Chapter One
You see the long, wide, perfectly straight strip of asphalt before you, the hangar to your right with the words GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS painted in billboard-size letters along the side. You recognize it as Burlington’s runway 33, facing to the northwest. When your first officer lifts your plane off the ground, you know there will be a slight bump in about eight or nine seconds as you rise up and cross over the ravine churned out by the Winooski River. There is always a slight updraft there, even on a muggy afternoon such as today’s. The sun has begun its descent in the west but is still high above the Adirondacks.
Already, however, you feel yourself sweating, and so you know on some level this must be a dream. But, unfortunately, you don’t know how to wake yourself up. No idea. Emily, your wife, can do that, but not you. Still, you wouldn’t be sweating unless this were a dream because in reality you never broke a sweat when you were flying. Why would you? And if it is a dream—that dream—you know what’s next. Your heart starts pummeling your ribs even before they appear. And then there they are. The geese. You are upon them or they are upon you. Doesn’t matter. You’re somewhere between two and two and a half thousand feet above the ground, and there are the Bonnie and Clyde–like machine-gun blasts as you plow through them. (Why Bonnie and Clyde? You’re unclear on this, too, but your therapist has told you with a smile what an odd place the unconscious world is. And so it is Bonnie and Clyde’s Browning automatic rifles that you think of when you think of that sound.) Your engines will go—one in flames, one with grinding, steel-cutting-steel immolation, in both cases the nine-, ten-, even eleven-pound birds displacing the compressor blades and sending them spinning like shrapnel through the engines—although your forward thrust will bring you to about twenty-five hundred feet before you will begin your glide and start to lose altitude.
By then, of course, it is your plane. At least it was in reality. You had taken the controls.
So why is it now that it isn’t—why is it that you aren’t flying the jet? In this strange, dreamy version, no one is flying the aircraft, not even Amy Lynch, your first officer. Instead, the jet is immobile in the air, as if teetering on a high wire or balanced on its belly on the top of a great triangular obelisk. And then it becomes—and here is that expression a friend of yours who is in the Air National Guard and flies F-16s uses to convey his own fighter’s absolute lack of glide prowess—a lawn dart. The nose turns down, straight down, still well east of the lake, and you are looking down at trees and grass and death in the sort of cataclysmic fireball after which only small fragments of body are ever recovered and identified. A finger with a wedding band. A foot as far as an ankle, still strangely wearing a black Converse sneaker. A quarter of a jaw with a few bottom teeth.
Only then do you wake up. Apparently, you really can’t die in a plane crash in your dreams. A myth proves accurate. You find yourself cradled in Emily’s arms in the small hours of the night, your whole body wet with sweat and your heart that relentless jackhammer.
When your Philadelphia therapist refers to this as a flashback, you wonder if you should correct her. It’s a nightmare, not a flashback. In reality, you didn’t actually auger into the ground.
They decided they would take a break from the boxes they had been unpacking and the wallpaper they had been scraping to go skiing and snowboarding. It was the Lintons’ first Sunday in New Hampshire, and they woke, took their equipment from the massive pile of athletic gear they had deposited unceremoniously in the mudroom off the front entryway, and Chip hooked everything into the rack on the top of the station wagon or wedged it into the back. They would drive to Cannon Mountain, where they would buy day passes for the family. Emily would snowboard with the girls while Chip skied alone. After five days of steady work, the stacks of boxes had begun to shrink and the corridors composed of cardboard had begun to diminish in both height and length. The cartons marked HALLIE and GARNET and KITCHEN were largely (but not entirely) gone, flattened and taken yesterday to the transfer station. On the other hand, they hadn’t even started on the boxes in the living room because they had made the decision that the wallpaper there—a repeating image of horses and hounds and a fox that looked disturbingly like an eel with fur—had to go and they might as well deal with it sooner rather than later. Nor had they started on the boxes in the dining room or the guest bedrooms. In the other rooms (and this house, they realized, really did have a lot of rooms) they had made varying degrees of progress, though all still had at least two or three unopened moving cartons.
