The day and the evening slowly came back to her. Snowboarding. The tram with her mom and Hallie, and the way the snow on the pine trees at the top of the mountain reminded her of vanilla cake frosting. Hot chocolate at the base lodge. Then there was the dinner at home that was completely inedible: a bean loaf followed by bad-tasting brownies that some woman had baked for them, though Hallie had liked the brownies more than everyone else and had been so hungry after the main course that she had ended up devouring the brownie with Dad’s name on it as well as her own. Then they had watched a DVD of some teen boy who learns he’s a prince, a movie they’d long outgrown that made both girls wish they had the satellite dish hooked up so they could watch regular TV instead.
“Garnet?”
There in the doorway stood Hallie.
In an instant, the second that Garnet had pushed herself ever so slightly off the mattress and glanced at her, Hallie had realized that her sister was awake and raced across the room like a sprinter and dove into bed beside her. She burrowed under the quilt, and Garnet could feel how cold her sister’s feet were.
“Your toes are icicles,” she said to Hallie. Then: “What are you doing?”
Her voice a whisper, Hallie said, “You don’t hear them?”
Them? Mom and Dad? “Who?” she asked anyway, presuming that of course her sister was referring to their parents.
“I don’t know. Listen,” Hallie murmured urgently. “Just listen.”
And so Garnet did. She heard the slight whistle of her sister’s breathing through her nose and she heard the occasional soft bang from the ancient radiator that sat like a gargoyle on the wall nearest the bed. But there was no wind outside and the cat, wherever she was at the moment, wasn’t making a sound. There was no noise at all coming from Mom and Dad’s bedroom on the floor below them.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said finally.
“You must!” There was an urgency to Hallie’s voice that was rare.
“What time is it?”
“It’s like three. Listen!”
“What should I be hearing?”
In the moonlight Garnet could see her sister’s eyes, wide and alert, and she thought once again of their cat. Dessy, short for Desdemona. They had gotten the cat from the animal shelter when they were three and Mom had done a Shakespeare play with a character with that name. The cat’s orange fur had reminded their mom of the color of the gown she had worn for much of the production.
“You really don’t hear it?” Hallie asked in a small but intense voice. “You really don’t hear them?”
There was that word again: them.
“No.”
Hallie was lying on her side, but her head was elevated, her ears well above the pillow. “Wait, it’s stopped.”
“What?”
“Shhhhhhhh.”
“No, don’t shush me. Tell me! You’re scaring me!” Rarely was Garnet ever this insistent with her older sister. Though Hallie was only minutes her senior, Garnet always deferred to her as if the chasm that separated them was two or three years.
“I’m scared myself.”
“Of what?”
“I heard people.”
“Really?”
Hallie nodded. “Two or three. I don’t know. But definitely one was a girl-like our age. Or maybe a little younger.”
“In the house?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t. The nearest house must be, like, a mile away.”
“No, that’s not why it doesn’t make sense,” Hallie said.
“Then why?”
“I don’t know, but the people were mad. Or scared. That’s it, that’s why they were so loud: They were scared. I think they were more scared than mad. And I heard water. Lots of water. Waves and stuff.”
“You were dreaming.”
“I heard it when I was talking to you just this second.”
“What did you hear?”
“The water and the people and someone was, like, choking-”
“We don’t have a pond,” Garnet said, cutting her off. “We don’t have a pool. We don’t even have a brook like we had in West Chester. It had to be just a nightmare.”
“I don’t have nightmares. You do. I don’t.” She made it sound like a failing, Garnet thought, like Hallie viewed it as an accomplishment that she didn’t have bad dreams. But Garnet also had to admit that she was indeed far more likely to have nightmares than her sister. It had always been that way. Supposedly the nightmares had nothing to do with what the adults referred to as her epilepsy or her seizures, but she wasn’t so sure. When she was having one, it was like she was asleep and the waking world-the real world-was a dream.
“Besides, it wasn’t the water that made it so scary,” Hallie went on.
“No?”
“No. It’s that the people were drowning.”
“What?”
“They were, like, screaming for help and choking. Especially the girl. And just now when I came in here? It was like she was gagging. I could almost feel it.”
Garnet considered this for a brief second. Then she took Hallie’s hand and pulled her sister from the bed, dragging her along the short corridor on the third floor and then down the steep, thin stairway to the second floor, with their parents’ bedroom. On the way, she switched on every light in the halls between the two rooms.
Chapter Two
Emily’s separation from her firm was perfectly amicable, and she was able to bring some of her practice with her from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. She passed the White Mountain bar in the winter months between when she and Chip made an offer on the house and when they and their daughters moved in. But she also joined a small firm in Littleton so she would have an office and an assistant and at least a shadow of the legal amenities she was accustomed to. Their new real estate agent, Reseda Hill, had essentially brokered that deal, too, introducing her to John Hardin, the firm’s paterfamilias. Now Emily would have a place to go during the day, which was something she needed; she didn’t see herself as the sort of attorney who was capable of working from her house.
But at nights and on weekends, when she was in their new home that February, she found herself studying her husband carefully. She was not precisely sure what she was looking for and worried about, yet she was incapable of suppressing a demonstrable anxiety that filled her on occasion when she saw him. He was sleeping badly, even worse here in northern New England than he had in their rambling Colonial in the development outside of Philadelphia in the weeks after the crash. The psychiatrist from the union had warned her that this would happen. She had said it was likely that Chip’s appetite might all but disappear. It had. And his bad dreams continued, despite the prescribed pharmacological intervention, and all it took was the ethereal plume of a plane high in the atmosphere to cause his heart to race. He broke out in a sweat at Cannon Mountain when the ski lift they were riding stalled halfway up the mountain and they dangled in their seats perhaps forty yards above the well-groomed snow. He became nauseous sometimes when he heard the birds that remained through the winter months outside the kitchen window in the morning. And he would grow a little dizzy whenever he came across a news story about the airline industry or an airplane-and there were always news stories about the airline industry and airplanes. Always. And, finally, there were those phantom pains throughout his body that continued to plague him. He’d had all the testing imaginable back in Pennsylvania: CAT scans and MRIs and dyes injected everywhere. He had seen all manner of chiropractors and physical therapists. And none of the tests had shown anything wrong.