The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  Or is this just the morphine or whatever painkiller they’re giving you? Are you being melodramatic, trying to shift blame? It’s a house. It’s not alive. Actually, it’s a place that you are painstakingly making your own. You know people in Pennsylvania who would kill for a house just like this. The truth is, you are the problem. Not the house.

  You have known all along that your future began to diminish last summer, on August 11. That was when the possibilities began to narrow. And now? Look at the way you are giving sentience and breath to bricks and mortar. You are becoming estranged from the world of the sane. You deserve nothing, and you have nothing.

  You contemplate going home tomorrow and realize that you are afraid. The idea of being alone with your children terrifies you. What might you do when they climb off the school bus tomorrow afternoon—or the day after, or the day after that—while Emily is at work? Everyone fears you will hurt yourself. That should be the least of their concerns. Still, you find the notion of suicide growing real in your mind. You killed thirty-nine people back in August and nearly a fortieth this evening. You know this has to end. You tried to end it this evening, but wouldn’t your death at your own hands scar your sweet girls even more? Of course it would. And look at the emotional wounds you have inflicted upon them already. Or would your death be a relief for everyone? In the long run, might it save your children’s lives? Emily could take the girls back to Pennsylvania. Or raise them right here in Bethel with the help of Reseda and Holly and Anise. With John and Clary, with Peyton and Sage. Everyone here adores your daughters. They adore Emily. They say it takes a village to raise a child; well, this village loves your girls. So be it.

  But you love them, too. You love Emily.

  You stare at the horizontal blinds in the window and try to focus. A thought: You fly the plane until, pure and simple, you can’t. Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. It’s what you do. It’s all about concentration.

  Yes, tomorrow you will go home. You will try to stay away from the basement. You will try not to curl into a ball in the bone-ridden dirt in your own little pit of despair.

  Outside your hospital room, you hear the nurse with the goatee laughing gently with another of the nurses, the stout woman with the button mushroom for a nose. She seemed very kind. They all seem very kind.

  Yes, yes, the poor, dead Ashley Stearns does deserve friends. She does. But you can’t do what it takes. You won’t.

  Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Fly the plane until you can’t.

  You close your eyes against the stars in your hospital room, and eventually you fall back to sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  In the morning, John Hardin came to the house. The sun was up, and it was apparent that the last of the snow in the yard would be gone by lunchtime. There would still be snow in the woods, and a small, crunchy, knee-high ridge along the north wall of the carriage barn was likely to remain for at least a couple more days. And certainly more snow would fall at the end of March and into April. But the morning felt like spring when Emily opened the front door around seven-thirty. Holly and the twins were still asleep, but Reseda was upstairs showering. Emily had been so exhausted when she returned from the hospital that she hadn’t bothered to climb into her nightgown and had instead simply collapsed on her bed in her clothes and pulled the quilt over her. She had somehow staggered to her feet when the alarm went off, and she had only set the alarm because she was a mother of ten-year-old girls who were going to need her rather badly when they awoke.

  “Good morning,” John said, his voice as cheerful as ever. She noticed that he was dressed more formally than usual. He was wearing a necktie with his tweed coat, and penny loafers instead of his usual L.L.Bean duck boots. She was impressed by how well rested he seemed; she hadn’t glanced at herself in the mirror when she made her way from the bedroom to the kitchen, and so she presumed that she looked terrible—tired and messy and not even clean. But simply having made it awake and vertical seemed a monumental accomplishment at the moment—or, perhaps, a testimony to whatever antidepressant Michael Richmond had given her.

  “Hi, John,” she whispered, ushering him into the hallway and then into the kitchen. “The girls and Holly are still sound asleep in the living room.”

  He hunched his shoulders and nodded, as if making his body a little smaller would make him a little quieter. He sat down at the kitchen table in the seat nearest the counter with the coffeemaker as she started to brew a pot. “Giving the girls a day off from school?” he asked very quietly, enunciating each word with care. “I think that is an excellent plan.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was a plan. It’s just what’s happening.”

  “Well, I hope you weren’t intending on coming into the office today.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I presume you don’t mind.”

  “I would have sent you home the moment I heard you coming up the stairs. Your girls need you today. Chip needs you. What time are you getting him?”

  “I thought I would call the hospital in a few minutes and see what’s going on. But I guess I was hoping he would be back here by lunchtime or so.”

  “I want him to have the best care available,” John said. “It’s why I’ve come by. We both know in our hearts he didn’t fall on that knife.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed at her temples. She wanted this—whatever this was—to be a one-time aberration. She wanted Chip to come home and be fine and this latest phase in their nightmare to be behind them. “What do you have in mind?” she asked finally. “Is there a particular doctor or psychiatrist you would recommend?”

  “I know Dr. Richmond spoke to him for a couple minutes last night—”

  “Michael is his psychiatrist here in New Hampshire,” she told him. “They have a relationship. It wasn’t like he just dropped by the hospital.”

  “I understand. Not a problem at all. But there’s another doctor I would love him to see, too. Her name is Valerian Wainscott, and you can have absolute faith in her. She’s very, very good—an excellent therapist.” He chuckled and shook his head slightly. “I remember watching her grow up.”

