Girls of Brackenhill

by Moretti, Kate

  Hannah discovered that if she lay in the right place, right in the center of the courtyard between the honeysuckle and the roses, next to the fountain, she could see all four turrets at once in periphery, their towers poking at the listing clouds, the blue above her like a song, and she’d never known happiness like that, a bubble in her chest about to burst, gasping like she couldn’t catch her breath. Even years later, Hannah couldn’t remember a better kind of peace.

  Julia once asked about the history of the house, who had lived there, had it been a queen and king? Aunt Fae laughed and told her, “No one important, just us.” They’d inherited it, Fae told them. Which Hannah understood to mean it had been given to them, but by whom? Why? Any further questions were always met with vague responses, hmm-hmmms and oh, just family, until the girls got bored and wandered away.

  The grounds were wild in appearance but cared for, vines and ground cover creeping over everything. Trimmed daily by Stuart with his shears as he whistled a lilting tune, something unknown to Hannah but melancholy, ripe with sadness to match the hoods of her uncle’s eyes. All the adults in her life seemed so sad, even if only when they thought no one was watching them. Her mother was a frequent crier, and her stepfather, Wes, was given to bouts of anger, particularly when drunk. She’d never known an adult in her life to display actual joy.

  But the house! She counted thirty-three rooms: ballrooms and sitting rooms and winding staircases (more than one!) and servants’ quarters and empty bedrooms, closed off and drafty even in the belly of summer. She thrilled at imagining ancient horrors hidden behind the doors, even after Fae insisted it was simply easier to close them up than to clean them.

  “Then why are they locked?” Hannah persisted, following behind Fae as she cleaned and puttered up and down the hallways, driving her aunt crazy.

  “Because I don’t want you girls making a mess. There’s no reason. Some of them don’t even have furniture! It’s expensive to keep up a home this size.” Fae shooed Hannah outside, the conversation over.

  Hannah had goose bumps in certain corners of the castle, some hallways that were colder than others.

  Each year they learned more about the woods: her trees and creek beds, her trails, her vines and crumbling stone walls, her bugs, bees, birds, the chirps and calls the soundtrack to their wild days, alone and exploring. At least until the year Uncle Stuart bought them bikes and Hannah and Julia rode to town and found other teenagers, and the spell of their childhood, it seemed to Hannah, had been broken.

  And that summer, the summer of the broken spell, when they left their castle and let others in—let evil in, as Hannah thought later, so dramatic—was the beginning of the end. The summer of lost chances and faded hope. Brackenhill, she would imagine later, was always frozen in that one moment, the first summer when Hannah had lain in the courtyard and watched the clouds, the points of the towers prodding the sky, breaking it open to rain on her face, matting her clothes to her body, filling her mouth and her eyes, mixing with her tears.

  In the end, Hannah would return home alone, and never come back to Brackenhill.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Now

  Rockwell Mountain Road was two narrow lanes with sharp curves, flanked by a steep ravine and the Beaverkill to the west and an imposing vertical wall of shale and slate—the tumbled face of Rockwell Mountain—to the east. As Huck drove, Hannah studied the guardrail, looking for signs that a car had blown through. A mile from town she found the breach—a post had been violently uprooted, the wood splintered. Instinctively Huck punched the brake, and the car jerked and slowed. Hannah couldn’t see over the side, down to the bottom of the ravine. Was the car still there? How long had Aunt Fae lain there, bleeding and in pain, before she’d been helped? On impact, she remembered. Hannah turned her head away from the ravine, toward Huck, and he reached out to grasp her fingertips.

  “Turn on Castle Drive at the top of the hill,” Hannah said.

  “Inventive.” Huck squeezed her fingertips and gave her a half smile. Hannah tried to form her lips into what would pass as a smile but found she couldn’t. The thrum of dread pulsed in her ears, her chest.

  The gate at the end of the road was swung wide, the driveway looming in front of them like an open mouth, the stone archway like large yellowed teeth. Huck inched the car forward, and Hannah held her breath as the tower points came into view.

