Chapter Four

In the days when you were a first officer, after your aircraft landed, you would meticulously go through the shutdown checklist with the captain and then walk around the plane. It was your responsibility to eyeball the aircraft and make sure that nothing was leaking or out of place. Sure enough, once you did spot a crack in the skin near the nose, and that aircraft subsequently was taken out of service. But you never spied anything leaking.

What you noticed often, however, and always on the leading edges of the plane—the wings and the nose and the vertical climb of the tail—were bits of dead birds. One time there was a dent in a wing the length of a couch cushion, likely the result of a collision with a goose. In hindsight, you can’t say whether you noticed the spots monthly or perhaps even more frequently than that. But you know the birds that brought down 1611 were certainly not the first birds to collide with an aircraft you were flying.

Some days you find yourself Googling the details of the Lockheed turboprop that was brought down by starlings at Logan Airport in 1960 when sixty-two people would perish. It fascinates you that when a pair of Airbus engines were destroyed by geese nearly five decades later, so little mention would be made of that earlier nightmare. But that was the accident that led aircraft designers to start firing birds into engines to test their capabilities and the FAA to set requirements for how many birds an engine had to be able to swallow before choking to death.

On the school bus, Garnet was aware of a sixth-grade boy staring back at Hallie and her. They were sitting beside each other in what had become their accustomed side (the left), and she was in her accustomed spot: cocooned beside the grimy window, her sister buffering her from the world. The boy was the older brother of a girl in their class named Sally. Finally he spoke: “You do and you don’t look like twins,” he said, his bare hands on the back of his seat as he looked at them. He was two rows ahead of them, but the seat between them was empty. The long bus was never more than half full.

“I have no idea what that means,” Hallie told the boy. “You do and you don’t look like Sally’s big brother,” she then added belligerently.

But Garnet knew what the boy had meant. She understood precisely what the sixth-grader was trying to say. Perhaps because she was always following Hallie or deferring to Hallie, she was always looking at Hallie. Watching her. And while they were not physically identical twins, there was an air of identicalness about them. They were like puppies from the same litter. Hallie, Garnet knew, glided through the world with far more confidence than she herself ever would have, but still their mannerisms were eerily similar. They gnawed at the nails on their pinkies with the same affectation, extending their thumbs as if they were hitchhiking. They stretched the same way in class or while watching television, extending their legs and toes and raising their arms like long, slinky cats. And though their hair was two very different colors, it was equally fine, fell to the same spot on their shoulders, and today was kept out of their eyes with the same robin’s egg blue headbands. And, Garnet knew, they had the same delicate chins and the same almond-shaped eyes. She had been told (warned, actually) that because she was a redhead eventually she would have great constellations of freckles, but so far she had been spared and she and her sister had the same invariably tan complexions.

“It means,” the boy said, his voice betraying his unease with Hallie’s challenging tone, “that you look like you’re more than just sisters. That’s all.” Then he turned around and stared out his own window. He was, of course, absolutely right. Garnet knew that Hallie had in fact also known just what he was driving at. But sometimes Hallie needed to assert herself. Procure for herself a little distance. And that was fine. Besides, just as Garnet had anticipated she would, at that moment her sister discreetly took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

Reseda sat alone in the butterfly position—her back straight, the soles of her feet touching, her fingers gently grasping her toes—on a silk pillow on the gravel path in her greenhouse. She was vaguely aware of the sound of the water from her fountain and the occasional clicking from the baseboard radiators, and she felt the sun through the glass against her eyelids. She inhaled the fragrance of the nearby rosemary. Still, she was uneasy: Her mind kept circling back to the Linton twins, and she wondered what this meant. As she had reminded Anise, she herself was a twin. What was it about this pair that seemed to have such … potential? What might make them more suitable—more useful—than other twins? The tincture demanded the blood of a traumatized twin, but that may have been nineteenth-century drama or alliteration. Moreover, no one had ever been able to tell her what “trauma” Sawyer Dunmore had endured. The girls were still prepubescent, that was true. But the reality was that the tincture was from the second volume, a book that Reseda found deeply disturbing. It was filled with concoctions and cures that demanded animal hearts and human blood. Anise was a vegan, but she was willing to make exceptions for recipes found in the second book—especially when a tincture was as effective as the one leavened years earlier with Sawyer Dunmore’s blood.

Anise—all the other women, actually—had been interested in another set of twins three years earlier. Again, fraternal, childlike, and possibly traumatized. Boys, that time, like the Dunmores. They had moved to Littleton because their father was going to be the superintendent of a nearby correctional facility. They were eleven when they arrived, moving with their parents and two younger sisters from Nashua to the White Mountains. When they had been toddlers, their town house and the adjoining town house had burned down in the small hours of the morning, and the fire had begun in the very bedroom they shared. The wiring behind their night-light had been defective and set the night-light and then their bedding on fire as they slept. But their father had smelled the smoke before they succumbed to it and gotten the twins and his wife safely out of the house. The next-door neighbors had not been so fortunate: They were an elderly couple, and both succumbed to smoke inhalation in their sleep.

