The Night Strangers Part 2

"You were dreaming."

"I heard it when I was talking to you just this second."

"What did you hear?"

"The water and the people and someone was, like, choking-"

"We don't have a pond," Garnet said, cutting her off. "We don't have a pool. We don't even have a brook like we had in West Chester. It had to be just a nightmare."

"I don't have nightmares. You do. I don't." She made it sound like a failing, Garnet thought, like Hallie viewed it as an accomplishment that she didn't have bad dreams. But Garnet also had to admit that she was indeed far more likely to have nightmares than her sister. It had always been that way. Supposedly the nightmares had nothing to do with what the adults referred to as her epilepsy or her seizures, but she wasn't so sure. When she was having one, it was like she was asleep and the waking world-the real world-was a dream.

"Besides, it wasn't the water that made it so scary," Hallie went on.

"No?"

"No. It's that the people were drowning."

"What?"

"They were, like, screaming for help and choking. Especially the girl. And just now when I came in here? It was like she was gagging. I could almost feel it."

Garnet considered this for a brief second. Then she took Hallie's hand and pulled her sister from the bed, dragging her along the short corridor on the third floor and then down the steep, thin stairway to the second floor, with their parents' bedroom. On the way, she switched on every light in the halls between the two rooms.

Chapter Two.

Emily's separation from her firm was perfectly amicable, and she was able to bring some of her practice with her from Pennsylvania to New Hamps.h.i.+re. She pa.s.sed the White Mountain bar in the winter months between when she and Chip made an offer on the house and when they and their daughters moved in. But she also joined a small firm in Littleton so she would have an office and an a.s.sistant and at least a shadow of the legal amenities she was accustomed to. Their new real estate agent, Reseda Hill, had essentially brokered that deal, too, introducing her to John Hardin, the firm's paterfamilias. Now Emily would have a place to go during the day, which was something she needed; she didn't see herself as the sort of attorney who was capable of working from her house.

But at nights and on weekends, when she was in their new home that February, she found herself studying her husband carefully. She was not precisely sure what she was looking for and worried about, yet she was incapable of suppressing a demonstrable anxiety that filled her on occasion when she saw him. He was sleeping badly, even worse here in northern New England than he had in their rambling Colonial in the development outside of Philadelphia in the weeks after the crash. The psychiatrist from the union had warned her that this would happen. She had said it was likely that Chip's appet.i.te might all but disappear. It had. And his bad dreams continued, despite the prescribed pharmacological intervention, and all it took was the ethereal plume of a plane high in the atmosphere to cause his heart to race. He broke out in a sweat at Cannon Mountain when the ski lift they were riding stalled halfway up the mountain and they dangled in their seats perhaps forty yards above the well-groomed snow. He became nauseous sometimes when he heard the birds that remained through the winter months outside the kitchen window in the morning. And he would grow a little dizzy whenever he came across a news story about the airline industry or an airplane-and there were always news stories about the airline industry and airplanes. Always. And, finally, there were those phantom pains throughout his body that continued to plague him. He'd had all the testing imaginable back in Pennsylvania: CAT scans and MRIs and dyes injected everywhere. He had seen all manner of chiropractors and physical therapists. And none of the tests had shown anything wrong.

The real strangeness? His ankle and two of his ribs-the former sprained badly, the latter broken and cracked-had healed completely and he felt absolutely no pain there. Same with the spot on his head where he had actually been cut. The top of his head, he reported, often hurt like h.e.l.l-but not his forehead, which had been cut when his head slammed into the right p.r.o.ng of the control stick. Moreover, these aches and pains had only gotten worse since they had moved to northern New Hamps.h.i.+re.

