The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [68]
“Children are resilient,” Anise said, simultaneously agreeing with her friend and cutting her off. “But often their wounds simply remain invisible until, all at once, whatever is festering there becomes agonizingly apparent.”
“Nevertheless, neither seems quite as traumatized as I would have expected. They’re going to have dinner with Reseda tonight, and I will be very interested in her take.”
Anise pressed the lid atop the glass and then screwed the large ring around the top, sealing the jar shut. “Reseda’s talents are overrated.”
“You only think so because you are some strange exception to the rule. Trust me: When I’m with her, I spend most of my time pushing all compromising or catty thoughts as far from my mind as possible.”
“I can’t believe you have thoughts that are catty.”
Clary smiled. “But you do believe I have ones that are compromising?”
“Of course,” said Anise, and she squeezed past her friend on the way to the walk-in pantry filled with the raw materials for her cooking and tinctures: her powders and seeds and dried leaves. “You’re married to a lawyer.”
On Sunday night, Emily leaned back against the gleaming steel and marble cooking island in Reseda’s kitchen and inhaled deeply the aroma of rosemary and lamb from the oven and the scent of the beeswax candles that seemed to be alight everywhere. It was a wonder the woman had found the counter space to cook. Emily knew she was a little tipsy—maybe even more than a little—but she didn’t care. It felt good to relax and let down her guard a bit. She was drinking some sort of hard, mulled cider and it was like candy. The twins were watching movies on the other side of the house in the den while the rest of the adults were in the sunroom that was attached to this two-hundred-year-old Colonial like an architectural afterthought. In addition to Chip and her, Reseda had invited Holly and a young man with a silver loop in his eyebrow who seemed to be Holly’s boyfriend, and the Jacksons—an older couple whose attitude toward her daughters was eerily reminiscent of the way Clary Hardin and Sage Messner had hovered over the twins just last night. Emily had joined Reseda when the hostess came to the kitchen to check on the lamb and toss the potatoes that were roasting on a rack below the meat, offering to help but really hoping only to get away from the Jacksons for a moment.
As soon as she and Chip had arrived at Reseda’s, she had known who this older couple was. She wasn’t sure how because she had never met them. (She hadn’t returned to the Jacksons’ to get the bean sprouts and carrot tops for the girls’ class science project, because Ginger had taken the initiative and brought them to the school.) But, even before Ginger Jackson had opened her mouth, Emily had had a feeling that she was going to recognize the slightly throaty rasp that marked the woman’s voice from the answering machine. She pegged the woman to be in her late sixties and her husband, Alexander, to be in his early seventies. She thought she had seen him somewhere before but couldn’t pinpoint where or when. Then it clicked: He was the fellow that odd Becky Davis had nearly bowled over the day she raced out of the diner in Littleton. Alexander was tall and powerfully built and, despite his age, could pull off a completely shaved head. His shoulders seemed to be pressing hard against his turtleneck and navy blue blazer. Ginger wore her hair very much like Anise: It was a free-flowing silver mane that cascaded a long way down her back and looked a little wild. She was wearing a peasant skirt that fell to her ankles and rimless eyeglasses with lenses that didn’t look much bigger than pennies and seemed to be levitating just over her nose. The two of them, Alexander and Ginger, had been at least as smothering with her twins as the Hardins and the Messners had been on Saturday night. They had been so invasive of Hallie’s and Garnet’s personal space—what their third-grade teacher back in West Chester had called an individual