The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [59]
“No, it’s certainly not. But tell me, Emily: Could you design a greenhouse?”
“No, but I could call a company that makes them and order one.”
“There was more to it than that,” Sage told her, her tongue clicking hard on the last word, and Emily was just about to say she agreed, she understood, she was just being glib. It wasn’t that she actually believed she had said something that might merit an apology; rather, she simply wanted to deescalate the conversation. But before she had opened her mouth, John and Peyton returned with the girls’ Shirley Temples and her and Chip’s glasses of red wine.
“You’re going to like this, Chip,” Peyton told her husband.
“And you girls are going to love these,” said John, leaning over and handing each of the twins a wide tumbler blushing with grenadine syrup. “It’s my secret ingredient.”
“And that is?” asked Chip.
“A magician never reveals the secret behind an illusion. And notice I did not use the word trick.”
“Any special reason?” Emily asked.
“A trick suggests I have taken advantage of people or fooled them. Played a joke of some sort on them. I prefer to leave that sort of bad behavior to my work as an attorney.”
“Just so long as it’s not an herbal narcotic or magic hallucinogen of some kind,” Chip remarked. “Drink up, girls.”
Everyone turned to him, a little nonplussed by the inappropriateness of the comment. But he simply raised his wineglass in a silent toast and took a sip. “You were right, Peyton. This is a delightful wine. A great selection.”
And Peyton nodded and the girls sipped their Shirley Temples, a little tentatively at first but then voraciously, as Peyton told the grown-ups how he and Sage had discovered the vineyard on a tasting tour in Northern California last year, and how the Malbec was a new varietal for these wine growers. Chip’s strange admonition was ignored, and the small party quickly regained its footing. Emily was relieved. She had the sense that everyone was. Before the children had finished their Shirley Temples, John was escorting them up the stairs to the playroom, and Emily told herself that Sage and Clary were only following her daughters with their eyes because the girls were twins and they were indeed adorable. There was nothing more to it than that.
“So, tell me,” Chip was saying. “What’s Clary short for? Clarice?”
“Oh, it’s not short for anything at all,” the woman said, pushing herself to her feet and then sitting on the spot on the pouf that Hallie had vacated. “It’s just Clary. I was named after the herb.”
“Clary? I don’t believe I know that herb,” Emily confessed.
“Treats women’s problems,” Peyton said, and he laughed, even rolling his eyes.
“Oh, stop it, Peyton, you know it does much more than that,” Clary chastised him, though it was evident that this was a long-running joke between the two friends.
“I do. I do, indeed,” he agreed.
There was a short lull in the conversation, and in the pause Emily listened to the low murmur of John’s voice upstairs as he showed the girls how to work the DVD player and then she heard the sound of the television. She couldn’t make out the program, but the girls laughed either at something the lawyer had said or at something on the screen. It really didn’t matter which. They sounded content enough, and so she turned her attention to her hostess and her new friends and settled in for the evening.
You wake up when you hear the murmuring voices. You pull your way like a swimmer from the torrents of another sleep burdened by dreams of airplanes crashing hard into the earth, and you sit up in bed. There beside you, your wife slumbers soundlessly. She is curled on her side and has heard nothing. It doesn’t strike you as the slightest bit odd that you are confident the voices are neither burglars nor intruders. Almost abstractedly, you scan this room in the foothills along the western