The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  She knew Garnet didn’t have quite as much interest in the building as she did, but dutifully she had helped cart out their dolls and the doll furniture; she seemed to appreciate the idea that at some point this was going to be their playhouse—or, at least, a playhouse that they might share with their mom and dad’s plants. Their parents had not evidenced a particular interest in gardening in West Chester, but recently their mother had said something about starting tomato seedlings in here. She had said she might even take up flowers as a hobby. It didn’t matter to Hallie. How much time could a grown-up really spend in a building like this? Besides, their mom had taken a job with a couple of other lawyers in Littleton. And their dad? Hallie couldn’t begin to imagine what was going to interest Dad now that he was no longer a pilot. She was pretty sure that planes were all he knew and all that interested him. He liked to fly—or had once. She certainly didn’t see him gardening or growing flowers in here.

  Of course, she wasn’t precisely sure what was going to interest her either in New Hampshire. She knew that she was outgrowing her dolls, but she had no idea what might replace them here in the mountains. Probably not ballet and probably not the flute. Though she was only ten, Hallie grasped the reality that these would be just hobbies for her, even if she pursued them vigorously; she was no prodigy and there was no point in approaching either ballet or music with passion. This revelation neither saddened nor slowed her. She presumed someday she would find something else, and in the meantime she would go to dance class and practice her flute with the same dogged acceptance that compelled her to attend to her homework.

  She had noticed already that she didn’t seem to have quite as much homework in Bethel. That might change. But at least over their first few days here, her new teacher hadn’t assigned nearly as much math or spelling or reading as Mrs. Leeds had in West Chester.

  Moreover, there weren’t the massive shopping malls here that there were in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Or the community theater groups for their mom. Or even the Phillies—which, she had to admit, interested her mostly because they had interested her dad and some of her friends at her old school. Had they remained in Pennsylvania, she and Garnet were going to get cell phones for their eleventh birthday this coming summer, but cell phones seemed less important here: There wasn’t any coverage at their new house, so how could they text their friends—assuming, of course, they eventually made some new ones? Hallie imagined bringing a laptop out to the greenhouse and getting a page on something like Facebook, just like the older kids, and surfing and posting and chatting for hours, but the router would have to be mighty powerful. She guessed they would spend a lot more time snowboarding here than they had in Pennsylvania. After all, the mountain was only twenty minutes away; they could see it from one of the house’s porches. And yesterday they had seen—and heard—snowmobiles racing across the farthest edge of the meadow, and so she thought it was possible that maybe she’d take up snowmobiling.

  Now, here was something that might interest Dad: snowmobiling. The connections in her mind were the roar of the engines and the sense of speed. Like a jet, a snowmobile was fast and it was loud.

  Based on the few days that she and Garnet had been at their new school and their first visit to their new dance studio, it was clear that she was going to have to take the lead if she and her sister were going to make any new friends. That probably was to be expected. She had always been more popular than Garnet back in Pennsylvania, so why wouldn’t that be the case here? Hallie understood that her sister was going to be a part of any group largely because she herself was. Moms seemed to love Garnet’s red hair, but kids thought it was almost too red. This wasn’t strawberry blond stuff. It was more like just strawberry. (Hallie was thankful every day that they were fraternal twins only; she liked her dark brown hair much more than Garnet’s, and she knew she had a much prettier nose.) And then there were the trances. And those overnight stays at the hospital over the years for EEGs and testing. It was only a matter of time before Garnet would have a seizure here and the kids would view her simultaneously with the contempt wolves feel for the wounded and lame, and with the terror they feel for someone who is chronically ill.

  And yet the sense that Garnet was an outsider, a little different, also gave her twin a certain control over her: Hallie knew that often she would defer to Garnet’s wishes when they were alone, the motivation existing somewhere in that realm between sympathy and loyalty.