  “Any special reason you want Chip to see her?”

  “Well, Valerian has a lot of experience with post-traumatic stress disorder. She works at the state psychiatric hospital two days a week,” he explained. “Tell me: Has Chip been acting particularly odd lately—you know, before last night?”

  “You mean more than the flashbacks?”

  “And, I suppose, a measure of guilt and depression.”

  She watched the coffee drip into the glass pot and breathed in the aroma. “Yes. He has been a different person since the crash—which is to be expected.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “He …” She floundered for a moment, trying to find the right words. It had been much easier talking to the psychiatrist around midnight, when she was at once exhausted and in shock. When she resumed, she said, “As I told Michael last night, he went a little nuts on this door in the basement. It was just the old coal chute. But it was nailed shut, and he took an ax to it.”

  “It was a violent act?”

  “An act with an ax usually is.”

  “I see your point.”

  “And I think he was more disturbed than I was by Tansy Dunmore’s paranoia. At first I was pretty shaken—more than Chip. But I guess I got over it.” The night before she had told John and Clary that the knife Chip had brought to the basement was one of the items Tansy had left hidden in the house. “He was a little obsessed by it.”

  “Her paranoia.”

  “Yes.”

  John shook his head ruefully. “She was a very ill woman toward the end.”

  “So I gather.”

  “And Chip’s therapist knew about all this?”

  “Michael? Oh, absolutely.”

  “Good,” he said, but the word caught just the tiniest bit in his throat. Then he smiled. “Tell me: How are the world’s most adorable twins?”

 
Before Emily could answer, Reseda appeared in the kitchen entrance from the dining room, a towel on her head like a turban. “They’re fine, John,” she told him. “I just peered into the living room, and they’re still sound asleep.”

  “Reseda, God bless you,” John said, rising from his chair, a small eddy of laughter in his voice. “Well, I think that coffee is just about ready. May I help myself, Emily?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You were suggesting Valerian to Emily?” Reseda asked him.

  “I was, I was. Doesn’t this coffee smell heavenly? Ladies, may I pour? Reseda?”

  “Thank you, John,” Reseda said, “but I think I’ll have tea.”

  “Of course you will,” he murmured, “of course. You know, Emily, on the bright side, at least you’re here in Bethel right now and not in West Chester. I don’t know what sorts of friends or support group you had back there, but here you have a whole big family waiting to care for you and those two precious children of yours. Imagine: You had Reseda and Holly staying the night. You have Anise’s magical cooking in your refrigerator. And you have people like my own lovely bride and Sage and Peyton at your disposal.”

  “And you, John,” she said, taking the mug of coffee he was handing her. “Really, I’m so lucky to have you, too. You’re such a gift.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Some folks would say I’m more of a curse. Wouldn’t you agree, Reseda?” Her friend raised her eyebrows but otherwise didn’t respond. “But, yes, I do try. We all try here in Bethel.” He paused for a moment and then said with great earnestness, “It’s a bit like all of you have come home to a big family, don’t you think? It must feel a bit like coming home.”

  Garnet had seen greenhouses as large as this one, but they had all been commercial nurseries—not someone’s personal greenhouse. There had been a nursery like this not too far from where they lived in Pennsylvania, and two or three times she and Hallie had gone there with their mother, and Garnet recalled trying (and failing) to convince Mom to buy one of the stone gargoyles or garden trolls the place sold. But she had never been inside a greenhouse this large in someone’s backyard—or one that had grow lights on stands above many of the tables of plants. It struck her as longer than any of the ones she had seen from the roads as they drove between the highway and their new home. It belonged to Sage Messner, the older woman she and her sister had met at Mr. and Mrs. Hardin’s house a couple of nights ago. Saturday.

  It was a little hard to believe that Saturday night was only a couple of nights ago. It was Tuesday morning, but in some ways Saturday night felt as far away as when her family had lived back in West Chester. Maybe it even felt as far away as before her dad’s plane had crashed in the lake. She and Hallie hadn’t been expected to go to school today, and now their mom was off meeting with doctors and bringing their dad home from the hospital, and Reseda had taken her sister and her here to Sage Messner’s to see the greenhouse. Sage and Clary had been fussing over her and Hallie for over an hour, giving them lemonade with chlorophyll—the greenest beverage she had ever seen in her life, but it turned out to be pretty good—and chocolate brownies. Then Sage had shown them the guest bedrooms in the house, where she told them they could stay whenever they wanted. When she had shared the bedrooms with them, it was like when Mom and Dad had taken them last summer to Mount Vernon in Virginia, where George Washington had lived, and they had been shown his bedroom: Sage’s enthusiasm was just about off-the-charts crazy as she went on and on about some amazing herbalist who had lived in the house before her. Garnet had half-expected the bedroom doorway to have a red velvet rope in front of it. Consequently, she had been a little relieved when Reseda had taken just her and her sister out here to the greenhouse, leaving Sage in the kitchen to make them yet another snack.

