The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Reseda?” Sage asked, when the younger woman remained on her feet. “Going to join us for our … our picnic?”

  “I’m fine,” Reseda answered simply, but Garnet detected a slight sharpness to her tone. She noticed that Anise was staring intently at her, the woman’s face curious and probing.

  “What have you shown the girls so far?” Anise asked.

  Reseda motioned vaguely at the long columns of tables behind her.

  “The rosemary and the calandrinia?”

  “No. That felt rather premature to me. Remember, all we discussed was showing the girls some plants. We did not discuss a naming ceremony.”

  “Not a ceremony. Just a …”

  “A chance to eat finger sandwiches and learn our new nicknames,” Sage chirped agreeably, cutting Anise off, clearly desirous of easing the tension that seemed to exist between the two women. “All right then, Anise, do you want to begin?”

  The women who had sat down only a moment ago all rose up to their full heights, Clary rubbing the small of her back but still grinning expectantly. Her eyes sparkled, and she and Sage held out their hands, and Garnet realized that she and Hallie were each supposed to take one. And so they did, Hallie taking Clary’s and Garnet grasping Sage’s slightly gnarled but soft fingers. Then Anise led them down an aisle between the tables from one end of the long greenhouse to the other. Reseda followed, but Garnet sensed it was only grudgingly. Finally they stopped almost at the farthest wall of glass, and Anise motioned toward a pair of pots beneath grow lights at the edge of the table. One held an herb and one a flower with a great fan of red petals. “Do you recognize either of them?” she asked.

  Garnet looked at her sister. Hallie shrugged, as unsure of what the plants were as she was. “No,” Garnet answered simply.

  “Well, we have a lot to learn then, don’t we?” Anise said, and there was a waft of judgment in the remark. “This is rosemary. Smell it. Inhale the aroma. Lovely, isn’t it? It looks like a little evergreen. And this is calandrinia. Feel the dirt it’s in: sand, peat moss, and loam. And the flower—this one in particular—has a coloring that reminds me a little of your hair, Garnet. Clary here was the first person in this area to grow it. She brought the seeds back from Chile.”

  Anise used her thumbs to push her own untamed hair back behind her ears. “Hallie,” she said, bending over with her hands on her knees so she was face-to-face with the girl, “I appreciate the idea that you are named for your grandmother. It was such a lovely gesture on your mother and father’s part. I like genealogical legacies. And Garnet, I love the idea that you are named for that magnificent hair of yours. That was so creative of your parents and, at the time, so perfect.”

  Garnet nodded and waited for more, well aware that this was a preamble to … something.

  “But,” Anise went on, “when we’re together, I think we would all like to call you Cali—short for calandrinia—instead of Garnet. You are, like this flower, a little mysterious, and you clearly have a depth that is both grand and uncommon. And Hallie, how would you like to be Rosemary? You are fragrant and proud and make the world a little more savory.”

  “But why?” Hallie asked. “Why these new names?”

  “See what I mean? Already you are living up to the name. And the answer is simple: They’re terms of endearment. Of affection. That’s all. Many of us here in Bethel have taken names of interesting herbs and remarkable plants. It shows we’re … friends. You may have noticed. And we want you two girls to be our friends.”

  Garnet didn’t mind having a nickname, though a part of her wished that she had been given Rosemary and her sister Cali. She had to hope it would grow on her. And it sounded like only her mom’s women friends were going to be using it anyway. She’d still be Garnet at school. Nevertheless, she wondered what Mom would think of this. Would her feelings be hurt? Would she feel it was some sort of intrusion into the family? Almost as if Reseda could read her mind, the woman knelt before her and said, “In time, your mother will be very happy with your names. Your father, too. And here is something that might make you feel a little more comfortable with this change. When your mother is with us, she is going to be called Verbena. Verbena is all about courage and friendship. Loyalty. It suits your mother.” She brushed a strand of her own lustrous hair off her forehead.

