Part 5 (1/2)

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 Hamps.h.i.+re-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 sh.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+ngle. 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 a.s.sumed the annual needs of a cranky old house on a hill in a frigid corner of northern New Hamps.h.i.+re did not grow particularly onerous in the coming decade and change.) This morning, perhaps because it was a Friday and the fas.h.i.+on 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-s.h.i.+rt from the town in Mississippi that claimed the world's largest aluminum and concrete catfish. Apparently, based on the photo on the s.h.i.+rt, you could walk inside the attraction and ”Live Just Like Jonah!” The T-s.h.i.+rt 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 d.a.m.nedest 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?”

”Oh, no.”

”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 sc.r.a.pe 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 sc.r.a.ping and unpacking?”

”Just fine.”

He nodded. Then: ”Do you have dinner plans on Sat.u.r.day, 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 pa.s.sengers that August afternoon weren't quite as terrified in their last moments of life as other people who died in other plane crashes. This a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.sengers 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers were coolly reaching for the life jackets under their seats and pulling them over their summer s.h.i.+rts. 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 pa.s.sengers 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 cla.s.sroom 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 Hamps.h.i.+re. One wall was filled with postcards the cla.s.s 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 Hamps.h.i.+re'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 cla.s.s 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 Hamps.h.i.+re 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 VermontNew Hamps.h.i.+re border, to the interstate highway that these days ran parallel to it. After that, the cla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e 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 cla.s.sroom 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 cla.s.smates 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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.