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Authors: Chris Bohjalian
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the testing imaginable back in Pennsylvania: CAT scans and MRIs and dyes injected everywhere. He had seen all manner of chiropractors and physical therapists. And none of the tests had shown anything wrong.
The real strangeness? His ankle and two of his ribs—the former sprained badly, the latter broken and cracked—had healed completely and he felt absolutely no pain there. Same with the spot on his head where he had actually been cut. The top of his head, he reported, often hurt like hell—but not his forehead, which had been cut when his head slammed into the right prong of the control stick. Moreover, these aches and pains had only gotten worse since they had moved to northern New Hampshire.
They both understood that a degree of PTSD was inevitable. How could it not be? He had captained a plane that had crashed and four-fifths of the people onboard had died. It wasn’t his fault: He wasn’t fatigued, he hadn’t been distracted or inattentive, he hadn’t pulled back on the control yoke when he should have pressed it forward to recover from a stall. (Once, years earlier, he had had a plane stall on him when the wings iced over, and calmly he had pushed the yoke forward, accelerating the descent but restarting the engines, and landed smoothly. None of the passengers onboard had ever known there had been a problem, but he had been roundly applauded by his airline. And how many times had he successfully aborted landings at the last minute because there was a truck or a plane on the runway that wasn’t supposed to be there and performed a go-around? At least once for every seven or eight months he had been flying.) That didn’t make the visions and memories that came back to him—illuminated suddenly like trees in the dark made clear by great bolts of lightning—any easier to shoulder. But, still, she watched him when she wasn’t at her new office in Littleton, aware that this was a reversal in their roles: In the past, he had been the one to watch over her during those intervals when he wasn’t flying.
Meanwhile, Hallie was sleeping badly, too, and no one from the union or the airline or the Critical Incident Response Team had advised her to expect this. There was that strange night when her daughter was convinced she heard people—a child—drowning. It had been three in the morning and had been the worst sort of nightmare: so real that she was convinced she was hearing the child for long minutes after she was awake. And Hallie had never really had nightmares before. Bad dreams had always been far more likely to dog Garnet than her sister in the small hours of the morning.
Consequently, when Emily wasn’t watching her husband, she was watching her daughter. And when she wasn’t watching Hallie, she had to remain vigilant around Garnet: She always had to be prepared for the next seizure. It was a wonder she was able to get out of bed in the morning, much less find the energy to get her girls out the door for school and then drive into Littleton for work. But she had to. She had to. Someone, somehow, had to keep it together.
Y ou are curious about the hallways in this house in the White Mountains because the one on the third floor of the structure seems slender compared to the ones on the second. Or, for that matter, the ones on the first. You really didn’t notice this when you were looking at the house with Emily and Sheldon. And so you track down the tape measure in the carton with the tools you have been using as you settle into the house but have yet to organize in some fashion in that basement made largely of dirt. You find it in the living room, where you were wallpapering yesterday, and begin by measuring the corridor that links the front hall with the seventeen steps to the second floor. (A thought: That strange, thin back stairwell that links the kitchen with the second floor. Is that seventeen steps, too?) Then you climb those steps to measure the hallway outside of your and Emily’s bedroom.
The real strangeness? His ankle and two of his ribs—the former sprained badly, the latter broken and cracked—had healed completely and he felt absolutely no pain there. Same with the spot on his head where he had actually been cut. The top of his head, he reported, often hurt like hell—but not his forehead, which had been cut when his head slammed into the right prong of the control stick. Moreover, these aches and pains had only gotten worse since they had moved to northern New Hampshire.
They both understood that a degree of PTSD was inevitable. How could it not be? He had captained a plane that had crashed and four-fifths of the people onboard had died. It wasn’t his fault: He wasn’t fatigued, he hadn’t been distracted or inattentive, he hadn’t pulled back on the control yoke when he should have pressed it forward to recover from a stall. (Once, years earlier, he had had a plane stall on him when the wings iced over, and calmly he had pushed the yoke forward, accelerating the descent but restarting the engines, and landed smoothly. None of the passengers onboard had ever known there had been a problem, but he had been roundly applauded by his airline. And how many times had he successfully aborted landings at the last minute because there was a truck or a plane on the runway that wasn’t supposed to be there and performed a go-around? At least once for every seven or eight months he had been flying.) That didn’t make the visions and memories that came back to him—illuminated suddenly like trees in the dark made clear by great bolts of lightning—any easier to shoulder. But, still, she watched him when she wasn’t at her new office in Littleton, aware that this was a reversal in their roles: In the past, he had been the one to watch over her during those intervals when he wasn’t flying.
Meanwhile, Hallie was sleeping badly, too, and no one from the union or the airline or the Critical Incident Response Team had advised her to expect this. There was that strange night when her daughter was convinced she heard people—a child—drowning. It had been three in the morning and had been the worst sort of nightmare: so real that she was convinced she was hearing the child for long minutes after she was awake. And Hallie had never really had nightmares before. Bad dreams had always been far more likely to dog Garnet than her sister in the small hours of the morning.
Consequently, when Emily wasn’t watching her husband, she was watching her daughter. And when she wasn’t watching Hallie, she had to remain vigilant around Garnet: She always had to be prepared for the next seizure. It was a wonder she was able to get out of bed in the morning, much less find the energy to get her girls out the door for school and then drive into Littleton for work. But she had to. She had to. Someone, somehow, had to keep it together.
Y ou are curious about the hallways in this house in the White Mountains because the one on the third floor of the structure seems slender compared to the ones on the second. Or, for that matter, the ones on the first. You really didn’t notice this when you were looking at the house with Emily and Sheldon. And so you track down the tape measure in the carton with the tools you have been using as you settle into the house but have yet to organize in some fashion in that basement made largely of dirt. You find it in the living room, where you were wallpapering yesterday, and begin by measuring the corridor that links the front hall with the seventeen steps to the second floor. (A thought: That strange, thin back stairwell that links the kitchen with the second floor. Is that seventeen steps, too?) Then you climb those steps to measure the hallway outside of your and Emily’s bedroom.
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