The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [83]
“You girls really haven’t seen him?” her mother asked, her voice helpless.
Hallie shook her head but then wondered if her mother could see her and said, “No, Mom.”
She watched her mother go to the wall where the phone usually hung, running her hand along it. It was as if she had forgotten she had a flashlight. “I can’t find the phone!” she was saying. “It’s not in the cradle. I want to call the power company, and I can’t even find the goddamn phone.” A moment later Hallie heard a crash and her mother swearing again, and she knew by the sound it was the casserole dish in which her parents had baked the enchiladas they’d eaten for dinner. But then her mother must have found the phone, because they heard her pressing the buttons. Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to work because there was no power. Hallie could have told her that. It was electric. And, as they all knew, there was no cell coverage in this corner of Bethel, which was why her mom had been searching for the regular phone in the first place.
“Fuck!” her mother swore. Hallie had never heard her mother say that word before. “Fuck!”
“Want me to go upstairs and get another flashlight?” Hallie asked. “It would make the kitchen a little lighter.”
“God, no! I want all three of you to stay right here with me,” her mother said, trying to regain a semblance of maternal composure. “I’m sure the power will come back on any second now and your father will reappear—he’s probably outside in the woods this very minute looking for you—and so let’s just stay right where we are. Okay? We’ll stay right here in the kitchen and wait for him,” she continued, and she had barely finished her sentence when, indeed, the lights returned and the refrigerator started to hum and below them the furnace rumbled back into life. Hallie heard the classical music their parents must have been listening to on the public radio station when they were cleaning up the kitchen.
“See what I mean?” her mother said, and she extended her hands, palms up. She looked disheveled, her hair wild, as if she had been awakened in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, Garnet sat perfectly still, absolutely unmoved or unaware or uninterested in the fact that the power had been restored. She was indeed having a seizure, and, given the blackout and their dad’s disappearance, Hallie hoped it would be a short one. She looked to see if her mom had noticed yet that Garnet was in her own private world, but her mother was staring down at her feet. She was still wearing only her socks, and they were sopping wet and streaked with mud.
“I guess I’ll need to throw these away,” she said, looking up, and Hallie thought she might have been about to offer a small smile, but she looked over Hallie’s shoulder and gasped, and a second later Molly pushed away from the table and stood, screaming, a ululating, sirenlike wail of terror. And so reflexively Hallie turned around, too.
There in the doorway at the top of the stairs to the basement was their father. His shirt was awash in blood, a great stain spreading from the left of his navel with the speed of toppled house paint on tile. And there in the center of that red tsunami was—and now Hallie started to scream, too—the pearl handle of a carving knife. Her father rolled his eyes up into his head so they looked like golf balls and groaned. Then he fell back against the doorframe, pulled the knife from his abdomen with both hands, and sank slowly to the floor, leaving a long swash of blood against the wood.
Chapter Nine
Garnet felt confused, the way she always did when a seizure had passed: It was as if she had had a nap and missed things that everyone else knew about. But unlike after a nap, she never felt well rested. She felt groggy instead: It was like she had awoken in the middle of the night rather than at a predictable time in the morning.
Now she was aware that her mother was leaving her, speeding down the driveway after their father. The headlights and siren from the ambulance had faded moments ago, and Reseda was here. Holly and Ginger