They both understood that a degree of PTSD was inevitable. How could it not be? He had captained a plane that had crashed and four-fifths of the people onboard had died. It wasn't his fault: He wasn't fatigued, he hadn't been distracted or inattentive, he hadn't pulled back on the control yoke when he should have pressed it forward to recover from a stall. (Once, years earlier, he had had a plane stall on him when the wings iced over, and calmly he had pushed the yoke forward, accelerating the descent but restarting the engines, and landed smoothly. None of the pa.s.sengers...o...b..ard had ever known there had been a problem, but he had been roundly applauded by his airline. And how many times had he successfully aborted landings at the last minute because there was a truck or a plane on the runway that wasn't supposed to be there and performed a go-around? At least once for every seven or eight months he had been flying.) That didn't make the visions and memories that came back to him-illuminated suddenly like trees in the dark made clear by great bolts of lightning-any easier to shoulder. But, still, she watched him when she wasn't at her new office in Littleton, aware that this was a reversal in their roles: In the past, he had been the one to watch over her during those intervals when he wasn't flying.

Meanwhile, Hallie was sleeping badly, too, and no one from the union or the airline or the Critical Incident Response Team had advised her to expect this. There was that strange night when her daughter was convinced she heard people-a child-drowning. It had been three in the morning and had been the worst sort of nightmare: so real that she was convinced she was hearing the child for long minutes after she was awake. And Hallie had never really had nightmares before. Bad dreams had always been far more likely to dog Garnet than her sister in the small hours of the morning.

Consequently, when Emily wasn't watching her husband, she was watching her daughter. And when she wasn't watching Hallie, she had to remain vigilant around Garnet: She always had to be prepared for the next seizure. It was a wonder she was able to get out of bed in the morning, much less find the energy to get her girls out the door for school and then drive into Littleton for work. But she had to. She had to. Someone, somehow, had to keep it together.

You are curious about the hallways in this house in the White Mountains because the one on the third floor of the structure seems slender compared to the ones on the second. Or, for that matter, the ones on the first. You really didn't notice this when you were looking at the house with Emily and Sheldon. And so you track down the tape measure in the carton with the tools you have been using as you settle into the house but have yet to organize in some fas.h.i.+on in that bas.e.m.e.nt made largely of dirt. You find it in the living room, where you were wallpapering yesterday, and begin by measuring the corridor that links the front hall with the seventeen steps to the second floor. (A thought: That strange, thin back stairwell that links the kitchen with the second floor. Is that seventeen steps, too?) Then you climb those steps to measure the hallway outside of your and Emily's bedroom. Finally you start up the fifteen steps to the third floor. There you kneel and stretch the tape measure across the corridor outside of Hallie's bedroom. It wasn't your imagination or an optical illusion: The hallways are thirty-nine inches wide on the first floor (there, again, is that number), thirty-seven on the second, and thirty-four on the third. Five inches is not a great distance, but it is enough to make that corridor feel claustrophobic-or, to use the word Emily and the girls have used as your twins have started nesting like barn swallows on this small, third floor, cozy. The third floor has but three rooms: two bedrooms that share a walk-in closet in the hallway (neither bedroom has a closet of its own) and a bathroom with a lion's-foot tub but no shower. The attic exists on the same level, but a veritable Berlin Wall separates it from this small nook of rooms. The house narrows between the second and third floors, with that elegant fish-scale trim that marks the screened porch reestablis.h.i.+ng itself on the third-floor exterior. Hallie's and Garnet's bedrooms are characterized by the house's sloping roof, snug knee walls, and horizontal windows.

You put the tape measure down on the wooden floor and sit.

She deserves friends.

A man's voice. You have heard it periodically since you came here. You try to recall if you heard it in Pennsylvania as well, and you decide ... maybe. Maybe not. You turn to see if anyone is with you in the corridor, and, as always, you are alone. But you know, in reality, you're not. There is the voice you have just heard of this man roughly your age and the voice of a girl no older (and, perhaps, a bit younger) than your lovely daughters and the voice of a woman perhaps ten years your junior. And there are the cacophonous shrieks and wails of all the women and men who died on Flight 1611. Should you have told Hallie that you knew precisely who she heard your first Sunday night in this house? Maybe. But how could you without further terrifying the poor child? You wish you knew what it meant that she heard their voices, too, and try to take comfort in the reality that she hasn't reported hearing them since.

You sigh. You note the suns.h.i.+ne through the hallway window and the opalescent light it casts upon the wood paneling. This third-floor hallway is paneled with maple, like some of the first-floor corridors; the second floor is merely painted Sheetrock. You find yourself slowly pulling your knees into your chest and contemplating how, other than that voice-now gone-the house is quiet. The girls are at school and Emily is at work. It must seem to the world that you are all alone.

