by Jim Nelson
“Not all twins,” Ruby said, unfazed. “Not mine.”
“But nobody gives their twins the same name,” Hanna teased.
“You have the same name as the other Hanna,” Ruby said. “She looked exactly like you.”
“But we’re not twins,” Hanna said, sensing a game in motion. “She was my bridge mother. She was born fourteen years before I was born.”
“Right,” Ruby said. “Just like Ruby Jo and Ruby Jo.”
Hanna began to protest again, then realized she was fighting child’s logic, a form of reasoning that exists on its own plane. “Whatever you say,” Hanna said with a slight smile. She peered around. “Where’s your sister?”
“I think she’s taking a nap in our room,” Ruby said.
Ruby took naps, Cynthia did not. Perhaps the fresh air had gotten to her, Hanna reasoned. Life on the farm was a seductive narcotic. Hanna knew it all too well. She also considered the possibility Cynthia was nearer to her finality than Dr. Bellingham advised. Cynthia had vomited up most of her lunch, yelling through the bathroom door it was no big deal and to leave her alone. Takes after her father, Hanna thought.
—
Hanna woke on the couch with a worn paperback butterflied across her chest, Rosemary’s Bridge, an old potboiler she’d discovered in the bookcase beside the fireplace. Her mother, morose at times, serious always, carried a secret affection for the domestic thriller, and wasn’t above a little horror in it as well. Hanna made it through the fourth chapter before conking out.
Hanna sat up, stretching and scratching her neck. She surveyed the living room for any sign of activity. She’d been asleep for forty-five minutes, perhaps an hour. Growing up in the monastic silence of the farmhouse created a counterintuitive impatience within Hanna, a shortness of temper with people who talked too much, or with the train traveler who felt entitled to play music aloud during rush hour. At this moment, though, the silence in the farmhouse was not welcome. It felt the place had been abandoned.
Hanna stepped through the empty kitchen, noting the dishes and cooking utensils had been cleaned and put away. Down the back hall, she checked her room first—empty, as expected—and the bathroom, dark and vacant, door wide open. The master bedroom door was closed, hopefully indicating her mother was fast asleep. The door to the girls’ room was closed too, a sliver of pale light coming through the crack under the door. Hanna perked her ears and heard voices within. Without knocking, she twisted the handle and pushed it open.
“Cynthia?” she said. The bedroom was empty but not vacated. The beds were made and the girls’ bags were open on the floor, not completely unpacked yet. One of Dr. Bellingham’s coloring books lay open beside them. An outline of a puppy was colored-in while the opposite page illustration of a castle remained only lines. Grandmother’s big box of crayons lay open beside the book with sticks of the shades of yellow loose on the floor, from Dijon to Lemon.
“Ruby? Girls?”
Cynthia emerged from the adjoining bathroom. The door to it was mostly closed, and Cynthia squeezed through to avoid opening it wide.
“Where’s Ruby?” Hanna said to her.
“In there,” Cynthia spoke, wide-eyed.
“What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing,” Cynthia said. “Brushing our hair.”
“Ruby,” Hanna spoke up. She moved toward the bathroom. “Are you—”
“I’m here!” Ruby swung open the door and emerged from the bathroom. She stood in the door frame at attention, chin level and hands at the small of her back, as bridge daughters are taught since a young age.
“What are you two up to?” Hanna said.
“Just brushing our hair,” Ruby said.
Their hair didn’t appear particularly groomed. Hanna motioned for Ruby to stand aside. She poked her head inside the bathroom and peered left and right. The pleated shower curtain was pushed to the wall and tied fast by a length of vinyl rope. The side window was open, allowing in the cool afternoon air and the scent of the redwoods and pine trees beyond. Knowing the temperature would drop soon, Hanna slid the window down and latched it. A padlock could be run through the window latch to keep it in place, although Hanna felt no need to lock the girls in. This was no longer Ma Cynthia’s world.
Returning to the bedroom, the girls had lined themselves up between the two beds. Cynthia joined Ruby in adopting the bridge daughter stance, chin level, hands behind her back. Hanna debated what do say, unsure what to make of the moment.
