The Night Strangers (40 page)

“It was an accident, I swear!” Anise cries out, drawing the long blade from Reseda’s neck as if she is prying a carrot from soil, and a geyser of blood sprays the two herbalists in the face. Then, ever so slowly because Anise is trying to pull her up by her shoulders—as if she believes that so long as Reseda is sitting upright the woman will live—Reseda chokes out one last rivulet of blood and collapses, a marionette freed from its crossbar and strings. John Hardin falls upon her, though she’s already dead, as do Ginger and Clary and Sage.

And almost in that instant you see Reseda, alive and standing before you. She is offering you that unreadable smile, her blue eyes beckoning. She motions behind her, and there is Ashley, your beautiful daughter, the straps of her Dora the Explorer backpack looking a bit like suspenders against her summer shirt. She is grinning happily, her eyes alight, the way she did when she was beside you on the runway at Burlington International Airport and all that loomed was a fifty-five- or fifty-six-minute flight to Philadelphia. She waves. You wave back. And the moment you start toward her, all of the rage that has been burning inside you since Flight 1611 cartwheeled into the lake vanishes. You kneel before her and embrace her. Then, the sky brightening as if the sun is rising in June, you stand up and—still holding Ashley’s small hand—follow Reseda into the welcoming daylight.

Somewhere very far behind you stands a pilot. An airline pilot. He looks a little haggard—they all look a little haggard—as one of his girls is led back to the cauldron. You hope someday there is someone back there for him, too. Someone just like Reseda.

Epilogue

I
n all the years that you have lived in Bethel, you have to admit: Clary Hardin has never looked better. And while there are some people who presume that both she and her husband, John, have on occasion resorted to chemical injections and peels that minimize lines, you know them well enough to understand that they’re just not the type. Neither is that vain. Both are wary of inorganic toxins. Verbena also looks considerably younger than her peers. Maybe she escaped the pressures of that Philadelphia law firm just in time. The two of you have a daughter in college now, but still Verbena’s hair hasn’t begun to gray. Oh, she hennas it. She likes that look, as do you. But you are confident that underneath that color not a single follicle has turned white, and this despite the crash of Flight 1611 and then the death of a child—the single worst thing that can happen to a parent—a decade ago. Verbena misses the girl. As do you. You miss her madly. You see the child in the cheekbones and the shape of the eyes of your remaining daughter, her twin, when the girl is home from college or when you visit her there.

But somehow you and Verbena both moved on. You survived. In the end, neither of you wound up like Tansy Dunmore. Thank God. You are, clearly, a survivor. You survived a plane crash, didn’t you? Of course you did. Somehow, you survived even the stultifying guilt that had paralyzed you in the aftermath, the what-ifs, the visions, the ghosts.

Nevertheless, for months—for over a year, until well after the anniversary of the girl’s death had passed—you had indeed been smothered by mourning; it was all you had. No, that’s not completely true. You had the herbalists and their strange concoctions and desperately needed friendship. They were constantly feeding both you and Emily. Their foods and their tinctures were what kept you both upright and functioning, their medicines were what made the memories bearable—and, then, what made the worst of the memories recede so far into the backs of your minds that it’s almost as if they never happened.

And, yes, they needed you, too. Holly was especially devastated by her friend’s death, but even Anise and Ginger and Sage—mature enough to have seen a great many of their own friends pass away—seemed to have been scarred by the accident that took the woman’s life.

And your daughter’s.

“What do you think, Chip?”

You turn toward Anise, sipping the Syrah that Peyton discovered this past February in Argentina, when he and Sage were escaping a White Mountain winter. Sage was looking for specific herbs and roots in the foothills of the Andes, while Peyton insisted he was interested only in grapes. You guess they are each at least eighty now, as are John and Clary. You will turn fifty in a month. Peyton is helping you convert what had once been a coal chute in your basement into a wine cellar. The space is ideal, a fitting spot to indulge your new passion. What else could a person put in that space but wine? It’s perfect.