You wonder if you will ever work again. You wonder what you could do. All you have ever done professionally is fly airplanes.

Somehow, despite the way your grades tumbled after your father died and your mother was aged quickly by bottles of very bad Scotch, you made it into the University of Ma.s.sachusetts. It might have been the University of Connecticut, but when you were fifteen your mother lost her driver's license for the last time and your aunt and uncle in Framingham, Ma.s.sachusetts, decided that you and your eleven-year-old brother would be better off with them. Your mother agreed. It had gotten to the point where it didn't matter that you watered down the Scotch, every other day pouring out perhaps half an inch-a portion of the schooner sail or cliff-side estate that gave character to the label-of the whiskey and adding just that much tap water. Your mother would drink just that much more.

And your little brother? He's doing fine. He used to be considered fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Done in by the abrupt and early death of your father and the virtual mummification of your mother. He's doing better than you, these days. He teaches history at a high school in Berkeley. Got as far away from Connecticut and Ma.s.sachusetts as he could.

Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are.

A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome sh.e.l.l of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.

She deserves friends.

You nod. She does.

Chapter Three.

Garnet came down the stairs with her math workbook and a couple of pencils. They were supposed to convert miles into yards or feet and vice versa, and Hallie was incapable of explaining to her how to do it when the answer wasn't obvious. Their dad was excellent at math, although neither girl had availed herself of his abilities since the accident because they did not want to burden him with one more thing. From conversations they had overheard their mother having with friends on the telephone and the things they had seen their father doing (or, in some cases, not doing), they feared that asking him to help them with math just might put him over the edge. But they had been in New Hamps.h.i.+re for a couple of weeks now, and maybe things would be different here. More normal. Their mother and father talked about how they were starting here with a clean slate. And based on the changes that would occur in the house when they were at school-some old wallpaper gone or some new wallpaper hung, a banister stained or another room painted-their dad had emerged from the funk that had left him coc.o.o.ned and immobile in his bathrobe in West Chester. And so Garnet figured now was as good a time as any to come down the two flights of stairs and get some help with her math. It might even be good for Dad.

When she found him, he was in the kitchen, but he wasn't making dinner even though it was nearly five in the afternoon. They seemed to eat earlier here than they did in Pennsylvania, in part because Mom didn't have such a long commute and got home earlier, but also because everyone here just seemed to do everything earlier. In Pennsylvania, Dad had usually done the cooking in those three- or four-day periods when he had been home and Mom had fed them when Dad had been flying. Of course, Mom's dinners had been pretty likely to be frozen food or take-out pizza-which was absolutely fine. She was, essentially, a single parent half the time. And then there were those seasons when Mom was in a community theater drama or musical. Often those nights when Dad was flying, Garnet and Hallie would color or play games or do a little homework while eating deli sandwiches in the back of whatever gym or community center where Mom's theater troupe was rehearsing.

When Garnet got downstairs, she found her father on his knees, rummaging through the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. His head and shoulders were invisible inside the cabinetry, and around his legs were the bottles and jars and brushes that usually were stored under there.

"Dad?"

Carefully he withdrew his upper body and sat on his heels. His hair was disheveled, and she noticed a thin trickle of sweat on his brow. He had a mug with cold coffee beside him.

"Hey, princess," he said. He called both her and her sister princess. It was a term of endearment, but no more specific than honey or darling. "What do you need?"

"Can you help me with my math?" She held out the workbook like an offering, both of her hands beneath it as if she were presenting a sacred text to a rabbi or priest.

He was silent for a moment, and she wondered after she had spoken if this might be one of those instances that would be important years from now: the first time her dad had helped her with her math after the accident. A great step forward in the march back to normalcy. But when the moment grew long and still he had said nothing, she decided she was wrong: This would instead be merely one more of those times when her dad's behavior would suggest it was going to be a long, long time before he was better.

