Yes, they were scared. But unlike you, they were largely oblivious to the stories of the water ditchings that were disasters. None, for example, had watched the absolutely horrific video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767 that attempted to land in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros in 1996. The plane had been hijacked and had, finally, run out of fuel. Its left wing slammed into the water first, no more than a few hundred yards from the beach, and the aircraft broke into thousands of pieces. As you watched the video, you found it amazing that only 125 of the 175 people onboard died. You would have expected everyone to have been killed.
The truth is that airlines don’t have pilots practice water landings on their simulators. The reason? There is so little data about how a plane performs when it hits the water that it’s difficult to program the simulation. Besides, what’s the point? Why waste precious training and practice time on an eventuality that’s so very rare?
And yet, thanks to Sully Sullenberger, many of your passengers that August afternoon probably believed they were going to survive what is, the vast majority of the time, an absolutely unsurvivable event.
Heads down, heads down, heads down!
Then, that new voice: She deserves friends.
You sip your soda and stare at the door, unsure which of the voices are real and which are only in your head. You rub your aching neck and the top of your skull: phantom pains. Nothing more. Nothing to do with the shoveling. Really, it’s nothing. Nothing at all.
Hallie watched Mrs. Collier lean against the wall beside the chalkboard, her checkered smock dress a little white with dust. The woman’s eyes scanned the students, and Hallie knew they were going to pause when they reached her. This was part intuition and part experiential knowledge. Hallie could tell Mrs. Collier had decided pretty quickly that she liked her and had figured out that she would give a pretty good answer to whatever question had been posed. And, sure enough, the teacher spotted her at her table—the classroom had five tables, each with four or five children, because Mrs. Collier preferred communal tables to neat rows of individual desks—and pushed a stray lock of her sandy brown hair away from her eyes and behind her ear. Then she said in that breathy voice she used whenever she spoke her name, “Hallie, what do you think?” They were discussing what effect having so many rivers and lakes had had on the early settlement patterns in Vermont and New Hampshire. One wall was filled with postcards the class had collected of Squam, Sunapee, Winnipesaukee, and Umbagog. There were two of Lake Champlain (the name of which alone made Hallie uncomfortable) and Lake Memphremagog. New Hampshire’s nearby Echo and Profile lakes were tiny compared to most of the other ones they had looked at in northern New England, but they were still of great interest to the class and there were postcards of each of them, too. Echo was located right beside the ski resort, and sometimes people were allowed to ski off the trail and onto the ice. And Profile was underneath a ledge where a rock formation called the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. Apparently, the Old Man was a cliffside made of granite that once had resembled the face of a cranky-looking old man. In 2003 it had fallen apart, and the pieces had plummeted thirteen hundred feet to the ground. Hallie was fascinated by the way New Hampshire used it on their quarter and on stamps and in all kinds of literature. She wished it were still up there above Profile Lake. She would have liked to have seen it for real.
Now she looked up at Mrs. Collier and answered that she thought the rivers had been more important than the lakes, because the rivers could power mills and help people get around. The teacher nodded and proceeded to compare the Connecticut River, which flowed north-south along the Vermont–New Hampshire border, to the interstate highway that these days ran parallel to it. After that, the class might have moved on with the lesson in how geography affected development, but Hallie noticed that the boy beside her, a rail of a child with a mop of dark hair that curled in great, swooping tendrils, was drawing a picture of an airplane dropping like an arrow toward a lake. His name was Dwight. He was using a yellow Ticonderoga pencil and a sheet of three-hole loose-leaf paper, and coloring in the water as she watched. The pine trees along the shore and the plane already were in place. There was smoke coming from at least one of the aircraft’s two engines.
