The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [56]
“And you two, quite obviously, are Hallie and Garnet,” said Sage, kneeling down before the twins. It looked like she was drinking Scotch, and the ice cubes tinkled against her glass as she moved. With her free hand she surprised Garnet by stroking her hair, and Emily hoped that only a mother would sense her child’s discomfort with a gesture this intimate from a stranger. “Your hair is every bit as extraordinary and as beautiful as I’d heard,” Sage went on.
“I told Sage at bridge club,” Clary said quickly.
“And I had told Clary,” John added, chuckling. “I told her it was remarkable, a shade of magical titian that only a practiced Renaissance dye maker could concoct.”
“And you knew your share of them, old man,” Peyton Messner chided him.
“I am old, but not that old—thank heavens,” John corrected him.
Emily handed John her overcoat and glanced quickly at Chip. He was staring at the chandelier that was dangling from the dining room ceiling, and so she glanced at it, too. The bulbs were faces, she realized, though because they were lit one couldn’t really study them. But there seemed to be at least three or four different characters, one as sad as the classic drama mask signifying tragedy and one as hysterical as the mask denoting comedy. And then there was one that seemed … terrified. She thought of the Edvard Munch painting of the scream. She guessed there were twenty bulbs, each the white of a cotton ball cloud, and they seemed to exist like flowers at the ends of slender but tangled wrought-iron vines.
“Don’t you just love it,” Clary said, when she noticed Emily gazing at the chandelier. “John and I found it in a lighting store in Paris. We saw it for sale in a shop window in the Marais and just had to have it.”
“It’s pretty eccentric,” she said.
“I’ve always found it downright hypnotic,” said Peyton, his voice deep and plummy and rather hypnotic itself.
“Where in the world do you get replacement bulbs?” Emily asked.
“I hope we brought a lifetime supply back with us,” said John, and he punctuated the sentence with another small laugh. “But I do fear someday we may run out.”
“When my father’s construction company was building the first greenhouses, he was investigating the best grow lights. I wonder what he would have thought of bulbs like these,” Peyton said, pointing at the chandelier ever so slightly with one of his long, elegant fingers.
“Tell me something,” Emily asked. “Why are there so many greenhouses in Bethel?”
“Do you girls want some juice—or cocktails?” Clary asked the twins, and Emily had the distinct sense that she was consciously avoiding the question by turning her attention—everyone’s attention—to Hallie and Garnet. “John makes a mean Shirley Temple.”
“I make a mean everything,” her husband said, raising his eyebrows rakishly.
Emily saw both children looking at her, trying to gauge whether she approved of their having cocktails. The word was such a throwback to another era that she wasn’t sure either girl even knew what it meant. “Why not have Shirley Temples?” she said to them. “You always like them at the airport.” Funny, Emily thought now: The girls did like Shirley Temples, but she and Chip only thought to order them for the children when they were traveling. She recalled almost at once all of the restaurants and bars and lounges along the concourses at the Philadelphia airport.
“Okay, I’ll have one,” Hallie agreed.
“And you, Garnet?” asked John.
“Yes, please.”
“I have cherries, but the red won’t be as magic as your hair,” he said to her and then retreated to the kitchen.
“Where would you like the girls to settle in?” Emily asked