Chapter Nine

Garnet felt confused, the way she always did when a seizure had passed: It was as if she had had a nap and missed things that everyone else knew about. But unlike after a nap, she never felt well rested. She felt groggy instead: It was like she had awoken in the middle of the night rather than at a predictable time in the morning.

Now she was aware that her mother was leaving her, speeding down the driveway after their father. The headlights and siren from the ambulance had faded moments ago, and Reseda was here. Holly and Ginger Jackson, too. Her mother had called Reseda and said to come quickly. She had. Before that, however, Molly’s mother had come to the house and retrieved her own daughter. The first thing Garnet recalled seeing when she emerged from the seizure was Molly leaning against her own mom, sobbing, as Mrs. Francoeur stood in the front hallway and ranted about what a mistake she had made letting the girl stay here. Only when Mrs. Francoeur saw Garnet’s father bleeding on the kitchen floor did her rage dissipate. She went from railing about how Emily clearly was part of something evil to crying that the house was cursed and Emily was merely a fool to bring her family here. Meanwhile, Garnet’s mom simply kept pressing dish towels against her dad’s abdomen. Then the ambulance arrived, and Mrs. Francoeur finally went home—though not before making it clear that Molly was never going to be allowed over for a playdate again.

Before her mother left, she had told Garnet that she would be back soon. She had said that Daddy would be just fine. He would get some stitches and be as good as new. But whether soon meant within hours or the next day, Garnet didn’t know, and when she asked, her mother just repeated that one word: soon. So, now she sat beside the window in the living room and gazed outside. The yard was dark once more now that all the cars had driven off and—other than murmured voices—the only sound was the occasional rattle of one of the windowpanes in an early spring breeze. Yet the house felt full. Reseda and Holly and Ginger were in the kitchen, discussing how best they could help the family, and it had already been decided that Reseda and Holly were going to spend the night.

Eventually Hallie sat back down beside her. “They’re about to have us get in our pajamas and go to sleep,” she said, her chin in her hands.

“You were listening.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You hear anything else?”

“Not really. They knew I was by the door.”

“They did?”

“Yup.”

“How?”

Hallie shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, Reseda wasn’t mad or anything. She just tapped on the door and teased me about it.”

“I don’t want to sleep upstairs.”

“Me, either.”

Garnet sighed. “When we were in the woods, do you think he was there?” she wondered aloud.

“Dad?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t think so. Do you?” Hallie asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

“There was one second when I thought I saw something. Someone,” Hallie admitted.

“If it was Dad, he must have been there to protect us,” she said.

“Yup,” Hallie agreed, but Garnet had the sense that her sister—like her—wasn’t completely certain of that.

Reseda had spent very little time in the Southwest, but one night in Taos she had been part of a fire ceremony. The shamans had burned juniper branches they had soaked in water, and the result was a blaze with hypnotic purple smoke, the air alive with the aroma from the juniper’s essential oils. A woman had played the violin while sixty or seventy of them sat or stood around the bonfire and contemplated the colors of the flames against the night sky.

Tonight, with the two girls haunted by the power outage and the image of their father’s blood, she was using sage. In her experience, sage cleansed the energy in a space in much the same fashion as juniper: It helped clear away fear and worry and violence. And this was a space that had experienced all three that evening. She added a few more drops of sage oil to the diffuser and lit the tea candle beneath it.

“Candles make me think of blackouts,” Hallie said from the couch, her voice slightly petulant.

Reseda knew this was the child’s way of asking her to blow out the candle. She sat down on the armrest beside the girl and wondered what it meant that her father had actually cut the breakers: This had been no wind- or storm-triggered blackout. She had gleaned this when she said good-bye to him and to Emily as they left for the hospital. She honestly wasn’t sure what to do with this information and, at the moment, had no plans to share it with anyone. “This candle really offers very little light,” she said. “It warms the oil in the shallow bowl above it. Do you like the aroma?”

