“Really, thank you for letting me dive into one,” she says. “I didn’t plan on attacking the cupcakes like this, but I realized when I got here that I was completely, totally famished. And let’s face it: Buttercream frosting is irresistible—if I say so myself.”
Cupcake crazy. Attacking the cupcakes like this. There is something almost taunting about her terminology. As if she knows what you have been asked to do by the dead. But then again, perhaps you are reading more into her remarks than really is there. Maybe she is merely linguistically clumsy. Isn’t it possible you are hearing things in this conversation that she honestly hadn’t meant as gibes? You recall Reseda’s offhand remark about the geese when you were in her office last week. The truth is, Valerian really did attack that cupcake just now. She certainly seemed ravenous.
“I wish I had brought some of the ones I decorated for the kids. Sprinkles and jimmies and faces made out of M&M’s. Trust me: Those bad boys were seriously tricked out.”
“I’ll bet they were. I’ve seen my share of cupcakes at elementary school birthday parties.”
“With twins? I’ll bet you have.”
The two of you then finish your cupcakes in a strangely companionable silence. You recall that this woman works a few days a week at the state psychiatric hospital. She probably has lots of experience with patients who don’t say very much. “So,” she says finally, “shall we get down to business?”
“Why not?”
“Indeed, why not? Do you understand why I’m here, Chip?”
“I do.”
“Good. That’s a start.” She wipes her hands on a paper napkin and daubs at her lips. Her demeanor visibly changes as she pulls a pad and a clipboard and a fountain pen from that bag.
“I don’t see a lot of people using fountain pens these days.”
“That’s because you’ve spent so much of your time in the air. You want to see a mess? Bring one of these on a plane. You have not seen a mess until you’ve seen a fountain pen explode at ten thousand feet.”
“Probably not,” you tell her, marveling at the way she can make everything sound vaguely disturbing. Explode. Mess. Ten thousand feet. Some people are capable of making innocuous sentences sound sexual—they can twist everything into a double entendre. Valerian seems to have a similar, perhaps inadvertent, talent when it comes to breathing life into your own particular subconscious fiends.
She motions with both hands at the room in which you are sitting and out the window at the carriage barn and the greenhouse and the sloping meadows beyond it, and continues, “Okay, then. How are you doing here? How are your neighbors? They treating you well? Tell me honestly.”
“They are. Honestly.” You wonder: Did your repeating the word honestly sound like you were being flip? And if it did, should you care? You wonder why this woman’s opinion should matter more than Dr. Richmond’s. Again, you experience a wave of misgiving. What do these women whose names belong in a garden want from you? Do they want anything, anything at all? But Valerian simply nods. She doesn’t seem to find your response in any way impolite. She simply asks whom you have met and where, and what sorts of plans you have for the house. She asks, parent to parent, what you think of the school system here in this secluded corner of the White Mountains, since of course she has a girl only three grades behind Hallie and Garnet. Finally she gets around to the issue that matters most to Emily—the reason Valerian is here. She glances ever so slightly at your stomach, barely moving her head. It’s all done with her eyes.
“Tell me about the other night,” she asks.
“Well, without wanting to be glib, there are at least two ‘other nights’ that didn’t end well. There was the night when the girls had a friend over for dinner and a playdate and I wound up in the hospital. And then there was last night, when Garnet found a human skull and jawbone in the basement. Which?”
“Let’s start with the night of the playdate. What do you recall of your accident?”
You think about this. She said accident without a trace of sarcasm. Good for her. And so you tell her, as you have told others, about having Molly over for dinner. How you and Emily asked Molly a lot of questions about what she liked about the school and what she didn’t. She seemed like a good kid. A nice kid. Then you pause, recalling where everyone sat around the table in the dining room. There once again is Molly’s face, her elbow on the table and a fork balanced on the ends of her fingers. Behind her, on the wall, is one of those menacing sunflowers.
