The Night Strangers (8 page)

E
mily thought Chip was functioning rather well most of the time—at least on the surface, he was. Some days, it even seemed as if he were getting better. Not all of the time, of course. Far from it. But most of the time. She noted carefully, as if she were a physician or nurse, that it seemed to be the smallest of things that might set him off. After he had sent some signed documents back to the airline and the pilots’ union via Federal Express, he confessed to having had an almost disabling occurrence of heart palpitations: Federal Express meant airplanes, and there had been that Tom Hanks movie with that all too grim scene of a plane augering into a body of water—which brought back to him his own failed ditching. He said he had sat in the car for forty-five minutes after sending the papers, trying to catch his breath. He admitted that he had almost driven himself to the emergency room at the hospital in Littleton, and she had felt bad that she hadn’t been there for him.

Actually, she felt a little guilty that she wasn’t with him most days as he worked all alone in their new house, tackling the small and large projects. She encouraged him to take time off and drive into town to join her for lunch, but always he passed. One morning she suggested, her voice as offhand and casual as she could make it, that he visit a career counselor to see what else he might want to do with his life—but only, of course, when he was ready. She tried to respect his fragility and his need to withdraw from the world. She only nodded when he said he was fine—absolutely fine—at home.

Home. She understood this Victorian on a hill in a distant corner of the White Mountains was now their home, but in her office in Littleton she felt a distance from it that transcended the buyer’s remorse she had anticipated. There was a randomness to the house that originally had seemed quaint, as if an eccentric old aunt rather than a trained architect had designed it, but now seemed at once useless and disturbing. Why was the third-floor attic inaccessible from the two third-floor bedrooms? What really was the purpose of those rickety stairs that ran from a kitchen nook to a shadowy corner of the second floor? And then there was the Dunmores’ absolutely horrific taste in wallpaper: Had they chosen it consciously to terrify their two sons? Good Lord, Emily feared she might have killed herself, too, if she’d had to grow up near the carnivorous sunflowers in one room or the viperlike mammals in another. Like Tansy, she might have wound up so squirrelly that she would have hid crowbars and carving knives in the house’s myriad crannies. Moreover, every floor seemed to have odd drafts and squeaking doors. It had that basement made of dirt.

She wondered if she had made a monumental mistake uprooting her family: Sometimes it felt to her as if she had sacrificed her daughters for her husband. Could their new elementary school really be as good as the one in West Chester? Not likely, she feared. And, yes, the girls would make new friends and develop new interests, but would there be the same sorts of opportunities for them here that there had been in an admittedly tony suburb of Philadelphia? Already she questioned the capabilities of the music teachers she had found for the girls. Moreover, she missed her friends—her co-workers at the firm on Chestnut Street and the self-proclaimed theater geeks with whom she would dress up in period costume and sing and dance—more than she had expected, and for the first time in her life began to experience real depression. She thought often of the last show she had been in before Flight 1611 had crashed into Lake Champlain. It had been
Hello, Dolly!
She had been called back for Dolly but hadn’t gotten the part and been cast instead as one of the four middle-aged women expected to add multigenerational authenticity to the chorus. She didn’t care. This was, it seemed, her new function, and she milked the role for all it was worth. The last time she had had a lead had been as Anna in the
The King and I
, and that had been three years ago. Now she was thirty-eight. Lord, she had become “a community theater actress of a certain age,” which was far worse than being a real actress of a certain age.

But it was she who had, in fact, initiated this move to northern New England. Chip was only forty. With any luck, they had decades together ahead of them. A half century, even. The key was starting over someplace new. Someplace where mere acquaintances (and some total strangers) wouldn’t want to talk about the accident with her when they came upon her squeezing avocados at the supermarket, while her closest friends, after those first days, didn’t know what to say. Someplace where people were not bewildered by Chip’s ongoing near catatonia (for God’s sake, his plane had crashed) but nonetheless surprised by it. After all, this was Chip Linton. Captain Linton.