The girl shrugged noncommittally, but Reseda knew that she did. Then Hallie put down the mug with the California poppy and chamomile tea that Reseda had steeped for the twins to help them sleep. She noted that it was almost empty.

“I love sage,” said Holly, looking up at the girl from her spot on one of the two air mattresses they had inflated and set on the floor beside the couch. She was planning to sleep tonight in black dance pants and a yoga T-shirt. Reseda watched her reach under the quilt on the couch and squeeze Hallie’s toes. “It smells heavenly, and it’s the Lysol of essential oils.”

Garnet was curled into a ball on the air mattress beside Holly, and she looked like she was already asleep. Reseda, however, knew that she wasn’t. Her head was deep in the pillow and her eyes were shut, but she was merely feigning sleep while listening intently to the conversation around her.

“Will you keep the candle burning when you turn out the lights?” Hallie asked from her nest on the sofa.

“I was thinking that we might keep some of the lights on,” Reseda told her. “I know I’d be happier if we kept at least the lamp on that table on. Would you mind?”

Hallie shook her head.

“Thank you.”

“I know I want a light on, too,” Holly said, and she giggled.

Hallie turned to Reseda. “Where are you going to sleep?” she asked.

The truth was, Reseda wasn’t completely sure she was going to sleep. She had found that she was most receptive to visions when she was a little sleep-deprived. Everyone was. Healers and shamans and religious fanatics of all stripes knew the mind was most amenable to psychic visitation when it was exhausted. And she was feeling a little wrung out. Assuming the girls—especially Garnet, whose mind was particularly interesting to Reseda—eventually fell asleep, she thought she might visit the basement. She might see for herself the door that was of such interest to the captain and try to get a sense of what might have attached itself to him.

Emily had presumed that nothing could have been worse than watching the news footage of her husband’s plane cartwheeling across the surface of Lake Champlain, or the images of the floating wreckage and the bodies as they bobbed amidst the ferries and dinghies and rescue boats. But this might have been worse. She wasn’t sure how—she couldn’t make distinctions that fine when the world was unraveling so completely—but at the moment she didn’t even have the relief that came with the idea that the worst was at least behind her. By the time she’d seen the images of the destruction of Flight 1611, she knew that Chip had survived. Her husband was alive.

But now? Her husband was alive, but he had just had another very close call. He had, apparently, fallen down the basement steps and accidentally plunged a knife into his abdomen when he hit the mud floor. At least he said it was an accident. She would have been more confident that it was if the knife hadn’t been the one the paranoid woman who had lived in the house before them had left behind in a second-floor heating grate. The young ER physician and an even younger nurse at the hospital here in Littleton had sewed him up, telling her that he was very, very lucky. The knife had not perforated the intestines. Nor had it nicked his left kidney, the pancreas, or—perhaps most fortunately—the iliac artery. There had been a lot of blood, but not a lot of damage. The principal concern, now that he was stitched up, was infection. But that should be manageable. Still, the hospital staff had decided to keep him overnight for observation, and now he was resting, sedated, in a room down the corridor.

Chip had insisted that he hadn’t tried to harm himself, but he had seemed confused when he first appeared at the top of the basement steps. Had she not noticed all the blood, she would have wondered first how he could possibly have gotten so filthy: It was as if he had been rolling around on the dirt floor in the basement. But he had seemed to reacquire his bearings quickly, and then he had grown contrite and shaken. He kept apologizing for disappearing, and he kept trying to explain both to her and to himself what had happened. It still wasn’t clear to her when he had fallen down the stairs. Had he stumbled while on his way to the water tank to check the pilot light? (There again was that excuse. Hadn’t he claimed to have been checking the pilot on the furnace when she found him in the basement on Saturday night?) Or was it after the lights had gone out, on his way back up the stairs? He had offered both scenarios. And why was he even bringing that old knife with him down the stairs into the basement? He said he happened to have been washing it with the dinner dishes because it was a perfectly good knife, and he had had it in his hands in the soapy water when he decided to check on the water tank.

