The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  Meanwhile, Hallie was sleeping badly, too, and no one from the union or the airline or the Critical Incident Response Team had advised her to expect this. There was that strange night when her daughter was convinced she heard people—a child—drowning. It had been three in the morning and had been the worst sort of nightmare: so real that she was convinced she was hearing the child for long minutes after she was awake. And Hallie had never really had nightmares before. Bad dreams had always been far more likely to dog Garnet than her sister in the small hours of the morning.

  Consequently, when Emily wasn’t watching her husband, she was watching her daughter. And when she wasn’t watching Hallie, she had to remain vigilant around Garnet: She always had to be prepared for the next seizure. It was a wonder she was able to get out of bed in the morning, much less find the energy to get her girls out the door for school and then drive into Littleton for work. But she had to. She had to. Someone, somehow, had to keep it together.

  You are curious about the hallways in this house in the White Mountains because the one on the third floor of the structure seems slender compared to the ones on the second. Or, for that matter, the ones on the first. You really didn’t notice this when you were looking at the house with Emily and Sheldon. And so you track down the tape measure in the carton with the tools you have been using as you settle into the house but have yet to organize in some fashion in that basement made largely of dirt. You find it in the living room, where you were wallpapering yesterday, and begin by measuring the corridor that links the front hall with the seventeen steps to the second floor. (A thought: That strange, thin back stairwell that links the kitchen with the second floor. Is that seventeen steps, too?) Then you climb those steps to measure the hallway outside of your and Emily’s bedroom. Finally you start up the fifteen steps to the third floor. There you kneel and stretch the tape measure across the corridor outside of Hallie’s bedroom. It wasn’t your imagination or an optical illusion: The hallways are thirty-nine inches wide on the first floor (there, again, is that number), thirty-seven on the second, and thirty-four on the third. Five inches is not a great distance, but it is enough to make that corridor feel claustrophobic—or, to use the word Emily and the girls have used as your twins have started nesting like barn swallows on this small, third floor, cozy. The third floor has but three rooms: two bedrooms that share a walk-in closet in the hallway (neither bedroom has a closet of its own) and a bathroom with a lion’s-foot tub but no shower. The attic exists on the same level, but a veritable Berlin Wall separates it from this small nook of rooms. The house narrows between the second and third floors, with that elegant fish-scale trim that marks the screened porch reestablishing itself on the third-floor exterior. Hallie’s and Garnet’s bedrooms are characterized by the house’s sloping roof, snug knee walls, and horizontal windows.

  You put the tape measure down on the wooden floor and sit.

  She deserves friends.

  A man’s voice. You have heard it periodically since you came here. You try to recall if you heard it in Pennsylvania as well, and you decide … maybe. Maybe not. You turn to see if anyone is with you in the corridor, and, as always, you are alone. But you know, in reality, you’re not. There is the voice you have just heard of this man roughly your age and the voice of a girl no older (and, perhaps, a bit younger) than your lovely daughters and the voice of a woman perhaps ten years your junior. And there are the cacophonous shrieks and wails of all the women and men who died on Flight 1611. Should you have told Hallie that you knew precisely who she heard your first Sunday night in this house? Maybe. But how could you without further terrifying the poor child? You wish you knew what it meant that she heard their voices, too, and try to take comfort in the reality that she hasn’t reported hearing them since.

  You sigh. You note the sunshine through the hallway window and the opalescent light it casts upon the wood paneling. This third-floor hallway is paneled with maple, like some of the first-floor corridors; the second floor is merely painted Sheetrock. You find yourself slowly pulling your knees into your chest and contemplating how, other than that voice—now gone—the house is quiet. The girls are at school and Emily is at work. It must seem to the world that you are all alone.

  You wonder if you will ever work again. You wonder what you could do. All you have ever done professionally is fly airplanes.

  Somehow, despite the way your grades tumbled after your father died and your mother was aged quickly by bottles of very bad Scotch, you made it into the University of Massachusetts. It might have been the University of Connecticut, but when you were fifteen your mother lost her driver’s license for the last time and your aunt and uncle in Framingham, Massachusetts, decided that you and your eleven-year-old brother would be better off with them. Your mother agreed. It had gotten to the point where it didn’t matter that you watered down the Scotch, every other day pouring out perhaps half an inch—a portion of the schooner sail or cliff-side estate that gave character to the label—of the whiskey and adding just that much tap water. Your mother would drink just that much more.

  And your little brother? He’s doing fine. He used to be considered fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Done in by the abrupt and early death of your father and the virtual mummification of your mother. He’s doing better than you, these days. He teaches history at a high school in Berkeley. Got as far away from Connecticut and Massachusetts as he could.

  Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they’re right. Perhaps you are.

  A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.

  She deserves friends.

  You nod. She does.

