The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  She sighed. It wasn’t simply that the earth here in Bethel felt sacred to Reseda—though it did. It was liminal. Connected. A bridge, in her opinion—or, better still, a passageway. She thought of the Egyptian doors to the afterlife, six- and seven-foot slabs of granite found in some of the ancient tombs. Often carved into granite was a series of concentric doorways, suggesting an infinite corridor.

  But Bethel was also isolated, and that mattered, too. It was, in the end, why she stayed here. The soil was at once blessed and undiscovered—at least by most of the living.

  Sometimes people from other parts of the country found her. They wanted her to host everything from goddess workshops to rites of passage retreats. These strangers had heard rumors about her and wanted to learn from her, though they never wanted to learn anything she wanted to teach. Politely she would direct them to shamans she knew who were legitimate healers and—unlike her—comfortable as teachers. Unfortunately, the world also was filled with hundreds (thousands?) of people who claimed to be shamans and had Web sites, and would be content to take their money and teach them to handcraft a shamanic rattle or drum. Maybe help them to try to make sense of their dreams. The truth was, she wasn’t especially interested in the living. These days, she knew, she was far more fascinated by the dead.

  Once again she saw in her mind the faces of the Linton girls and then the face of their father. She saw him flinching reflexively when his plane flew into a cloud of geese. And, finally, she thought of the geese themselves, rising up from a marsh or inlet or patch of swampy soil and flying thousands of feet into the air only to collide with a jet plane. One of the other women in a group she had joined before retreating to New Hampshire had had an eagle for a power animal. But no one, as far as Reseda knew, had ever had a goose. She wondered if those geese had been part of a plan. Had they been sent? Had there been a reason for the sacrifice of the thirty-nine passengers aboard the aircraft?

  She resolved she would watch the twins more attentively and she would wait. Unlike the family of the correctional superintendent, she doubted the Lintons were going anywhere soon.

  Occasionally, you recall the unsolicited comments that passengers would offer as they boarded the plane and you were in the midst of your preflight checklist. There was that exchange with a Southern belle as you prepared to lift off from Charlotte. She was a blond debutante, attractive and slim at middle age, and she stood beside the flight attendant, her elegant Burberry carry-on bouncing against her tanned knee and the edge of the galley.

  “You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?” she asked, peering into the flight deck, her Southern accent emphasizing each and every d.

  “I do,” you said.

  “I hope so. I have four children at home,” she told you, and you were struck by the way she had managed to lose all that weight four times. “And I want to make sure we get there safely. So you all be sure and tell me if you need any help, okay?”

  You had to ask: “Are you a pilot?”

  “No,” she answered, shaking her head and smiling. “But I am a very fast learner.”

  When you arrived in Philadelphia, she again peered into the flight deck as she was exiting the aircraft. “Thank you,” she said, “well done.” Then she gave you a thumbs-up.

  Emily was leaning aimlessly against the counter at the diner on the main street in Littleton. It was lunchtime, and she had ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup—comfort food in her opinion, even when one was nearing forty—that she was planning to bring back to her office. She would eat at her desk and work.

  “Are you Emily Linton?”

  She turned and saw before her an attractive woman somewhere around fifty. The stranger had ash blond hair that was cut short and a lovely, aquiline nose. She was wearing a down overcoat that fell to mid-shin and leather boots stained white from salt on the sidewalk.

  “I am,” she said.

  “I’m Becky Davis,” the woman said, pulling off a leather glove and extending her hand to Emily. She smiled, but Emily could sense that she was a little wary. “Do you have a second?”

  Emily glanced at the rectangular cutout in the wall behind the counter and peered into the chaos in the kitchen and the plates lined up on the brushed metal sill. It didn’t look like her grilled cheese was up. “Sure,” she said.

  Becky studied the patrons in the diner—mostly senior citizens and mostly men in green John Deere ball caps—and seemed to be considering where they should talk. Then she spied an empty booth not far from where they were standing and motioned toward it.

