Chapter Eleven
You contemplate all the hours you sat attentive and alert on the flight deck, and how you never grew less enamored of the niveous white magnificence of clouds as you gazed down at them from thirty or thirty-five thousand feet. Their exquisite polar flatness: fields of pillowy snow that stretched to the horizon. As the shadow of your plane would pass over them, you would imagine you were gazing down on an arctic, alabaster plain, and in your mind you could see yourself crossing them alone in a hooded parka and boots. (You wonder now: Why were you always a solitary man in this daydream?) If you were flying at the right time of the day and the sun was in the right spot, the vista would be reduced to a splendid bicolor world: albino white and amethyst blue.
And then there was that moment when you would skim across the surface of the great woolpack before starting to descend underneath it, and your plane would feel more like a submarine than a jet. It was like going underwater-deep underwater-right down to the darkness that abruptly would enfold the aircraft once you were inside the clouds. One minute the sky would be blue and the flight deck bright, and the next the world outside would be gray soup and the flight deck dim.
You know the technical names for clouds as well as a meteorologist, just as you know the federal aviation definitions for ice: Glaze. Inter-cycle. Known or observed. Mixed. Residual. Runback. Rime. You have always loved the alliteration that marks those last three, the poetry of the memorized cadence. And you can do the same thing with clouds. You know the names of the ones that grow in the low elevations and the ones that exist in much higher skies. Even now, sitting in the backseat of the Volvo as Emily and John Hardin drive you home from the hospital, you can see perfectly in your mind the leaden sheets of gray stratus as the nose of your plane would start to nudge through them; the fleece of the cumulus, bright and cheerful when lit by the sun, dark and shadowy when not; the ominous towers and anvil plumes of the cumulonimbus you would steer your plane around when the traffic and the tower permitted. You close your eyes and see once again the gauzy layers of cirrus, their wisps strangely erotic, or their cousins, the rippling cirrocumulus. (Some people call these clouds a mackerel sky, but a flight instructor you liked very much called it a lake sky because it reminded him of the days he would spend with his own father fishing.) You see the rain on the flight deck windows and feel the bump as you break the plane of a layer of dark nimbostratus.
And now you open your eyes and the clouds disappear and you stare at the back of John Hardin’s head. It is an indication of the toll your breakdown is having on Emily that she needed cavalry help to bring you home from the hospital. It is a sign of how ill they think you are that they have squirreled you into the backseat. John has pulled the passenger seat so far forward that his knees are pressed against the glove compartment, though you have told him over and over you are fine. You have been telling people precisely this all morning long. I am fine. Fine. Just fine.
You still have in your mouth the taste of the oatmeal cookies that John Hardin handed you when you first climbed into the backseat. Immediately you ate two. Anise had baked them. Of course. You are aware of raisins and cinnamon and a bitter spice you don’t recognize. The truth is, you were never an especially creative cook, and you don’t recognize very many spices and seasonings.
There is midday sun coming in through the car window, and you stare up into it. Into a cloudless sky. Apparently a psychiatrist-not your psychiatrist, not Michael Richmond-is going to come visit you tomorrow afternoon. Examine you. At your house. Imagine, a psychiatrist making house calls. You have no idea what to make of that, none at all. But she’s a friend of John’s and, like all of John’s friends, seems to want to help you. To help you and Emily and your girls.
You run your tongue between your teeth and your gums. You decide that you don’t honestly understand the appeal of Anise’s cooking. She seems to be a hit-and-miss baker. Of course, it may simply be that you will never be interested in vegan cooking and vegan desserts, and apparently everything the woman cooks is vegan. Or, maybe, she really isn’t especially talented in the kitchen. Maybe people abide her cuisine simply because they like her. Even those oatmeal cookies you just polished off have left a sour, vinegary aftertaste that seems to smother the cinnamon.
“Chip?”
You face forward and see that John is speaking to you.
“The hospital pharmacy gave us a couple pills for pain. You may not need them, but we have them.”
Us. We. “Thank you.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I am fine.” Fine. Just fine.
“Well, if you need something more, Clary gave me a tincture that I can assure you works wonders.”
“A tincture.”
“Her own little potion. Skullcap and willow bark. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me when my knees get cranky after a day skiing or hiking.” He reaches into his front blazer pocket and removes a small brown bottle the length of a finger. It has an eyedropper for a lid.
“Thank you.”
Now it seems to be Emily’s turn: “Chip?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Is there anything special you would like from the grocery store? We can stop before heading up the hill.”
“No, I’m good.” I am fine.
“Okay.”
You want to ask about the twins. You want to ask Emily what they believe happened last night and what they think of you now, but you won’t with John Hardin present. You can’t. You will wait until you and your wife are alone. But they are smart girls. They know something has happened. Something has happened to you. You have- choose an expression-gone off the rails. Left the reservation. Gone broken arrow.
But do they know that, for whatever the reason, you can’t be trusted?
For the briefest of moments you recall the will-the monumental determination-it took to press the knife into your abdomen, and the agony that finally forced you to stop. You wince, but neither John nor Emily notices.
You didn’t see Ethan or Ashley or Sandra last night in the hospital. You were alone with the distant stars that made up your room. But you have a feeling they will be waiting for you tonight.
C hip went upstairs to shower, and John climbed from the station wagon into his immaculate green sedan and drove back to their office in Littleton. The girls were with Reseda somewhere. And so Emily found herself alone in the kitchen, staring out the window over the sink at the greenhouse and, beyond it, at the meadow and the edge of the woods. She closed her eyes and fought back the tears. She tried to push from her mind her memories of last night or, even more recently, the image of her husband in the rearview mirror of the car that morning, chewing cookies without evident pleasure: He was eating them, it seemed, only because John had offered them. He insisted he was fine, but he wasn’t. The Chip Linton she lived with now was a frightening doppelganger for her husband. The fellow was a mere husk of the man she had married. It wasn’t merely that this new catatonia was different from the walking somnambulance that had marked the months after the crash: This one was both the result of whatever tranquilizers he’d been given last night at the hospital and the reality that the self-loathing he’d experienced after the failed ditching of Flight 1611 paled compared to the self-hatred he was experiencing now. Whatever had happened to him last night-whatever he had done-had left him staggered: He’d slouched as they walked to the car in the hospital parking lot this morning, unshaven and his hair badly combed, like one of the murmuring homeless men Emily had seen on the streets of Philadelphia. She recalled something he had said to her last night in the emergency room: It was something nonsensical about the pit of despair that awaited him, and how it would be a relief to be walled up inside it.
It all left her wondering: What had been happening to him since they arrived here in the White Mountains? What had she been missing over the last month and a half? What had been occurring at the house while she’d been at work and the girls had been at school? She felt she had been a derelict wife, and she considered if this was, in some way, her fault. Had she been inattentive? So it seemed. Michael Richmond had been unable to reassure her that it was safe to leave Chip home alone. She wasn’t certain it was even safe to leave him alone with the girls. It wasn’t that he might harm them-though the idea had now entered her mind, and she knew as a mother it was going to lodge there-it was that he might harm himself when they were present.