Emily found herself fascinated by the traces that remained of the family who had lived in the house before them: Sometimes she was bemused, other times slightly disturbed. Parnell Dunmore had been buried nearly seven years now in the cemetery a mile away with the elegant wrought-iron fencing and the gates with the ornate trelliswork, and his wife, Tansy, had been in that graveyard almost four. Tansy had lived in the house not quite fifty years and, with Parnell, raised two sons there. Twins, which Emily viewed as either an irony or a coincidence. One of the sons had taken his own life as a twelve-year-old decades earlier, but his brother, now an ornery fifty-four-year-old named Hewitt, lived about forty minutes away in St. Johnsbury. Though almost all of the Dunmores’ furniture had long been cleared by the time the Lintons moved in, a certain amount of detritus remained that either the son had forgotten or hadn’t bothered to pack—or, in some way, was inextricably linked to the house. Sometimes Emily would find the sort of thing you might discover in the back of an antiques store, such as the broken but handsome sewing machine from the late nineteenth century. It was made of cast iron and mahogany and had a treadle in the bottom of the cabinet that demanded both feet to operate. It looked like a desk and might have weighed as much as a small car. Emily found it in the attic and couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly have carted it up the rickety steps that descended from a trapdoor in the second-floor ceiling and was the only link between the attic and the rest of the house. Not far from the sewing machine were rows of old wine bottles—over two dozen—with either plastic flowers or melted candles emerging from the tops. Some were forty years old. Among the items they found in the basement (all far from the corner with that peculiar door) were old wooden sap buckets, great coils of deteriorating rubber garden hose, a plastic model of an Apollo rocket, a brass door knocker, and three separate birdhouses. The girls found a couple of old teacups hanging from hooks in the very back of a cabinet in a dining room wall and porcelain figurines of elves and trolls and skiers in a box in a corner of the walk-in closet on the third floor.
Meanwhile, the carriage barn had everything from long lengths of rusted barbed wire to a Betty Crocker wall calendar made of canvas from 1973. There were empty paint cans and barrels of bobbins because once, decades and decades ago, there had been a bobbin mill along the river at the base of the hill on which the house sat. Apparently, every house in Bethel had barrels of bobbins. There were a boy’s bow and a quiver of arrows, the tips blunt, and tall piles of what might have been the house’s original shutters (there must have been fifty of them). There was a collar for a draft horse. Emily phoned Hewitt Dunmore in St. Johnsbury and asked about this miscellaneous silt from the house and the barn, even offering to drive the articles (including, somehow, that sewing machine) to his home, but Hewitt raged that he couldn’t have been expected to empty the house completely, not with a back as bad as his and with knees that were cranky at best. He suggested they keep whatever they liked and bring to the dump whatever they didn’t.
Even the small greenhouse hadn’t been fully emptied. It still had its four wooden tables for plants, and the girls seemed to view it as their playhouse, even though it really wasn’t all that warm right now; in fact, Emily was quite sure that the temperature was no more than four or five degrees warmer than outside. But the twins already had swept off the tables and deposited their American Girl dolls there, as well as most of the dolls’ furniture. They had carted their bins with dress-up clothes there, too, as well as their plastic trolls (which they insisted they had outgrown years earlier but nonetheless had brought with them to New Hampshire). The cat, meanwhile, seemed to spend her time in the barn. She hadn’t caught anything, as far as they knew, but she seemed to be stalking mice there.
The items that left Emily troubled were the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. She found their presence alarming and was relieved that it was she who had come across them, rather than Hallie or Garnet. She found the crowbar in the back of the closet of the second-floor bedroom that once had belonged to one of the Dunmore boys, a room that was going to be a guest bedroom now. It was upright in a corner and might merely have been there for years, forgotten. The knife was a carving knife with a pearl handle, and while the handle was discolored with age, the blade, though rusted, was sharp as new. Emily found it underneath a wrought-iron heating grate in the master bedroom—what was now her and Chip’s bedroom—and she only noticed it because she was considering replacing the dingy black grille with something more attractive from a home restoration catalog. And so she happened to spin the grate and there it was. Some of the metal latticework had been sawed off, allowing the knife to be slipped into place—and quickly removed. And, finally, there was that ax—a hatchet, really. She found it behind some ancient (and scarily toxic) cleaning supplies that Hewitt Dunmore had left underneath the kitchen sink. It was the length of her arm from her elbow to the tip of her finger.
She showed each of the items—the crowbar, the knife, and the ax—to Chip as soon as she found them. He suggested that perhaps Tansy Dunmore had been especially unnerved by the murders, some years earlier, of a pair of Dartmouth College professors by some local teen boys. Dartmouth was a ninety-minute drive to the south, and the double homicide had left everyone in Vermont and New Hampshire on edge. Or, perhaps, Tansy had always been easily frightened.
“But we know that Parnell Dunmore had a hunting rifle,” she replied, and he, in turn, surmised that she probably didn’t know how to shoot.
“Trust me, most women aren’t Lizzie Borden,” Emily argued. “If a woman has a choice between killing someone at close range with a carving knife or an ax or shooting that person with a rifle, she is always going to pick the gun.” But she saw that Chip was unconvinced. He remained more baffled than alarmed.
