t speak for him.”

“Interesting choice in people to help,” she murmured, and she draped one of her skeletal arms over her eyes.

“Meaning?”

“He seems pretty damn self-sufficient.”

“Maybe that’s his problem.”

“I’d focus on the girl. The teenager. She’s the one who could end up like us,” said my sister.

“Katie.”

“Uh-huh.”

I considered correcting her: I didn’t think that Amanda and I had wound up similarly. But so much of life is about forgiveness and healing-restraining that urge to tweak or lash out or get in the last word-that I said simply, “I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. At least I hope it isn’t.”

“How much do you like him?”

“So far? Plenty.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Excuse me?”

She yawned, and I noticed when she went to cover her mouth that she was no longer wearing either of the two silver bracelets that usually adorned her wrists. I feared that either they no longer fit or they hurt. My sister was disappearing once again into a wisp of a woman, frightening in her calculated emaciation, and I made a mental note to call her doctors as soon as Stephen and I had left.

“I said, do you trust him? Don’t you worry that this country pastor sees you as his new meal ticket? All of a sudden, a rich, pretty lady drops into his life like an angel-and, please, sis, I only used that word because the simile was irresistible-and he sees in her an opportunity. A retirement plan, if you will.”

“He clearly has assets of his own.”

“Not like yours, I promise. One of these days, you will branch out into angel merchandise. Angel baubles and angel jewelry boxes. Angel note cards. Angel figurines and Christmas ornaments. Angel rainbow catchers for kitchen windows. Angel vacation cruises.”

The sun had warmed the rock beneath me, and I gingerly rolled off my towel so I could feel the heat on all of my skin. My sister was enjoying herself, having a little fun at my expense. “What would occur on an angel cruise?” I asked, in part to change the subject but also in some way to indulge her.

“Oh, you’d give your lectures,” she said. “Everyone would watch the stars from the middle of the ocean. They’d tell stories of the angels who had saved their lives. There would be yoga. Meditation. Angel food cake at all the buffets.”

“You’ve really thought this through.”

“No I haven’t. I was just being glib.”

I smiled at her, but she couldn’t see me because her eyes were still covered by her arm. I said a silent prayer that either she would open her heart to an angel or that an angel would do for my sister what clearly I could not: encourage her to save her own life.

THERE WERE A half dozen boxes of familial history that wouldn’t be sold in the estate sale that followed my parents’ deaths. There was their wedding album and a long shelf of college and high-school yearbooks. There were scrapbooks and photo albums. And there were the long trays of slides, many of which had belonged originally to my grandparents: my father’s mother and father. These cartons, after the house in upstate New York had been sold, were stored in the attic in my aunt and uncle’s home in Fairfield, Connecticut.

I had been out of college and living alone in a small studio in a corner of Brooklyn not quite a dozen subway stops from lower Manhattan when I came across a Bell & Howell slide projector with a carousel in the window of an antique shop in Bay Ridge. It was twenty-five dollars, which seemed like a lot of money for a piece of technology so profoundly useless in the advent of the digital age. But I recalled those yellow-and-blue cartons of slides in the attic in Fairfield, some holding thirty images and some holding forty, and how I hadn’t looked at any of them since one New Year’s Eve when I’d been in the sixth grade. It had been at a dinner party, and my mother had decided in the period between dessert and the moment when the grown-ups would all stand in front of the television with champagne flutes in their hands to watch the ball drop in Times Square that it might be fun to savor the fading Kodachrome images. In all fairness, a great many of the slides would include my parents’ friends who were with them that evening, so the idea wasn’t as self-absorbed and egocentric as it might sound.

And it proved to be a lovely idea. The grown-ups were just tipsy enough to be moved, but not so drunk that they would pass out in the dark. My father set up the white screen in front of the bay window, and we-a dozen grown-ups and the two Laurent daughters-positioned ourselves on the couch and the floor and the dining-room chairs that we carried into the living room. We stopped watching a few minutes before midnight only because the adults felt a moral obligation to bear witness to the precise second that the New Year was commemorated on Broadway.

And so I decided there on the street in Brooklyn to buy the projector and carry it back to my studio. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds, and my apartment was on the fifth floor of a five-story walk-up. The five flights were, in my mind, a great gift: They helped keep me in shape, and the apartment that awaited me at the top was high enough that I could see a part of the bay (though not the Statue of Liberty) through a sliver between two taller buildings to the west.

A few weeks after I bought the slide projector, I went to my aunt and uncle’s for Thanksgiving. When I returned that evening to Brooklyn, I brought with me a dozen trays of slides in a canvas bag. Amanda, who was living in Boston at the time, hadn’t come to Connecticut that year. None of the slide trays had been labeled, but my selection hadn’t been entirely random. I’d made sure that I had images that covered the early years of my parents’ marriage as well as ones highlighting Amanda and me as little girls. (By the time we were in elementary school, even my father-who had savored his use of slides as the family documentarian-had boxed away his slide camera and was using only film.) And then the next evening, completely alone, I allowed myself to study for long moments the man who had murdered my mother and then killed himself; the woman who would die at the hands of a man whom, I have to assume, she had once loved and with whom she had expected to grow old; and their two little girls, each of whom was transformed by their parents’ deaths in ways it would take years to fully comprehend. That night I used a white bedsheet for a screen.

What struck me most as I sipped a glass of wine and studied the images was how charismatic and elegant my parents had been. The colors were faded, which gave the two of them an even more retro sort of allure: Rock Hudson and Doris Day. My father was more robust than I usually thought of him, though my mother was exactly as beautiful. In some of the slides, when she was just about my age then, she was decked out in dresses with pointed collars and cuffed sleeves. In others, as the 1960s became the 1970s, she was in gold-sequined bathing suits on the white sands of Palm Beach and the farthest tip of Long Island, her skin nearly the red of a lobster. Meanwhile my father, who appeared in considerably fewer photos than my mother, would be decked out in beige trench coats and black wing tips, in charcoal gray business suits, or in tennis shorts and navy blue sweaters. In one shot, years before I was born, he was wearing a salmon-colored Nehru shirt and a peace medallion the size of a coaster, and my sense was that he was at a Halloween costume party. My father with a peace medallion? Had to be his idea of irony.

And there were the cars with their fins and the convertible my mother had loved when I’d been so very small and remembered now only in terms of its inviting red leather seats and how invigorating the breeze had felt in my hair in the summer. And there were my sister and me. In prams. In matching bathing suits (but never gold-sequined). On, I have to assume, Amanda’s first day of school: I am beside her, looking up at her, and my face is a combination of longing and awe. She has a lunch box and a small backpack that is shaped like a monkey. Curious George? Perhaps, though I have never had any recollection of either of us having had a special fondness for those yellow books, and when I asked Amanda about it, she was characteristically evasive, clutching her memories close to her heart. I was pleased that her hair had been brushed before school. Our mother was mercurial, and some mornings she simply couldn’t cope-all the energy she had expended the night before battling with our father would leave her a rag doll-and our hair had been rats’ nests.

Ah, but in the evenings? That was when both of our parents would experience their strange and unpredictable transformations-their all-too-frequent transmogrifications. They were vampires. Werewolves. The night changed them. But they didn’t instantly become monstrous. Often there was, first, those long hours of celebrity-like glamour. That night in Brooklyn, I held the stem of my wineglass between my fingers and gazed at a slide of my parents arm in arm on their way to a black-tie dinner, my father in a tuxedo and my mother in a strapless gown that shadowed her collarbone. They were in control-of their lives and of their emotions. They were in charge. They could have been movie stars.

In that image they were standing in front of our house on a summer evening, the convertible with red leather seats parked in the portico just to their left. One of our magnificent weeping willows is over their shoulders. When we sold the house, my aunt told me, the roots of those trees were just starting to burst through the cement floor of the cellar. She thought this was rather funny, an indication in her mind that Amanda and I were getting out of the house just in time. Although in hindsight the violation of the structure from the inside out and the bottom up can only be viewed as a metaphorical sledgehammer, it is nonetheless telling.

But there was one more detail to that aging Kodachrome slide that caused me to sit forward on my couch and then, a moment later, to put the wine on the floor and approach the sheet. To actually run my fingers over the cotton. To press it flat, to understand if what I was seeing was merely a wrinkle in the fabric or an illusion caused by something behind the sheet. A picture hook in the wall, maybe, or a dimple in the Sheetrock. What was there? What was drawing me to the makeshift screen I had hung on a wall in my tiny apartment? There in the window of my childhood bedroom, standing in profile and gazing down at the corner of the room in which I knew had once sat my small white bed-absolutely oblivious to the slide picture being taken outside the house-was an angel. I could see the tips of the wings, her shoulders (and she was a female angel), and the hair the color of corn silk. I could not see her face because of the angle.

Angels demand nothing from us but faith, and I should have known then that there was no reason to doubt the image on the wall. I had been saved by an angel five years earlier: What grounds had I to mistrust what I was seeing now? Why should I have wondered that she had been looking out for me even then, when I was a small child? But I did wonder, I did doubt. And that was my mistake. I took the slide from the carousel to see if I could see the angel on the actual slide. I turned on the lamp by the table, pulled off the shade, and held the slide near the bulb. Of course the angel was gone. Evaporated like a splash of water from the concrete lip of a swimming pool under a hot summer sun at midday. When I placed the slide back in the carousel, there was no longer a trace of her. The window was dark, and that little girl I had been long ago was, once again, all alone in that bedroom.

