The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  She noticed that the woman was holding a long, flat Tupperware tin in both hands and, on top of it, a similarly shaped baking dish covered with aluminum foil. Emily understood instantly that this was a neighbor bringing food. More food. A lasagna and brownies, she suspected. She guessed that the woman was almost a generation older than she and Chip: probably fifty-five or sixty. Her face was lovely but lined, and her eyes looked a bit like her parka: They were the color of moonstones. She wasn’t wearing gloves. “I’m Anise,” she said. “I’m a friend of Reseda Hill,” she added, referring to the woman who had taken over as their real estate agent after Sheldon Carter died so abruptly.

  “Emily Linton,” she said. “This is Chip, my husband.” Emily found it interesting that, ever since the plane crash, she had been more likely to introduce her husband than he was to take the social lead and introduce her. He wasn’t a failure—not by a long stretch when she contemplated the traumas that had marked his childhood—but he had confessed to her that he felt like one. These days he defined himself entirely by a single moment, and that moment was not about the nine people who had lived but was instead about the thirty-nine who had perished. He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not. Now she watched the tentative way that he gave this friend of their real estate agent his hand and mumbled a soft greeting.

  “Oh, I’d know your face anywhere,” Anise said with a broad smile that revealed a layer of upper teeth that were just beginning to cross over one another and a row of lower ones that were starting to yellow with age. The woman hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but it had become one of those statements that Emily knew made Chip anxious. Yes, for a time his face had been everywhere. For a time it had been all over the Web, the cable news networks, and the newsweeklies. After all, he was the pilot who had failed to do what Sully Sullenberger had accomplished. People never meant anything when they said that they recognized him. And sometimes it was even better when they came right out and acknowledged that they knew who he was, as Anise just had, rather than simply staring at him and saying nothing. Chip had told her once that silence without verbal recognition seemed like even more of an indictment.

  “Can I help you with those?” Emily asked, and she pointed at the tin and the baking dish in Anise’s arms.

  “If you promise to eat them,” said Anise. “There’s a lentil-nut loaf in this one and carob-chip brownies in the other.”

  “Vegan?” Emily asked.

  “Yes. They taste better than they sound—I promise,” Anise insisted, and she handed the items to Emily with particular care because Emily was already wearing her ski gloves. “The brownies have names on them. One for each of you. Hallie is spelled with an i-e, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Really, this all sounds scrumptious. Thank you. It will be such a gift not to have to cook tonight.”

  “Reheat the lentil loaf in a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree oven for twenty minutes.”

  “Or microwave it for, what, three minutes? Four?”

  Anise tilted her head as if this were a math equation that was puzzling her. “Huh. I don’t have one of those. Too scary. I put those in the same category with cell phones and aspartame. You’re just asking for brain cancer.”

  Emily noticed that her husband hadn’t said a word, but now he was eyeing the woman’s vehicle. She had been married to him long enough to know that he was probably wondering how this woman with her fear of carcinogens in diet soda and radiation from a cell phone could drive around in that rusted-out, carbon-monoxide-spewing tank.

  “It looks like you’re about to head to the mountain,” Anise observed, just as the pause was about to grow awkward.

  “We are,” Emily told her.

  “With the girls?”

  “Yes,” she said, momentarily nonplussed by the idea that she and Chip might be leaving the girls behind. Of course they would be bringing them. She wasn’t going to leave a pair of ten-year-olds alone for the day—especially in an unfamiliar house in which once had resided an apparently sociopathically skittish old woman who left knives and hatchets in corners. But then she reminded herself that Anise was a friend of Reseda’s, and there was every reason to presume that Anise was simply trying to make conversation. Show some interest. “It’s a family outing,” Emily went on. “An escape from Box Hell.”

  “You lose power last night?”

  “We did. Did you?”

  “I did. I was surprised because I live in the valley. Living up here on the hill, you’ll lose it more often than I will,” Anise said. Then: “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I live on the road to the Notchway Inn. It’s the brick Georgian with the greenhouse and the overgrown paddock with the white fence. I don’t have horses, but a previous owner did. Don’t be strangers.”