And, soon enough, her alarm passed, too, or perhaps she was so fixated on the day-to-day logistics of anchoring her family. Registering the twins for dance classes and school. Finding Hallie a new teacher for the flute and one for Garnet for the violin. Doing what she could to get them acclimated to their new classroom and teacher and (she hoped) friends. And then there was the ongoing vigilance when it came to Garnet’s seizures. In most ways, they were minor: She would go into a trance and leave them for perhaps half an hour. Sometimes it would be less, sometimes more. It was a variant of epilepsy: Electrostatic discharges in her brain—solar flares on the EEGs—would interrupt her thinking, and her mind would become, in essence, a frozen computer. The issue, according to the neurologists (and they had seen three over the years), was whether the seizures might be symptomatic of a condition that would worsen as she grew, the seizures both lengthening and occurring with greater frequency. But, they reassured Chip and Emily, they were just as likely to disappear forever as Garnet approached adolescence. For a while she had been treated with Valium, but in doses that Emily knew would have left most adults wobbly-kneed and walking into walls. Somehow, Garnet handled the dosage just fine, despite the reality that she weighed barely half as much as her mother. The child had been off Valium for a year now and she hadn’t had a seizure since October, but Emily never stopped watching.
Then last night they had lost power in a windstorm and the four of them wound up huddling for three hours in front of the woodstove. The novelty of the outage had worn off quickly, and the event had proven to be the last straw. They needed to get away for the day, and a Sunday at the nearby ski resort seemed like the ideal prescription.
As they were stowing their gear in the wagon midmorning, the air brisk but not uncomfortable (the thermometer outside the kitchen window, a dollop of mercury in a tube that was held by a brass relief of either a portly chimney sweep or Saint Nicholas, they couldn’t decide, read thirty-one degrees), Emily saw a battered pickup truck rumbling its way up the long driveway. Most of the year the driveway was gravel and dirt, but by this point in the winter it was a solid glaze of packed snow and ice. The drifts along the side were so high that she couldn’t see the truck’s wheels, and it looked as if the vehicle were skimming across the top of the snow. She didn’t recognize it. As far as she could tell it was red, but it was so streaked with white from road salt and brown from spread sand that she wasn’t entirely sure. But it seemed to be losing a back panel to rust. And it definitely needed muffler work. It announced its presence with a roar, even though it was navigating the curling driveway with some care.
“You know who that is?” Chip asked. He had just finished pulling shut the clamps that locked the girls’ snowboards to the roof.
“Not a clue,” she said, and now she could see it was a woman driving, her hair a lustrous gray mane that was parted in the middle and fell well past her shoulders. Her parka was blue. The woman coasted to a stop in a section of driveway in front of the carriage barn, actually driving past their station wagon. Emily looked at her husband and saw he was already walking over to the pickup, and so she followed. The girls were bundled up and ready to go, but—as usual, when there was daylight and they weren’t in school or unpacking boxes in their bedrooms—they were in the greenhouse.
“Good morning,” the woman said, pushing open her door and jumping down onto the driveway with an obliviousness to the coating of snow there that was somewhere between foolhardy and confident. Emily still found herself moving gingerly along it. They had snow in Pennsylvania, but not like this. Not all winter long. There the snow came and it went. Here? You’d never know that Greenland was melting faster than a Popsicle in July. Here were the winters she recalled from her childhood: snow and cold and winds that numbed her cheeks. Leafless, sinuous maples.
She noticed that the woman was holding a long, flat Tupperware tin in both hands and, on top of it, a similarly shaped baking dish covered with aluminum foil. Emily understood instantly that this was a neighbor bringing food. More food. A lasagna and brownies, she suspected. She guessed that the woman was almost a generation older than she and Chip: probably fifty-five or sixty. Her face was lovely but lined, and her eyes looked a bit like her parka: They were the color of moonstones. She wasn’t wearing gloves. “I’m Anise,” she said. “I’m a friend of Reseda Hill,” she added, referring to the woman who had taken over as their real estate agent after Sheldon Carter died so abruptly.
“Emily Linton,” she said. “This is Chip, my husband.” Emily found it interesting that, ever since the plane crash, she had been more likely to introduce her husband than he was to take the social lead and introduce her. He wasn’t a failure—not by a long stretch when she contemplated the traumas that had marked his childhood—but he had confessed to her that he felt like one. These days he defined himself entirely by a single moment, and that moment was not about the nine people who had lived but was instead about the thirty-nine who had perished. He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not. Now she watched the tentative way that he gave this friend of their real estate agent his hand and mumbled a soft greeting.
“Oh, I’d know your face anywhere,” Anise said with a broad smile that revealed a layer of upper teeth that were just beginning to cross over one another and a row of lower ones that were starting to yellow with age. The woman hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but it had become one of those statements that Emily knew made Chip anxious. Yes, for a time his face had been everywhere. For a time it had been all over the Web, the cable news networks, and the newsweeklies. After all, he was the pilot who had failed to do what Sully Sullenberger had accomplished. People never meant anything when they said that they recognized him. And sometimes it was even better when they came right out and acknowledged that they knew who he was, as Anise just had, rather than simply staring at him and saying nothing. Chip had told her once that silence without verbal recognition seemed like even more of an indictment.
“Can I help you with those?” Emily asked, and she pointed at the tin and the baking dish in Anise’s arms.
“If you promise to eat them,” said Anise. “There’s a lentil-nut loaf in this one and carob-chip brownies in the other.”
