Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

What would remain a mystery to Chip and Emily and everyone who investigated the ditching was why the flight attendant had unlatched himself from his harness and not tried to open the exit. He had survived the initial impact, that was clear, and yet his body would be found lodged in the third row of seats. One possibility? He, too, had been disoriented when he was upside down and underwater, and he’d simply gotten lost when he tried to find the exit. Or, perhaps, he had tried to help someone. That seemed likely to Chip. He hadn’t known Eliot Hardy well, but in the few days they had flown together before the crash, he had found him patient, firm, and good-humored-precisely the characteristics that defined a professional flight attendant. His cause of death was drowning, but based on his broken nose, there was some thought that he may have hit his head on debris or been kicked in the face by a passenger. Even if the impact hadn’t knocked him out, it may have caused him to swallow great gulps of water, and that was the beginning of the end.

But the other flashbacks that Chip described to her were equally as disturbing in Emily’s opinion, beginning with the flameout of the left engine and ending with the half dozen corpses that somehow had been flung like scarecrows and wax figurines from the wrecked aircraft and were floating around him like buoys in Lake Champlain.

In some ways, the flashbacks were all worse than the nightmares. “I seem to know when it’s a dream and I seem to know that I’m not going to die-though there are times when I think you all would have been better off if I had died,” he said.

“You don’t mean that,” Emily told him. “I wouldn’t want to live without you. Hallie and Garnet would have been devastated to lose you. We all still have a lot of years before us.”

But she had been coached well by his therapist in Philadelphia and by friends that she should expect this. It was survivor guilt. No, it was worse than that: It was survivor guilt exacerbated by the reality that he was a captain who had survived the wreck of his plane. The captain had not gone down with his ship. She could remind him that he had saved eight other lives, but it never did any good. He was focused on the thirty-nine people who had died. The fact that it wasn’t his fault may have been some consolation, though the comfort it offered wasn’t as healing as she wished it would be. He was constantly second-guessing everything he had done on that flight, constantly reliving every decision he had made and contemplating whether there was something he should have done instead or something he could have done better. Maybe he should have tried for the highway. Maybe he should have tried gliding to Plattsburgh. Maybe his pitch was a degree off. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe…

One time that winter he confessed to her that he had wondered prior to Flight 1611 if in some fashion his whole career as a pilot had been snakebitten and it was only a matter of time before he had an accident. He presumed that, by the time he was forty, he would have been flying an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 737. He’d be on track to be captaining triple-seven heavies internationally, flying between Philadelphia and Rome or San Francisco and Tokyo. He had been born in 1972 and graduated from college in 1994. But it had taken him until 1998 to finish flight school, because twice he ran out of money and had to find other jobs to fund his flying: Once it was banging nails into shoddily built town houses in a development in Orlando, Florida. Next it was as a bellman at a hotel in Disney World. Anything to make some money and be near the flight school. He and Emily met his first year as a first officer, when he was flying Dash 8 turboprops between Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and by 2001 he was married and convinced his career was back on track. But advancement as a pilot is based entirely on seniority, and his airline suffered as much as any carrier after 9/11; he was among the junior pilots laid off in 2002, losing his job while Emily was beginning her third trimester with twins. He would finally latch on with another airline in early 2003, and took comfort in the idea that unemployment had meant he and Emily together had diapered and fed the twins their first few months in this world. Emily had been on maternity leave from the law firm for three months and he had been out of work nine. He had loved that period, though both he and Emily had fretted over money. But it also meant that, when he was forty years old and Flight 1611 was flipped by a wave in Lake Champlain, he was still flying regional jets.

E mily thought Chip was functioning rather well most of the time-at least on the surface, he was. Some days, it even seemed as if he were getting better. Not all of the time, of course. Far from it. But most of the time. She noted carefully, as if she were a physician or nurse, that it seemed to be the smallest of things that might set him off. After he had sent some signed documents back to the airline and the pilots’ union via Federal Express, he confessed to having had an almost disabling occurrence of heart palpitations: Federal Express meant airplanes, and there had been that Tom Hanks movie with that all too grim scene of a plane augering into a body of water-which brought back to him his own failed ditching. He said he had sat in the car for forty-five minutes after sending the papers, trying to catch his breath. He admitted that he had almost driven himself to the emergency room at the hospital in Littleton, and she had felt bad that she hadn’t been there for him.

Actually, she felt a little guilty that she wasn’t with him most days as he worked all alone in their new house, tackling the small and large projects. She encouraged him to take time off and drive into town to join her for lunch, but always he passed. One morning she suggested, her voice as offhand and casual as she could make it, that he visit a career counselor to see what else he might want to do with his life-but only, of course, when he was ready. She tried to respect his fragility and his need to withdraw from the world. She only nodded when he said he was fine-absolutely fine-at home.

Home. She understood this Victorian on a hill in a distant corner of the White Mountains was now their home, but in her office in Littleton she felt a distance from it that transcended the buyer’s remorse she had anticipated. There was a randomness to the house that originally had seemed quaint, as if an eccentric old aunt rather than a trained architect had designed it, but now seemed at once useless and disturbing. Why was the third-floor attic inaccessible from the two third-floor bedrooms? What really was the purpose of those rickety stairs that ran from a kitchen nook to a shadowy corner of the second floor? And then there was the Dunmores’ absolutely horrific taste in wallpaper: Had they chosen it consciously to terrify their two sons? Good Lord, Emily feared she might have killed herself, too, if she’d had to grow up near the carnivorous sunflowers in one room or the viperlike mammals in another. Like Tansy, she might have wound up so squirrelly that she would have hid crowbars and carving knives in the house’s myriad crannies. Moreover, every floor seemed to have odd drafts and squeaking doors. It had that basement made of dirt.

She wondered if she had made a monumental mistake uprooting her family: Sometimes it felt to her as if she had sacrificed her daughters for her husband. Could their new elementary school really be as good as the one in West Chester? Not likely, she feared. And, yes, the girls would make new friends and develop new interests, but would there be the same sorts of opportunities for them here that there had been in an admittedly tony suburb of Philadelphia? Already she questioned the capabilities of the music teachers she had found for the girls. Moreover, she missed her friends-her co-workers at the firm on Chestnut Street and the self-proclaimed theater geeks with whom she would dress up in period costume and sing and dance-more than she had expected, and for the first time in her life began to experience real depression. She thought often of the last show she had been in before Flight 1611 had crashed into Lake Champlain. It had been Hello, Dolly! She had been called back for Dolly but hadn’t gotten the part and been cast instead as one of the four middle-aged women expected to add multigenerational authenticity to the chorus. She didn’t care. This was, it seemed, her new function, and she milked the role for all it was worth. The last time she had had a lead had been as Anna in the The King and I, and that had been three years ago. Now she was thirty-eight. Lord, she had become “a community theater actress of a certain age,” which was far worse than being a real actress of a certain age.