terrified of flying. Absolutely petrified. Had to be hammered to get on an airplane. Had to have her good-luck charm bracelet on her wrist and her Saint Christopher’s medal around her neck. Had to be wearing a specific pair of sunglasses as a headband to keep that long and lustrous black hair off her face. Tony Swoboda and his wife, Kaye, were driving you and your family from Stamford to Kennedy Airport the time you all flew to Spain and Portugal on a two-week tour. One of those vacation packages that took you to a half dozen cities in barely a dozen days: Madrid in two days and Lisbon in thirty-six hours. An afternoon for Toledo. It was your last vacation as a family-you and your parents and your younger brother-because it would be soon after your return that your father would start up the grand staircase at Grand Central Terminal around 8:35 on a Tuesday morning and die right there on the steps of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. (His last conscious vision? You like to believe it was Paul Helleu’s Mediterranean sky, but at the time the ceiling had not yet been restored. The stars that day had still been obscured by soot.) He was walking from the train station to his office at the ad agency on Forty-eighth Street, as he had almost every workday of his life for twenty years. It was the end for him, but only the beginning of the end for your mother. Somehow, her husband’s life insurance had lapsed and their savings and investments were clearly inadequate to keep her and her two sons in a four-bedroom house near the water in Greenwich, Connecticut. They would cut back, then they would move. A smaller house in Stamford, at the edge of the city. It wouldn’t have been so bad for the three of them if the combination of widowhood and diminished resources hadn’t conspired to turn a social drinker (a very social drinker, in hindsight) into a drunk.
Ah, but your father was still among you when you went to Kennedy Airport for the final time as a family of four. And Tony was teasing your mother that afternoon, trying to make her smile because the idea of flying across the Atlantic Ocean at night had her on the verge of vomiting. Tony and Kaye were great friends of your parents. Had been for years. “Yeah,” Tony was saying to your mother, as he and your father carted the great suitcases into the terminal from the parking lot (you realize when you focus upon the details of this memory that Tony and Kaye have not dropped you all off at the curb before the departure doors; they have parked their massive station wagon and are crossing the garage with you), “you’re just a broad broad brought abroad.” Your mother couldn’t quite bring herself to smile, but she finally put out her cigarette and stared at something other than her fingers or the smoke or the length of the ash, and marched into the terminal. This was at the very end of the era when people dressed for flying as if the airplane were a synagogue or a church. Your mother was wearing a gray cashmere blazer and a black skirt, and even as a ten-year-old boy you knew it was far chichier than the uniforms that some of the airlines had their stewardesses wearing. And you, of course, were in your navy blue sports jacket-the only blazer you owned because you were a boy and how many sports jackets does a boy really need?
Unlike your mother (and, to a certain extent, even your father), you had never been scared of flying. Not even the tiniest bit. From your very first flight, a Boeing 727 to Florida, you would always sit hypnotized in your seat, staring out the window as the plane accelerated down the runway and gently lifted off. The windows invariably were scratched, but still you would watch the world grow small and wait for the jolt as the plane cracked the edge of the clouds. You built plastic models of fighter jets, passenger jets, and the lumbering bombers the United States used in the Second World War. For hours at a time you played a video game-one of the first of its kind-in which you were a pilot with a rudimentary jet console before you.
That night you flew with your family to Europe, your mother sitting in the seat beside you, gripping the armrests during takeoff, convinced that nothing as heavy as this-a Boeing 747-could possibly get off the ground or (if somehow it did) remain aloft. Meanwhile, you only studied the lights along the runway and the landmarks of the terminals nearby. Your mother believed that bad things happened at thirty-five thousand feet, and her terrors were exacerbated rather than relieved by all that Scotch she would consume when the plane reached its cruising altitude. She was always a little pale when she flew. A broad broad brought abroad.
You, however, loved the experience. The speed. The vistas. The peace. Later you would understand the physics of flying, but that never lessened the magic. Even when the plane would be cruising on autopilot and you were swapping out Jepp charts in your binder-tedious work you seemed to be doing at least twice a month-you would occasionally glance out the window and find yourself a little awed by the beauty of the world so very, very far below you.