Sadly, no sooner had Anise gotten to know the twins’ mother—a deferential and mousy little thing, and thus rather perfect—than the father was involved in a very public, gloves-off sort of fight with the state legislature over funding for the correctional facility and ended up quitting in a huff. The family moved back to Nashua, and whatever opportunities those twins might have offered were gone. They couldn’t possibly try outside of Bethel; they couldn’t possibly try at such a distance. People would notice. They would watch. They would intervene.

She sighed. It wasn’t simply that the earth here in Bethel felt sacred to Reseda—though it did. It was liminal. Connected. A bridge, in her opinion—or, better still, a passageway. She thought of the Egyptian doors to the afterlife, six- and seven-foot slabs of granite found in some of the ancient tombs. Often carved into granite was a series of concentric doorways, suggesting an infinite corridor.

But Bethel was also isolated, and that mattered, too. It was, in the end, why she stayed here. The soil was at once blessed and undiscovered—at least by most of the living.

Sometimes people from other parts of the country found her. They wanted her to host everything from goddess workshops to rites of passage retreats. These strangers had heard rumors about her and wanted to learn from her, though they never wanted to learn anything she wanted to teach. Politely she would direct them to shamans she knew who were legitimate healers and—unlike her—comfortable as teachers. Unfortunately, the world also was filled with hundreds (thousands?) of people who claimed to be shamans and had Web sites, and would be content to take their money and teach them to handcraft a shamanic rattle or drum. Maybe help them to try to make sense of their dreams. The truth was, she wasn’t especially interested in the living. These days, she knew, she was far more fascinated by the dead.

Once again she saw in her mind the faces of the Linton girls and then the face of their father. She saw him flinching reflexively when his plane flew into a cloud of geese. And, finally, she thought of the geese themselves, rising up from a marsh or inlet or patch of swampy soil and flying thousands of feet into the air only to collide with a jet plane. One of the other women in a group she had joined before retreating to New Hampshire had had an eagle for a power animal. But no one, as far as Reseda knew, had ever had a goose. She wondered if those geese had been part of a plan. Had they been sent? Had there been a reason for the sacrifice of the thirty-nine passengers aboard the aircraft?

She resolved she would watch the twins more attentively and she would wait. Unlike the family of the correctional superintendent, she doubted the Lintons were going anywhere soon.

Occasionally, you recall the unsolicited comments that passengers would offer as they boarded the plane and you were in the midst of your preflight checklist. There was that exchange with a Southern belle as you prepared to lift off from Charlotte. She was a blond debutante, attractive and slim at middle age, and she stood beside the flight attendant, her elegant Burberry carry-on bouncing against her tanned knee and the edge of the galley.

“You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?” she asked, peering into the flight deck, her Southern accent emphasizing each and every d.

“I do,” you said.

“I hope so. I have four children at home,” she told you, and you were struck by the way she had managed to lose all that weight four times. “And I want to make sure we get there safely. So you all be sure and tell me if you need any help, okay?”

You had to ask: “Are you a pilot?”

“No,” she answered, shaking her head and smiling. “But I am a very fast learner.”

When you arrived in Philadelphia, she again peered into the flight deck as she was exiting the aircraft. “Thank you,” she said, “well done.” Then she gave you a thumbs-up.

Emily was leaning aimlessly against the counter at the diner on the main street in Littleton. It was lunchtime, and she had ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup—comfort food in her opinion, even when one was nearing forty—that she was planning to bring back to her office. She would eat at her desk and work.

“Are you Emily Linton?”

She turned and saw before her an attractive woman somewhere around fifty. The stranger had ash blond hair that was cut short and a lovely, aquiline nose. She was wearing a down overcoat that fell to mid-shin and leather boots stained white from salt on the sidewalk.

“I am,” she said.

“I’m Becky Davis,” the woman said, pulling off a leather glove and extending her hand to Emily. She smiled, but Emily could sense that she was a little wary. “Do you have a second?”

Emily glanced at the rectangular cutout in the wall behind the counter and peered into the chaos in the kitchen and the plates lined up on the brushed metal sill. It didn’t look like her grilled cheese was up. “Sure,” she said.

Becky studied the patrons in the diner—mostly senior citizens and mostly men in green John Deere ball caps—and seemed to be considering where they should talk. Then she spied an empty booth not far from where they were standing and motioned toward it.

“I really can’t stay,” Emily said. “I was planning to bring my sandwich back to my office and work through lunch.”

