Chapter Five
A bird became trapped in the woodstove. It flew in through the top of the chimney just as the late winter sun was starting to thaw the thin skins of ice on the shallow puddles in the driveway. No one was awake in the house. The animal worked its way lower and lower in the Metalbestos prefabricated chimney—a sparkling, cylindrical metal tube that was nine inches wide—from the opening nearly four feet above the twelve-by-twelve pitch made of slate and through the tube that cut through the attic and the second floor, darting finally through the rectangular vent to the catalytic converter and then into the soapstone stove with its regal glass windows. The windows were caked over with soot from fires long ago as well as from the few logs the Lintons had burned, and so the bird flew around and around in the near total dark, its wings frequently clipping the iron walls or the black stains on the glass. Desdemona, the Lintons’ cat, was aware of the animal before anyone else, and she stared alertly at the stove, her haunches raised ever so slightly and her tail occasionally brushing the floor.
Emily was the first one downstairs that morning, and when she saw the cat watching the stove as if it were a mole hole in the yard back in Pennsylvania, she didn’t know what to think. But she switched on the lamp beside the couch and two heavy boxes of unpacked books, and instantly the poor bird made another effort to escape, thwapping into the door because the flue was open just enough to create thin slats of light. Emily knew instantly then what was so interesting to Desdemona. She screamed upstairs to Chip because she was afraid of birds and knew that, once she opened the woodstove door and the bird flew out into the room, she would be utterly useless. And yet it was only when she heard him on the stairs, asking her what was wrong, that she knew how strange and inconsiderate it would be to tell him her panic had been caused by a bird. One small bird. But with the competence that formerly she had taken for granted, he opened the window nearest the stove and closed the door between the living room and the dining room—the room with, perhaps, the strangest, darkest wallpaper, a series of sunflowers that grew from the hardwood floor to the height of a grown man and, over time, had become brown with age and made her think of the elongated, damned souls in an El Greco painting—and used a bath towel to whisk the bird in the direction of the open window. It was a chickadee. She noticed a little black soot on its gray wings and the white of its nape. Instead of flying through the open half of the window, however, the bird darted straight into the solid pane above it, breaking its neck and falling dead onto the carpet.
As Chip gently picked it up, using his fingers to sweep it into the palm of his hand before Desdemona could cart it away in her mouth, Emily started to cry. She thought on some level it was just because it was so small, so very small, but she knew in her heart that there was more to it than that. Much more. Chip brought the bird outside, though where she didn’t know, and then he came back inside and sat down beside her. He put his arm around her. He didn’t say a word, he just rocked her a little bit and sighed, and she let her tears fall against the plaid top of his pajamas until they both heard their girls on the stairs. Abruptly they stood, and she told the children that she had been crying because the bird in the woodstove was just so little, but she was fine now. She was, she really was. They were all just fine.
You stand in blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the logo of your old airline emblazoned across the front and shovel coal for nearly thirty minutes, moving the pile a solid five feet from that basement door. It was possible to stand amidst the coal earlier this month when you were merely tinkering with one of the carriage bolts. But if you’re going to get medieval on that door with an ax this morning, you need a little more space. A little more room. Before you know it, you’re sweating, even though it is the first week in March and you are working in a dank basement in a badly insulated house that’s nearly a century and a quarter old. But the furnace emits a little heat, even here, and it’s no more than a dozen feet away.
When you have finally redistributed the coal, you sit on the basement steps to rest and sip from the plastic bottle of soda that has grown warm. Your heart is thumping from the exertion as you study the door and the bolts and wonder what precisely you will find behind it. You didn’t tell Emily you were going to do this when she left for work this morning, you didn’t mention it to the girls before school. You weren’t sure this really was a part of your agenda. You had expected you would tape the doorframes and windowsills and paint another wall in the kitchen. Roll that soothing sienna Emily picked out over the freshly spackled Sheetrock.
