Read Online The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online Page B

Finally you start up the fifteen steps to the third floor. There you kneel and stretch the tape measure across the corridor outside of Hallie’s bedroom. It wasn’t your imagination or an optical illusion: The hallways are thirty-nine inches wide on the first floor (there, again, is that number), thirty-seven on the second, and thirty-four on the third. Five inches is not a great distance, but it is enough to make that corridor feel claustrophobic—or, to use the word Emily and the girls have used as your twins have started nesting like barn swallows on this small, third floor, cozy . The third floor has but three rooms: two bedrooms that share a walk-in closet in the hallway (neither bedroom has a closet of its own) and a bathroom with a lion’s-foot tub but no shower. The attic exists on the same level, but a veritable Berlin Wall separates it from this small nook of rooms. The house narrows between the second and third floors, with that elegant fish-scale trim that marks the screened porch reestablishing itself on the third-floor exterior. Hallie’s and Garnet’s bedrooms are characterized by the house’s sloping roof, snug knee walls, and horizontal windows.
    You put the tape measure down on the wooden floor and sit.
    She deserves friends .
    A man’s voice. You have heard it periodically since you came here. You try to recall if you heard it in Pennsylvania as well, and you decide … maybe. Maybe not. You turn to see if anyone is with you in the corridor, and, as always, you are alone. But you know, in reality, you’re not. There is the voice you have just heard of this man roughly your age and the voice of a girl no older (and, perhaps, a bit younger) than your lovely daughters and the voice of a woman perhaps ten years your junior. And there are the cacophonous shrieks and wails of all the women and men who died on Flight 1611. Should you have told Hallie that you knew precisely who she heard your first Sunday night in this house? Maybe. But how could you without further terrifying the poor child? You wish you knew what it meant that she heard their voices, too, and try to take comfort in the reality that she hasn’t reported hearing them since.
    You sigh. You note the sunshine through the hallway window and the opalescent light it casts upon the wood paneling. This third-floor hallway is paneled with maple, like some of the first-floor corridors; the second floor is merely painted Sheetrock. You find yourself slowly pulling your knees into your chest and contemplating how, other than that voice—now gone—the house is quiet. The girls are at school and Emily is at work. It must seem to the world that you are all alone.
    You wonder if you will ever work again. You wonder what you could do. All you have ever done professionally is fly airplanes.
    Somehow, despite the way your grades tumbled after your father died and your mother was aged quickly by bottles of very bad Scotch, you made it into the University of Massachusetts. It might have been the University of Connecticut, but when you were fifteen your mother lost her driver’s license for the last time and your aunt and uncle in Framingham, Massachusetts, decided that you and your eleven-year-old brother would be better off with them. Your mother agreed. It had gotten to the point where it didn’t matter that you watered down the Scotch, every other day pouring out perhaps half an inch—a portion of the schooner sail or cliff-side estate that gave character to the label—of the whiskey and adding just that much tap water. Your mother would drink just that much more.
    And your little brother? He’s doing fine. He used to be considered fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Done in by the abrupt and early death of your father and the virtual mummification of your mother. He’s doing better than you, these days. He teaches history at a high school in Berkeley. Got as far away from Connecticut and Massachusetts as he could.
    Now it is you who everyone presumes is