THERE WERE MOMENTS when I was fascinated by the way Stephen’s fertile mind worked. One morning when I awoke, he was still beside me in bed, but I could tell that he had been awake for a while. It wasn’t quite seven-thirty, and the sun was turning the seraphim in my chandeliers the color of pearl. I burrowed into his chest and asked him what he was thinking, expecting perhaps an account of a dream or an analysis of the independent film we had seen the night before at the Angelika. He pulled me against him and said simply, “There were no secrets in Eden.”

I liked the idea that we were alone in my bed and he was contemplating Eden.

“No,” I agreed, “there weren’t. What made you think of that?”

“Eden? Isn’t it enough that I have a beautiful woman curled up beside me?”

“Thank you. And I’ll accept that my presence was a part of the inspiration.”

“But only a part.”

“Yes.”

I rested my hand on his heart and watched it rise and fall on his chest.

“Genesis is a blunt instrument,” he said after a moment. “Especially the story of Adam and Eve. The symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. Obvious.”

“Is a sermon forming in your mind?” He shook his head. “No. I was just contemplating what an arduous burden a secret is. If I were the storyteller, I would have spent more time in what had to have been that nightmarishly stressful period between when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and when God confronted them with what they had done. Just imagine how oppressive the wait must have been. There the two of them are, cowering in the garden, just waiting to be discovered.”

“Genesis isn’t known for character development.”

“No. But the beauty of Adam and Eve’s nakedness? It’s that they haven’t any secrets at all. Not a one. And maybe that’s the magic of Eden-and what we’ve lost forever.”

There was a ruefulness to his tone that was endearing. It made me want to hold him-and be held by him-forever.

I HAD THE sense that the investigators wanted to find parallels between the ways my parents and the Haywards had died. Why not? It was, in part, those rudimentary similarities that had drawn me to Haverill that first July afternoon. But as I learned more and more about the Haywards’ marriage, I was reminded that even batterers and drunks have their distinctions and quirks. The biggest difference, it seemed to me, was that although my father’s behavior was indefensible-and I am not even referring to the reality that in the end he would murder the woman he’d married-my mother was no picnic to live with. She drank too much and had a tongue that was poisonous. She could be desperately loving with Amanda and me, but she seemed to take pleasure in the ways she could verbally emasculate our father. I remember the first time I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I thought it was a home movie.

From what I learned about the Haywards, Alice had spent her life trying her best not to antagonize the beast that was her husband. My mother, on the other hand, was poking hers with a sharp stick. That doesn’t excuse the fact that my father would hit her. It isn’t a justification for homicide. But the auras of both of my parents were sad and grim in ways that were unlike the auras that must have shrouded George and Alice Hayward and kept their particular angels at bay.

I WAS IN a vintage-clothing shop on lower Broadway when Stephen called me on my cell phone. I was in the dressing room-a dark and musty little cubicle with a fraying curtain the color of subway-track muck-wondering if I was still young enough to pull off a sleeveless black sheath from the 1960s or whether it made me look like an amazon. I was in a very good mood, a little giddy even. It was late afternoon, and when I saw that it was Stephen causing my phone to chirp, I may even have allowed myself a little extra sigh of contentment. We hadn’t been apart long, but already I missed him madly, and our tentative plan was that he would return to Manhattan that weekend and stay with me. We had ruled out my coming to Vermont until he had a better sense of whether he was capable of resuming his duties in the pulpit. The idea that he was continuing to live in the parsonage though he was no longer serving as the minister was a source of great consternation to him. I don’t think his parishioners cared then-though they would soon-but he did. It was one more thing, it seemed to me at the time, over which he felt needless and un reasonable guilt. Already he was looking for a place he could rent in Bennington.

“Hi, stranger,” I said, and I leaned against the wall of the dressing room. I turned up the volume on my phone so I could hear him over the throbbing bass of the store’s sound system. “How are you doing?”

“We need to talk.”

There was an urgency to his voice that I had never heard before. I was aware of the way his mood could vacillate between brooding and playful; I had seen him despairing to the point where there was an edge of meanness to his tone. But the insistence I noted in those four words was new to me.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“In a stall that could seriously use some Febreze.” He went silent, and I realized that my lame little joke had given him the wrong idea of where I was. “I’m in a dressing room in a clothing store. A shop that has some great dresses. I think I’m too old for the one I’m wearing, but it was still fun to try it on. I-”

“When can I call you so we can talk?”

“Well, we’re talking now. But it sounds like this is serious.”

“It is.”

I thought about the things he might want to discuss that would make him sound so grim, and the obvious one was that he wanted to-as he might have put it-break up with me. That he wasn’t going to come back to New York after all. I wasn’t precisely sure how far along our relationship was, but I did know that I wanted it to continue. Initially I had presumed that I’d been dropped into his life by his angel because he needed me after the Haywards had died, but as we spent more and more time together, I had begun to wonder if, perhaps, our angels-mine and his-had been in collusion and had consciously brought us together.

“We can’t talk now?” I asked. He was, quite obviously, stalling. Whatever he wanted to discuss, he was hoping he wouldn’t have to broach the subject while I was in a slightly rank dressing room in clothes I didn’t own.

“I’d rather you were alone.”

“I am alone.”

“I’d rather you were home.”

“Do I need to be sitting down?” I asked, teasing him.

“Please,” he said, and his voice softened the tiniest bit. “I need to tell you something, and it’s important you understand that this isn’t a moment to be light.”

“‘Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.’”

“What?”

“That’s a quote from G. K. Chesterton.”

“Heather, I just came from a state police barracks. For the last forty-five minutes, I was interrogated by two very curt troopers.”

I realized I had misread the signals in his voice. This was not urgency so much as it was outrage. He was indignant. “Go on,” I said.

“Now?”

“Now. It’s fine.”

“They think I killed them. Maybe just him. George.”

I slid down onto the thin wooden board that served as a seat and went completely still. I actually did need to sit down. “Why would they think that?” I asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. And appalling. Obviously I didn’t kill the two of them. I offered to take a lie-detector test. But they’re serious enough about this that I’m going to have to get a lawyer.”

“Where did they get this idea? They certainly didn’t think you’d had anything to do with this tragedy when it first happened.”

“I know.”

“Why, then?”

“I don’t know. I just know I’m furious.”

“It does sound a little absurd.”

“Trust me: It is.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the feet of teen girls and women younger than me walking beneath the drape, but the world went eerily silent. I was no longer aware of the pulsating music the store had been playing or the conversations between customers just outside the dressing room. I stared down at the black wool of the dress, bunched up a little bit in my lap, and rested my forehead in my hand. My ears were ringing. On the floor of the dressing room was a torn sliver of bathroom tissue, and I couldn’t imagine why it was there.

“Heather?”

“I’m here,” I said. Then: “So you’re getting a lawyer?”

“I am.”

“Well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. I know that’s not universally true. But have a little faith in your angel,” I said, and a memory came to me. I thought you were my angel. It was what he had said that first Saturday morning when he’d come to my loft and I’d told him that I wanted to show him an angel. He had called me his angel at least three times since then, and I expected him to say those words to me now. But he didn’t.

“I expect I’ll depend mostly on my lawyer,” he said instead. “But thank you very much.”

“You’re still coming to New York?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I just might be a day later than planned. It depends on who is representing me and when he or she can get together with me.”

I was relieved, though not completely. From the other side of the drape, I heard teen girls giggling about the scatological drawing and the sexual double entendre on a T-shirt. They sounded too young to be so knowledgeable, and that only unnerved me further. I was engulfed in an aura of demonstrable unease.

“When you know when you’re coming,” I said, “please call.”

“You sound annoyed.”

“No. Anxious would be a better word.”

“I didn’t know you got anxious,” he said, and I wondered if I had heard a ripple of challenge in his tone or whether he had meant this only as a small jest.

“Oh, I get anxious,” I told him. “As you get to know me, you’ll see I have a whole cauldron of emotions.” Still, I don’t believe I expected at the time that he would see hurt and anger and, worst of all, betrayal.

AS SOON AS Stephen returned to Manhattan, I insisted we stroll into the West Village and stretch our legs along the narrow, oddly angled streets bordered by manicured brownstones. He had arrived near dinnertime because he’d met with a lawyer in Vermont over lunch. Eventually, I thought, we might get as far as the Hudson, where we could watch the late-summer sun descend in the horizon beyond the river, and on the way there I might show him an angel that warmed me near St. Luke’s Church. But mostly I just wanted to talk and savor the first small wisps of autumn in the air.

Initially he was guarded and resistant to my inquiries. It was as if we were back on his porch in Haverill the Tuesday just after the tragedy. The conversation was unsatisfying, and I felt a stab of apprehension that we might not be able to recover what we had had. But that didn’t seem reasonable to me that evening since-then-I believed everything he had told me and thus the inquiries of the police were unfounded. Ludicrous. A strange comet that would streak across the night sky, cause a little disconcerting befuddlement, and be gone. And eventually his resentment and pique did fade and the distance between us narrowed. When we left my loft, we might have been mistaken on the street for a brother and sister who were not especially close: We walked without touching, and our eyes never met. But by the time we reached St. Luke’s, we were holding hands. And when we returned to Greene Street later that night, I was burrowed against him and his arm was around my shoulders. We would be fine, I decided. We were laughing, and his wit had lost that caustic bite that dogged him when he was irritated.