“Oh, I have work to do, too,” Becky told her, and she slid onto the red leather cushion. Reluctantly Emily sat across from her. She couldn’t decide whether she was about to get an earful now about her husband the pilot or whether this woman was about to try to invite her to visit a church or join a women’s group of some sort. Becky seemed normal enough, but the way her eyes had darted around before deciding they should sit suggested that looks in this case might be deceiving; perhaps she was one of the town crazies. She seemed a little flushed—the cold, perhaps—but she was fidgeting nervously with the zipper on her coat and her unease was palpable.

“You’re Hallie and Garnet’s mother, right?” Becky asked. “You just moved here from Pennsylvania.”

“That’s right,” Emily admitted, understanding this would not be about Flight 1611. It was, she decided, instead going to be about joining the elementary school’s parent-teacher organization. Maybe they needed her to bake cupcakes for something. In West Chester, it seemed she was always baking cupcakes for something. Still, she smiled and raised her eyebrows. “You’ll have to tell me why you’ve done so much homework.”

“Oh, everyone knows. Bethel is a small town. I live in the brick house with the white shutters about two miles from you. I imagine you pass it every day on the way in to Littleton. Still, our paths weren’t going to cross unless I introduced myself to you, because my boys are well beyond the elementary school. One is in high school and one is in college.”

“Where do you work?” Emily asked.

“I work at Lyndon State. It’s a long commute, I know.”

“Not by Philly standards.”

“I guess. And obviously I’m not there today. My parents are coming north from Asheville for the week and I took the day off to get the house ready. That’s my work this afternoon.” Now the woman was glancing behind her and peering out the large glass windows of the diner.

“You expect to see them on the sidewalk?” Emily asked. She couldn’t resist.

“What?”

“Your parents. You were looking around just now like you expected to see them wandering up Main Street.”

“No. Look, I’m taking a chance talking to you. Reseda Hill sold you your house and you work in John Hardin’s law firm. So, obviously, it’s crossed my mind that you might be …” She paused, the half sentence lingering awkwardly amidst the clattering dishes and burble of conversation in the diner.

“I might be what?”

“There’s no graceful way to say it: You might be one of them.”

“One of them? One of who?”

“But there’s obviously a lot about you on the Web—because of your husband,” she went on, ignoring Emily’s question. “I’ve read a lot. And I know the principal at the elementary school, of course. Doris LeBaron. She’s been the principal since before my older boy started there. And she’s told me a little about you, too.”

“Why was Doris talking to you about me? I mean, I hate to sound paranoid, but … why?”

“I could lie and say it’s just because of who your husband is. I’m sure you know, people talk about that. It’s human nature. But that wouldn’t be the truth—at least not the whole truth. Doris and I are friends. We walk together in the summer. We’re in the same spin class in the winter. And she’s seen you with your girls. And we both have the sense that you’re not one of them. Now, if I’m wrong, well then I guess I have just seriously—”

“One of who?” Emily asked again. “You didn’t say.”

“The herbalists,” she said, leaning in as she spoke and then pulling away. It was as if herbalists was a dirty word.

“Oh, I get it,” Emily said, and she had to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. “Those women who have the greenhouses. I mean, I’ve heard something. And Anise and Reseda are indeed trying to look out for us. They’ve both been very helpful.”

“Anise, too,” Becky murmured thoughtfully, as if this were additional bad news.

“She seems eccentric—but nice. Really.”

Becky craned her neck to glance over Emily’s shoulder and abruptly stood up. “God, I’ve completely lost track of time. I’m so sorry, but I have to go.”

“You didn’t order anything. Aren’t you eating?” Emily asked.

The woman shook her head. “If you ever want to talk, call me,” she said. “My number is in the book.” She pulled on her gloves and strode purposefully down the diner corridor between the booths and the row of swivel seats at the counter, and then out the door. On her way out, she almost bowled over a regal looking fellow with massive shoulders and a bald head the shape of an egg as the two of them nearly collided at the front door. Emily saw the waitress was beckoning her from the register and holding up a white paper bag with her lunch. She rose. She couldn’t imagine how a woman like Becky Davis could seem so normal on the surface and so clearly unstable underneath. She didn’t expect she would ever have a reason to phone her.

And what of God? You pause in your work in the kitchen, replacing the paint roller in the tray and sitting back on your heels as you wonder: Where was He when Flight 1611 crashed?

The thing is, you went to Sunday school as a little boy, but by college you were no longer capable of reconciling childhood cancer, genocidal warfare, and mudslides that obliterated whole villages and buried babies alive with any kind of divine presence. Sometimes you and Emily worry that you have made a mistake not introducing your girls to any religious tradition at all—wouldn’t it at least have helped them to hone their moral compasses?—but between your travel and Emily’s work, Sundays really were nothing more than days of rest. Besides, half the time you weren’t even home on Sundays. When the girls were toddlers and Emily was alone with them, the last thing she was going to be capable of on a Sunday morning was getting them up and dressed and off to church. And certainly the geese that appeared before your windshield just above two thousand feet on August 11 have done nothing to reinvigorate your faith. Nothing at all. The thirty-nine people who died that day in the water died through no fault of their own. They were as innocent as the many millions who die every year of disease and starvation. The many millions more who have died throughout human history in war or been killed in genocidal slaughters. The casualties of fire, water, air. The victims of car accidents, train collisions, and … plane crashes.

