The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [99]
She remembered something John had said to her that morning, before they picked up her husband. “This will all seem less surreal as the days pass,” the older lawyer had told her. “I mean that, Emily. Everything’s different now, nothing will ever be the same. But eventually you’ll find a new normalcy. We all do.”
She thought about this. She saw her experience as unique—horrific and peculiar to herself. But he’d seemed to be viewing it as a rite of passage. Unpredictable and certainly unanticipated, but in some way universal. “You make it sound like you went through something like this,” she had said, staring straight ahead at the entry ramp to the interstate and the pine trees now clean of snow.
“No, of course not.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“But my mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt. Someone must have told you that by now.”
“No. Right now I am far more desirous of finding the healing in an orange prescription vial.”
“I imagine Clary or Anise has something much better for you: more effective and safer,” he’d said, smiling, his eyes a little knowing and wide.
She listened to the water running in the shower above her and turned her face toward the spring sun. She breathed in deeply through her nose, the air whistling ever so slightly, and tried to focus on nothing but the warmth on her face.
Hallie hadn’t planned on going to the basement. She hadn’t even planned on getting out of bed. But she awoke in the night and thought she heard noises downstairs in the kitchen and presumed that her parents were sitting at the table and talking. She knew her mom was really worried about Dad. Then she decided that Garnet must be down there, too; it was why, in the hazy logic of someone awoken from a deep sleep, she hadn’t peeked into Garnet’s room before heading downstairs. But the kitchen was completely empty. The overhead lights were on, but probably because her mom had left them on by mistake before going upstairs to bed herself. The digital clock on the stove read 12:15.
She realized she was a little scared to be downstairs alone at night and was about to scamper back up the two flights of stairs to her own bed when, for the briefest of seconds, she heard a voice again—a single voice this time—and understood it was coming from the basement. The door was ajar, and a light was on down there as well. And so she stood for a long moment at the top of the stairs, listening carefully, aware because of the cold drifting up from the cellar that she hadn’t bothered to put on her slippers. Now she regretted that: Her toes were cold. She ran her fingers over her bracelet, which she had begun to view as a good-luck charm. That afternoon Anise had said she would like her second present even more, but the truth was that she loved this bracelet much better. The second gift was a very old book about plants and what Anise called natural medicine. According to Anise, it had belonged to another herbalist a long time ago. Then Anise had given her sister an even fatter book titled The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs—again, apparently, a favorite of an herbalist who had passed away.
Finally, when Hallie was just about to shut the basement door and race upstairs, she heard someone mumbling and she was sure it was her sister.
“Garnet?” she called into the basement. “Is that you?”
But no one responded, and so she tiptoed onto the top step, the wood coarse against her bare feet, and peered underneath the banister.