And for a week we were fine. Occasionally after talking to his lawyer-with whom he seemed to speak daily-he would breathe deeply through his nose and sigh and stare for long moments at either my osprey or my angels or the passersby on the street below us. Never would he tell me what he and his lawyer had discussed, and usually the conversations were brief. Still, it was clear he was exasperated, and one time I said to him, “Those little phone consultations with your lawyer can’t be cheap. This is a nonissue-he’ll make it disappear. Let it go.” And after a few minutes he would, and our vacation from real life would resume. We would walk and read and eat and make love. I did a radio interview with a program that broadcast from Manhattan’s City Hall, and he made faces at me through the glass when the host wasn’t looking. I wrote a bit, did a few online q &a’s, and responded to the occasional request from my publisher. But I did little else that week that could possibly have been construed as work. We saw no movies and no shows, because we were content-at least I was-to bask in a world that wasn’t much bigger than the alcove and daybed in my loft.

WE HAD BEEN together again for a week, and as far as I was concerned, nothing in our world needed to change. I knew it would, of course. But I was very, very happy. Sometimes when I look back at the period when Stephen and I were involved, I find myself doubting that we could ever have been so perfectly mated, so finely attuned to each other’s cravings and desires. It is as if that varied collection of memories we store-some precisely rendered and accurate, others modified by the caprices and needs of an aura, some gifts from an angel-in my case has a series embedded there that is more fiction than fact. That is, perhaps, all fiction. A string of pearls that turn out to be bath beads when you squeeze them.

And a part of my later sadness would stem from the reality that so many of our long talks together had been total fiction. I discovered I had been lied to for nearly five weeks.

But for those five weeks I had been as content as I have ever been in my life.

It all came apart after one more of his conversations with his attorney. As he did always when he spoke to this Aaron Lamb, he took his cell phone and stood at the corner window, retreating to the section of my loft I lived in least. He spoke softly, and while I might hear an occasional word-investigation, allegations, evidence, office-I never knew precisely what they were talking about. I heard no specifics. And that last phone call was really no different, though I did hear two words that struck me in a way that none had in any of their previous conversations: diary. And DNA. I honestly think I knew before Stephen had ended the call that something different and new had transpired, and it boded ill for our affair.

After he slipped his phone into his pants pocket, he folded one arm around his chest and rubbed at his chin with the other. He hadn’t shaved yet-that week he tended to shave just before lunch-and he seemed to be toying with the stubble along his jawline. It was obvious that this call had agitated him more than most.

I pushed my chair away from my desk and turned to him. “Anything interesting?” I asked softly, though it was evident to me that there was.

He cleared his throat before speaking. “I’m not sure interesting is the right word,” he said carefully. “It may be interesting for uninvolved parties. The prurient who have followed one family’s nightmare in the media. But for me? I’m not sure I would use the word interesting.”

“What word would you use?”

He had remained on his feet, and his fingers were still at his face. “Let’s see. Disturbing, perhaps. Disquieting. Problematic.”

“Sit down. Tell me: What did he have to say this time?”

He didn’t sit, and so I stood and went to him. I pulled his arms from his body to mine and rested them on my hips. For the briefest of seconds, he seemed to resist. I noticed the room wasn’t as bright this time of the morning as it had been only days earlier, and I realized we had reached a stage in the season when the sun no longer rose quite as high over the surrounding buildings.

“Tell me,” I said again.

“Well, where to begin… ” He was frowning.

“Aaron told you something. Begin there.”

“He did.”

I was growing restless at the protracted way he was sharing his news. I wanted to know what he had learned so I could offer comfort and counsel. And though I no longer presumed it would be essentially nothing and he would need from me only reassurance, still I hoped. As we stood together in silence, I sent a short, brief petition to my angel that my misgivings were unwarranted. That nothing had changed. “Are you going to tell me?” I asked finally, careful to keep my voice light.

He took a breath and looked out the window over my shoulder. “Alice kept a journal,” he said, his voice a little clipped.

Instantly my anxiety was transformed into dread, and I felt as if I were sliding underwater. For the rest of that conversation, his voice would sound slightly muffled to me, as if my ears were beneath the smooth plane of a very still lake. I understood from the moment he had said there was a journal that we were moving inexorably toward separation. If I didn’t know precisely what he was about to tell me, I had a feeling. The gifts of prophecy and fear? Trifles compared to the insight an angel will give a receptive mind. I didn’t yet remove his hands from my body, but only because I clung to the tiniest strip of kindling that I was mistaken.

“Go on,” I said.

“In all likelihood I am in that journal.”

“As her pastor?”

“As her… ”

“For God’s sake, Stephen, just tell me.”

He sighed. “There is an element to the story-a little background, if you will-that I didn’t share with you. Arguably, I should have. But I made the calculated decision that it would only distress you if I did. I think, in some way, I thought I was shielding you.”

“From what? The idea you’re a killer? I think you have grave demons, Stephen, but I promise you: I don’t see you as a killer.”

“I’m glad. Thank you,” he said, and I am convinced he added that only because it gave him an extra second to stall. To frame his thoughts. Then he continued, “For a time Alice and I were lovers.” He looked into my eyes, but I looked away, and after a brief second I pushed myself off him. I may have seen something like this coming, but the sensation of betrayal was nonetheless palpable, and I could hear my heart thrumming in the back of my head.

“We were lovers, and-”

“I heard you the first time.”

“And I should have told you.”

“When were you two together?” I asked. It seemed the first of a great many pieces of very basic information I needed to gather.

“Late last year. Early this year.”

“How early? It’s currently September. Was this two nights? Two weeks? Two months?” Outside my window I watched a double-decker tour bus lurch to a stop at the traffic light.

“Two seasons.”

“Winter and spring.”

“Yes. Through the second week in May.”

“And in all of our conversations about the murder and the suicide and your guilt, you never told me this… why?”

“I don’t know. I thought I was protecting you. And it didn’t seem relevant.”

“I think the fact you fucked her is as relevant as the fact you baptized her,” I said, though I was able to restrain myself from raising my voice.

“I deserved that.”

I tried to remind myself that hostility invariably boomerangs back. In the end we wound ourselves, too, when we lash out.

“I imagine I was concerned that you would get the wrong idea about Alice’s and my relationship,” he went on when I remained silent. “Or, perhaps, that you might presume I was at her house that evening.”

“The evening they were killed?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?” I asked him.

“About Alice?”

“About anything.”

“No. But things are changing. I am going to have to return to Vermont and give them what they call a DNA swab. I am going to have to give them some fingerprints and turn over my laptop.”

“Are you being arrested?”

“No. Not yet, anyway.”

I took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “Are you scared?”

“Of?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I would think being a suspect in a murder investigation just might unnerve a person.”

“I can’t tell: Are you being sarcastic?”

“Yes, Stephen. I am being sarcastic.”

“That doesn’t seem like you.”

“I just asked you if you were frightened, and you asked me what of. The moment seemed to call for sarcasm.”

“You have every right to be angry with me. I should have told you about Alice.”

“Were you two in love?”

He went quiet, and I couldn’t decide whether it was because they had been and for some reason he didn’t want to admit this or whether he honestly couldn’t decide. Finally: “I’m not completely sure what that means.”

“It’s not a hard question. I didn’t ask you to list for me the contents of the periodic table. Were you two in love?”

“I think she might have loved me. For a time.”

“And you?”

“I enjoyed her company.”

“And you enjoyed sleeping with her.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Her husband wanted to come home. He insisted he’d changed; he said things would be different. It seemed to me that if I told her not to take him back, I would have an obligation to marry her myself.”

“Or tell her that you didn’t love her enough to marry her.”

“In all fairness, I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking up a marriage that might have a second life.”

“Even a marriage that bad?”

“So it would seem.”

“But you didn’t care enough for Alice to fight for her. To make a serious commitment. You left her to fend for herself with George.”

“Apparently.”

My eyes were growing moist, and I tried to regain perspective. To imagine this conversation both from God’s vantage point and from an angel’s. I heard in my head the word forgiveness, and I thought about Jesus Christ’s admonition to Peter: Be prepared to forgive someone not merely seven times, but seventy times seven. I might have mastered myself completely, but I was so unnerved by those last lackadaisical responses-So it would seem. Apparently.-that I made the mistake of asking him one more question.

“Well, then: Did you kill him? Either of them?”

“Or both?”

“Yes. Or both.”

I was just beginning to wonder why Stephen wasn’t answering my question and whether he would when he said, his teeth seemingly clenched in exasperation, “I can’t believe you would even ask. Has it really come to that?”

I considered pressing him, but I knew by the glacial disgust in his tone that I didn’t dare. Besides: I had my answer.

“There’s another thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Aaron said you might want to get some coaching from a lawyer.”

“Me?”

“That’s right-but only so you’ll be prepared when the Vermont State Police come to interview you.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I agreed. But still I didn’t turn around, because I didn’t want him to see that I was no longer able to bridle my tears. I didn’t turn around when I told him that I thought he should go.

“Thank you,” he said, misunderstanding me completely, perhaps because he couldn’t see my face. “I’ll return as soon as I can.”