And yet still …

Still …

Since the failed ditching in Lake Champlain, you have found yourself pausing as you gaze up at thunderheads and rainbows and at the snow that transforms these leafless trees in Bethel into skeletal sculptures of black and silver and white.

No one has brought up church here in New Hampshire. At least not yet. Everyone did back in West Chester after Flight 1611 broke apart in Lake Champlain. Maybe folks here are more circumspect. Still, it has left you surprised. Apparently, the Congregational church in the village has sparse attendance at best. You noticed few cars in the lot when you drove past it that first Sunday morning on your way to the ski resort. Maybe everyone here goes to the Catholic and Methodist churches in Littleton, or the Baptist one in Twin Mountain.

You shrug and dip the paint roller into the tray once again and resume work on the corner of the kitchen behind the pumpkin pine table and deacon’s bench. The irony that you own a piece of furniture called a deacon’s bench is not lost on you. In your old house, Desdemona would doze on it in the afternoons, when the sun would warm the long cushion. In this new house, the bench sits in a corner unlikely to see much sun, even in June and July. You wonder where the cat will doze now.

Emily drove up the long driveway that led to a house where an elderly couple named Jackson lived, the girls in the backseat behind her. She didn’t know the Jacksons, but the twins’ teacher, Mrs. Collier, wanted the girls to catch up with the rest of the class on a science project: The students were growing bean sprouts and carrot tops in glass jars, but they had started a little more than a week before the Lintons arrived in Bethel. Ginger Jackson, a retired food chemist from New Jersey, was also an avid vegetable gardener, and she had provided the class with the materials for their project. She had informed Mrs. Collier that she had extras she had started herself to follow along, and she could give them to Hallie and Garnet so they could have plants at the same stage as their peers’.

Emily felt an unexpected pang of melancholy when she reached the house, and she wondered what it was in the structure that was affecting her so. The oldest, original parts of the house dated back to 1860, Reseda had said. It was a Gothic Revival cottage, though the term cottage suggested a modesty the building had probably lacked even before two additions increased the size by roughly a thousand square feet. Now it was shaped like a rectangular U with four fireplaces, one in each of the shorter wings and two in the long center. The chimneys reminded Emily of the pictures of the funnels she had seen on massive cruise ships in port, and the house’s roofs were slate and descended gently like sand dunes. A snug and inviting bay window anchored each tip of the U, and Emily could imagine one of her daughters curled up with a book in each of the window seats.

And that, she understood suddenly, was why she was feeling a great pang of sadness. This was the sort of house she wanted—not the melancholy crypt she and Chip had bought.

“Does she know we’re coming for the plants?” Hallie asked her mother from the backseat of the car.

“I called and left a message,” Emily answered. She coasted to a stop beside the garage. “But it doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” she said, talking to herself as much as she was informing her daughters. She climbed from the Volvo and looked around. No sign of any other vehicles. She walked gingerly over the ice on the driveway and peered through one of the glass windows in the garage door. There was no car in either bay.

“I’m sorry, girls,” she said when she returned, settling back in behind the wheel. “We’ll have to try again another day.”

“Are you disappointed?” Garnet asked her.

“Oh, only for you girls,” she said, worried that her own disenchantment must have crept into her voice.

Garnet shrugged. Hallie had her chin in her hand. “We’ll probably just come back tomorrow,” she said. “Or the next day. Why not? There’s not a whole lot else to do around here.”

“Sometimes when I went to New Hampshire to visit my grandmother, I felt exactly the same way,” Emily confessed. “The stores were boring, there was no TV reception. I didn’t know the kids there so I didn’t have any friends. But the place kind of grew on me.”

“You were just visiting, Mom.”

“I know. But …” She stopped speaking when she heard Hallie’s small sniffle, and she turned her full attention on the child. The girl missed her friends in West Chester. Both twins did. “Oh, sweetie, I know it’s hard. But you’ll meet kids, I know you will. You’ll make new friends. I promise.”

Hallie nodded and wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand. Garnet patted her sister on the knee. And neither girl said a word. If they couldn’t put into concrete sentences the reasons why their family had moved, they understood how brittle their father had become and the need to retreat from Pennsylvania. From civilization. And they accepted that, because they were his children, this move was a part of their lot.

The notion made Emily want to cry, too.