  So far they hadn’t brought any of their new schoolmates—her new schoolmates, really—over to play. Not Molly or Lily or Adele. There hadn’t been time. But she guessed she would soon. Molly, perhaps, who sat at her classroom table, even though she and Molly really didn’t have all that much in common. Or maybe it would be Lily. She hoped she and Lily would become friends. Good friends. Lily was nice. So was Lily’s mother, though the woman seemed to hover a lot. When they were introduced at the school and Lily’s mother figured out that she and Garnet were twins—the new twins, she had cooed—she had been weirdly excited. Hallie could tell that it had made the school principal, who happened to be in the classroom at the time, a little uncomfortable. But Lily’s mom was friends with Reseda, the lady who’d wound up being their real estate agent after Mr. Carter died, and Reseda seemed to be nice enough. She was sweet—and she was very, very pretty, in an exotic sort of way.

  Hallie heard Garnet calling for her now, yelling that Mom and Dad said the car was packed and it was time to leave for the mountain. As she closed the greenhouse door, she made a mental note to ask Mom if she was making new friends. She hoped that her mom and Reseda would become pals.

  When the girls had been in the second grade, a plane had crashed outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, killing all forty-four people onboard. Apparently, a combination of ice and wind and inexperience had been the culprits. It was a turboprop—a Dash 8—not one of the planes Chip flew. But it crashed on approach to the airport, and so it was near enough to civilization that news crews were on the scene in moments and footage of the fiery wreck was on television for days. Chip had been gone at the time, in the midst of three days of flying around the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic. Emily recalled the ways she had tried to shield her girls from the images—as she did always when there was an accident—but this time the twins had gotten wind of the crash and become frightened. She had had to sit Hallie and Garnet down in the living room, the three of them in what had become their accustomed spots on the massive, L-shaped couch with the upholstery of lovebirds, and reassure them that they needn’t worry. Their father was safe. Their father’s plane (and even though Chip flew many planes, they seemed to discuss Chip’s work as if he always flew the same exact jet) was not going to crash. Because she harbored her own small superstitions, Emily did not want to jinx Chip by stating that his plane was never going to crash. It was a small, semantic distinction, but it reassured her; it gave her the sense that she wasn’t really tempting fate. (Still, in even her worst, wildest dreams, she didn’t honestly believe that someday his plane might pinwheel into a lake minutes after takeoff.)

  And she had managed to comfort the girls that day. Other planes might crash—but not Daddy’s.

  She wondered now if when the twins were alone they discussed that afternoon on the couch three years ago. She assumed they remembered it. She considered whether they felt betrayed by their mother, whether they had come to the conclusion that her reassurances were meaningless. That she would say anything to calm them down. But what mother wouldn’t? The fact that neither girl had reminded her of the conversation meant nothing to Emily.

  She was glad they lived three hours east of Lake Champlain. She could never have tolerated a move to New England if Bethel had been anywhere near that lake.

  “Garnet?”

  The girl opened her eyes when she heard her name and swam slowly to the surface of wakefulness. At first she presumed she was home. West Chester. The room overlooking the front walkway and the apple tree, the two windows on one wall opposite the
foot of the bed. The homes of their neighbors—the Morrisons and the Browns—visible if she craned her neck to the left or the right. But here, she noticed, there was only one window at the foot of her bed, while there was a second one to the right side of it—both horizontal. She saw the wallpaper in the night-light, the green and red plaid that looked like Christmastime wrapping paper. She saw the moon, a day or two short of full, through the glass and the gauzy curtains that her father had hung the day before yesterday. And finally she remembered precisely where she was. New Hampshire. Not home. No, that wasn’t right. She was home. It was just that home now was New Hampshire. She and Hallie had the two bedrooms on the third floor of this house. The floor with the attic (though you couldn’t get to the attic from either her or Hallie’s room; you had to pull down that trapdoor in the ceiling in the hallway on the floor below them). Their old home, she recalled, had only the two floors. For a moment her eyes focused on the last remaining moving box that she hadn’t yet begun to unpack, and she tried to remember what was inside it. It was a big one. Barbie dolls and the Dream House? Summer T-shirts and shorts and bathing suits? That seemed right. It had clothes and dolls and the Dream House.

