The Night Strangers (5 page)

Ah, but your father was still among you when you went to Kennedy Airport for the final time as a family of four. And Tony was teasing your mother that afternoon, trying to make her smile because the idea of flying across the Atlantic Ocean at night had her on the verge of vomiting. Tony and Kaye were great friends of your parents. Had been for years. “Yeah,” Tony was saying to your mother, as he and your father carted the great suitcases into the terminal from the parking lot (you realize when you focus upon the details of this memory that Tony and Kaye have not dropped you all off at the curb before the departure doors; they have parked their massive station wagon and are crossing the garage with you), “you’re just a broad broad brought abroad.” Your mother couldn’t quite bring herself to smile, but she finally put out her cigarette and stared at something other than her fingers or the smoke or the length of the ash, and marched into the terminal. This was at the very end of the era when people dressed for flying as if the airplane were a synagogue or a church. Your mother was wearing a gray cashmere blazer and a black skirt, and even as a ten-year-old boy you knew it was far chichier than the uniforms that some of the airlines had their stewardesses wearing. And you, of course, were in your navy blue sports jacket—the only blazer you owned because you were a boy and how many sports jackets does a boy really need?

Unlike your mother (and, to a certain extent, even your father), you had never been scared of flying. Not even the tiniest bit. From your very first flight, a Boeing 727 to Florida, you would always sit hypnotized in your seat, staring out the window as the plane accelerated down the runway and gently lifted off. The windows invariably were scratched, but still you would watch the world grow small and wait for the jolt as the plane cracked the edge of the clouds. You built plastic models of fighter jets, passenger jets, and the lumbering bombers the United States used in the Second World War. For hours at a time you played a video game—one of the first of its kind—in which you were a pilot with a rudimentary jet console before you.

That night you flew with your family to Europe, your mother sitting in the seat beside you, gripping the armrests during takeoff, convinced that nothing as heavy as this—a Boeing 747—could possibly get off the ground or (if somehow it did) remain aloft. Meanwhile, you only studied the lights along the runway and the landmarks of the terminals nearby. Your mother believed that bad things happened at thirty-five thousand feet, and her terrors were exacerbated rather than relieved by all that Scotch she would consume when the plane reached its cruising altitude. She was always a little pale when she flew. A broad broad brought abroad.

You, however, loved the experience. The speed. The vistas. The peace. Later you would understand the physics of flying, but that never lessened the magic. Even when the plane would be cruising on autopilot and you were swapping out Jepp charts in your binder—tedious work you seemed to be doing at least twice a month—you would occasionally glance out the window and find yourself a little awed by the beauty of the world so very, very far below you.

T
en-year-old Hallie Linton thought their new greenhouse in Bethel was a bit like the walled garden in that story
The Secret Garden
. It was an enchanted place, but—just like in the novel and the movie—right now you couldn’t see its possibilities. It was wintry in there at the moment and empty, except for those four tables and the stacks of flimsy plastic pots, and it smelled musty. There was so much black dirt on some of the big glass panes that a person could write her name in it. But she loved the building. Even now, the sun six weeks shy of the equinox and much of the glass opaque with grime, the greenhouse glowed with a bluish tint at the right time of the day. Hallie studied the way the long metal beams sparkled at noon, especially after she and Garnet had taken some Windex and paper towels yesterday and gingerly stood on the tables and scrubbed a few of the windowpanes. (Cleaning all of the windows was going to be a major project, both because there were so many and because the dirt, in this temperature, seemed to have been quilted over with glue. Nevertheless, she had every intention of making the effort when the days had gotten a little longer and the sun had started thawing the grime.)

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.

W
hen 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.

“G
arnet?”

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.