You find yourself studying the transcript of the final seconds of your final flight and hearing over and over in your head the actual recording that was played in the NTSB hearing. You sat through all three days of the investigation, you listened to the tapes, you watched the computer simulations. You were transfixed by the cell phone video made by a tourist who happened to have been eating an ice cream cone at the Burlington boathouse when you ditched your plane in the water. (She would drop the ice cream on the wooden dock when she saw the regional jet bearing down amidst the boats on the lake.) Then, those nights on the news, you watched yourself in the hearing room staring at that video or listening to testimony or—one day—testifying yourself, and you were struck both by how much your hair had thinned and by how impassive you seemed in your rolling chair beside that long mahogany table. You wore your uniform (again, a last time) when you testified.

You always sounded calm and controlled in the recording. You never raised your voice. You never panicked. Same with your first officer. Amy, like you, was a study in professionalism. Yes, she screamed reflexively when the wave careened into the wingtip of the jet and you went perpendicular to the water. But you didn’t. You didn’t curse, you didn’t cry out (though the woman recording the cell phone video certainly did, exclaiming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s flipping! It’s flipping!”). You kept your composure even then, even when death appeared imminent. There was an involuntary grunt because the sensation was not unlike being punched hard in the stomach and the chest, and the yoke slammed up into your thumbs with such force that it’s a small miracle they didn’t break. But otherwise you stayed with your controls until all control was completely out of your hands. You flew your aircraft until, pure and simple, you couldn’t.

And then, the day after the crash, you endured the interrogation by the NTSB. It was all about alcohol, sleep, and food. Thank God, you recall thinking at the time, you hadn’t had even a glass of wine the night before the plane hit the birds. And you clicked shut your hotel door that evening and fell asleep watching a Red Sox game on a hotel cable station. When you flew your three legs that day, you had been sober and well rested; you had eaten well.

People have told you that you would have had a better chance of succeeding that August afternoon in an Airbus than in a CRJ, because the Airbus uses more fly-by-wire technology: A computer prevents a pilot from flying either too fast or too slowly and assures that the aircraft’s pitch and turn angles never exceed the plane’s capabilities. But the issue wasn’t bringing the plane safely to the lake: You did that. You and Amy did that together. In the end, the issue was, son of a bitch, that wave.

Still, it seems indecent to be alive today when four-fifths of your passengers and your crew are dead. You have no plans to rectify that and join them, of course: Haven’t you done enough to scar your two children already? The last thing they need now is for their father to kill himself. But when you see in your mind the black box—and you see it often, though not as frequently as the dead as they bobbed in the water and the fuselage slipped under the waves—you see also that the only place for you to live is a place like this: a sparsely populated hill in a sparsely populated corner of a sparsely populated state. You are living in exile. As an exile. Emily doesn’t view Bethel quite this way. It was her brainchild to come here in the first place. But you do. You view it precisely as an exile. Your own personal Elba.

One day when Emily is at her office in Littleton and the girls are at school and you have just been to the hardware store to get lightbulbs and Spackle and have yet another window shade cut, on your way home you decide to detour toward the office of the real estate agency where the agents—first Sheldon, then Reseda—who sold you the house work. You coast into the parking lot of the dignified mock Tudor that houses the agency and sits beside the brick library and across the street from the post office. You stare for a moment at the town common, with its pristine white gazebo and creosote black Civil War cannon, the heavy gun’s small mounted plaque honoring the White Mountain veterans of that war and the ones that followed in Europe and the Middle East. You gaze at the maple trees—willowy, sable, spiderlike—with a dusting of snow on the wider branches from last night. You wonder precisely why you have veered here and what you are going to ask.

But in you go, and there is Reseda Hill seated behind her desk with her landline phone against her ear and the screen on her computer showing a modest house for sale just off the main street in Littleton. The agent smiles when she sees you, and you stand there awkwardly, not wanting to appear to be eavesdropping on the conversation but not wanting to seem to ignore her, either. There doesn’t seem to be a receptionist, but out of nowhere another agent appears from a backroom, a woman in her mid-thirties—Reseda’s age, too, you believe—who is wearing black pants that are provocative and tight and a cashmere sweater with pearls. She has hennaed her hair and placed it back in a bun and is wearing a perfume that reminds you of lilacs. She introduces herself to you as Holly, but, before the conversation has proceeded any further, Reseda has motioned to her that she will be off the phone in a moment.

“Would you like some tea?” asks Holly, but you decline. You hear yourself telling her your name, and she says, “I know.” And you’re not taken aback. Not at all. Of course she knows your name.

“Coffee?”

“No, I’m fine. Really.” You tell her you can come back, it’s not important, because deference now leaches from you like perspiration.

“I’m sure Reseda would want to talk to you,” she insists. Then: “I’ve always thought being an airline pilot must be very glamorous. Is it?”

