Up here, the voices are the same indecipherable buzz they were on the second floor. This strikes you as interesting. You would have expected the sound to be more muffled-perhaps even inaudible-when you are another floor higher. Here you may even have heard what sounded a bit like a laugh: a mean-spirited little chuckle at someone’s expense.
And so you start back down that narrow stairwell and then along the second-floor corridor, passing your and your wife’s bedroom. At the top of the stairs to the first floor, you reach for the flashlight you keep upright beside the trim, but you do not switch it on until you have reached the bottom step because you do not want to risk waking Emily. But when you are on the ground floor, you turn it on and spray the rooms. There in the living room is that wallpaper with the fox that looks like an eel, the image repeated over and over. There in the dining room are the walls of statuesque but sickly sunflowers, as well as the two sawhorses and the piece of plywood on which you drape sheets of wallpaper and then slather them with paste; in this light, with a curtainless vertical window just beyond the sawhorses, the image resembles a guillotine. (You built a plastic one from a modeling kit when you were a boy. It actually came with the pieces for a plastic nobleman with a detachable head. You were meticulous and glued the device and the victim together with the same care you brought to your models of jet airplanes and battleships.) There, in a corner of the hallway, is a stepladder with a gallon of paint on the top step, and for just a fraction of a second you are sure it’s a man.
And, finally, there is the door to the basement, and you find you are nodding to yourself that it is open. The door to the basement is never open. You keep it closed because why would you want the smell of the dirt floor wafting up into the house? Why would you want the heat from the radiators or the woodstove to drift there?
Ah, but it is ajar now. Of course. It has been opened for you. It is open now because that’s where the voices are coming from and whoever is down there wanted to be sure that you heard them.
You see in your mind a book jacket: How to Live in a Haunted House . No, that’s not right: It should be How Not to Live in a Haunted House. But then you decide that this construction is wrong, too. All wrong. Both books sound like real estate guides: The first is a manual for finding a house with a history; the second is a handbook for avoiding one. What you are after is an instruction booklet alive with advice for cohabiting with the dead. What to expect. How to cope with the voices that fill the night and the doors that mysteriously open. How to make sense of a house with bones in its basement. Unfortunately, that title eludes you. It hovers like a wisp just beyond your mind’s reach.
Perhaps that’s because you don’t really believe in ghosts. You tell yourself you are not in a ghost story. These voices have woken no one but you. In all likelihood, a draft opened the basement door. Or you left it open yourself: Either you forgot to close it or you left it like this subconsciously. Your therapist would love that. And this conversation below you is only in your head, another invisible wound from the disaster that marked your last flight.
“Hello?” The sound of your own voice surprises you. You hear a slight tremor in it, an uncharacteristic hitch in those two syllables. This is not the tone that told passengers cruising altitudes or directed them to gaze out their windows at the majesty of the Manhattan skyline and New York Harbor or the unexpected expanse of Lake Michigan. This is not the voice that one time (and one time only) told them to brace for impact. Instantly the discussion in the basement grows quiet. “Hello?” you call again, a little louder, a little more confident. Still, there is nothing but silence. You beam the light down the stairs at the stones in the wall at the bottom, at the coils of hose the moving men happened to dump just to the side of the banister. At the wooden pallets you rounded up the other day and on which you have stacked great jugs of cat sand and cases of soda and juice you bought at the warehouse store in Littleton. You feel for the switch at the top of the stairs that flips on the two naked, sixty-watt bulbs in the basement ceiling-really just pillows of insulation amidst thick wooden beams-and, after the basement is awash in the dim half-light, you start down, your feet still bare. You wish you had thought to put on your slippers. Then again, perhaps not. You can clean your feet under the spigot in the bathtub before climbing back into bed. The slippers would have to go into the wash. You never go into the basement without the sorts of shoes you are likely to wear only outdoors.
