Hannah
When Hannah got home, she sent the director of me3, Cat Saunders, a note with links to some of her relevant work. Their website and social media feeds were great, and the TEDx talks were compelling. There was no sense turning down money just because Ben had been reluctant and because she might feel a teeny bit of PTSD over something stupid that had happened twenty years ago. Grow up, Hannah, she told herself.
Over the years, she’d found writing to be a clean, detached way to contribute to causes. She didn’t have to hold hands and wipe tears. She just had to create content that made other people feel things. And Cat seemed, well, for lack of a better word, cool. Like Hannah might actually like her instead of want to strangle her. So email sent. Fine, she thought. We’ll see what happens. She got an autoreply that said Cat was currently in a two o’clock meeting but would reply soon.
Next up, the Philanthropist. Hannah had gently suggested to the Philanthropist that they organize their process, but gentle didn’t seem to work with her. Hannah had sent a rough outline, timeline, and guided questions to help discuss her life chronologically the week before and had been rewarded with a FaceTime call insisting she preferred to operate free-form. “I’m at my best off the cuff,” she had said, as if she’d been told she was a natural storyteller, a true raconteur.
Hannah had worked with a few truly charming people over the years with great stories to tell. She’d made her reputation as a ghostwriter with people like that, translating their spoken stories onto the page.
But this woman was a different story. Everything she said sounded like a diary entry mixed with name dropping. “I had tea with Desi before he got on the QE2. We went to the most marvelous fundraiser for the Bidens, and they served lamb chop lollipops.” Hannah was going to have to start poking in the tender parts to get anything out of her. When she began asking pointed questions, when she asked to speak to her relatives and friends, the Philanthropist was going to dig in her heels. Maybe she knew there was nothing to tell, or maybe she had secrets. Who knew? But whatever the case, Hannah wanted to write a deep story. The Philanthropist thought the glossy surface was fascinating.
Hannah sighed and changed into leggings and sneakers. She sat in her living room, in the white canvas chair near the fireplace, and put up her feet. She kept a bowl of cashews next to her and allowed herself to eat three at fifteen-minute intervals as a reward for listening to the Philanthropist drone on. After an hour, she’d endured three unconnected stories, about her current neighbor’s dog (small but vicious), her sorority’s pledge week (drunk but harmless), and her second husband’s first wife (a showgirl), and the cashews were long gone.
She stood up, went outside. Time for a walk. Running might be too aggressive if it was still wet, but she’d see what the terrain was like. Other than walking to book club, lifting boxes, and hanging a few pictures, she hadn’t exercised since the move. It had been weeks, and her body felt tense from leaning over to unpack and hunching over her laptop. She stretched on the porch and tried to decide between the high road, which went past Hillary’s, or the low trails, which went past Liza Harris’s house.
There had been police vans parked in the Harrises’ driveway for several days earlier in the week, with techs around the house, doing something in the soil, around the windows. Once, she glanced out and saw them carrying bags out of the house. One day, there was a police dog in a neon vest circling the property, sniffing at the edge of the creek. Action News and Eyewitness News had done live reports from the street several times, their cameras pointed toward the creek and trees.
She’d avoided the paths and street, stayed inside. She worried the news vans might come early, when the kids were waiting for the bus, but they didn’t. She supposed interviewing minors was not exactly ethical. On television the night before, after the police had verified the cause of death as strangulation with an unknown implement, she’d seen a spokesperson for the Harris family, the same man who’d organized the search, saying they hoped for new leads, that someone had to know something or have seen something, and he urged them to come forward. Carelli and Thompson stood behind him, faces stony, as if embarrassed someone had to help them do their job.
That day, though, the coast was clear, and she was eager to stretch and work her muscles. She chose to walk the lower trails, and in her mind, she only did this for novelty, because she’d already been on the street and upper trails on their way to book club.
The path down to the wood-chipped trail from Brindle Lane was slippery with muddy rocks and roots, and she couldn’t help thinking of how much more nimble and goatlike kids were, navigating obstacles with smaller feet and lower centers of gravity. She thought of the little girl skipping down there alone, weightless, her bucket only full of possibility. Looking for frogs, they’d said the day of the search. But had she found any? And where had she gone to look?