And so she was worried that this was, in reality, no mere accident. Whether it was self-flagellation or a suicide attempt, however, remained unclear. Obviously he had been depressed since the plane crash; obviously he had been enduring ongoing symptoms of PTSD. But there was a monumental difference between experiencing flashbacks of a failed water ditching and taking a knife and plunging it into one’s own stomach. It was as if he had been in the throes of some new PTSD hallucination or nightmare. Moreover, something Chip had said when he collapsed at the top of the stairs, before he came back to his senses, made absolutely no sense. He was babbling that some child who had died in the accident needed company and he owed it to the passenger to find her a playmate. A moment later he seemed to understand fully where he was and what had happened: They had lost power, it was back on, and he was bleeding.

Emily sipped at the coffee, tepid and a little bitter, that she had gotten from a vending machine outside the hospital cafeteria, long closed for the night, and surveyed the waiting room. She wasn’t alone because no more than a dozen yards away was command central for the wing, an island with four walls of chest-high counters, and nurses and doctors and administrators who were constantly racing among patient rooms and back behind it with clipboards, paperwork, and plastic cups filled with meds. But there were no other relatives or friends of patients at the moment because it was after midnight and visiting hours were long over. She recalled Jocelyn Francoeur’s remorseless (though understandable) hostility. Before she had seen how badly Chip was hurt, the woman had been furious, nearly hysterical, and had hissed that she had been warned about the family. She had been told to steer clear of Emily and the twins the way she had always steered clear of Reseda and Anise and that whole perverted crowd.

Emily rubbed at her eyes. Clearly there was a schism in Bethel. There were her strange new friends with their greenhouses, and then there was the rest of the community. But who had reached out to her except for those odd herbalists? No one. No one at all. Consequently, she decided she was very glad to have that whole perverted crowd a part of her life tonight. John and Clary Hardin had appeared out of nowhere and had been sitting on this appallingly ugly, orange Naugahyde couch beside her until a few minutes ago, holding her hand and comforting her, until finally she had insisted they go home and get some rest. And even before Chip had been rushed to the hospital, Reseda and Holly and Ginger had descended upon her home, Reseda and Holly offering to stay with the girls as long as necessary. (She called, they came. That was friendship.) When Emily had phoned home a few minutes ago to check in, the four of them—Reseda and Holly, Hallie and Garnet—had set up a big slumber party in the living room, piling quilts and air mattresses and pillows onto the floor as if they were all teenage girls on a Friday night. Reseda didn’t think the twins would want to stay alone in their bedrooms, and she was correct. The girls had sounded more tired than terrified when Emily spoke to them, and they were all finally going to sleep. According to Reseda, Anise had been by the house as well. She’d just left, though not before stocking the refrigerator.

The truth was, Emily knew that she didn’t have anyone but these people in Bethel. Her mother-in-law? She might phone her in the morning, but then again she might not. What precisely would she tell her? And given her mother-in-law’s drinking—given the reality that her mother-in-law was a drunk—what assistance could she provide? Absolutely none. After Flight 1611 had crashed, two days had passed before she called her son, and, though Chip wouldn’t share with Emily the details of the conversation, he did say that his mother had told him fatalistically that it—an accident of this magnitude—was bound to happen. Emily imagined she could phone her theater pals in Pennsylvania or some of the lawyers with whom she was friends in her old firm, but what were they supposed to do? Drop everything and come to New Hampshire so they could hold her hand and help nurse her husband back to health? That was what mothers and fathers and siblings did, and she had none. Since her parents had passed away, she didn’t have any family at all.

