rumbling down your driveway, and they were out of your life-at least for the moment. You waved to them casually from the porch, the wind seeming to slice through the gray sweatshirt with your airline’s logo on the chest.
Now, before going back inside, you stroll to the greenhouse, where you gather up three of Hallie and Garnet’s American Girl dolls. Your own children won’t be back for hours, and Ashley might enjoy them. The dolls have been out there since the night Molly Francoeur was over for a playdate. Sadly, Molly won’t be back. That is painfully clear. A lost opportunity. Despite the pain that comes with grasping the dolls like bags of groceries-you can feel the pressure against your stitches-you carry them in precisely this fashion back into the house. No sooner have you pulled open the screen door than your skull starts to throb and you feel that daggerlike pain in your lower back, and you know from experience that, at the very least, Ethan and Ashley have returned. Perhaps Sandra, too.
And, sure enough, there is Ashley in the den, her face melancholy, sitting before the woodstove. Already a small puddle is forming beneath her on the brick hearth. She looks up at you when you walk into the room, and instantly she notices the dolls in your arms.
“Here,” you tell her, and you place them on the floor before her, watching as the white bonnet on one of the dolls soaks up the lake water like a sponge. “I thought it might be fun for you to have some more dolls. My girls wouldn’t mind.”
She smiles, and it dawns on you that you have never before seen her smile.
“Your breathers,” she says.
You move her Dora the Explorer backpack so you can sit beside her. “Yes. My breathers.” And then, just the way you did with Hallie and Garnet before Flight 1611 crashed into Lake Champlain, you suggest a story line for the dolls, the barest outline of a tale about three sisters-triplets-who all fall in love with the same prince. Then you step back from your role as creator and allow Ashley to add the details that will bring the story to life.
Y ou look up from Ashley and the dolls when the doorbell rings. Apparently, you had been so engrossed in the game that you hadn’t heard the vehicle as it bumped along the gravel driveway. When you turn back to the child, planning to tell her that you’ll be gone just a moment, she has vanished. And so you nod to yourself and climb to your feet. You pass through the kitchen, peering once down the stairs to the basement as you cross the room to the entry hallway, and then open the front door. The woman there introduces herself as Valerian Wainscott, the psychiatrist John Hardin wants you to meet.
You tell her you are sorry for the muddy footprints that you and the troopers from the Major Crime Unit have left in the hallway and the kitchen, but she waves off any apology. The woman is roughly Emily’s age, slight, with short blond hair in natural ringlets and dark eyes that seem to be laughing. She smiles easily as she pulls off her Windbreaker and motions toward the kitchen table.
“Shall we talk here?” she asks.
You consider the other possibilities, including the living room with the wet American Girl dolls. You would love to show her those. But she would presume they are damp for any one of a variety of reasons, none of which begin and end with the water from Lake Champlain and a dead girl named Ashley.
“Here is good,” you agree, and you offer her coffee. Which she declines. She tells you she is tea drinker, though she doesn’t want a cup right now, thank you very much, and you find yourself smiling. Of course she drinks tea. Her name is Valerian. And valerian is a plant or a flower or an herb of some kind. Valerian root. A sedative, maybe. A muscle relaxant. You wonder how much you should trust her, whether your misgivings are grounded in anything tangible. But then you ask yourself whether tangibility really matters. Is Ashley Stearns tangible? Or Ethan? No, not at all. But their pain is as real as yours. Ethan’s anger (and grief) is as profound as any father’s.
Valerian slides onto the deacon’s bench, and you sit in one of the ladder-back chairs.
Despite the reality that Valerian has come to see you for the businesslike purpose of trying to assess your mental health-to offer your wife a second opinion-she has brought with her four chocolate cupcakes. She unveiled them from inside the large shoulder bag that seems to double as both her pocketbook and her attache case. Your regular psychiatrist here in New Hampshire, Michael Richmond, only offers you coffee and water when you see him. Same with the therapist you saw back in Pennsylvania.
