Part 11 (2/2)

”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 s.p.a.ce in much the same fas.h.i.+on as juniper: It helped clear away fear and worry and violence. And this was a s.p.a.ce 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-s.h.i.+rt. 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. a.s.suming the girls-especially Garnet, whose mind was particularly interesting to Reseda-eventually fell asleep, she thought she might visit the bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 princ.i.p.al concern, now that he was st.i.tched 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt on Sat.u.r.day 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 bas.e.m.e.nt? He said he happened to have been was.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.senger 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 friends.h.i.+p.) 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 a.s.sistance could she provide? Absolutely none. After Flight 1611 had crashed, two days had pa.s.sed 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 Hamps.h.i.+re 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 pa.s.sed 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 Hamps.h.i.+re. 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 st.i.tching 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 t.i.tanic 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.

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