Emily realized that she desperately needed to sleep now, but there was one more doctor who wanted to talk to her, and that was Chip’s new psychiatrist here in New Hampshire. Her husband had only met with him three or four times, but Chip had said that he liked him, and so Emily had called him. His name was Michael Richmond. He had arrived at the hospital just about when the ER physician and the nurse finished stitching up Chip, and he had been allowed to spend a few minutes with her husband after he was admitted. Now the psychiatrist was discussing her husband’s case on the phone with a colleague in Chicago. Emily yawned again and was just about to curl up her legs and lie down on the couch when he returned. He was a tall man, roughly her age, in a white oxford shirt and blue jeans. He had thinning blond hair and a strong face made more handsome by the scars that remained from what must have been a titanic battle with acne as an adolescent. He sat on the couch beside her, in the very spot where John Hardin had been earlier.

“So,” he began, his voice soft and melodic. “You must be exhausted.”

“I am,” she agreed.

“And, I imagine, pretty shocked.”

“That, too.”

“Do you want something to help you relax? Maybe even just a sleeping pill?”

She thought about this. “Yes. I will take a sleeping pill. I will even say yes to whatever you’re offering in the way of antidepressants.”

“You’ve been through a lot,” he agreed.

“Well, let’s start with what just happened to my husband. I really don’t understand it. Did he actually try and hurt himself? I understand his guilt. But the flight was seven months ago. Why tonight? Why now?”

“We don’t know for a fact that he did try and hurt himself. Maybe it really was an accident.”

“You don’t believe that.”

He sighed. “PTSD is a complicated thing.”

“There’s more. There must be more.”

“Has Chip had any issues with anger since the crash? Rage he couldn’t control?”

“Not at all.”

“Frustration that seemed, oh, a little off the charts?”

“Well, there was a door,” she said after a moment, and she proceeded to tell the doctor about the barnboard door to a coal chute that Chip had turned to kindling with an ax. She wondered if that counted as anger he couldn’t control.

“How about with the girls? How has he been with them?”

“He’s been great. Always has been. The issue for me over the years was that he wasn’t home half the time because he was a pilot. Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“Try being a single mom with a job and twin toddlers three or four days a week. When he’d come home after flying for three or four days, the girls would swarm on him. We’re talking seagulls on a Dumpster. And while I understood that it was simply that he’d been away, I always felt a little, I don’t know, inadequate. And unloved. No, that’s not right: less loved.”

“But you realized this was an inaccurate perception.”

“Intellectually. Not viscerally,” she said, and she regretted that somehow this discussion was starting to become about her rather than about her husband. But it seemed that the doctor sensed her unease and brought the conversation back to Chip.

“And since the plane crash? How has he been as a dad since the accident?” he asked.

“Still great. He’s a terrific parent. I mean, he’s been a little spacey. How could he not? And, as you know, he’s been depressed. There was a period when I don’t think he was getting dressed until the girls were about to get off the school bus in the afternoon.”

“Here in New Hampshire?”

“No, this was in those months right after the crash. Back in Pennsylvania.”

He rubbed at his eyes, and she guessed that he was probably as tired as she was.

“How is he doing now?” she asked.

“Well, he’s sticking with his story that it was an accident. He fell. And I guess it is possible that he happened to have the knife with him when he took a tumble while going downstairs to check on the pilot light. Or maybe he fell and didn’t fall on the knife. Then, as he was sitting on the basement floor in the dark—he has no flashlight, remember—it all just overwhelms him: the accident, the move, the lack of purpose in his life right now. The flashbacks, the guilt. There is a lot going on inside his head. And so he hurts himself. I mean, we usually associate cutting with teen girls and young women. But it can affect anyone.”

“He’d never cut himself before tonight.”

“And perhaps he never will again. But it’s still going to take a bit of work to answer your question: Why did he do this? And we may never answer that question, at least not to our satisfaction. But your husband has no history of schizophrenia or mental illness or violence, correct?”

“No,” she agreed. “None. Trust me, they don’t let schizophrenics fly planes. They don’t let people who are likely to take a knife to themselves pilot commercial jets.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“But what about that thing he said about some girl on his flight—his last flight—needing a playmate? What was that about?”