You find it interesting that the ax you are going to use to bring down this door came with the house. It’s the one Emily found hidden behind the ancient cleaning supplies in the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink. You could have used the ax you had brought with you along with a litany of other gardening tools from Pennsylvania: the rake and the hoe and the shears and the wheelbarrow. The clippers. The netting for the blueberry bushes. After all, you wandered out to the barn to retrieve the shovel you’re using now and you could have carried the ax back inside the house, too. But instead you pulled down the trapdoor and climbed up into the attic and found the box where Emily had stored those three, strange implements of self-defense: The crowbar. The knife. The ax. For reasons neither of you could precisely articulate, you couldn’t bring yourselves to cart those old items to the dump. But neither had you any desire to leave them where they were or to use them yourselves. Until now. Until you realized you needed an ax for this morning’s project.
And you like the symmetry. It’s as if the Dunmores left you this ax for precisely this purpose—which, of course, means there might be purposes as well for the crowbar and the knife. Now there’s a macabre thought.
This coming Sunday night, two days from now, you and Emily and the girls are having dinner with Reseda and Holly and whomever else the real estate agent will invite. You sip that cola and contemplate how satisfying it will be to inform them that you took the door down on your own—no need for this Gerard character that Reseda recommended—and found behind it … what?
You just can’t imagine. You have absolutely no idea what might be back there.
Emily’s mood had been sinking for days, ever since that chickadee died on their living room rug (though she told herself that there was no connection; her mood was going to deteriorate regardless of whether that bird made it out of the house). She knew it was never a good sign when she found herself poring over the obituaries she found in the Philadelphia Inquirer or—now that she and her family were ensconced in northern New Hampshire—in the weekly edition of the Littleton Courier. The old and the middle-aged and, in some disturbing or terrifying cases, the young. The faces in the photographs that were now being worked on by a mortician or moldering in a grave. Or cremated. It was the first thing Emily did this morning when she arrived at work and sat down at her desk in the room that not all that long ago had probably been someone’s bedroom. She sipped her coffee and thought of how she had uprooted her children and how her husband was a shell of the man he had been a mere seven months earlier. She thought of her friends she missed—those at the large firm where she had risen to partner, and those in the ridiculous, narcissistic, but bighearted theater community that offered such a wondrous change from her legal practice—and she contemplated how it had all come to this: a dusky office with three other lawyers she barely knew, a sweet young paralegal named Eve, and a secretary her own age named Violet, whom the lawyers shared and was dauntingly competent and not a little intimidating. She thought of how the days just didn’t get long fast enough here in northern New England. Right now back in West Chester, people were having their ride-on mowers tuned up.
On the stairway she heard footsteps, and a moment later she looked up and saw John Hardin peering in. John’s name was first on the firm’s shingle. He was over seventy, but he had the big hair of a Russian commissar. It was entirely white now, but he was a vigorous man who still skied and jogged and seemed to have no plans to retire. He didn’t work all that hard—none of them did—but they also didn’t make all that much money. In theory, however, that was precisely the point of living here rather than in, say, a suburb of Philadelphia like West Chester. Your paycheck was considerably smaller but your quality of life was so much better. You could age with the grace of John Hardin—though Emily knew that her and Chip’s dotage might not be quite so serene if either she didn’t find a way to make a little more money than she was earning now or Chip didn’t find a second career. The reality was that she had earned considerably more than her husband when they lived in Pennsylvania: Estate law was vastly more lucrative than commercial aviation in this day and age. Now that her income had taken a severe nosedive and his was—at the moment, anyway—nonexistent, they had not put a penny into their girls’ college funds in nine months and their savings would be long depleted by the time they were receiving their first solicitations from AARP. (And even that assumed the annual needs of a cranky old house on a hill in a frigid corner of northern New Hampshire did not grow particularly onerous in the coming decade and change.)
This morning, perhaps because it was a Friday and the fashion bar at the firm fell even lower, John was wearing blue jeans that were a little baggy, a gray tweed blazer, and a novelty T-shirt from the town in Mississippi that claimed the world’s largest aluminum and concrete catfish. Apparently, based on the photo on the shirt, you could walk inside the attraction and “Live Just Like Jonah!” The T-shirt was neon yellow and blue and clashed mightily with the jacket: It was like he had wrapped the Swedish flag around his torso. His parka was slung over his shoulder, and he was holding a paper cup of coffee in his free hand.