  “And this is memoria,” Reseda was saying, running the tips of her fingers gently along the purplish leaves of the plant. The memoria was about five inches high, the leaves the size of her thumb and roughly the shape of the spade on a playing card. There were seven of the plants side by side in small terra-cotta vases.

  “Feel the leaves,” she added, and so Garnet did and then Hallie followed.

  “It feels like puppy fur,” Hallie said, and Garnet thought this was the perfect description. Indeed, there was a light down on the leaves that felt like it should have been the coat on a cute little animal, not a plant. Garnet was wearing a small silver bracelet that resembled ivy around her wrist—Reseda had given it to her a few minutes ago—and Garnet noticed it once more when she gazed down at her fingertips against the memoria. She loved the bracelet as much as she had loved any jewelry she’d ever been given—even more, she realized, than the unicorn choker her parents had gotten her at Disney World just about two years ago now. It felt like a more adult piece of jewelry. Hallie had been given a bracelet, too, also silver, though the design on hers looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Garnet could tell that Hallie appreciated her gift as well.

  “What do you do with it?” Garnet asked Reseda, referring to the memoria.

  “It’s a healing herb. Medicinal.”

  “What does it cure?” her sister wondered.

  Reseda smiled at the two of them. She was wearing a suede duster, unbuttoned and open, that fell below her knees and blue jeans that clung to her legs. She really didn’t need the coat because the greenhouse was heated and there were steamers hard at work in two of the corners. The glass there had filmed over with droplets of water. But it wasn’t a very heavy jacket, and she looked elegant in it: Garnet liked the way it billowed around her like a sail as she walked. “Bad dreams,” she said simply and then, after a moment, added, “And bad memories.” Then she walked beside the long table and paused at another plant, beckoning for the twins to follow. “This one is despairium,” she said, and for a second Garnet presumed the long tendrils were dead because they were as black as the moldering coal that sat in a dank corner of their basement. But apparently they weren’t. “I don’t want you to touch it,” Reseda said. “But have you ever felt shrimp? The stems here feel just like cooked shrimp, except they leave a resin on your skin that is a bit like poison ivy. Only worse. It lasts considerably longer. That’s why you shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands.”

  “Then why does Mrs. Messner grow it?” Hallie asked.

  “If you know how to harvest a pinch and steep it in tea—with a little honey and a little lemon—it can give a person a new perspective on life. It can cause a person to see things, well, differently. And some of us like to bake with it. Anise, for example, uses it.”

  “Anise is always baking us stuff.”

  “Is she now?”

  “Uh-huh. She even labels the treats. Puts our names on them.”

  Reseda nodded, a little pensive. “She just arrived.”

  “You mean here at Mrs. Messner’s?”

  “That’s right.” Garnet decided Reseda must have amazing hearing, because she herself hadn’t heard a car pull into the driveway.

  “So, this greenhouse isn’t just for Mrs. Messner?” Hallie asked.

  Garnet was glad her sister had asked this. It was beginning to dawn on her, too, that this was a sort of communal nursery. She had a feeling that Mrs. Messner wasn’t the only one who grew plants here.

  “That’s right,” Reseda said. “Some of us have our own greenhouses, but not everyone. Holly, for instance, keeps her plants here. And none of us has a greenhouse quite this large. So, yes, this one is a sort of shared space. We all help tend the plants here. And you must call Mrs. Messner Sage. I know she’d prefer that.” She brought the girls slowly up and down the long rows of tables, and occasionally Garnet recognized the name of an herb or a flower, but more often it was a plant that she had never heard of before. Some looked a little frightening, even when their names were rather comforting, such as the hoja santa: The leaves were the size of her face, and she imagined being smothered by one. Her favorite names, she decided? Elderberry. Fenugreek. False unicorn. One corner of the greenhous
e had a series of raised dirt beds instead of tables, and the magic here, according to Reseda, was beneath the soil. Eventually someone would pull up many of the roots that mattered, but in some cases—such as the dangerously poisonous mandrake—only select, very experienced gardeners would be allowed to handle the harvest.

  “Did the woman who lived in this house before Sage share the greenhouse, too?” Garnet asked.

  “She did. And she actually bred some of these plants. Some she brought from other parts of the world, but others she created herself—like this rather potent despairium.”

  Just then the greenhouse door opened, and Sage entered with a plate of small tea sandwiches in her hands, and Anise and Clary beside her. Garnet decided she was right about Reseda’s hearing: She had never heard Anise’s pickup pull in or the truck doors slam shut. The sandwiches were made with watercress and chives and cream cheese, and some also had cucumber. The white bread was almost as thin as a cracker, and Garnet thought they were absolutely delicious.

  “Is the watercress from this greenhouse?” Hallie asked, after Sage had listed for them the ingredients.

  “It is, absolutely,” Sage told her, and she surprised Garnet by putting the tray of sandwiches on one of the long tables with plants and sitting down on the dirt floor of the greenhouse. Anise and Clary, despite their ages, sat on the ground, too, and Clary patted the earth, signaling Hallie and her to join them. Garnet looked at her sister and saw that the girl was already sitting down, so she did as well.