“Vegan?” Emily asked.
“Yes. They taste better than they sound—I promise,” Anise insisted, and she handed the items to Emily with particular care because Emily was already wearing her ski gloves. “The brownies have names on them. One for each of you. Hallie is spelled with an i-e, right?”
“Yes, that’s right. Really, this all sounds scrumptious. Thank you. It will be such a gift not to have to cook tonight.”
“Reheat the lentil loaf in a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree oven for twenty minutes.”
“Or microwave it for, what, three minutes? Four?”
Anise tilted her head as if this were a math equation that was puzzling her. “Huh. I don’t have one of those. Too scary. I put those in the same category with cell phones and aspartame. You’re just asking for brain cancer.”
Emily noticed that her husband hadn’t said a word, but now he was eyeing the woman’s vehicle. She had been married to him long enough to know that he was probably wondering how this woman with her fear of carcinogens in diet soda and radiation from a cell phone could drive around in that rusted-out, carbon-monoxide-spewing tank.
“It looks like you’re about to head to the mountain,” Anise observed, just as the pause was about to grow awkward.
“We are,” Emily told her.
“With the girls?”
“Yes,” she said, momentarily nonplussed by the idea that she and Chip might be leaving the girls behind. Of course they would be bringing them. She wasn’t going to leave a pair of ten-year-olds alone for the day—especially in an unfamiliar house in which once had resided an apparently sociopathically skittish old woman who left knives and hatchets in corners. But then she reminded herself that Anise was a friend of Reseda’s, and there was every reason to presume that Anise was simply trying to make conversation. Show some interest. “It’s a family outing,” Emily went on. “An escape from Box Hell.”
“You lose power last night?”
“We did. Did you?”
“I did. I was surprised because I live in the valley. Living up here on the hill, you’ll lose it more often than I will,” Anise said. Then: “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I live on the road to the Notchway Inn. It’s the brick Georgian with the greenhouse and the overgrown paddock with the white fence. I don’t have horses, but a previous owner did. Don’t be strangers.”
“You know much about this house?” It was Chip speaking, and because it was the first time he had opened his mouth other than his softly murmured how-do-you-do, both she and Anise found themselves turning toward him with a combination of intensity and expectation.
“A little bit. I knew Sawyer and Hewitt Dunmore. It’s an interesting place, isn’t it?”
“Can I ask you a question?” Chip said.
“Absolutely,” answered this friend of their real estate agent.
“In the basement is a door. I noticed it the day before yesterday when I was bringing a load of laundry down there.”
“Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Where does it go?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you might.”
“Nope.”
“It’s sealed shut.”
“Sealed?”
“With bolts. Lots and lots of carriage bolts.”
“That’s interesting. Based on the design of the house, where do you think it goes? Back up to the kitchen, I’d wager. I know the house has a back stairway linking the first and second floors. Why not one linking the basement with the kitchen?”
“Not likely. The kitchen would be above the other side of the basement. It seems to be a door to nothing. It’s at the edge of the house. All that’s above it is the screened porch. And that porch is just built above dirt.”
“I’ll bet it was a ramp, in that case. A wheelbarrow ramp.”
“There’s one of those on the other side of the basement—on the north side of the house.”
“Maybe it’s a coal chute then.”
“There is some old coal lying around it,” he admitted.
“There you go, mystery solved. The Dunmores—or the Pierces before them—probably built that screened porch after they stopped heating with coal.”
He nodded, but Emily knew that her husband wasn’t entirely convinced. The two of them had discussed the likelihood that it was merely a coal chute the afternoon he first noticed it. Certainly it was possible that’s all it was. But why would you use thirty-nine carriage bolts to seal it shut? (Emily feared the coincidence that there were the same number of bolts as there were fatalities on Flight 1611 was only going to exacerbate her husband’s fixation on the door.) Chip had removed one of the bolts, but it had taken an awl with a beveled point, a screwdriver, and a hammer—and nearly twenty-five minutes of struggling. It was six inches long. When he realized that the remaining thirty-eight were probably identical and might demand the same labor—kneeling in dirt and moldy, crumbling coal—he twisted the carriage bolt back into place and returned upstairs to unpack some more boxes. Over cups of decaffeinated coffee late that night, sitting on the floor in the den because here was one room where the wallpaper was a soothing pattern of blue and yellow iris, he and Emily discussed calling Hewitt Dunmore to ask about the strange door. But when Emily had phoned Hewitt yesterday about the possessions they’d come across in the house, everything from that extraordinary sewing machine to those eccentric figurines, she had found herself incapable of asking him about it—or, for that matter, about the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. He seemed too damn ornery. Besides, it was just a door to a coal chute, wasn’t it? She decided another time, perhaps.
“Yeah, that’s what we figured,” Chip said finally. “A coal chute.”
