Part 13 (2/2)

You run your tongue between your teeth and your gums. You decide that you don't honestly understand the appeal of Anise's cooking. She seems to be a hit-and-miss baker. Of course, it may simply be that you will never be interested in vegan cooking and vegan desserts, and apparently everything the woman cooks is vegan. Or, maybe, she really isn't especially talented in the kitchen. Maybe people abide her cuisine simply because they like her. Even those oatmeal cookies you just polished off have left a sour, vinegary aftertaste that seems to smother the cinnamon.

”Chip?”

You face forward and see that John is speaking to you.

”The hospital pharmacy gave us a couple pills for pain. You may not need them, but we have them.”

Us. We. ”Thank you.”

”How are you feeling?”

”I am fine.” Fine. Just fine.

”Well, if you need something more, Clary gave me a tincture that I can a.s.sure you works wonders.”

”A tincture.”

”Her own little potion. Skullcap and willow bark. I can't tell you how much it has helped me when my knees get cranky after a day skiing or hiking.” He reaches into his front blazer pocket and removes a small brown bottle the length of a finger. It has an eyedropper for a lid.

”Thank you.”

Now it seems to be Emily's turn: ”Chip?”

”Yes, sweetheart?”

”Is there anything special you would like from the grocery store? We can stop before heading up the hill.”

”No, I'm good.” I am fine.

”Okay.”

You want to ask about the twins. You want to ask Emily what they believe happened last night and what they think of you now, but you won't with John Hardin present. You can't. You will wait until you and your wife are alone. But they are smart girls. They know something has happened. Something has happened to you. You have-choose an expression-gone off the rails. Left the reservation. Gone broken arrow.

But do they know that, for whatever the reason, you can't be trusted?

For the briefest of moments you recall the will-the monumental determination-it took to press the knife into your abdomen, and the agony that finally forced you to stop. You wince, but neither John nor Emily notices.

You didn't see Ethan or Ashley or Sandra last night in the hospital. You were alone with the distant stars that made up your room. But you have a feeling they will be waiting for you tonight.

Chip went upstairs to shower, and John climbed from the station wagon into his immaculate green sedan and drove back to their office in Littleton. The girls were with Reseda somewhere. And so Emily found herself alone in the kitchen, staring out the window over the sink at the greenhouse and, beyond it, at the meadow and the edge of the woods. She closed her eyes and fought back the tears. She tried to push from her mind her memories of last night or, even more recently, the image of her husband in the rearview mirror of the car that morning, chewing cookies without evident pleasure: He was eating them, it seemed, only because John had offered them. He insisted he was fine, but he wasn't. The Chip Linton she lived with now was a frightening doppelganger for her husband. The fellow was a mere husk of the man she had married. It wasn't merely that this new catatonia was different from the walking somnambulance that had marked the months after the crash: This one was both the result of whatever tranquilizers he'd been given last night at the hospital and the reality that the self-loathing he'd experienced after the failed ditching of Flight 1611 paled compared to the self-hatred he was experiencing now. Whatever had happened to him last night-whatever he had done-had left him staggered: He'd slouched as they walked to the car in the hospital parking lot this morning, unshaven and his hair badly combed, like one of the murmuring homeless men Emily had seen on the streets of Philadelphia. She recalled something he had said to her last night in the emergency room: It was something nonsensical about the pit of despair that awaited him, and how it would be a relief to be walled up inside it.

It all left her wondering: What had been happening to him since they arrived here in the White Mountains? What had she been missing over the last month and a half? What had been occurring at the house while she'd been at work and the girls had been at school? She felt she had been a derelict wife, and she considered if this was, in some way, her fault. Had she been inattentive? So it seemed. Michael Richmond had been unable to rea.s.sure her that it was safe to leave Chip home alone. She wasn't certain it was even safe to leave him alone with the girls. It wasn't that he might harm them-though the idea had now entered her mind, and she knew as a mother it was going to lodge there-it was that he might harm himself when they were present.

She remembered something John had said to her that morning, before they picked up her husband. ”This will all seem less surreal as the days pa.s.s,” the older lawyer had told her. ”I mean that, Emily. Everything's different now, nothing will ever be the same. But eventually you'll find a new normalcy. We all do.”

She thought about this. She saw her experience as unique-horrific and peculiar to herself. But he'd seemed to be viewing it as a rite of pa.s.sage. Unpredictable and certainly unantic.i.p.ated, but in some way universal. ”You make it sound like you went through something like this,” she had said, staring straight ahead at the entry ramp to the interstate and the pine trees now clean of snow.

”No, of course not.”

”That's what I thought.”

”But my mother used to talk about pa.s.sages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt. Someone must have told you that by now.”

