Still, it seems indecent to be alive today when four-fifths of your passengers and your crew are dead. You have no plans to rectify that and join them, of course: Haven’t you done enough to scar your two children already? The last thing they need now is for their father to kill himself. But when you see in your mind the black box-and you see it often, though not as frequently as the dead as they bobbed in the water and the fuselage slipped under the waves-you see also that the only place for you to live is a place like this: a sparsely populated hill in a sparsely populated corner of a sparsely populated state. You are living in exile. As an exile. Emily doesn’t view Bethel quite this way. It was her brainchild to come here in the first place. But you do. You view it precisely as an exile. Your own personal Elba.
One day when Emily is at her office in Littleton and the girls are at school and you have just been to the hardware store to get lightbulbs and Spackle and have yet another window shade cut, on your way home you decide to detour toward the office of the real estate agency where the agents-first Sheldon, then Reseda-who sold you the house work. You coast into the parking lot of the dignified mock Tudor that houses the agency and sits beside the brick library and across the street from the post office. You stare for a moment at the town common, with its pristine white gazebo and creosote black Civil War cannon, the heavy gun’s small mounted plaque honoring the White Mountain veterans of that war and the ones that followed in Europe and the Middle East. You gaze at the maple trees-willowy, sable, spiderlike-with a dusting of snow on the wider branches from last night. You wonder precisely why you have veered here and what you are going to ask.
But in you go, and there is Reseda Hill seated behind her desk with her landline phone against her ear and the screen on her computer showing a modest house for sale just off the main street in Littleton. The agent smiles when she sees you, and you stand there awkwardly, not wanting to appear to be eavesdropping on the conversation but not wanting to seem to ignore her, either. There doesn’t seem to be a receptionist, but out of nowhere another agent appears from a backroom, a woman in her mid-thirties-Reseda’s age, too, you believe- who is wearing black pants that are provocative and tight and a cashmere sweater with pearls. She has hennaed her hair and placed it back in a bun and is wearing a perfume that reminds you of lilacs. She introduces herself to you as Holly, but, before the conversation has proceeded any further, Reseda has motioned to her that she will be off the phone in a moment.
“Would you like some tea?” asks Holly, but you decline. You hear yourself telling her your name, and she says, “I know.” And you’re not taken aback. Not at all. Of course she knows your name.
“Coffee?”
“No, I’m fine. Really.” You tell her you can come back, it’s not important, because deference now leaches from you like perspiration.
“I’m sure Reseda would want to talk to you,” she insists. Then: “I’ve always thought being an airline pilot must be very glamorous. Is it?”
You find yourself smiling. It is a popular misconception. “It once was-but that was years before I started flying. The generation of pilots before me had it a little easier: They certainly weren’t eating cheese sandwiches on the flight deck.”
“The airline doesn’t feed you?”
“My first years, it did. We had vouchers. But no more. The vouchers disappeared with my pension. So, on my first leg-I’m sorry, my first flight-I would usually be eating a brown bag lunch I packed myself before leaving home. I remember some mornings, I would make three identical sandwiches: one for me and one for each of my daughters. I have two. Twins. My daughters would bring theirs to school, of course. But you know what? I liked those cheese sandwiches. I really did. You get to your cruising altitude and you eat and enjoy the view. It’s actually rather pleasant. I loved to fly.”
“Were you gone a lot?”
“Probably too much. I was usually flying four days and home three. The rules for rest are complicated, but I might fly a dozen legs those four days. Sometimes, it would be less: seven or eight. Either way, I would say I ate half my meals between thirty and thirty-five thousand feet with a paper napkin in my lap.”
“And that was safe?”
You nod. “That was safe. I was always a stickler for safety.”
Just about then your real estate agent laughs at something and hangs up the phone. She rises from the seat behind her desk, and you are struck by the suede and fur, burgundy-colored boots she is wearing, and how they haven’t any heels at all: This really is a woman who knows how to navigate her way through a White Mountain winter.
“Chip, how are you?” she says, smiling, her eyes that beautiful, disturbing cobalt blue you noticed the first time you met and you think of whenever you think of her. Reseda is tall and trim, a slight ski jump to her nose, and her cheekbones are almost as prominent as her eyes. Her hair is darker than the chest-high wrought-iron fence that surrounds the cemetery at the edge of the village. She takes one of your hands in both of hers, and you always have the sense around her that, if you were in a big city, she would be the type who would want you to greet her with polite air kisses on both of her cheeks. Her palms are dry and cold, and yet the sensation, the touch, makes you a little warm.
“We’re settling in well, I think,” you begin. You describe your breakfasts with the view of Mount Lafayette from the kitchen and skiing periodically the past couple of weeks at the nearby resort. You make a small joke-and the joke does seem to you to be woefully inadequate-about the numbers of boxes you have unpacked and yet the numbers that remain. You wonder as you listen to the sound of your voice-a voice that once inspired confidence at thirty-five thousand feet-whether you are capable of asking the questions that have brought you here. They seem ridiculous now. Absolutely ridiculous. But, finally, you start: “You ever notice that door?”
She angles her head slightly, justifiably confused. The world has a lot of doors. Your house alone has twenty-seven (yes, you have counted), and that doesn’t include the closets and the cupboards and the pantry. “What door?”
“There is a door in the basement. It-”
And then there it is, that slight smile and sympathetic nod you have seen so often from people since August 11, and she is cutting you off. You are now in everyone’s eyes an emotional invalid. They need to be… gentle… around you. “Oh, Anise told me you were asking about that,” she is saying. “The coal chute.”
And you realize that once more they have been talking about you. Anise has told Reseda that you were nonplussed by a… coal chute.
“I must confess,” she continues, “I never did notice it. But then I rarely showed that house. Still, it must be a guy thing. I never heard other agents mention it. I guess women notice how much light a kitchen gets in the afternoon and men notice the coal chute in the basement. But sit down and tell me. What about it?”
You sit in the chair opposite her desk, and it feels good, if only because you have been working very, very hard scraping wallpaper and Reseda is indeed lovely to look at. The chair is leather and the smell is vaguely reminiscent of the aroma of the seat on the flight deck: human and animal all at once.
“I just can’t imagine why someone would have sealed the door shut in such an enthusiastic fashion,” you begin, careful to smile back both because Emily has told you that you have a handsome smile and because you don’t want to sound like any more of a lunatic than you already must.
She shrugs. “Hewitt Dunmore is a bit of an odd duck,” she says simply, referring to the previous owner.
“So you think he was the one who closed it up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know him well. Anise does. She knew his parents and his brother, too. Maybe his father was the one who sealed it up. You know, that’s actually more likely. I imagine it was years and years ago that they stopped heating with coal. It’s LP gas now, correct?”
“It is. And there’s also that woodstove.”
“I love that woodstove. Soapstone. Palladian windows on the doors, right?”
“Right. We’ve been so busy unpacking we’ve only started a fire in it a couple of times.”
“That must have been cozy,” she says, and there is something vaguely seductive in the sibilant way that she finishes her sentence. Those magnificent eyes widen just the tiniest bit.
“It’s not really a cozy house.”
She sits upright behind her desk, that lovely oval of a face abruptly looking alarmed. But you’re not at all sure that the alarm is genuine. She looks alarmed, and it is that same disingenuousness that marked the bad acting of so many of Emily’s friends in Pennsylvania when they pretended to be actors in their community theater
