The Sisters Chase

by Sarah Healy

  Mary had already decided what she would do by the time she heard Diane’s door close, though she lay on her bed for another half hour, her muscles stone-still. Hannah’s cries dwindled then ceased, and when only the silence of sleep was in the air did Mary get up and begin her preparations. Many of Hannah’s clothes were already in her room, ferreted away from Diane’s and tucked neatly into drawers. There was a stack of diapers on her dresser, and the stroller was in the office. It had started to rain earlier, and Mary saw the fat drops hit the glass of her window then slide down, leaving their glistening trails.

  She turned her backpack upside down and let her schoolbooks fall out of it, let them lay splayed and contorted on the floor. Then she began to fill it with what they would need. She pulled up a corner of the carpet in the closet, lifted out the $263 that she had kept there, and slid it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she took a coat—the one that had been her grandfather’s—from a hanger and pulled it on. It nearly came to her knees, but it was warm and thick, and water beaded on its heavy canvas fabric and then ran right off. She took a baby blanket from her bed and rolled it tightly, cinching it with a shoelace, and then she hooked it to her belt, where it would stay dry under the jacket. She put on the backpack that was filled with clothes and diapers, leaving enough room for the formula and bottles that she would get in the kitchen.

  The stroller was in a closet off of the office and Mary set it up, unfolding it quietly, straightening the bar between the wheels. When everything was ready, she went to Diane’s room. She cracked the door only slightly at first, peering at her mother who was lying above the covers, her bathrobe still on, her arms crossed over her chest as her head lolled back. Her mouth was open and her breath sounded wet and thick. Mary opened the door just wide enough to slip through, then she walked silently and quickly to Hannah’s crib and leaned over.

  Hannah was awake and on her back and looking at the mobile that hung above her bed. She grabbed her feet, covered with the pink flowers of her onesie. When she saw Mary, she smiled.

  “Hi, Bunny,” Mary whispered, beaming back at her.

  Then she reached down, scooped her up, and was out the door before any sound could disrupt Diane’s leaden sleep.

  “We’re going on a trip,” she cooed, as she held Hannah tightly against her chest. “Just you and me.”

  In the office, she set Hannah into the stroller and fastened the straps. Then she unlocked the door, propped it open with her hand, and wheeled Hannah out. The cold rain hit Mary’s face immediately, and she blinked against it, adjusting the cover to the stroller to shield Hannah. “Don’t worry,” she said, her voice gentle as she tucked a thick blanket around her. “It’s just rain.”

  With her hood up, Mary lowered her head against the wind as she walked, charging down the sidewalk without looking up. She saw the blinding brightness of headlights as cars approached, heard the splash of their tires against the wet street as they passed. It was a little more than a mile to the bus station. There would be a bus leaving just after one in the morning.

  Mary walked quickly, and the calves of her jeans were soon soaked with water, making them stiff and cold. She thought about where she would go, what she would say once they were in the city. There were shelters, Mary knew. She could say they needed help. She could say that they had no place else to go.

  When they were halfway there, Hannah started crying and Mary stopped the stroller, lifted her sister out, then zipped her into the inside of her coat, where she held her with one hand, pushing the stroller with the other. And against the dry warmth of Mary’s chest, Hannah found comfort.

  They arrived at the bus station with less than an hour to spare, and Mary unzipped her jacket and lifted Hannah out as she looked around for a bathroom; she needed paper towels to dry off the stroller. The yellow cinder-block walls were made yellower still from the humming glow of the fluorescent lights overhead, and faded posters of destinations hung crookedly. Sedona. Las Vegas. Miami. After they got to the city, they could go anywhere. Mary caught the ticket agent’s eye through the Plexiglas he sat behind.

  “Is the 1:05 on time?” she called. The few other passengers waiting for the bus looked up as they sat on plastic chairs that were bolted to fixed metal bars.

  He nodded, regarding Mary from behind his spectacles.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” she asked.

  Without a word, he pointed toward the hallway that ran parallel to his perch.

  “Thanks,” Mary said, as she started toward it. “We’re going to get everything nice and dry,” she whispered to Hannah. “So that you can just sleep on the bus.”

  In the bathroom, Mary took a paper towel and rubbed it over her wet face. She took another and wiped down the vinyl of the stroller while balancing Hannah on her hip. Then she walked back out to the waiting room and up to the clerk.

  “One,” she said, reaching into her back pocket. “For the 1:05.” Then she tilted her head toward Hannah, adjusting her weight to better balance her. “Plus a child.”

  “Child’s free,” said the clerk, as he licked his finger and reached toward a stack of tickets.

  Mary took one of the many empty seats and put Hannah on her lap facing her. She brought Hannah’s hands to her cheeks and smiled, feeling her cool fingers on her face. Then she clapped Hannah’s hands together. Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.