"I mean, if you're busy, I can probably figure it out myself," she continued. She knew that sometimes she made people uncomfortable when she grew quiet. They feared she was about to have a seizure and go into a trance. Especially lately. But often it was just easier to say nothing and let everyone else do the talking, the deciding, and the ... worrying. And it was nice to daydream. She liked the visions that sometimes marked the seizures. She wondered if her dad now had them, too.

"Oh, I'm not doing anything important," he said finally.

"Cleaning?" she asked. "Organizing?"

"Something like that. I keep expecting to find a secret compartment back there."

She nodded, intrigued by the idea that there might be one. She understood why her father might have such a suspicion. Sometimes she found strange things in this house and the barn and the greenhouse.

Abruptly he stood to full height and rubbed his hands together, a habit of his when he was excited about something. "Well," he said, his voice robust and happy. "What have you got there?" Then he placed his palm on her back and escorted her to the dining room table, where together they tackled the two pages in the workbook.

Reseda Hill stood in her greenhouse a few steps in front of Anise, inspecting the scapes on the coral root she had transplanted earlier that winter. She kept the plants and spices for cooking cordoned off from the herbs for healing. Basil and parsley had no business mixing with hypn.o.bium, belladonna, or amalaki. Her tomato seedlings in late April, prior to being transplanted into her vegetable garden, would not do well near the pungent aroma from the angel's death. The greenhouse was pentagonal and divided in half: On the right side, as one entered, were those herbs and spices that were common to any chef with even a modic.u.m of culinary education; on the left side were those rare tropical plants from South America and India that only experienced healers, herbalists, and shamans were likely to use. In the center of the pentagon was a fountain with a stone creature holding a vase that dribbled water into the catch basin. The creature stood about three and a half feet tall, half man and half goat, with great, batlike wings on his back and a trim and pointed Vand.y.k.e running from his chin to his ears. Reseda did not bring it home from a compound in Barre, Vermont, that sold mostly (but not exclusively) tombstones and have it transformed into a fountain for her greenhouse because it bore a distinct resemblance to Baphomet. The truth was, she wasn't a Satanist or attracted to most satanic rituals; but she was a bit of a bomb thrower, and she liked the idea that designing her greenhouse in the shape of a pentagon and placing what looked like a stone demon smack in the center would fuel rumors among the sorts of people who were never going to be her friends anyway. Besides, she liked goats and she liked handsome men with their s.h.i.+rts off. She thought both were cute in a diminutive sort of way.

"I find the twins very interesting," Anise was saying, her parka draped over her folded arms.

"You've spent too much time with horror movies and pulp paperbacks. You always find twins interesting. I'm a twin. The world is filled with twins. Trust me: We're not interesting."

"These ones are prep.u.b.escent, and they have been traumatized. They're like the Dunmore boys. You know the tincture. You know the recipe."

Reseda bent over the patchouli and rubbed one of the egg-shaped leaves between her thumb and forefinger, breathing in deeply the perfume. Patchouli made her feel young. "The Dunmores were well before my time," she said after a moment. "Besides, it was the girls' father who was traumatized. We don't know if Hallie and Garnet were."

"You're not a mother; I am. Their scars are different from their father's, but nearly as deep."

"The pair struck me as rather resilient."

"I'm sure they are. But their father is an airline pilot who survived a plane crash. Most of his pa.s.sengers died."

"You really don't like to fly, do you?" Reseda observed.

"You know I don't."

"When was the last time you were on an airplane?"

"I was twenty-three. Laurence and I flew to Aruba on our honeymoon. It took three planes to get there back then."

"Was it pleasant?"

"The honeymoon? Absolutely. But I was scared to death every moment I was in the air. Of course, I didn't know then what I know now."

"I don't like that expression: scared to death."

"It's apt."

"It demonstrates both fear and naivete."

"Perhaps in my case it's a control phobia-or the lack of control. That's why many people dislike flying. But I think my point is still valid. Captain Linton crashed a plane into a lake."

Reseda went to the table with the motherwort and the hypn.o.bium. She felt Anise's eyes on her back. Anise loved working with hypn.o.bium. She was one of the few women who was capable of using it in food as well as in potions. She was almost able to mask its bitterness with dark chocolate and sugar; no one could hide the taste completely, but Anise was able to make it edible. "The captain had help," Reseda reminded her. "It wasn't his fault."