At the bottom of the stairs you pause, the flashlight at your side, and then turn slowly toward the pile of coal and the doorway behind which you found the bones. Instantly you recognize the pair of adults standing between the doorway and the coal, and you go to them, switching the flashlight from your right to your left hand so you can shake their wet hands if they choose to extend their wet arms to you. And the man does, even though it is painfully clear that you have interrupted a fight he has been having with the woman. A squabble. You wonder: Perhaps you were mistaken; perhaps you were not supposed to hear them.
“Captain,” the man says, but the woman only gazes at you with a worried look in her eyes. A chasmlike gash disfigures the right side of her face, and blood is pooling on the shoulder of her blouse. She is fortunate that she wasn’t one of the three passengers on the plane who were decapitated. Her name is Sandra Durant, though her hair-which was honey in the snapshot photos you saw in the newspaper-has been darkened by lake water and muddied by blood: thirty-two years old, a single woman who you learned in the weeks after the disaster had been on your plane because she had just interviewed for a job in Vermont. She worked at a computer company in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and was considering a job at IBM’s Essex Junction facility. She was a public relations manager. Had a boyfriend, parents, two brothers. A cat named Ozzie.
The man is a strong, well-built fellow about forty, and he, too, suffered a horrific head wound: His forehead looks as if someone drilled a hole in it the size of a flute. His biceps stretch the fabric of his green short-sleeved polo shirt. His handshake is solid.
“You’re Ashley’s dad,” you say, referring to the child with the Dora the Explorer backpack. Again, you saw a photo in the newspaper. After he releases your hand, you glance down at the drops of lake water that Ethan Stearns has left on your fingers and palm.
“That’s right.”
Ashley’s mother is alive in a suburb of Burlington, Vermont. You believe it’s called Monkton. Ashley and her parents were traveling to Florida to visit an aunt and uncle there before school resumed in September. They would have changed planes in Philadelphia. You recall the voice of Ashley’s mother as she screamed her daughter’s name in the waves and dove under the surface of Lake Champlain over and over in the seconds after the aircraft broke apart and jet fuel coated the surface like olive oil.
“I’m sorry about Ashley,” you tell him. “I’m sorry about everything,” you tell them both.
“It wasn’t your fault,” says Sandra Durant.
“We were so close to being all right,” you tell her. “You know that, don’t you?” You consider adding, It was the birds that brought us down, but it was the wake from a boat that did us in. But you will never know that for certain. What if you had kept the aircraft nose a single degree higher above the horizon? Or, perhaps, a single degree lower? Would a wave still have pitchpoled your plane and killed thirty-nine of your passengers?
The woman looks at Ethan, a little frightened. Behind you the furnace kicks on. This sudden rumbling, a reminder of the bricks and mortar and horsehair tangibility of the house, takes you back to the reality that you are standing in cold dirt and coal dust. You gaze for a moment at the splintered pieces of wood from the door that once had been sealed shut with thirty-nine carriage bolts. Thirty-nine. A day or two after you had counted them for the first time, you returned to the basement and envisioned the door was the diagram for a CRJ700, your old plane. You touched each of the bolts with the tips of your fingers. You worked your way back to the rear of the cabin, attaching names to the bolts wherever you could. When you finally smashed in the door, you wanted to be sure that you did not dislodge the bolts from their spots in the wood. If you managed to break through the barnboard without inadvertently dislodging one, you pretended, you would ditch the plane without a single casualty. Everyone would get out alive. You knew you couldn’t rewrite history this way or bring back the dead, but it wasn’t precisely a game, either.
“Ashley was smart and beautiful and she had a huge heart,” says Ethan Stearns. “She was a kid with unbelievable promise. She was a ballerina.”
“All little girls are ballerinas,” you tell him. What you meant was, I know what you mean. I have twins and they’re dancers, too. But the words hang out there wrong in the air, all wrong; they sound antagonistic, challenging-as if you are disputing this angry, grieving dead man in your basement. Impugning his lovely little girl’s talents.
“You have no idea what she would have done with her life,” he says, his tone the confrontational murmur that first drew you from sleep. His hatred for you permeates every syllable. He blames you for his child’s death. The fact that he is dead, too, is irrelevant. This is a good man, you conclude. You would be just as irate if, God