  She would miss Diane, of course. She did love her mother. But Diane was condemned by the effort she put into raising Mary. By her desperate tactics. By the threats and punishments leveraged to try to rein in a willful and wild daughter. Diane was condemned by being a mother. But Hannah . . . Mary loved Hannah boundlessly.

  “We can pretend we’re princesses,” whispered Mary, bringing her nose to Hannah’s. “Whose castle and fortune were stolen. We can pretend we used to dress in silk and diamonds.”

  The station’s waiting room all but emptied when the bus boarded. The driver helped Mary stow the stroller in the under-bus compartment, then Mary took the black rubber-treaded steps up. She took a seat at the very back of the bus next to the bathroom, watching the other passengers settle in, watching them let their heads sink back. Both the girls slept on the way into the city, Mary’s head resting against the cool glass of the window, Hannah’s body warm on her chest. The bus’s interior was dim and quiet, and the roads were empty as they glided over the interstate, the speed bringing Mary peace.

  Mary and Hannah were the last to disembark at the terminal, to make their way down the bus’s long center aisle. They were the last to see the two police officers waiting at the bottom of the steps, one of them lifting his radio the moment his eyes made contact with Mary’s.

  It wasn’t long after the bus first set off that Diane had woken up. And after thirty minutes of searching on foot, she had called the police. Mary was memorable and so she was easy to find. The clerk at the ticket window had given her up before the bus had even reached the turnpike.

  Diane would meet them at the police station, still in her robe as she sat in the waiting room, her hair still wet at the roots from walking around in the rain. Mary would meet her eyes and Diane would bring her hands to her face and she’d weep—huge aching sobs shaking her shoulders. And Mary would want to go to her, but she’d resist and she’d hold Hannah tightly until her mother looked up at her and with swollen eyes, nod. Fine, she’d say. Fine.

  Soon after, Diane would switch her shift at the casino from afternoons to nights. She’d spend the day with Hannah at the motel, then she’d turn her over to Mary, kiss them both on the forehead, and leave.

  Twenty-four

  1989

  What came after Mary and Hannah left the swamp that second time was this: years. Vast expanses of time that sped by like the flat empty land where they were spent. They passed those many days in the middle of the country, in towns that rose up out of the yellow horizon like islands, isolated and hours from the next.

  As Mary drove between those towns, she used to watch th
e storms gather in the sky, their opaque gray clouds churning, bending earth and air toward them. They called them twisters in those parts.

  The girls would stay in a town for two months or maybe three. Mary would find temporary work washing dishes or cleaning rooms or doing whatever work for whichever business needed an extra hand. Sometimes Mary would take money for other things. She wouldn’t talk about what those were, but neither was she ashamed of them. The things she did to survive were automatic, reflexive, and once they were done, they were no more than dust in her tracks.

  She liked the Midwestern boys, with their awestruck professions of love, with their earnest, down-on-one-knee sentimentality. She liked their pale backs and strong tanned arms. She liked their simple minds. She always chose the docile ones. The tame ones. The ones who would do anything for her. Or, rather, she let them choose her. Mary’s instincts were keen enough to steer clear of the ones with dark eyes and matching hungers. When she encountered one of those, it was time to leave.

  Mary marveled at how many towns there were in this swath of the country, how many that seemed just alike. It was a safe place for her to have Hannah. The authorities didn’t bother much with truancy, and their homeschooling laws were lax to nonexistent. These were places were kids grew up working on farms, not sitting in classrooms. But Mary was diligent about Hannah’s schooling, and they would often spend their evenings scratching out equations or reading whatever Mary could find. She taught Hannah algebra by the time she was eight. They’d find owl pellets in fields and dissect them, organizing and identifying the rodent bones. And at night they’d sit together reading the same page in the same novel, Mary waiting for Hannah to finish before she went on to the next.

  Hannah grew up during those years. Grew taller and leaner, her fledging breasts just starting to become visible under her T-shirts. Her sense of privacy blossoming with her body. They were staying in a trailer in an RV park where Mary was helping out for the summer when Mary opened the bathroom door without knocking.

  “Hey!” Hannah yelled, bumping her hip against the open door, but not before Mary saw her pull her shirt down. Hannah had been looking at herself in the mirror.

  “Bunny,” scolded Mary. “Relax. It’s not like I’ve never seen boobs before.”

  Hannah pushed her way out of the bathroom, mumbling something unintelligible and storming out of the trailer. “Pretty mature!” Mary called after her, the door clanging, then swinging wide open. “Keep acting like that, and those boobs are going to crawl right back up into your chest!”

  She watched the back of Hannah’s form as she stomped over the dry dirt, then Mary went back into the bathroom.