“No,” I told him. “Please don’t. I’d rather you didn’t ever come back.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

People often share with me stories of the angels who have dropped into their lives and how they have been saved by them. When the tale comes via e-mail or the postal service and the writer seems to need a response, either my assistant or I will answer it. Usually it is my assistant who pens the first draft, and the year that the Haywards would die my assistant was a young Columbia grad student named Rick who once was less than a second away from qualifying for the Olympics in the four-hundred-meter freestyle and still looked an awful lot like a lifeguard. His fiancée, two years his senior, was already an assistant editor in publishing (though not at my house), and I expected that eventually Rick would follow her into the profession.

About an hour after I had broken up with Stephen-and this was, in my mind, an irrevocable break-Rick came by with some letters and e-mails from readers that were hauntingly beautiful and precisely what I needed at that moment. There were encounters that were stirring, and there were encounters that were poignant. A young soldier in Afghanistan e-mailed me that he had been driving a jeep with three comrades in a mountainous stretch of Uruzgan when a female angel stood in the path of the vehicle. He veered around the spirit and wound up careening into the grass off to the side. No one was hurt, and when the soldiers went to the spot on the road where the driver insisted he had seen the angel, they discovered an IED that would have detonated like a mine had they driven over it. Another reader shared with me that at the precise moment when her much-beloved mother expired in a hospice, an angel was sitting calmly on the mattress beside the older woman and lifted the hands of the two generations of women, one already cold, and clasped them together for a brief moment. Then the room filled with light, causing two of the aides at the hospice to race there because they feared that the building was on fire, and thus there were three witnesses to the sight of the angel gently lifting the soul from the dead woman’s body and carrying it like a honey moon bride off to heaven.

That evening I felt that I needed an angel rather badly. My despair wasn’t simply that Stephen had been sleeping with someone and hadn’t told me; that alone wouldn’t have sent me into such a funk. People have secrets. Certainly I do. It was that withholding this particular piece of information about Alice Hayward, given how paramount the woman’s life and desperately sad end had been in our brief time together, was a breach of faith that made tawdry our supposed intimacy. I was hurt: There is no getting around that detail. Moreover, it had caused me to question so much else of what he’d told me. If he could withhold this facet of his involvement with the Haywards, what else wasn’t he telling me? The reality is that I suspected he really had murdered at least one of the Haywards, and so I needed to separate myself from him while I prayed for guidance and tried to understand what I was feeling.

As he did every day that he came to my loft, Rick had prioritized the letters and e-mails that were most important. Usually these were from my editor or my literary or speaking agents, or they were from journalists. But the chaos that surrounds the launch of a book had settled down, and so when I was alone that evening, there were mostly e-mails and letters from readers. Among them were those stories from the soldier in Afghanistan and the woman who had witnessed an angel cradle her mother’s soul. But the one that caused me to think about what was most important in my life-what I really needed to do next-was from a fifteen-year-old girl in Ohio whose father had died a year earlier after a brief battle with brain cancer. The teenager shared with me that she was an only child and she and her father had been very close. For months after her father’s death, both she and her mother had been nearly catatonic. Her mother, an accountant in Columbus, had returned to work in the small firm where she was employed, and the teen had resumed her schooling after three weeks away. But neither was functioning especially well, and separately they both had begun seeing therapists who specialized in grief counseling.

“I know from your book that angels often have real halos and wings,” the young woman wrote to me in her e-mail, “but my mother and I both believe that Dr. Noel is an angel, too.” I Googled Dr. Noel and found that she was a psychiatrist whose first name was Corona. Corona Noel. Is there a more perfect name for an angel? The teenager said that she and her mother were getting better now, and she wanted to know if I thought angels sometimes took on the guise of a mortal and whether she might have been correct that her therapist was a celestial being. She also wanted to know more about how I had handled the deaths of my own parents and what it had been like to see their bodies after they had died. Apparently it was soothing to her to have seen her father’s face at peace after the physical and emotional agony he had endured in the last months of his life.

The e-mail, I realized, was both a responsibility-as is much of the correspondence I receive-and a message for me. This young woman, wise beyond her years, may not have met her own angel yet (though it did indeed seem possible to me that this Corona Noel had celestial connections), but I found myself contemplating the notion that she herself was being inspired by an angel. By my angel. Alone at my desk, I found myself sniffling back real tears because I hadn’t seen my parents’ bodies after they had died, and I grew alarmed at what I had missed. What, I wondered, had happened to them? How had they been handled and treated by the pathologist?

Moreover, I concluded that in my self-absorption-my interest in Stephen and my misguided concern for the man-I had lost sight of someone very, very important: Katie. My sister had been right that afternoon when we’d gone skinny-dipping at the funnel. I should have been focusing more on the girl. And so I looked at my calendar and I pinpointed a row of blank days. I decided I would return to Vermont and visit the newly orphaned daughter of George and Alice Hayward.

I AM NOT sure how Stephen had expected me to respond to his confession that he’d been sleeping with Alice Hayward. Had he anticipated that my heart would be so resilient that I wouldn’t be hurt? I know he didn’t believe that I would have an angel to care for my wounds, because he had no faith in angels at all. He had no faith in anything. But did he presume that I would-and here is a word that is too often misused by therapists and self-help gurus who believe we can be healed with mortal counseling alone-understand? Did he think either that I would understand that he’d had an affair with a parishioner or that I would understand his reluctance to tell me? In hindsight it was the latter that disturbed me far more. People-therapists and pastors alike-sometimes succumb to temptation and move from healing to hurting. The preacher becomes the predator. We are all flawed, and I could have forgiven that. In my mind I imagine Stephen telling me about the affair our first afternoon together on the parsonage porch. (And though the prosecutor from Vermont, at least in the early weeks of her investigation, didn’t believe that that Tuesday afternoon was the first time Stephen and I had met, it was.) Or, more likely, I hear him telling me about his intimate and inappropriate relationship with the poor woman our first Saturday in my loft in the city. He certainly could have told me then. He had ample opportunities that afternoon and evening.

But he didn’t.

The fact was, I realized, he was never going to tell me. He only confessed when he did because he had to: because that investigator with the state police had learned that he had been sleeping with Alice Hayward and he was a suspect in the murder of one or both of the Haywards-and now, it seemed, I might be, too.

It all left me a little sick and despairing in ways that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. I honestly wasn’t sure what I found more troubling: the reality that Stephen Drew was comfortable keeping such a secret to himself or the possibility that he was capable of murder.

And as the days passed, it seemed more and more conceivable to me that he had indeed killed George Hayward. Alice? No, not really. I saw the horror unfolding in the same conventional manner as, in the end, would that state’s attorney. Stephen had gone to the house that Sunday night in July and found Alice already dead and George passed out drunk on the couch. And so he had taken the fellow’s handgun and murdered him.

The world is filled with human toxins-not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actual people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous-and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light. As scarred and as wounded as my sister had been by the thorns that mark our paths through this world, Stephen Drew was even more seriously damaged: Unlike Amanda, he had become a thorn himself.

KATIE HAYWARD’S HIGH school was one of those sprawling two-story complexes that were built in the 1970s for durability, not aesthetics. It was designed to endure teenagers, not educate them, and so it was a labyrinth of cinder-block walls and windows reinforced with wire mesh. It smelled of antiseptic and-because the gymnasium and locker rooms were across a thin lobby from the front doors-adolescent sweat. Everything was painted a drab green, ostensibly to celebrate the Green Mountains, but I was left with no sense of foliage when I stood for a moment outside the sliding glass partition bearing the sign VISITORS SIGN IN HERE. Eventually an elderly secretary with a round face and a kind smile listened to my story and found Katie’s guidance counselor, Joanne Degraff, and then Joanne escorted me to the cafeteria, where Katie was having lunch with her friends. I wasn’t quite sure where Katie and I would speak and whether we would get to be alone, but Joanne had moonstone-blue eyes that were rich with understanding and compassion, and she suggested that Katie and I take a walk around the school. Katie seemed content with this plan. She had finished her sandwich, and it was a beautiful September afternoon. The leaves were just starting to change color in the hills to the east of the school’s athletic fields, and there were thin ribbons of red and orange beginning to form along the peak of the distant ridge.

“My friends think you’re another psychiatrist or a social worker,” she said to me as we started to stroll beside the oval where the track team practiced and out toward the football field with its two long walls of wooden bleachers with peeling evergreen paint. Students on the far side of those stands were playing soccer in gym class. Katie was wearing a black T-shirt with a Chihuahua sporting a studded collar on the front and blue jeans that clung to her legs. She had used mascara and eyeliner with great enthusiasm, and I thought I might have seen the edge of a tattoo where the back of her shirt collar met her left shoulder blade. But she also looked a little lost to me, and that gave me some comfort: She was needful and frightened, and I knew that eventually her angel was going to be there for her.

“You’ve seen a lot of social workers?” I asked.

“Yup. And two different counselors, though I seem to be spending the most time with a social worker named Josie Morrison. But it’s, like, totally okay. I get it. I know why everyone is so worried. And I know you get it.”

“Thank you.”

“Ginny loaned me her copies of your books.”

“You read them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, thank you. I am very flattered,” I told her, and I was.

“Ginny thought they would help me.”

“Did they?”

“Little bit. Ginny said they helped her.”

“Your mother’s friend is struggling?”

“Yeah. She is. I don’t see her a ton. But I guess she’s still kind of freaked. I hear Tina’s mom and dad talking.”