“It’s going to snow tonight,” he said, and the prospect clearly delighted him.
“And tomorrow?”
“Skiing.”
“Okay, then.”
“How are you doing, Emily? Honestly?” He had paused on the far side of her desk, and his voice took on the cast that she imagined he used when, before settling into a practice that revolved around real estate closings and trust modifications, he wanted to convey an avuncular sincerity to a jury. Convey to them how he could only represent a client who was innocent. She could tell he had noticed that her newspaper was open to the obituaries.
“No complaints,” she lied, shrugging.
He peered over her desk and pointed at the face of the teenage boy who had died in a snowmobile accident. “There’s little in this world worse than the death of a child,” he murmured.
“I agree.”
“I think everyone would. And yet it’s the damnedest thing: History is filled with human sacrifice—child sacrifice. Can you image? Anise and Reseda have come across some of the strangest cults and traditions in their botanical and shamanic research,” he said.
“Anise and Reseda? I know they grow a lot of bizarre plants. I know Reseda has introduced some very exotic flowers to this area. But human sacrifice? Where in the world does that fit in?” She wondered at the connection in John’s mind that would lead him to link the death of a boy in a snowmobile accident with human sacrifice.
“Well, it isn’t their specialty,” he said, and he raised his eyebrows mischievously.
“That’s a relief: No one likes to learn that one’s new friends are into human sacrifice.”
“I just meant that Reseda’s other work—her shamanic work—has led her to hear of ideas from other parts of the world that most people around here would find rather disturbing. Anise has, too.”
“Are Anise and Reseda both … shamans?”
“Just Reseda?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Of course, even in this corner of the globe we’ve had our share of strange doings. Trust me: Some people think the woods around here are just filled with witches.” He shook his head a little ruefully and then smiled. “Tell me, do you and Chip have anything special planned this weekend?”
“I think we’ll do something different and scrape some wallpaper. Maybe unpack a few boxes. And, as a matter of fact, we’re having dinner with Reseda on Sunday.”
“How’s it coming? All that scraping and unpacking?”
“Just fine.”
He nodded. Then: “Do you have dinner plans on Saturday, too?”
They didn’t, but she wasn’t sure whether she felt up to two dinner parties in two days. She also understood, however, that it would probably do both her and Chip some good to get out tomorrow night and spend some time with this partner in the firm and his wife and whomever else he decided to invite at the very last minute.
“No.”
“Then come to Clary’s and my house for supper. Nothing fancy. We should have had you over weeks and weeks ago. We’re derelict. I’m derelict.”
Supper. A quaint word. Provincial, but sweet. She heard herself murmuring that yes, they would like that, thank you, but only if they could bring the girls because they didn’t really have a babysitter yet.
“Of course,” he said. “We can set them up in the playroom upstairs and they’ll be happy as can be. We already have an awful lot of high-tech toys and video games up there for our own grandchildren. Or, if the girls would be more comfortable, they can be downstairs with us.”
“Okay, then. Thank you. What can we bring?”
“Smiles. That’s absolutely it.”
“A bottle of wine?”
“Sure. I will never say no to a bottle of wine. That would be perfect.”
It all sounded so civilized, she thought. So … normal.
Unfortunately, it also sounded now as if she were hearing both of their voices underwater. And that, she knew, was not a good sign. She feared that it would take more than two dinner parties in two days to pull her back from the lip of depression. Two in two days might be precisely the sort of push that would send her spiraling over the edge.
You may be kidding yourself, but you have always presumed that your passengers that August afternoon weren’t quite as terrified in their last moments of life as other people who died in other plane crashes. This assumption is based on the reality that they knew an awful lot about the miracle on the Hudson, too. They had seen the color photographs of the passengers as they stood in the icy water on the Airbus wings. They had seen the way the great plane had floated long enough for 155 people to exit the aircraft. And so as your CRJ was gliding—though inexorably descending—toward Lake Champlain, they must have clung to the hope that they, too, would survive; that they, too, would exit the cabin in an orderly fashion and slide into the life rafts or wait for their rescue on the wings. Or, perhaps, tread water for a few brief moments until a boat picked them up, because this was August and the lake would be warm.
