Chris Bohjalian: The Night Strangers

Then last night they had lost power in a windstorm and the four of them wound up huddling for three hours in front of the woodstove. The novelty of the outage had worn off quickly, and the event had proven to be the last straw. They needed to get away for the day, and a Sunday at the nearby ski resort seemed like the ideal prescription.

As they were stowing their gear in the wagon midmorning, the air brisk but not uncomfortable (the thermometer outside the kitchen window, a dollop of mercury in a tube that was held by a brass relief of either a portly chimney sweep or Saint Nicholas, they couldn’t decide, read thirty-one degrees), Emily saw a battered pickup truck rumbling its way up the long driveway. Most of the year the driveway was gravel and dirt, but by this point in the winter it was a solid glaze of packed snow and ice. The drifts along the side were so high that she couldn’t see the truck’s wheels, and it looked as if the vehicle were skimming across the top of the snow. She didn’t recognize it. As far as she could tell it was red, but it was so streaked with white from road salt and brown from spread sand that she wasn’t entirely sure. But it seemed to be losing a back panel to rust. And it definitely needed muffler work. It announced its presence with a roar, even though it was navigating the curling driveway with some care.

“You know who that is?” Chip asked. He had just finished pulling shut the clamps that locked the girls’ snowboards to the roof.

“Not a clue,” she said, and now she could see it was a woman driving, her hair a lustrous gray mane that was parted in the middle and fell well past her shoulders. Her parka was blue. The woman coasted to a stop in a section of driveway in front of the carriage barn, actually driving past their station wagon. Emily looked at her husband and saw he was already walking over to the pickup, and so she followed. The girls were bundled up and ready to go, but-as usual, when there was daylight and they weren’t in school or unpacking boxes in their bedrooms-they were in the greenhouse.

“Good morning,” the woman said, pushing open her door and jumping down onto the driveway with an obliviousness to the coating of snow there that was somewhere between foolhardy and confident. Emily still found herself moving gingerly along it. They had snow in Pennsylvania, but not like this. Not all winter long. There the snow came and it went. Here? You’d never know that Greenland was melting faster than a Popsicle in July. Here were the winters she recalled from her childhood: snow and cold and winds that numbed her cheeks. Leafless, sinuous maples.

She noticed that the woman was holding a long, flat Tupperware tin in both hands and, on top of it, a similarly shaped baking dish covered with aluminum foil. Emily understood instantly that this was a neighbor bringing food. More food. A lasagna and brownies, she suspected. She guessed that the woman was almost a generation older than she and Chip: probably fifty-five or sixty. Her face was lovely but lined, and her eyes looked a bit like her parka: They were the color of moonstones. She wasn’t wearing gloves. “I’m Anise,” she said. “I’m a friend of Reseda Hill,” she added, referring to the woman who had taken over as their real estate agent after Sheldon Carter died so abruptly.

“Emily Linton,” she said. “This is Chip, my husband.” Emily found it interesting that, ever since the plane crash, she had been more likely to introduce her husband than he was to take the social lead and introduce her. He wasn’t a failure-not by a long stretch when she contemplated the traumas that had marked his childhood-but he had confessed to her that he felt like one. These days he defined himself entirely by a single moment, and that moment was not about the nine people who had lived but was instead about the thirty-nine who had perished. He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not. Now she watched the tentative way that he gave this friend of their real estate agent his hand and mumbled a soft greeting.

“Oh, I’d know your face anywhere,” Anise said with a broad smile that revealed a layer of upper teeth that were just beginning to cross over one another and a row of lower ones that were starting to yellow with age. The woman hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but it had become one of those statements that Emily knew made Chip anxious. Yes, for a time his face had been everywhere. For a time it had been all over the Web, the cable news networks, and the newsweeklies. After all, he was the pilot who had failed to do what Sully Sullenberger had accomplished. People never meant anything when they said that they recognized him. And sometimes it was even better when they came right out and acknowledged that they knew who he was, as Anise just had, rather than simply staring at him and saying nothing. Chip had told her once that silence without verbal recognition seemed like even more of an indictment.

“Can I help you with those?” Emily asked, and she pointed at the tin and the baking dish in Anise’s arms.

“If you promise to eat them,” said Anise. “There’s a lentil-nut loaf in this one and carob-chip brownies in the other.”

“Vegan?” Emily asked.

“Yes. They taste better than they sound-I promise,” Anise insisted, and she handed the items to Emily with particular care because Emily was already wearing her ski gloves. “The brownies have names on them. One for each of you. Hallie is spelled with an i-e, right?”

“Yes, that’s right. Really, this all sounds scrumptious. Thank you. It will be such a gift not to have to cook tonight.”

“Reheat the lentil loaf in a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree oven for twenty minutes.”

“Or microwave it for, what, three minutes? Four?”

Anise tilted her head as if this were a math equation that was puzzling her. “Huh. I don’t have one of those. Too scary. I put those in the same category with cell phones and aspartame. You’re just asking for brain cancer.”

Emily noticed that her husband hadn’t said a word, but now he was eyeing the woman’s vehicle. She had been married to him long enough to know that he was probably wondering how this woman with her fear of carcinogens in diet soda and radiation from a cell phone could drive around in that rusted-out, carbon-monoxide-spewing tank.

“It looks like you’re about to head to the mountain,” Anise observed, just as the pause was about to grow awkward.

“We are,” Emily told her.

“With the girls?”

“Yes,” she said, momentarily nonplussed by the idea that she and Chip might be leaving the girls behind. Of course they would be bringing them. She wasn’t going to leave a pair of ten-year-olds alone for the day-especially in an unfamiliar house in which once had resided an apparently sociopathically skittish old woman who left knives and hatchets in corners. But then she reminded herself that Anise was a friend of Reseda’s, and there was every reason to presume that Anise was simply trying to make conversation. Show some interest. “It’s a family outing,” Emily went on. “An escape from Box Hell.”

“You lose power last night?”

“We did. Did you?”

“I did. I was surprised because I live in the valley. Living up here on the hill, you’ll lose it more often than I will,” Anise said. Then: “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I live on the road to the Notchway Inn. It’s the brick Georgian with the greenhouse and the overgrown paddock with the white fence. I don’t have horses, but a previous owner did. Don’t be strangers.”

“You know much about this house?” It was Chip speaking, and because it was the first time he had opened his mouth other than his softly murmured how-do-you-do, both she and Anise found themselves turning toward him with a combination of intensity and expectation.