Ten-year-old Hallie Linton thought their new greenhouse in Bethel was a bit like the walled garden in that story The Secret Garden. It was an enchanted place, but-just like in the novel and the movie-right now you couldn’t see its possibilities. It was wintry in there at the moment and empty, except for those four tables and the stacks of flimsy plastic pots, and it smelled musty. There was so much black dirt on some of the big glass panes that a person could write her name in it. But she loved the building. Even now, the sun six weeks shy of the equinox and much of the glass opaque with grime, the greenhouse glowed with a bluish tint at the right time of the day. Hallie studied the way the long metal beams sparkled at noon, especially after she and Garnet had taken some Windex and paper towels yesterday and gingerly stood on the tables and scrubbed a few of the windowpanes. (Cleaning all of the windows was going to be a major project, both because there were so many and because the dirt, in this temperature, seemed to have been quilted over with glue. Nevertheless, she had every intention of making the effort when the days had gotten a little longer and the sun had started thawing the grime.)
She knew Garnet didn’t have quite as much interest in the building as she did, but dutifully she had helped cart out their dolls and the doll furniture; she seemed to appreciate the idea that at some point this was going to be their playhouse-or, at least, a playhouse that they might share with their mom and dad’s plants. Their parents had not evidenced a particular interest in gardening in West Chester, but recently their mother had said something about starting tomato seedlings in here. She had said she might even take up flowers as a hobby. It didn’t matter to Hallie. How much time could a grown-up really spend in a building like this? Besides, their mom had taken a job with a couple of other lawyers in Littleton. And their dad? Hallie couldn’t begin to imagine what was going to interest Dad now that he was no longer a pilot. She was pretty sure that planes were all he knew and all that interested him. He liked to fly-or had once. She certainly didn’t see him gardening or growing flowers in here.
Of course, she wasn’t precisely sure what was going to interest her either in New Hampshire. She knew that she was outgrowing her dolls, but she had no idea what might replace them here in the mountains. Probably not ballet and probably not the flute. Though she was only ten, Hallie grasped the reality that these would be just hobbies for her, even if she pursued them vigorously; she was no prodigy and there was no point in approaching either ballet or music with passion. This revelation neither saddened nor slowed her. She presumed someday she would find something else, and in the meantime she would go to dance class and practice her flute with the same dogged acceptance that compelled her to attend to her homework.
She had noticed already that she didn’t seem to have quite as much homework in Bethel. That might change. But at least over their first few days here, her new teacher hadn’t assigned nearly as much math or spelling or reading as Mrs. Leeds had in West Chester.
Moreover, there weren’t the massive shopping malls here that there were in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Or the community theater groups for their mom. Or even the Phillies-which, she had to admit, interested her mostly because they had interested her dad and some of her friends at her old school. Had they remained in Pennsylvania, she and Garnet were going to get cell phones for their eleventh birthday this coming summer, but cell phones seemed less important here: There wasn’t any coverage at their new house, so how could they text their friends-assuming, of course, they eventually made some new ones? Hallie imagined bringing a laptop out to the greenhouse and getting a page on something like Facebook, just like the older kids, and surfing and posting and chatting for hours, but the router would have to be mighty powerful. She guessed they would spend a lot more time snowboarding here than they had in Pennsylvania. After all, the mountain was only twenty minutes away; they could see it from one of the house’s porches. And yesterday they had seen-and heard-snowmobiles racing across the farthest edge of the meadow, and so she thought it was possible that maybe she’d take up snowmobiling.
Now, here was something that might interest Dad: snowmobiling. The connections in her mind were the roar of the engines and the sense of speed. Like a jet, a snowmobile was fast and it was loud.
Based on the few days that she and Garnet had been at their new school and their first visit to their new dance studio, it was clear that she was going to have to take the lead if she and her sister were going to make any new friends. That probably was to be expected. She had always been more popular than Garnet back in Pennsylvania, so why wouldn’t that be the case here? Hallie understood that her sister was going to be a part of any group largely because she herself was. Moms seemed to love Garnet’s red hair, but kids thought it was almost too red. This wasn’t strawberry blond stuff. It was more like just strawberry. (Hallie was thankful every day that