  “Thank you, Reseda,” Anise said, but her voice was strangely curt. “I wasn’t planning on going into that much detail today.”

  “And I wasn’t anticipating a naming ceremony.”

  “Not a ceremony—just a preview. But I can’t tell you how much it pleases me that even around you I can be a little unpredictable,” she said. Then she reached for the leather shoulder bag that she had placed on the ground where they had been sitting and announced, “Girls, I have a present for each of you.”

  “More jewelry?” Hallie asked.

  Anise glanced at their wrists, noticing the bracelets for the first time.

  “I can be unpredictable, too,” Reseda said, a wisp of a smile on her face.

  But Anise only nodded agreeably and reached into the bag. “Do you two like to read?” she asked, and Garnet knew instantly that, instead of presents, they were both about to get homework.

  Chapter Eleven

  You contemplate all the hours you sat attentive and alert on the flight deck, and how you never grew less enamored of the niveous white magnificence of clouds as you gazed down at them from thirty or thirty-five thousand feet. Their exquisite polar flatness: fields of pillowy snow that stretched to the horizon. As the shadow of your plane would pass over them, you would imagine you were gazing down on an arctic, alabaster plain, and in your mind you could see yourself crossing them alone in a hooded parka and boots. (You wonder now: Why were you always a solitary man in this daydream?) If you were flying at the right time of the day and the sun was in the right spot, the vista would be reduced to a splendid bicolor world: albino white and amethyst blue.

  And then there was that moment when you would skim across the surface of the great woolpack before starting to descend underneath it, and your plane would feel more like a submarine than a jet. It was like going underwater—deep underwater—right down to the darkness that abruptly would enfold the aircraft once you were inside the clouds. One minute the sky would be blue and the flight deck bright, and the next the world outside would be gray soup and the flight deck dim.

  You know the technical names for clouds as well as a meteorologist, just as you know the federal aviation definitions for ice: Glaze. Inter-cycle. Known or observed. Mixed. Residual. Runback. Rime. You have always loved the alliteration that marks those last three, the poetry of the memorized cadence. And you can do the same thing with clouds. You know the names of the ones that grow in the low elevations and the ones that exist in much higher skies. Even now, sitting in the backseat of the Volvo as Emily and John Hardin drive you home from the hospital, you can see perfectly in your mind the leaden sheets of gray stratus as the nose of your plane would start to nudge through them; the fleece of the cumulus, bright and cheerful when lit by the sun, dark and shadowy when not; the ominous towers and anvil plumes of the cumulonimbus you would steer your plane around when the traffic and the tower permitted. You close your eyes and see once again the gauzy layers of cirrus, their wisps strangely erotic, or their cousins, the rippling cirrocumulus. (Some people call these clouds a mackerel sky, but a flight instructor you liked very much called it a lake sky because it reminded him of the days he would spend with his own father fishing.) You see the rain on the flight deck windows and feel the bump as you break the plane of a layer of dark nimbostratus.

  And now you open your eyes and the clouds disappear and you stare at the back of John Hardin’s head. It is an indication of the toll your breakdown is having on Emily that she needed cavalry help to bring you home from the hospital. It is a sign of how ill they think you are that they have squirreled you into the backseat. John has pulled the passenger seat so far forward that his knees are pre
ssed against the glove compartment, though you have told him over and over you are fine. You have been telling people precisely this all morning long. I am fine. Fine. Just fine.

  You still have in your mouth the taste of the oatmeal cookies that John Hardin handed you when you first climbed into the backseat. Immediately you ate two. Anise had baked them. Of course. You are aware of raisins and cinnamon and a bitter spice you don’t recognize. The truth is, you were never an especially creative cook, and you don’t recognize very many spices and seasonings.