  “I really can’t stay,” Emily said. “I was planning to bring my sandwich back to my office and work through lunch.”

  “Oh, I have work to do, too,” Becky told her, and she slid onto the red leather cushion. Reluctantly Emily sat across from her. She couldn’t decide whether she was about to get an earful now about her husband the pilot or whether this woman was about to try to invite her to visit a church or join a women’s group of some sort. Becky seemed normal enough, but the way her eyes had darted around before deciding they should sit suggested that looks in this case might be deceiving; perhaps she was one of the town crazies. She seemed a little flushed—the cold, perhaps—but she was fidgeting nervously with the zipper on her coat and her unease was palpable.

  “You’re Hallie and Garnet’s mother, right?” Becky asked. “You just moved here from Pennsylvania.”

  “That’s right,” Emily admitted, understanding this would not be about Flight 1611. It was, she decided, instead going to be about joining the elementary school’s parent-teacher organization. Maybe they needed her to bake cupcakes for something. In West Chester, it seemed she was always baking cupcakes for something. Still, she smiled and raised her eyebrows. “You’ll have to tell me why you’ve done so much homework.”

  “Oh, everyone knows. Bethel is a small town. I live in the brick house with the white shutters about two miles from you. I imagine you pass it every day on the way in to Littleton. Still, our paths weren’t going to cross unless I introduced myself to you, because my boys are well beyond the elementary school. One is in high school and one is in college.”

  “Where do you work?” Emily asked.

  “I work at Lyndon State. It’s a long commute, I know.”

  “Not by Philly standards.”

  “I guess. And obviously I’m not there today. My parents are coming north from Asheville for the week and I took the day off to get the house ready. That’s my work this afternoon.” Now the woman was glancing behind her and peering out the large glass windows of the diner.

  “You expect to see them on the sidewalk?” Emily asked. She couldn’t resist.

  “What?”

  “Your parents. You were looking around just now like you expected to see them wandering up Main Street.”

  “No. Look, I’m taking a chance talking to you. Reseda Hill sold you your house and you work in John Hardin’s law firm. So, obviously, it’s crossed my mind that you might be …” She paused, the half sentence lingering awkwardly amidst the clattering dishes and burble of conversation in the diner.

  “I might be what?”

  “There’s no graceful way to say it: You might be one of them.”

  “One of them? One of who?”

  “But there’s obviously a lot about you on the Web—because of your husband,” she went on, ignoring Emily’s question. “I’ve read a lot. And I know the principal at the elementary school, of course. Doris LeBaron. She’s been the principal since before my older boy started there. And she’s told me a little about you, too.”

  “Why was Doris talking to you about me? I mean, I hate to sound paranoid, but … why?”

  “I could lie and say it’s just because of who your husband is. I’m sure you know, people talk about that. It’s human nature. But that wouldn’t be the truth—at least not the whole truth. Doris and I are friends. We walk together in the summer. We’re in the same spin class in the winter. And she’s seen you with your girls
. And we both have the sense that you’re not one of them. Now, if I’m wrong, well then I guess I have just seriously—”

  “One of who?” Emily asked again. “You didn’t say.”

  “The herbalists,” she said, leaning in as she spoke and then pulling away. It was as if herbalists was a dirty word.

  “Oh, I get it,” Emily said, and she had to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. “Those women who have the greenhouses. I mean, I’ve heard something. And Anise and Reseda are indeed trying to look out for us. They’ve both been very helpful.”

  “Anise, too,” Becky murmured thoughtfully, as if this were additional bad news.

  “She seems eccentric—but nice. Really.”

  Becky craned her neck to glance over Emily’s shoulder and abruptly stood up. “God, I’ve completely lost track of time. I’m so sorry, but I have to go.”

  “You didn’t order anything. Aren’t you eating?” Emily asked.