And Chip’s own family? There wasn’t much. There was his mother, who, somehow, was still alive despite a liver that had to be nothing more than a cirrhosis-ridden briquette of scar tissue. Up until the accident, Chip had still visited her every six or eight weeks (every third of those seemingly at the hospital), trying to find a semblance of the mother he could recall from before his father had died, but the girls hadn’t seen their grandmother since they’d been in kindergarten. The woman terrified the twins with her alcoholic rants or her disastrous attempts at grandmotherly affection: scalding Garnet when she tried (and failed) to make the child herbal tea or accidentally setting a dish towel (and nearly the kitchen) on fire when she thought it would be fun to bake brownies. Emily’s brother-in-law, meanwhile, was living in California. Chip thought it was wonderful that his brother was a schoolteacher, but she knew the truth: He was among the most juvenile and selfish men she had ever met. He had completely cut himself off from his mother and was, clearly, a teacher because it was the way he satisfied his insatiable need for attention. His social life was a mystery, but she feared it involved a string of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls, some in college but some still in high school. He was too smart to sleep with one younger than eighteen, but he had said just enough to give her a sense that his tastes ran to women not yet old enough to drink. And, like her mother-in-law, he had been useless and invisible since Flight 1611 had crashed.

Her parents, Emily believed, would have been better. They might have been awkward, but they would have been … present. They would have tried. One of the great sadnesses for her was always going to be that they had never gotten to meet Hallie and Garnet. She had been a first-year associate, fresh from law school, and Chip was a young first officer when they fell in love, and she anticipated that together they would build a life that was stylish and romantic and productive. Then her parents got sick, her mother from ALS and her father from colon cancer. She spent three years watching them die up close and at a distance, while she and Chip dated, got engaged, and eventually wed. She was an only child, and in those first months after Flight 1611 fell from the sky, she missed her parents as much as she had at any point in all the years they’d been gone.

The sad truth was, however, that some days it seemed to her that she was no better than everyone else when it came to knowing what to say to her husband. She hadn’t a clue. In the autumn, in the season after the accident, when the days were growing short and rainy and damp, they would walk past each other in the corridors of their Pennsylvania house like sleepwalkers and avoid eye contact over dinner as if they were travelers at an airport restaurant who spoke different languages. Even the girls would often sit silently at the table, worried and ill at ease.

One time she found Chip sobbing in Hallie’s empty bedroom while the twins were sleeping over at a friend’s house, a sight that was almost tragic in her mind since he was a man who never cried. Had been a brick as her parents deteriorated and died, supported her in every way that she needed. Had handled Garnet’s condition (somehow, she preferred that term to
illness
)—the strange early seizures, the batteries of tests, the diagnosis—in a fashion that was at once unflappable and sensitive. He, it seemed, had always known what to say to her. At least until the accident. Everything had been different after the accident. And it was different in ways that she didn’t like. Not one single bit.

And when something wasn’t working, you changed it. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. Wasn’t that what the legal consultant with the Armani suits and the ponytail had said to her when he was working with her Chestnut Street law firm?

Indeed. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.

And so here they were. In New Hampshire. Far from everything that had been her life as recently as 5:04
P.M
. on the afternoon of August 11, the minute that Flight 1611 began its descent into Lake Champlain.

Chapter Four

I
n the days when you were a first officer, after your aircraft landed, you would meticulously go through the shutdown checklist with the captain and then walk around the plane. It was your responsibility to eyeball the aircraft and make sure that nothing was leaking or out of place. Sure enough, once you did spot a crack in the skin near the nose, and that aircraft subsequently was taken out of service. But you never spied anything leaking.

What you noticed often, however, and always on the leading edges of the plane—the wings and the nose and the vertical climb of the tail—were bits of dead birds. One time there was a dent in a wing the length of a couch cushion, likely the result of a collision with a goose. In hindsight, you can’t say whether you noticed the spots monthly or perhaps even more frequently than that. But you know the birds that brought down 1611 were certainly not the first birds to collide with an aircraft you were flying.

Some days you find yourself Googling the details of the Lockheed turboprop that was brought down by starlings at Logan Airport in 1960 when sixty-two people would perish. It fascinates you that when a pair of Airbus engines were destroyed by geese nearly five decades later, so little mention would be made of that earlier nightmare. But that was the accident that led aircraft designers to start firing birds into engines to test their capabilities and the FAA to set requirements for how many birds an engine had to be able to swallow before choking to death.

