The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [98]
“Chip?”
You face forward and see that John is speaking to you.
“The hospital pharmacy gave us a couple pills for pain. You may not need them, but we have them.”
Us. We. “Thank you.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I am fine.” Fine. Just fine.
“Well, if you need something more, Clary gave me a tincture that I can assure you works wonders.”
“A tincture.”
“Her own little potion. Skullcap and willow bark. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me when my knees get cranky after a day skiing or hiking.” He reaches into his front blazer pocket and removes a small brown bottle the length of a finger. It has an eyedropper for a lid.
“Thank you.”
Now it seems to be Emily’s turn: “Chip?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Is there anything special you would like from the grocery store? We can stop before heading up the hill.”
“No, I’m good.” I am fine.
“Okay.”
You want to ask about the twins. You want to ask Emily what they believe happened last night and what they think of you now, but you won’t with John Hardin present. You can’t. You will wait until you and your wife are alone. But they are smart girls. They know something has happened. Something has happened to you. You have—choose an expression—gone off the rails. Left the reservation. Gone broken arrow.
But do they know that, for whatever the reason, you can’t be trusted?
For the briefest of moments you recall the will—the monumental determination—it took to press the knife into your abdomen, and the agony that finally forced you to stop. You wince, but neither John nor Emily notices.
You didn’t see Ethan or Ashley or Sandra last night in the hospital. You were alone with the distant stars that made up your room. But you have a feeling they will be waiting for you tonight.
Chip went upstairs to shower, and John climbed from the station wagon into his immaculate green sedan and drove back to their office in Littleton. The girls were with Reseda somewhere. And so Emily found herself alone in the kitchen, staring out the window over the sink at the greenhouse and, beyond it, at the meadow and the edge of the woods. She closed her eyes and fought back the tears. She tried to push from her mind her memories of last night or, even more recently, the image of her husband in the rearview mirror of the car that morning, chewing cookies without evident pleasure: He was eating them, it seemed, only because John had offered them. He insisted he was fine, but he wasn’t. The Chip Linton she lived with now was a frightening doppelgänger for her husband. The fellow was a mere husk of the man she had married. It wasn’t merely that this new catatonia was different from the walking somnambulance that had marked the months after the crash: This one was both the result of whatever tranquilizers he’d been given last night at the hospital and the reality that the self-loathing he’d experienced after the failed ditching of Flight 1611 paled compared to the self-hatred he was experiencing now. Whatever had happened to him last night—whatever he had done—had left him staggered: He’d slouched as they walked to the car in the hospital parking lot this morning, unshaven and his hair badly combed, like one of the murmuring homeless men Emily had seen on the streets of Philadelphia. She recalled something he had said to her last night in the emergency room: It was something nonsensical about the pit of despair that awaited him, and how it would be a relief to be walled up inside it.
It all left her wondering: What had been happening to him since they arrived here in the White Mountains? What had she been missing over the last month and a half? What had been occurring at the house while she’d been at work and the girls had been at school? She felt