  The woman shook her head. “If you ever want to talk, call me,” she said. “My number is in the book.” She pulled on her gloves and strode purposefully down the diner corridor between the booths and the row of swivel seats at the counter, and then out the door. On her way out, she almost bowled over a regal looking fellow with massive shoulders and a bald head the shape of an egg as the two of them nearly collided at the front door. Emily saw the waitress was beckoning her from the register and holding up a white paper bag with her lunch. She rose. She couldn’t imagine how a woman like Becky Davis could seem so normal on the surface and so clearly unstable underneath. She didn’t expect she would ever have a reason to phone her.

  And what of God? You pause in your work in the kitchen, replacing the paint roller in the tray and sitting back on your heels as you wonder: Where was He when Flight 1611 crashed?

  The thing is, you went to Sunday school as a little boy, but by college you were no longer capable of reconciling childhood cancer, genocidal warfare, and mudslides that obliterated whole villages and buried babies alive with any kind of divine presence. Sometimes you and Emily worry that you have made a mistake not introducing your girls to any religious tradition at all—wouldn’t it at least have helped them to hone their moral compasses?—but between your travel and Emily’s work, Sundays really were nothing more than days of rest. Besides, half the time you weren’t even home on Sundays. When the girls were toddlers and Emily was alone with them, the last thing she was going to be capable of on a Sunday morning was getting them up and dressed and off to church. And certainly the geese that appeared before your windshield just above two thousand feet on August 11 have done nothing to reinvigorate your faith. Nothing at all. The thirty-nine people who died that day in the water died through no fault of their own. They were as innocent as the many millions who die every year of disease and starvation. The many millions more who have died throughout human history in war or been killed in genocidal slaughters. The casualties of fire, water, air. The victims of car accidents, train collisions, and … plane crashes.

  And yet still …

  Still …

  Since the failed ditching in Lake Champlain, you have found yourself pausing as you gaze up at thunderheads and rainbows and at the snow that transforms these leafless trees in Bethel into skeletal sculptures of black and silver and white.

  No one has brought up church here in New Hampshire. At least not yet. Everyone did back in West Chester after Flight 1611 broke apart in Lake Champlain. Maybe folks here are more circumspect. Still, it has left you surprised. Apparently, the Congregational church in the village has sparse attendance at best. You noticed few cars in the lot when you drove past it that first Sunday morning on your way to the ski resort. Maybe everyone here goes to the Catholic and Methodist churches in Littleton, or the Baptist one in Twin Mountain.

  You shrug and dip the paint roller into the tray once again and resume work on the corner of the kitchen behind the pumpkin pine table and deacon’s bench. The irony that you own a piece of furniture called a deacon’s bench is not lost on you. In your old house, Desdemona would doze on it in the afternoons, when the sun would warm the long cushion. In this new house, the bench sits in a corner unlikely to see much sun, even in June and July. You wonder where the cat will doze now.

  Emily drove up the long driveway that led to a house where an elderly couple named Jackson lived, the girls in the backseat behind her. She didn’t know the Jacksons, but the twins’ teacher, Mrs. Collier, wanted the girls to catch up with the rest of the class on a science project: The students were growing bean sprouts and carrot tops in glass jars, but they had started a little more than a week before the Lintons arrived in Bethel. Ginger Jackson, a retired food chemist from New Jersey, was also an avid vegetable gardener, and she had provided the class with the materials for their project. She had informed Mrs. Collier that she had extras she had started herself to follow along, and she could give them to Hallie and Garnet so they could have plants at the same stage as their peers’.

  Emily felt an unexpected pang of melancholy when she reached the house, and she wondered what it was in the structure that was affecting her so. The oldest, original parts of the house dated back to 1860, Reseda had said. It was a Gothic Revival cottage, though the term cottage suggested a modesty the building had probably lacked even before two additions increased the size by roughly a thousand square feet. Now it was shaped like a rectangular U with four fireplaces, one in each of the shorter wings and two in the long center. The chimneys reminded Emily of the pictures of the funnels she had seen on massive cruise ships in port, and the house’s roofs were slate and descended gently like sand dunes. A snug and inviting bay window anchored each tip of the U, and Emily could imagine one of her daughters curled up with a book in each of the window seats.