"True. But here is what I keep thinking about: The family came to us. The girls came to us. Sheldon Carter was an old fool selling a house. He had no idea what we needed. Lord, he had no idea even what we are."

"What you are. I wasn't there."

"Sometimes I think you don't approve of us, Reseda."

"Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should."

"My point is simply that it wasn't you who found the family and enticed them north. They found the house on the Web and Sheldon responded."

"That's true."

"And so it must mean something. You of all people should see that."

"Perhaps," Reseda murmured, but she didn't turn around. She honestly couldn't decide if it meant anything at all. The world was awash in coincidence and connection; usually, it took time to deduce which was which.

Chip told Emily that the worst of the flashbacks were of the moment when he was upside down, disoriented, the water starting to enter the flight deck through the edges of the door to the cabin, and he suspected the plane behind him had broken apart. But he had other flashbacks, too, such as when he was pulling his first officer through the upside-down door of the flight deck and saw how deep the water already was in the fuselage. He said he didn't recall seeing any pa.s.sengers strapped in the bulkhead seats, their feet above the waterline, their heads below it, either drowning or drowned. But he knew one woman had been there. She would manage to unbuckle her seat belt, but apparently she did so before registering where the exit was and, upside down, she went to the side of the plane with the lavatory. She had been sitting right beside the exit, and yet she would drown pressed against the floor of the fuselage, which, as this piece of aircraft fell to the bottom of the lake, had become its ceiling. Chip presumed he would have seen her when he was opening the door had she remained in her seat or not swum in the wrong direction.

What would remain a mystery to Chip and Emily and everyone who investigated the ditching was why the flight attendant had unlatched himself from his harness and not tried to open the exit. He had survived the initial impact, that was clear, and yet his body would be found lodged in the third row of seats. One possibility? He, too, had been disoriented when he was upside down and underwater, and he'd simply gotten lost when he tried to find the exit. Or, perhaps, he had tried to help someone. That seemed likely to Chip. He hadn't known Eliot Hardy well, but in the few days they had flown together before the crash, he had found him patient, firm, and good-humored-precisely the characteristics that defined a professional flight attendant. His cause of death was drowning, but based on his broken nose, there was some thought that he may have hit his head on debris or been kicked in the face by a pa.s.senger. Even if the impact hadn't knocked him out, it may have caused him to swallow great gulps of water, and that was the beginning of the end.

But the other flashbacks that Chip described to her were equally as disturbing in Emily's opinion, beginning with the flameout of the left engine and ending with the half dozen corpses that somehow had been flung like scarecrows and wax figurines from the wrecked aircraft and were floating around him like buoys in Lake Champlain.

In some ways, the flashbacks were all worse than the nightmares. "I seem to know when it's a dream and I seem to know that I'm not going to die-though there are times when I think you all would have been better off if I had died," he said.

"You don't mean that," Emily told him. "I wouldn't want to live without you. Hallie and Garnet would have been devastated to lose you. We all still have a lot of years before us."

But she had been coached well by his therapist in Philadelphia and by friends that she should expect this. It was survivor guilt. No, it was worse than that: It was survivor guilt exacerbated by the reality that he was a captain who had survived the wreck of his plane. The captain had not gone down with his s.h.i.+p. She could remind him that he had saved eight other lives, but it never did any good. He was focused on the thirty-nine people who had died. The fact that it wasn't his fault may have been some consolation, though the comfort it offered wasn't as healing as she wished it would be. He was constantly second-guessing everything he had done on that flight, constantly reliving every decision he had made and contemplating whether there was something he should have done instead or something he could have done better. Maybe he should have tried for the highway. Maybe he should have tried gliding to Plattsburgh. Maybe his pitch was a degree off. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe ...

