The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [170]
Somewhere very far behind you stands a pilot. An airline pilot. He looks a little haggard—they all look a little haggard—as one of his girls is led back to the cauldron. You hope someday there is someone back there for him, too. Someone just like Reseda.
Epilogue
In all the years that you have lived in Bethel, you have to admit: Clary Hardin has never looked better. And while there are some people who presume that both she and her husband, John, have on occasion resorted to chemical injections and peels that minimize lines, you know them well enough to understand that they’re just not the type. Neither is that vain. Both are wary of inorganic toxins. Verbena also looks considerably younger than her peers. Maybe she escaped the pressures of that Philadelphia law firm just in time. The two of you have a daughter in college now, but still Verbena’s hair hasn’t begun to gray. Oh, she hennas it. She likes that look, as do you. But you are confident that underneath that color not a single follicle has turned white, and this despite the crash of Flight 1611 and then the death of a child—the single worst thing that can happen to a parent—a decade ago. Verbena misses the girl. As do you. You miss her madly. You see the child in the cheekbones and the shape of the eyes of your remaining daughter, her twin, when the girl is home from college or when you visit her there.
But somehow you and Verbena both moved on. You survived. In the end, neither of you wound up like Tansy Dunmore. Thank God. You are, clearly, a survivor. You survived a plane crash, didn’t you? Of course you did. Somehow, you survived even the stultifying guilt that had paralyzed you in the aftermath, the what-ifs, the visions, the ghosts.
Nevertheless, for months—for over a year, until well after the anniversary of the girl’s death had passed—you had indeed been smothered by mourning; it was all you had. No, that’s not completely true. You had the herbalists and their strange concoctions and desperately needed friendship. They were constantly feeding both you and Emily. Their foods and their tinctures were what kept you both upright and functioning, their medicines were what made the memories bearable—and, then, what made the worst of the memories recede so far into the backs of your minds that it’s almost as if they never happened.
And, yes, they needed you, too. Holly was especially devastated by her friend’s death, but even Anise and Ginger and Sage—mature enough to have seen a great many of their own friends pass away—seemed to have been scarred by the accident that took the woman’s life.
And your daughter’s.
“What do you think, Chip?”
You turn toward Anise, sipping the Syrah that Peyton discovered this past February in Argentina, when he and Sage were escaping a White Mountain winter. Sage was looking for specific herbs and roots in the foothills of the Andes, while Peyton insisted he was interested only in grapes. You guess they are each at least eighty now, as are John and Clary. You will turn fifty in a month. Peyton is helping you convert what had once been a coal chute in your basement into a wine cellar. The space is ideal, a fitting spot to indulge your new passion. What else could a person put in that space but wine? It’s perfect.
“Oh,” you answer, no longer worrying about whether you need to choose your words carefully, “I think a green thumb is just an expression. Either no one has a green thumb or everyone does. Sure, some people are destined to be ballerinas and some people, no matter how hard they work, will never be recruited by the American Ballet Theatre. But I think gardening is more like … cooking. Some people are better than others, but, with a little patience and a little practice, most people can make a pretty adequate lasagna.”
“I disagree,” Anise says, and she reaches across the large pouf in John and Clary’s living room