The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [14]
“Emily Linton,” she said. “This is Chip, my husband.” Emily found it interesting that, ever since the plane crash, she had been more likely to introduce her husband than he was to take the social lead and introduce her. He wasn’t a failure—not by a long stretch when she contemplated the traumas that had marked his childhood—but he had confessed to her that he felt like one. These days he defined himself entirely by a single moment, and that moment was not about the nine people who had lived but was instead about the thirty-nine who had perished. He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not. Now she watched the tentative way that he gave this friend of their real estate agent his hand and mumbled a soft greeting.
“Oh, I’d know your face anywhere,” Anise said with a broad smile that revealed a layer of upper teeth that were just beginning to cross over one another and a row of lower ones that were starting to yellow with age. The woman hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but it had become one of those statements that Emily knew made Chip anxious. Yes, for a time his face had been everywhere. For a time it had been all over the Web, the cable news networks, and the newsweeklies. After all, he was the pilot who had failed to do what Sully Sullenberger had accomplished. People never meant anything when they said that they recognized him. And sometimes it was even better when they came right out and acknowledged that they knew who he was, as Anise just had, rather than simply staring at him and saying nothing. Chip had told her once that silence without verbal recognition seemed like even more of an indictment.
“Can I help you with those?” Emily asked, and she pointed at the tin and the baking dish in Anise’s arms.
“If you promise to eat them,” said Anise. “There’s a lentil-nut loaf in this one and carob-chip brownies in the other.”
“Vegan?” Emily asked.
“Yes. They taste better than they sound—I promise,” Anise insisted, and she handed the items to Emily with particular care because Emily was already wearing her ski gloves. “The brownies have names on them. One for each of you. Hallie is spelled with an i-e, right?”
“Yes, that’s right. Really, this all sounds scrumptious. Thank you. It will be such a gift not to have to cook tonight.”
“Reheat the lentil loaf in a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree oven for twenty minutes.”
“Or microwave it for, what, three minutes? Four?”
Anise tilted her head as if this were a math equation that was puzzling her. “Huh. I don’t have one of those. Too scary. I put those in the same category with cell phones and aspartame. You’re just asking for brain cancer.”
Emily noticed that her husband hadn’t said a word, but now he was eyeing the woman’s vehicle. She had been married to him long enough to know that he was probably wondering how this woman with her fear of carcinogens in diet soda and radiation from a cell phone could drive around in that rusted-out, carbon-monoxide-spewing tank.
“It looks like you’re about to head to the mountain,” Anise observed, just as the pause was about to grow awkward.
“We are,” Emily told her.
“With the girls?”
“Yes,” she said, momentarily nonplussed by the idea that she and Chip might be leaving the girls behind. Of course they would be bringing them. She wasn’t going to leave a pair of ten-year-olds alone for the day—especially in an unfamiliar house in which once had resided an apparently sociopathically skittish old woman who left knives and hatchets in corners. But then she reminded herself that Anise was a friend of Reseda’s, and there was every reason to presume that Anise was simply trying to make conversation. Show some interest. “It’s a family outing,” Emily went on. “An escape from Box Hell.”
“You lose power last night?”
“We did. Did