The Night Strangers (15 page)

“You’re going to like this, Chip,” Peyton told her husband.

“And you girls are going to love these,” said John, leaning over and handing each of the twins a wide tumbler blushing with grenadine syrup. “It’s my secret ingredient.”

“And that is?” asked Chip.

“A magician never reveals the secret behind an illusion. And notice I did not use the word
trick
.”

“Any special reason?” Emily asked.

“A trick suggests I have taken advantage of people or fooled them. Played a joke of some sort on them. I prefer to leave that sort of bad behavior to my work as an attorney.”

“Just so long as it’s not an herbal narcotic or magic hallucinogen of some kind,” Chip remarked. “Drink up, girls.”

Everyone turned to him, a little nonplussed by the inappropriateness of the comment. But he simply raised his wineglass in a silent toast and took a sip. “You were right, Peyton. This is a delightful wine. A great selection.”

And Peyton nodded and the girls sipped their Shirley Temples, a little tentatively at first but then voraciously, as Peyton told the grown-ups how he and Sage had discovered the vineyard on a tasting tour in Northern California last year, and how the Malbec was a new varietal for these wine growers. Chip’s strange admonition was ignored, and the small party quickly regained its footing. Emily was relieved. She had the sense that everyone was. Before the children had finished their Shirley Temples, John was escorting them up the stairs to the playroom, and Emily told herself that Sage and Clary were only following her daughters with their eyes because the girls were twins and they were indeed adorable. There was nothing more to it than that.

“So, tell me,” Chip was saying. “What’s Clary short for? Clarice?”

“Oh, it’s not short for anything at all,” the woman said, pushing herself to her feet and then sitting on the spot on the pouf that Hallie had vacated. “It’s just Clary. I was named after the herb.”

“Clary? I don’t believe I know that herb,” Emily confessed.

“Treats women’s problems,” Peyton said, and he laughed, even rolling his eyes.

“Oh, stop it, Peyton, you know it does much more than that,” Clary chastised him, though it was evident that this was a long-running joke between the two friends.

“I do. I do, indeed,” he agreed.

There was a short lull in the conversation, and in the pause Emily listened to the low murmur of John’s voice upstairs as he showed the girls how to work the DVD player and then she heard the sound of the television. She couldn’t make out the program, but the girls laughed either at something the lawyer had said or at something on the screen. It really didn’t matter which. They sounded content enough, and so she turned her attention to her hostess and her new friends and settled in for the evening.

Y
ou wake up when you hear the murmuring voices. You pull your way like a swimmer from the torrents of another sleep burdened by dreams of airplanes crashing hard into the earth, and you sit up in bed. There beside you, your wife slumbers soundlessly. She is curled on her side and has heard nothing. It doesn’t strike you as the slightest bit odd that you are confident the voices are neither burglars nor intruders. Almost abstractedly, you scan this room in the foothills along the western spine of the White Mountains, your bedroom—but still not a room that offers even a shadow of the familiarity and intimacy you associate with that word:
bedroom
. This still is but a room with a bed. The digital clock on Emily’s dresser reads 2:55. Not quite three in the morning. You left the Hardins’ about eleven and were in bed by midnight. Asleep then by 12:15. You still have the faint taste in your mouth of Peyton’s wines from Sonoma and the special canapés that Clary kept passing to you. (
I know you will like these, Chip. I just know it
.)

The voices are coming from someplace in the house below you, not from the floor above. And so it seems that the speakers are not Hallie and Garnet. Besides, they’re grown-ups. You knew that the moment you awoke. Still, isn’t it conceivable that the girls are watching something on television at three in the morning and the grown-ups are characters in a movie or Disney Channel sitcom or whatever is being beamed into your house that moment via a satellite and a dish? But then you remember: You don’t have a dish yet. You had one in West Chester. Not here. You have one on order, but it is not going to be installed until this coming Tuesday morning. And so if these sounds are indeed grown-ups, then the girls must be watching a DVD.

