house, a sight that was almost tragic in her mind since he was a man who never cried. Had been a brick as her parents deteriorated and died, supported her in every way that she needed. Had handled Garnet’s condition (somehow, she preferred that term to illness)-the strange early seizures, the batteries of tests, the diagnosis-in a fashion that was at once unflappable and sensitive. He, it seemed, had always known what to say to her. At least until the accident. Everything had been different after the accident. And it was different in ways that she didn’t like. Not one single bit.
And when something wasn’t working, you changed it. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. Wasn’t that what the legal consultant with the Armani suits and the ponytail had said to her when he was working with her Chestnut Street law firm?
Indeed. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.
And so here they were. In New Hampshire. Far from everything that had been her life as recently as 5:04 P.M. on the afternoon of August 11, the minute that Flight 1611 began its descent into Lake Champlain.
Chapter Four
In the days when you were a first officer, after your aircraft landed, you would meticulously go through the shutdown checklist with the captain and then walk around the plane. It was your responsibility to eyeball the aircraft and make sure that nothing was leaking or out of place. Sure enough, once you did spot a crack in the skin near the nose, and that aircraft subsequently was taken out of service. But you never spied anything leaking.
What you noticed often, however, and always on the leading edges of the plane-the wings and the nose and the vertical climb of the tail-were bits of dead birds. One time there was a dent in a wing the length of a couch cushion, likely the result of a collision with a goose. In hindsight, you can’t say whether you noticed the spots monthly or perhaps even more frequently than that. But you know the birds that brought down 1611 were certainly not the first birds to collide with an aircraft you were flying.
Some days you find yourself Googling the details of the Lockheed turboprop that was brought down by starlings at Logan Airport in 1960 when sixty-two people would perish. It fascinates you that when a pair of Airbus engines were destroyed by geese nearly five decades later, so little mention would be made of that earlier nightmare. But that was the accident that led aircraft designers to start firing birds into engines to test their capabilities and the FAA to set requirements for how many birds an engine had to be able to swallow before choking to death.
O n the school bus, Garnet was aware of a sixth-grade boy staring back at Hallie and her. They were sitting beside each other in what had become their accustomed side (the left), and she was in her accustomed spot: cocooned beside the grimy window, her sister buffering her from the world. The boy was the older brother of a girl in their class named Sally. Finally he spoke: “You do and you don’t look like twins,” he said, his bare hands on the back of his seat as he looked at them. He was two rows ahead of them, but the seat between them was empty. The long bus was never more than half full.
“I have no idea what that means,” Hallie told the boy. “You do and you don’t look like Sally’s big brother,” she then added belligerently.
But Garnet knew what the boy had meant. She understood precisely what the sixth-grader was trying to say. Perhaps because she was always following Hallie or deferring to Hallie, she was always looking at Hallie. Watching her. And while they were not physically identical twins, there was an air of identicalness about them. They were like puppies from the same litter. Hallie, Garnet knew, glided through the world with far more confidence than she herself ever would have, but still their mannerisms were eerily similar. They gnawed at the nails on their pinkies with the same affectation, extending their thumbs as if they were hitchhiking. They stretched the same way in class or while watching television, extending their legs and toes and raising their arms like long, slinky cats. And though their hair was two very different colors, it was equally fine, fell to the same spot on their shoulders, and today was kept out of their eyes with the same robin’s egg blue headbands. And, Garnet knew, they had the same delicate chins and the same almond-shaped eyes. She had been told (warned, actually) that because she was a redhead eventually she would have great constellations of freckles, but so far she had been spared and she and her sister had the same invariably tan complexions.
“It means,” the boy said, his voice betraying his unease with Hallie’s challenging tone, “that you look like you’re more than just sisters. That’s all.” Then he turned around and stared out his own window. He was, of course, absolutely right. Garnet knew that Hallie had in fact also known just what he was driving at. But sometimes Hallie needed to assert herself. Procure for herself a little distance. And that was fine. Besides, just as Garnet had anticipated she would, at that moment her sister discreetly took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
R eseda sat alone in the butterfly position-her back straight, the soles of her feet touching, her fingers gently grasping her toes-on a silk pillow on the gravel path in her greenhouse. She was vaguely aware of the sound of the water from her fountain and the occasional clicking from the baseboard radiators, and she felt the sun through the glass against her eyelids. She inhaled the fragrance of the nearby rosemary. Still, she was uneasy: Her mind kept circling back to the Linton twins, and she wondered what this meant. As she had reminded Anise, she herself was a twin. What was it about this pair that seemed to have such… potential? What might make them more suitable-more useful-than other twins? The tincture demanded the blood of a traumatized twin, but that may have been nineteenth-century drama or alliteration. Moreover, no one had ever been able to tell her what “trauma” Sawyer Dunmore had endured. The girls were still prepubescent, that was true. But the reality was that the tincture was from the second volume, a book that Reseda found deeply disturbing. It was filled with concoctions and cures that demanded animal hearts and human blood. Anise was a vegan, but she was willing to make exceptions for recipes found in the second book-especially when a tincture was as effective as the one leavened years earlier with Sawyer Dunmore’s blood.
Anise-all the other women, actually-had been interested in another set of twins three years earlier. Again, fraternal, childlike, and possibly traumatized. Boys, that time, like the Dunmores. They had moved to Littleton because their father was going to be the superintendent of a nearby correctional facility. They were eleven when they arrived, moving with their parents and two younger sisters from Nashua to the White Mountains. When they had been toddlers, their town house and the adjoining town house had burned down in the small hours of the morning, and the fire had begun in the very bedroom they shared. The wiring behind their night-light had been defective and set the night-light and then their bedding on fire as they slept. But their father had smelled the smoke before they succumbed to it and gotten the twins and his wife safely out of the house. The next-door neighbors had not been so fortunate: They were an elderly couple, and both succumbed to smoke inhalation in their sleep.
Sadly, no sooner had Anise gotten to know the twins’ mother-a deferential and mousy little thing, and thus rather perfect-than the father was involved in a very public, gloves-off sort of fight with the state legislature over funding for the correctional facility and ended up quitting in a huff. The family moved back to Nashua, and whatever opportunities those twins might have offered were gone. They couldn’t possibly try outside of Bethel; they couldn’t possibly try at such a distance. People would notice. They would watch. They would intervene.
She sighed. It wasn’t simply that the earth here in Bethel felt sacred to Reseda-though it did. It was liminal. Connected. A bridge, in her opinion-or, better still, a passageway. She thought of the Egyptian doors to the afterlife, six- and seven-foot slabs of granite found in some of the ancient tombs. Often carved into granite was a series of concentric doorways, suggesting an infinite corridor.
But Bethel was also isolated, and that mattered, too. It was, in the end, why she stayed here. The soil was at once blessed and undiscovered-at least by most of the living.
Sometimes people from other parts of the country found her. They wanted her to host everything from goddess workshops to rites of passage retreats. These strangers had heard rumors about her and wanted to learn from her, though they never wanted to learn anything she wanted to teach. Politely she would direct them to shamans she knew who were legitimate healers and-unlike her-comfortable as teachers. Unfortunately, the world also was filled with hundreds (thousands?) of people who claimed to be shamans and had Web sites, and would be content to take their money and teach them to handcraft a shamanic rattle or drum. Maybe help them to try to make sense of their dreams. The truth was, she wasn’t especially interested in the living. These days, she knew, she was far more fascinated by the dead.