  “You know much about this house?” It was Chip speaking, and because it was the first time he had opened his mouth other than his softly murmured how-do-you-do, both she and Anise found themselves turning toward him with a combination of intensity and expectation.

  “A little bit. I knew Sawyer and Hewitt Dunmore. It’s an interesting place, isn’t it?”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Chip said.

  “Absolutely,” answered this friend of their real estate agent.

  “In the basement is a door. I noticed it the day before yesterday when I was bringing a load of laundry down there.”

  “Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Where does it go?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you might.”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s sealed shut.”

  “Sealed?”

  “With bolts. Lots and lots of carriage bolts.”

  “That’s interesting. Based on the design of the house, where do you think it goes? Back up to the kitchen, I’d wager. I know the house has a back stairway linking the first and second floors. Why not one linking the basement with the kitchen?”

  “Not likely. The kitchen would be above the other side of the basement. It seems to be a door to nothing. It’s at the edge of the house. All that’s above it is the screened porch. And that porch is just built above dirt.”

  “I’ll bet it was a ramp, in that case. A wheelbarrow ramp.”

  “There’s one of those on the other side of the basement—on the north side of the house.”

  “Maybe it’s a coal chute then.”

  “There is some old coal lying around it,” he admitted.

  “There you go, mystery solved. The Dunmores—or the Pierces before them—probably built that screened porch after they stopped heating with coal.”

  He nodded, but Emily knew that her husband wasn’t entirely convinced. The two of them had discussed the likelihood that it was merely a coal chute the afternoon he first noticed it. Certainly it was possible that’s all it was. But why would you use thirty-nine carriage bolts to seal it shut? (Emily feared the coincidence that there were the same number of bolts as there were fatalities on Flight 1611 was only going to exacerbate her husband’s fixation on the door.) Chip had removed one of the bolts, but it had taken an awl with a beveled point, a screwdriver, and a hammer—and nearly twenty-five minutes of struggling. It was six inches long. When he realized that the remaining thirty-eight were probably identical and might demand the same labor—kneeling in dirt and moldy, crumbling coal—he twisted the carriage bolt back into place and returned upstairs to unpack some more boxes. Over cups of decaffeinated coffee late that night, sitting on the floor in the den because here was one room where the wallpaper was a soothing pattern of blue and yellow iris, he and Emily discussed calling Hewitt Dunmore to ask about the strange door. But when Emily had phoned Hewitt yesterday about the possessions they’d come across in the house, everything from that extraordinary sewing machine to those eccentric figurines, she had found herself incapable of asking him about it—or, for that matter, about the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. He seemed too damn ornery. Besides, it was just a door to a coal chute, wasn’t
it? She decided another time, perhaps.

  “Yeah, that’s what we figured,” Chip said finally. “A coal chute.”

  “What else could it be?” Anise agreed, and she raised her eyebrows and smiled once more. “It’s not like the Dunmores hid bodies down there.”

  No, of course not, Emily thought.

  “It must feel wonderful to be here,” Anise continued.

  “It’s nice,” Emily agreed, carefully modulating her tone. Nothing in her life felt particularly wonderful right now. Besides, she hadn’t been here long enough to have any sense at all of whether moving to Bethel had been the right decision.

  “Are you going to garden?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you garden in Pennsylvania?”

  “Not really.”

  Anise motioned at the greenhouse. “You’ll want to take advantage of that. Tansy did for a while. Then she stopped. She shouldn’t have.”

  Emily thought about this. “I presume you’re a gardener,” she said finally. “You said you have a greenhouse.”

  “We’re all gardeners,” Anise answered, and there was something in the tone that was oddly salacious. A moment later, the woman was climbing into her battered pickup and Emily was carrying the lentil-nut loaf and four carob-chip brownies with their names on them into the kitchen and calling for the girls. Chip remained outside by their car, staring up into the sky and, she presumed, watching for birds or the white trail of a jet high overhead.

