been in the throes of some new PTSD hallucination or nightmare. Moreover, something Chip had said when he collapsed at the top of the stairs, before he came back to his senses, made absolutely no sense. He was babbling that some child who had died in the accident needed company and he owed it to the passenger to find her a playmate. A moment later he seemed to understand fully where he was and what had happened: They had lost power, it was back on, and he was bleeding.
Emily sipped at the coffee, tepid and a little bitter, that she had gotten from a vending machine outside the hospital cafeteria, long closed for the night, and surveyed the waiting room. She wasn’t alone because no more than a dozen yards away was command central for the wing, an island with four walls of chest-high counters, and nurses and doctors and administrators who were constantly racing among patient rooms and back behind it with clipboards, paperwork, and plastic cups filled with meds. But there were no other relatives or friends of patients at the moment because it was after midnight and visiting hours were long over. She recalled Jocelyn Francoeur’s remorseless (though understandable) hostility. Before she had seen how badly Chip was hurt, the woman had been furious, nearly hysterical, and had hissed that she had been warned about the family. She had been told to steer clear of Emily and the twins the way she had always steered clear of Reseda and Anise and that whole perverted crowd.
Emily rubbed at her eyes. Clearly there was a schism in Bethel. There were her strange new friends with their greenhouses, and then there was the rest of the community. But who had reached out to her except for those odd herbalists? No one. No one at all. Consequently, she decided she was very glad to have that whole perverted crowd a part of her life tonight. John and Clary Hardin had appeared out of nowhere and had been sitting on this appallingly ugly, orange Naugahyde couch beside her until a few minutes ago, holding her hand and comforting her, until finally she had insisted they go home and get some rest. And even before Chip had been rushed to the hospital, Reseda and Holly and Ginger had descended upon her home, Reseda and Holly offering to stay with the girls as long as necessary. (She called, they came. That was friendship.) When Emily had phoned home a few minutes ago to check in, the four of them-Reseda and Holly, Hallie and Garnet-had set up a big slumber party in the living room, piling quilts and air mattresses and pillows onto the floor as if they were all teenage girls on a Friday night. Reseda didn’t think the twins would want to stay alone in their bedrooms, and she was correct. The girls had sounded more tired than terrified when Emily spoke to them, and they were all finally going to sleep. According to Reseda, Anise had been by the house as well. She’d just left, though not before stocking the refrigerator.
The truth was, Emily knew that she didn’t have anyone but these people in Bethel. Her mother-in-law? She might phone her in the morning, but then again she might not. What precisely would she tell her? And given her mother-in-law’s drinking-given the reality that her mother-in-law was a drunk-what assistance could she provide? Absolutely none. After Flight 1611 had crashed, two days had passed before she called her son, and, though Chip wouldn’t share with Emily the details of the conversation, he did say that his mother had told him fatalistically that it-an accident of this magnitude-was bound to happen. Emily imagined she could phone her theater pals in Pennsylvania or some of the lawyers with whom she was friends in her old firm, but what were they supposed to do? Drop everything and come to New Hampshire so they could hold her hand and help nurse her husband back to health? That was what mothers and fathers and siblings did, and she had none. Since her parents had passed away, she didn’t have any family at all.
Emily realized that she desperately needed to sleep now, but there was one more doctor who wanted to talk to her, and that was Chip’s new psychiatrist here in New Hampshire. Her husband had only met with him three or four times, but Chip had said that he liked him, and so Emily had called him. His name was Michael Richmond. He had arrived at the hospital just about when the ER physician and the nurse finished stitching up Chip, and he had been allowed to spend a few minutes with her husband after he was admitted. Now the psychiatrist was discussing her husband’s case on the phone with a colleague in Chicago. Emily yawned again and was just about to curl up her legs and lie down on the couch when he returned. He was a tall man, roughly her age, in a white oxford shirt and blue jeans. He had thinning blond hair and a strong face made more handsome by the scars that remained from what must have been a titanic battle with acne as an adolescent. He sat on the couch beside her, in the very spot where John Hardin had been earlier.
“So,” he began, his voice soft and melodic. “You must be exhausted.”
“I am,” she agreed.
“And, I imagine, pretty shocked.”
“That, too.”
“Do you want something to help you relax? Maybe even just a sleeping pill?”
She thought about this. “Yes. I will take a sleeping pill. I will even say yes to whatever you’re offering in the way of antidepressants.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” he agreed.
“Well, let’s start with what just happened to my husband. I really don’t understand it. Did he actually try and hurt himself? I understand his guilt. But the flight was seven months ago. Why tonight? Why now?”
“We don’t know for a fact that he did try and hurt himself. Maybe it really was an accident.”
“You don’t believe that.”
He sighed. “PTSD is a complicated thing.”
“There’s more. There must be more.”
“Has Chip had any issues with anger since the crash? Rage he couldn’t control?”
“Not at all.”
“Frustration that seemed, oh, a little off the charts?”
“Well, there was a door,” she said after a moment, and she proceeded to tell the doctor about the barnboard door to a coal chute that Chip had turned to kindling with an ax. She wondered if that counted as anger he couldn’t control.
“How about with the girls? How has he been with them?”
“He’s been great. Always has been. The issue for me over the years was that he wasn’t home half the time because he was a pilot. Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Try being a single mom with a job and twin toddlers three or four days a week. When he’d come home after flying for three or four days, the girls would swarm on him. We’re talking seagulls on a Dumpster. And while I understood that it was simply that he’d been away, I always felt a little, I don’t know, inadequate. And unloved. No, that’s not right: less loved.”
“But you realized this was an inaccurate perception.”
“Intellectually. Not viscerally,” she said, and she regretted that somehow this discussion was starting to become about her rather than about her husband. But it seemed that the doctor sensed her unease and brought the conversation back to Chip.
“And since the plane crash? How has he been as a dad since the accident?” he asked.
“Still great. He’s a terrific parent. I mean, he’s been a little spacey. How could he not? And, as you know, he’s been depressed. There was a period when I don’t think he was getting dressed until the girls were about to get off the school bus in the afternoon.”
“Here in New Hampshire?”
“No, this was in those months right after the crash. Back in Pennsylvania.”
He rubbed at his eyes, and she guessed that he was probably as tired as she was.
“How is he doing now?” she asked.
“Well, he’s sticking with his story that it was an accident. He fell. And I guess it is possible that he happened to have the knife with him when he took a tumble while going downstairs to check on the pilot light. Or maybe he fell and didn’t fall on the knife. Then, as he was sitting on the basement floor in the dark-he has no flashlight, remember-it all just overwhelms him: the accident, the move, the lack of purpose in his life right now. The flashbacks, the guilt. There is a lot going on inside his head. And so he hurts himself. I mean, we usually associate cutting with teen girls and young women. But it can affect anyone.”
“He’d never cut himself before tonight.”
“And perhaps he never will again. But it’s still going to take a bit of work to answer your question: Why did he do this? And we may never answer that question, at least not to our satisfaction. But your husband has no history of schizophrenia or mental illness or violence, correct?”
