The real strangeness? His ankle and two of his ribs-the former sprained badly, the latter broken and cracked-had healed completely and he felt absolutely no pain there. Same with the spot on his head where he had actually been cut. The top of his head, he reported, often hurt like hell-but not his forehead, which had been cut when his head slammed into the right prong of the control stick. Moreover, these aches and pains had only gotten worse since they had moved to northern New Hampshire.
They both understood that a degree of PTSD was inevitable. How could it not be? He had captained a plane that had crashed and four-fifths of the people onboard had died. It wasn’t his fault: He wasn’t fatigued, he hadn’t been distracted or inattentive, he hadn’t pulled back on the control yoke when he should have pressed it forward to recover from a stall. (Once, years earlier, he had had a plane stall on him when the wings iced over, and calmly he had pushed the yoke forward, accelerating the descent but restarting the engines, and landed smoothly. None of the passengers onboard had ever known there had been a problem, but he had been roundly applauded by his airline. And how many times had he successfully aborted landings at the last minute because there was a truck or a plane on the runway that wasn’t supposed to be there and performed a go-around? At least once for every seven or eight months he had been flying.) That didn’t make the visions and memories that came back to him-illuminated suddenly like trees in the dark made clear by great bolts of lightning-any easier to shoulder. But, still, she watched him when she wasn’t at her new office in Littleton, aware that this was a reversal in their roles: In the past, he had been the one to watch over her during those intervals when he wasn’t flying.
Meanwhile, Hallie was sleeping badly, too, and no one from the union or the airline or the Critical Incident Response Team had advised her to expect this. There was that strange night when her daughter was convinced she heard people-a child-drowning. It had been three in the morning and had been the worst sort of nightmare: so real that she was convinced she was hearing the child for long minutes after she was awake. And Hallie had never really had nightmares before. Bad dreams had always been far more likely to dog Garnet than her sister in the small hours of the morning.
Consequently, when Emily wasn’t watching her husband, she was watching her daughter. And when she wasn’t watching Hallie, she had to remain vigilant around Garnet: She always had to be prepared for the next seizure. It was a wonder she was able to get out of bed in the morning, much less find the energy to get her girls out the door for school and then drive into Littleton for work. But she had to. She had to. Someone, somehow, had to keep it together.
Y ou are curious about the hallways in this house in the White Mountains because the one on the third floor of the structure seems slender compared to the ones on the second. Or, for that matter, the ones on the first. You really didn’t notice this when you were looking at the house with Emily and Sheldon. And so you track down the tape measure in the carton with the tools you have been using as you settle into the house but have yet to organize in some fashion in that basement made largely of dirt. You find it in the living room, where you were wallpapering yesterday, and begin by measuring the corridor that links the front hall with the seventeen steps to the second floor. (A thought: That strange, thin back stairwell that links the kitchen with the second floor. Is that seventeen steps, too?) Then you climb those steps to measure the hallway outside of your and Emily’s bedroom. Finally you start up the fifteen steps to the third floor. There you kneel and stretch the tape measure across the corridor outside of Hallie’s bedroom. It wasn’t your imagination or an optical illusion: The hallways are thirty-nine inches wide on the first floor (there, again, is that number), thirty-seven on the second, and thirty-four on the third. Five inches is not a great distance, but it is enough to make that corridor feel claustrophobic-or, to use the word Emily and the girls have used as your twins have started nesting like barn swallows on this small, third floor, cozy. The third floor has but three rooms: two bedrooms that share a walk-in closet in the hallway (neither bedroom has a closet of its own) and a bathroom with a lion’s-foot tub but no shower. The attic exists on the same level, but a veritable Berlin Wall separates it from this small nook of rooms. The house narrows between the second and third floors, with that elegant fish-scale trim that marks the screened porch reestablishing itself on the third-floor exterior. Hallie’s and Garnet’s bedrooms are characterized by the house’s sloping roof, snug knee walls, and horizontal windows.
You put the tape measure down on the wooden floor and sit.
She deserves friends.
A man’s voice. You have heard it periodically since you came here. You try to recall if you heard it in Pennsylvania as well, and you decide… maybe. Maybe not. You turn to see if anyone is with you in the corridor, and, as always, you are alone. But you know, in reality, you’re not. There is the voice you have just heard of this man roughly your age and the voice of a girl no older (and, perhaps, a bit younger) than your lovely daughters and the voice of a woman perhaps ten years your junior. And there are the cacophonous shrieks and wails of all the women and men who died on Flight 1611. Should you have told Hallie that you knew precisely who she heard your first Sunday night in this house? Maybe. But how could you without further terrifying the poor child? You wish you knew what it meant that she heard their voices, too, and try to take comfort in the reality that she hasn’t reported hearing them since.
You sigh. You note the sunshine through the hallway window and the opalescent light it casts upon the wood paneling. This third-floor hallway is paneled with maple, like some of the first-floor corridors; the second floor is merely painted Sheetrock. You find yourself slowly pulling your knees into your chest and contemplating how, other than that voice-now gone-the house is quiet. The girls are at school and Emily is at work. It must seem to the world that you are all alone.
You wonder if you will ever work again. You wonder what you could do. All you have ever done professionally is fly airplanes.
Somehow, despite the way your grades tumbled after your father died and your mother was aged quickly by bottles of very bad Scotch, you made it into the University of Massachusetts. It might have been the University of Connecticut, but when you were fifteen your mother lost her driver’s license for the last time and your aunt and uncle in Framingham, Massachusetts, decided that you and your eleven-year-old brother would be better off with them. Your mother agreed. It had gotten to the point where it didn’t matter that you watered down the Scotch, every other day pouring out perhaps half an inch-a portion of the schooner sail or cliff-side estate that gave character to the label-of the whiskey and adding just that much tap water. Your mother would drink just that much more.
And your little brother? He’s doing fine. He used to be considered fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Done in by the abrupt and early death of your father and the virtual mummification of your mother. He’s doing better than you, these days. He teaches history at a high school in Berkeley. Got as far away from Connecticut and Massachusetts as he could.