day, Garnet didn’t know, and when she asked, her mother just repeated that one word: soon. So, now she sat beside the window in the living room and gazed outside. The yard was dark once more now that all the cars had driven off and-other than murmured voices-the only sound was the occasional rattle of one of the windowpanes in an early spring breeze. Yet the house felt full. Reseda and Holly and Ginger were in the kitchen, discussing how best they could help the family, and it had already been decided that Reseda and Holly were going to spend the night.
Eventually Hallie sat back down beside her. “They’re about to have us get in our pajamas and go to sleep,” she said, her chin in her hands.
“You were listening.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You hear anything else?”
“Not really. They knew I was by the door.”
“They did?”
“Yup.”
“How?”
Hallie shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, Reseda wasn’t mad or anything. She just tapped on the door and teased me about it.”
“I don’t want to sleep upstairs.”
“Me, either.”
Garnet sighed. “When we were in the woods, do you think he was there?” she wondered aloud.
“Dad?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t think so. Do you?” Hallie asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
“There was one second when I thought I saw something. Someone,” Hallie admitted.
“If it was Dad, he must have been there to protect us,” she said.
“Yup,” Hallie agreed, but Garnet had the sense that her sister-like her-wasn’t completely certain of that.
R eseda had spent very little time in the Southwest, but one night in Taos she had been part of a fire ceremony. The shamans had burned juniper branches they had soaked in water, and the result was a blaze with hypnotic purple smoke, the air alive with the aroma from the juniper’s essential oils. A woman had played the violin while sixty or seventy of them sat or stood around the bonfire and contemplated the colors of the flames against the night sky.
Tonight, with the two girls haunted by the power outage and the image of their father’s blood, she was using sage. In her experience, sage cleansed the energy in a space in much the same fashion as juniper: It helped clear away fear and worry and violence. And this was a space that had experienced all three that evening. She added a few more drops of sage oil to the diffuser and lit the tea candle beneath it.
“Candles make me think of blackouts,” Hallie said from the couch, her voice slightly petulant.
Reseda knew this was the child’s way of asking her to blow out the candle. She sat down on the armrest beside the girl and wondered what it meant that her father had actually cut the breakers: This had been no wind- or storm-triggered blackout. She had gleaned this when she said good-bye to him and to Emily as they left for the hospital. She honestly wasn’t sure what to do with this information and, at the moment, had no plans to share it with anyone. “This candle really offers very little light,” she said. “It warms the oil in the shallow bowl above it. Do you like the aroma?”
The girl shrugged noncommittally, but Reseda knew that she did. Then Hallie put down the mug with the California poppy and chamomile tea that Reseda had steeped for the twins to help them sleep. She noted that it was almost empty.
“I love sage,” said Holly, looking up at the girl from her spot on one of the two air mattresses they had inflated and set on the floor beside the couch. She was planning to sleep tonight in black dance pants and a yoga T-shirt. Reseda watched her reach under the quilt on the couch and squeeze Hallie’s toes. “It smells heavenly, and it’s the Lysol of essential oils.”
Garnet was curled into a ball on the air mattress beside Holly, and she looked like she was already asleep. Reseda, however, knew that she wasn’t. Her head was deep in the pillow and her eyes were shut, but she was merely feigning sleep while listening intently to the conversation around her.
“Will you keep the candle burning when you turn out the lights?” Hallie asked from her nest on the sofa.
“I was thinking that we might keep some of the lights on,” Reseda told her. “I know I’d be happier if we kept at least the lamp on that table on. Would you mind?”
Hallie shook her head.
“Thank you.”
“I know I want a light on, too,” Holly said, and she giggled.
Hallie turned to Reseda. “Where are you going to sleep?” she asked.
The truth was, Reseda wasn’t completely sure she was going to sleep. She had found that she was most receptive to visions when she was a little sleep-deprived. Everyone was. Healers and shamans and religious fanatics of all stripes knew the mind was most amenable to psychic visitation when it was exhausted. And she was feeling a little wrung out. Assuming the girls-especially Garnet, whose mind was particularly interesting to Reseda-eventually fell asleep, she thought she might visit the basement. She might see for herself the door that was of such interest to the captain and try to get a sense of what might have attached itself to him.
E mily had presumed that nothing could have been worse than watching the news footage of her husband’s plane cartwheeling across the surface of Lake Champlain, or the images of the floating wreckage and the bodies as they bobbed amidst the ferries and dinghies and rescue boats. But this might have been worse. She wasn’t sure how-she couldn’t make distinctions that fine when the world was unraveling so completely-but at the moment she didn’t even have the relief that came with the idea that the worst was at least behind her. By the time she’d seen the images of the destruction of Flight 1611, she knew that Chip had survived. Her husband was alive.
But now? Her husband was alive, but he had just had another very close call. He had, apparently, fallen down the basement steps and accidentally plunged a knife into his abdomen when he hit the mud floor. At least he said it was an accident. She would have been more confident that it was if the knife hadn’t been the one the paranoid woman who had lived in the house before them had left behind in a second-floor heating grate. The young ER physician and an even younger nurse at the hospital here in Littleton had sewed him up, telling her that he was very, very lucky. The knife had not perforated the intestines. Nor had it nicked his left kidney, the pancreas, or-perhaps most fortunately-the iliac artery. There had been a lot of blood, but not a lot of damage. The principal concern, now that he was stitched up, was infection. But that should be manageable. Still, the hospital staff had decided to keep him overnight for observation, and now he was resting, sedated, in a room down the corridor.
Chip had insisted that he hadn’t tried to harm himself, but he had seemed confused when he first appeared at the top of the basement steps. Had she not noticed all the blood, she would have wondered first how he could possibly have gotten so filthy: It was as if he had been rolling around on the dirt floor in the basement. But he had seemed to reacquire his bearings quickly, and then he had grown contrite and shaken. He kept apologizing for disappearing, and he kept trying to explain both to her and to himself what had happened. It still wasn’t clear to her when he had fallen down the stairs. Had he stumbled while on his way to the water tank to check the pilot light? (There again was that excuse. Hadn’t he claimed to have been checking the pilot on the furnace when she found him in the basement on Saturday night?) Or was it after the lights had gone out, on his way back up the stairs? He had offered both scenarios. And why was he even bringing that old knife with him down the stairs into the basement? He said he happened to have been washing it with the dinner dishes because it was a perfectly good knife, and he had had it in his hands in the soapy water when he decided to check on the water tank.
And so she was worried that this was, in reality, no mere accident. Whether it was self-flagellation or a suicide attempt, however, remained unclear. Obviously he had been depressed since the plane crash; obviously he had been enduring ongoing symptoms of PTSD. But there was a monumental difference between experiencing flashbacks of a failed water ditching and taking a knife and plunging it into one’s own stomach. It was as if he had