You find yourself smiling. It is a popular misconception. “It once was—but that was years before I started flying. The generation of pilots before me had it a little easier: They certainly weren’t eating cheese sandwiches on the flight deck.”

“The airline doesn’t feed you?”

“My first years, it did. We had vouchers. But no more. The vouchers disappeared with my pension. So, on my first leg—I’m sorry, my first flight—I would usually be eating a brown bag lunch I packed myself before leaving home. I remember some mornings, I would make three identical sandwiches: one for me and one for each of my daughters. I have two. Twins. My daughters would bring theirs to school, of course. But you know what? I liked those cheese sandwiches. I really did. You get to your cruising altitude and you eat and enjoy the view. It’s actually rather pleasant. I loved to fly.”

“Were you gone a lot?”

“Probably too much. I was usually flying four days and home three. The rules for rest are complicated, but I might fly a dozen legs those four days. Sometimes, it would be less: seven or eight. Either way, I would say I ate half my meals between thirty and thirty-five thousand feet with a paper napkin in my lap.”

“And that was safe?”

You nod. “That was safe. I was always a stickler for safety.”

Just about then your real estate agent laughs at something and hangs up the phone. She rises from the seat behind her desk, and you are struck by the suede and fur, burgundy-colored boots she is wearing, and how they haven’t any heels at all: This really is a woman who knows how to navigate her way through a White Mountain winter.

“Chip, how are you?” she says, smiling, her eyes that beautiful, disturbing cobalt blue you noticed the first time you met and you think of whenever you think of her. Reseda is tall and trim, a slight ski jump to her nose, and her cheekbones are almost as prominent as her eyes. Her hair is darker than the chest-high wrought-iron fence that surrounds the cemetery at the edge of the village. She takes one of your hands in both of hers, and you always have the sense around her that, if you were in a big city, she would be the type who would want you to greet her with polite air kisses on both of her cheeks. Her palms are dry and cold, and yet the sensation, the touch, makes you a little warm.

“We’re settling in well, I think,” you begin. You describe your breakfasts with the view of Mount Lafayette from the kitchen and skiing periodically the past couple of weeks at the nearby resort. You make a small joke—and the joke does seem to you to be woefully inadequate—about the numbers of boxes you have unpacked and yet the numbers that remain. You wonder as you listen to the sound of your voice—a voice that once inspired confidence at thirty-five thousand feet—whether you are capable of asking the questions that have brought you here. They seem ridiculous now. Absolutely ridiculous. But, finally, you start: “You ever notice that door?”

She angles her head slightly, justifiably confused. The world has a lot of doors. Your house alone has twenty-seven (yes, you have counted), and that doesn’t include the closets and the cupboards and the pantry. “What door?”

“There is a door in the basement. It—”

And then there it is, that slight smile and sympathetic nod you have seen so often from people since August 11, and she is cutting you off. You are now in everyone’s eyes an emotional invalid. They need to be … gentle … around you. “Oh, Anise told me you were asking about that,” she is saying. “The coal chute.”

And you realize that once more they have been talking about you. Anise has told Reseda that you were nonplussed by a … coal chute.

“I must confess,” she continues, “I never did notice it. But then I rarely showed that house. Still, it must be a guy thing. I never heard other agents mention it. I guess women notice how much light a kitchen gets in the afternoon and men notice the coal chute in the basement. But sit down and tell me. What about it?”

You sit in the chair opposite her desk, and it feels good, if only because you have been working very, very hard scraping wallpaper and Reseda is indeed lovely to look at. The chair is leather and the smell is vaguely reminiscent of the aroma of the seat on the flight deck: human and animal all at once.

“I just can’t imagine why someone would have sealed the door shut in such an enthusiastic fashion,” you begin, careful to smile back both because Emily has told you that you have a handsome smile and because you don’t want to sound like any more of a lunatic than you already must.

She shrugs. “Hewitt Dunmore is a bit of an odd duck,” she says simply, referring to the previous owner.

“So you think he was the one who closed it up?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know him well. Anise does. She knew his parents and his brother, too. Maybe his father was the one who sealed it up. You know, that’s actually more likely. I imagine it was years and years ago that they stopped heating with coal. It’s LP gas now, correct?”

“It is. And there’s also that woodstove.”

“I love that woodstove. Soapstone. Palladian windows on the doors, right?”

“Right. We’ve been so busy unpacking we’ve only started a fire in it a couple of times.”

“That must have been cozy,” she says, and there is something vaguely seductive in the sibilant way that she finishes her sentence. Those magnificent eyes widen just the tiniest bit.

“It’s not really a cozy house.”

She sits upright behind her desk, that lovely oval of a face abruptly looking alarmed. But you’re not at all sure that the alarm is genuine. She looks alarmed, and it is that same disingenuousness that marked the bad acting of so many of Emily’s friends in Pennsylvania when they pretended to be actors in their community theater dramas and musicals. “Oh, I hope you’re not regretting the move already. We’re all so happy to have you here. You and Emily and your beautiful twins.”

