The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [85]
The girl shrugged noncommittally, but Reseda knew that she did. Then Hallie put down the mug with the California poppy and chamomile tea that Reseda had steeped for the twins to help them sleep. She noted that it was almost empty.
“I love sage,” said Holly, looking up at the girl from her spot on one of the two air mattresses they had inflated and set on the floor beside the couch. She was planning to sleep tonight in black dance pants and a yoga T-shirt. Reseda watched her reach under the quilt on the couch and squeeze Hallie’s toes. “It smells heavenly, and it’s the Lysol of essential oils.”
Garnet was curled into a ball on the air mattress beside Holly, and she looked like she was already asleep. Reseda, however, knew that she wasn’t. Her head was deep in the pillow and her eyes were shut, but she was merely feigning sleep while listening intently to the conversation around her.
“Will you keep the candle burning when you turn out the lights?” Hallie asked from her nest on the sofa.
“I was thinking that we might keep some of the lights on,” Reseda told her. “I know I’d be happier if we kept at least the lamp on that table on. Would you mind?”
Hallie shook her head.
“Thank you.”
“I know I want a light on, too,” Holly said, and she giggled.
Hallie turned to Reseda. “Where are you going to sleep?” she asked.
The truth was, Reseda wasn’t completely sure she was going to sleep. She had found that she was most receptive to visions when she was a little sleep-deprived. Everyone was. Healers and shamans and religious fanatics of all stripes knew the mind was most amenable to psychic visitation when it was exhausted. And she was feeling a little wrung out. Assuming the girls—especially Garnet, whose mind was particularly interesting to Reseda—eventually fell asleep, she thought she might visit the basement. She might see for herself the door that was of such interest to the captain and try to get a sense of what might have attached itself to him.
Emily had presumed that nothing could have been worse than watching the news footage of her husband’s plane cartwheeling across the surface of Lake Champlain, or the images of the floating wreckage and the bodies as they bobbed amidst the ferries and dinghies and rescue boats. But this might have been worse. She wasn’t sure how—she couldn’t make distinctions that fine when the world was unraveling so completely—but at the moment she didn’t even have the relief that came with the idea that the worst was at least behind her. By the time she’d seen the images of the destruction of Flight 1611, she knew that Chip had survived. Her husband was alive.
But now? Her husband was alive, but he had just had another very close call. He had, apparently, fallen down the basement steps and accidentally plunged a knife into his abdomen when he hit the mud floor. At least he said it was an accident. She would have been more confident that it was if the knife hadn’t been the one the paranoid woman who had lived in the house before them had left behind in a second-floor heating grate. The young ER physician and an even younger nurse at the hospital here in Littleton had sewed him up, telling her that he was very, very lucky. The knife had not perforated the intestines. Nor had it nicked his left kidney, the pancreas, or—perhaps most fortunately—the iliac artery. There had been a lot of blood, but not a lot of damage. The principal concern, now that he was stitched up, was infection. But that should be manageable. Still, the hospital staff had decided to keep him overnight for observation, and now he was resting, sedated, in a room down the corridor.
Chip had insisted that he hadn’t tried to harm himself, but he had seemed confused when he first appeared at the top of the basement steps. Had she not noticed all the blood, she would have wondered first how he could possibly have gotten so filthy: It was as if he had been rolling around on the dirt floor in the basement. But he had seemed to reacquire his bearings quickly, and then he had grown contrite and