“It’s hard to lose a friend-especially in such a violent fashion. It’s not as bad as losing a parent. But it is scarring. Life-altering.”

She seemed to think about this. Then: “Some of those stories about angels in your books were really out there.”

“Angel stories usually are.”

“But you don’t, like, actually believe them, do you?”

“It depends on the story. Some of them I believe. But yes, others have a significance that is more allegorical. Like a parable. That’s why I include them. But I can tell you this: There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that angels are real. As real as you and me and your friend Tina. As real as Lula,” I said, referring to the springer spaniel that she and her parents had gotten at the local humane society when she was younger.

It was clear that my declaration of faith had made her a little uncomfortable, and she wasn’t sure how to respond. “So how long are you here for?” she asked, what I presumed she viewed as an innocuous question-her way of changing the subject.

“In Haverill? Just this afternoon. Maybe a little longer in Vermont. I don’t know. I really don’t have a schedule.”

“Are you here to see Stephen?”

“No.”

“But you will, right?”

“No, I probably won’t.”

“Huh. I kinda thought you two were, you know, like an item.”

“For a time we were friends,” I said, “but he seems to have built a wall against angels.” I looked over at her, but she scrupulously avoided eye contact. The fact that we were walking and talking, I realized, made this conversation much easier for her than if we’d been sitting across from each other at one of those cafeteria tables.

“But you knew him before my parents died, right?”

“Nope. I met him the Tuesday after that happened. I read about it in the papers and saw the story on the news. And his aura seemed in such sad disrepair that I went to see him. I went to see you.”

“After that happened,” she said, repeating the words and nodding. “Oh.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine the stories this young woman had probably heard-or, in some cases, merely overheard. It broke my heart when I thought about what she was learning about her mother and Stephen through the rumor mill.

“So, then, am I, like, the reason you’re here now?” she went on.

“You know, I think you are. Is that okay?”

She shrugged as she walked and folded her arms in front of her chest. The sun abruptly caught the stud in her nose, and for a split second it sparkled. “I guess. Do you have a place or something in Vermont?”

“This is so funny. I thought I would be asking you all the questions. But you seem to have turned the tables on me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, her voice rising just the tiniest bit, and for the first time she actually turned to face me. She looked a little stricken.

“No, it’s okay,” I told her, and I was sure to smile. We were near enough to the gym class that we could hear the gym teacher with his whistle and occasional reprimands or shouts of encouragement. “I think it’s just fine. And to answer your question, no, I don’t have a place in Vermont. I live in an apartment in New York City.”

“Yeah, I think I knew that. From your second book.”

“You really have done your homework.”

“Not so much,” she said. A tall boy from the gym class with a great mane of yellow hair waved at her and shouted something I didn’t quite hear. She made a face at him that suggested she was disgusted and then gave him the finger, but I could tell it was meant in good fun. “Sorry about that,” she said to me sheepishly. “That was kind of awkward.”

“It’s fine.”

“Since I’m already, like, asking way more questions than I should, can I ask you one more?”

“Absolutely. You can ask me as many as you like.”

“How long… ”

“Go ahead.”

“How long does it take you to get over something like this?”

I wasn’t surprised that she would ask this particular question, because I had discovered the first time we met how frank Katie Hayward could be. But I was nonetheless impressed. “On the one hand, I don’t think you ever do,” I answered. “And I don’t think you’re meant to. It’s always going to be a part of who you are. Certainly that has been my experience. But eventually it recedes into one more of the many experiences that have shaped you. It may be the most wounding. It may be the most terrifying. But you don’t have to remain wounded and terrified. I mean, I haven’t found myself avoiding relationships or marriage because of how my parents’ lives ended. I assure you, that’s not the reason I’m single. Nor am I always thinking about how they died-what my father did to my mother and then to himself.”

“Do you dream about them? I don’t sleep well these days, and it’s not just because I miss my own house. But when I am asleep, I have these totally freakish dreams. Not exactly nightmares. But stuff that really, really creeps me out. Sometimes I can’t even go back to sleep afterward.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I see what Ginny must have seen when she got there the next morning.”

“Your parents’… bodies.”

“Yeah.”

“I used to imagine my mother’s body after my father shot her. And my father’s after he hanged himself. Even now I try to avoid those police shows on television. They always show dead bodies, and that always sends my imagination into overdrive. Sometimes when I’m channel surfing, I remain stuck on QVC-there seem to be corpses on every other station.”

“And I know what I’m seeing in my dreams isn’t quite right. Either it’s bloodier than it could have been-I mean, the blood is just everywhere-or my mom is wearing clothes. But she was in her nightgown, right?”

“So they tell me. I wasn’t there.”

“And my dad’s blood is all over her shirt and her jeans. I mean all over her. But it couldn’t have been, right? Because they said my dad was on the couch and my mom was all the way across the room.”

“I don’t think there was any blood on your mother,” I told her, hoping I could put her mind at rest.

“Did they tell you which nightgown she was wearing?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Ginny said she didn’t remember, either. When I asked Stephen-”

“When did you ask Stephen?” I said, not meaning to cut her off. I was surprised, given the fact he was under investigation for murder and the story had been in the newspapers, that he was still counseling her. I was struck by the casual way she had used his name just now. “Was this in July or August or recently?”

“Yesterday,” she answered, and when I glanced over at her, she didn’t seem unduly alarmed by the seeming urgency of my interruption. She pushed her dark hair off her face. “I saw him in Bennington yesterday afternoon. Tina drove me.”

“And you asked him about the nightgown.”

“I did, and he said he didn’t quite remember, either. But the one he described was one I don’t think she even owned. He said he thought it was a plaid summer nightshirt. But all her summer nightshirts had, like, flowers on them. Or they were solid colors. One was red. One was green. But plaid? One of her winter flannel nightgowns was plaid, but there was no way she was wearing that one in July. I mean, back in April she had probably stored it with her winter clothes and sweaters in these tubs she keeps way in the back of her closet. Was it possible she had a plaid summer nightshirt and I just didn’t know?”

It was possible. But it was also conceivable that Stephen knew of Alice Hayward’s plaid flannel nightgown from their affair in the winter; perhaps she had worn it then, when they’d been sleeping together, and now, months later, he was confusing the images in his recollection. It was also possible that he honestly didn’t remember what nightgown Alice had been wearing and yesterday had described for the girl the only one he could recall. “Yes,” I said simply, “that’s possible.”

“But you don’t think so. I can tell from your voice.”

“What else did you two talk about?” I asked.

“He wanted to know if I was angry at him. He knew I’d heard about the stuff that went on between him and my mom, and he wanted to apologize.”

“That was kind of him,” I said, but something was gnawing at me. I felt far from angelic, and I was hoping that a little magnanimity would help clear my head. “So: Are you angry at him?”

“No. I really don’t see the big deal anymore. At first I didn’t believe they were sleeping together. I was totally weirded out by the whole idea. But now I realize they were having an affair, and I’m okay with it. I mean, my mom and dad were apart, and so she and Stephen hooked up. I mean, my dad was… ”

“Go on.”

“He was mean to Mom. I know you know that. He would hit her.”

“You heard their fights?”

“Didn’t you hear your parents’?”

“Yes.”

“So you know how much it all just sucks,” she said, and she wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something unpleasant. “So, like, what did it matter if my mom and Stephen had something? It didn’t hurt anyone. It’s like the two of you-who does it hurt if you two have something going on?” I considered correcting her-reminding her that have should be had. But I restrained the impulse, and she continued, “When my dad came back, things seemed to be a little better. At least for a while. They were like newlyweds for the first weeks of June. And so, maybe, my mom’s… relationship… with Stephen had the potential to make things better between her and Dad. In the end it didn’t. But maybe it could have.”

“Do you think your father knew that your mother had been involved with Stephen?”

She turned to me, and she looked so intense that the world seemed to grow quiet. Suddenly the students at the soccer field in the distance were a television image with the volume muted. It was as if there were no birds and no breeze as we circled the perimeter of the school. “I think he found out the night they died,” she said carefully. “I’ve thought about this a lot the last couple of days, what with all the stuff on the Internet and a conversation I had with Ginny. I sure don’t think my dad knew when he came home in May. I don’t think he knew at the start of the summer. I think somehow he learned what was going on when I was at the concert in Albany.”

“That Sunday night.”

“Yeah. Uh-huh. I mean, she had been baptized that day, and Dad didn’t go. I know she was a little angry at him about that. A little disappointed. And so maybe that night they were talking about the baptism and she was talking about Stephen and it just, like, came up.”

I contemplated whether confessing to an affair could just, like, come up. And while that wasn’t likely, I did think that Katie’s instincts were sound: It seemed plausible enough that if Alice were angry at George for not attending a ritual that obviously meant so much to her-a ritual conducted by her former lover-it was conceivable that as the last fight of their lives escalated, she told him she’d been involved with her pastor. Perhaps she’d told George she’d loved this other man. Still, why hadn’t he gone after Stephen if that was the case? Why hadn’t he taken his gun and gone to the church or the parsonage after strangling his wife?

“But until he found out-if he found out,” I said carefully to Katie, “the reality that your mom and Stephen had discovered each other actually made things better between your mom and your dad. For a time, anyway. That’s what you’re suggesting, right?”

She nodded. “For a time. Maybe because she was a little more confident. But it didn’t last. I don’t know. They were fighting again in July. Well, Dad was fighting.”