“I’m sure she is a good kid,” Valerian agrees, and the sound of her voice brings you back. “Go on.”
And so you do. “I felt we were running out of hot water after we ate,” you hear yourself saying, “which didn’t make any sense. One extra set of dishes? Oh, please. Besides, we were just putting the plates in the dishwasher.”
“What did you have for dinner?”
“It was all very easy. Mexican food. Rice. Beans.”
“Where were the girls?”
“By then they were out in the greenhouse. Hallie and Garnet view it as their playhouse.”
“A waste,” she says, and you can’t decide if she is kidding.
“They’ve had their dolls out there ever since we arrived.”
“Well, they’ll outgrow that soon enough,” she adds, as if she is trying to reassure you. “So, you and your wife were washing the dishes in the kitchen.”
“Yes. And the water felt lukewarm to me,” you explain, and then you tell her about the pilot light and going downstairs with the knife in your hands, and how you must have fallen down the wooden steps. You add that everything after that is now a bit of a fog. You shrug, hoping the motion does not appear theatrical.
“Did you hear Emily calling for you?”
“Not for a long while. Emily thinks that maybe I knocked my head and was unconscious for a few minutes. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, when I did hear her, I started back up the stairs, and the next thing I know, I’m in the kitchen and I’m covered in blood.”
“With the knife inside you.”
“Yes.”
“You never reached the pilot light.”
“I don’t believe so.”
“But you didn’t relight it.”
“I don’t think I did.”
“So it probably wasn’t out,” she says. She seems to be thinking about this, but in reality you understand she is watching you. She is trying to decide if you’re lying. You realize at some point that your shoulders have sagged and you are hunched over with your hands in your lap. Once, a long time ago it seems, you had exceptional posture. You take a breath and sit up straight in your chair, inadvertently pulling at the stitches.
“What shoes were you wearing?” she asks.
“Slippers. Suede moccasins.”
“You’re certain?”
“I am. I always wear those slippers when I’m in for the night in the winter.”
“I like slippers,” she says, writing. You look down at her boots. Leather, small, solid heels. Her skirt is made of denim and falls just about to her knees. Her panty hose—no, these are tights—are black. “I’m just curious, did you ever wear slippers in the cockpit?”
“It’s a flight deck. We call it a flight deck.”
“Not a cockpit?”
“No.”
“Okay. I won’t ask why.”
“You can.”
“No, I’m good.”
“Why would you think we wore slippers while on the flight deck?”
“Well, not when you were actually flying the airplane. But once when I was flying from Philadelphia to Rome, the seat beside me was empty and the captain or the copilot came out and put on a pair of those eyeshades and slippers they give you when you fly and took a nap.”
“You were flying first class.”
“Business. Anyway, I can see you doing that.”
“No, you can’t. I never flew overseas. I flew regional jets.”
“Yes. The small ones.” Somehow, even this exchange has left you unsettled. It’s as if you were a failure because you never flew a jet bigger than a CRJ. Did she do this on purpose, too? Again, your mind recalls Reseda and her remark about geese; again, it circles back to the idea that you are being oversensitive.
“Can we talk about 1611?”
“Yes.” And you patiently answer the sorts of questions you have answered for other therapists (in two states), as well as investigators and lawyers and the FAA and the pilots’ union. Finally Valerian asks you if you blame yourself for the deaths of the thirty-nine people on the plane.
“I blame the geese,” you answer simply. “I blame the ferryboat captain who turned his boat too hard too quickly and created that wave. And, yes, I do blame myself.”
“But no one else does …”
“Blames me.”
“Right. The crash wasn’t pilot error. What Sully Sullenberger did was a miracle. You know there isn’t a soul in this world who thinks it’s your fault. You know that, don’t you?”