  The day and the evening slowly came back to her. Snowboarding. The tram with her mom and Hallie, and the way the snow on the pine trees at the top of the mountain reminded her of vanilla cake frosting. Hot chocolate at the base lodge. Then there was the dinner at home that was completely inedible: a bean loaf followed by bad-tasting brownies that some woman had baked for them, though Hallie had liked the brownies more than everyone else and had been so hungry after the main course that she had ended up devouring the brownie with Dad’s name on it as well as her own. Then they had watched a DVD of some teen boy who learns he’s a prince, a movie they’d long outgrown that made both girls wish they had the satellite dish hooked up so they could watch regular TV instead.

  “Garnet?”

  There in the doorway stood Hallie.

  In an instant, the second that Garnet had pushed herself ever so slightly off the mattress and glanced at her, Hallie had realized that her sister was awake and raced across the room like a sprinter and dove into bed beside her. She burrowed under the quilt, and Garnet could feel how cold her sister’s feet were.

  “Your toes are icicles,” she said to Hallie. Then: “What are you doing?”

  Her voice a whisper, Hallie said, “You don’t hear them?”

  Them? Mom and Dad? “Who?” she asked anyway, presuming that of course her sister was referring to their parents.

  “I don’t know. Listen,” Hallie murmured urgently. “Just listen.”

  And so Garnet did. She heard the slight whistle of her sister’s breathing through her nose and she heard the occasional soft bang from the ancient radiator that sat like a gargoyle on the wall nearest the bed. But there was no wind outside and the cat, wherever she was at the moment, wasn’t making a sound. There was no noise at all coming from Mom and Dad’s bedroom on the floor below them.

  “I don’t hear anything,” she said finally.

  “You must!” There was an urgency to Hallie’s voice that was rare.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s like three. Listen!”

  “What should I be hearing?”

  In the moonlight Garnet could see her sister’s eyes, wide and alert, and she thought once again of their cat. Dessy, short for Desdemona. They had gotten the cat from the animal shelter when they were three and Mom had done a Shakespeare play with a character with that name. The cat’s orange fur had reminded their mom of the color of the gown she had worn for much of the production.

  “You really don’t hear it?” Hallie asked in a small but intense voice. “You really don’t hear them?”

  There was that word again: them.

  “No.”

  Hallie was lying on her side, but her head was elevated, her ears well above the pillow. “Wait, it’s stopped.”

  “What?”

  “Shhhhhhhh.”

  “No, don’t shush me. Tell me! You’re scaring me!” Rarely was Garnet ever this insistent with her older sister. Though Hallie was only minutes her senior, Garnet always deferred to her as if the chasm that separated them was two or three years.

  “I’m scared myself.”

  “Of what?”

  “I heard people.”

  “Really?”

  Hallie nodded. “Two or three. I don’t know. But definitely one was a girl—like our age. Or maybe a little younger.”

  “In the house?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. The nearest house must be, like, a mile away.”

  “No, that’s not why it doesn’t make sense,” Hallie said.

  “Then why?”

  “I don’t know, but the people were mad. Or scared. That’s it, that’s why they were so loud: They were scared. I think they were more scared than mad. And I heard water. Lots of water. Waves and stuff.”

  “You were dreaming.”

  “I heard it when I was talking to you just this second.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “The water and the people and someone was, like, choking—”

  “We don’t have a pond,” Garnet said, cutting her off. “We don’t have a pool. We don’t even have a brook like we had in West Chester. It had to be just a nightmare.”

  “I don’t have nightmares. You do. I don’t.” She made it sound like a failing, Garnet thought, like Hallie viewed it as an accomplishment that she didn’t have bad dreams. But Garnet also had to admit that she was indeed far more likely to have nightmares than her sister. It had always been that way. Supposedly the nightmares had nothing to do with what the adults referred to as her epilepsy or her seizures, but she wasn’t so sure. When she was having one, it was like she was asleep and the waking world—the real world—was a dream.

