THEIR HOUSE WAS different from the other houses on their tight Shadyside street, like it was from the future. She loved it because it was safe, and familiar, and Daddy designed the whole thing. He always said Mommy helped him with the inside, but Hanna knew she just picked out the furniture—stuff not so different from things she’d seen in the IKEA catalog. Everything was white or natural-looking wood. But the magical part was all Daddy’s doing: the glass wall that overlooked the big garden, even from the second floor. The space-age stairs. The cool cleanness of the whole interior, better than a flying saucer.
The L-shaped living room couch was custom-made. Hanna liked to leap off the built-in slats that stuck out at the ends. Mommy always yelled “Stop standing on the tables!” but to Hanna they looked like diving platforms. She liked to stick her fingers in the potted plants to see if they needed to be watered, but Mommy always yelled at her for sprinkling dirt on the floor. Mommy liked things to be clean. And she liked to yell, when Daddy wasn’t around. Hanna liked to play in the walled-in garden, the high fence and hedges a barrier that obscured the other houses, and hid them all from the neighbors’ curious eyes. No one bothered her as she ran around saving all the passengers from the sinking ship. She filched the money from their pockets and the gems from their necks before pushing them into the lifeboat. Sometimes she galloped around and around, astride her magnificent gray horse.
She stood in front of the giant television, flipping through the channels.
“Hanna—it’s not time for TV, you haven’t done any schoolwork today.”
Behind her, Mommy put away the Trader Joe’s stuff in the cabinets that reminded her of fog. When she was little, she climbed onto the counter and carefully took out all the plates and bowls. She was about to hoist herself in, wanting to see the foggy cabinet from the inside where she imagined it would be like being in a cloud. Then Daddy scooped her into his arms. “Whatcha doing, little monkey?” He wasn’t mad and she giggled.
She kept pressing the buttons on the remote control, aware of her sticky fingers. She saw it in her mind, and then it happened: Mommy marched over and grabbed the remote. She made her disgusted face. “You’ve got chocolate…”
Mommy clicked her tongue and switched off the TV. She carried the remote back with her to the kitchen and got a paper towel and the fancy spray bottle and rubbed away Hanna’s cooties. Hanna grinned behind her hand, licking it clean.
“Come on, we’ll start with a little spelling bee, it’ll be fun. You can impress me with all the hard words you know.” Mommy got some supplies out of the cupboard where they kept the school things.
Hanna trudged over. She sat on her knees in a chair at the big tree-slab table that hovered between the kitchen and the living room.
Mommy stuck a pencil into the electric sharpener, whirring it until it was sharp enough to poke out an eye. Hanna liked that part, and watched as Mommy did a second pencil. Mommy handed them both to her, and slid over a piece of paper.
“We’ll just do a few. It’ll be a short school day. First word: love. I love sleeping. You love the color yellow. Love.”
As Hanna wrote down an answer, Mommy tucked the reading book under her arm so Hanna couldn’t see the answers and went back to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water and two white pills. She swallowed the pills as she came back.
“Got it? Ready?” Mommy sat across from her, looking weird and wobbly as she rubbed at two spots on either side of her head.
Hanna held up her paper so Mommy could see what she’d written.
Hate
“Nice try. But this isn’t word association. Do you want to spell out love?”
Hanna shook her head. She knew Mommy tried to be her most extra patient when they did schoolwork, because it was Important. Daddy said that all the time, so Hanna usually tried her best so Daddy would gush about how smart she was. But she needed Mommy to understand how it would be if she forced her to go to school. Mommy should never have brought it up.
“Okay, we’ll do a different word. How about … summer. In a couple of months it will be summer. Hanna’s Farmor and Farfar come to visit every summer.”
So easy peasy. Hanna wrote something on her paper, then turned it around to show Mommy.
Bitch
Mommy’s sigh half-melted her and she could barely keep her floppy-self sitting upright. “That’s not a nice word. I’m not even surprised you know how to spell it. Could you please spell the words I’m asking you to spell? The sooner we finish this, the sooner we can move on to other things.”
Hanna sat poised, ready for the next word.
“Strawberry. Straw-berry. She couldn’t eat just one strawberry.”
Hanna covered the paper with her hand so Mommy couldn’t see what she was writing.
“That seems a bit long for one word—what are you spelling over there?”
Hanna giggled and kept writing. When she was ready, she held up her masterpiece.
Fuck Mommy. She is week and stupid.
A vein squiggled next to Mommy’s eye and she clenched her jaw.
“Okay, that’s it, you can work on your own for a while.” As she got up, Mommy reached for the spelling test.