“We should start dinner,” Cynthia said.
“That’s a good idea,” Hanna said cautiously. “What are you thinking?”
Ruby piped up. “Baked Alaska!”
—
A scratchy shouting came from the rear of the house. Hanna and Ruby hurried to the master bedroom to discover Hanna’s mother sitting up in bed. The neckline and underarms of her nightgown were dark with sweat. She complained of a nightmare and said she needed a glass of water. Ruby hustled off to the kitchen.
Hanna sat beside her mother and attempted to get her to lie back down. She quaffed the water Ruby brought and swallowed two Tylenol with the last of it. Ruby shook the mercury down in a thermometer and put it into Dian’s mouth, ignoring her protests. Hanna excused Ruby from the room, saying she would check the temperature when it was ready.
The two women sat beside each other in the dark, Hanna waiting, Dian fuming.
“It’s always Ruby,” Hanna’s mother said. “That other one, she’s never on-hand to help. Can she even cook?”
“Ruby’s the chef,” Hanna said. “Cynthia’s better at cleaning up.”
“What else does she do around the apartment?”
It stung to hear her bridge daughter referred to so dismissively, doubly so to hear it from her own mother. It was not the fever talking. These criticisms were common.
“Cynthia used to work on the car,” Hanna said. “She changed the oil.”
“A bridge daughter under the hood of a car,” Dian mumbled around the thermometer protruding from her lips. “Just to think.”
“It saved a little money,” Hanna said.
“Money a problem?”
“I’m not getting ahead,” Hanna admitted. “Every paycheck is spent before I cash it. I should tell you—” She debated saying it, fearing it would sound like hinting for a handout. “I’m house-hunting again.”
“To buy?”
“I can’t afford a house in Berkeley,” Hanna said. “Another rental. Something smaller, something more affordable.”
“Smaller?” With the thermometer in her mouth, it came out Thmawther? Hanna’s mother couldn’t imagine living in a smaller abode than the house Hanna and the girls already occupied.
“A two-bedroom would be enough,” Hanna said, “one for the nursery, one for me.”
“You thewed—”
Aggravated, Hanna’s mother plucked the thermometer from her mouth and handed it over. Hanna checked it under the reading lamp on the nightstand.
“You should move here,” Hanna’s mother said. “Save your money. There’s plenty of room for you and the two little ones on the way.”
“One hundred point nine,” Hanna announced. She put a palm to her mother’s forehead. “Lie back down.”
“We can set up the nursery in the girls’ room,” Hanna’s mother said. “My hospital is not fifteen minutes from here. I’ve heard wonderful things about their pediatric department.”
They’d had this conversation many times before, in person and on the phone. “I work in the city—”
“We’re thirty minutes from the city.”
“From the city limits,” Hanna said. “It’s another half hour to the Financial District. And I don’t want to drive into downtown San Francisco every day, Mom. The train from Berkeley is perfect for me.” Before her mother could interject, she added, “And I need to work from home some times. That means Internet. You don’t even have cable TV.”
“Are you still wasting your money on that brid
ge school?” her mother said. “How many years there and they haven’t gotten around to teaching Cynthia to cook and clean?”
Hanna stopped herself. She’d told her mother numerous times that the Coit New Bridge School taught more than home economics. She was goading Hanna, and Hanna knew it.
“If you won’t live here, then don’t leave your home,” her mother said. “I have a little money saved up. How much do you need? I can help with the rent.”
Hanna stared down at the cooling thermometer for a quiet moment. “I need to leave the house.” She spoke softly, concerned about prying ears at the door. “It’s Vaughn.”
Hanna’s mother’s pale lips tightened and narrowed. A grimness settled across her disheveled appearance. “What about Vaughn?”
“He’s been calling me,” Hanna said.
“What does he say?”
“I don’t answer,” Hanna said, the confession gathering momentum. “He doesn’t leave a message. I’m afraid he’ll come back to the house if we stay there.”
“And you’re sure it’s not this Marc fellow you broke up with,” meaning the last man she’d dated more than twice.