“Oh,” you answer, no longer worrying about whether you need to choose your words carefully, “I think a green thumb is just an expression. Either no one has a green thumb or everyone does. Sure, some people are destined to be ballerinas and some people, no matter how hard they work, will never be recruited by the American Ballet Theatre. But I think gardening is more like … cooking. Some people are better than others, but, with a little patience and a little practice, most people can make a pretty adequate lasagna.”

“I disagree,” Anise says, and she reaches across the large pouf in John and Clary’s living room and squeezes your knee. You savor the hint of patchouli in her perfume tonight, and for a moment the aroma from the kitchen is lost beneath it. Rosemary. The main course is a stew of some sort, simmering right now on the stove, and you smile when you recall what Clary had said when you first arrived this evening and inhaled the delicious scent from the great copper pot:
A pinch of rosemary makes everything better
. “You really don’t believe that your Verbena here is such an extraordinary gardener because it’s in her blood?” Anise asks.

“I think she’s an extraordinary gardener because you and Clary and Sage are very good teachers.”

Verbena sips her wine, and her eyes are shining. She is wearing a black velour sweater tonight that clings to her and a string of pearls. She couldn’t, it seems to you, be more beautiful.

“And your little girl?” Anise continues, pulling her hand back and folding her arms across her chest. She raises her eyebrows a little impishly and smirks.

Indeed, you wonder about your little girl, though she is no longer little. She is majoring in plant biology and minoring in anthropology. She grew up, it seems, in that greenhouse beside your home, and the communal one at the Messners’. Nevertheless, in your opinion that was more about nurture than nature—it was proximity, not genes. Had you remained in Pennsylvania, there is no reason to believe that your daughter would have wound up an aspiring botanist and herbalist. Still, the evening is too pleasant to waste energy debating whether her interest in plants was genetically inevitable or a self-fulfilling career path once you landed here in northern New Hampshire.

“Well, she also had some exceptional teachers,” you answer simply and sip your wine. The goblet has the crest of the coven (there really is no other word for it, though they insist they are nothing but botanists of a sort), and your eyes pause on it for a brief moment. Really, what would you and your wife and your daughter have done if it had not been for these remarkable people? You contemplate this almost unthinkable what-if, as you do periodically: How much does Verbena recall about that night? Supposedly very little. The women have seen to that. Memorium. Delirium. Their magical tinctures. The car was totaled in the rainstorm. They told you it’s a miracle that Verbena survived when your daughter was killed and Reseda was all but decapitated. Celandine was the first on the scene.

“I’d say she had miraculous teachers,” Sage purrs, saying something that sounds prosaic but you know in reality is really very profound. Then she turns to Clary and says, “Do you need any help getting supper on the table?”

Clary rises from the sofa with the serpentine arms and nods. “You’re positively psychic,” she says, smiling at her friend, and bustles into the kitchen. Verbena—so placid at midlife, so free from anxiety, it’s as if in addition to discovering a fountain of youth in this northern New England backwater she has also found here the secret to calmness and serenity—stands up and joins the women, kissing you on the cheek as she passes. She is wearing black lace ballet flats, and you are struck by the erotic elegance of even her small feet. Have you ever been more in love? No. Clearly not.

Anise follows the women, leaving you alone with Peyton and John.

“You’re a lucky, lucky man, Chip,” Peyton says.

“I think we all are,” John adds agreeably.

“When does Cali come home from school for the summer?” Peyton asks.

“Oh, that’s still a month away. The Friday before Memorial Day weekend most likely.”

“Does she still have those seizures?”

“Rarely. But every once in a while, yes.”

Peyton nods and glances at John, but John doesn’t look up from his Syrah. He seems lost in thought.

“She spending the summer here in New Hampshire?”

“I wish. Nope, she is only here through the end of June. Then she’s off to the Southwest for just about six weeks. Desert plants, mostly.”

“There’s a lot to study there,” Peyton says.

“Indeed. She’ll be in Santa Fe, Sedona, Bisbee, Las Cruces—though not necessarily in that order. But it is a pretty packed itinerary.”

