Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

“It was an accident, I swear!” Anise cries out, drawing the long blade from Reseda’s neck as if she is prying a carrot from soil, and a geyser of blood sprays the two herbalists in the face. Then, ever so slowly because Anise is trying to pull her up by her shoulders-as if she believes that so long as Reseda is sitting upright the woman will live-Reseda chokes out one last rivulet of blood and collapses, a marionette freed from its crossbar and strings. John Hardin falls upon her, though she’s already dead, as do Ginger and Clary and Sage.

And almost in that instant you see Reseda, alive and standing before you. She is offering you that unreadable smile, her blue eyes beckoning. She motions behind her, and there is Ashley, your beautiful daughter, the straps of her Dora the Explorer backpack looking a bit like suspenders against her summer shirt. She is grinning happily, her eyes alight, the way she did when she was beside you on the runway at Burlington International Airport and all that loomed was a fifty-five- or fifty-six-minute flight to Philadelphia. She waves. You wave back. And the moment you start toward her, all of the rage that has been burning inside you since Flight 1611 cartwheeled into the lake vanishes. You kneel before her and embrace her. Then, the sky brightening as if the sun is rising in June, you stand up and-still holding Ashley’s small hand-follow Reseda into the welcoming daylight.

Somewhere very far behind you stands a pilot. An airline pilot. He looks a little haggard-they all look a little haggard-as one of his girls is led back to the cauldron. You hope someday there is someone back there for him, too. Someone just like Reseda.

In all the years that you have lived in Bethel, you have to admit: Clary Hardin has never looked better. And while there are some people who presume that both she and her husband, John, have on occasion resorted to chemical injections and peels that minimize lines, you know them well enough to understand that they’re just not the type. Neither is that vain. Both are wary of inorganic toxins. Verbena also looks considerably younger than her peers. Maybe she escaped the pressures of that Philadelphia law firm just in time. The two of you have a daughter in college now, but still Verbena’s hair hasn’t begun to gray. Oh, she hennas it. She likes that look, as do you. But you are confident that underneath that color not a single follicle has turned white, and this despite the crash of Flight 1611 and then the death of a child-the single worst thing that can happen to a parent-a decade ago. Verbena misses the girl. As do you. You miss her madly. You see the child in the cheekbones and the shape of the eyes of your remaining daughter, her twin, when the girl is home from college or when you visit her there.

But somehow you and Verbena both moved on. You survived. In the end, neither of you wound up like Tansy Dunmore. Thank God. You are, clearly, a survivor. You survived a plane crash, didn’t you? Of course you did. Somehow, you survived even the stultifying guilt that had paralyzed you in the aftermath, the what-ifs, the visions, the ghosts.

Nevertheless, for months-for over a year, until well after the anniversary of the girl’s death had passed-you had indeed been smothered by mourning; it was all you had. No, that’s not completely true. You had the herbalists and their strange concoctions and desperately needed friendship. They were constantly feeding both you and Emily. Their foods and their tinctures were what kept you both upright and functioning, their medicines were what made the memories bearable-and, then, what made the worst of the memories recede so far into the backs of your minds that it’s almost as if they never happened.

And, yes, they needed you, too. Holly was especially devastated by her friend’s death, but even Anise and Ginger and Sage-mature enough to have seen a great many of their own friends pass away-seemed to have been scarred by the accident that took the woman’s life.

And your daughter’s.

“What do you think, Chip?”

You turn toward Anise, sipping the Syrah that Peyton discovered this past February in Argentina, when he and Sage were escaping a White Mountain winter. Sage was looking for specific herbs and roots in the foothills of the Andes, while Peyton insisted he was interested only in grapes. You guess they are each at least eighty now, as are John and Clary. You will turn fifty in a month. Peyton is helping you convert what had once been a coal chute in your basement into a wine cellar. The space is ideal, a fitting spot to indulge your new passion. What else could a person put in that space but wine? It’s perfect.

“Oh,” you answer, no longer worrying about whether you need to choose your words carefully, “I think a green thumb is just an expression. Either no one has a green thumb or everyone does. Sure, some people are destined to be ballerinas and some people, no matter how hard they work, will never be recruited by the American Ballet Theatre. But I think gardening is more like… cooking. Some people are better than others, but, with a little patience and a little practice, most people can make a pretty adequate lasagna.”

“I disagree,” Anise says, and she reaches across the large pouf in John and Clary’s living room and squeezes your knee. You savor the hint of patchouli in her perfume tonight, and for a moment the aroma from the kitchen is lost beneath it. Rosemary. The main course is a stew of some sort, simmering right now on the stove, and you smile when you recall what Clary had said when you first arrived this evening and inhaled the delicious scent from the great copper pot: A pinch of rosemary makes everything better. “You really don’t believe that your Verbena here is such an extraordinary gardener because it’s in her blood?” Anise asks.

“I think she’s an extraordinary gardener because you and Clary and Sage are very good teachers.”

Verbena sips her wine, and her eyes are shining. She is wearing a black velour sweater tonight that clings to her and a string of pearls. She couldn’t, it seems to you, be more beautiful.

“And your little girl?” Anise continues, pulling her hand back and folding her arms across her chest. She raises her eyebrows a little impishly and smirks.

Indeed, you wonder about your little girl, though she is no longer little. She is majoring in plant biology and minoring in anthropology. She grew up, it seems, in that greenhouse beside your home, and the communal one at the Messners’. Nevertheless, in your opinion that was more about nurture than nature-it was proximity, not genes. Had you remained in Pennsylvania, there is no reason to believe that your daughter would have wound up an aspiring botanist and herbalist. Still, the evening is too pleasant to waste energy debating whether her interest in plants was genetically inevitable or a self-fulfilling career path once you landed here in northern New Hampshire.

“Well, she also had some exceptional teachers,” you answer simply and sip your wine. The goblet has the crest of the coven (there really is no other word for it, though they insist they are nothing but botanists of a sort), and your eyes pause on it for a brief moment. Really, what would you and your wife and your daughter have done if it had not been for these remarkable people? You contemplate this almost unthinkable what-if, as you do periodically: How much does Verbena recall about that night? Supposedly very little. The women have seen to that. Memorium. Delirium. Their magical tinctures. The car was totaled in the rainstorm. They told you it’s a miracle that Verbena survived when your daughter was killed and Reseda was all but decapitated. Celandine was the first on the scene.

“I’d say she had miraculous teachers,” Sage purrs, saying something that sounds prosaic but you know in reality is really very profound. Then she turns to Clary and says, “Do you need any help getting supper on the table?”