“How do you feel about Stephen?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

“That’s a freaky one for me. I mean, how would you feel if you learned after your dad had killed your mom that she’d been having an affair with the minister? You might be really pissed off at the guy. You’d think, whoa-is he the reason my mom is dead? But then maybe you wouldn’t go there. Maybe you’d just think how he had made your mom happy. You know, maybe your dad would have killed your mom anyway, and so you think, well, at least the minister made her happy for a while.”

“But that assumes the minister did make her happy. That he didn’t break her heart.”

“Did he break yours?” We were almost back to the entrance to the school. My sense was that Katie had asked this quickly because once we were at the building and in the midst of the students and teachers, she wouldn’t have dared. Still, I stopped in my tracks. Tentatively I put my arm around her shoulders, wondering how she would respond to my touch. But her body didn’t tense, and she allowed her small frame to fall against me for a moment.

“Be careful,” I said simply.

“Like, in what way? Like around Stephen?”

“Just be careful. Please. Promise me you will always keep your heart open to angels and you will always take care of yourself.” Then I gave her my cell-phone number and told her to call me whenever she’d like.

HOURS LATER I found myself a little nauseous. I had just left the pathologist’s office in Vermont, and for a long moment I sat in the front seat of my car in the hospital parking lot. The vehicle was steaming inside from having baked in the sun with the windows rolled up, and so I opened them all and pressed hard on the button that rolled back the moonroof. It wasn’t that I had seen anything especially distressing in the mortuary-the bodies on the shelves in the walk-in refrigerator were the elderly who had passed away of natural causes that day on the hospital floors high above-and their faces looked downright beatific. They looked as if they were sleeping deeply and comfortably on their backs beneath blue hospital blankets. Rather, I think I was disturbed because now I could imagine precisely how my parents’ corpses had been autopsied. I saw concretely in my mind the way the medical examiner in our corner of New York had placed each of their bodies on the slanted steel table-slanted for drainage-and meticulously described aloud precisely the physical characteristics of each of my parents. I didn’t know who had gone first, but I found myself envisioning my mother’s corpse on the table, since I had seen her naked in the bathtub when I would keep her company as she bathed and in the changing room of the country club. Her face, in my mind, was intact, but I knew in reality that a large part of it had been obliterated completely by the bullet. And then I saw what the Vermont pathologist had described as the Y incision: a cut in the shape of a capital Y, a wishbone with the two prongs at the shoulders and the point extending from sternum to pubic bone. The incision, the pathologist had told me, was deep-you had to cut through the abdominal wall. Then all three of these great flaps of skin were pulled back.

“The one over the upper chest,” I had asked. “You pulled that back over her face?”

“That’s correct,” he had said calmly. “How do you know that?”

I’d shrugged. “A college course. I really know very little.”

Next, my mother’s ribs would have been cut apart and the anterior chest wall opened so the doctor could examine the organs underneath. Their connections to the body would be severed and each one carefully scrutinized and weighed. The intestines would be drained in the sink to see what undigested food and feces were present. The contents of the stomach would be noted. Samples from most organs would be preserved and then, in my mother’s case, the organs replaced back inside the cadaver.

I thought of the names of the tools he had mentioned: Bone saw. Scalpel. Skull chisel.

“And the brain?” I wondered, because I realized abruptly that the bullet wound might have affected how the brain would be autopsied. “How would the way my mother was killed affect how the brain was autopsied?”

“Well,” the medical examiner began, clearly choosing his words with care to minimize my discomfort, “what might have happened would have depended on what sorts of conversations had occurred between the pathologist and your adult relatives: an aunt and uncle, maybe, or your grandparents. A fresh brain can be difficult to study, and so on occasion it will be fixed for as much as two weeks in formalin. It would depend upon what the officials investigating the case needed to learn.”

“Two weeks?”

“Or less.”

“So it was possible my mother was buried without her brain?”

“It’s possible. But not likely,” he said. “Not from what you’ve told me of the circumstances of your mother’s death. It was a bullet. And your father left behind a confession.”

“Of sorts,” I agreed, and I sighed. For a moment I wondered why anyone had bothered to autopsy my parents, since it was painfully clear what had occurred: My father had shot my mother and then hanged himself.

But then a thought dawned on me, and I recall looking up from my steering wheel toward one of the old, Gothic buildings on the university campus adjacent to the hospital and mortuary: To the casual eye, it had also been rather apparent what had happened in the Haywards’ living room back in July. But, in fact, George Hayward hadn’t shot himself, and that only became clear when the medical examiner with whom I’d just met had autopsied the man’s body. And so it was just as important that my parents’ bodies had been examined as well.

“What color nightgown was Alice wearing when she died?” I’d asked the medical examiner as I was leaving. “I’m curious.”

“I would call it a nightshirt,” he’d said. “It only fell to midthigh.”

“Was it plaid?”

“No,” he had told me. “I’m quite sure it was solid red.”

IN THE WEEKS after I had returned to New York after my brief visit to Vermont, I thought of Stephen Drew all the time. I didn’t miss him, precisely. After all, as meaningful as our affair might have been, it had also been brief. But I did wonder about the ways that my intentions, which had only been kind, had led me astray. Initially I had hoped only that I could provide counsel and healing. Offer my experiences and share my access to the angels. Instead I had misread everything about the man and lost focus on the light and the wings that have guided me since that night I almost took my own life. That autumn I didn’t necessarily view the fallen minister as beyond salvation. But I did view him as poisonous to the stillness and equanimity that helps me to commune with the angels. And I knew that if our paths crossed ever again, it would be extremely difficult for me to trust him.

Still, he was often on my mind. How could he not have been? After all, I’d had the Vermont State Police in my home.

Day after day I would find myself living in two worlds in my head, one I knew well and one constructed entirely from my imagination. The first comprised all of those days and nights I had spent with Stephen in Haverill, Manhattan, and Statler. I would close my eyes, and a whole cyclorama of our experiences together would unfurl before me. I would feel again the warmth of his body beside me, and I would savor the scent of the skin on his neck. I would see his eyes and the way he would listen as I spoke, with his long, beautiful fingers steepled together, almost unmoving. I would recall the stories he had shared with me and the sound of his voice-as soothing as a warm bath-and how I had believed all he’d told me.

The second world was far more abstract to me and tended to have an uncertain fluidity to it, because I was crafting it entirely from things people had told me or I had manufactured for my mind’s eye. And that world was the final day-the final hours-of Alice and George Hayward. It would begin with the baptism on Sunday morning, with the images from the digital photos of the ritual that Ginny O’Brien had taken and shared with me at Alice’s funeral. With the pond, deserted when Stephen and I had driven past it.

No, it would commence even before that. I would imagine Alice getting dressed in the morning. Choosing her bathing suit in her bedroom at eight-fifteen or eight-thirty. Perhaps gazing at herself in the long mirror that hung on the inside of the white closet door in her and George’s bedroom. This wouldn’t be vanity on her part: After all, she was about to wear that Speedo before the whole congregation, and she needed to be sure that George’s handiwork was well hidden. At that moment she would have had just about twelve hours to live.

There was her emergence from the pond water itself. Roughly eleven-thirty now. She would have nine hours remaining. I would see her spooning macaroni salad onto a paper plate at the potluck (and macaroni salad is a guess founded on nothing, because no one ever said a word to me about what Alice might have eaten at that meal). Gardening in the middle of the afternoon, in the vegetable plot in the backyard, perhaps weeding among the rows of carrots and harvesting her string beans and peas. Racing to the general store just before it closed at five o’clock to buy a clear plastic container of coleslaw: her very last purchase on this planet. She now had barely three hours. Maybe three hours and a few minutes. Less time than it takes me to drive to my sister’s in Statler. Less time than it took my mother to roast a turkey when I was a child. And, finally, there was her last phone call with Ginny. Strong, sisterly, protective Ginny O’Brien (now, it seemed, sad, scarred, and struggling Ginny O’Brien). There it was, her last conversation with anyone in the world other than the man who would kill her. She had only minutes now, though how many we’ll never know. The medical examiner in Vermont said it was impossible to be that precise with the time of death. But it was clear that the time remaining to her would be calculated in minutes, not hours.

Still, the vision I kept returning to was this: Alice Hayward alone in her bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning as she studied her curves and her legs and her breasts in that bathing suit. Twelve hours. Half a day. That was about what she had left. What, I would wonder, would she have done differently if she had known that in half a day she would be dead? If the rules were such that there was no appeal to her predestined fate-she couldn’t leave; she couldn’t be somewhere else that Sunday night-but she understood that these were her last hours on earth, what conversations would she have initiated? What experiences would have mattered to her? What advice would she have shared with fifteen-year-old Katie?

But obviously she didn’t know what loomed before her. Stephen insisted to me that she had known-that it was clear to her she was going to die and that he, in turn, should have done something. He said she might not have known it was going to occur that Sunday evening, but she had been confident that her death was coming soon at the hands of her husband. And, indeed, it had been at his hands.

Yet I questioned whether Alice really had seen this coming. She had fought George. Struggled. She had not gone quietly to the angels. And according to Ginny, there had been nothing in that last phone call that might have suggested that Alice was either frightened or despondent. She had even joked about George. Infantilized him on the telephone. And, of course, Alice had Katie. I knew if I had a child, that would be reason enough for me to want to carry on. Parents may commit suicide every day, but nothing I had heard or learned about Alice suggested she was depressed.