It surprised her that, despite all of their discussions of lakes throughout the week, someone hadn’t thought of her father sooner. She was relieved that Garnet sat at a different table, because she feared her sister would find the drawing far more upsetting. That was just how Garnet was wired. Whenever they talked of the plane crash, Garnet would wind up sad or scared or strangely distant. These were not the neurological seizures that looked to most of the world like trances—there she was, just staring at the same page in a book or at the same Web site on the computer or at something outside the window only she seemed to see—though at first Hallie and her mother had feared that they were. (Hallie recalled now how one time the previous autumn Garnet had spent so long on the window seat in her old bedroom in West Chester, her knees at her chest and her arms around her knees, her eyes open but not seeing, that Hallie had had to rush downstairs and bring their dad upstairs to her sister. See if he could snap her out of the seizure. He had. Sort of. The girl made eye contact with him and nodded that she was okay, they didn’t need to go to a doctor. But it was another ten minutes before she was off the window seat and back at the computer they shared.) Still, Garnet would retreat to someplace in her mind and sometimes not say a word for a minute or two. She would ignore everyone, her eyes morose. These were not the ten- or fifteen- or even twenty-minute trances that marked the seizures. But they were nonetheless worrisome. Consequently, Hallie tried not to bring up the plane crash—which, she guessed now, might explain why today’s classroom discussion of lakes hadn’t made her think of Flight 1611 until she noticed the drawing.
Abruptly Mrs. Collier was at her table, standing right between her and Dwight and exuding anger and pain. Fiercely she grabbed the piece of paper with the sketch of the plane from the tabletop and stared at it. Then she glowered at the boy and said, her voice only barely controlled, “Did you hear one single word I was saying? Or one single word your classmates were saying?”
The boy looked terrified. His hands were buried in his lap, and his head and shoulders had gone limp like wilting flowers. Hallie didn’t think he had meant anything by the drawing. He knew about her father—everyone knew about her father—but she didn’t believe that he had been trying to frighten her or tease her in some fashion. He was just a boy, and boys seemed to like drawing airplanes—and, sometimes, those planes seemed to crash.
“Uh-huh,” he murmured finally.
“Uh-huh, what?” Mrs. Collier pressed.
“I was listening.”
“What was the last thing I said?”
Hallie knew it was the comparison of the river to a highway, but it was painfully clear that Dwight had indeed been in his own world and hadn’t a clue. The duration of the silence grew excruciating as Mrs. Collier waited for an answer she was never going to get.
And that’s when it happened. Abruptly Garnet was on her feet, too, and she was crossing the classroom to their table and standing beside their teacher and Dwight. Reflexively Mrs. Collier started to pull the paper toward her chest, crinkling it into a ball, but Garnet was too fast for her. She had an edge of the drawing in her fingers and then the whole picture in her hands. Out of nowhere she revealed a red plastic cigarette lighter, and then she was igniting the wrinkled sheet, holding it so that in seconds the flames had climbed up the image and incinerated every bit of the pulp. The children were either gasping or eerily silent, and Mrs. Collier was demanding that Garnet put it out, put it out now.
But already it was out. The last black wisps floated to the tile floor as gently as snowflakes, and Garnet stepped on them with her clog. Then she handed Mrs. Collier the lighter and said, her voice sweeter than warm syrup, “If you want, I can go to the principal’s office. I know where it is.”
Hallie h
ad never seen her sister do anything like this. Not ever. She presumed that, if either of them was going to pull a stunt like this, it would have been far more likely to have been her.
Later, when they were walking up their driveway where the school bus left them off each afternoon, Garnet finally told her sister where she had gotten the lighter. She said it was in the far back corner of the walk-in closet they shared in the hallway between their bedrooms and she’d found it the night before when she was trying to find places for all of her boots and shoes. She added, “I didn’t know it was a picture of Dad’s plane at first. I really didn’t. I just knew it was making Mrs. Collier unhappy. And I guess I just wanted to try out the lighter.” Given what the picture was, however, and how the adults all presumed Garnet knew that the image was Flight 1611 plummeting into Lake Champlain, neither the principal nor Mrs. Collier felt a serious inclination to discipline her. They simply told her that the school didn’t allow students such things as lighters, and then the principal tried to call Dad at home and Mom at her office. Hallie pointed out to Garnet how she’d received absolutely no punishment at all, and her sister nodded. “You and I can probably do just about anything we want and get away with it,” Hallie added, and it was only after she had spoken that she realized she was stating the obvious. Garnet, it seemed, had known this for months.
