Chip had insisted that he hadn’t tried to harm himself, but he had seemed confused when he first appeared at the top of the basement steps. Had she not noticed all the blood, she would have wondered first how he could possibly have gotten so filthy: It was as if he had been rolling around on the dirt floor in the basement. But he had seemed to reacquire his bearings quickly, and then he had grown contrite and shaken. He kept apologizing for disappearing, and he kept trying to explain both to her and to himself what had happened. It still wasn’t clear to her when he had fallen down the stairs. Had he stumbled while on his way to the water tank to check the pilot light? (There again was that excuse. Hadn’t he claimed to have been checking the pilot on the furnace when she found him in the basement on Saturday night?) Or was it after the lights had gone out, on his way back up the stairs? He had offered both scenarios. And why was he even bringing that old knife with him down the stairs into the basement? He said he happened to have been washing it with the dinner dishes because it was a perfectly good knife, and he had had it in his hands in the soapy water when he decided to check on the water tank.
And so she was worried that this was, in reality, no mere accident. Whether it was self-flagellation or a suicide attempt, however, remained unclear. Obviously he had been depressed since the plane crash; obviously he had been enduring ongoing symptoms of PTSD. But there was a monumental difference between experiencing flashbacks of a failed water ditching and taking a knife and plunging it into one’s own stomach. It was as if he had been in the throes of some new PTSD hallucination or nightmare. Moreover, something Chip had said when he collapsed at the top of the stairs, before he came back to his senses, made absolutely no sense. He was babbling that some child who had died in the accident needed company and he owed it to the passenger to find her a playmate. A moment later he seemed to understand fully where he was and what had happened: They had lost power, it was back on, and he was bleeding.
Emily sipped at the coffee, tepid and a little bitter, that she had gotten from a vending machine outside the hospital cafeteria, long closed for the night, and surveyed the waiting room. She wasn’t alone because no more than a dozen yards away was command central for the wing, an island with four walls of chest-high counters, and nurses and doctors and administrators who were constantly racing among patient rooms and back behind it with clipboards, paperwork, and plastic cups filled with meds. But there were no other relatives or friends of patients at the moment because it was after midnight and visiting hours were long over. She recalled Jocelyn Francoeur’s remorseless (though understandable) hostility. Before she had seen how badly Chip was hurt, the woman had been furious, nearly hysterical, and had hissed that she had been warned about the family. She had been told to steer clear of Emily and the twins the way she had always steered clear of Reseda and Anise and that whole perverted crowd.
Emily rubbed at her eyes. Clearly there was a schism in Bethel. There were her strange new friends with their greenhouses, and then there was the rest of the community. But who had reached out to her except for those odd herbalists? No one. No one at all. Consequently, she decided she was very glad to have that whole perverted crowd a part of her life tonight. John and Clary Hardin had appeared out of nowhere and had been sitting on this appallingly ugly, orange Naugahyde couch beside her until a few minutes ago, holding her hand and comforting her, until finally she had insisted they go home and get some rest. And even before Chip had been rushed to the hospital, Reseda and Holly and Ginger had descended upon her home, Reseda and Holly offering to stay with the girls as long as necessary. (She called, they came. That was friendship.) When Emily had phoned home a few minutes ago to check in, the four of them-Reseda and Holly, Hallie and Garnet-had set up a big slumber party in the living room, piling quilts and air mattresses and pillows onto the floor as if they were all teenage girls on a Friday night. Reseda didn’t think the twins would want to stay alone in their bedrooms, and she was correct. The girls had sounded more tired than terrified when Emily spoke to them, and they were all finally going to sleep. According to Reseda, Anise had been by the house as well. She’d just left, though not before stocking the refrigerator.
The truth was, Emily knew that she didn’t have anyone but these people in Bethel. Her mother-in-law? She might phone her in the morning, but then again she might not. What precisely would she tell her? And given her mother-in-law’s drinking-given the reality that her mother-in-law was a drunk-what assistance could she provide? Absolutely none. After Flight 1611 had crashed, two days had passed before she called her son, and, though Chip wouldn’t share with Emily the details of the conversation, he did say that his mother had told him fatalistically that it-an accident of this magnitude-was bound to happen. Emily imagined she could phone her theater pals in Pennsylvania or some of the lawyers with whom she was friends in her old firm, but what were they supposed to do? Drop everything and come to New Hampshire so they could hold her hand and help nurse her husband back to health? That was what mothers and fathers and siblings did, and she had none. Since her parents had passed away, she didn’t have any family at all.
Emily realized that she desperately needed to sleep now, but there was one more doctor who wanted to talk to her, and that was Chip’s new psychiatrist here in New Hampshire. Her husband had only met with him three or four times, but Chip had said that he liked him, and so Emily had called him. His name was Michael Richmond. He had arrived at the hospital just about when the ER physician and the nurse finished stitching up Chip, and he had been allowed to spend a few minutes with her husband after he was admitted. Now the psychiatrist was discussing her husband’s case on the phone with a colleague in Chicago. Emily yawned again and was just about to curl up her legs and lie down on the couch when he returned. He was a tall man, roughly her age, in a white oxford shirt and blue jeans. He had thinning blond hair and a strong face made more handsome by the scars that remained from what must have been a titanic battle with acne as an adolescent. He sat on the couch beside her, in the very spot where John Hardin had been earlier.
“So,” he began, his voice soft and melodic. “You must be exhausted.”
“I am,” she agreed.
“And, I imagine, pretty shocked.”
“That, too.”
“Do you want something to help you relax? Maybe even just a sleeping pill?”
She thought about this. “Yes. I will take a sleeping pill. I will even say yes to whatever you’re offering in the way of antidepressants.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” he agreed.
“Well, let’s start with what just happened to my husband. I really don’t understand it. Did he actually try and hurt himself? I understand his guilt. But the flight was seven months ago. Why tonight? Why now?”
“We don’t know for a fact that he did try and hurt himself. Maybe it really was an accident.”
“You don’t believe that.”
He sighed. “PTSD is a complicated thing.”
“There’s more. There must be more.”
“Has Chip had any issues with anger since the crash? Rage he couldn’t control?”
“Not at all.”
“Frustration that seemed, oh, a little off the charts?”
“Well, there was a door,” she said after a moment, and she proceeded to tell the doctor about the barnboard door to a coal chute that Chip had turned to kindling with an ax. She wondered if that counted as anger he couldn’t control.