Chris Bohjalian: The Night Strangers

“V erbena, no! No, no, no! That was a monumental mistake.”

Emily was on the floor, kneeling over the broad-shouldered stranger in the wool cap and the yellow slicker she had just attacked, and there before her-towering over her, it felt-were Anise and John. Emily was almost hyperventilating, and she wasn’t precisely sure where she had stabbed the fellow: She had seen him from the top of the back stairs no more than three or four feet away and leapt at him, trying to plunge the knife into him. And now the man was facedown and Emily could see a great streak of blood along one of the jacket shoulders.

“We were going to fetch the girls and then you,” John continued, the irritation evident in his usually avuncular voice. “Really, what in heaven’s name would possess you to assault a person like that?”

“Where’s Hallie? Where’s Garnet? What have you done with my children?” She spat the words out in a frenzy as she rose to her feet, and now she held up the knife, pointing the tip at John as if it were a fencing foil. She saw that Anise looked every bit as perturbed as the older lawyer-perhaps more so. She was wearing a parka so wet that it glistened in the beam of the flashlight. “Tell me right now or I will kill you just like I killed him,” Emily continued, motioning at the body on the floor.

Anise rubbed her eyes with her fingers, clearly exasperated and tired. “No, I don’t think you will. Especially since, thank God, you didn’t kill Alexander,” she said. And just as the realization was registering in Emily’s mind that she hadn’t recognized the powerfully built older man because of his wool cap, she felt her bare ankles being grabbed and her legs pulled out from underneath her. She lost the flashlight as she fell onto her knees, the bones thumping hard on the wooden floor, but she might have been able to hang on to the knife if John hadn’t grabbed her arm and whisked it from her fingers. Then Alexander rolled her onto her back and knelt on her chest, one of his knees pressing hard against her sternum. She barely could breathe beneath his weight.

“That’s fine, Alexander,” John said. “That’s enough. Are you badly hurt?”

“Well, I could bore you with the details of what could have been the damage to my rotator cuff,” he answered, grimacing. “But I won’t. Shoulder wounds can be nasty, so suffice to say I dodged a bullet-or, in this case, a knife. I have a bulky sweater under my raincoat, and that helped. She only got my upper arm. I’m bleeding, but mostly she knocked the wind out of me.”

“We’ll be sure to tend to your wounds,” Anise said as she crouched before Emily.

“I’ll be fine,” he said simply in response.

“Trust me, Verbena, this will all go so much easier if you just tell us where Cali and Rosemary are hiding,” John said. “Will you do that, for us-for them?”

“They’re in the attic,” Alexander said. “At least I think they are. I thought I heard them scurrying around up there when I pulled open the trapdoor.”

“I hope so. Really, I do. I hope it wasn’t just a couple of very large mice,” John muttered. “Verbena, call your girls. Tell them to come down.”

“I won’t,” she grunted. “I can’t yell with him on me anyway,” she stammered.

“If I ease up, you’ll call them?” Alexander asked.

They beamed a flashlight onto her face, and she shook her head no.

“Good Lord, what do you think we plan to do with them?” John asked. “Cook them in a stewpot?”

And so Alexander sat back on his heels so she could breathe deeply and yell, and Emily did call out to the girls. But she screamed precisely the opposite of what John and Anise desired. “Hallie, Garnet, wherever you are, stay hidden!” she screamed as loud as she could. “Don’t let them find you!”

Alexander cupped his hand over her mouth, and Emily was astonished at the fellow’s strength. “All you are doing is postponing the inevitable,” John said to her. Then he turned his gaze upon Alexander. “I think you can let her go. Really, I do. She’s not leaving. But would you mind going up to the attic and retrieving the children? Anise, you, too? Give me the knife and I’ll wait here with Verbena. This already has taken far, far too long. We have people waiting.”

“And it has been a long wait,” said Anise, and Emily understood that the woman was speaking of something entirely different from what John Hardin had meant.

But the partner in her law firm smiled at Anise’s remark and added, “Indeed, it has.” Then he looked straight into Emily’s eyes and told her, “We’ve been waiting since Sawyer Dunmore died. Now: Let’s go get the girls from the attic. Shall we?”

T here is nothing you would not do for your daughter. Nothing.

Or is it daughters? You find yourself watching the CRJ descend toward Lake Champlain, but the view is not from the flight deck, it’s from one of the passenger cabin windows toward the left rear of the aircraft. Meanwhile, you struggle with this one strangely unanswerable but profoundly important question: Where on the aircraft is your daughter? Or, again, daughters? You see in your mind the round face and blond spit curls of one girl, but shouldn’t there be a second child? Or (and here the mind feels truly unmoored) a third? Briefly you envision a girl with red hair, but the image grows hazy fast. And then it is gone. She’s gone.

The seat beside you is empty, but you are absolutely certain that your daughter-the blond girl-was there just a moment ago. She was in that window seat. Her Dora the Explorer backpack is still nearby, one of its straps and a nylon handle peering out from underneath the seat ahead of you. But that little girl? Gone. You scan the rows of people in the seats before you, but there is absolutely no sign of her. There is absolutely no sign of any children at all.

At the very least, you must find the child with the blond hair before the plane belly flops into the lake and-as somehow you know it will-breaks apart. You must, because you love her and she needs you and there is no more powerful, more poignant cord. But then the plane is down and for the barest of seconds seems to be skimming along the surface of the lake. This may, in the end, turn out all right. Suddenly, however, the aircraft plows into a surface as solid as a medieval castle wall and is stood upright on its nose, and your head is whipped into the seat before you and then, as the fuselage crashes back into the water, into the collapsing ceiling. Or is it the floor? You have no idea. You know only that the cabin has come alive with the sounds of screaming and ripping metal, and already you can smell the lake water that is rolling like a tsunami down the aisle, and-this doesn’t seem possible, this can’t possibly have happened-a metal pike has pierced your skull like an arrow. You run the fingers of your right hand over the shard, and they come away bloodied. And then you try to take a breath, but already the water is over your mouth and nose and you start to gag.

So you struggle, you thrash, even as you grow weak, even as the water is flooding your nose and you are aware that you will never survive your head wound. You try to rip the seat belt in half because something has dented the metal buckle and now it won’t open. And somewhere very far away someone is calling your name. Someone closer is, too.

But, still, you have no idea what happened to your daughter. Or those other girls. Twins? Yes, twins. You know for sure only one thing: Your daughter didn’t deserve this, and the realization has you enraged. She didn’t deserve to die this way. She deserved more than eight years. She deserved a lifetime. She deserved friends.

And so, once again, you lash out, even though it is futile, even though there is absolutely nothing that can be done.