  Chapter Three

  Garnet came down the stairs with her math workbook and a couple of pencils. They were supposed to convert miles into yards or feet and vice versa, and Hallie was incapable of explaining to her how to do it when the answer wasn’t obvious. Their dad was excellent at math, although neither girl had availed herself of his abilities since the accident because they did not want to burden him with one more thing. From conversations they had overheard their mother having with friends on the telephone and the things they had seen their father doing (or, in some cases, not doing), they feared that asking him to help them with math just might put him over the edge. But they had been in New Hampshire for a couple of weeks now, and maybe things would be different here. More normal. Their mother and father talked about how they were starting here with a clean slate. And based on the changes that would occur in the house when they were at school—some old wallpaper gone or some new wallpaper hung, a banister stained or another room painted—their dad had emerged from the funk that had left him cocooned and immobile in his bathrobe in West Chester. And so Garnet figured now was as good a time as any to come down the two flights of stairs and get some help with her math. It might even be good for Dad.

  When she found him, he was in the kitchen, but he wasn’t making dinner even though it was nearly five in the afternoon. They seemed to eat earlier here than they did in Pennsylvania, in part because Mom didn’t have such a long commute and got home earlier, but also because everyone here just seemed to do everything earlier. In Pennsylvania, Dad had usually done the cooking in those three- or four-day periods when he had been home and Mom had fed them when Dad had been flying. Of course, Mom’s dinners had been pretty likely to be frozen food or take-out pizza—which was absolutely fine. She was, essentially, a single parent half the time. And then there were those seasons when Mom was in a community theater drama or musical. Often those nights when Dad was flying, Garnet and Hallie would color or play games or do a little homework while eating deli sandwiches in the back of whatever gym or community center where Mom’s theater troupe was rehearsing.

  When Garnet got downstairs, she found her father on his knees, ru
mmaging through the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. His head and shoulders were invisible inside the cabinetry, and around his legs were the bottles and jars and brushes that usually were stored under there.

  “Dad?”

  Carefully he withdrew his upper body and sat on his heels. His hair was disheveled, and she noticed a thin trickle of sweat on his brow. He had a mug with cold coffee beside him.

  “Hey, princess,” he said. He called both her and her sister princess. It was a term of endearment, but no more specific than honey or darling. “What do you need?”

  “Can you help me with my math?” She held out the workbook like an offering, both of her hands beneath it as if she were presenting a sacred text to a rabbi or priest.

  He was silent for a moment, and she wondered after she had spoken if this might be one of those instances that would be important years from now: the first time her dad had helped her with her math after the accident. A great step forward in the march back to normalcy. But when the moment grew long and still he had said nothing, she decided she was wrong: This would instead be merely one more of those times when her dad’s behavior would suggest it was going to be a long, long time before he was better.

  “I mean, if you’re busy, I can probably figure it out myself,” she continued. She knew that sometimes she made people uncomfortable when she grew quiet. They feared she was about to have a seizure and go into a trance. Especially lately. But often it was just easier to say nothing and let everyone else do the talking, the deciding, and the … worrying. And it was nice to daydream. She liked the visions that sometimes marked the seizures. She wondered if her dad now had them, too.

  “Oh, I’m not doing anything important,” he said finally.

  “Cleaning?” she asked. “Organizing?”

  “Something like that. I keep expecting to find a secret compartment back there.”

  She nodded, intrigued by the idea that there might be one. She understood why her father might have such a suspicion. Sometimes she found strange things in this house and the barn and the greenhouse.

  Abruptly he stood to full height and rubbed his hands together, a habit of his when he was excited about something. “Well,” he said, his voice robust and happy. “What have you got there?” Then he placed his palm on her back and escorted her to the dining room table, where together they tackled the two pages in the workbook.

  Reseda Hill stood in her greenhouse a few steps in front of Anise, inspecting the scapes on the coral root she had transplanted earlier that winter. She kept the plants and spices for cooking cordoned off from the herbs for healing. Basil and parsley had no business mixing with hypnobium, belladonna, or amalaki. Her tomato seedlings in late April, prior to being transplanted into her vegetable garden, would not do well near the pungent aroma from the angel’s death. The greenhouse was pentagonal and divided in half: On the right side, as one entered, were those herbs and spices that were common to any chef with even a modicum of culinary education; on the left side were those rare tropical plants from South America and India that only experienced healers, herbalists, and shamans were likely to use. In the center of the pentagon was a fountain with a stone creature holding a vase that dribbled water into the catch basin. The creature stood about three and a half feet tall, half man and half goat, with great, batlike wings on his back and a trim and pointed Vandyke running from his chin to his ears. Reseda did not bring it home from a compound in Barre, Vermont, that sold mostly (but not exclusively) tombstones and have it transformed into a fountain for her greenhouse because it bore a distinct resemblance to Baphomet. The truth was, she wasn’t a Satanist or attracted to most satanic rituals; but she was a bit of a bomb thrower, and she liked the idea that designing her greenhouse in the shape of a pentagon and placing what looked like a stone demon smack in the center would fuel rumors among the sorts of people who were never going to be her friends anyway. Besides, she liked goats and she liked handsome men with their shirts off. She thought both were cute in a diminutive sort of way.