One time that winter he confessed to her that he had wondered prior to Flight 1611 if in some fas.h.i.+on his whole career as a pilot had been snakebitten and it was only a matter of time before he had an accident. He presumed that, by the time he was forty, he would have been flying an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 737. He'd be on track to be captaining triple-seven heavies internationally, flying between Philadelphia and Rome or San Francisco and Tokyo. He had been born in 1972 and graduated from college in 1994. But it had taken him until 1998 to finish flight school, because twice he ran out of money and had to find other jobs to fund his flying: Once it was banging nails into shoddily built town houses in a development in Orlando, Florida. Next it was as a bellman at a hotel in Disney World. Anything to make some money and be near the flight school. He and Emily met his first year as a first officer, when he was flying Dash 8 turboprops between Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and by 2001 he was married and convinced his career was back on track. But advancement as a pilot is based entirely on seniority, and his airline suffered as much as any carrier after 9/11; he was among the junior pilots laid off in 2002, losing his job while Emily was beginning her third trimester with twins. He would finally latch on with another airline in early 2003, and took comfort in the idea that unemployment had meant he and Emily together had diapered and fed the twins their first few months in this world. Emily had been on maternity leave from the law firm for three months and he had been out of work nine. He had loved that period, though both he and Emily had fretted over money. But it also meant that, when he was forty years old and Flight 1611 was flipped by a wave in Lake Champlain, he was still flying regional jets.

Emily thought Chip was functioning rather well most of the time-at least on the surface, he was. Some days, it even seemed as if he were getting better. Not all of the time, of course. Far from it. But most of the time. She noted carefully, as if she were a physician or nurse, that it seemed to be the smallest of things that might set him off. After he had sent some signed doc.u.ments back to the airline and the pilots' union via Federal Express, he confessed to having had an almost disabling occurrence of heart palpitations: Federal Express meant airplanes, and there had been that Tom Hanks movie with that all too grim scene of a plane augering into a body of water-which brought back to him his own failed ditching. He said he had sat in the car for forty-five minutes after sending the papers, trying to catch his breath. He admitted that he had almost driven himself to the emergency room at the hospital in Littleton, and she had felt bad that she hadn't been there for him.

Actually, she felt a little guilty that she wasn't with him most days as he worked all alone in their new house, tackling the small and large projects. She encouraged him to take time off and drive into town to join her for lunch, but always he pa.s.sed. One morning she suggested, her voice as offhand and casual as she could make it, that he visit a career counselor to see what else he might want to do with his life-but only, of course, when he was ready. She tried to respect his fragility and his need to withdraw from the world. She only nodded when he said he was fine-absolutely fine-at home.

Home. She understood this Victorian on a hill in a distant corner of the White Mountains was now their home, but in her office in Littleton she felt a distance from it that transcended the buyer's remorse she had antic.i.p.ated. There was a randomness to the house that originally had seemed quaint, as if an eccentric old aunt rather than a trained architect had designed it, but now seemed at once useless and disturbing. Why was the third-floor attic inaccessible from the two third-floor bedrooms? What really was the purpose of those rickety stairs that ran from a kitchen nook to a shadowy corner of the second floor? And then there was the Dunmores' absolutely horrific taste in wallpaper: Had they chosen it consciously to terrify their two sons? Good Lord, Emily feared she might have killed herself, too, if she'd had to grow up near the carnivorous sunflowers in one room or the viperlike mammals in another. Like Tansy, she might have wound up so squirrelly that she would have hid crowbars and carving knives in the house's myriad crannies. Moreover, every floor seemed to have odd drafts and squeaking doors. It had that bas.e.m.e.nt made of dirt.

She wondered if she had made a monumental mistake uprooting her family: Sometimes it felt to her as if she had sacrificed her daughters for her husband. Could their new elementary school really be as good as the one in West Chester? Not likely, she feared. And, yes, the girls would make new friends and develop new interests, but would there be the same sorts of opportunities for them here that there had been in an admittedly tony suburb of Philadelphia? Already she questioned the capabilities of the music teachers she had found for the girls. Moreover, she missed her friends-her co-workers at the firm on Chestnut Street and the self-proclaimed theater geeks with whom she would dress up in period costume and sing and dance-more than she had expected, and for the first time in her life began to experience real depression. She thought often of the last show she had been in before Flight 1611 had crashed into Lake Champlain. It had been h.e.l.lo, Dolly! She had been called back for Dolly but hadn't gotten the part and been cast instead as one of the four middle-aged women expected to add multigenerational authenticity to the chorus. She didn't care. This was, it seemed, her new function, and she milked the role for all it was worth. The last time she had had a lead had been as Anna in the The King and I, and that had been three years ago. Now she was thirty-eight. Lord, she had become "a community theater actress of a certain age," which was far worse than being a real actress of a certain age.