  Hannah’s heart lodged in her throat. She hadn’t been to Brackenhill since a week after Julia disappeared. Her clearest memory of the end of that summer was the house receding in the rear window of the Buick as the car sped down the driveway. She remembered Aunt Fae holding a handkerchief over her face. Uncle Stuart’s left hand raised, unmoving, his face gaunt and stricken.

  Her stepfather had steered the car with one hand and rested the other on the empty front seat. Trina, her mother, hadn’t made the trip to retrieve Hannah, and for the rest of the summer she rarely left her bedroom. It was after Julia vanished that her isolated piety turned full-blown zealous. Julia had been hers. A special mother-daughter bond that Hannah used to study, try to understand. Hannah and Trina had never been close. Hannah was too exuberant, too much. Everything Hannah did seemed to exhaust Trina, particularly after Julia left.

  Hannah’s mother took to carrying rosaries with her everywhere, her lips always moving, her fingers rolling the black beads in small circles around the pads of her thumbs.

  Now, in the early-morning light, the castle looked ethereal, a black shadow lit pink from behind. Only as they edged closer could Hannah see its age: Crumbling stone and missing mortar, sagging flashing along the roofline and dangling slate shingles. Window ledges with peeling paint in various shades of white, tan, even green, like Aunt Fae had run out of one color and just used whatever she’d found in the basement.

  The basement. Hannah closed her eyes, her nose and mouth filled with the smell of rot, whether real or imagined, she couldn’t say. The maze of small rooms connected with no discernible pattern by a series of arched doorways. They’d played hide-and-seek there, convinced the rooms shifted, the house accommodating their wild imaginations. They’d tried to tell Aunt Fae once. A labyrinth in the basement that seemed intent on trapping them, keeping them hostage. Fae had laughed, waved her hand around in a circle, dismissive. “Everyone tells stories about this house; don’t feed them,” she’d warned. But the rooms had moved. As a child, Hannah was certain of it.

  “Holy shit, Hannah,” Huck whispered next to her. “I had no idea.”

  Of course he didn’t. He didn’t know about any of it. Hannah felt a burst of impatience with him, a quick bolt of frustration at his inability to keep up. She didn’t want to explain Brackenhill, her aunt and uncle, her family, her sister. More than not wanting to—she couldn’t.

  Hannah approached the building to search for the key. She heard Huck’s sharp intake of breath next to her as she led them through a stone archway and into the courtyard. Aunt Fae had kept up the garden: green and full, bursting with color, pinks and blues. Even in the hot August months, when perennials would be wilting, Fae’s garden looked lush as spring. Dappled with birdhouses and fountains.

  Hannah found the cobalt-blue flowerpot in the corner and lifted it; the brass key glinted in the sunlight. Brackenhill never changed.

  Inside it smelled like a memory: damp and sweet, musty carpets and layers of perfume. Aunt Fae’s banana bread. Peeling paint along the concrete walls. Dust trapped in fluted moldings. The ceilings were uneven—barely above Huck’s head in some areas, looming over fifteen feet high in others. Their voices echoed. Rink ran in a circle, barked, the sound ricocheting off the stone walls.

  “Hannah.” Huck stopped. The question unspoken. He touched her elbow. His eyebrows pinched as he searched her face. There was never a moment when Hannah looked at his face, his gray-blue eyes sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes bright with love, and didn’t feel the gentle tug of something wonderfully sweet. Love. Desire. Admiration. Even now, in this castle, her
heart a trapped bird inside her rib cage, her breath sour in her mouth, she loved him. He deserved some kind of explanation, of course.

  “This house,” she said, her voice wobbly and unsure to her own ears. She began again. Squared her shoulders, stood up straighter. “For five years, we came here every summer, my sister and I. From the time I was eleven to the time I was fifteen. My stepfather was a drunk. My mother was incapable. Brackenhill was . . . our sanctuary. But something happened to my sister here, and that was the end of it. I was fifteen. Julia was seventeen. She was acting so strangely that summer . . .” Her voice trailed off, her thoughts winding back to that August: Julia’s bed empty, the sheets cool, the tug of jealousy in Hannah’s core, the girl with the long red hair. What was her name? Evie? Ellie. The new feeling of a boy, the first boy, the weight and smell of him (his name she’d not forget, and she still woke up with it full in her mouth—Wyatt). Wondering if it had all started, or ended, because of a teenage boy who was loved by two girls who happened to be sisters.