  “I find the twins very interesting,” Anise was saying, her parka draped over her folded arms.

  “You’ve spent too much time with horror movies and pulp paperbacks. You always find twins interesting. I’m a twin. The world is filled with twins. Trust me: We’re not interesting.”

  “These ones are prepubescent, and they have been traumatized. They’re like the Dunmore boys. You know the tincture. You know the recipe.”

  Reseda bent over the patchouli and rubbed one of the egg-shaped leaves between her thumb and forefinger, breathing in deeply the perfume. Patchouli made her feel young. “The Dunmores were well before my time,” she said after a moment. “Besides, it was the girls’ father who was traumatized. We don’t know if Hallie and Garnet were.”

  “You’re not a mother; I am. Their scars are different from their father’s, but nearly as deep.”

  “The pair struck me as rather resilient.”

  “I’m sure they are. But their father is an airline pilot who survived a plane crash. Most of his passengers died.”

  “You really don’t like to fly, do you?” Reseda observed.

  “You know I don’t.”

  “When was the last time you were on an airplane?”

  “I was twenty-three. Laurence and I flew to Aruba on our honeymoon. It took three planes to get there back then.”

  “Was it pleasant?”

  “The honeymoon? Absolutely. But I was scared to death every moment I was in the air. Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now.”

  “I don’t like that expression: scared to death.”

  “It’s apt.”

  “It demonstrates both fear and naïveté.”

  “Perhaps in my case it’s a control phobia—or the lack of control. That’s why many people dislike flying. But I think my point is still valid. Captain Linton crashed a plane into a lake.”

  Reseda went to the table with the motherwort and the hypnobium. She felt Anise’s eyes on her back. Anise loved working with hypnobium. She was one of the few women who was capable of using it in food as well as in potions. She was almost able to mask its bitterness with dark chocolate and sugar; no one could hide the taste completely, but Anise was able to make it edible. “The captain had help,” Reseda reminded her. “It wasn’t his fault.”

  “True. But here is what I keep thinking about: The family came to us. The girls came to us. Sheldon Carter was an old fool selling a house. He had no idea what we needed. Lord, he had no idea even what we are.”

  “What you are. I wasn’t there.”

  “Sometimes I think you don’t approve of us, Reseda.”

  “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

  “My point is simply that it wasn’t you who found the family and enticed them north. They found the house on the Web and Sheldon responded.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And so it must mean something. You of all people should see that.”

  “Perhaps,” Reseda murmured, but she didn’t turn around. She honestly couldn’t decide if it meant anything at all. The world was awash in coincidence and connection; usually, it took time to deduce which was which.

  * * *

  Chip told Emily that the worst of the flashbacks were of the moment when he was upside down, disoriented, the water starting to enter the flight deck through the edges of the door to the cabin, and he suspected the plane behind him had broken apart. But he had other flashbacks, too, such as when he was pulling his first officer through the upside-down door of the flight deck and saw how deep the water already was in the fuselage. He said he didn’t recall seeing any passengers strapped in the bulkhead seats, their feet above the waterline, their heads below it, either drowning or drowned. But he knew one woman had been there. She would manage to unbuckle her seat belt, but apparently she did so before registering where the exit was and, upside down, she went to the side of the plane with the lavatory. She had been sitting right beside the exit, a
nd yet she would drown pressed against the floor of the fuselage, which, as this piece of aircraft fell to the bottom of the lake, had become its ceiling. Chip presumed he would have seen her when he was opening the door had she remained in her seat or not swum in the wrong direction.

  What would remain a mystery to Chip and Emily and everyone who investigated the ditching was why the flight attendant had unlatched himself from his harness and not tried to open the exit. He had survived the initial impact, that was clear, and yet his body would be found lodged in the third row of seats. One possibility? He, too, had been disoriented when he was upside down and underwater, and he’d simply gotten lost when he tried to find the exit. Or, perhaps, he had tried to help someone. That seemed likely to Chip. He hadn’t known Eliot Hardy well, but in the few days they had flown together before the crash, he had found him patient, firm, and good-humored—precisely the characteristics that defined a professional flight attendant. His cause of death was drowning, but based on his broken nose, there was some thought that he may have hit his head on debris or been kicked in the face by a passenger. Even if the impact hadn’t knocked him out, it may have caused him to swallow great gulps of water, and that was the beginning of the end.

  But the other flashbacks that Chip described to her were equally as disturbing in Emily’s opinion, beginning with the flameout of the left engine and ending with the half dozen corpses that somehow had been flung like scarecrows and wax figurines from the wrecked aircraft and were floating around him like buoys in Lake Champlain.