The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [16]
“I don’t know.”
“Did you garden in Pennsylvania?”
“Not really.”
Anise motioned at the greenhouse. “You’ll want to take advantage of that. Tansy did for a while. Then she stopped. She shouldn’t have.”
Emily thought about this. “I presume you’re a gardener,” she said finally. “You said you have a greenhouse.”
“We’re all gardeners,” Anise answered, and there was something in the tone that was oddly salacious. A moment later, the woman was climbing into her battered pickup and Emily was carrying the lentil-nut loaf and four carob-chip brownies with their names on them into the kitchen and calling for the girls. Chip remained outside by their car, staring up into the sky and, she presumed, watching for birds or the white trail of a jet high overhead.
You do watch for birds. You do stare at the plumes of the jets high overhead. You will, you know, never fly again. Not as a pilot and not as a passenger. Never.
You have confessed only to your psychiatrist in Philadelphia that, suddenly, you are afraid of flying. As well, you discussed with her at length what physicians have determined are the psychosomatic or phantom pains in your neck and your back and your head: the lingering whiplash. The occasional daggerlike spikes in your left kidney and abdomen, a sensation you have likened to a horizontal barb impaling you through your back and your stomach. The way your skull sometimes feels as if the frontal bone—that great helmet beneath your skin—has been crushed, smashed into the brain in one moment of life-ending trauma.
She told you they would pass. Eventually.
Instead they have gotten worse this week since you arrived in New Hampshire. You tell yourself it is because of the work of moving your family from one house to another. All that lifting. All that stress. It was bound to aggravate whatever is going on in your back and your neck and your head. Your mind.
Moreover, the dreams seem to be changing here. Oh, you still have the dreams where you crash CRJs in catastrophic, steel-melting infernos—though, of course, you always wake a split second before impact. You still have the nightmares with dense tropical forests filled with palm trees and oxygen masks dangling like strange, tubular plants.
But last night there was a dream with a little girl, not either of your daughters. She was sopping wet, drowned—dead, you knew it even in your sleep—but she didn’t know she was dead and she was nattering on and on about her backpack, which she wanted you to help her find. This was new. So was the dream on Thursday night with some burly guy your age who was standing behind you and Amy, your now dead first officer, on the flight deck of the CRJ as you were about to start down Burlington’s runway 33 for the last time. He was telling you to wait, wait, wait—to goddamn it, wait!—because if you waited just a couple of seconds you wouldn’t hit the goddamn birds. But you ignored him and started your roll, turning around to command him to take his seat in the passenger cabin, noticing for the first time when you turned that he, too, was dead and hadn’t a clue: A round metal shard had pierced his skull like a long spike of rebar, and another was protruding from just beneath his rib cage. Only in a dream could he stand.
Soon enough, the nightmare ended as they all do: a fireball occurring just as you open your eyes and stare up at the diaphanous shadows of your bedroom at night.
One time, if only to change the dynamic with your psychiatrist in Philadelphia, you told her about a broad broad brought abroad. A joke at your mother’s expense when you were in the fifth grade. Your mother was terrified of flying. Absolutely petrified. Had to be hammered to get on an airplane. Had to have her good-luck charm bracelet on her wrist and her Saint Christopher’s medal around her neck. Had to be wearing a specific pair of sunglasses as a headband to keep that long and lustrous black hair off her face. Tony Swoboda and his wife, Kaye, were driving you and your family from Stamford to Kennedy Airport the time you all flew to Spain