Free Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian Page B

sincerity was phosphorescent.Her charisma was high-definition. She was the perfect pitchwoman for celestial guardians in the digital world.
    Finally I leaned over and glanced at the pictures that had set her off. They were of Katie alone and of Katie and Alice together.
    “She’s going to be so pretty,” she sniffled, referring to the now-orphaned fifteen-year-old.
    “She already is,” I said, but mostly I was focused on Heather. On how, despite my despair and my culpability and my innumerable failures as a minister and as a man, I could appreciate how lovely this woman was. I thought she might be a bit of a lunatic. But I also felt an undeniable attraction to her that managed to bob safely in the maelstrom of other emotions that would have taken precedence in a person of character—or at least in a person not unmoored—and sent it corkscrewing slowly but ceaselessly to the very bottom of the ocean.
    She was studying a group of photos, some of which I had already seen on the Facebook and MySpace pages of teens in the Youth Group. (I should tell you that I only visited those pages with the teenagers themselves, when they wanted to share a digital album with me at Youth Group or, for one reason or another, after school.) There was Katie with some of her friends making faces beneath a Broadway marquee in Manhattan; there she and her mother were—again, making silly faces—in bathing suits somewhere near their cottage on Lake Bomoseen. There she was with her grandparents from Nashua, a whole page of photos taken the previous Christmas. There was a series of Katie on the church van: literally, sitting on top of it with some members of the Youth Group, a Red Sox cap shading much of her face. It was one of the last times I would recall her going anywhere with the Youth Group.
    “You told me you’ve never been married,” I said. “I assume you don’t have any children.”
    “No, I don’t. But I’d love to someday.”
    “Think it’s in the cards?”
    “If the right man is, maybe. But I have no interest in being a heroic single mother.”
    She flipped some more pages, and there was Katie beside her friend Tina Cousino’s ancient gray Appaloosa. The horse had gone blind and lame and been euthanized a little over a year ago and was buried in a field by the Cousinos’ house. Tina and Katie had choreographed a small service that had left me both moved and impressed. They had asked me to eulogize the animal, and I had. And there were Katie and Alice together approaching the summit of Mount Equinox, a hike they had taken with a woman from Alice’s bank toward the very end of that period when Alice and George had been estranged. Mid-May, I recalled.
    “There aren’t very many of Alice and George together, are there?” she murmured.
    “Well, not in this album, anyway.”
    “I’d wager there aren’t many of George Hayward, period. If the pattern holds, he controlled the camera in the early years of the marriage, and so he took most of the pictures. Then, as their marriage deteriorated, they spent less time together in the sorts of situations that…someone would want to photograph.”
    “That’s probably true. Most people rarely saw them together over the last few years. Maybe at a parade. Maybe at the volunteer firefighters’ annual chicken barbecue. Maybe at a business fete of some sort in Manchester.”
    “George was a volunteer firefighter?”
    “He was for a while. He quit a few years ago, when he opened his third business. But he was still friends with some of the guys.”
    The room smelled of cleanser and disinfectant. It was a bad smell to me at that moment, almost a little sickening, and so I opened another window.
    “Who gardened?”
    “Alice.”
    “These pictures of tomatoes should be on seed packets.”
    “She was a good gardener, no doubt about it. You should peek at her garden before you leave.”
    Heather started to nod and then stopped. She was staring at old Easter photos, and George was in