You stand tall as you swing the ax hard into the door made of barnboard, your pants and sneakers positively black with coal, your hands and forearms streaked with sweat and muck. You convince yourself that the knobs and lines on the wood really look nothing like a face. Nothing at all. When you pause for breath you recall a historian you once heard speaking on the radio about the testosterone it must have taken to clear great swaths of New England of trees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The forests that greeted the first Europeans were substantial, and the tools the men used to clear them were primitive. They swung axes for hours and hours a day.
And now you are slamming the steel blade into the wood, conscious of how different this tool is from the electrical and mechanical ones that kept your airplanes aloft for nearly a decade and a half. The timbers around you quiver with each blow and the barnboard begins to splinter. When you hit the wood just right, there is a high-pitched groan after the crash of the blade that sounds a bit like a tree branch swaying in a fierce wind. But the groan may be your imagination or your mind playing tricks on you for any number of reasons. You are tired, you are lonely, you are—and the notion surprises you momentarily because until this second you hadn’t realized it was the case—worried about Emily. Tending to you—taking care of you—has begun to wear on her. You can tell.
Or maybe what sounds precisely like a moan from the door is a new manifestation of your PTSD: anthropomorphizing the timbers that were used to board up a coal chute.
And then, of course, the whimpers may be real: This may be precisely what shattering wood sounds like.
Regardless, soon enough, you have hewn a hole in the door. With your hands you pull the pieces apart, a chest-high hole that is large enough to reach in far if you want (you don’t). You take the heavy metal flashlight you bought at the hardware store for precisely this purpose (not, as you murmured to the woman behind the counter, because you seem to lose power so often here on the hill) and shine it through the uneven fissure.
And all that you spy are what look like wooden walls. Aged horizontal timbers that resemble a part of the foundation of the house. Otherwise, it is an empty … and what is the word you want? Compartment? Fruit cellar? Bin? The floor, you notice, is dirt, just like the rest of the basement.
But you have determined it is not a coal chute. At least you think you have. You’re not completely sure. Perhaps it had been a coal chute for a time and then it was walled off in this manner and used to store vegetables or fruit. Hard to say unless you tear down the door completely. And so you will. You allow yourself to rest for a moment, aware of the way your heart is thumping in your chest—from effort this time, rather than from anxiety—and then you resume your efforts, raising the ax and smashing it so hard into the timbers that you wonder if this is what the retort from a rifle feels like against your shoulder. But you continue to slam the ax into the barnboard over and over and over, until you have reduced a sizable section of it to kindling. You pull apart the remnants of the lumber with your bare hands as if you are parting the leaves in the trees at the edge of a great forest. It’s that simple. And then you drop the ax and pick the flashlight up off the dirt floor. You bow down just enough to twist your body through the passage you have created, careful as you step not to tear your jeans or catch your sweatshirt on the sharp points of the shredded wood.
And before you know it, you are in. The thirty-nine carriage bolts are still surrounding the frame like the bulbs on a movie marquee, but you are in. It took no more than an hour and a half, including the time you spent shoveling the coal like a stoker on a steamer.