  “Besides, it wasn’t the water that made it so scary,” Hallie went on.

  “No?”

  “No. It’s that the people were drowning.”

  “What?”

  “They were, like, screaming for help and choking. Especially the girl. And just now when I came in here? It was like she was gagging. I could almost feel it.”

  Garnet considered this for a brief second. Then she took Hallie’s hand and pulled her sister from the bed, dragging her along the short corridor on the third floor and then down the steep, thin stairway to the second floor, with their parents’ bedroom. On the way, she switched on every light in the halls between the two rooms.

  Chapter Two

  Emily’s separation from her firm was perfectly amicable, and she was able to bring some of her practice with her from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. She passed the White Mountain bar in the winter months between when she and Chip made an offer on the house and when they and their daughters moved in. But she also joined a small firm in Littleton so she would have an office and an assistant and at least a shadow of the legal amenities she was accustomed to. Their new real estate agent, Reseda Hill, had essentially brokered that deal, too, introducing her to John Hardin, the firm’s paterfamilias. Now Emily would have a place to go during the day, which was something she needed; she didn’t see herself as the sort of attorney who was capable of working from her house.

  But at nights and on weekends, when she was in their new home that February, she found herself studying her husband carefully. She was not precisely sure what she was looking for and worried about, yet she was incapable of suppressing a demonstrable anxiety that filled her on occasion when she saw him. He was sleeping badly, even worse here in northern New England than he had in their rambling Colonial in the development outside of Philadelphia in the weeks after the crash. The psychiatrist from the union had warned her that this would happen. She had said it was likely that Chip’s appetite might all but disappear. It had. And his bad dreams continued, despite the prescribed pharmacologica
l intervention, and all it took was the ethereal plume of a plane high in the atmosphere to cause his heart to race. He broke out in a sweat at Cannon Mountain when the ski lift they were riding stalled halfway up the mountain and they dangled in their seats perhaps forty yards above the well-groomed snow. He became nauseous sometimes when he heard the birds that remained through the winter months outside the kitchen window in the morning. And he would grow a little dizzy whenever he came across a news story about the airline industry or an airplane—and there were always news stories about the airline industry and airplanes. Always. And, finally, there were those phantom pains throughout his body that continued to plague him. He’d had all the testing imaginable back in Pennsylvania: CAT scans and MRIs and dyes injected everywhere. He had seen all manner of chiropractors and physical therapists. And none of the tests had shown anything wrong.

  The real strangeness? His ankle and two of his ribs—the former sprained badly, the latter broken and cracked—had healed completely and he felt absolutely no pain there. Same with the spot on his head where he had actually been cut. The top of his head, he reported, often hurt like hell—but not his forehead, which had been cut when his head slammed into the right prong of the control stick. Moreover, these aches and pains had only gotten worse since they had moved to northern New Hampshire.

  They both understood that a degree of PTSD was inevitable. How could it not be? He had captained a plane that had crashed and four-fifths of the people onboard had died. It wasn’t his fault: He wasn’t fatigued, he hadn’t been distracted or inattentive, he hadn’t pulled back on the control yoke when he should have pressed it forward to recover from a stall. (Once, years earlier, he had had a plane stall on him when the wings iced over, and calmly he had pushed the yoke forward, accelerating the descent but restarting the engines, and landed smoothly. None of the passengers onboard had ever known there had been a problem, but he had been roundly applauded by his airline. And how many times had he successfully aborted landings at the last minute because there was a truck or a plane on the runway that wasn’t supposed to be there and performed a go-around? At least once for every seven or eight months he had been flying.) That didn’t make the visions and memories that came back to him—illuminated suddenly like trees in the dark made clear by great bolts of lightning—any easier to shoulder. But, still, she watched him when she wasn’t at her new office in Littleton, aware that this was a reversal in their roles: In the past, he had been the one to watch over her during those intervals when he wasn’t flying.