The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [22]
Garnet considered this for a brief second. Then she took Hallie’s hand and pulled her sister from the bed, dragging her along the short corridor on the third floor and then down the steep, thin stairway to the second floor, with their parents’ bedroom. On the way, she switched on every light in the halls between the two rooms.
Chapter Two
Emily’s separation from her firm was perfectly amicable, and she was able to bring some of her practice with her from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. She passed the White Mountain bar in the winter months between when she and Chip made an offer on the house and when they and their daughters moved in. But she also joined a small firm in Littleton so she would have an office and an assistant and at least a shadow of the legal amenities she was accustomed to. Their new real estate agent, Reseda Hill, had essentially brokered that deal, too, introducing her to John Hardin, the firm’s paterfamilias. Now Emily would have a place to go during the day, which was something she needed; she didn’t see herself as the sort of attorney who was capable of working from her house.
But at nights and on weekends, when she was in their new home that February, she found herself studying her husband carefully. She was not precisely sure what she was looking for and worried about, yet she was incapable of suppressing a demonstrable anxiety that filled her on occasion when she saw him. He was sleeping badly, even worse here in northern New England than he had in their rambling Colonial in the development outside of Philadelphia in the weeks after the crash. The psychiatrist from the union had warned her that this would happen. She had said it was likely that Chip’s appetite might all but disappear. It had. And his bad dreams continued, despite the prescribed pharmacological intervention, and all it took was the ethereal plume of a plane high in the atmosphere to cause his heart to race. He broke out in a sweat at Cannon Mountain when the ski lift they were riding stalled halfway up the mountain and they dangled in their seats perhaps forty yards above the well-groomed snow. He became nauseous sometimes when he heard the birds that remained through the winter months outside the kitchen window in the morning. And he would grow a little dizzy whenever he came across a news story about the airline industry or an airplane—and there were always news stories about the airline industry and airplanes. Always. And, finally, there were those phantom pains throughout his body that continued to plague him. He’d had all the testing imaginable back in Pennsylvania: CAT scans and MRIs and dyes injected everywhere. He had seen all manner of chiropractors and physical therapists. And none of the tests had shown anything wrong.
The real strangeness? His ankle and two of his ribs—the former sprained badly, the latter broken and cracked—had healed completely and he felt absolutely no pain there. Same with the spot on his head where he had actually been cut. The top of his head, he reported, often hurt like hell—but not his forehead, which had been cut when his head slammed into the right prong of the control stick. Moreover, these aches and pains had only gotten worse since they had moved to northern New Hampshire.
They both understood that a degree of PTSD was inevitable. How could it not be? He had captained a plane that had crashed and four-fifths of the people onboard had died. It wasn’t his fault: He wasn’t fatigued, he hadn’t been distracted or inattentive, he hadn’t pulled back on the control yoke when he should have pressed it forward to recover from a stall. (Once, years earlier, he had had a plane stall on him when the wings iced over, and calmly he had pushed the yoke forward, accelerating the descent but restarting the engines, and landed smoothly. None of the passengers onboard had ever known there had been a problem, but he had been roundly applauded by his airline. And how many times had he successfully aborted landings at the last minute because