“I was baking for my daughter’s class,” Valerian is saying. “Today’s her seventh birthday, and so I brought the class cupcakes. Still, I think I went a little cupcake crazy. I had extras. But how is it possible to make cupcakes from a box and wind up with extras? I actually needed to find an extra cupcake tin. That’s what I mean by cupcake crazy.”
Given the reason why the two of you are meeting, you have the sense that she wanted to wink when she said cupcake crazy. But she restrained herself. Instead she sighs. “Please, have one. You must. I’m starving, and there is nothing more pathetic than eating cupcakes alone. Now that is sad.”
“Okay. I never had lunch.”
“God, me, too,” she says. “What’s that bumper sticker? ‘Life is short. Eat dessert first.’ ” And then she takes one of the cupcakes and peels off the paper and takes a very healthy bite for a woman who otherwise seems so petite. She licks a bit of chocolate icing off the tip of her index finger. Her nail polish is the red of a maple leaf in early October.
You reach for the one nearest you and take a bite, too. It’s delicious, much tastier than most of Anise’s confections.
“Really, thank you for letting me dive into one,” she says. “I didn’t plan on attacking the cupcakes like this, but I realized when I got here that I was completely, totally famished. And let’s face it: Buttercream frosting is irresistible-if I say so myself.”
Cupcake crazy. Attacking the cupcakes like this. There is something almost taunting about her terminology. As if she knows what you have been asked to do by the dead. But then again, perhaps you are reading more into her remarks than really is there. Maybe she is merely linguistically clumsy. Isn’t it possible you are hearing things in this conversation that she honestly hadn’t meant as gibes? You recall Reseda’s offhand remark about the geese when you were in her office last week. The truth is, Valerian really did attack that cupcake just now. She certainly seemed ravenous.
“I wish I had brought some of the ones I decorated for the kids. Sprinkles and jimmies and faces made out of M amp;M’s. Trust me: Those bad boys were seriously tricked out.”
“I’ll bet they were. I’ve seen my share of cupcakes at elementary school birthday parties.”
“With twins? I’ll bet you have.”
The two of you then finish your cupcakes in a strangely companionable silence. You recall that this woman works a few days a week at the state psychiatric hospital. She probably has lots of experience with patients who don’t say very much. “So,” she says finally, “shall we get down to business?”
“Why not?”
“Indeed, why not? Do you understand why I’m here, Chip?”
“I do.”
“Good. That’s a start.” She wipes her hands on a paper napkin and daubs at her lips. Her demeanor visibly changes as she pulls a pad and a clipboard and a fountain pen from that bag.
“I don’t see a lot of people using fountain pens these days.”
“That’s because you’ve spent so much of your time in the air. You want to see a mess? Bring one of these on a plane. You have not seen a mess until you’ve seen a fountain pen explode at ten thousand feet.”
“Probably not,” you tell her, marveling at the way she can make everything sound vaguely disturbing. Explode. Mess. Ten thousand feet. Some people are capable of making innocuous sentences sound sexual-they can twist everything into a double entendre. Valerian seems to have a similar, perhaps inadvertent, talent when it comes to breathing life into your own particular subconscious fiends.
She motions with both hands at the room in which you are sitting and out the window at the carriage barn and the greenhouse and the sloping meadows beyond it, and continues, “Okay, then. How are you doing here? How are your neighbors? They treating you well? Tell me honestly.”
“They are. Honestly.” You wonder: Did your repeating the word honestly sound like you were being flip? And if it did, should you care? You wonder why this woman’s opinion should matter more than Dr. Richmond’s. Again, you experience a wave of misgiving. What do these women whose names belong in a garden want from you? Do they want anything, anything at all? But Valerian simply nods. She doesn’t seem to find your response in any way impolite. She simply asks whom you have met and where, and what sorts of plans you have for the house. She