But it was she who had, in fact, initiated this move to northern New England. Chip was only forty. With any luck, they had decades together ahead of them. A half century, even. The key was starting over someplace new. Someplace where mere acquaintances (and some total strangers) wouldn't want to talk about the accident with her when they came upon her squeezing avocados at the supermarket, while her closest friends, after those first days, didn't know what to say. Someplace where people were not bewildered by Chip's ongoing near catatonia (for G.o.d's sake, his plane had crashed) but nonetheless surprised by it. After all, this was Chip Linton. Captain Linton.

And Chip's own family? There wasn't much. There was his mother, who, somehow, was still alive despite a liver that had to be nothing more than a cirrhosis-ridden briquette of scar tissue. Up until the accident, Chip had still visited her every six or eight weeks (every third of those seemingly at the hospital), trying to find a semblance of the mother he could recall from before his father had died, but the girls hadn't seen their grandmother since they'd been in kindergarten. The woman terrified the twins with her alcoholic rants or her disastrous attempts at grandmotherly affection: scalding Garnet when she tried (and failed) to make the child herbal tea or accidentally setting a dish towel (and nearly the kitchen) on fire when she thought it would be fun to bake brownies. Emily's brother-in-law, meanwhile, was living in California. Chip thought it was wonderful that his brother was a schoolteacher, but she knew the truth: He was among the most juvenile and selfish men she had ever met. He had completely cut himself off from his mother and was, clearly, a teacher because it was the way he satisfied his insatiable need for attention. His social life was a mystery, but she feared it involved a string of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls, some in college but some still in high school. He was too smart to sleep with one younger than eighteen, but he had said just enough to give her a sense that his tastes ran to women not yet old enough to drink. And, like her mother-in-law, he had been useless and invisible since Flight 1611 had crashed.

Her parents, Emily believed, would have been better. They might have been awkward, but they would have been ... present. They would have tried. One of the great sadnesses for her was always going to be that they had never gotten to meet Hallie and Garnet. She had been a first-year a.s.sociate, fresh from law school, and Chip was a young first officer when they fell in love, and she antic.i.p.ated that together they would build a life that was stylish and romantic and productive. Then her parents got sick, her mother from ALS and her father from colon cancer. She spent three years watching them die up close and at a distance, while she and Chip dated, got engaged, and eventually wed. She was an only child, and in those first months after Flight 1611 fell from the sky, she missed her parents as much as she had at any point in all the years they'd been gone.

The sad truth was, however, that some days it seemed to her that she was no better than everyone else when it came to knowing what to say to her husband. She hadn't a clue. In the autumn, in the season after the accident, when the days were growing short and rainy and damp, they would walk past each other in the corridors of their Pennsylvania house like sleepwalkers and avoid eye contact over dinner as if they were travelers at an airport restaurant who spoke different languages. Even the girls would often sit silently at the table, worried and ill at ease.

One time she found Chip sobbing in Hallie's empty bedroom while the twins were sleeping over at a friend's house, a sight that was almost tragic in her mind since he was a man who never cried. Had been a brick as her parents deteriorated and died, supported her in every way that she needed. Had handled Garnet's condition (somehow, she preferred that term to illness)-the strange early seizures, the batteries of tests, the diagnosis-in a fas.h.i.+on that was at once unflappable and sensitive. He, it seemed, had always known what to say to her. At least until the accident. Everything had been different after the accident. And it was different in ways that she didn't like. Not one single bit.

And when something wasn't working, you changed it. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. Wasn't that what the legal consultant with the Armani suits and the ponytail had said to her when he was working with her Chestnut Street law firm?

Indeed. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.