“It’s going to snow tonight,” he said, and the prospect clearly delighted him.
“And tomorrow?”
“Skiing.”
“Okay, then.”
“How are you doing, Emily? Honestly?” He had paused on the far side of her desk, and his voice took on the cast that she imagined he used when, before settling into a practice that revolved around real estate closings and trust modifications, he wanted to convey an avuncular sincerity to a jury. Convey to them how he could only represent a client who was innocent. She could tell he had noticed that her newspaper was open to the obituaries.
“No complaints,” she lied, shrugging.
He peered over her desk and pointed at the face of the teenage boy who had died in a snowmobile accident. “There’s little in this world worse than the death of a child,” he murmured.
“I agree.”
“I think everyone would. And yet it’s the damnedest thing: History is filled with human sacrifice-child sacrifice. Can you image? Anise and Reseda have come across some of the strangest cults and traditions in their botanical and shamanic research,” he said.
“Anise and Reseda? I know they grow a lot of bizarre plants. I know Reseda has introduced some very exotic flowers to this area. But human sacrifice? Where in the world does that fit in?” She wondered at the connection in John’s mind that would lead him to link the death of a boy in a snowmobile accident with human sacrifice.
“Well, it isn’t their specialty,” he said, and he raised his eyebrows mischievously.
“That’s a relief: No one likes to learn that one’s new friends are into human sacrifice.”
“I just meant that Reseda’s other work-her shamanic work-has led her to hear of ideas from other parts of the world that most people around here would find rather disturbing. Anise has, too.”
“Are Anise and Reseda both… shamans?”
“Oh, no.”
“Just Reseda?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Of course, even in this corner of the globe we’ve had our share of strange doings. Trust me: Some people think the woods around here are just filled with witches.” He shook his head a little ruefully and then smiled. “Tell me, do you and Chip have anything special planned this weekend?”
“I think we’ll do something different and scrape some wallpaper. Maybe unpack a few boxes. And, as a matter of fact, we’re having dinner with Reseda on Sunday.”
“How’s it coming? All that scraping and unpacking?”
“Just fine.”
He nodded. Then: “Do you have dinner plans on Saturday, too?”
They didn’t, but she wasn’t sure whether she felt up to two dinner parties in two days. She also understood, however, that it would probably do both her and Chip some good to get out tomorrow night and spend some time with this partner in the firm and his wife and whomever else he decided to invite at the very last minute.
“No.”
“Then come to Clary’s and my house for supper. Nothing fancy. We should have had you over weeks and weeks ago. We’re derelict. I’m derelict.”
Supper. A quaint word. Provincial, but sweet. She heard herself murmuring that yes, they would like that, thank you, but only if they could bring the girls because they didn’t really have a babysitter yet.
“Of course,” he said. “We can set them up in the playroom upstairs and they’ll be happy as can be. We already have an awful lot of high-tech toys and video games up there for our own grandchildren. Or, if the girls would be more comfortable, they can be downstairs with us.”
“Okay, then. Thank you. What can we bring?”
“Smiles. That’s absolutely it.”
“A bottle of wine?”
“Sure. I will never say no to a bottle of wine. That would be perfect.”
It all sounded so civilized, she thought. So… normal.
Unfortunately, it also sounded now as if she were hearing both of their voices underwater. And that, she knew, was not a good sign. She feared that it would take more than two dinner parties in two days to pull her back from the lip of depression. Two in two days might be precisely the sort of push that would send her spiraling over the edge.
Y ou may be kidding yourself, but you have always presumed that your passengers that August afternoon weren’t quite as terrified in their last moments of life as other people who died in other plane crashes. This assumption is based on the reality that they knew an awful lot about the miracle on the Hudson, too. They had seen the color photographs of the passengers as they stood in the icy water on the Airbus wings. They had seen the way the great plane had floated long enough for 155 people to exit the aircraft. And so as your CRJ was gliding-though inexorably descending-toward Lake Champlain, they must have clung to the hope that they, too, would survive; that they, too, would exit the cabin in an orderly fashion and slide into the life rafts or wait for their rescue on the wings. Or, perhaps, tread water for a few brief moments until a boat picked them up, because this was August and the lake would be warm.
And, indeed, this view has been partially corroborated by the statements of at least two of the passengers who survived. Behind you, as you struggled to bring the crippled jet safely back to earth, the cabin was calm. Yes, there were people praying. There were people who were texting what they thought might be their final messages to spouses and parents and children. But some of the passengers were coolly reaching for the life jackets under their seats and pulling them over their summer shirts. Some, inevitably, inflated them inside the cabin, which they weren’t supposed to do, and which might have hastened their death when the water rushed in and they were unable to dive under the surface and swim to the holes in the jet. But they weren’t panicked.
Yes, they were scared. But unlike you, they were largely oblivious to the stories of the water ditchings that were disasters. None, for example, had watched the absolutely horrific video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767 that attempted to land in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros in 1996. The plane had been hijacked and had, finally, run out of fuel. Its left wing slammed into the water first, no more than a few hundred yards from the beach, and the aircraft broke into thousands of pieces. As you watched the video, you found it amazing that only 125 of the 175 people onboard died. You would have expected everyone to have been killed.
The truth is that airlines don’t have pilots practice water landings on their simulators. The reason? There is so little data about how a plane performs when it hits the water that it’s difficult to program the simulation. Besides, what’s the point? Why waste precious training and practice time on an eventuality that’s so very rare?
And yet, thanks to Sully Sullenberger, many of your passengers that August afternoon probably believed they were going to survive what is, the vast majority of the time, an absolutely unsurvivable event.
Heads down, heads down, heads down!
Then, that new voice: She deserves friends.
You sip your soda and stare at the door, unsure which of the voices are real and which are only in your head. You rub your aching neck and the top of your skulclass="underline" phantom pains. Nothing more. Nothing to do with the shoveling. Really, it’s nothing. Nothing at all.
H allie watched Mrs. Collier lean against the wall beside the chalkboard, her checkered smock dress a little white with dust. The woman’s eyes scanned the students, and Hallie knew they were going to pause when they reached her. This was part intuition and part experiential knowledge. Hallie could tell Mrs. Collier had decided pretty quickly that she liked her and had figured out that she would give a pretty good answer to whatever question had been posed. And, sure enough, the teacher spotted her at her table-the classroom had five tables, each with four or five children, because Mrs. Collier preferred communal tables to neat rows of individual desks-and pushed a stray lock of her sandy brown hair away from her eyes and behind her ear. Then she said in that breathy voice she used whenever she spoke her name, “Hallie, what do you think?” They were discussing what effect having so many rivers and lakes had had on the early settlement patterns in Vermont and New Hampshire. One wall was filled with postcards the class had collected of Squam, Sunapee, Winnipesaukee, and Umbagog. There were two of Lake Champlain (the name of which alone made Hallie uncomfortable) and Lake Memphremagog. New Hampshire’s nearby Echo and Profile lakes were tiny compared to most of the other ones they had looked at in northern New England, but they were still of great interest to the class and there were postcards of each of them, too. Echo was located right beside the ski resort, and sometimes people were allowed to ski off the trail and onto the ice. And Profile was underneath a ledge where a rock formation called the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. Apparently, the Old Man was a cliffside made of granite that once had resembled the face of a cranky-looking old man. In 2003 it had fallen apart, and the pieces had plummeted thirteen hundred feet to the ground. Hallie was fascinated by the way New Hampshire used it on their quarter and on stamps and in all kinds of literature. She wished it were still up there above Profile Lake. She would have liked to have seen it for real.