She looked back at the Harris house from this low angle. Every week that passed approaching October, every leaf that fell, would offer a clearer view of who these people were and how they lived. The pool house and pool. The sloping yard with stepping stones leading to the path, easier to navigate from their home than the road. The woodpile in a lean-to near the pool house, stacked and ready for the cold weather ahead. As a child, Hannah had watched the woodpile behind her own house grow smaller and more uneven every year after her father’s death, down to nothing. She could picture her father, hungover, she knew now, Saturday morning, chopping wood, her mother worrying as she watched out the window. Never letting her daughters go near him, never letting them learn that task.
Would this family keep chopping wood? Would they rake their leaves, change the flowers in their oversized pots, or let it all go downhill? Would they stay in this house? Would they put it on the market? And how would a new buyer feel, given the terrible story they inherited?
She squinted as if she could see in the windows, doors. She could not. The shades weren’t drawn, and the curtains weren’t pulled, that much she could tell. If someone was home, they were awake, dressed. Was their extended family assembled? Or had they fled the home and its memories? Any other option struck Hannah as cruel. To be a mother, alone, grieving. And then, just as quickly, the thought pierced her heart. That would be her. If something happened to Miles, she would be alone. She was alone. She shuddered, put it out of her mind. Her sister was next door! Her mother was around the corner!
“Where are the binoculars when you need them?”
She jumped at the sound of his voice.
“Ben,” she said, her hand up to her heart. “Where did you come from?”
“From the path below.”
“Not from home?” The path heading down was steep, through the woods to another development.
“No. I, uh, had a lunch. I mean a meeting.”
She screwed up her face. “Sounds like you don’t know what you had,” she said, laughing.
“You know, lunch plus a meeting equals a leeting,” he said. “I love a good leeting.”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” She glanced down the hill. “Looks slippery down there.”
“Only in parts.”
Sweat glistened on her brother-in-law’s neck and face and dotted through part of his blue T-shirt, which made his navy eyes look even larger. Ben almost always wore blue clothing, she realized suddenly, as if he knew this was to his advantage. Had she ever seen him in black, gray, tan?
“I didn’t know you ran.”
“I am a man of many talents, Ms. Sawyer.”
“That I do not doubt.”
“So you’re snooping, right? Thinking about taking up investigative journalism instead of writing content?”
“Stop. I guess it looks bad, but I was just wondering about the family. If they were home, if—”
“If they needed anything?”
“I suppose.”
“Anything they need they can get delivered.”
She blinked. “I wasn’t just thinking of food.”
“Neither was I.”
That seemed like an awfully cold, pragmatic response, but she supposed he was right. Masseuses came to the house, therapists were online, Uber Eats brought anything you wanted. So much for the need for neighborly niceties.
She glanced at her watch, and as if reading her mind, Ben said he had to get going; he had to shower and take Morgan to dance class, because he’d promised.
“Sometimes I wish I could work from home so I could take her to dance more often,” he said.
“I bet you do,” Hannah replied.
“But working at home for hours feels weird. Gets claustrophobic.”
She tried to imagine feeling claustrophobic in a house as large as his. Hannah remembered going over once and asking if Ben was home and her sister looking around quizzically and then saying she didn’t actually know. She had texted him to find out.
A person could get lost in one of these houses.
“Well, thanks again for today. And have fun dancing with the girls,” she said, turning to go.
He struck a ridiculous dance pose, half twerk, and she laughed.
She walked down fifteen feet, then twenty, and when she turned back, she wasn’t certain why she felt a need to see Ben’s feet hit the street, to make sure he was going where he said he was going. She glanced back one more time at the Harrises’ house. The windows, the French doors, all that glass. Did they think about their child’s death all the time? Did they look out their windows and worry that death was everywhere? Her breath caught, thinking of that. Wasn’t that how Miles saw the world, too? Worried about creatures and death?
A slight movement at the edge of the house drew her eye. A small camera rotating. There were more, too, she saw now, the eyes of a house, radiating out. Blinking at her, at them, at the world.
There were cameras, she supposed, everywhere.
She raised her hand, stupidly, and waved.