  There is midday sun coming in through the car window, and you stare up into it. Into a cloudless sky. Apparently a psychiatrist—not your psychiatrist, not Michael Richmond—is going to come visit you tomorrow afternoon. Examine you. At your house. Imagine, a psychiatrist making house calls. You have no idea what to make of that, none at all. But she’s a friend of John’s and, like all of John’s friends, seems to want to help you. To help you and Emily and your girls.

  You run your tongue between your teeth and your gums. You decide that you don’t honestly understand the appeal of Anise’s cooking. She seems to be a hit-and-miss baker. Of course, it may simply be that you will never be interested in vegan cooking and vegan desserts, and apparently everything the woman cooks is vegan. Or, maybe, she really isn’t especially talented in the kitchen. Maybe people abide her cuisine simply because they like her. Even those oatmeal cookies you just polished off have left a sour, vinegary aftertaste that seems to smother the cinnamon.

  “Chip?”

  You face forward and see that John is speaking to you.

  “The hospital pharmacy gave us a couple pills for pain. You may not need them, but we have them.”

  Us. We. “Thank you.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I am fine.” Fine. Just fine.

  “Well, if you need something more, Clary gave me a tincture that I can assure you works wonders.”

  “A tincture.”

  “Her own little potion. Skullcap and willow bark. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me when my knees get cranky after a day skiing or hiking.” He reaches into his front blazer pocket and removes a small brown bottle the length of a finger. It has an eyedropper for a lid.

  “Thank you.”

  Now it seems to be Emily’s turn: “Chip?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Is there anything special you would like from the grocery store? We can stop before heading up the hill.”

  “No, I’m good.” I am fine.

  “Okay.”

  You want to ask about the twins. You want to ask Emily what they believe happened last night and what they think of you now, but you won’t with John Hardin present. You can’t. You will wait until you and your wife are alone. But they are smart girls. They know something has happened. Something has happened to you. You have—choose an expression—gone off the rails. Left the reservation. Gone broken arrow.

  But do they know that, for whatever the reason, you can’t be trusted?

  For the briefest of moments you recall the will—the monumental determination—it took to press the knife into your abdomen, and the agony that finally forced you to stop. You wince, but neither John nor Emily notices.

  You didn’t see Ethan or Ashley or Sandra last night in the hospital. You were alone with the distant stars that made up your room. But you have a feeling they will be waiting for you tonight.

  Chip went upstairs to shower, and John climbed from the station wagon into his immaculate green sedan and drove back to their office in Littleton. The girls were with Reseda somewhere. And so Emily found herself alone in the kitchen, staring out the window over the sink at the greenhouse and, beyond it, at the meadow and the edge of the woods. She closed her eyes and fought back the tears. She tried to push from her mind her memories of last night or, even more recently, the image of her husband in the rearview mirror of the car that morning, chewing cookies without evident pleasure: He was eating them, it seemed, only because John had offered them. He insisted he was fine, but he wasn’t. The Chip Linton she lived with now was a frightening doppelgänger for her husband. The fellow was a mere husk of the man she had married. It wasn’t merely that this new catatonia was different from the walking somnambulance that had marked the months after the crash: This one was both the result of whatever tranquilizers he’d been given last night at the hospital and the reality that the self-loathing he’d experienced after the failed ditching of Flight 1611 paled compared to the self-hatred he was experiencing now. Whatever had happened to him last night—whatever he had done—had left him staggered: He’d slouched as they walked to the car in the hospital parking lot this morning, unshaven and his hair badly combed, like one of the murmuring homeless men Emily had seen on the streets of Philadelphia. She recalled something he had said to her last night in the emergency room: It was something nonsensical about the pit of despair that awaited him, and how it would be a relief to be walled up inside it.

  It all left her wondering: What had been happening to him since they arrived here in the White Mountains? What had she been missing over the last month and a half? What had been occurring at the house while she’d been at work and the girls had been at school? She felt she had been a derelict wife, and she considered if this was, in some way, her fault. Had she been inattentive? So it seemed. Michael Richmond had been unable to reassure her that it was safe to leave Chip home alone. She wasn’t certain it was even safe to leave him alone with the girls. It wasn’t that he might harm them—though the idea had now entered her mind, and she knew as a mother it was going to lodge there—it was that he might harm himself when they were present.

