The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  “She means well,” Reseda was saying, referring to Ginger Jackson. “I hope it wasn’t a mistake inviting her.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Emily said. Reseda was wearing a perfectly pressed white button-down blouse, open at the neck just enough to show a hint of the lace on her bra, a black leather skirt that fell to her knees, and charcoal tights. Like Emily, she was not wearing shoes, but otherwise Emily felt underdressed beside her; she was wearing jeans, wool socks, and a blue and green Fair Isle sweater. It was a Sunday night and she had dressed casually. “But it is nice to catch my breath,” she continued. “She does have her share of very strong opinions. And she is very, very passionate about her gardening and tinctures and creams. But you all are, aren’t you?”

  Reseda smiled but didn’t respond to the question. Instead she said with sisterly camaraderie, “I’ll see if I can discreetly seat you and Ginger at opposite ends of the table.”

  “Or in opposite rooms, perhaps.”

  Reseda nodded. “Chip seems a little better,” she observed.

  “A little. But PTSD isn’t a cold. Depression isn’t a cold. It’s going to take time.” She thought again of the way he had razed that door in the basement and then how she had found him down there in the middle of the night sixteen or seventeen hours ago. She didn’t believe for a moment that he was checking the pilot light.

  Reseda slid the roasted potatoes back into the oven and shut the door. “I think we’re just about there,” she murmured and then turned her attention back to Emily. “His name is Baphomet.”

  “What is?”

  “The creature in the fountain in my greenhouse. I rather like him.”

  Emily gazed down at her drink. Had she mentioned aloud the greenhouse just now? She didn’t believe that she had.

  “I bought him in a moment of minor anarchism. I knew what people were saying about me, and I thought I would really give them something to talk about.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Some people think he’s the devil.”

  “Baphomet.”

  “Yes.”

  “And people think you do … what? Worship the devil? They think you’re a—what’s the word?—a Satanist?”

  “Or Wiccan. But, I assure you, I’m neither.”

  “John said you’re a shaman.”

  “I’m not sure John knows what that means.”

  “But you are something.”

  Reseda sipped her mulled cider and seemed to be contemplating her answer, as if she weren’t precisely sure herself. Emily was struck by the woman’s eyes, which, in the candlelight in the kitchen, looked almost black. Weren’t they usually blue? Her lipstick was the color of a ripe fig, and her face was shaped like a heart. Emily realized that she wanted to kiss her, which struck her as odd because she hadn’t kissed a girl since she and a friend experimented at a sleepover in ninth grade. But she and Chip rarely made love now. Perhaps that explained her desire. Between his catatonia, her exhaustion, raising the girls, and the logistics of the move, she guessed that they had had sex perhaps a half dozen times since August 11 (and not once since moving to New Hampshire), and each event had been a rather rote affair. It had felt to her—and, she presumed, to him—like they were going through the motions because they were supposed to. They were married, they were in love; they were supposed to have sex. Before the crash, they had always had a rather interesting sex life, fueled by the three- and four-day absences that marked what he did for a living. Alas, romance, it seemed, was another casualty of Flight 1611.

  “When I was a teenager, something happened to my sister and me,” Reseda said finally, stepping over to Emily so that Emily felt her lower back pressed against the counter. Reseda placed her cider on the marble. “It was violent and horrifying. But I learned something very interesting. Someday I’ll tell you.”

  “But not tonight, I gather,” Emily said. She found it difficult to speak with Reseda so close, and her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “No. Not tonight.”

  The woman was standing right in front of her now, and suddenly all Emily could smell was the unrecognizable but absolutely heavenly scent of her perfume—the aroma of the lamb and the rosemary and the candles seemed to have vanished completely—and then the woman was closing her eyes and leaning into her, and pressing those lips the color of figs against hers. Emily was startled, but she closed her eyes, too, and accepted the woman’s warm tongue as it explored first her lips and then burrowed gently between them and started teasing the inside of her mouth. She felt Reseda’s hand reaching between her legs and massaging her firmly through her jeans; almost involuntarily she started to move her hips, to grind against the woman’s fingers.

  And then Reseda was pulling away, her eyes open, smiling in a vague, absentminded sort of way. “Sweet,” she said softly, and she turned and took a pair of pot holders off the counter and went to remove the lamb from the oven. “This looks perfect,” she said.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” Emily said, embarrassed, the words catching in her throat, but already Reseda was placing the great yellow pan with the meat on an ivy-shaped trivet and bringing one long, slender finger to her lips. In the kitchen doorway Emily heard her husband and Alexander Jackson, the two of them laughing about something, and Reseda said to the pair, “Ah, men. Lovely. Could one of you start pouring the wine in the dining room? We’re just about ready.”

