The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [64]
“But it’s not just all that potential that’s gone,” he says. He takes a deep breath and exhales through his nose. The steam rises like mist in the chill of the basement. “It’s that she has no one her age. She has—”
“Ethan, stop it,” says Sandra Durant, her tone at once determined and pleading. How is it, you wonder, that she hasn’t yet finished bleeding out? Her blouse and her skirt have become indistinguishable, one long, saturated tunic the color of those wines Peyton kept opening earlier that evening.
“I won’t,” Ethan insists. “I want my daughter to have friends again. I want her to have little girls to play with.”
“That’s cruel!”
“That’s fair! She deserves friends!” he snaps back. And that’s when you first understand what this pair has been fighting about. They have been arguing over your girls. Hallie and Garnet, the two of them asleep right now in their rooms on the third floor. Ethan holds you responsible for the death of his daughter. For killing Ashley and leaving her with no one to play with. You know you would feel precisely the same way.
“Would you like me to introduce my girls to Ashley?” you ask this father, this man just like you. “They seem to be a little older, but they’re good girls, Ethan. Very good girls. Very kind, both of them. They’d be good playmates—and role models.”
“Yes, I would like that,” he tells you. “Do what it takes.” His scowl lessens appreciably, but then Sandra slaps him hard, whatever fear she has of him subsumed by her apparent worry for your daughters, and you feel the spray from the lake on your own face. You bring your fingertips to your cheek and then gaze at the drops of water there that a moment ago were on Ethan Stearns’s cheek.
“Chip?” You turn toward the stairs when you hear Emily’s voice. She is calling down into the basement from the top of the steps, her concern for you permeating your name. When you turn back to Ethan and Sandra, the two of them are gone.
“I’m here, sweetheart,” you call up to Emily.
“What are you doing?”
“I was checking the pilot light on the furnace.” Yes, that’s it. What else would you have been doing? Then you walk in your bare feet across the moist dirt of the basement and up the steps to your wife, telling her that the pilot is fine and the furnace is fine and the basement is fine. Everything is fine.
Yes, it is. Everything is just fine. Even the pilot.
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
You kiss her on the cheek and meet her worried eyes. You smile. Then you flip off the light to the basement and grab a wad of paper towels for your feet. No sense in tracking mud between here and the bathtub.
Chapter Seven
The girl was another fifth-grader named Molly Francoeur, and Hallie had figured out right away—in her very first hours in the new classroom—that the child was not one of the school’s popular kids. She was big for her age, already five and a half feet tall, and she towered over the boys and the girls. As a result, she was gangly, awkward, and could be very shy in the classroom and at recess. She wore a tractor green John Deere sweatshirt most days and reminded Hallie of a Sesame Street character. Her father had run off years earlier, and her mother worked a shift behind the register at the gas station and convenience store by the entrance to the interstate. She had a sister in second grade and a brother in ninth grade, at the high school, a boy who had already gotten into trouble for drugs and “borrowing” a car that belonged to a teacher’s aide. But Molly was also much smarter than Hallie had expected when Mrs. Collier was introducing the twins to the class and she sat Hallie down at the table with Molly and two boys. Hallie had slowly gotten to know the girl, and she realized that the kid had been besieged by bad luck since the day she’d been born.
At first, Hallie had feared that she herself wouldn’t have a lot of clout in whatever pecking order existed here in northern New Hampshire: She was new, her father was the pilot who crashed the plane into the lake (even if it wasn’t his fault), and she was