“Oh, it could mean any one of a hundred things. What I found interesting is that he only brought that up after he had given you the knife and collapsed.”

“He didn’t give me the knife,” she corrected him. “He pulled it out of his stomach and tossed it on to the floor. It was like it was something that repulsed him.”

The doctor stretched his legs out straight in front of him. She noticed he was wearing black Converse sneakers. “Your husband’s contrition is profound. He is calm but ashamed. Appalled at what he did tonight. He is devastated that his girls saw him that way. But he is also continuing to insist that the water in the sink seemed a little cool when the two of you were doing the dishes after dinner. He says you went to the dining room to continue clearing the table and he went downstairs to the basement to see what was going on with the hot-water tank. But he tripped and fell. Then the lights went out.” He paused, thinking, and then turned to her. “Did that ER doctor check for a head injury?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Before your husband goes home tomorrow—”

“If my husband goes home tomorrow—”

“Make sure he was checked for a concussion. There was no obvious sign of a head injury, but I wonder if maybe he hit the back or the side of his head in the dark and blacked out. It’s just an idea.”

Emily thought about this and about how Chip hadn’t answered her when she had called out his name over and over, yelling for him as she went from floor to floor in the house. “Wouldn’t the ER have looked into a concussion?” she asked.

“You had a pretty green doctor and nurse. I think he had graduated, oh, around three-thirty this afternoon. A lot would have depended on what he thought to ask your husband. And I’m not saying your husband even has a concussion. I’m only suggesting that he may have blacked out—if only briefly.”

“You might be onto something,” she said, and she told Richmond about her attempts to find Chip and how he hadn’t responded when she had positively screamed for him during the blackout. She actually felt a little relieved at the idea that he may have been unconscious. “It would explain an awful lot,” she told him when she was finished.

“See what I mean?” he said, and he gave her a small smile. “There are a lot of questions about what happened tonight that we’ll never answer. Never. But some may have incredibly obvious solutions.”

Reseda knew as well as anyone the stories—all suspect in her opinion—that Tansy Dunmore had not buried her son in the cemetery. The woman had feared that Clary or Sage or Anise or one of the herbalists long past would try again, even if it meant desecrating the boy’s bloated corpse. Reseda gave little credence to the idea. Although Sawyer Dunmore had died before she was born (though only by half a decade, a reality that always made Reseda aware of her age since most of Bethel viewed Sawyer Dunmore’s death as chronologically distant as the Peloponnesian War), she knew the women and she knew the tincture. She had always been confident that Sawyer Dunmore’s body was in his casket in the family plot beside the two hydrangeas in the cemetery. It was only when the pilot had come to her office and mentioned that door in the basement that she had begun to wonder if she was mistaken.

Now standing perfectly still, hunched over, in the muddy chamber that Chip Linton had opened with an ax, she decided that Tansy and Parnell Dunmore had indeed turned a corner of their basement into a mausoleum. They had buried their child here, determined to keep even the soulless, rotting cadaver from the women. She had the sense that, if she took a shovel and dug, it wouldn’t take long to find human remains. The notion filled her with despair for both of the parents, but particularly for Tansy. Her guilt just might have rivaled the pilot’s.

Nevertheless, Reseda felt nothing attaching itself to her, nothing—no one—at all. If Sawyer Dunmore had remained here with his body (a distinct possibility, given how he died), he was now long gone. She ran her fingertips over the ravaged barnboard. It was appropriate that here was a doorway. A threshold. A liminal world.

