Hannah
She called the same movers, requested the same team of guys. Everyone was happy to see one another. It was like a little reunion. The only bright spot in a terrible autumn. Miles got to use the hydraulic lift again. Hannah reused most of the same boxes, which were still like new. And the apartment they moved into, in Wayne, walking distance to school, was brighter than her old street, facing south, not east, and overlooking trees that didn’t seem to be hiding anything or anyone. Friendly trees, she thought, and then the phrase mature trees came to mind and grew in meaning. Yes. Mature trees.
The apartment wasn’t large, but square footage wise, it wasn’t much smaller than her house. It really wasn’t. The only thing missing was the porch, and she figured the town would be her porch. Miles would like that better, all that freedom. He could run errands, go to the movies, go out for pizza with his friends. Hannah had seen the clusters of kids walking everywhere in town. Like a college town, but with middle schoolers and high schoolers everywhere. All that freedom but more people than animals. That would be better.
When she’d called Kendra to tell her she was leaving the neighborhood, Kendra had mentioned she loved the village of Wayne. That she’d often thought of moving there, too, for Liza. And, she’d added, it’s close by. With plenty of places to walk. She’d promised that after the holidays and traveling to see her brother and parents, she’d call Hannah to schedule some walks.
Ben and Hillary put their house up for sale almost immediately, too. They went beyond cleaning the kitchen and patio—they gutted the floors, redid them with wood in a herringbone pattern. As if the zigzags could distract from what had happened there, the spilled red sauce and chili, and yes, her mother’s blood. All of it mixed together, indistinguishable. As if her mother had been injured by the pot of food.
She supposed it would be years, a dozen or more, before she or Hillary or Miles could ever think of eating chili again. It would become a kind of joke in their family, if Eva had anything to say about it.
So far, her sister hadn’t gotten any offers on their house. Their move would take longer, be more considered, and require more equipment, but Hannah still passed on the names of the moving company to her sister. She wanted them to have someone kind to help them go through their transitions, too. Morgan was having nightmares. She dreamed that Barrett had broken out of jail. She dreamed that Kendra tried to kidnap her. Hillary and Hannah had even called Kendra, to FaceTime with her, at Morgan’s insistence. She wanted to apologize. And Kendra, of course, said there was no reason to. She told Morgan nothing was her fault. She held her hands together like a benediction and there were tears in everyone’s eyes. This made everyone feel a little better.
But Morgan still felt terribly guilty, Hillary had said. But how could she have known? How could she have understood that she was being groomed the same way Kendra’s daughter had been? That a man had been watching her jump into the pool while thinking of another little girl? Another girl who didn’t want to talk to him anymore, who didn’t want his presents, who yanked herself away and died because of it?
Hannah couldn’t bear to think of Barrett Smith, so tall and broad and silent, watching the neighborhood from his perch. And Ben? Ben was angry with himself. How could he not have known? How could he have had beers with that guy for years and not seen any sign? But Hannah knew it was possible. How little you can know someone you see every day.
You can do all the wrong things and feel terrible forever. But you can also do all the right things and still find something more you could have done. Even a small knuckle of guilt can weigh on you. Hannah should have said something about the ribbon a long time ago. She was so focused on protecting her son, it had closed her mind. She was as bad as the detectives, locked into a theory.
And Eva? Well, she was a tough old bird, but even she agreed that she needed to live in a smaller place with more people around. No more stairs. No more raking leaves, shoveling snow. No more driving, perhaps. A skull fracture will do that to you. After she finished rehab, Hannah and Hillary would move their mother somewhere close. An apartment. Assisted living. But close to which one of them, neither could say.
Hillary was talking about moving to another state, starting fresh. And Hannah couldn’t blame her. But she also thought she was bluffing, doing it for show, parroting what her husband wanted to do. Hannah knew her sister would end up back near her someday. She just didn’t know when or how close.
She told the whole story, all of it, to Jay DeSanto over a drink at a little bistro in Wayne. She surprised herself, discussing it in public. But it was early, not quite five o’clock on a Saturday. There were curtains on the windows. Jay had known the bartender, greeted him by name. He seemed older, discreet, like bartenders used to be, barely glancing at them as Jay kept asking Hannah questions, delighting in the details, shaking his head. Even a lawyer who had heard it all enjoyed a good crime story with a happy ending. Well, happy enough.
She’d been surprised when his number came up on her phone. He’d called to ask her how she was, said he’d been thinking of her. In his penthouse office, in his suit. She pictured him there, looking out the window. She said she was fine, but it had been quite a month. Complicated. Crazy. And then he had said, well then, we need to discuss it over cocktails.
