The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [45]
“I think we’ll do something different and scrape some wallpaper. Maybe unpack a few boxes. And, as a matter of fact, we’re having dinner with Reseda on Sunday.”
“How’s it coming? All that scraping and unpacking?”
“Just fine.”
He nodded. Then: “Do you have dinner plans on Saturday, too?”
They didn’t, but she wasn’t sure whether she felt up to two dinner parties in two days. She also understood, however, that it would probably do both her and Chip some good to get out tomorrow night and spend some time with this partner in the firm and his wife and whomever else he decided to invite at the very last minute.
“No.”
“Then come to Clary’s and my house for supper. Nothing fancy. We should have had you over weeks and weeks ago. We’re derelict. I’m derelict.”
Supper. A quaint word. Provincial, but sweet. She heard herself murmuring that yes, they would like that, thank you, but only if they could bring the girls because they didn’t really have a babysitter yet.
“Of course,” he said. “We can set them up in the playroom upstairs and they’ll be happy as can be. We already have an awful lot of high-tech toys and video games up there for our own grandchildren. Or, if the girls would be more comfortable, they can be downstairs with us.”
“Okay, then. Thank you. What can we bring?”
“Smiles. That’s absolutely it.”
“A bottle of wine?”
“Sure. I will never say no to a bottle of wine. That would be perfect.”
It all sounded so civilized, she thought. So … normal.
Unfortunately, it also sounded now as if she were hearing both of their voices underwater. And that, she knew, was not a good sign. She feared that it would take more than two dinner parties in two days to pull her back from the lip of depression. Two in two days might be precisely the sort of push that would send her spiraling over the edge.
You may be kidding yourself, but you have always presumed that your passengers that August afternoon weren’t quite as terrified in their last moments of life as other people who died in other plane crashes. This assumption is based on the reality that they knew an awful lot about the miracle on the Hudson, too. They had seen the color photographs of the passengers as they stood in the icy water on the Airbus wings. They had seen the way the great plane had floated long enough for 155 people to exit the aircraft. And so as your CRJ was gliding—though inexorably descending—toward Lake Champlain, they must have clung to the hope that they, too, would survive; that they, too, would exit the cabin in an orderly fashion and slide into the life rafts or wait for their rescue on the wings. Or, perhaps, tread water for a few brief moments until a boat picked them up, because this was August and the lake would be warm.
And, indeed, this view has been partially corroborated by the statements of at least two of the passengers who survived. Behind you, as you struggled to bring the crippled jet safely back to earth, the cabin was calm. Yes, there were people praying. There were people who were texting what they thought might be their final messages to spouses and parents and children. But some of the passengers were coolly reaching for the life jackets under their seats and pulling them over their summer shirts. Some, inevitably, inflated them inside the cabin, which they weren’t supposed to do, and which might have hastened their death when the water rushed in and they were unable to dive under the surface and swim to the holes in the jet. But they weren’t panicked.
Yes, they were scared. But unlike you, they were largely oblivious to the stories of the water ditchings that were disasters. None, for example, had watched the absolutely horrific video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767 that attempted to land in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros in 1996. The plane had been hijacked and had, finally, run out of fuel. Its left wing slammed into the water first, no more than a few hundred yards from the beach, and the aircraft broke