Consequently I found myself wondering if Stephen’s long, desperate riffs on guilt and self-loathing were nothing but an act. There. That was the whole clue, he had said, that single word. Her response to her baptism. It began to seem more and more likely that Stephen had made the whole thing up: the word as prophecy. The word as message. Oh, he might have been feeling guilty, and indeed a measure of it might have been because Alice was dead. But he hadn’t killed his former lover. If Stephen Drew really was feeling remorse, it was because he had left Alice to her fate by breaking off their affair and then, months later, because he had murdered her husband.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When my cell phone rang, I was home, rolling a yoga mat into a tube. It was raining outside, but it was a warm, Indian-summer sort of rain, and my windows overlooking Greene Street were open. I had finished my yoga for the day, and I was as close to content as I was in those weeks: not as serene as I was accustomed to being, but through prayer and meditation I was confident that eventually my aura would lose the toxicity that was causing me to see the world through an enervating smog. I felt that my angel was with me, ensuring that I would endure this strange autumn, as I had far worse crises-spiritual and physical-in my life.

“Hi, Heather, it’s me,” said a little voice, and I knew instantly that it was Katie Hayward. I sat down on the daybed so I could focus on her. I asked her where she was and how she was faring. There was a ripple of anxiety in her tone, and instantly I was worried. She was calling from the bedroom that was now hers and Tina’s at the Cousino family’s house, and the disquiet I heard was fueled, she said, by another dream she’d had the night before and she’d been thinking about all day at school. The dream-a nightmare, really-had taken place the evening when her parents had died.

“And Lula was inside the house, and my mom and dad’s bodies were there in the living room,” Katie was saying now.

“Lula was inside the house?” I asked. I remembered that someone had told me that the dog had been outside when Ginny O’Brien had arrived Monday morning.

“Yeah. And she was… ”

“Go on.”

“She was drinking my dad’s blood off his head. Lapping at it. Sort of nibbling at the hole where the bullet went in. Isn’t that gross? I feel like I’m really sick to even think of such a thing.”

“No, you’re not sick at all. But remember: Lula hadn’t been in the living room. It was just a dream. Lula had probably been out all night. Your mom or dad let her out before they… fought.”

“But that’s just it: They didn’t let Lula out! She was a shelter dog, and she’s always been a bit of a kook. Like a total lunatic. So either we walked her on a leash or we let her out when we could watch her. You know, keep an eye on her. We never just opened the door and let her out. Never. And let me tell you, she hasn’t changed a bit here at Tina’s. There is no way you just open the door and let that dog rock. I think it’s a miracle she was sitting on the front porch when Ginny got to my house the next day.”

Did Katie understand the ramifications of what she was saying? I thought she did, which would explain the fretfulness in her voice. But I wasn’t sure, and so I pressed her just a bit. “Your father had been drinking. Maybe he-”

“He didn’t let her out. I don’t care how drunk he was, he wouldn’t have let her out. I mean, like, why would he?”

“Perhaps your mother tried to leave. And Lula left then. Maybe she just ran out the door.”

“No. That’s what hit me because of the dream. As awful as the nightmare was, it made something really, really clear to me that I hadn’t thought about: Someone else let Lula out the door that night, either on purpose or by mistake. Now, sometimes, if something has totally freaked her out, she’ll just zoom out the front door. But she really does have to be totally freaked. Totally scared.”

The implication, and neither of us said anything for a moment, was that whoever had killed her father-assuming that he hadn’t killed himself-had let the dog out.

“Was Lula ever scared of your father?” I asked.

“No way. He treated Lula a lot better than he treated Mom.”

“But she was scared of strangers, I presume.”

“She was scared of men-except for Dad, who won her over. But other men scared the crap out of her. Even Stephen.”

“Why do you say ‘even Stephen’?”

“Well, he’s, like, a minister. Isn’t he supposed to be all about peace?”

“Do you think Stephen was at your house on Sunday night? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“They’re selling the house, you know. It will pay for my college.”

I repeated the question: “Do you think Stephen was at your house on Sunday night?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Lula was out.”

“There has to be more to it than that.”

She exhaled so profoundly that I could hear it clearly over the phone. “Remember when you called me the day after you visited the coroner guy?” she said after a moment. “You told me he said Mom had been wearing her red nightgown.”

“Go on.”

“I mean, I don’t know if any of this is what happened. But I keep thinking about it a lot. When my mom sent my dad away last winter, he didn’t take the handgun with him. He made a big deal about this. My mom didn’t even want to touch it, but he insisted she hang on to it, because she was going to be the only parent in the house looking out for me. And our house is sort of isolated. Two women and all. So he left her the gun and the bullets, and then he went to go live at the lake. And Mom put the gun in one of these big plastic tubs she uses to swap out her clothes. She puts her summer clothes in them in the winter and her winter clothes in them in the summer. And as far as I know, the gun was still in one of the tubs in July, even though the summer clothes had been replaced with the winter ones. She’d kept the gun where it was. See?”

“I’m listening,” I said simply.

“Well, here’s the thing: I don’t think Stephen ever saw my mom in her plaid flannel nightgown. Her winter one. I mean, if they were sleeping together, it was during the day when I was at school, because they sure weren’t doing it when I was home at night. And so she wouldn’t have been wearing her nightgown at, like, eleven in the morning or when she came home from the bank to be with him. She would have been wearing clothes. Casual clothes or work clothes. But clothes. Besides, that nightgown is sort of grungy. It’s got weird tears and coffee stains. My mom really liked it. But there is no way she would have let anyone other than my dad or me ever see her in it. Especially… ”

“Especially what?”

“I’m a virgin. Okay? I’m a virgin. But I’m not totally naïve. And if you’re having sex with a guy for the first couple of times, you want to look as hot as you can, even if you’re, like, middle-aged. And I know my mom. There is no way she would ever have let Stephen see her in that plaid flannel nightgown.”

“And so you’re suggesting he saw the nightgown for the first time when he got the gun.”

“I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” she said, her voice growing more animated, more urgent. “But I just can’t see how else Stephen could have known about the nightgown.”

“Do you know if he knew the gun was in one of those tubs? Did your mom ever tell you that she’d told him she kept the pistol there?”

“You sound like a detective.”

“I’m sorry. But my head is spinning a little bit. Have you told the police any of this?”

“They didn’t ask me any questions about the gun. Or about Lula. And it was only when I had the dream about Lula that the whole nightgown thing even crossed my mind. See, in the dream my mom was wearing that ridiculous plaid nightgown. And that image made the rest really, really clear.”

“I’m going to tell you three things,” I said. “First of all, grown-ups are strange, and sometimes we get comfortable with one another pretty quickly. Your mother and Stephen were intimate in the winter. And so I wouldn’t discount completely the idea that your mother wore that grungy plaid nightgown around him at some point. Then, in the midst of whatever else Stephen is experiencing right now, he confused the nightgowns in his mind when he spoke with you. But here is the second thing: You might be onto something, and you should share your conjectures with the police. I would call them myself-and if you want me to, I will be happy to. But they’re going to want to talk to you anyway after that, so you might as well just pick up the phone and call them yourself. Call that state trooper who interviewed us or call the deputy state’s attorney. I believe her name is Catherine. I’ll get you both numbers-or Josie can. That social worker. Let them decide if there’s anything to it.”

“And the third? You said there were three things.”

“Don’t tell anyone else what you told me.”

“Not even Tina or Ginny?”

“No, not even Tina or Ginny,” I said. And then, because I wanted to leave nothing to chance when it came to Katie Hayward’s safety, I added, “And not Stephen. Under no circumstances tell Stephen what you just told me.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “he would be the last person I’d tell.”

I STARTED READING the Vermont newspapers online that autumn, peeking at them every day to see if there was any news about Stephen or any quotes from his attorney, Aaron Lamb-a name that struck me at some moments as appropriate, others as ironic. I watched to see if Katie’s revelations about the gun and the nightgown would appear in the papers, but they didn’t. A friend of mine who is a lawyer for the City of New York told me that unless the case went to trial, I wouldn’t read about them. She said that didn’t mean that the information wasn’t being used as part of the investigation into Stephen Drew or that detectives weren’t trying to (her words, not mine) turn up the heat on the now officially retired minister. But she said that from everything I had shared with her, unless they could link him to the gun, an indictment wasn’t likely.

“But it’s so clear that he did it,” I told her one evening over a glass of wine at a bar at the South Street Seaport just after Columbus Day weekend. Outside, the shoes of the businesswomen and-men clattered along the cobblestones as, invariably, they chatted on their headsets and PDAs.

“Well, maybe it’s clear to you,” she corrected me. “But it sounds to me that unless he confesses, he’s going to get away with it.”

I considered calling that Vermont state trooper who had interviewed me, and periodically I found myself fiddling with his card, which, for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint, I kept in my purse. I considered making another statement, a second one, but what more really could I say? Stephen refused to own up to his guilt to me and had told me nothing I could add. I could make sure that Katie had shared her ideas with the investigators, but there really wasn’t any doubt in my mind that she had. By now they knew about the gun and the nightgown and the dog.