O
n the school bus, Garnet was aware of a sixth-grade boy staring back at Hallie and her. They were sitting beside each other in what had become their accustomed side (the left), and she was in her accustomed spot: cocooned beside the grimy window, her sister buffering her from the world. The boy was the older brother of a girl in their class named Sally. Finally he spoke: “You do and you don’t look like twins,” he said, his bare hands on the back of his seat as he looked at them. He was two rows ahead of them, but the seat between them was empty. The long bus was never more than half full.

“I have no idea what that means,” Hallie told the boy. “You do and you don’t look like Sally’s big brother,” she then added belligerently.

But Garnet knew what the boy had meant. She understood precisely what the sixth-grader was trying to say. Perhaps because she was always following Hallie or deferring to Hallie, she was always looking at Hallie. Watching her. And while they were not physically identical twins, there was an air of identicalness about them. They were like puppies from the same litter. Hallie, Garnet knew, glided through the world with far more confidence than she herself ever would have, but still their mannerisms were eerily similar. They gnawed at the nails on their pinkies with the same affectation, extending their thumbs as if they were hitchhiking. They stretched the same way in class or while watching television, extending their legs and toes and raising their arms like long, slinky cats. And though their hair was two very different colors, it was equally fine, fell to the same spot on their shoulders, and today was kept out of their eyes with the same robin’s egg blue headbands. And, Garnet knew, they had the same delicate chins and the same almond-shaped eyes. She had been told (warned, actually) that because she was a redhead eventually she would have great constellations of freckles, but so far she had been spared and she and her sister had the same invariably tan complexions.

“It means,” the boy said, his voice betraying his unease with Hallie’s challenging tone, “that you look like you’re more than just sisters. That’s all.” Then he turned around and stared out his own window. He was, of course, absolutely right. Garnet knew that Hallie had in fact also known just what he was driving at. But sometimes Hallie needed to assert herself. Procure for herself a little distance. And that was fine. Besides, just as Garnet had anticipated she would, at that moment her sister discreetly took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

R
eseda sat alone in the butterfly position—her back straight, the soles of her feet touching, her fingers gently grasping her toes—on a silk pillow on the gravel path in her greenhouse. She was vaguely aware of the sound of the water from her fountain and the occasional clicking from the baseboard radiators, and she felt the sun through the glass against her eyelids. She inhaled the fragrance of the nearby rosemary. Still, she was uneasy: Her mind kept circling back to the Linton twins, and she wondered what this meant. As she had reminded Anise, she herself was a twin. What was it about this pair that seemed to have such … potential? What might make them more suitable—more useful—than other twins? The tincture demanded the blood of a traumatized twin, but that may have been nineteenth-century drama or alliteration. Moreover, no one had ever been able to tell her what “trauma” Sawyer Dunmore had endured. The girls were still prepubescent, that was true. But the reality was that the tincture was from the second volume, a book that Reseda found deeply disturbing. It was filled with concoctions and cures that demanded animal hearts and human blood. Anise was a vegan, but she was willing to make exceptions for recipes found in the second book—especially when a tincture was as effective as the one leavened years earlier with Sawyer Dunmore’s blood.

Anise—all the other women, actually—had been interested in another set of twins three years earlier. Again, fraternal, childlike, and possibly traumatized. Boys, that time, like the Dunmores. They had moved to Littleton because their father was going to be the superintendent of a nearby correctional facility. They were eleven when they arrived, moving with their parents and two younger sisters from Nashua to the White Mountains. When they had been toddlers, their town house and the adjoining town house had burned down in the small hours of the morning, and the fire had begun in the very bedroom they shared. The wiring behind their night-light had been defective and set the night-light and then their bedding on fire as they slept. But their father had smelled the smoke before they succumbed to it and gotten the twins and his wife safely out of the house. The next-door neighbors had not been so fortunate: They were an elderly couple, and both succumbed to smoke inhalation in their sleep.

Sadly, no sooner had Anise gotten to know the twins’ mother—a deferential and mousy little thing, and thus rather perfect—than the father was involved in a very public, gloves-off sort of fight with the state legislature over funding for the correctional facility and ended up quitting in a huff. The family moved back to Nashua, and whatever opportunities those twins might have offered were gone. They couldn’t possibly try outside of Bethel; they couldn’t possibly try at such a distance. People would notice. They would watch. They would intervene.

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.

O
ccasionally, 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.

E
mily 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?”