She recalled the first time the dead had attached themselves to her and the trauma that had preceded it. She had understood even then, if only instinctively, how receptive the traumatized are to the dead. How open. Again, a doorway into one’s aura—one’s space. The dead will always find a passage. In hindsight, her twin sister had attached herself to her well before the police and the EMTs arrived. Reseda had been barely conscious and had presumed at first that she was dreaming: One minute she and Lucinda were walking on a path along Storrow Drive, and the next there was a man before them whom her sister clearly recognized and whose sudden presence she found terrifying. But all that had registered for Reseda was that he was wearing a New England Patriots knit cap and that he was massive. It was late at night, and people would tell her later that they shouldn’t have been out. But they were both juniors, Reseda at BC and Lucinda at BU. Soon they would be going home for Thanksgiving. Their family lived perhaps a mile from the ocean in Yarmouth, Maine. Lucinda had taken her sister’s arm when she saw the man, but she had barely started to scream when he killed her. Just like that. Reared up like a stallion and stabbed her over and over in the chest and face. There had been so much of Lucinda’s blood on Reseda’s own white parka that initially the EMTs had been confused as they tried to find where she had been stabbed. And then he had attacked her. The next day in the hospital she would learn that her forearms had practically been skinned and the snow jacket sleeves shredded as she used her arms to ward off the knife blows and defend herself. A tendon in her hand had been sliced through, presumably because she grabbed at the blade while reaching for the knife. But the blade had neither hit her heart nor nicked her aorta, either of which in all likelihood would have been lethal. The knife had missed her liver and her spleen. She had lost a lot of blood, but she had suffered mostly puncture wounds, and nothing vital—no large-caliber veins—had been punctured. Unfortunately, in addition to gaping lesions along both arms and an especially cavernous maw on her right leg (had she kicked at her assailant as he stabbed her?), her left lung was collapsed.

And yet as she lay on the ground, her attacker disappearing into the night because he presumed she was as dead as her sister, almost right away she had the feeling that she wasn’t alone. The sensation was so pronounced that even when she was being loaded onto the backboard, her neck in a cervical collar, she thought Lucinda was being carried into the ambulance beside her. She wasn’t. At one point Reseda glanced at the trauma dressings and wraparound gauze that made her arms look like a mummy’s, and she could have sworn that she saw her sister’s slim wrist and the Georg Jensen bracelet with the moonstones she always wore.

Two days later she would be identifying Lucinda’s killer from a series of snapshots. He was a deeply disturbed custodian at the university lab where Lucinda worked and had had a crush on her that had gone horribly wrong. Somehow Reseda knew details of the relationship—and the strange ways the young man had stalked her sister—that Lucinda had never shared.

The incursion into her aura would prove, in some ways, to be a penetrating injury. And though her sister had meant her no harm (which Reseda knew now was usually, but not always, the case with the undead), Lucinda’s presence was at once debilitating and disorienting. Everyone in her family and at school noticed the changes in Reseda, and even when her internal and external wounds had healed, it would be a long, long time until she was fully recovered—until she was, quite literally, herself again. Everyone attributed this to the trauma, and they were right—though not in the way they meant. Had Reseda not been so traumatized by the attack, she might have resisted her sister’s invasion of her aura.

Which brought her back to Sawyer Dunmore and his crypt here in the basement. It felt empty, save for whatever bones were somewhere in the dirt beneath her feet. Either he had made it to another plane or he had found another host on this earth. She presumed it was the former, since whatever was tormenting the pilot did not seem to reflect the little she knew about Sawyer. She wondered: Had Chip Linton found the bones? If so, he hadn’t been thinking about them when he had been at her house for dinner. She hadn’t sensed either Sawyer or a skeleton.

She circled back in her mind to the women. She thought of Anise. Of Clary. Of Ginger. Then she thought of John Hardin and Alexander Jackson. The original tincture was long gone, but now they had a fresh pair of twins at their disposal. The odds were good they would try again.

When she went upstairs, Holly and the girls were all sound asleep in the living room. She kissed each on the cheek and then perched herself on the deacon’s bench in the kitchen, prepared to keep vigil until either Emily returned or the sun rose, whichever came first.