And, indeed, this view has been partially corroborated by the statements of at least two of the passengers who survived. Behind you, as you struggled to bring the crippled jet safely back to earth, the cabin was calm. Yes, there were people praying. There were people who were texting what they thought might be their final messages to spouses and parents and children. But some of the passengers were coolly reaching for the life jackets under their seats and pulling them over their summer shirts. Some, inevitably, inflated them inside the cabin, which they weren’t supposed to do, and which might have hastened their death when the water rushed in and they were unable to dive under the surface and swim to the holes in the jet. But they weren’t panicked.
Yes, they were scared. But unlike you, they were largely oblivious to the stories of the water ditchings that were disasters. None, for example, had watched the absolutely horrific video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767 that attempted to land in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros in 1996. The plane had been hijacked and had, finally, run out of fuel. Its left wing slammed into the water first, no more than a few hundred yards from the beach, and the aircraft broke into thousands of pieces. As you watched the video, you found it amazing that only 125 of the 175 people onboard died. You would have expected everyone to have been killed.
The truth is that airlines don’t have pilots practice water landings on their simulators. The reason? There is so little data about how a plane performs when it hits the water that it’s difficult to program the simulation. Besides, what’s the point? Why waste precious training and practice time on an eventuality that’s so very rare?
And yet, thanks to Sully Sullenberger, many of your passengers that August afternoon probably believed they were going to survive what is, the vast majority of the time, an absolutely unsurvivable event.
Heads down, heads down, heads down!
Then, that new voice: She deserves friends.
You sip your soda and stare at the door, unsure which of the voices are real and which are only in your head. You rub your aching neck and the top of your skull: phantom pains. Nothing more. Nothing to do with the shoveling. Really, it’s nothing. Nothing at all.
Hallie watched Mrs. Collier lean against the wall beside the chalkboard, her checkered smock dress a little white with dust. The woman’s eyes scanned the students, and Hallie knew they were going to pause when they reached her. This was part intuition and part experiential knowledge. Hallie could tell Mrs. Collier had decided pretty quickly that she liked her and had figured out that she would give a pretty good answer to whatever question had been posed. And, sure enough, the teacher spotted her at her table—the classroom had five tables, each with four or five children, because Mrs. Collier preferred communal tables to neat rows of individual desks—and pushed a stray lock of her sandy brown hair away from her eyes and behind her ear. Then she said in that breathy voice she used whenever she spoke her name, “Hallie, what do you think?” They were discussing what effect having so many rivers and lakes had had on the early settlement patterns in Vermont and New Hampshire. One wall was filled with postcards the class had collected of Squam, Sunapee, Winnipesaukee, and Umbagog. There were two of Lake Champlain (the name of which alone made Hallie uncomfortable) and Lake Memphremagog. New Hampshire’s nearby Echo and Profile lakes were tiny compared to most of the other ones they had looked at in northern New England, but they were still of great interest to the class and there were postcards of each of them, too. Echo was located right beside the ski resort, and sometimes people were allowed to ski off the trail and onto the ice. And Profile was underneath a ledge where a rock formation called the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. Apparently, the Old Man was a cliffside made of granite that once had resembled the face of a cranky-looking old man. In 2003 it had fallen apart, and the pieces had plummeted thirteen hundred feet to the ground. Hallie was fascinated by the way New Hampshire used it on their quarter and on stamps and in all kinds of literature. She wished it were still up there above Profile Lake. She would have liked to have seen it for real.
Now she looked up at Mrs. Collier and answered that she thought the rivers had been more important than the lakes, because the rivers could power mills and help people get around. The teacher nodded and proceeded to compare the Connecticut River, which flowed north-south along the Vermont–New Hampshire border, to the interstate highway that these days ran parallel to it. After that, the class might have moved on with the lesson in how geography affected development, but Hallie noticed that the boy beside her, a rail of a child with a mop of dark hair that curled in great, swooping tendrils, was drawing a picture of an airplane dropping like an arrow toward a lake. His name was Dwight. He was using a yellow Ticonderoga pencil and a sheet of three-hole loose-leaf paper, and coloring in the water as she watched. The pine trees along the shore and the plane already were in place. There was smoke coming from at least one of the aircraft’s two engines.