  She remembered something John had said to her that morning, before they picked up her husband. “This will all seem less surreal as the days pass,” the older lawyer had told her. “I mean that, Emily. Everything’s different now, nothing will ever be the same. But eventually you’ll find a new normalcy. We all do.”

  She thought about this. She saw her experience as unique—horrific and peculiar to herself. But he’d seemed to be viewing it as a rite of passage. Unpredictable and certainly unanticipated, but in some way universal. “You make it sound like you went through something like this,” she had said, staring straight ahead at the entry ramp to the interstate and the pine trees now clean of snow.

  “No, of course not.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But my mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt. Someone must have told you that by now.”

  “No. Right now I am far more desirous of finding the healing in an orange prescription vial.”

  “I imagine Clary or Anise has something much better for you: more effective and safer,” he’d said, smiling, his eyes a little knowing and wide.

  She listened to the water running in the shower above her and turned her face toward the spring sun. She breathed in deeply through her nose, the air whistling ever so slightly, and tried to focus on nothing but the warmth on her face.

  Hallie hadn’t planned on going to the basement. She hadn’t even planned on getting out of bed. But she awoke in the night and thought she heard noises downstairs in the kitchen and presumed that her parents were sitting at the table and talking. She knew her mom was really worried about Dad. Then she decided that Garnet must be down there, too; it was why, in the hazy logic of someone awoken from a deep sleep, she hadn’t peeked into Garnet’s room before heading downstairs. But the kitchen was completely empty. The overhead lights were on, but probably because her mom had left them on by mistake before going upstairs to bed herself. The digital clock on the stove read 12:15.

  She realized she was a little scared to be downstairs alone at night and was about to scamper back up the two flights of stairs to her own bed when, for the briefest of seconds, she heard a voice again—a single voice this time—and understood it was coming from t
he basement. The door was ajar, and a light was on down there as well. And so she stood for a long moment at the top of the stairs, listening carefully, aware because of the cold drifting up from the cellar that she hadn’t bothered to put on her slippers. Now she regretted that: Her toes were cold. She ran her fingers over her bracelet, which she had begun to view as a good-luck charm. That afternoon Anise had said she would like her second present even more, but the truth was that she loved this bracelet much better. The second gift was a very old book about plants and what Anise called natural medicine. According to Anise, it had belonged to another herbalist a long time ago. Then Anise had given her sister an even fatter book titled The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs—again, apparently, a favorite of an herbalist who had passed away.

  Finally, when Hallie was just about to shut the basement door and race upstairs, she heard someone mumbling and she was sure it was her sister.

  “Garnet?” she called into the basement. “Is that you?”

  But no one responded, and so she tiptoed onto the top step, the wood coarse against her bare feet, and peered underneath the banister. Sure enough, there was Garnet, all alone, standing in the shadows before the remnants of the wooden door that their father had destroyed last week. She was ankle deep in the coal and staring into the black maw of the tiny room that their father had found behind that door.

  “Garnet,” she said again, her voice reduced by incredulity to a stage whisper. “What are you doing down there?”

  The girl looked up at her, blinked, and then rubbed at her eyes. She looked down at her feet and seemed to realize for the first time the grotesque mess in which she was standing. She jumped away from it, landing in the moist dirt of the floor, which was a marginal improvement at best. Hallie understood that her sister had just—as one of their teachers back in West Chester once put it, infuriating their mom—zoned out. She had gone into one of her trances and lost herself somewhere inside her head. Hallie feared that it might have been a full seizure, and the fact that she was having a second one so close on the heels of another alarmed her. Garnet had never before had two in a week. Moreover, until the other night, it had been a long while since she had had even one.