  And that, she understood suddenly, was why she was feeling a great pang of sadness. This was the sort of house she wanted—not the melancholy crypt she and Chip had bought.

  “Does she know we’re coming for the plants?” Hallie asked her mother from the backseat of the car.

  “I called and left a message,” Emily answered. She coasted to a stop beside the garage. “But it doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” she said, talking to herself as much as she was informing her daughters. She climbed from the Volvo and looked around. No sign of any other vehicles. She walked gingerly over the ice on the driveway and peered through one of the glass windows in the garage door. There was no car in either bay.

  “I’m sorry, girls,” she said when she returned, settling back in behind the wheel. “We’ll have to try again another day.”

  “Are you disappointed?” Garnet asked her.

  “Oh, only for you girls,” she said, worried that her own disenchantment must have crept into her voice.

  Garnet shrugged. Hallie had her chin in her hand. “We’ll probably just come back tomorrow,” she said. “Or the next day. Why not? There’s not a whole lot else to do around here.”

  “Sometimes when I went to New Hampshire to visit my grandmother, I felt exactly the same way,” Emily confessed. “The stores were boring, there was no TV reception. I didn’t know the kids there so I didn’t have any friends. But the place kind of grew on me.”

  “You were just visiting, Mom.”

  “I know. But …” She stopped speaking when she heard Hallie’s small sniffle, and she turned her full attention on the child. The girl missed her friends in West Chester. Both twins did. “Oh, sweetie, I know it’s hard. But you’ll meet kids, I know you will. You’ll make new friends. I promise.”

  Hallie nodded and wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand. Garnet patted her sister on the knee. And neither girl said a word. If they couldn’t put into concrete sentences the reasons why their family had moved, they understood how brittle their father had become and the need to retreat from Pennsylvania. From civilization. And they accepted that, because they were his children, this move was a part of their lot.

  The notion made Emily want to cry, too.

  Y
ou find yourself studying the transcript of the final seconds of your final flight and hearing over and over in your head the actual recording that was played in the NTSB hearing. You sat through all three days of the investigation, you listened to the tapes, you watched the computer simulations. You were transfixed by the cell phone video made by a tourist who happened to have been eating an ice cream cone at the Burlington boathouse when you ditched your plane in the water. (She would drop the ice cream on the wooden dock when she saw the regional jet bearing down amidst the boats on the lake.) Then, those nights on the news, you watched yourself in the hearing room staring at that video or listening to testimony or—one day—testifying yourself, and you were struck both by how much your hair had thinned and by how impassive you seemed in your rolling chair beside that long mahogany table. You wore your uniform (again, a last time) when you testified.

  You always sounded calm and controlled in the recording. You never raised your voice. You never panicked. Same with your first officer. Amy, like you, was a study in professionalism. Yes, she screamed reflexively when the wave careened into the wingtip of the jet and you went perpendicular to the water. But you didn’t. You didn’t curse, you didn’t cry out (though the woman recording the cell phone video certainly did, exclaiming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s flipping! It’s flipping!”). You kept your composure even then, even when death appeared imminent. There was an involuntary grunt because the sensation was not unlike being punched hard in the stomach and the chest, and the yoke slammed up into your thumbs with such force that it’s a small miracle they didn’t break. But otherwise you stayed with your controls until all control was completely out of your hands. You flew your aircraft until, pure and simple, you couldn’t.

  And then, the day after the crash, you endured the interrogation by the NTSB. It was all about alcohol, sleep, and food. Thank God, you recall thinking at the time, you hadn’t had even a glass of wine the night before the plane hit the birds. And you clicked shut your hotel door that evening and fell asleep watching a Red Sox game on a hotel cable station. When you flew your three legs that day, you had been sober and well rested; you had eaten well.