The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [156]
A thought crossed her mind: I am like a firefighter. I am running into a burning building. But it passed quickly as she tried to imagine where her girls might be hiding.
Far below them, Hallie and Garnet saw the station wagon headlights bounce against the greenhouse and then watched their mother emerge from the car, barely shutting the door as she returned to the house. They had been sitting absolutely still, curled into small balls, when the strangers were just across the wall from them in Garnet’s bedroom, barely daring to exhale until they heard the sounds move away from them into Hallie’s bedroom and then down the stairs to the second floor. Only then had they stood up and moved to the window, where they waited now, surveying the world below them.
“They’re in the guest room,” Garnet murmured.
“I know,” Hallie agreed. “I hear them.”
“I’m scared.”
“Me, too.”
“How many are there?”
“I don’t know. Two, I think. But maybe three,” Hallie answered. The attic floorboards were cold and her toes were starting to freeze.
“I was hoping it was just one person,” Garnet said. Then: “Think they’ll hurt Mom if they catch her?”
“They haven’t yet.”
“No. I guess not.”
“It must be us who they want,” Hallie said. “I think they want to kidnap us.”
Garnet thought about this, and she realized something she should have understood earlier—the moment she had heard the strangers inside the house. “No, that’s not it,” she said. “It’s not like they’re strangers who want to kidnap us for money. It’s Anise.”
“What?”
“Well, maybe not Anise herself. I don’t know. But it’s the plant ladies. They’ve come for us. I know it.”
“Then why wouldn’t they have just taken us any of the times we’ve been at their houses or greenhouses—or when they’ve been over here in the past? And why would they come in the middle of the night? Why would they be sneaking around? There aren’t any other cars outside.”
“I don’t know. But we can’t just stay up here if Mom’s looking for us downstairs,” Garnet said, and she heard her voice growing a little more urgent. Hallie pushed a finger against her lips to shush her. “We have to help her,” Garnet whispered. “We have to do something.”
They could no longer feel anyone moving anywhere inside the house: not the strangers in the guest bedroom below them or their mother in some other corner or on the stairs. The house went absolutely still. And so for a moment they both stood where they were, staring out the attic window at the storm and contemplating what they should do. Just then the trapdoor was yanked open from the second floor and a flashlight beam rose like a waterspout into the attic.
This time, the captain’s white shirt starts to fall away. Or, to be precise, you fall away. You drift, swaying as if the wrecked fuselage of the jet were a hammock, rocking you, as you and the others descend toward the muddy bottom of Lake Champlain, your back against the aircraft aisle floor. Once before you grabbed that white shirt and clung to it. Not this time. Someone in the distance is calling to you. Urging you to go home. Someone else—your grandfather—is leaning against his vintage white Mustang with the black vinyl hardtop. Tony the Pony he called that car, and you would laugh and sink deep into the vehicle’s red leather seats. You sat on his lap when you were a little girl in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and other times you would sit beside him on the couch when he would read to you, while your grandmother sat near you both, doing her crewelwork. Their home often had the welcoming aroma of your grandmother’s homemade Swedish meatballs or, as Christmas neared, her holiday sugar cookies. After your grandfather retired, he