“What else could it be?” Anise agreed, and she raised her eyebrows and smiled once more. “It’s not like the Dunmores hid bodies down there.”
No, of course not, Emily thought.
“It must feel wonderful to be here,” Anise continued.
“It’s nice,” Emily agreed, carefully modulating her tone. Nothing in her life felt particularly wonderful right now. Besides, she hadn’t been here long enough to have any sense at all of whether moving to Bethel had been the right decision.
“Are you going to garden?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you garden in Pennsylvania?”
“Not really.”
Anise motioned at the greenhouse. “You’ll want to take advantage of that. Tansy did for a while. Then she stopped. She shouldn’t have.”
Emily thought about this. “I presume you’re a gardener,” she said finally. “You said you have a greenhouse.”
“We’re all gardeners,” Anise answered, and there was something in the tone that was oddly salacious. A moment later, the woman was climbing into her battered pickup and Emily was carrying the lentil-nut loaf and four carob-chip brownies with their names on them into the kitchen and calling for the girls. Chip remained outside by their car, staring up into the sky and, she presumed, watching for birds or the white trail of a jet high overhead.
You do watch for birds. You do stare at the plumes of the jets high overhead. You will, you know, never fly again. Not as a pilot and not as a passenger. Never.
You have confessed only to your psychiatrist in Philadelphia that, suddenly, you are afraid of flying. As well, you discussed with her at length what physicians have determined are the psychosomatic or phantom pains in your neck and your back and your head: the lingering whiplash. The occasional daggerlike spikes in your left kidney and abdomen, a sensation you have likened to a horizontal barb impaling you through your back and your stomach. The way your skull sometimes feels as if the frontal bone—that great helmet beneath your skin—has been crushed, smashed into the brain in one moment of life-ending trauma.
She told you they would pass. Eventually.
Instead they have gotten worse this week since you arrived in New Hampshire. You tell yourself it is because of the work of moving your family from one house to another. All that lifting. All that stress. It was bound to aggravate whatever is going on in your back and your neck and your head. Your mind.
Moreover, the dreams seem to be changing here. Oh, you still have the dreams where you crash CRJs in catastrophic, steel-melting infernos—though, of course, you always wake a split second before impact. You still have the nightmares with dense tropical forests filled with palm trees and oxygen masks dangling like strange, tubular plants.
But last night there was a dream with a little girl, not either of your daughters. She was sopping wet, drowned—dead, you knew it even in your sleep—but she didn’t know she was dead and she was nattering on and on about her backpack, which she wanted you to help her find. This was new. So was the dream on Thursday night with some burly guy your age who was standing behind you and Amy, your now dead first officer, on the flight deck of the CRJ as you were about to start down Burlington’s runway 33 for the last time. He was telling you to wait, wait, wait—to goddamn it, wait!—because if you waited just a couple of seconds you wouldn’t hit the goddamn birds. But you ignored him and started your roll, turning around to command him to take his seat in the passenger cabin, noticing for the first time when you turned that he, too, was dead and hadn’t a clue: A round metal shard had pierced his skull like a long spike of rebar, and another was protruding from just beneath his rib cage. Only in a dream could he stand.
Soon enough, the nightmare ended as they all do: a fireball occurring just as you open your eyes and stare up at the diaphanous shadows of your bedroom at night.
One time, if only to change the dynamic with your psychiatrist in Philadelphia, you told her about a broad broad brought abroad. A joke at your mother’s expense when you were in the fifth grade. Your mother was terrified of flying. Absolutely petrified. Had to be hammered to get on an airplane. Had to have her good-luck charm bracelet on her wrist and her Saint Christopher’s medal around her neck. Had to be wearing a specific pair of sunglasses as a headband to keep that long and lustrous black hair off her face. Tony Swoboda and his wife, Kaye, were driving you and your family from Stamford to Kennedy Airport the time you all flew to Spain and Portugal on a two-week tour. One of those vacation packages that took you to a half dozen cities in barely a dozen days: Madrid in two days and Lisbon in thirty-six hours. An afternoon for Toledo. It was your last vacation as a family—you and your parents and your younger brother—because it would be soon after your return that your father would start up the grand staircase at Grand Central Terminal around 8:35 on a Tuesday morning and die right there on the steps of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. (His last conscious vision? You like to believe it was Paul Helleu’s Mediterranean sky, but at the time the ceiling had not yet been restored. The stars that day had still been obscured by soot.) He was walking from the train station to his office at the ad agency on Forty-eighth Street, as he had almost every workday of his life for twenty years. It was the end for him, but only the beginning of the end for your mother. Somehow, her husband’s life insurance had lapsed and their savings and investments were clearly inadequate to keep her and her two sons in a four-bedroom house near the water in Greenwich, Connecticut. They would cut back, then they would move. A smaller house in Stamford, at the edge of the city. It wouldn’t have been so bad for the three of them if the combination of widowhood and diminished resources hadn’t conspired to turn a social drinker (a very social drinker, in hindsight) into a drunk.