It surprised her that, despite all of their discussions of lakes throughout the week, someone hadn’t thought of her father sooner. She was relieved that Garnet sat at a different table, because she feared her sister would find the drawing far more upsetting. That was just how Garnet was wired. Whenever they talked of the plane crash, Garnet would wind up sad or scared or strangely distant. These were not the neurological seizures that looked to most of the world like trances—there she was, just staring at the same page in a book or at the same Web site on the computer or at something outside the window only she seemed to see—though at first Hallie and her mother had feared that they were. (Hallie recalled now how one time the previous autumn Garnet had spent so long on the window seat in her old bedroom in West Chester, her knees at her chest and her arms around her knees, her eyes open but not seeing, that Hallie had had to rush downstairs and bring their dad upstairs to her sister. See if he could snap her out of the seizure. He had. Sort of. The girl made eye contact with him and nodded that she was okay, they didn’t need to go to a doctor. But it was another ten minutes before she was off the window seat and back at the computer they shared.) Still, Garnet would retreat to someplace in her mind and sometimes not say a word for a minute or two. She would ignore everyone, her eyes morose. These were not the ten- or fifteen- or even twenty-minute trances that marked the seizures. But they were nonetheless worrisome. Consequently, Hallie tried not to bring up the plane crash—which, she guessed now, might explain why today’s classroom discussion of lakes hadn’t made her think of Flight 1611 until she noticed the drawing.
Abruptly Mrs. Collier was at her table, standing right between her and Dwight and exuding anger and pain. Fiercely she grabbed the piece of paper with the sketch of the plane from the tabletop and stared at it. Then she glowered at the boy and said, her voice only barely controlled, “Did you hear one single word I was saying? Or one single word your classmates were saying?”
The boy looked terrified. His hands were buried in his lap, and his head and shoulders had gone limp like wilting flowers. Hallie didn’t think he had meant anything by the drawing. He knew about her father—everyone knew about her father—but she didn’t believe that he had been trying to frighten her or tease her in some fashion. He was just a boy, and boys seemed to like drawing airplanes—and, sometimes, those planes seemed to crash.
“Uh-huh,” he murmured finally.
“Uh-huh, what?” Mrs. Collier pressed.
“I was listening.”
“What was the last thing I said?”
Hallie knew it was the comparison of the river to a highway, but it was painfully clear that Dwight had indeed been in his own world and hadn’t a clue. The duration of the silence grew excruciating as Mrs. Collier waited for an answer she was never going to get.
And that’s when it happened. Abruptly Garnet was on her feet, too, and she was crossing the classroom to their table and standing beside their teacher and Dwight. Reflexively Mrs. Collier started to pull the paper toward her chest, crinkling it into a ball, but Garnet was too fast for her. She had an edge of the drawing in her fingers and then the whole picture in her hands. Out of nowhere she revealed a red plastic cigarette lighter, and then she was igniting the wrinkled sheet, holding it so that in seconds the flames had climbed up the image and incinerated every bit of the pulp. The children were either gasping or eerily silent, and Mrs. Collier was demanding that Garnet put it out, put it out now.
But already it was out. The last black wisps floated to the tile floor as gently as snowflakes, and Garnet stepped on them with her clog. Then she handed Mrs. Collier the lighter and said, her voice sweeter than warm syrup, “If you want, I can go to the principal’s office. I know where it is.”
Hallie had never seen her sister do anything like this. Not ever. She presumed that, if either of them was going to pull a stunt like this, it would have been far more likely to have been her.