In this world. You try to decide what that means, because certainly Ethan Stearns views the crash as your fault. So did the families of some of the passengers who died who came to the hearings. You saw it in their faces. Why couldn’t you do what Sully Sullenberger did? they seemed to be asking. And you can feel Ethan’s presence right now, right here in the kitchen, in the way the top of your head is starting to throb. And although you try to restrain yourself, you can’t help but turn around in your seat—and there he is. He is in the doorway to the dining room, framed by those ghoulish sunflowers, and he is glaring at you. Shaking his head in disgust. And this only makes the pain in your skull worsen, and you fear that while this doctor is sitting across from you it might become the searing, white-light agony you have experienced around Ethan in the past.
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
“Chip?”
You rub your eyes. You turn around. “I’m sorry,” you tell Valerian, wondering how it is that only you know Ethan is here with you. Valerian seems to be staring right at him.
“You looked a little peaked there,” she says. “A midafternoon sugar low?”
“I guess. My head hurts.”
She sighs. “Feverfew and cayenne,” she tells you. “I have just the tincture. Sadly, I have just the tincture at home. In the meantime, have another cupcake. You’ll feel so much better. I promise.” And she hands you another of those remarkable confections.
Chapter Thirteen
“You disappear, except for your name,” explains Sandra Durant. “I’m just a name on a passenger manifest. In the newspaper. On a crawl on the cable news.” She motions with her finger—and you notice the polish is salmon, every bit as vibrant as Valerian’s but perhaps more girlish and childlike—toward Ashley, who is sitting rather primly on the couch. “She used to love to eat canned peaches in heavy syrup. She tells me she mastered the can opener in first grade and would snack on them after school and on weekends. Now no one will ever know that. Soon, no one but her mother will recall that she could make an origami swan—and eventually her mom will forget that detail, too. She’ll forget what it was like watching Ashley learn to ride her bicycle. And some new technology will replace the video that her father made of her doing cannonballs into a swimming pool one afternoon, and no one will duplicate the disk onto whatever comes next. And so that splash and the girl’s laugh will be gone, too. Gone forever. Eventually, all that will remain is her name.”
You ask, “And you?”
“And me? Orange marmalade. I loved it.”
“There’s more.”
“Of course there is.”
“Tell me one more. Tell me one more thing that no one will know from your name on the passenger manifest.”
“No one will ever know that at the end of my life my favorite color happened to be pink.” She holds up her hands and spreads wide her fingers, her palms facing her, so you can see those nails you already have noticed. “But who knows,” she adds, raising her eyebrows in mock earnestness. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I was already too old for Barbie pink.”
Garnet watched Hallie crushing the small purple seeds with the mortar and pestle, a little surprised by how much pleasure her sister was deriving from the chore. The seeds were about the size of sesame seeds, but they smelled like blueberries when they were mashed: The more of them Hallie turned to powder, the more the kitchen smelled like a fruit smoothie. Garnet had a sense that a big part of her sister’s contentment came from the obsessive amounts of attention Anise and Clary and Sage were lavishing upon the two of them. Garnet, on the other hand, found the women slightly annoying; their presence was growing invasive. She and her sister seemed to spend three or four days a week after school with them. The only days they didn’t wind up at Anise’s or Clary’s or Sage’s (and most frequently it seemed to be Sage’s) were those days when they had dance class or music lessons. Again today Clary Hardin had picked them up at the school entrance precisely at three o’clock and brought them to Sage Messner’s home to make tinctures or bake or tend to the seemingly endless tables of plants in that massive communal greenhouse. Garnet thought that she and Hallie spent more time in Sage’s kitchen or greenhouse than they did after school with kids their own age.
Which, maybe, was okay. Maybe they were fortunate to have the attention of these ladies. After the stories that Molly and her mother had told everyone of the blackout and their father’s disappearance—and then, far worse, his reappearance covered in blood—there was no way that any kids were going to be allowed to come to their house anytime soon. Maybe forever. And now the girls (and even the boys) in their classroom seemed to be a little scared of her and her sister. It was like they were the ones who made the strange potions—not the women.