“Oh, Mom, Marc was gone months ago,” Hanna said.
“Have you called the police?”
“For what?” she said. “He’s their father. He’s my husband. What are the police going to do?”
“Have you spoken with Vaughn at all since he left?”
Hanna nodded. “I answered his phone call the first time he called. I was stupid. I don’t normally pick up when caller ID is blocked, but I did and it was him.”
“What did he say?”
“He was living in Arizona,” Hanna said. She bowed her head and put her face in her hands. “Really, I have no idea where he is now.” She could feel the pressure behind her face, a tight swelling forming. “He told me he wanted us to come to Flagstaff so he could see us. He said he was going to buy the girls new dresses and put them through school. He has a house, he said, and a business in town.”
Face in her hands and unable to see, Hanna only heard her mother’s deep intake of air and pronounced sigh. Hanna felt a lecture coming on.
“You should have gotten the divorce like I’d told you to,” she told Hanna. “He wasn’t even helping with money, for God’s sake—”
“No.” Hanna lifted her face from her hands. Red, puffy, about ready to weep, Hanna did her best to keep it together. “He is sending us money. Cashier’s checks. Postmarked from Arizona at first. Then they came from Nevada. Now they’re coming from Southern California.”
“Does he write you?” her mother asked.
“Just envelopes with checks,” Hanna said. “No return address. No letter or note.”
“And you’re sure they’re coming from Vaughn?”
“Who else would send me money?” She made a bitter laugh. “I need that money, Mom. It’s not mad money. I depend on those checks.” Coit New Bridge School. Gefyriatrician appointments. Maternity clothes. Trips to the dentist. It all went to the girls.
“How much are we talking about?”
“Eight hundred here, a thousand there.” Vaughn seemed to know when to send it. The money arrived when it was needed most: one of the girls goes ill and needs a trip to the doctor, or her landlord levying a water bond pass-through on the rent one month. Vaughn’s money was the net beneath the financial tightrope Hanna walked each month.
“Can he prove he’s been supporting you?” Hanna’s mother asked.
“I think he can,” Hanna said.
Her mother said stared hard. “You need to be rid of this man. I’ve told you a hundred times, you should—”
Hanna plunged forward and buried her face in her mother’s neck. They embraced for a long while, her mother’s arms around her back and rocking her, Hanna’s cold cheek against her mother’s hot skin.
Her mother took her by the shoulders and pushed her away so she could speak to her face.
“You can’t hide from him,” she told Hanna. “You have to face this head-on. But don’t let him draw you in. You make him come here.”
“Why?” Hanna wanted nothing more than to never see Vaughn again.
“Because I don’t think he will,” she said. “Men like Vaughn Brubaker, they crave their freedom. They love being able to move on when a whim strikes. Vaughn is allergic to responsibility. I never met a man so keen at ducking out. He won’t come here, Hanna. He will stay far away. He’ll try to get you to come to him. You ignore all that talk about dresses and a new house. It’s a ploy. He’s using you.”
“Mom,” Hanna said. “I don’t know what he wants.”
“Power,” her mother said without a moment of pause. “He wants to make you dance for him. And if you’re not careful, he’ll try to get those girls away from you.”
Hanna couldn’t imagine Vaughn raising a goldfish, let alone caring for bridge daughters to their finalities. Two infants would be a pair of leashes around Vaughn’s neck. “Why would he want that?”
“Will you quit trying to decode the man?” Hanna’s mother snapped. “You talk like you’re dealing with a reasonable person.”
Exhausted, her mother flopped back into her pillows, perspiration making her face gleam in the dim failing light coming through the drapes. Hanna helped her settle down. She pulled the blankets up to her chin and kissed her on a wet cheek. Good night.
Fourteen
Nostalgia bloomed within Hanna when she found her old bicycle in the barn, the one she rode as a teenager. It was stored alongside dust-covered jars of photographic developer, reams of Kodak paper stored in brittle paperboard boxes, and a stack of ceramic developer baths, all the remains of one of Ma Cynthia’s many avocations. Morning light cascaded into the barn interior from windows up high, its golden sheets revealing a galaxy of hay motes drifting through the air. The rust-pocked powder-blue bicycle had three speeds, although the young Hanna rarely had a need to take it out of first gear. She never rode it on the open road, as she recalled, only tooling around the farm on it.