Later, when they were walking up their driveway where the school bus left them off each afternoon, Garnet finally told her sister where she had gotten the lighter. She said it was in the far back corner of the walk-in closet they shared in the hallway between their bedrooms and she’d found it the night before when she was trying to find places for all of her boots and shoes. She added, “I didn’t know it was a picture of Dad’s plane at first. I really didn’t. I just knew it was making Mrs. Collier unhappy. And I guess I just wanted to try out the lighter.” Given what the picture was, however, and how the adults all presumed Garnet knew that the image was Flight 1611 plummeting into Lake Champlain, neither the principal nor Mrs. Collier felt a serious inclination to discipline her. They simply told her that the school didn’t allow students such things as lighters, and then the principal tried to call Dad at home and Mom at her office. Hallie pointed out to Garnet how she’d received absolutely no punishment at all, and her sister nodded. “You and I can probably do just about anything we want and get away with it,” Hallie added, and it was only after she had spoken that she realized she was stating the obvious. Garnet, it seemed, had known this for months.
You stand tall as you swing the ax hard into the door made of barnboard, your pants and sneakers positively black with coal, your hands and forearms streaked with sweat and muck. You convince yourself that the knobs and lines on the wood really look nothing like a face. Nothing at all. When you pause for breath you recall a historian you once heard speaking on the radio about the testosterone it must have taken to clear great swaths of New England of trees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The forests that greeted the first Europeans were substantial, and the tools the men used to clear them were primitive. They swung axes for hours and hours a day.
And now you are slamming the steel blade into the wood, conscious of how different this tool is from the electrical and mechanical ones that kept your airplanes aloft for nearly a decade and a half. The timbers around you quiver with each blow and the barnboard begins to splinter. When you hit the wood just right, there is a high-pitched groan after the crash of the blade that sounds a bit like a tree branch swaying in a fierce wind. But the groan may be your imagination or your mind playing tricks on you for any number of reasons. You are tired, you are lonely, you are—and the notion surprises you momentarily because until this second you hadn’t realized it was the case—worried about Emily. Tending to you—taking care of you—has begun to wear on her. You can tell.
Or maybe what sounds precisely like a moan from the door is a new manifestation of your PTSD: anthropomorphizing the timbers that were used to board up a coal chute.
And then, of course, the whimpers may be real: This may be precisely what shattering wood sounds like.
Regardless, soon enough, you have hewn a hole in the door. With your hands you pull the pieces apart, a chest-high hole that is large enough to reach in far if you want (you don’t). You take the heavy metal flashlight you bought at the hardware store for precisely this purpose (not, as you murmured to the woman behind the counter, because you seem to lose power so often here on the hill) and shine it through the uneven fissure.
And all that you spy are what look like wooden walls. Aged horizontal timbers that resemble a part of the foundation of the house. Otherwise, it is an empty … and what is the word you want? Compartment? Fruit cellar? Bin? The floor, you notice, is dirt, just like the rest of the basement.
But you have determined it is not a coal chute. At least you think you have. You’re not completely sure. Perhaps it had been a coal chute for a time and then it was walled off in this manner and used to store vegetables or fruit. Hard to say unless you tear down the door completely. And so you will. You allow yourself to rest for a moment, aware of the way your heart is thumping in your chest—from effort this time, rather than from anxiety—and then you resume your efforts, raising the ax and smashing it so hard into the timbers that you wonder if this is what the retort from a rifle feels like against your shoulder. But you continue to slam the ax into the barnboard over and over and over, until you have reduced a sizable section of it to kindling. You pull apart the remnants of the lumber with your bare hands as if you are parting the leaves in the trees at the edge of a great forest. It’s that simple. And then you drop the ax and pick the flashlight up off the dirt floor. You bow down just enough to twist your body through the passage you have created, careful as you step not to tear your jeans or catch your sweatshirt on the sharp points of the shredded wood.
And before you know it, you are in. The thirty-nine carriage bolts are still surrounding the frame like the bulbs on a movie marquee, but you are in. It took no more than an hour and a half, including the time you spent shoveling the coal like a stoker on a steamer.