You know you are in a hospital bed. There are the metal rungs along the sides, there is a galaxy of small dots of light: distant stars, but not really distant at all. You listen to the sounds of the nurses, including the slim fellow with the immaculate, graying goatee, as they tend to you and whoever else is on this floor, passing by your half-open door. How long ago was it that Michael Richmond was here? An hour? Two? Three? You believe you are alone, but you are not completely sure. You hear no one breathing in that second bed, and there had been nobody there when you were first brought here from the ER. You recall that earlier your stomach hurt, but no more. They have given you something, and this is your principal source of frustration at the moment. You should be in pain. You deserve to be in pain. When you recall what you were contemplating, you grow a little nauseous. Would you actually have turned the knife on a child? Your own child? Apparently. It was close.

You fear that you will never be able to look your children in the eyes again. You almost did the absolute worst thing a parent can do. And the fact that you failed (thank God) doesn’t mean that you can be trusted. You can’t. Your daughters should never trust you again. You will never trust yourself. Ever.

You wonder what time it is and scan the hospital room for a clock. There doesn’t seem to be one amidst all those pinpricks of light. But you presume that your girls are sound asleep right now. As is Emily.

At least you imagine that they are sound asleep. In your mind, however, you don’t see them in their rooms on the third floor of the house. You hope, when you think about it, that they are not even in the structure: You like to believe that they have gone to a motel or an inn. That they are with John and Clary Hardin. Anywhere is better than that despicable place you now call your home. Three floors of malevolent timbers and plaster and pine board. Knob-and-tube wiring, every inch of which is as ominous as a snake. Rooms and corridors that are claustrophobic, wallpaper designed to make a man despair. Those sunflowers. The foxes. Weapons and cigarette lighters hidden throughout the house like Easter eggs, but evil. And then there is the basement. The pit of despair. Doors that lead nowhere. Whatever led you to nearly take a knife to a child was spawned in that pit. You need to get out. You need to get your family out.

Or is this just the morphine or whatever painkiller they’re giving you? Are you being melodramatic, trying to shift blame? It’s a house. It’s not alive. Actually, it’s a place that you are painstakingly making your own. You know people in Pennsylvania who would kill for a house just like this. The truth is, you are the problem. Not the house.

You have known all along that your future began to diminish last summer, on August 11. That was when the possibilities began to narrow. And now? Look at the way you are giving sentience and breath to bricks and mortar. You are becoming estranged from the world of the sane. You deserve nothing, and you have nothing.

You contemplate going home tomorrow and realize that you are afraid. The idea of being alone with your children terrifies you. What might you do when they climb off the school bus tomorrow afternoon—or the day after, or the day after that—while Emily is at work? Everyone fears you will hurt yourself. That should be the least of their concerns. Still, you find the notion of suicide growing real in your mind. You killed thirty-nine people back in August and nearly a fortieth this evening. You know this has to end. You tried to end it this evening, but wouldn’t your death at your own hands scar your sweet girls even more? Of course it would. And look at the emotional wounds you have inflicted upon them already. Or would your death be a relief for everyone? In the long run, might it save your children’s lives? Emily could take the girls back to Pennsylvania. Or raise them right here in Bethel with the help of Reseda and Holly and Anise. With John and Clary, with Peyton and Sage. Everyone here adores your daughters. They adore Emily. They say it takes a village to raise a child; well, this village loves your girls. So be it.

But you love them, too. You love Emily.

You stare at the horizontal blinds in the window and try to focus. A thought: You fly the plane until, pure and simple, you can’t. Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. It’s what you do. It’s all about concentration.

Yes, tomorrow you will go home. You will try to stay away from the basement. You will try not to curl into a ball in the bone-ridden dirt in your own little pit of despair.

Outside your hospital room, you hear the nurse with the goatee laughing gently with another of the nurses, the stout woman with the button mushroom for a nose. She seemed very kind. They all seem very kind.

Yes, yes, the poor, dead Ashley Stearns does deserve friends. She does. But you can’t do what it takes. You won’t.

Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Fly the plane until you can’t.

You close your eyes against the stars in your hospital room, and eventually you fall back to sleep.