And yet that wouldn’t be like your daughters. Not at all. They’re ten—still four months shy of eleven. You really can’t imagine them tiptoeing down these strange stairs in this strange house in the middle of the night to watch a DVD. Besides, the distant murmuring doesn’t sound like typical sitcom fare: It sounds like a woman and a man who are embroiled in a dispute. Arguing about something, and not in a playful, comedic, all-problems-will-be-solved-in-twenty-two-minutes-of-television sort of way.

Your plane always had a low altitude warning system on the altimeter: Whenever you were a mere thousand feet above the earth, even on a normal approach to a normal landing, it would tweet three times. You wish now your brain had a similar warning system, a way of alerting you that you were about to experience another of these … visions. Or, perhaps, visitations. After the accident, you had been warned of the flashbacks and the sleeplessness and the loss of appetite. The nightmares and the guilt. The inability to focus. But no one had told you of the visitations.

Now you climb from beneath the quilt, a little nonplussed by how cold the room is. For a brief moment you wonder if the furnace is out and you will need to relight the pilot. (You see in your mind an image of yourself in your captain’s uniform and wonder: Why is it called a
pilot
light?) Your feet are bare, and the floor feels a little rough and chilly on them. When you were a child, you had pancake-flat feet. Not an arch to be found. And so from an early age you wore special orthopedic shoes; as a toddler and a small boy, you slept with a steel bar linking your ankles. You had to hop instead of walk when you awoke in the night, and you hopped in your bare feet. There was a wooden floor in the house just like this one. It was the room in your parents’ house that they (and you, eventually) called the playroom. When you were a boy, once a month you would visit your orthopedist in Stamford and strip down to nothing but a pair of white underpants, and the doctor would roll marbles down a long corridor that ended in his practice’s waiting room. While he watched your feet and your ankles and your hips, you would run after those marbles. That corridor had a carpet that was thick but firm. At first you weren’t shy about running in nothing but underpants into that waiting room, chasing after marbles that were white as cue balls and shiny like ice. Eventually, however, the indignity of the practice began to dawn on you and you grew hesitant. Then diffident. Still, the doctor always convinced your mother to persuade you to run, and so there you were, even in the first and second grade, being run like a monkey down a hall until you emerged into a roomful of strangers in nothing but underpants. Your feet never developed perfect arches, but whatever that doctor did was not ineffective. By the time you stopped scampering after marbles, your arches were at least good enough. Oh, you were never going to be a fighter jock, but when you chose to become a commercial pilot, your feet were never an issue.

The discussion below you has grown a little more agitated, and you pause in your pajamas in the frame of your bedroom door. The hallway is lit by the moon through the corridor windows. You ponder the narrow stairs up to Hallie’s and Garnet’s bedrooms and wonder if you should check on the twins before going downstairs: see if they are indeed in their beds, because if they are, then it’s clear that the voices below you are not coming from a DVD.

And so you move slowly and quietly up that thin stairway to the cozy and snug third floor of your house. You press your fingers against the wall for balance because this stairwell is so cramped that there is neither a handrail nor a banister. The girls’ doors are both open, and you peer into each room for a long moment, watching each child sleep in the red glow of her night-light. You have always loved watching your children sleep. Some nights in Pennsylvania—before the crash, when life was filled with only routine and promise—you and your wife would stand in the doorway and watch first Garnet and then Hallie sleep, your souls warmed by the uncomplicated domesticity conveyed by the perfume in a baby shampoo. You would watch the way Garnet’s small hands would be embracing a stuffed teddy bear she had named Scraggles, or the way Hallie would be lying flat on her stomach, her arms burrowed deep beneath her pillow. In the winter, the girls often slept in red and white Lanz nightgowns that matched one of their mother’s. Tonight they are sleeping in pajamas: Garnet’s are patterned with evergreen trees and Hallie’s with Japanese lotus flowers. Now, at three in the morning, you wander as silently as you can into each child’s room, first pulling the comforter back up and over Garnet’s shoulders and then placing the stuffed gray rabbit Hallie named Smokey beside her on her bed. The bunny had fallen to the floor.

Up here, the voices are the same indecipherable buzz they were on the second floor. This strikes you as interesting. You would have expected the sound to be more muffled—perhaps even inaudible—when you are another floor higher. Here you may even have heard what sounded a bit like a laugh: a mean-spirited little chuckle at someone’s expense.