  Hours later, Emily woke up in the night when she felt Chip’s hands on her rear. She had been asleep on her side, and he had pulled her nightgown up and over her waist, and now his fingers were sliding down the crevice and rubbing her. She felt his erection against her thigh, and her mind moved between images of Reseda’s closed eyes and the taste of her tongue and the feel of her husband hard against her leg. When his finger entered her, she was shocked at how wet she was. She pressed her ass against him and heard herself purring ever so slightly. She couldn’t recall the last time she and Chip had made love in the middle of the night. No, wait, she could. It had been four and a half years ago, when he had gotten home from a deadhead leg at two or two-thirty in the morning after four days away. She started to recall the details, but now Chip was rolling her onto her back and all she was aware of was the feel of his mouth on her breasts and the way he was raising himself above her—she reached up and grabbed at the sides of his chest, her fingers pressing against his ribs—and entering her. She moaned and rolled her head back against the pillow.

  In the morning, while preparing the girls’ breakfast with Chip, she tried to make sense of Reseda’s kiss and the reality that she and her husband had finally christened their bedroom in New Hampshire—and how, for the first time in well over half a year, the sex had left her satisfied. It wasn’t a coincidence, this she knew. There was a connection. But for the life of her she couldn’t decide what it meant.

  Chapter Eight

  The house always seems a little more peculiar to you when the girls are at school and Emily is at work. When you’re alone. It’s as if it suspects that this is when you’re the most receptive. Or, perhaps, the most vulnerable.

  It.

  One day you stood on your driveway and just stared at it. The windows were eyes, the long screened porch a mouth. It watched you back.

  You know the air moves in currents along the hallways like breath, especially in that back stairway to the second floor and the thin corridor along the third floor. One day you came across Desdemona cowering in the living room, her orange body a small ball between the radiator and the corner where the wall angled into the bay window. She was quivering, her fur fluffed and her eyes wide. For the only time ever she hissed at you.

  And then there was the time you found her with her collar caught on the pineapple finial on the banister to the front staircase. She was trying and failing to extricate herself and growing panicked. She was hanging herself, choking to death because for some reason the breakaway collar hadn’t unclasped. If you hadn’t wandered into the hallway at that ver
y moment, in all likelihood the animal would have died.

  In the end, you didn’t tell Emily about this because you know it would have upset her. There is actually a great deal you are shielding her from.

  You realize, of course, that you are giving life to slate and clapboard and horsehair plaster. To bad wallpaper and a door in the basement. There is no it. But there is something. There are people. You know what you have found and you know what you have hidden in newspapers in the back of your armoire.

  She deserves friends.

  It’s Monday, the start of a workweek for Emily and a school week for your girls, and once more you are here all alone. You tell yourself it wasn’t a bad weekend, despite your encounter with Ethan Stearns and Sandra Durant from Flight 1611 in the small hours of Sunday morning. After all, you spent time with the living, too. You got to know Emily’s boss a little better on Saturday night; you had a nice evening at Reseda’s on Sunday. Both parties were actually rather pleasant, and you made new friends. Moreover, when you awoke hours before sunrise today, you and Emily made love with an ardor you hadn’t felt in months.

  So, you tell yourself, in many ways you are managing just fine. For a long moment you sit in a ladder-back chair and stare at the grotesque sunflowers on the dining room walls. These are not the cheerful Tuscan sunflowers of August. They are the dying blossoms of September, brown not merely because the wallpaper is antique. Even brand-new this paper may have been morbid.

  The plan today is to continue stripping that god-awful wallpaper. In the past—in this house and in West Chester—you always scraped the old wallpaper off all of the walls before starting to hang the new paper. That is the logical way to proceed. But not this time. The other day you grew so bored with scraping that you started hanging the new paper, a serene (and appropriate) Victorian array of roses, on the wall on which you had removed all the old paper. You expect you will finish scraping today. You have one long wall and a small portion of another to go. Then you will have only one set of sponges and buckets to contend with and one set of tools.

  Tools. You gaze for a moment at the sponges and scrapers and box cutters and pause on the word. Each tool has a purpose.

  As did that ax that was left for you. It was meant to batter down that door in the basement.

