The Night Strangers (6 page)

“Garnet?”

There in the doorway stood Hallie.

In an instant, the second that Garnet had pushed herself ever so slightly off the mattress and glanced at her, Hallie had realized that her sister was awake and raced across the room like a sprinter and dove into bed beside her. She burrowed under the quilt, and Garnet could feel how cold her sister’s feet were.

“Your toes are icicles,” she said to Hallie. Then: “What are you doing?”

Her voice a whisper, Hallie said, “You don’t hear them?”

Them?
Mom and Dad? “Who?” she asked anyway, presuming that of course her sister was referring to their parents.

“I don’t know. Listen,” Hallie murmured urgently. “Just listen.”

And so Garnet did. She heard the slight whistle of her sister’s breathing through her nose and she heard the occasional soft bang from the ancient radiator that sat like a gargoyle on the wall nearest the bed. But there was no wind outside and the cat, wherever she was at the moment, wasn’t making a sound. There was no noise at all coming from Mom and Dad’s bedroom on the floor below them.

“I don’t hear anything,” she said finally.

“You must!” There was an urgency to Hallie’s voice that was rare.

“What time is it?”

“It’s like three. Listen!”

“What should I be hearing?”

In the moonlight Garnet could see her sister’s eyes, wide and alert, and she thought once again of their cat. Dessy, short for Desdemona. They had gotten the cat from the animal shelter when they were three and Mom had done a Shakespeare play with a character with that name. The cat’s orange fur had reminded their mom of the color of the gown she had worn for much of the production.

“You really don’t hear it?” Hallie asked in a small but intense voice. “You really don’t hear them?”

There was that word again:
them
.

“No.”

Hallie was lying on her side, but her head was elevated, her ears well above the pillow. “Wait, it’s stopped.”

“What?”

“Shhhhhhhh.”

“No, don’t shush me. Tell me! You’re scaring me!” Rarely was Garnet ever this insistent with her older sister. Though Hallie was only minutes her senior, Garnet always deferred to her as if the chasm that separated them was two or three years.

“I’m scared myself.”

“Of what?”

“I heard people.”

“Really?”

Hallie nodded. “Two or three. I don’t know. But definitely one was a girl—like our age. Or maybe a little younger.”

“In the house?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Of course it doesn’t. The nearest house must be, like, a mile away.”

“No, that’s not why it doesn’t make sense,” Hallie said.

“Then why?”

“I don’t know, but the people were mad. Or scared. That’s it, that’s why they were so loud: They were scared. I think they were more scared than mad. And I heard water. Lots of water. Waves and stuff.”

“You were dreaming.”

“I heard it when I was talking to you just this second.”

“What did you hear?”

“The water and the people and someone was, like, choking—”

“We don’t have a pond,” Garnet said, cutting her off. “We don’t have a pool. We don’t even have a brook like we had in West Chester. It had to be just a nightmare.”

“I don’t have nightmares. You do. I don’t.” She made it sound like a failing, Garnet thought, like Hallie viewed it as an accomplishment that she didn’t have bad dreams. But Garnet also had to admit that she was indeed far more likely to have nightmares than her sister. It had always been that way. Supposedly the nightmares had nothing to do with what the adults referred to as her epilepsy or her seizures, but she wasn’t so sure. When she was having one, it was like she was asleep and the waking world—the real world—was a dream.

“Besides, it wasn’t the water that made it so scary,” Hallie went on.

“No?”

“No. It’s that the people were drowning.”

“What?”

“They were, like, screaming for help and choking. Especially the girl. And just now when I came in here? It was like she was gagging. I could almost feel it.”

Garnet considered this for a brief second. Then she took Hallie’s hand and pulled her sister from the bed, dragging her along the short corridor on the third floor and then down the steep, thin stairway to the second floor, with their parents’ bedroom. On the way, she switched on every light in the halls between the two rooms.

Chapter Two

E
mily’s separation from her firm was perfectly amicable, and she was able to bring some of her practice with her from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. She passed the White Mountain bar in the winter months between when she and Chip made an offer on the house and when they and their daughters moved in. But she also joined a small firm in Littleton so she would have an office and an assistant and at least a shadow of the legal amenities she was accustomed to. Their new real estate agent, Reseda Hill, had essentially brokered that deal, too, introducing her to John Hardin, the firm’s paterfamilias. Now Emily would have a place to go during the day, which was something she needed; she didn’t see herself as the sort of attorney who was capable of working from her house.

But at nights and on weekends, when she was in their new home that February, she found herself studying her husband carefully. She was not precisely sure what she was looking for and worried about, yet she was incapable of suppressing a demonstrable anxiety that filled her on occasion when she saw him. He was sleeping badly, even worse here in northern New England than he had in their rambling Colonial in the development outside of Philadelphia in the weeks after the crash. The psychiatrist from the union had warned her that this would happen. She had said it was likely that Chip’s appetite might all but disappear. It had. And his bad dreams continued, despite the prescribed pharmacological intervention, and all it took was the ethereal plume of a plane high in the atmosphere to cause his heart to race. He broke out in a sweat at Cannon Mountain when the ski lift they were riding stalled halfway up the mountain and they dangled in their seats perhaps forty yards above the well-groomed snow. He became nauseous sometimes when he heard the birds that remained through the winter months outside the kitchen window in the morning. And he would grow a little dizzy whenever he came across a news story about the airline industry or an airplane—and there were always news stories about the airline industry and airplanes. Always. And, finally, there were those phantom pains throughout his body that continued to plague him. He’d had all the testing imaginable back in Pennsylvania: CAT scans and MRIs and dyes injected everywhere. He had seen all manner of chiropractors and physical therapists. And none of the tests had shown anything wrong.

The real strangeness? His ankle and two of his ribs—the former sprained badly, the latter broken and cracked—had healed completely and he felt absolutely no pain there. Same with the spot on his head where he had actually been cut. The top of his head, he reported, often hurt like hell—but not his forehead, which had been cut when his head slammed into the right prong of the control stick. Moreover, these aches and pains had only gotten worse since they had moved to northern New Hampshire.

They both understood that a degree of PTSD was inevitable. How could it not be? He had captained a plane that had crashed and four-fifths of the people onboard had died. It wasn’t his fault: He wasn’t fatigued, he hadn’t been distracted or inattentive, he hadn’t pulled back on the control yoke when he should have pressed it forward to recover from a stall. (Once, years earlier, he had had a plane stall on him when the wings iced over, and calmly he had pushed the yoke forward, accelerating the descent but restarting the engines, and landed smoothly. None of the passengers onboard had ever known there had been a problem, but he had been roundly applauded by his airline. And how many times had he successfully aborted landings at the last minute because there was a truck or a plane on the runway that wasn’t supposed to be there and performed a go-around? At least once for every seven or eight months he had been flying.) That didn’t make the visions and memories that came back to him—illuminated suddenly like trees in the dark made clear by great bolts of lightning—any easier to shoulder. But, still, she watched him when she wasn’t at her new office in Littleton, aware that this was a reversal in their roles: In the past, he had been the one to watch over her during those intervals when he wasn’t flying.

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.

Y
ou 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.