Ah, but your father was still among you when you went to Kennedy Airport for the final time as a family of four. And Tony was teasing your mother that afternoon, trying to make her smile because the idea of flying across the Atlantic Ocean at night had her on the verge of vomiting. Tony and Kaye were great friends of your parents. Had been for years. “Yeah,” Tony was saying to your mother, as he and your father carted the great suitcases into the terminal from the parking lot (you realize when you focus upon the details of this memory that Tony and Kaye have not dropped you all off at the curb before the departure doors; they have parked their massive station wagon and are crossing the garage with you), “you’re just a broad broad brought abroad.” Your mother couldn’t quite bring herself to smile, but she finally put out her cigarette and stared at something other than her fingers or the smoke or the length of the ash, and marched into the terminal. This was at the very end of the era when people dressed for flying as if the airplane were a synagogue or a church. Your mother was wearing a gray cashmere blazer and a black skirt, and even as a ten-year-old boy you knew it was far chichier than the uniforms that some of the airlines had their stewardesses wearing. And you, of course, were in your navy blue sports jacket—the only blazer you owned because you were a boy and how many sports jackets does a boy really need?
Unlike your mother (and, to a certain extent, even your father), you had never been scared of flying. Not even the tiniest bit. From your very first flight, a Boeing 727 to Florida, you would always sit hypnotized in your seat, staring out the window as the plane accelerated down the runway and gently lifted off. The windows invariably were scratched, but still you would watch the world grow small and wait for the jolt as the plane cracked the edge of the clouds. You built plastic models of fighter jets, passenger jets, and the lumbering bombers the United States used in the Second World War. For hours at a time you played a video game—one of the first of its kind—in which you were a pilot with a rudimentary jet console before you.
That night you flew with your family to Europe, your mother sitting in the seat beside you, gripping the armrests during takeoff, convinced that nothing as heavy as this—a Boeing 747—could possibly get off the ground or (if somehow it did) remain aloft. Meanwhile, you only studied the lights along the runway and the landmarks of the terminals nearby. Your mother believed that bad things happened at thirty-five thousand feet, and her terrors were exacerbated rather than relieved by all that Scotch she would consume when the plane reached its cruising altitude. She was always a little pale when she flew. A broad broad brought abroad.
You, however, loved the experience. The speed. The vistas. The peace. Later you would understand the physics of flying, but that never lessened the magic. Even when the plane would be cruising on autopilot and you were swapping out Jepp charts in your binder—tedious work you seemed to be doing at least twice a month—you would occasionally glance out the window and find yourself a little awed by the beauty of the world so very, very far below you.
Ten-year-old Hallie Linton thought their new greenhouse in Bethel was a bit like the walled garden in that story The Secret Garden. It was an enchanted place, but—just like in the novel and the movie—right now you couldn’t see its possibilities. It was wintry in there at the moment and empty, except for those four tables and the stacks of flimsy plastic pots, and it smelled musty. There was so much black dirt on some of the big glass panes that a person could write her name in it. But she loved the building. Even now, the sun six weeks shy of the equinox and much of the glass opaque with grime, the greenhouse glowed with a bluish tint at the right time of the day. Hallie studied the way the long metal beams sparkled at noon, especially after she and Garnet had taken some Windex and paper towels yesterday and gingerly stood on the tables and scrubbed a few of the windowpanes. (Cleaning all of the windows was going to be a major project, both because there were so many and because the dirt, in this temperature, seemed to have been quilted over with glue. Nevertheless, she had every intention of making the effort when the days had gotten a little longer and the sun had started thawing the grime.)
She knew Garnet didn’t have quite as much interest in the building as she did, but dutifully she had helped cart out their dolls and the doll furniture; she seemed to appreciate the idea that at some point this was going to be their playhouse—or, at least, a playhouse that they might share with their mom and dad’s plants. Their parents had not evidenced a particular interest in gardening in West Chester, but recently their mother had said something about starting tomato seedlings in here. She had said she might even take up flowers as a hobby. It didn’t matter to Hallie. How much time could a grown-up really spend in a building like this? Besides, their mom had taken a job with a couple of other lawyers in Littleton. And their dad? Hallie couldn’t begin to imagine what was going to interest Dad now that he was no longer a pilot. She was pretty sure that planes were all he knew and all that interested him. He liked to fly—or had once. She certainly didn’t see him gardening or growing flowers in here.
Of course, she wasn’t precisely sure what was going to interest her either in New Hampshire. She knew that she was outgrowing her dolls, but she had no idea what might replace them here in the mountains. Probably not ballet and probably not the flute. Though she was only ten, Hallie grasped the reality that these would be just hobbies for her, even if she pursued them vigorously; she was no prodigy and there was no point in approaching either ballet or music with passion. This revelation neither saddened nor slowed her. She presumed someday she would find something else, and in the meantime she would go to dance class and practice her flute with the same dogged acceptance that compelled her to attend to her homework.