When she walked into the restaurant, she almost didn’t recognize Jay in ordinary clothes. A sweater with a leather pull, dark jeans, loafers. He could be a dad from school, a man at poker night. His suit and tie had sharpened him, and now he looked softer, more approachable. Younger. Kind of handsome, now that she saw him out of context. She and Hillary used to discuss the differences in men’s looks by assigning them labels from TV shows and movies. Rhett and Ashley from Gone with the Wind. Charlie and Bailey from Party of Five. As if all the love triangles they’d seen had taught them there were only two poles, two types. Their father, the drunk. Their husbands, the nondrunks.
Seeing Jay now, she saw clearly the in-between. Not big and muscled, like Mike had been, not classically handsome like Ben, but a softer kind of manly and confident. Something in-between. Someone who could nurse one whiskey and didn’t think anything of you ordering sparkling water. Didn’t even ask you why.
When she got to the part about Barrett Smith and his restraining order to keep him away from another child in his old neighborhood, a child he’d also given gifts to, just like Morgan and Liza, Jay leaned in, and his face creased with concern. As if it were his own child, his own daughter, grown and in college. And when she said he lived behind her, with cameras facing her house and Hillary’s, he covered his face with his hand. Then he took a long sip of his whiskey.
“Hannah, who did you buy your house from?”
She blinked. “A couple who was retiring, moving to Florida.”
“So if they had kids, they were much older. That’s somewhat of a relief, isn’t it?”
Hannah sucked in their breath. “Wait. They…had a granddaughter,” she said. “Seven years old. She was staying with them when I first looked at the house.”
He reached out and took her hand, told her to breathe. Told her it was probably all fine but that she should probably make a phone call. Just in case. A heads-up.
“I don’t know—I don’t know why I didn’t think of that,” she said. “It was selfish. I should have—why didn’t that occur to me?”
“No, stop. You had your hands full, Hannah. You’re just a person, not a cop, and you were under tremendous stress. You should have hired a PI, you do know that, right? I mean, what you and your sister did was ridiculously dangerous.”
“Of course I should have. But then…then I wouldn’t have had a story to tell you,” she said, smiling finally, shyly. “I wouldn’t have had anything to say to you over dinner.”
“Sure you would have.”
“No. I’d just have a street full of suspects, a kid even his own family doesn’t understand, and an empty bank account.”
“I have a feeling, Hannah,” he said, “that you are full of stories. More than you know.”
She thought of that sentence as she said good night to him after coffee, after he kissed her on the cheek and asked if he could see her again. After she said yes.
She went home and folded laundry and did the dishes and told her son to put away the iPad in the charging station and go to sleep. As she closed her own computer and walked away from all the storytelling work she did for others, not herself. As she looked out her window, facing the trees that hid nothing, and the first flakes of snow started to swirl and got caught in the streetlights, shining. The ordinary days and nights when nothing happened but everything did. The unglamorous life she lived and mostly loved.
She didn’t tell anyone the story of why she didn’t drink. Didn’t tell them about the night in high school she’d passed out at a party, and when she’d woken up with vomit in her hair, and seen, down the hall, two boys taking off the clothes of another unconscious girl. A girl in her Spanish class, a year younger, the younger sister of Marisa Gothie. Her pale bare legs, her slim toes, her feet dead weight as they moved her. Hannah’s head was spinning, and she could barely move. But when they dragged and pulled at the other girl, she felt it on her own skin. She’d sneaked into the back of the kitchen, found a phone, and called Hillary, her older sister, her beacon, and told her about the girl, had asked her what to do. And Hillary had told her to leave, immediately. To walk to the corner and find a cab and come home.
Hannah hadn’t questioned her sister’s directive that night, not once. And she didn’t question her own actions for a long time. They both knew her mother’s heart would break if there was another alcoholic in the house. And if Hannah had opted to stay and call the police and make a statement about those boys and that girl, shit-faced, tongue so thick in her mouth the words came out swollen, it might not have even mattered. No one listened to drunk girls anyway. And the other girl? Marisa Gothie’s sister? She’d survive. Or had she? Who knew where she was. She had disappeared midsemester, gone to another high school, and Hannah’s secret had slowly faded into the background of her life. It had only resurfaced when Hillary threw the fact of it in her face: that Hannah would do almost anything to save herself and her family. That Hannah would do what her sister told her to do, even if she knew it was wrong. Those things were true. That was part of her story, but that wasn’t all of it. Hadn’t she stopped drinking that very night, forever, to try to prove that? Didn’t that count for something?
Maybe, she thought, she needed to add to her own story now. Not her sister’s. Not her mother’s. Not her son’s. She didn’t share a property line with anyone. She didn’t share her bed or her room any longer. No.
She’d done some smart things and some idiotic things and, yes, some criminal things in her life, but now she saw it clearly as she wiped down the counters and refilled the soap dispenser. All these things, all these moments, they all belonged to her. No one’s sister, no one’s daughter, no one’s wife. Just someone’s mother, trying to help her boy. And now, finding the strength to finally help herself. Rock, paper, scissors, Sawyer.