And so you start back down that narrow stairwell and then along the second-floor corridor, passing your and your wife’s bedroom. At the top of the stairs to the first floor, you reach for the flashlight you keep upright beside the trim, but you do not switch it on until you have reached the bottom step because you do not want to risk waking Emily. But when you are on the ground floor, you turn it on and spray the rooms. There in the living room is that wallpaper with the fox that looks like an eel, the image repeated over and over. There in the dining room are the walls of statuesque but sickly sunflowers, as well as the two sawhorses and the piece of plywood on which you drape sheets of wallpaper and then slather them with paste; in this light, with a curtainless vertical window just beyond the sawhorses, the image resembles a guillotine. (You built a plastic one from a modeling kit when you were a boy. It actually came with the pieces for a plastic nobleman with a detachable head. You were meticulous and glued the device and the victim together with the same care you brought to your models of jet airplanes and battleships.) There, in a corner of the hallway, is a stepladder with a gallon of paint on the top step, and for just a fraction of a second you are sure it’s a man.

And, finally, there is the door to the basement, and you find you are nodding to yourself that it is open. The door to the basement is never open. You keep it closed because why would you want the smell of the dirt floor wafting up into the house? Why would you want the heat from the radiators or the woodstove to drift there?

Ah, but it is ajar now. Of course. It has been opened for you. It is open now because that’s where the voices are coming from and whoever is down there wanted to be sure that you heard them.

You see in your mind a book jacket:
How to Live in a Haunted House
. No, that’s not right: It should be
How Not to Live in a Haunted House
. But then you decide that this construction is wrong, too. All wrong. Both books sound like real estate guides: The first is a manual for finding a house with a history; the second is a handbook for avoiding one. What you are after is an instruction booklet alive with advice for cohabiting with the dead. What to expect. How to cope with the voices that fill the night and the doors that mysteriously open. How to make sense of a house with bones in its basement. Unfortunately, that title eludes you. It hovers like a wisp just beyond your mind’s reach.

Perhaps that’s because you don’t really believe in ghosts. You tell yourself you are not in a ghost story. These voices have woken no one but you. In all likelihood, a draft opened the basement door. Or you left it open yourself: Either you forgot to close it or you left it like this subconsciously. Your therapist would love that. And this conversation below you is only in your head, another invisible wound from the disaster that marked your last flight.

“Hello?” The sound of your own voice surprises you. You hear a slight tremor in it, an uncharacteristic hitch in those two syllables. This is not the tone that told passengers cruising altitudes or directed them to gaze out their windows at the majesty of the Manhattan skyline and New York Harbor or the unexpected expanse of Lake Michigan. This is not the voice that one time (and one time only) told them to brace for impact. Instantly the discussion in the basement grows quiet. “Hello?” you call again, a little louder, a little more confident. Still, there is nothing but silence. You beam the light down the stairs at the stones in the wall at the bottom, at the coils of hose the moving men happened to dump just to the side of the banister. At the wooden pallets you rounded up the other day and on which you have stacked great jugs of cat sand and cases of soda and juice you bought at the warehouse store in Littleton. You feel for the switch at the top of the stairs that flips on the two naked, sixty-watt bulbs in the basement ceiling—really just pillows of insulation amidst thick wooden beams—and, after the basement is awash in the dim half-light, you start down, your feet still bare. You wish you had thought to put on your slippers. Then again, perhaps not. You can clean your feet under the spigot in the bathtub before climbing back into bed. The slippers would have to go into the wash. You never go into the basement without the sorts of shoes you are likely to wear only outdoors.

At the bottom of the stairs you pause, the flashlight at your side, and then turn slowly toward the pile of coal and the doorway behind which you found the bones. Instantly you recognize the pair of adults standing between the doorway and the coal, and you go to them, switching the flashlight from your right to your left hand so you can shake their wet hands if they choose to extend their wet arms to you. And the man does, even though it is painfully clear that you have interrupted a fight he has been having with the woman. A squabble. You wonder: Perhaps you were mistaken; perhaps you were not supposed to hear them.