She had noticed already that she didn’t seem to have quite as much homework in Bethel. That might change. But at least over their first few days here, her new teacher hadn’t assigned nearly as much math or spelling or reading as Mrs. Leeds had in West Chester.
Moreover, there weren’t the massive shopping malls here that there were in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Or the community theater groups for their mom. Or even the Phillies—which, she had to admit, interested her mostly because they had interested her dad and some of her friends at her old school. Had they remained in Pennsylvania, she and Garnet were going to get cell phones for their eleventh birthday this coming summer, but cell phones seemed less important here: There wasn’t any coverage at their new house, so how could they text their friends—assuming, of course, they eventually made some new ones? Hallie imagined bringing a laptop out to the greenhouse and getting a page on something like Facebook, just like the older kids, and surfing and posting and chatting for hours, but the router would have to be mighty powerful. She guessed they would spend a lot more time snowboarding here than they had in Pennsylvania. After all, the mountain was only twenty minutes away; they could see it from one of the house’s porches. And yesterday they had seen—and heard—snowmobiles racing across the farthest edge of the meadow, and so she thought it was possible that maybe she’d take up snowmobiling.
Now, here was something that might interest Dad: snowmobiling. The connections in her mind were the roar of the engines and the sense of speed. Like a jet, a snowmobile was fast and it was loud.
Based on the few days that she and Garnet had been at their new school and their first visit to their new dance studio, it was clear that she was going to have to take the lead if she and her sister were going to make any new friends. That probably was to be expected. She had always been more popular than Garnet back in Pennsylvania, so why wouldn’t that be the case here? Hallie understood that her sister was going to be a part of any group largely because she herself was. Moms seemed to love Garnet’s red hair, but kids thought it was almost too red. This wasn’t strawberry blond stuff. It was more like just strawberry. (Hallie was thankful every day that they were fraternal twins only; she liked her dark brown hair much more than Garnet’s, and she knew she had a much prettier nose.) And then there were the trances. And those overnight stays at the hospital over the years for EEGs and testing. It was only a matter of time before Garnet would have a seizure here and the kids would view her simultaneously with the contempt wolves feel for the wounded and lame, and with the terror they feel for someone who is chronically ill.
And yet the sense that Garnet was an outsider, a little different, also gave her twin a certain control over her: Hallie knew that often she would defer to Garnet’s wishes when they were alone, the motivation existing somewhere in that realm between sympathy and loyalty.
So far they hadn’t brought any of their new schoolmates—her new schoolmates, really—over to play. Not Molly or Lily or Adele. There hadn’t been time. But she guessed she would soon. Molly, perhaps, who sat at her classroom table, even though she and Molly really didn’t have all that much in common. Or maybe it would be Lily. She hoped she and Lily would become friends. Good friends. Lily was nice. So was Lily’s mother, though the woman seemed to hover a lot. When they were introduced at the school and Lily’s mother figured out that she and Garnet were twins—the new twins, she had cooed—she had been weirdly excited. Hallie could tell that it had made the school principal, who happened to be in the classroom at the time, a little uncomfortable. But Lily’s mom was friends with Reseda, the lady who’d wound up being their real estate agent after Mr. Carter died, and Reseda seemed to be nice enough. She was sweet—and she was very, very pretty, in an exotic sort of way.
Hallie heard Garnet calling for her now, yelling that Mom and Dad said the car was packed and it was time to leave for the mountain. As she closed the greenhouse door, she made a mental note to ask Mom if she was making new friends. She hoped that her mom and Reseda would become pals.
When the girls had been in the second grade, a plane had crashed outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, killing all forty-four people onboard. Apparently, a combination of ice and wind and inexperience had been the culprits. It was a turboprop—a Dash 8—not one of the planes Chip flew. But it crashed on approach to the airport, and so it was near enough to civilization that news crews were on the scene in moments and footage of the fiery wreck was on television for days. Chip had been gone at the time, in the midst of three days of flying around the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic. Emily recalled the ways she had tried to shield her girls from the images—as she did always when there was an accident—but this time the twins had gotten wind of the crash and become frightened. She had had to sit Hallie and Garnet down in the living room, the three of them in what had become their accustomed spots on the massive, L-shaped couch with the upholstery of lovebirds, and reassure them that they needn’t worry. Their father was safe. Their father’s plane (and even though Chip flew many planes, they seemed to discuss Chip’s work as if he always flew the same exact jet) was not going to crash. Because she harbored her own small superstitions, Emily did not want to jinx Chip by stating that his plane was never going to crash. It was a small, semantic distinction, but it reassured her; it gave her the sense that she wasn’t really tempting fate. (Still, in even her worst, wildest dreams, she didn’t honestly believe that someday his plane might pinwheel into a lake minutes after takeoff.)
And she had managed to comfort the girls that day. Other planes might crash—but not Daddy’s.
