The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [154]
You sigh. You decide that what you just experienced of Flight 1611 was a dream, not a flashback. This distinction seems to matter, even now.
“Where is Sandra?”
You turn your head the other way—at least you believe you do—toward the sound of Reseda’s voice, and you have the sense that Holly is standing beside her. Perhaps it is the aroma of lilacs that reminds you Holly is assisting Reseda. Doesn’t the woman always smell slightly of lilacs? You cannot recall what the three of you might have discussed when Reseda was steeping that strange tea in the kitchen. When you first lay down here in the greenhouse, over Holly’s shoulder was a pipe with hanging plants, the leaves of which were shaped like Valentine hearts; the colors were an orange and a purple more vibrant than your twins’ Magic Markers.
“Where is Sandra?” Reseda asks again.
You try to find your voice, to tell her you don’t know, you don’t feel the specific pain you associate with Sandra’s presence, when out of nowhere you hear her. You hear Sandra. You hear her with the same perfect clarity that you heard her that first time she spoke to you in your basement.
Here, she says simply.
“When did you join the captain?” Reseda asks, and you realize that Reseda heard her voice, too. Or did she hear yours? You have read about out-of-body experiences and you long for one now. You want to be both in and above that former pilot on the pumpkin pine table, because you want to witness this. You want to see where Sandra is standing this second. Is she visible to the two other women?
I don’t know, she is telling Reseda, but I think I joined him in the water. I couldn’t breathe.
You try to sit up, to find her. But you can’t. You recall the mind-altering crumpets infused with God-alone-knows-what that Anise and Valerian had been feeding you and start to panic that now Reseda and Holly have paralyzed you from the neck down. Is this, you wonder, what it is like to be hypnotized? Or is this something else entirely?
“Shhhh, you’re not paralyzed,” Reseda says. “Don’t struggle. Let Sandra speak.”
You try to relax, at least a little. Do you nod? You believe that you do, but, again, you are not completely sure. No matter. No … matter.
Reseda runs a clay pestle under your nose with a shallow puddle of hot oil bubbling inside it, and you inhale what might be juniper. Then Holly—yes, you can hear her and sense her—is lining the head of the table, just beyond the futon, with burning votives. Each time she places one on the pine, Reseda dips her fingers into the hot wax and presses a single drop onto your forehead and murmurs a name you recognize from the passenger manifest. The sensation is not unpleasant, and you wonder if she will do it forty-eight times. She stops at twelve, however, listing the names of the nine survivors (including yours) and the names of the three people who died but have attached themselves to you. The melting wax in the votives is flecked with aromatic herbs, but the scent is unfamiliar to you. Again she asks Sandra a question, and you are listening to the woman’s response when suddenly there is the water from Lake Champlain that awful August afternoon starting to wash over you in a single great wave. And so you take a deep breath, your cheeks ballooning like a toddler’s, though the air in those pockets is largely irrelevant. And then, before you know it, you are upside down and the lake water is in your nose, the pain stinging, and you are desperate for air, desperate. When you open your eyes to see where you are, you are completely underwater.