She pedaled slowly at first, tires crunching over the gravel and coarse dirt. Being off-center while riding in the narrow juts made the handlebars jerk left and right. After a minute of practice, she was pedaling down the jutted road on an even keel, just as she had as a girl. Her face and hands were sticky from the sunscreen Ruby had slathered on before Hanna left the farmhouse. Ruby would not allow anyone to expose themselves to the sun without proper protection.
When Hanna reached the bridge, she dismounted and lifted the bicycle onto the wood planks. The lip of the first plank was not even with the road and she’d crash if she hit it any angle other than straight-on.
She stopped halfway across the bridge to reminisce over the dry arroyo below. The smooth river rock was covered with a powdery gray moss. When the county water district released the dammed snowmelt, the arroyo flowed steadily with cold clear water. As a girl, she waded in up to her waist on hot summer days. So isolated, Hanna sometimes waded in without a shirt, or a stitch of clothes at all. How tan she got, she recalled.
Hanna couldn’t bear to tell Ruby the real reason she’d quit researching the family tree. Popularized in the 1930s by an abdicated king and his divorcee wife, the Edwardian Form’s recognition of bridge daughters in the lineage was not popular outside of small circles. Twelve-year-old Hanna did not know this when she picked up the book. When her mother began sniping at her for including the bridge daughter ovals in the family tree, it stung.
She thought her mother would be proud of her interest in their family’s past. Genealogy was a bookish pursuit encouraging patient research. She’d spent many afternoons at the Marin City library poring over census data and microfiche of Los Angeles newspapers learning all she could about her mother’s family. She knew her grandfather was an oilman of some kind, most likely corrupt, and that a concert hall in Santa Monica bore the Abney name. Genealogy required asking questions and double-checking answers, exactly what her mother had taught in her homeschooli
ng. Her mother taught her to question the President, to question the Pope and television preachers. When Hanna asked questions about her own family, the open-mindedness dropped like an iron gate. Genealogy was the one childhood pursuit she took seriously, and her mother’s wall of silence and criticism erased all enjoyment of it.
She had little else on the farm to hold her attention. Boys were not an issue for Hanna growing up. Being schooled at home, Hanna had little regular contact with the weaker sex, as her mother called them. Sure, she’d flirted around town on the rare occasions when she drove in alone for groceries. Hanna knew better than to flirt in front of her mother.
It was their new postman, a lean, craggy-faced man named Brubaker, who spotted seventeen-year-old Hanna splashing around naked under the bridge on the farm. A week later, Brubaker’s son drove his step-side Dodge pickup onto the property. The July heat made the sequoias release their syrupy odor, and the farm smelled thickly of their tannins. He circled the yard in his truck, cut the engine, and stepped down to the gravel, one boot, then the other. Vaughn wore a crisply ironed cowboy shirt with pearlescent buttons and faded boot-cut jeans hitched up by a tooled leather belt. He was ten years older than Hanna but military-fit. Sauntering into the shade of their porch, he called out I’ve come to pay Hanna Madeline Driscoll a visit. Hanna’s mother stepped outside, looked him up and down, and told him to get off the property.
Hanna remounted the bicycle on the other side of the bridge. She picked up steam on the downhill, gliding for an eighth of a mile before sliding to a halt at the tree line on the edge of the family property. The gate along Old Jachsen Road was closed, just as she’d left it the night before. She rattled it to ensure it was still latched, as though this token amount of detective work proved conclusively whether anyone had camped on the property.
Hanna wasn’t sure she believed her mother spotted this alleged camper. Not that her mother was the paranoid type or prone to hallucinations, but with the passing of the years, Hanna had begun to wonder about her mother’s vision and imagination. The seductive silence of the farmhouse, the redwoods standing over the property like magnificent chess pieces, the security of never locking the front door at night or when away—a narcotic.