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By Root 1140 0

shaken. He kept apologizing for disappearing, and he kept trying to explain both to her and to himself what had happened. It still wasn’t clear to her when he had fallen down the stairs. Had he stumbled while on his way to the water tank to check the pilot light? (There again was that excuse. Hadn’t he claimed to have been checking the pilot on the furnace when she found him in the basement on Saturday night?) Or was it after the lights had gone out, on his way back up the stairs? He had offered both scenarios. And why was he even bringing that old knife with him down the stairs into the basement? He said he happened to have been washing it with the dinner dishes because it was a perfectly good knife, and he had had it in his hands in the soapy water when he decided to check on the water tank.

And so she was worried that this was, in reality, no mere accident. Whether it was self-flagellation or a suicide attempt, however, remained unclear. Obviously he had been depressed since the plane crash; obviously he had been enduring ongoing symptoms of PTSD. But there was a monumental difference between experiencing flashbacks of a failed water ditching and taking a knife and plunging it into one’s own stomach. It was as if he had been in the throes of some new PTSD hallucination or nightmare. Moreover, something Chip had said when he collapsed at the top of the stairs, before he came back to his senses, made absolutely no sense. He was babbling that some child who had died in the accident needed company and he owed it to the passenger to find her a playmate. A moment later he seemed to understand fully where he was and what had happened: They had lost power, it was back on, and he was bleeding.

Emily sipped at the coffee, tepid and a little bitter, that she had gotten from a vending machine outside the hospital cafeteria, long closed for the night, and surveyed the waiting room. She wasn’t alone because no more than a dozen yards away was command central for the wing, an island with four walls of chest-high counters, and nurses and doctors and administrators who were constantly racing among patient rooms and back behind it with clipboards, paperwork, and plastic cups filled with meds. But there were no other relatives or friends of patients at the moment because it was after midnight and visiting hours were long over. She recalled Jocelyn Francoeur’s remorseless (though understandable) hostility. Before she had seen how badly Chip was hurt, the woman had been furious, nearly hysterical, and had hissed that she had been warned about the family. She had been told to steer clear of Emily and the twins the way she had always steered clear of Reseda and Anise and that whole perverted crowd.

Emily rubbed at her eyes. Clearly there was a schism in Bethel. There were her strange new friends with their greenhouses, and then there was the rest of the community. But who had reached out to her except for those odd herbalists? No one. No one at all. Consequently, she decided she was very glad to have that whole perverted crowd a part of her life tonight. John and Clary Hardin had appeared out of nowhere and had been sitting on this appallingly ugly, orange Naugahyde couch beside her until a few minutes ago, holding her hand and comforting her, until finally she had insisted they go home and get some rest. And even before Chip had been rushed to the hospital, Reseda and Holly and Ginger had descended upon her home, Reseda and Holly offering to stay with the girls as long as necessary. (She called, they came. That was friendship.) When Emily had phoned home a few minutes ago to check in, the four of them—Reseda and Holly, Hallie and Garnet—had set up a big slumber party in the living room, piling quilts and air mattresses and pillows onto the floor as if they were all teenage girls on a Friday night. Reseda didn’t think the twins would want to stay alone in their bedrooms, and she was correct. The girls had sounded more tired than terrified when Emily spoke to them, and they were all finally going to sleep. According to Reseda, Anise had been