Chris Bohjalian: The Night Strangers

Clary rises from the sofa with the serpentine arms and nods. “You’re positively psychic,” she says, smiling at her friend, and bustles into the kitchen. Verbena-so placid at midlife, so free from anxiety, it’s as if in addition to discovering a fountain of youth in this northern New England backwater she has also found here the secret to calmness and serenity-stands up and joins the women, kissing you on the cheek as she passes. She is wearing black lace ballet flats, and you are struck by the erotic elegance of even her small feet. Have you ever been more in love? No. Clearly not.

Anise follows the women, leaving you alone with Peyton and John.

“You’re a lucky, lucky man, Chip,” Peyton says.

“I think we all are,” John adds agreeably.

“When does Cali come home from school for the summer?” Peyton asks.

“Oh, that’s still a month away. The Friday before Memorial Day weekend most likely.”

“Does she still have those seizures?”

“Rarely. But every once in a while, yes.”

Peyton nods and glances at John, but John doesn’t look up from his Syrah. He seems lost in thought.

“She spending the summer here in New Hampshire?”

“I wish. Nope, she is only here through the end of June. Then she’s off to the Southwest for just about six weeks. Desert plants, mostly.”

“There’s a lot to study there,” Peyton says.

“Indeed. She’ll be in Santa Fe, Sedona, Bisbee, Las Cruces-though not necessarily in that order. But it is a pretty packed itinerary.”

“Ah, to be young and to have all that energy,” John says, smiling and suddenly returning to their conversation.

“We do all right,” Peyton says.

“We do now,” says the older lawyer. This is, it seems, a small but important correction in his mind.

“Hear, hear. A toast to health and to youth!” Peyton says, raising his voice as if he were in a bar, and you hold the goblet under your nose and breathe in the fragrance from the wine. And you agree: You haven’t felt this young or this healthy since well before a plane hit some geese and fell from the sky. But even that now seems but a distant, nebulous recollection: the details that for a time you knew so well? Either vague or gone. It is a bit like the death of your daughter. Rosemary-though when she was alive, weren’t you likely to call her Hallie? Yes. Yes, of course. But somehow the image of a girl named Hallie floats in the heavens just beyond the reach of your memory.

Like so much else, apparently. Like all of those thousands and thousands of hours you once spent on the flight deck of an airplane.

“Chip?”

You glance up at John and his raised chalice.

“You seem to have your head in the clouds tonight,” he says.

“Not anymore,” you tell him, holding high your glass, “those days are gone.” Then, after you have taken a slow, comradely sip, you sigh.