“No, not at all. It’s a wonderful house. I didn’t mean to suggest I had any regrets. I think Emily and I will be very comfortable there. I think the girls already are adjusting quite well. Especially Hallie. She loves that greenhouse.”

“That’s important. Is she sleeping well? Are you all sleeping well?”

You recall Hallie’s bad dream that first Sunday night. You recall a second she had more recently. You wonder simultaneously whether a couple of bad dreams would suggest your child is not sleeping well and why the real estate agent would ask such a thing in the first place. Has she heard something from someone? Did Emily mention something to another attorney in her firm who mentioned it to Reseda? Did Hallie tell her teacher in school, who, in turn, told this real estate agent? Is the town really that small? Is it possible that people really talk that much?

“We’re all sleeping fine,” you respond, which is, more or less, the case with your daughters and your wife. A couple of nightmares, you decide firmly, does not constitute sleeping badly. And while you yourself haven’t slept well in six months, your nightmares and flashbacks are really none of her business. Besides, you don’t want to appear any more damaged to Reseda than you already must.

“But right now you and Emily are only … comfortable,” she murmurs, repeating one of the words that you used, and you detect a slight sniff of disappointment. No, not disappointment: disapproval.

“Sometimes, happy is asking a lot.” You say this with no particular stoicism in your tone; it’s a glib throwaway.

“Oh, I hope that’s not true. Personally, I don’t think it is. I understand what you’ve been through. But I would like to believe that happiness is a perfectly reasonable expectation here.”

“Perhaps.”

“Have you taken the door off?” she asks, her eyes growing a little more probing, a little more intense.

“It would demand a lot of effort.”

“Have you talked to Hewitt?”

“About the door?”

She nods.

“Nope.”

“You should,” she says.

“Probably.”

“Or …”

“Yes?” You realize for the first time that there is a scent in the office that is reminiscent of lavender. Burned lavender. As if it were incense. You have inhaled a small, lovely dollop of Reseda’s perfume.

“You could ask Gerard up to the house and have him just rip that door down. That would be easier than removing all those bolts.”

You pause for just a moment before responding, because you don’t believe you have mentioned the bolts. But then you get it: “Anise must have told you about the bolts.”

And for just about the same amount of time that you paused, so does Reseda. Her face remains waxen, unmoving. Then: “Yes. She did.”

“Who’s Gerard?”

“Anise’s son—and a very nice young man. A little quiet, a little intimidating even. He’s a weight lifter. Belongs to the health club in Littleton. He will probably be the one haying your fields this summer. He’s big and tall and very, very strong, and I’m sure he could rip that door right off its hinges.”

You contemplate this notion. The advantage is that you would learn what’s behind the door pretty quickly. The disadvantage is that you would be in violation of an unspoken rural code: You are an able-bodied man and you are having another able-bodied man handle a household chore that you should be capable of managing on your own. You could take an ax to that door as well as this Gerard. You are not that old and infirm. And so you tell Reseda, “Thank you. I think I can handle this one. Maybe I should just rip the door off myself.”

“Well, if you change your mind, his shoulders are pretty broad. He’s pretty resourceful.”

“Good to know. Thank you.”

“Tell me: How is Emily enjoying Littleton? The second floor of a little brick building beside a bicycle shop and a bank must feel like a very big change from a top floor of a skyscraper in Philadelphia.”

Has Emily told Reseda this, too? Has she told her that her old firm dominated the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth floors of a building on Chestnut Street? Or is this conjecture on the part of the real estate agent? “It is a change,” you say, “but she finds the pace very pleasant.”

“And I’m sure the drive in to work—the commute—is a lot more civilized.”

You nod agreeably. “It is. And a lot shorter. About fifteen minutes, door to door. Can I ask you something else?”

“Absolutely,” she says.

You turn around in your chair because you remember Holly is there and what you are about to ask feels … private. Holly is at her desk and moving her mouse as she stares at her computer screen. But she senses you are gazing at her, and so she looks up and grins. Instantly you turn your attention back to Reseda.

“Hewitt Dunmore’s twin brother,” you begin awkwardly, unsure precisely how to broach the subject. “Sawyer, I think his name was. He took his own life, right?”

“That is what people say.”

“How? Why? What do you know about his death?”

“Well, I didn’t know Sawyer. I wasn’t even born when he died. But Anise knew him. She knew the whole family.”

“Is there anything you can tell me?”

She shrugs and shakes her head, her face growing a little sad. “Teenage or pre-teenage depression, I assume. He was what, twelve or thirteen? Back then, it wasn’t really understood or treated.”

“And the … means?”