Stephen did try to reconcile with me that autumn, but only one time with real effort. He called twice and left messages, and he e-mailed me once asking me whether it might be possible to have a conversation. The messages were not insincere, but nor were they impassioned. They were a little chilly and a little tame. Only in one instance did he make an effort in which I glimpsed the iridescence that hovers like a halo amid an aura, and even that was but a passing glance. It was in a handwritten note on a piece of yellow legal paper that he mailed me. Most of the individual letters on each line were so small and controlled that I wondered if he had had a contest with himself to see how many words he could wedge onto the page. He began by reiterating how I should, at the very least, see him once more. Face-to-face. See what it felt like for the two of us to be together, see if there was a hint of the fire we had once felt in each other’s presence. He had moved out of the parsonage by then and was renting an apartment in Bennington while he decided what to do next with his life. He never came right out and said that he was confident he was never going to be tried for murder, but it seemed to me that he was behaving that way. He was almost arrogant. I think he had moved to Bennington, rather than anywhere else, to flaunt his freedom before the very criminal-justice system that wanted to arrest him. Still, it was clear he didn’t plan to settle there. He said the lease was short-term because he was contemplating a move to Manhattan, where he would try to find a new career. He wrote that he thought he was going to become a social worker and, if necessary, he would return to school to get his M.S.W. He claimed that he wanted to work with the homeless. He had visions of himself rolling up his sleeves and doing the sorts of work he should have been doing when he had been in the pulpit. He insisted this wasn’t atonement. Altogether, it was a lot of information, and at first it felt rather formulaic to me. But then I came to a paragraph in which I saw his relentless self-control quiver: “If I make it to eighty, I wonder who will look back with me at the footprints I’ve left on the beach. I presume both that I will be the only one gazing at them and there will be but one set. This isn’t another plea for you to hear me out (I’ve already done that) or a plea wrapped in the most transparent of gauze that you’ll reconsider your distance; it is merely an acknowledgment that I am conscious of the tendency I have to wall myself off from others and that this inclination may not serve me well in the end.” I might have been more sympathetic if he had used the word fear instead of the word presume. But he hadn’t. Stephen Drew really didn’t know from fear, and whatever vulnerability he might briefly or inadvertently reveal, he would mask the moment he understood what he had done. I never responded to his phone calls or missives, until eventually they stopped coming. Like all things mortal, they simply disappeared.

IT WAS AMANDA who said most firmly that I was being ridiculous about Stephen. She came to New York to meet with a gallery owner who represented Norman’s birds, and as she does always when she visits, she stayed on the daybed in my loft. That evening, while smoking a cigarette and sipping a diet soda watered down by melted ice, she told me, “You took in too much of our parents’ quarrels. You’re thinking too much about the fights that young girl must have seen over the years in Vermont. You’re looking for a reason not to commit.”

She was wearing a smock dress that fell to midthigh and a cardigan sweater that was navy blue. But I could see from her knees that she had put on a little weight. Not a lot, but some. Clearly she was in a better phase than she had been back in August. Somehow she had learned that I’d called both her therapist and her nutritionist, but she hadn’t been angry with me. Her hair had regained a bit of its natural luster.

“He had been sleeping with Alice Hayward and hadn’t told me,” I reminded her.

“So what? Think of all the angels and devils you’ve slept with.”

“And he killed a man.”

“He killed a man who had beaten his wife for years and just strangled her with his bare hands. Not a great loss for humanity.”

“I could never feel safe with him,” I said.

“You spend too much time reliving our childhood and adolescence.”

“Funny. I told Katie Hayward just the opposite. I told her I don’t.”

“And these days it’s not just ours you relive. It’s hers, too.”

“Hers? Katie’s?”

“Yup, that orphan. The kid.”

I thought about this. “Actually, it’s Alice I seem to think about most.”

“Maybe. But I know you. You’re fixated on the Haywards and you’re fixated on the Laurents. You think about us. You and me and-I don’t know-pick a night. Pick the night we cowered behind the living-room couch.”

I sipped my wine. Here was a memory that-try as I might-I was never going to repress. I was in the third grade at the time, and so Amanda had been in the fifth. It was a weekend, probably a Saturday night. Our parents had been out that evening, and our father had just returned from driving the baby-sitter home. Both our mother and father had been drinking heavily, and there must have been an angel looking out for that baby-sitter that night, because otherwise I can’t imagine how she would have survived the three-and-a-half-mile drive to her house. Our mother had kissed each of us sloppily as she had checked in on us in our bedrooms, accidentally waking us both with her awkwardness, and then stumbled back down the stairs. I remember vividly how it sounded as if she’d fallen the last few steps. Amanda and I hadn’t planned to get out of our beds when our parents returned, but we had both heard the slight tumble and gone to investigate. We saw that our mother was already up. She was standing in the kitchen between the sink and the dishwasher, leaning against the counter the color of fossils. She had a juice glass in her hand, half filled with scotch. She was in her own world and didn’t realize we were watching. When we heard our father pulling in to the driveway-squealing to a stop and splintering one of the wood panels on the garage door with the sedan’s bumper-my instinct was to race back upstairs to my bedroom, but Amanda grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me into the living room.

Their struggle that evening was about our mother’s drinking. At least that was what on the most obvious level had led our father to start in on her. On another level he had undoubtedly been angry at himself for dinging the garage door. And while I expected my mother to fight back by observing that he wasn’t exactly a teetotaler, instead she brought up some woman from his office with whom, she implied, he was having an affair. In reality I have no doubt that her language was far more specific and colorful. Sufficiently specific and colorful that he said she had a sewer for a mouth and he couldn’t believe he had ever once kissed it or (and Amanda insists that we have not made this up, our father really did say this) stuck his penis in it-though, again, he did not use so clinical a word as penis.

At first we listened in on our parents’ fight from a perch atop the couch, but when we heard the rapid-fire sound of her open palm on his cheek and then the grunt as he punched her hard in (we would learn later) the abdomen, we dove over the back of the couch and hid underneath the table behind it. A moment later, our parents moved from the kitchen to the living room. Amanda and I have deconstructed what happened next any number of times in our adult lives, trying to make sense of what we heard or thought we heard in light of what we would discover later about the confusing and disturbing place where violence and adult sexuality sometimes intersected. Had our father sodomized our mother against her will that night over the front cushions of the couch? Had she asked him as he worked hard to hurt her whether he did this to his girlfriend, too? Had he told her, as the couch shoved the table against the wall and I almost cried out myself as one of its wooden legs tore a strip of skin off my pinkie, that she was a completely unfit mother and everyone would have been better off if he’d only fucked her there all these years?

There. The word that decades later Stephen Drew would insist symbolized everything for him one tragic summer and autumn.

“You know,” Amanda was saying now, “those troopers acted like they suspected Norman and me.”

“You? Why?”

“Well, Norman and I don’t make the best presentation, if you get my drift.”

“I thought they were just checking Stephen’s and my story.”

She chuckled and took a small sip of her soft drink. I noticed how carefully she nursed it, and I presumed this was a habit from drinking beverages that might have actual calories. I had drained my second glass of wine, and she had barely made a dent into her first diet soda. “Oh, they were. But when you meet a fellow with a criminal record who is as badly socialized as my Norman and a woman with my”-and here she paused, choosing her words carefully-“issues, you think they might be capable of anything. Anything bad, that is.”

After our father had finished with our mother, he slapped her one last time on her rear, and the sound was so sharp it echoed. Later I would think his hand must have hurt, too. Amanda and I wouldn’t go upstairs until our mother had lurched disconsolately into the bathroom (powder room in her vernacular) to clean up. We moved quickly but silently, because we understood that neither parent could ever know all that we had overheard. The next morning there would still be a small Rorschach of blood-a tree leaf, maybe, perhaps that of an oak-on the rug by the base of the couch, and the slipcover from one of the cushions would be in the laundry.

“I knew they thought I might have been involved,” I said. “But the two of you? That’s absurd.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. But I can see them looking at either you or me. Let’s face it: We’re both pretty damaged goods.”

Had she meant to be hurtful? It was possible. She knew that I didn’t view myself as any more damaged than most mortals. She knew that I took comfort in the way I was held close now by angels. When I said nothing, unsure how to respond, my older sister continued, “Seriously, Heather, just because our parents’ marriage was a disaster in every conceivable way, you shouldn’t assume all relationships are. My advice? Spend less time with your cherubim and seraphim. Spend more time with real people.”

“You’re the one living in the woods with the world’s quietest man,” I reminded her.

“And I’m a disaster. I’m nobody’s role model, least of all yours. But until you cut bait once again on what had the potential to be a terrifically normal-perhaps even healthy-relationship, I always presumed you were doing a lot better than me.”

There was never going to be anything normal or healthy about my involvement with Stephen Drew, but I was not going to argue that evening with Amanda. I remembered that Tuesday at the end of July when I had first met him: Originally I thought that I had gone to see the pastor of a small country church, because he’d seemed so lost to me in the newspaper and I presumed my history could help him. Could help his community. Only later would I admit to myself that my motivation may have been slightly different-or, at least, more involved. On some level it was likely that I had been drawn to Haverill that afternoon by the inexorable gravity of memory. By my own fathomless scars. We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven. When we were in grade school and hiding behind the couch. It’s why we need angels.

And there was something else that was always going to preclude any rapprochement with Stephen: There was that small detail that he was capable of murder. I understood the justification, and I appreciated the fury he must have experienced when he came upon the scene-when he saw his former lover dead on the floor in her nightgown. I was not unsympathetic. But I also knew that I wanted nothing to do with him ever again.