The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [113]
Still, Garnet felt guilty even thinking such things, and so she found herself answering, “I know what you mean. But Mom says it just takes time. He’ll get better. You think he will, right?”
“Yeah. I’m sure he will,” Hallie said, but she sounded dubious. Then: “Want me to get you your bracelet?”
Garnet pushed herself to a sitting position. “Fine. Get me my bracelet. It’s on the top of my—”
But before she could finish, Hallie handed it to her. She had already retrieved it and brought it downstairs. “I saw it on top of your bureau,” she said. “And I figured you should be wearing it. You just never know when Reseda or Anise or someone is going to drop by the house.”
It had been clear to Emily throughout dinner that something was troubling the girls, though Garnet had seemed more out of sorts than her sister. (But wouldn’t it be worse, she asked herself, if something wasn’t troubling her children?) She watched them pick at their food, Garnet always seeming on the verge of bringing something up. Now Emily was going through their vocabulary words with them in Hallie’s bedroom on the third floor, helping them complete the workbook pages they had been assigned as homework. Chip was downstairs taping the frames of the doors in the entry foyer, because he was planning to paint it tomorrow. His stomach, he insisted, felt pretty good.
But she studied her girls as they worked. Hallie was sitting on her bed, while she and Garnet sat on the floor with their backs against it. She tried to focus, but as she watched the twins together in a moment of such comforting normalcy—upstairs in a bedroom doing their homework—she found herself wondering how so much of their life as a family had gone so terribly wrong. Actually, not how. The how was easy. It was the why. The why seemed almost Job-like. Inexplicable. Unreasonable. But the how? A person could trace the steps with ease. There was the plane crash, of course, that was where it all began. It was Flight 1611 that had led to Chip’s depression and PTSD, which in turn had resulted in their moving to northern New Hampshire. And then it was here in Bethel that his mental illness had worsened, perhaps—according to Valerian—because of the solitude. Not that taking a yoga class or volunteering at the library would have made a difference. But all those hours alone in this house scraping wallpaper and slathering paint on kitchen walls? It had exacerbated his disconnection from people other than his wife and his daughters. And so whatever demons he already had were transformed into the self-loathing that had led him to hurt himself.
And then Garnet had found the bones. Good God, her children would have had to have been mannequins not to have been out of sorts. It was a miracle that they could put one foot in front of the other and function at all.
No, it wasn’t precisely a miracle. It was Reseda. Anise. Holly. Clary. Ginger. Sage. It was all those remarkable women. It was John Hardin. It was all those remarkable people. They were strange, there was no doubt about it. They were obsessed with their greenhouses and gardens and quaint little remedies. But they were caring and giving and intellectually engaged. While the girls might feel a little ostracized at the moment by their classmates—though Emily honestly was convinced this would improve over time—they had been embraced by the most interesting women of Bethel. Verbena. This was the name that Clary and Anise were calling her now. John was, too, though for some reason she found his use of it a little troubling: It suggested a more public transformation than she was prepared to