  And that would suggest that the crowbar and the pearl-handled knife have specific functions, too. They’ve been provided to you for a reason. Unfortunately, you see only the barest wisps of that reason; it stretches away from you like the delicate, silken threads of cirrus you gazed upon too many times to count from the flight deck.

  You have just steeled yourself to begin scraping for the day when you breathe in through your nose and there it is: the aroma of lake water and jet fuel. (The smell of the jet fuel actually makes you a little nauseous. This is new. You find this reality disconcerting.) You turn, and there on the dining room rug is little Ashley with her Dora the Explorer backpack, sitting with her legs curled up on the carpet underneath her. She looks at you with her big eyes and her damp hair, and you study her wet face. It’s not all lake water that is on her cheeks, you realize. You know from the redness of her eyes that she is crying, and her cheeks are moist with her tears.

  And so you sit on the floor beside her, your own knees a little creaky.

  “Hello, Ashley.”

  She sniffles and folds herself around that backpack. She looks down, and you can no longer see her eyes and her face, just the way her sodden hair is plastered to the top of her head.

  “Why are you crying, sweetie?”

  The second the words are out there, you regret the question. Why wouldn’t she be crying? She simply shakes her head obstinately and ignores your inquiry. Which is when the more practical question comes to you.

  “Sweetie,” you begin, and the second time you use this particular term of endearment, it dawns on you that this is a name you use often with Hallie and Garnet. “Is there something I can do?”

  She deserves friends. Do what it takes.

  Again, she offers you only a sad, stubborn twist of her head.

  “Are you lonely?”

  Slowly she meets your eyes. She nods almost imperceptibly. You recall your conversation with her father: You had offered to introduce this poor child to your own wonderful girls. You need to follow through with that idea of yours. You need to find Ashley playmates. This is something tangible you can do.

  “I know you’ve seen Hallie and Garnet,” you tell her, and you reach behind you for the roll of paper towels on the floor. You hand one to the girl so she can blow her nose and wipe her eyes. “How do I introduce you to them? Any idea there?”

  She presses the paper towel flat against her face for a moment and chokes back a small sob. Then she pulls it away and looks more composed. “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Tell me: Have my girls seen you?”

  “Sort of. But not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “I don’t think they can.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re breathers.”

  “Breathers?”

  “You know. Like you.”

  “But I can see you. I can hear you.”

  She shrugs.

  “Well, then,” you say in your most gentle, paternal voice. “We have a problem. And problems need solutions. Right?”

  She turns from you and gazes out the dining room window. You follow her eyes and see in the clear sky high over the meadow a plume from an airplane. Really, planes are everywhere. Just … everywhere. When you turn back to Ashley, she is gone. Reflexively you pat the carpet where she was sitting, and it is still damp with lake water. All that remains is the paper towel, which you pick up. It, too, is wet, and it has the rank odor of jet fuel. So, you wad it into a ball and push yourself to your feet. You know the solution to the problem and you know you have the tools. Or, to be precise, the tool. But you have no intention of taking the knife that the Dunmores left you and butchering either Hallie or Garnet so Ashley Stearns can have a playmate.

  Wouldn’t that be asking too much of you—of anyone? One would think so. Yes. That is indeed what one would think.

  Emily wasn’t about to call Reseda because she hadn’t the slightest idea what she would say. She honestly wasn’t sure whether she should be indignant that this woman had kissed her on Sunday night—certainly she would be if a man had done such a thing—or whether she needed to say simply that she wasn’t interested in her in that sort of way. She loved her husband and wanted only to be friends. The last thing she needed to add to her life was some sort of harmless, playful dalliance with Reseda. Because in the end it wouldn’t be harmless. These things never were.

  Besides, she didn’t believe that Reseda actually had designs on her. Emily couldn’t decide what the kiss had meant—if, in fact, it had meant anything.

  She realized she had been sitting at her desk, daydreaming, for twenty minutes. Somehow it had become ten-fifteen in the morning. She was supposed to be in Franconia for a real estate closing at eleven. Quickly she rose and gathered the file on the property, a relatively new gray Colonial with four bedrooms and a pond, and reached for her coat behind the door. In the hallway on her way out, she ran into John Hardin.

  “Emily,” he said, “your girls are a dream. Clary and Sage just adored them. I think they’re going to become the granddaughters Sage still doesn’t have!”

  She nodded. She had thought so much about that Sunday night kiss that she had completely forgotten how the seniors had swarmed on her children the night before then. Somehow, that part of the weekend seemed a long, long time ago.