“Ah, to be young and to have all that energy,” John says, smiling and suddenly returning to their conversation.

“We do all right,” Peyton says.

“We do now,” says the older lawyer. This is, it seems, a small but important correction in his mind.

“Hear, hear. A toast to health and to youth!” Peyton says, raising his voice as if he were in a bar, and you hold the goblet under your nose and breathe in the fragrance from the wine. And you agree: You haven’t felt this young or this healthy since well before a plane hit some geese and fell from the sky. But even that now seems but a distant, nebulous recollection: the details that for a time you knew so well? Either vague or gone. It is a bit like the death of your daughter. Rosemary—though when she was alive, weren’t you likely to call her Hallie? Yes. Yes, of course. But somehow the image of a girl named Hallie floats in the heavens just beyond the reach of your memory.

Like so much else, apparently. Like all of those thousands and thousands of hours you once spent on the flight deck of an airplane.

“Chip?”

You glance up at John and his raised chalice.

“You seem to have your head in the clouds tonight,” he says.

“Not anymore,” you tell him, holding high your glass, “those days are gone.” Then, after you have taken a slow, comradely sip, you sigh.

Acknowledgments

O
nce again, I could not have written this novel without an enormous amount of help. First of all, there were the pilots who shared with me what their lives are like on the ground and in the air: John Weber, Carol Lynn Wood, and Judy Bradt (who is a shaman as well as a pilot, a rare combination indeed). In addition, I am grateful to J. J. Gertler, a thorough and uncompromising reader, and a font of all sorts of esoteric information about aircraft. And then there was William Langewiesche, one of the world’s great aviation experts and a wonderful writer, who examined the scenes in this novel that involve flying (and crashing) and gently pointed out my particularly egregious errors.

And when it comes to crashing—or, at least, ditching—an aircraft, I am not sure that there are many people who know as much about surviving that sort of disaster as Maria Hanna and Richard Martin at Survival Systems USA in Groton, Connecticut. May I never need to use all I learned that day in the dunk tank, when the simulator was turning me upside down on the flight deck and I had to find my way to the surface of the water.

I learned an enormous amount as well from the shamans: Mary Alexander, Anthony Patrick Pauly, Jr., and Hilary Raimo.

And then there were the doctors, psychiatrists, and EMTs: Dr. Mike Kiernan, Dr. Richard Munson, Dr. Marc Tischler, and James Yeaton.

The books that were my Emergency Information Cards while writing this novel included
Medicine Woman
by Lynn V. Andrews;
The Unquiet Dead
by Edith Fiore;
Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle
on the Hudson
, by William Langewiesche; and
Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters
, by Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow.

And, of course, I am deeply indebted to the whole team at Random House and at Gelfman Schneider. First at Crown: Domenica Alioto, Shaye Areheart, Andy Augusto, Patty Berg, Cindy Berman, Sarah Breivogel, Jacob Bronstein, Whitney Cookman, Jill Flaxman, John Glusman, Kate Kennedy, Christine Kopprasch, Jacqui LeBow, Matthew Martin, Maya Mavjee, Donna Passannante, Philip Patrick, Tina Pohlman, Catherine Pollock, Annsley Rosner, Jay Sones, Molly Stern, Kira Walton, and Campbell Wharton. At Gelfman Schneider: Jane Gelfman, Cathy Gleason, and Victoria Marini. And no list would be complete without Arlynn Greenbaum at Authors Unlimited and Dean Schramm of the Schramm Group.

Finally, there is my lovely bride of a quarter of a century, who reads all my work in more drafts than anyone should have to endure, Victoria Blewer.

I thank you all so very, very much.

About the Author

C
HRIS BOHJALIAN
is the author of thirteen novels, including the
New York Times
bestsellers
Secrets of Eden, The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast
, and
Midwives
. His novel
Midwives
was a number one
New York Times
bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and have twice become movies (
Midwives
and
Past the Bleachers
). He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.

Visit him at
chrisbohjalian.com
, find him at
facebook.com
and
goodreads.com
, and follow Chris on Twitter.