Actually, she felt a little guilty that she wasn’t with him most days as he worked all alone in their new house, tackling the small and large projects. She encouraged him to take time off and drive into town to join her for lunch, but always he passed. One morning she suggested, her voice as offhand and casual as she could make it, that he visit a career counselor to see what else he might want to do with his life-but only, of course, when he was ready. She tried to respect his fragility and his need to withdraw from the world. She only nodded when he said he was fine-absolutely fine-at home.
Home. She understood this Victorian on a hill in a distant corner of the White Mountains was now their home, but in her office in Littleton she felt a distance from it that transcended the buyer’s remorse she had anticipated. There was a randomness to the house that originally had seemed quaint, as if an eccentric old aunt rather than a trained architect had designed it, but now seemed at once useless and disturbing. Why was the third-floor attic inaccessible from the two third-floor bedrooms? What really was the purpose of those rickety stairs that ran from a kitchen nook to a shadowy corner of the second floor? And then there was the Dunmores’ absolutely horrific taste in wallpaper: Had they chosen it consciously to terrify their two sons? Good Lord, Emily feared she might have killed herself, too, if she’d had to grow up near the carnivorous sunflowers in one room or the viperlike mammals in another. Like Tansy, she might have wound up so squirrelly that she would have hid crowbars and carving knives in the house’s myriad crannies. Moreover, every floor seemed to have odd drafts and squeaking doors. It had that basement made of dirt.
She wondered if she had made a monumental mistake uprooting her family: Sometimes it felt to her as if she had sacrificed her daughters for her husband. Could their new elementary school really be as good as the one in West Chester? Not likely, she feared. And, yes, the girls would make new friends and develop new interests, but would there be the same sorts of opportunities for them here that there had been in an admittedly tony suburb of Philadelphia? Already she questioned the capabilities of the music teachers she had found for the girls. Moreover, she missed her friends-her co-workers at the firm on Chestnut Street and the self-proclaimed theater geeks with whom she would dress up in period costume and sing and dance-more than she had expected, and for the first time in her life began to experience real depression. She thought often of the last show she had been in before Flight 1611 had crashed into Lake Champlain. It had been Hello, Dolly! She had been called back for Dolly but hadn’t gotten the part and been cast instead as one of the four middle-aged women expected to add multigenerational authenticity to the chorus. She didn’t care. This was, it seemed, her new function, and she milked the role for all it was worth. The last time she had had a lead had been as Anna in the The King and I, and that had been three years ago. Now she was thirty-eight. Lord, she had become “a community theater actress of a certain age,” which was far worse than being a real actress of a certain age.
But it was she who had, in fact, initiated this move to northern New England. Chip was only forty. With any luck, they had decades together ahead of them. A half century, even. The key was starting over someplace new. Someplace where mere acquaintances (and some total strangers) wouldn’t want to talk about the accident with her when they came upon her squeezing avocados at the supermarket, while her closest friends, after those first days, didn’t know what to say. Someplace where people were not bewildered by Chip’s ongoing near catatonia (for God’s sake, his plane had crashed) but nonetheless surprised by it. After all, this was Chip Linton. Captain Linton.
And Chip’s own family? There wasn’t much. There was his mother, who, somehow, was still alive despite a liver that had to be nothing more than a cirrhosis-ridden briquette of scar tissue. Up until the accident, Chip had still visited her every six or eight weeks (every third of those seemingly at the hospital), trying to find a semblance of the mother he could recall from before his father had died, but the girls hadn’t seen their grandmother since they’d been in kindergarten. The woman terrified the twins with her alcoholic rants or her disastrous attempts at grandmotherly affection: scalding Garnet when she tried (and failed) to make the child herbal tea or accidentally setting a dish towel (and nearly the kitchen) on fire when she thought it would be fun to bake brownies. Emily’s brother-in-law, meanwhile, was living in California. Chip thought it was wonderful that his brother was a schoolteacher, but she knew the truth: He was among the most juvenile and selfish men she had ever met. He had completely cut himself off from his mother and was, clearly, a teacher because it was the way he satisfied his insatiable need for attention. His social life was a mystery, but she feared it involved a string of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls, some in college but some still in high school. He was too smart to sleep with one younger than eighteen, but he had said just enough to give her a sense that his tastes ran to women not yet old enough to drink. And, like her mother-in-law, he had been useless and invisible since Flight 1611 had crashed.
Her parents, Emily believed, would have been better. They might have been awkward, but they would have been… present. They would have tried. One of the great sadnesses for her was always going to be that they had never gotten to meet Hallie and Garnet. She had been a first-year associate, fresh from law school, and Chip was a young first officer when they fell in love, and she anticipated that together they would build a life that was stylish and romantic and productive. Then her parents got sick, her mother from ALS and her father from colon cancer. She spent three years watching them die up close and at a distance, while she and Chip dated, got engaged, and eventually wed. She was an only child, and in those first months after Flight 1611 fell from the sky, she missed her parents as much as she had at any point in all the years they’d been gone.
The sad truth was, however, that some days it seemed to her that she was no better than everyone else when it came to knowing what to say to her husband. She hadn’t a clue. In the autumn, in the season after the accident, when the days were growing short and rainy and damp, they would walk past each other in the corridors of their Pennsylvania house like sleepwalkers and avoid eye contact over dinner as if they were travelers at an airport restaurant who spoke different languages. Even the girls would often sit silently at the table, worried and ill at ease.
One time she found Chip sobbing in Hallie’s empty bedroom while the twins were sleeping over at a friend’s house, a sight that was almost tragic in her mind since he was a man who never cried. Had been a brick as her parents deteriorated and died, supported her in every way that she needed. Had handled Garnet’s condition (somehow, she preferred that term to illness)-the strange early seizures, the batteries of tests, the diagnosis-in a fashion that was at once unflappable and sensitive. He, it seemed, had always known what to say to her. At least until the accident. Everything had been different after the accident. And it was different in ways that she didn’t like. Not one single bit.
And when something wasn’t working, you changed it. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. Wasn’t that what the legal consultant with the Armani suits and the ponytail had said to her when he was working with her Chestnut Street law firm?