She wondered now if when the twins were alone they discussed that afternoon on the couch three years ago. She assumed they remembered it. She considered whether they felt betrayed by their mother, whether they had come to the conclusion that her reassurances were meaningless. That she would say anything to calm them down. But what mother wouldn’t? The fact that neither girl had reminded her of the conversation meant nothing to Emily.
She was glad they lived three hours east of Lake Champlain. She could never have tolerated a move to New England if Bethel had been anywhere near that lake.
“Garnet?”
The girl opened her eyes when she heard her name and swam slowly to the surface of wakefulness. At first she presumed she was home. West Chester. The room overlooking the front walkway and the apple tree, the two windows on one wall opposite the foot of the bed. The homes of their neighbors—the Morrisons and the Browns—visible if she craned her neck to the left or the right. But here, she noticed, there was only one window at the foot of her bed, while there was a second one to the right side of it—both horizontal. She saw the wallpaper in the night-light, the green and red plaid that looked like Christmastime wrapping paper. She saw the moon, a day or two short of full, through the glass and the gauzy curtains that her father had hung the day before yesterday. And finally she remembered precisely where she was. New Hampshire. Not home. No, that wasn’t right. She was home. It was just that home now was New Hampshire. She and Hallie had the two bedrooms on the third floor of this house. The floor with the attic (though you couldn’t get to the attic from either her or Hallie’s room; you had to pull down that trapdoor in the ceiling in the hallway on the floor below them). Their old home, she recalled, had only the two floors. For a moment her eyes focused on the last remaining moving box that she hadn’t yet begun to unpack, and she tried to remember what was inside it. It was a big one. Barbie dolls and the Dream House? Summer T-shirts and shorts and bathing suits? That seemed right. It had clothes and dolls and the Dream House.
The day and the evening slowly came back to her. Snowboarding. The tram with her mom and Hallie, and the way the snow on the pine trees at the top of the mountain reminded her of vanilla cake frosting. Hot chocolate at the base lodge. Then there was the dinner at home that was completely inedible: a bean loaf followed by bad-tasting brownies that some woman had baked for them, though Hallie had liked the brownies more than everyone else and had been so hungry after the main course that she had ended up devouring the brownie with Dad’s name on it as well as her own. Then they had watched a DVD of some teen boy who learns he’s a prince, a movie they’d long outgrown that made both girls wish they had the satellite dish hooked up so they could watch regular TV instead.
“Garnet?”
There in the doorway stood Hallie.
In an instant, the second that Garnet had pushed herself ever so slightly off the mattress and glanced at her, Hallie had realized that her sister was awake and raced across the room like a sprinter and dove into bed beside her. She burrowed under the quilt, and Garnet could feel how cold her sister’s feet were.
“Your toes are icicles,” she said to Hallie. Then: “What are you doing?”
Her voice a whisper, Hallie said, “You don’t hear them?”
Them? Mom and Dad? “Who?” she asked anyway, presuming that of course her sister was referring to their parents.
“I don’t know. Listen,” Hallie murmured urgently. “Just listen.”
And so Garnet did. She heard the slight whistle of her sister’s breathing through her nose and she heard the occasional soft bang from the ancient radiator that sat like a gargoyle on the wall nearest the bed. But there was no wind outside and the cat, wherever she was at the moment, wasn’t making a sound. There was no noise at all coming from Mom and Dad’s bedroom on the floor below them.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said finally.
“You must!” There was an urgency to Hallie’s voice that was rare.
“What time is it?”
“It’s like three. Listen!”
“What should I be hearing?”
In the moonlight Garnet could see her sister’s eyes, wide and alert, and she thought once again of their cat. Dessy, short for Desdemona. They had gotten the cat from the animal shelter when they were three and Mom had done a Shakespeare play with a character with that name. The cat’s orange fur had reminded their mom of the color of the gown she had worn for much of the production.
“You really don’t hear it?” Hallie asked in a small but intense voice. “You really don’t hear them?”
There was that word again: them.
“No.”
Hallie was lying on her side, but her head was elevated, her ears well above the pillow. “Wait, it’s stopped.”
“What?”
“No, don’t shush me. Tell me! You’re scaring me!” Rarely was Garnet ever this insistent with her older sister. Though Hallie was only minutes her senior, Garnet always deferred to her as if the chasm that separated them was two or three years.
“I’m scared myself.”
“Of what?”
“I heard people.”
“Really?”
Hallie nodded. “Two or three. I don’t know. But definitely one was a girl—like our age. Or maybe a little younger.”
“In the house?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t. The nearest house must be, like, a mile away.”
“No, that’s not why it doesn’t make sense,” Hallie said.
“Then why?”
“I don’t know, but the people were mad. Or scared. That’s it, that’s why they were so loud: They were scared. I think they were more scared than mad. And I heard water. Lots of water. Waves and stuff.”
“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.