”No. Right now I am far more desirous of finding the healing in an orange prescription vial.”

”I imagine Clary or Anise has something much better for you: more effective and safer,” he'd said, smiling, his eyes a little knowing and wide.

She listened to the water running in the shower above her and turned her face toward the spring sun. She breathed in deeply through her nose, the air whistling ever so slightly, and tried to focus on nothing but the warmth on her face.

Hallie hadn't planned on going to the bas.e.m.e.nt. She hadn't even planned on getting out of bed. But she awoke in the night and thought she heard noises downstairs in the kitchen and presumed that her parents were sitting at the table and talking. She knew her mom was really worried about Dad. Then she decided that Garnet must be down there, too; it was why, in the hazy logic of someone awoken from a deep sleep, she hadn't peeked into Garnet's room before heading downstairs. But the kitchen was completely empty. The overhead lights were on, but probably because her mom had left them on by mistake before going upstairs to bed herself. The digital clock on the stove read 12:15.

She realized she was a little scared to be downstairs alone at night and was about to scamper back up the two flights of stairs to her own bed when, for the briefest of seconds, she heard a voice again-a single voice this time-and understood it was coming from the bas.e.m.e.nt. The door was ajar, and a light was on down there as well. And so she stood for a long moment at the top of the stairs, listening carefully, aware because of the cold drifting up from the cellar that she hadn't bothered to put on her slippers. Now she regretted that: Her toes were cold. She ran her fingers over her bracelet, which she had begun to view as a good-luck charm. That afternoon Anise had said she would like her second present even more, but the truth was that she loved this bracelet much better. The second gift was a very old book about plants and what Anise called natural medicine. According to Anise, it had belonged to another herbalist a long time ago. Then Anise had given her sister an even fatter book t.i.tled The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs-again, apparently, a favorite of an herbalist who had pa.s.sed away.

Finally, when Hallie was just about to shut the bas.e.m.e.nt door and race upstairs, she heard someone mumbling and she was sure it was her sister.

”Garnet?” she called into the bas.e.m.e.nt. ”Is that you?”

But no one responded, and so she tiptoed onto the top step, the wood coa.r.s.e against her bare feet, and peered underneath the banister. Sure enough, there was Garnet, all alone, standing in the shadows before the remnants of the wooden door that their father had destroyed last week. She was ankle deep in the coal and staring into the black maw of the tiny room that their father had found behind that door.

”Garnet,” she said again, her voice reduced by incredulity to a stage whisper. ”What are you doing down there?”

The girl looked up at her, blinked, and then rubbed at her eyes. She looked down at her feet and seemed to realize for the first time the grotesque mess in which she was standing. She jumped away from it, landing in the moist dirt of the floor, which was a marginal improvement at best. Hallie understood that her sister had just-as one of their teachers back in West Chester once put it, infuriating their mom-zoned out. She had gone into one of her trances and lost herself somewhere inside her head. Hallie feared that it might have been a full seizure, and the fact that she was having a second one so close on the heels of another alarmed her. Garnet had never before had two in a week. Moreover, until the other night, it had been a long while since she had had even one.

”Come upstairs,” Hallie said. ”Get out of there and come back to bed!” she added, though she guessed that first her sister would have to run her feet under some hot water in the tub.

Instead the girl shook her head and said, ”No. You have to see this first. You have to see what I found.” Then she raised her arm and pointed into that little room.

”You went in there?” Hallie asked.

”I think so. I ... I don't know.”

The last thing Hallie wanted to do was go down those stairs: It wasn't merely the cold and the dirt and the coal on the ground there. It was the reality that she was scared. Her sister had always been able to freak her out; the idea that it was inadvertent didn't make the sensation any less real. Still, it was clear that Garnet was not going to come upstairs until she went downstairs, and so Hallie held on to the banister and descended the steps, wondering as she went if instead she should have gone upstairs and awakened their mother. But, she decided, she didn't want to leave her sister alone here; she wanted to retrieve her twin (and here she was surprised when she heard in her head the name Cali instead of Garnet) and get the two of them back into their beds.

”This floor is gross,” she grumbled. ”It's bad enough with shoes on. Have you gone crazy coming down here barefoot?” Her feet made soft squis.h.i.+ng sounds as she navigated her way over to the coal.

”You're barefoot, too,” Garnet reminded her.

”Duh. But only because I was in bed when I came to look for you.” She exhaled in exasperation.

”Look,” said her sister. ”See it? I think I dug it up.” Her right hand was indeed brown with dirt, as were the knees of her pajamas.

Hallie peered in, but she didn't see anything at first, just more dirt inside the cubicle and the wooden framing darkened by earth and coal. ”What do you mean you dug it up? Dug what up?”

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