  You do watch for birds. You do stare at the plumes of the jets high overhead. You will, you know, never fly again. Not as a pilot and not as a passenger. Never.

  You have confessed only to your psychiatrist in Philadelphia that, suddenly, you are afraid of flying. As well, you discussed with her at length what physicians have determined are the psychosomatic or phantom pains in your neck and your back and your head: the lingering whiplash. The occasional daggerlike spikes in your left kidney and abdomen, a sensation you have likened to a horizontal barb impaling you through your back and your stomach. The way your skull sometimes feels as if the frontal bone—that great helmet beneath your skin—has been crushed, smashed into the brain in one moment of life-ending trauma.

  She told you they would pass. Eventually.

  Instead they have gotten worse this week since you arrived in New Hampshire. You tell yourself it is because of the work of moving your family from one house to another. All that lifting. All that stress. It was bound to aggravate whatever is going on in your back and your neck and your head. Your mind.

  Moreover, the dreams seem to be changing here. Oh, you still have the dreams where you crash CRJs in catastrophic, steel-melting infernos—though, of course, you always wake a split second before impact. You still have the nightmares with dense tropical forests filled with palm trees and oxygen masks dangling like strange, tubular plants.

  But last night there was a dream with a little girl, not either of your daughters. She was sopping wet, drowned—dead, you knew it even in your sleep—but she didn’t know she was dead and she was nattering on and on about her backpack, which she wanted you to help her find. This was new. So was the dream on Thursday night with some burly guy your age who was standing behind you and Amy, your now dead first officer, on the flight deck of the CRJ as you were about to start down Burlington’s runway 33 for the last time. He was telling you to wait, wait, wait—to goddamn it, wait!—because if you waited just a couple of seconds you wouldn’t hit the goddamn birds. But you ignored him and started your roll, turning around to command him to take his seat in the passenger cabin, noticing for the first time when you turned that he, too, was dead and hadn’t a clue: A round metal shard had pierced his skull like a long spike of rebar, and another was protruding from just beneath his rib cage. Only in a dream could he stand.

  Soon enough, the nightmare ended as they all do: a fireball occurring just as you open your eyes and stare up at the diaphanous shadows of your bedroom at night.

  One time, if only to change the dynamic with your psychiatrist in Philadelphia, you told her about a broad broad brought abroad. A joke at your mother’s expense when you were in the fifth grade. Your mother was terrified of flying. Absolutely petrified. Had to be hammered to get on an airplane. Had to have her good-luck charm bracelet on her wrist and her Saint Christopher’s medal around her neck. Had to be wearing a specific pair of sunglasses as a headband to keep that long and lustrous black hair off her face. Tony Swoboda and his wife, Kaye, were driving you and your family from Stamford to Kennedy Airport the time you all flew to Spain and Portugal on a two-week tour. One of those vacation packages that took you to a half dozen cities in barely a dozen days: Madrid in two days and Lisbon in thirty-six hours. An afternoon for Toledo. It was your last vacation as a family—you and your parents and your younger brother—because it would be soon after your return that your father would start up the grand staircase at Grand Central Terminal around 8:35 on a Tuesday morning and die right there on the steps of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. (His last conscious vision? You like to believe it was Paul Helleu’s Mediterranean sky, but at the time the ceiling had not yet been restored. The stars that day had still been obscured by soot.) He was walking from the train station to his office at the ad agency on Forty-eighth Street, as he had almost every workday of his life for twenty years. It was the end for him, but only the beginning of the end for your mother. Somehow, her husband’s life insurance had lapsed and their savings and investments were clearly inadequate to keep her and her two sons in a four-bedroom house near the water in Greenwich, Connecticut. They would cut back, then they would move. A smaller house in Stamford, at the edge of the city. It wouldn’t have been so bad for the three of them if the combination of widowhood and diminished resources hadn’t conspired to turn a social drinker (a very social drinker, in hindsight) into a drunk.

  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 hea
vy 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.

  Ten-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.)