You run the flashlight over the walls and the ceiling, aware that somewhere very far away the phone is ringing. (Later you will learn it is the principal at your daughters’ elementary school; you will be told that Garnet had brought a cigarette lighter into the classroom and reduced to ashes a drawing another student had made. Only after nearly ten minutes of obfuscation on the part of the principal will you discover that the drawing had been of a plane crashing into a lake.) No matter. The answering machine upstairs will get it. And with the flashlight you study the walls made of horizontal beams ten inches thick and easily two inches—two legitimate inches, not the two inches of the modern two-by-four—wide. If, long ago, this really had been a coal chute, the sluice has been boarded up solidly. You tap on the wood behind which the chute most likely would have existed, and it sounds pretty solid on the other side. Earth solid. No hollowness at all. And so you sit down in the dirt, your back to a wooden wall, and contemplate—now, where does this memory come from?—the pit of despair. That’s what it was called, when the researchers weren’t using its technical name: vertical chamber apparatus. You learned about it in college. In a psychology course. Harry Harlow designed it for baby monkeys to see what he could learn about depression. It was a stainless-steel trough in which he isolated the animals alone for months at a time. Even a year, in some cases. And, you recall, he learned only what one would expect from isolating a sentient creature for months in a box. The monkeys were wrecked when they emerged. Depressed. Psychotic. Really couldn’t be salvaged once they were set free. Rarely recovered. Well, this cubicle could be a pit of despair, too. You recall the sensation of lying in bed under the sheets this past autumn. After the accident. There were days, your children at school, thirty-nine dead in the water, your career over and done, when you didn’t get up until three in the afternoon, when the girls got home. Some days you didn’t get dressed at all. After all, what was the point? Really? What … was … the … point?
You pull your knees into your chest, if only because you believe this is the posture that behooves one in the midst of a stint in the pit of despair. You think of Poe and amontillado. A cask. Building stone and mortar. A trowel. Or, in this case, barnboard and thirty-nine six-inch-long carriage bolts. You bow your head against your drawn knees and breathe in the aroma of cold, cold dirt and mold. The air is a little stale.
In the unlikely event the cabin loses pressure, an oxygen mask will descend …
How many times had you heard that—or some version of that—in the cabin behind you while you were waiting to leave the gate? You always will miss that. The calm before … not the storm. The calm before the serenity of flying. How you loved flying.
You feel a sharp spike in your lower back, as if you have leaned against a protruding nail, and reflexively you wince. Just in case, you sit forward and run your hand over the wood behind you. It’s rough against your fingertips, but there is nothing spiking out from the beams. This pain is—as you presumed when you felt it—merely one of those strange, mystery aches that have dogged you since August 11.
“It was noisy under the water.”
Your head swivels instinctively toward the voice at the same time that your body jerks away from it, and your shoulder smacks hard into the gritty timbers beside you. But the voice is more startling than frightening. There, sitting next to you in the pit, is the child from the plane with the blond spit curls, her hair now wet with lake water and flattened against her scalp, who had boarded Flight 1611 with the Dora the Explorer backpack. The backpack is, in fact, in her arms even now, and she is sitting almost the way you are. Her arms are around her matchstick-like legs. You notice a bruise on one knee and a scratch on the other. Kiddie knees, Emily would call them. Too much tree climbing. Her uninflated life jacket looks like a bib.
“When I would have my head underwater at the swimming pool, it was always quiet,” she continues, her voice offhand, as if the two of you have known each other for years, “but that day in the lake? It was really, really noisy.”
When you think back to that moment, you realize she’s right. It was noisy. There were those ferryboat engines, which were much louder when you were in the water than when you were up on the deck, and the screams and shrieks from the passengers and the rescuers. There was a Coast Guard boat’s ululating siren. There was the chaotic, unorchestrated thwapping of the churned-up water and waves. And so you nod like a dad and tell the girl she is correct. You agree. Then you hear yourself asking the child her name, as if she is a slightly younger friend of Hallie and Garnet and you are sitting in a school classroom or, perhaps, at a Brownie picnic. (You wonder: Will your girls find a Girl Scout troop here or will this passage to the north lead them to leave the scouts altogether?)
“Ashley. I have two cats and a dog,” she tells you. “Your cat is huge. Much bigger than mine. Do you have any other pets?”
“Nope. Just Dessy. It’s short for Desdemona. And you’re right: She is a very big girl.”