You run the flashlight over the walls and the ceiling, aware that somewhere very far away the phone is ringing. (Later you will learn it is the principal at your daughters’ elementary school; you will be told that Garnet had brought a cigarette lighter into the classroom and reduced to ashes a drawing another student had made. Only after nearly ten minutes of obfuscation on the part of the principal will you discover that the drawing had been of a plane crashing into a lake.) No matter. The answering machine upstairs will get it. And with the flashlight you study the walls made of horizontal beams ten inches thick and easily two inches—two legitimate inches, not the two inches of the modern two-by-four—wide. If, long ago, this really had been a coal chute, the sluice has been boarded up solidly. You tap on the wood behind which the chute most likely would have existed, and it sounds pretty solid on the other side. Earth solid. No hollowness at all. And so you sit down in the dirt, your back to a wooden wall, and contemplate—now, where does this memory come from?—the pit of despair. That’s what it was called, when the researchers weren’t using its technical name: vertical chamber apparatus. You learned about it in college. In a psychology course. Harry Harlow designed it for baby monkeys to see what he could learn about depression. It was a stainless-steel trough in which he isolated the animals alone for months at a time. Even a year, in some cases. And, you recall, he learned only what one would expect from isolating a sentient creature for months in a box. The monkeys were wrecked when they emerged. Depressed. Psychotic. Really couldn’t be salvaged once they were set free. Rarely recovered. Well, this cubicle could be a pit of despair, too. You recall the sensation of lying in bed under the sheets this past autumn. After the accident. There were days, your children at school, thirty-nine dead in the water, your career over and done, when you didn’t get up until three in the afternoon, when the girls got home. Some days you didn’t get dressed at all. After all, what was the point? Really? What … was … the … point?
You pull your knees into your chest, if only because you believe this is the posture that behooves one in the midst of a stint in the pit of despair. You think of Poe and amontillado. A cask. Building stone and mortar. A trowel. Or, in this case, barnboard and thirty-nine six-inch-long carriage bolts. You bow your head against your drawn knees and breathe in the aroma of cold, cold dirt and mold. The air is a little stale.
In the unlikely event the cabin loses pressure, an oxygen mask will descend …
How many times had you heard that—or some version of that—in the cabin behind you while you were waiting to leave the gate? You always will miss that. The calm before … not the storm. The calm before the serenity of flying. How you loved flying.
You feel a sharp spike in your lower back, as if you have leaned against a protruding nail, and reflexively you wince. Just in case, you sit forward and run your hand over the wood behind you. It’s rough against your fingertips, but there is nothing spiking out from the beams. This pain is—as you presumed when you felt it—merely one of those strange, mystery aches that have dogged you since August 11.
“It was noisy under the water.”
Your head swivels instinctively toward the voice at the same time that your body jerks away from it, and your shoulder smacks hard into the gritty timbers beside you. But the voice is more startling than frightening. There, sitting next to you in the pit, is the child from the plane with the blond spit curls, her hair now wet with lake water and flattened against her scalp, who had boarded Flight 1611 with the Dora the Explorer backpack. The backpack is, in fact, in her arms even now, and she is sitting almost the way you are. Her arms are around her matchstick-like legs. You notice a bruise on one knee and a scratch on the other. Kiddie knees, Emily would call them. Too much tree climbing. Her uninflated life jacket looks like a bib.
“When I would have my head underwater at the swimming pool, it was always quiet,” she continues, her voice offhand, as if the two of you have known each other for years, “but that day in the lake? It was really, really noisy.”
When you think back to that moment, you realize she’s right. It was noisy. There were those ferryboat engines, which were much louder when you were in the water than when you were up on the deck, and the screams and shrieks from the passengers and the rescuers. There was a Coast Guard boat’s ululating siren. There was the chaotic, unorchestrated thwapping of the churned-up water and waves. And so you nod like a dad and tell the girl she is correct. You agree. Then you hear yourself asking the child her name, as if she is a slightly younger friend of Hallie and Garnet and you are sitting in a school classroom or, perhaps, at a Brownie picnic. (You wonder: Will your girls find a Girl Scout troop here or will this passage to the north lead them to leave the scouts altogether?)
“Ashley. I have two cats and a dog,” she tells you. “Your cat is huge. Much bigger than mine. Do you have any other pets?”
The Night Strangers Page 11