Their mom had tried to reassure them that over time the kids in their class would come around, but Garnet wasn’t so sure. She saw how they kept away at dance class and school. Still, her mom was confident. In the meantime, she and Hallie spent time with their mother’s new friends, either this group of women or Reseda—and sometimes Reseda and Holly. It seemed there were two separate cliques. Clearly Reseda was an herbalist and a friend of these other, older women, but there was also some tension. She kept her distance; it was like she didn’t completely approve of them. And while Reseda’s greenhouse was much cooler—it had a comforting shape and small statues that reminded Garnet of fantasy creatures—she found that she had to be careful about what she was thinking when she was around Reseda. It was as if Reseda knew.
One time Garnet had asked her mom why she and Hallie didn’t just go home after school when they didn’t have dance class or music lessons, the way they had before that night when Dad tumbled down the basement stairs and fell on the knife. And her mom had explained that their father was working hard on the house and his stomach needed to heal. Garnet didn’t completely believe this: Either he was working on the house or his stomach needed to heal. Not both. It was like the old joke about why the little girl didn’t turn in her homework: Either she forgot it at home or the dog got sick on it. Both were overkill.
In any case, Garnet had now decided that she would ask her mom that night about moving. She decided that she’d had enough of Bethel. Maybe they could go back to West Chester. Sure, she and Hallie were always going to be the kids whose father’s plane had crashed into a lake. And she would always be the kid who had the seizures. (It hurt her feelings when kids would talk about her that way, but they did. Sometimes people presumed she was in a trance when she was having one, but she wasn’t. She was just, as one doctor liked to say, in her own world.) But at least she and Hallie had friends there.
“Lovely, Rosemary,” Sage Messner was saying to her sister. “The powder is finer than salt, isn’t it? It’s as wispy as talc.” The woman was hovering over Hallie with her hand on the girl’s shoulder. It still left Garnet feeling a little uncomfortable and disloyal in
some way when these women called her and her sister by their new names. Mom didn’t seem to mind. And Hallie said she actually preferred being called Rosemary. But Calandrinia—and Cali for short? Over the last couple of weeks, she had grown to hate both the long and short versions of her new name.
“Now, your turn, Cali,” Sage said, her voice that singsong river of condescension. She always talked to Hallie and Garnet like she thought the two of them were preschoolers. So did Ginger and Clary. Anise tended to speak to them more like grown-ups. But she was also far more stern with the two of them.
“My turn to do what?” she asked. “I think the seeds are all ground up.”
“The hypnobium seeds are. But we still need to add the yarrow and the rose hips. If you only add hypnobium to a tea, you are likely to give someone a headache along with very scary—”
“Sage, that’s a lot more information than the girls need at the moment,” Anise said, cutting the woman off before she could finish her sentence. Garnet hadn’t realized that Anise had returned to the kitchen from the greenhouse.
“Along with what?” Garnet decided to ask, partly because she was curious but also because it was clear to her that Anise didn’t want her and Hallie to know.
“Instead of making them feel better, Cali,” Anise said simply but firmly. “Now you want to wash your hands thoroughly after working with hypnobium and completely rinse both the mortar and the pestle.” She barely glanced at Sage as she carefully poured the powder into a small glass spice jar. The ground-up seeds now resembled the old-fashioned sugar candy that some people gave away in straws on Halloween.
“I’m sorry, Anise,” Sage murmured, her voice low and soft, as if she hoped that no one else would hear her. But Anise seemed to ignore her as she screwed the lid on the spice jar and then ran hot tap water over the mortar and pestle. The moment the water hit the wood, the room was infused with the aroma of the herb and the kitchen smelled like someone was baking a blueberry pie.
“Next we need to prepare the rose hips,” Anise said, gazing out the kitchen window. “I think Sage thought that might be a nice task for you, Cali.”
The Night Strangers Page 24