“My cats are Mike and Ike. I didn’t name them. The animal shelter did. They were from the same litter, and the shelter named them after some candy because they loved each other so much as kittens and they were, like, always together. My dog is named Whisper. I got to name her. She’s a mutt, but she looks a little like a beagle.”
You wish you had gotten another dog after your chocolate Lab, Maxie, passed away the year before last. You would have liked to have had a dog here in the country. You would have liked to have had one to walk this past autumn when you were sleepwalking through life in Pennsylvania in the months after the crash. Desdemona might not have minded. She’d always seemed to like Maxie. But if you’d gotten a new dog, it would have been a puppy, and it’s possible that Desdemona would have had far less patience with the hysterical antics of a three-month-old Lab.
“Ashley’s a pretty name.”
“I don’t have a Mary-Kate.”
“I didn’t think so,” you tell her. You find yourself smiling, even though the child’s wet clothes are making the dirt between you turn to mud. Only recently have your daughters outgrown the Olsen sisters. “But you know what? My children are twins. I have twin girls.”
“I know.”
Of course she does. She knows about Dessy. Why wouldn’t she know about Hallie and Garnet?
“Most people think twins always look the same,” she tells you with great earnestness. “But I know that only happens sometimes. I have cousins who are twins, and one’s a boy and one’s a girl. It would be pretty weird if they looked identical! My family sometimes jokes about how Andrew—he’s the boy—is older than Becca. But it’s only by, like, a couple of minutes. Who’s older in this house: Hallie or Garnet?”
“Hallie but, like Andrew, only by minutes. Hallie is named after her grandmother. And her sister is named Garnet, because her hair was so very, very red when she was born.”
The child nods, taking this in. “Those are very pretty names.”
“I think so.”
Ashley stretches out her legs so she can open her backpack. She unzips the top and peers in for a moment. Then she turns to you, her face growing sad, and you reach out your arm to rub her shoulder, to console her. Suddenly she bends forward, bowing almost, grimacing, and your eyes go to her lower back, that precise spot on your own back where only moments ago you had felt a sharp sliver of pain. And then you gasp and, as if she were your own child, turn the girl away from you so you can examine more carefully the wound and see what you can do to help her. There you see a twisting corkscrew of metal nearly the size of a skateboard, a part of it adorned with the sky blue paint your airline uses to brighten the exterior fuselages of its jets, impaling the child from her back to her front. Perhaps seven or eight inches of the metal is extending from just beneath the front of her ribs—you must have missed it earlier because of her life jacket and knapsack—and at least a foot reaches out from her back like a shelf. Her clothing is awash in blood and flesh, and there are tendrils of muscle twitching like small black snakes from the holes that have been gashed through both sides of her shirt.
You can’t imagine what you can possibly do to help her—you can’t imagine what anyone could do—you can’t think of anything you could say to ease her agony and her fear. But, still, you reach for her because, after all, you are a father. Because you are an adult and you have to do something. Gently, so as not to jostle her and cause that great shard of metal to move inside her and cause her yet more agony, you wrap your arms around her. But when you press your fingers on the back of her shirt, you feel only air and she is gone.
You sigh. Your heart slows. You drop your hands to your sides and then, a moment later, touch the pinpricks of pain at the small of your own back.
She was never really there, you tell yourself. Yes, you recall there was a child on the plane named Ashley. You know this from the passenger manifest. You know this from the list of the dead. Ashley Stearns. She was seated beside her father, Ethan Stearns. But of course you just fabricated in your mind this whole brief conversation. You will be careful not to tell Emily. Or Michael Richmond, your new therapist here in New Hampshire. Already you worry them both. So, you will share this … this vision … with no one.
You run your fingers through the dirt, reassuring yourself that it was always this moist. This damp. You press them in a little deeper, digging abstractedly, when—And how did you not know this would happen, how could you possibly have not seen this coming? Isn’t this why you broke down the door in the first place?—you feel a long, coralline tube of bone. You pull it slowly from the ground and study it, grateful on some level that, unlike Ashley Stearns, it is no apparition. No delusion. This bone is as real as the ones in your forearm and probably as long as the radius and ulna that link your elbow and your wrist.