  “She left one day and never came back,” Hannah finished. “We fought, she left, and I never saw her again.”

  “Did she run away?” Huck asked, his voice hoarse, his eyes wide. “Have you looked for her? Now, with the internet?”

  “No. They found her purse in the river. She was declared dead years ago.” Hannah touched her forehead, felt the sweat beading there. Heard her breaths coming fast and tried to regulate herself.

  “I don’t understand. What happened to her?” Huck pressed.

  “We don’t know. It’s still an open murder case, but without a body . . .” It was a cold, clinical dissection, she knew. “Everyone suspected them. The town turned on Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart. I was never invited back.” Not that she would have come. “It was a forbidden topic with my mother. We rarely spoke about Julia. I had to force myself to just . . . move on.”

  “What do you think?” Huck asked, his voice quietly insistent but also incredulous. His face still. Hannah tried to read him and failed. How strange it must be to be told information of this magnitude so late in the game.

  “I think she ran away.”

  She’d never said it so definitively, out loud, before. She’d thought it plenty of times. Especially in the beginning. When Hannah first left home, got accepted to Dickinson, a private liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. When her college roommates would ask her basic questions about her family, why her mother never came to parents’ weekend. She’d say she was an only child. But she’d lie in bed at night and let her mind wander wildly. She’d try to force herself down one thought path, then another. From the obvious (Julia had been killed by a stranger in the woods and thrown in the river) to the probable (Julia had run away from Brackenhill because of some secret Hannah never understood) to the downright ridiculous (Julia was in witness protection).

  Senior year of college, she found herself blurting it out one late night while studying: I had a sister who ran away. Her roommate at the time became singularly focused, perhaps even obsessed, and they spent a few nights scouring Google for signs of Julia Maloney (and all her incarnations: J. Maloney, Julie Maloney, Julia Lorraine Maloney). Somewhere between college and adulthood, Hannah had accepted that version as truth.

  She didn’t utter the second part, the unformed thought: She’ll come back. She’d said it once, to her mother, years ago. They’d been fighting—no memory of what about—and Hannah spat it out, suddenly, almost violently. “Julia will come back for me.” Her mother had raged, “Julia is dead! Dead, Hannah.” She threw a pot that had been in her hand, dish soap flying, and it left a divot in the linoleum where it landed. Later in her room, Hannah tried out the word: “Dead.” Felt the heaviness of it on her tongue, the finality of it. It never felt true. As an adult, she crafted elaborate fantasies about her sister returning, their reunion, a tearful homecoming, a long dinner and a shared bottle of wine and her sister—returned to her! She’d had friendships, of course, but nothing as close as a sister. Someone to know you down to your bones, every halting sigh familiar. Someone to exchange a look with that said, I know. At a joke, a shop window, a drunken man in a crowded bar. It was the unspoken things that felt the most powerful. Hannah had lost that. Sometimes she didn’t even realize how much she missed it until she saw it pass between two other women. Sisters, mothers, neighbors.

  It never occurred to her to question specifically why Julia had run away. That night, knotted tightly in her chest like a closed fist.

  Hannah should not have shut Huck out. But that wasn’t quite right; it was never about Huck at all but rather what Hannah felt willing to say aloud. Her family had rarely said important things out loud, aside from Trina’s one “dead” proclamation. Her mother rarely mentioned Aunt Fae after that summer. Her mother’s most frequent emotion was fatigue—too tired to talk about Julia, Fae, Brackenhill. Too exhausted by Hannah’s presence, her relentless need to be fed, clothed, driven. Talking was a bridge too far.