But Hanna was ready: she tore up the page into little pieces and sprinkled them on the table.
“Of course, no evidence for Daddy. Hanna, I don’t want to do this with you right now. I know you couldn’t have loved the CT and new doctor—don’t you just want the rest of the day to be easy?” She scooped the paper scraps into her hand.
It wasn’t just easy, it was fun. And here was Mommy, losing her patience. Bad, bad Mommy. Maybe she’d make a report card on Mommy and show it to Daddy, with a big fat failing F. But Mommy wasn’t quite ready to give up. She opened another workbook and spun it around so Hanna could see it.
“You can read this short section … It’s about ancient Egypt: the Pyramids, and the Pharaohs—they’re like kings and queens, you’ll like that. And then on the next page. Look, you’ll get to write something out using hieroglyphs—that’s like a secret language. You can write Daddy a secret message. Okay? Write him whatever you want. Tell him you hit a baby at the store. Tell him you’ve mastered spelling profane words.” She headed for the kitchen. After sprinkling the spelling test into the recycling bin, she gathered up her cleaning supplies and trusty rubber gloves. “And by the way, you used the wrong spelling—it’s w-e-a-k. Because Mommy is not a day of the week.”
Hanna wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scowl. She didn’t like to be corrected. But she always enjoyed seeing Mommy like this, in her natural state of hating and giving up. If only Daddy could see it, then he’d understand that Mommy was phony. When he was around, Mommy was kissy and helpful. But it was an act she couldn’t keep up. If Hanna kept trying, Mommy’s face would dribble off and Daddy would shriek and toss her out of the house.
Hanna experimented with sounds as she read through the paragraphs. “Nya. Bya. Fya. Pwa. Bwa. Dwa.” She liked how French they sounded. She turned it into a repetitive singsong. “Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dwa bwa pwa. Mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee nya fya bya.”
Mommy glanced at her over her bucket of vinegar and water. “Little more reading, little less singing.”
“Bee bee bee bee bee bee bee, laa laa laa laa laa laa laaaaaaaaah! Di dee do do di dee do di ba ba baaaaaaah!”
“If you want to be vocal, say something. You’re only giving away the fact that you can say something.”
Hanna squished her lips together and batted her eyelashes. Mommy glared at her for a moment and went back to scrubbing the already clean kitchen. What a dumbo.
She liked how the Pyramids looked, but she wouldn’t want to live in one. No windows. Then she read that they were tombs for the Pharaohs. Homes for dead people. Weird. They were buried with gold and food. Weirder. Like dead people would wear jewelry and get hungry. It reminded her of some research she’d done online. On Daddy’s computer (because he let her use it sometimes). Fairy tales were full of ghosts and witches—people who weren’t like regular people, capable of fascinating and creepy things. Once she even wore a black dress and a pointy hat for Halloween. She was desperate to know But are they real? and heaped her library books about witches onto Daddy’s lap. He misunderstood. He patiently read them with her, but didn’t understand what she was trying to find out. She googled it on her own.
Yes. Witches were real.
There were lots of them, especially in the golden days. Her search on “real witches” led her to Mother Shipton and Agnes Sampson. She’d read about young girls who were burned alive or tossed into a river to drown, weighted with stones, while the stupid villagers cheered. Nobody liked witches, that much was clear, but Hanna couldn’t understand why. It made her giggle, thinking about the fun games she could play if she had a witch for a friend. Maybe such a friend could finally help her do what she’d struggled to do on her own: make Mommy go away and never come back. After digging around some more, curious about the witch hunts, she found a big list of people who were killed. One of them had a name she very much liked and still remembered—a pretty French name with soft letters, not like the ugly n’s that trampled through “Hanna Jensen.”
She silently tested the words Marie-Anne Dufosset with her lips and tongue. Maybe if she repeated it enough, the French girl would come to her in spirit and be her bestest friend. She and Marie-Anne could make up songs and sing them together. Marie-Anne could teach her how to cast spells with the words no one else understood. Spells that would make Mommy’s heart explode.
Marie-Anne Dufosset. Marie-Anne Dufosset.
Ha, it worked! Marie-Anne helpfully instructed her on how to get her vocalization just right.
“Nya nya, nya nya. Boo dee boo dee baaa! Bwa bwa bwa bwa loo lee loo lee laaa!”
Mommy tilted her head. Hanna loved the look she gave her—the one that said I give up.
“Fine.” She gathered up her bucket and sponge and, head held high, marched away. Up the space-age stairs and into the master bedroom.
Hanna cackled. It was a start. They had made Mommy disappear.