The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [51]
“Hallie but, like Andrew, only by minutes. Hallie is named after her grandmother. And her sister is named Garnet, because her hair was so very, very red when she was born.”
The child nods, taking this in. “Those are very pretty names.”
“I think so.”
Ashley stretches out her legs so she can open her backpack. She unzips the top and peers in for a moment. Then she turns to you, her face growing sad, and you reach out your arm to rub her shoulder, to console her. Suddenly she bends forward, bowing almost, grimacing, and your eyes go to her lower back, that precise spot on your own back where only moments ago you had felt a sharp sliver of pain. And then you gasp and, as if she were your own child, turn the girl away from you so you can examine more carefully the wound and see what you can do to help her. There you see a twisting corkscrew of metal nearly the size of a skateboard, a part of it adorned with the sky blue paint your airline uses to brighten the exterior fuselages of its jets, impaling the child from her back to her front. Perhaps seven or eight inches of the metal is extending from just beneath the front of her ribs—you must have missed it earlier because of her life jacket and knapsack—and at least a foot reaches out from her back like a shelf. Her clothing is awash in blood and flesh, and there are tendrils of muscle twitching like small black snakes from the holes that have been gashed through both sides of her shirt.
You can’t imagine what you can possibly do to help her—you can’t imagine what anyone could do—you can’t think of anything you could say to ease her agony and her fear. But, still, you reach for her because, after all, you are a father. Because you are an adult and you have to do something. Gently, so as not to jostle her and cause that great shard of metal to move inside her and cause her yet more agony, you wrap your arms around her. But when you press your fingers on the back of her shirt, you feel only air and she is gone.
You sigh. Your heart slows. You drop your hands to your sides and then, a moment later, touch the pinpricks of pain at the small of your own back.
She was never really there, you tell yourself. Yes, you recall there was a child on the plane named Ashley. You know this from the passenger manifest. You know this from the list of the dead. Ashley Stearns. She was seated beside her father, Ethan Stearns. But of course you just fabricated in your mind this whole brief conversation. You will be careful not to tell Emily. Or Michael Richmond, your new therapist here in New Hampshire. Already you worry them both. So, you will share this … this vision … with no one.
You run your fingers through the dirt, reassuring yourself that it was always this moist. This damp. You press them in a little deeper, digging abstractedly, when—And how did you not know this would happen, how could you possibly have not seen this coming? Isn’t this why you broke down the door in the first place?—you feel a long, coralline tube of bone. You pull it slowly from the ground and study it, grateful on some level that, unlike Ashley Stearns, it is no apparition. No delusion. This bone is as real as the ones in your forearm and probably as long as the radius and ulna that link your elbow and your wrist.
Chapter Six
“There’s another one,” Hallie was saying from the backseat of the Volvo.
“I saw it, too,” Garnet said, “and I saw it at the same time as you.”
“I called it, I get it,” Hallie insisted.
Emily stole a glance at her daughters in the rearview mirror. “Saw what? Get what?” she asked.
“Greenhouses,” Garnet answered. “There are greenhouses everywhere here. I bet there are even more greenhouses than silos.”
They were driving home from dance class Saturday morning, and it was starting to snow, great white flecks that hit the windshield and instantly were transformed into droplets of water. It wasn’t quite noon, and Emily was a little relieved to be talking about something other than that damned cigarette lighter. Counting greenhouses? The number in Bethel was odd, there was no doubt