  Hannah never learned how to talk about Julia. She knew, instinctively, that she should, at least to Huck. And yet the words would never come. It was too easy to push it all aside, ask instead, What do you want to do for dinner? How was your meeting? Did you stop at the dry cleaner? It was easy to be distracted by daily details of life and easier still to never say a word about a past that seemed irrelevant. Immaterial to the life she was carving out for herself. In those moments she could convince herself she was a strong, independent woman. Overcoming a childhood trauma.

  And the one thing she never told anyone—not the police, her mother, Wyatt, Huck. Julia had come back that night. It had been close to dawn. Hannah remembered seeing the brushstroke of pink out the window. When she tried to put a fine point on that memory, anchor it with details (What exactly had Julia said?), she found it too fuzzy. Incomplete. Then she wondered if it had really happened. She doubted her own memories of that summer at every turn.

  She couldn’t have said whether it was the fighting with Julia, the hazy excitement with Wyatt, the feeling of something on the horizon—something big and life changing for all of them. But Hannah had been plagued with insomnia that whole last summer. Sleepwalking all over the castle. So much of those last few weeks passed in a fever dream. What had been real?

  Her sister had stood poised between their bedrooms, her hand on the doorjamb. “Hannah, please,” she’d whispered. She’d been streaked with dirt, her face pale in the moonlight, like she’d been crying. It was all Hannah remembered, the simple two-word plea, and then her sister was gone. It could have been anything.

  Earlier that night Julia had said, “We are in danger here,” her voice a rush, her hair wild. Begged Hannah to come with her, but Hannah flatly refused, all her trust in her sister broken. They’d been to a fish fry picnic in town. Julia had kissed her Wyatt, and Hannah had screamed, pushed her. The fight had gotten ugly—but still, not terminal.

  Hannah vaguely remembered her own anger, how she’d known that nothing good ever came from running out of the house in the middle of the night. Especially this house, teetering high on the edge of a cliff, pressed against the wind, the Beaverkill River swollen and rushing below. What had Julia said?

  “We can go to the police. I have proof, okay? Come with me. We have to leave.”

  Leave! Absolutely not. Hannah would not be made to leave. Brackenhill was hers, and sometimes it felt like she was the only one who knew all the house’s secrets and loved her anyway.

  And then the reckless pulse of fury in Hannah’s chest as Julia turned, clicked the door shut. She had no idea what her sister was talking about, and she was tired of caring so much about one person. All her emotions invested so heavily in someone who seemed to care so little in return. The anger flooded back, the images of her sister kissing a boy, his red hair curled in her fingertips, her lips against his cheek.

  She almost, almost, opened the door again that night. Her hand was on the knob. She heard her sister on the other side. “I hope you unders
tand.”

  Hannah waited until she heard silence at the door between their bedrooms. Then she inched open the door to the hallway. She listened carefully to whispering on the stairs and the patter of quiet footsteps.

  Let her go, she told herself. She’s a bitch anyway.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Now

  Hannah ascended the curved concrete staircase, Huck following closely at her heels, his breath warm on the back of her neck in the chill of the stale castle air. From somewhere in the distance, in another room, a fan whirred. The clunk of a wooden door being blown shut.

  “I thought you said your uncle was bedridden?” Huck asked, startling at the distant slam.

  “He is. That’s just Brackenhill.” It had become so normal to Hannah, the muted groans and moans of a fortress standing against the whipping wind high on a hilltop. When she was younger, the night sounds had been soothed away by Aunt Fae’s honeyed voice, and the things that had happened at night had become dreams in her memory. During the day the castle was benign, even charming. Whimsical, with its loose pieces clattering against the outside stone. Through the telescope of age, everything else seemed like the conjuring of an imaginative child.

  Stuart and Fae’s room was the last door on the first hallway from the parlor staircase. There were three staircases, four hallways, and ten bedrooms, two in each of the north and south halls, three in each of the east and west hallways. Each room that extended to a corner held a turret. Most were closed up, locked even. Fae and Stuart’s was the largest, with the only attached bathroom, a later addition, Hannah assumed.