The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [169]
For an instant, you recall something. Them. Garnet. Hallie. They’re going to kill your children. The instant passes, because they’re not your children. Your child is Ashley. But that still doesn’t give them or you the right to kill … anyone. The whole notion has left you muddled, confused, and you find yourself staring at the knife as if you have no idea how it got into your hands. And just as you are starting to regain a modicum of your focus and your anger smothers your momentary befuddlement, the men in the robes—some, it seems, very old yet strangely strong—have a hold of your arms and the knife, and the greenhouse is filled with their admonishments to drop it, to stop struggling, to be still. You cry out against them, but there are so many and they are so forceful that they are able to pry the knife from your fingers. Your eyes rest on the women on the far side of the cauldron, and they stare at you, even Reseda, whose complexion is growing pale—as if the color is literally draining from her face and streaming into the cauldron. She murmurs, “Bring him to me,” and you are pushed forward so aggressively that only your toes are touching the greenhouse floor. She looks deep into your eyes across the black kettle and says, “I am telling you, she is gone. Your daughter is no longer here.”
She has said this before, and she will say it again. She will—
“I am telling you, your daughter is fine—but she needs you.”
She does need you. You are sure of this. A pitchfork leans against a glass wall, and the moment you spy it you rear up, bellowing like a wounded animal and breaking free from these old men. You grab it with both hands and jab at the crowd as they surround you. Once more you focus upon the children, standing a little stupefied with two of the older herbalists and their mother. And so you charge, the pitchfork a bayonet in your mind, only to be restrained again by the men and women in their robes. Their hands are everywhere upon your shoulders and waist and arms, and they are wrestling the pitchfork from your grip. And then abruptly they stop. You follow their eyes, but it must have happened so quickly that you are not precisely sure what occurred. Still, it appears that Anise and Reseda have collided and fallen to the ground as they tried to get out of your way. Or, perhaps, Reseda pulled Anise out of the way, trying to shield her, and the two women tumbled in a heap onto the greenhouse floor. Either way, when Reseda looks up at you, her face is oddly vacant. Almost bewildered. And then you understand why, as Anise is repeating “No, no, no!” over and over. Reseda’s blouse is black with her blood, and extending from that beautiful, swanlike neck is the long, elegant handle of the boline. When she fell, she fell on Anise’s hand and impaled herself on the knife.
“It was an accident, I swear!” Anise cries out, drawing the long blade from Reseda’s neck as if she is prying a carrot from soil, and a geyser of blood sprays the two herbalists in the face. Then, ever so slowly because Anise is trying to pull her up by her shoulders—as if she believes that so long as Reseda is sitting upright the woman will live—Reseda chokes out one last rivulet of blood and collapses, a marionette freed from its crossbar and strings. John Hardin falls upon her, though she’s already dead, as do Ginger and Clary and Sage.
And almost in that instant you see Reseda, alive and standing before you. She is offering you that unreadable smile, her blue eyes beckoning. She motions behind her, and there is Ashley, your beautiful daughter, the straps of her Dora the Explorer backpack looking a bit like suspenders against her summer shirt. She is grinning happily, her eyes alight, the way she did when she was beside you on the runway at Burlington International Airport and all that loomed was a fifty-five- or fifty-six-minute flight to Philadelphia. She waves. You wave back. And the moment you start toward her, all of the rage that has been burning inside you since Flight 1611 cartwheeled into the