The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [37]
Still, it seems indecent to be alive today when four-fifths of your passengers and your crew are dead. You have no plans to rectify that and join them, of course: Haven’t you done enough to scar your two children already? The last thing they need now is for their father to kill himself. But when you see in your mind the black box—and you see it often, though not as frequently as the dead as they bobbed in the water and the fuselage slipped under the waves—you see also that the only place for you to live is a place like this: a sparsely populated hill in a sparsely populated corner of a sparsely populated state. You are living in exile. As an exile. Emily doesn’t view Bethel quite this way. It was her brainchild to come here in the first place. But you do. You view it precisely as an exile. Your own personal Elba.
One day when Emily is at her office in Littleton and the girls are at school and you have just been to the hardware store to get lightbulbs and Spackle and have yet another window shade cut, on your way home you decide to detour toward the office of the real estate agency where the agents—first Sheldon, then Reseda—who sold you the house work. You coast into the parking lot of the dignified mock Tudor that houses the agency and sits beside the brick library and across the street from the post office. You stare for a moment at the town common, with its pristine white gazebo and creosote black Civil War cannon, the heavy gun’s small mounted plaque honoring the White Mountain veterans of that war and the ones that followed in Europe and the Middle East. You gaze at the maple trees—willowy, sable, spiderlike—with a dusting of snow on the wider branches from last night. You wonder precisely why you have veered here and what you are going to ask.
But in you go, and there is Reseda Hill seated behind her desk with her landline phone against her ear and the screen on her computer showing a modest house for sale just off the main street in Littleton. The agent smiles when she sees you, and you stand there awkwardly, not wanting to appear to be eavesdropping on the conversation but not wanting to seem to ignore her, either. There doesn’t seem to be a receptionist, but out of nowhere another agent appears from a backroom, a woman in her mid-thirties—Reseda’s age, too, you believe—who is wearing black pants that are provocative and tight and a cashmere sweater with pearls. She has hennaed her hair and placed it back in a bun and is wearing a perfume that reminds you of lilacs. She introduces herself to you as Holly, but, before the conversation has proceeded any further, Reseda has motioned to her that she will be off the phone in a moment.
“Would you like some tea?” asks Holly, but you decline. You hear yourself telling her your name, and she says, “I know.” And you’re not taken aback. Not at all. Of course she knows your name.
“Coffee?”
“No, I’m fine. Really.” You tell her you can come back, it’s not important, because deference now leaches from you like perspiration.
“I’m sure Reseda would want to talk to you,” she insists. Then: “I’ve always thought being an airline pilot must be very glamorous. Is it?”
You find yourself smiling. It is a popular misconception. “It once was—but that was years before I started flying. The generation of pilots before me had it a little easier: They certainly weren’t eating cheese sandwiches on the flight deck.”
“The airline doesn’t feed you?”
“My first years, it did. We had vouchers. But no more. The vouchers disappeared with my pension. So, on my first leg—I’m sorry, my first flight—I would usually be eating a brown bag lunch I packed myself before leaving home. I remember some mornings, I would make three identical sandwiches: one for me and one for each of my daughters. I have two. Twins. My daughters would bring theirs to school, of course. But you know what? I liked those cheese sandwiches. I really did. You get to your cruising altitude