The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [116]
“Once we’re revived?”
“Absolutely,” John agreed, and he kissed her on the back of her neck.
At night, after their parents had tucked her sister and her in and gone back downstairs to the second floor to get ready for bed themselves, Garnet watched the cold spring rain slap against a windowpane in her bedroom. She tried to study each of the water droplets as they ran down the glass, hoping to clear her mind of the moment when Anise had chastised her once again in Sage Messner’s kitchen. But she couldn’t escape the memory. It wasn’t merely that she didn’t want to be called Cali. It seemed like she was always getting in trouble. It wasn’t merely that she was jealous of the idea that these women wanted to call Hallie something normal like Rosemary. It was that she didn’t like the way the women looked at Hallie and her. She didn’t like the way they wanted her sister and her to be so interested in plants. And it seemed like Anise wanted to scare her—and, yes, that the woman usually succeeded. She realized that she was frightened of Anise, which was precisely why she hadn’t told her mother what sometimes occurred in the greenhouse. Before dinner she had considered telling her, but Hallie had argued successfully that this could only get the two of them in even more trouble when their mother confronted Anise—and, in a way that Garnet couldn’t quite fathom, she understood that this would endanger their whole family. The closest she could come to the issue was asking if they might move back to Pennsylvania. They couldn’t have their old house back, but maybe there was something for sale in a neighborhood just like the one they’d lived in most of her life. Maybe there was a nice house available somewhere that was far away from this creepy Victorian and Bethel and Anise. From all those kooky women.
For a long moment she stared at her dresser. She knew what was behind it. She had found it. Or, more accurately, Desdemona had found it. It was a small door—a hole, really—in the wall that connected to the attic on the other side. A few days earlier, Garnet had watched the cat sniffing there and then pawing at the edge. When she went to see what was so interesting to the animal, she had noticed it. It was a rectangle and it was just big enough for her to crawl through, but she only discovered it with Desdemona’s help because the edges were cut to blend into the red and green plaid of the wallpaper. And still, she had to slip a wooden ruler into the seam to dislodge the square, discovering that someone had cut away the plaster and horsehair and even sawed off a part of a beam, but the result was a passage into the attic. There was a six-inch length of twine stapled to the attic side of the doorway that served as a handle: Once inside the attic, a person could yank the block into place so it would blend into the wallpaper. The afternoon she found the small door, she had crawled through on her elbows and stood up in the attic. What struck her most wasn’t the idea that here was yet another disturbing quirk in the house—up there with those rickety back stairs from the kitchen and the door in the basement behind which she’d found the bones; rather it was how frigid the attic was compared to the rest of the house. After all, it wasn’t heated. So she had stood there with her arms around her chest, noting their old moving boxes, their old living room carpet rolled up in a tube, and that monster of an antique sewing machine that came with the house, and then crawled back through the passageway into her bedroom. Her instincts told her that this was, in some fashion, an escape hatch: A person would only travel from the bedroom to the attic this way, never the reverse. And it was nowhere near wide enough or tall enough to move anything from the attic to the bedroom. Nevertheless, once she was back in her bedroom that day, she