“He bled to death.”

“He slashed his wrists?”

“Something like that. But, honestly, my sense is that it was more complicated. Anise might know the details.”

Honestly. The word sounds insincere to you. Deceitful, maybe. How could she not recall the way a local boy had killed himself, even if it was before she was born? Wouldn’t it be a part of the lore of this small village, the sagas and stories and secrets that everyone shared? But, perhaps, you are being unfair; perhaps it really isn’t discussed around here. New England reticence. Propriety. And it was a long, long time ago.

“You must be looking forward to spring,” she says suddenly, her voice lightening. “It might be my favorite season. I love it—although I understand that for many people around here spring is a very mixed bag: mud and more mud. Lots of gray days. I tell you, crocuses this far north must have a death wish. No sooner do they poke their pretty little heads through the grass than they get hammered with eight inches of very wet snow. But there will also be some absolutely glorious days. Just wonderful! And there is sugaring to look forward to. I don’t sugar myself. But I have friends who do. You must bring your twins to a sugarhouse. I think they would love it: Sugar on snow, the aroma of maple. The samples. No child can resist a sugarhouse!”

“We will. Anyone’s sugarhouse in particular?”

“I think you should stop by the Milliers’. Claude and Lavender Millier. It will be weeks before there’s a sugar run. Or it might be a month. You never know. But I’ll introduce you between now and then.”

“Thank you. Do they have children?”

“Grown. But I know their son will scoot up from Salem for a few days to help with the boiling. He’s a doctor. A pediatrician. He’s part of a beautiful practice in a big old barn of a house with fantastic views of the ocean.”

“Anyone with a sugarhouse and children roughly Hallie and Garnet’s age?”

“Of course. I’ll just have to think a moment. I hear they’re doing very well in school.”

“You hear a lot,” you say, a reflex, and wish instantly that you could take the remark back. It isn’t like you. It’s just that everyone always seemed to be talking about you back in Pennsylvania this past autumn and winter, and now everyone seems to be talking about your whole family here in New Hampshire.

“Oh, you know how people chat in a small town. We haven’t anything better to do—especially this time of the year, when the days are short as a pepper plant.” She looks out the large picture window and continues, her voice a little dreamy. “Soon the geese will be coming back. We’ll see them flying north in just a few weeks. I love geese. Big, powerful birds. They’re another sign of spring.” Then she turns back to you and makes eye contact. “Tell me: Would you and Emily and your beautiful twins like to come to my house for dinner this weekend? Perhaps a casual dinner on Sunday night? Something easy and light?”

This is an enormous amount of information to try to make sense of: There is, as Emily would say, text and subtext. No one can use the words goose and geese around you without knowing that they connote profoundly disturbing images. They do not provoke a PTSD sort of flashback—you do not find yourself sweating when you hear them, they do not induce heart palpitations—but they do conjure for you the destruction of your airplane and the deaths of thirty-nine people. Thirty-six adults, three children. Including one with a doll dressed as a cheerleader. That, too, wound up floating in Lake Champlain, the eyes open, the hair the color of corn silk fanning out like seaweed in the waves. And then there was the girl with the Dora the Explorer backpack. All of the children were, you would learn later, younger than Hallie and Garnet.

At the same time, there is that dinner invitation, proffered out of the blue. An unexpected kindness.

You are not at all sure what to make of the juxtaposition. Was the invitation a spontaneous gesture provoked by guilt? Had she brought up the birds without thinking and then, after realizing what she had done, hoped to make amends with dinner?

“Well, that’s very sweet of you,” you hear yourself murmuring. “Thank you. Let me check with Emily and get back to you.”

“It will be very casual. Maybe some others will come.”

“I’m free!” says Holly from behind her desk, though she doesn’t look up when you glance back at her. “I want to come!”

“Of course,” says Reseda.

You find yourself struck by the names of all of these women around you. Reseda. Holly. Anise. You decide that either you have stumbled upon a secret society of florists or gardeners or all of their parents were hippies. Or, perhaps, they’re part of a coven. You are bemused by that notion in particular and conclude the synaptic link was triggered by the mention, a few minutes ago, of Salem. You always think of witches when you hear the name of that small city. Everyone does. The burning times. The hangings. The women (and men) pressed to death by stones.

“You’re grinning,” says Reseda.

“I just had a funny thought.”

“Can you share it?”

“I like your name. I like all of your names here.”

“The reseda is among the most enticing and fragrant flowers in the world,” she says, and you realize that you’re not in the slightest bit surprised.

When you leave a few minutes later, you have in one hand Gerard’s phone number and in the other a thick espresso-chip cookie from a batch that Anise had baked that very morning and dropped off at the real estate agency. You doubt you will ever call Gerard, at least about that door. But you are glad that you have the cookie. It’s delicious. You hadn’t realized how hungry you were.