  “Jesus,” she moaned, when she saw the state of it. Her makeup was spread all over the counter and her razor was in the sink still covered with shaving cream. “It’s not like you have any hair yet!” she called to the sister who couldn’t hear her. “Come on, Bunny,” she muttered to herself, rinsing the razor clean. Hannah had been getting into her things more and more, slicking on lipstick and splashing on the Jean Naté that some boy had bought her in some town.

  They’d be leaving the park in the morning. Mary hadn’t yet told the owners, but the tourist season was nearly over; there was no longer any reason for them to keep her around. After she cleaned up the bathroom, she began packing. She had done it so many times and they had so wonderfully little, it was a mechanical act. They had clothes and shoes, they had sleeping bags and coats. Mary had makeup, a hairdryer, and some books that she kept. Hannah had Barbies and some stuffed animals. Their lives were containable and transportable. Home wasn’t a place.

  When their backpacks were packed and fully zipped, Mary set them beside the thin metal door of the trailer, then went to go find Hannah.

  It had been a dry summer so the grass was sparse—ragged yellowing clusters holding to the dry dirt. The park was starting to clear out, only cinder blocks and bare earth marking the spots vacated by the summer people’s RVs. Mary wondered if there was a place on the planet that didn’t have summer people.

  She walked to the small aboveground pool where she could usually find Hannah, taking the steps up to the wooden platform. Helen was in the water. Helen came up from outside Oklahoma City every summer. All day long, she’d glide from one end of the pool to the other like some huge pelagic mammal. “You looking for your sister, honey?” she asked, drawing closer to Mary like a surfacing walrus.

  Mary nodded, then she brought her hand to rub the back of her scalp. It had been hot in the trailer. “Have you seen her?”

  Helen reached the edge of the pool by Mary’s feet, turned and pushed off again, her pale thighs powering her off the wall. “I saw her walk by a little while ago,” she called behind her. “She was walking toward the fields.”

  “Thanks,” said Mary. She paused before heading back down the steps. “Have a good swim,” she called behind her.

  “You, too, honey,” replied Helen, as she absent-mindedly dunked underneath the water.

  The park was surrounded by thousands of acres of slender green stalks of corn. Mary and Hannah had walked in those fields a few times, their eyes following the lines of the plants up toward the blue sky above, knowing that they were concealed by the terrestrial. In another month or so, the combine harvesters would descend on that land like massive churning beasts, leaving nothing but yellow ankle-high husks.

  When Mary reached the field, she walked along its edge. Hannah was mad at her, as she had been more often lately. There were some kids at the park Hannah had become friends with. They would leave together when Mary started work and run in a pack all day long. Mary would see them at the pool, she’d see them at the playground, she’d see them sitting on the ground by the shady side of the trailer, their backs in the dirt, their heads on one another’s bellies. It was Hannah, another girl, and a boy. Hannah, Kim, and Shawn. Kim had left a week ago and Shawn, just the other day. The night he left, Mary had lain next to Hannah in bed and listened to her crying and fiercely wiping her eyes in the dark, letting out only nearly inaudible high-pitched whines. That was when Mary decided it was time to go, time to push on to the next place.

  It was getting close to suppertime, and Mary turned around and headed back to the park; Hannah would be getting hungry soon. She pushed open the door to the trailer, feeling the tinned warmth hit her. They kept the windows open, but the late afternoon was always insufferable. “Bunny!” she called from the threshold, not wanting to go inside. In reply, there was only silence. But on the floor, just beside the door in a neat little parallel, sat Hannah’s dingy white canvas sneakers. “Bunny, I know you’re home,” called Mary, kicking off her own shoes, feeling the dampness of her soles. “I see your Keds!”

  There was no real answer, but from the bedroom, Mary heard a muffled cry of frustration. It was just like Hannah to go to the trouble of hiding only to reveal herself with orderliness.

  Mary pushed into the bedroom, and her eyes scanned the empty room. “Where are you?” she asked.

  From below the bed where Mary and Hannah’s sleeping bags lay, Mary heard Hannah’s voice. “I’m not leaving.”

  “Bunny, come out from under there.”

  “No.”

  “Bunny . . . ,” Mary started. Then she got down on her belly and lay on the floor next to Hannah. With her hand in between her cheek and the worn industrial carpet, Mary looked at her sister. Hannah was facedown, resting her forehead against the back of her hand. Mary looked at the chipped and faded pink nail polish on Hannah’s fingers. Hannah had picked out the color earlier in the summer, and Mary had painted them for her. “Why are you hiding?”

  “I’m not leaving tomorrow. I don’t want to go.”

  “Summer’s done,” said Mary, her voice gentle. “Everyone’s leaving here soon. Your friends are already gone. Kim and Shawn are gone. There’s no reason to stay, Bunny.”

  Mary watched the side of Hannah’s face redden, watched her eyes tighten, listened to a high, steady whine come from t
he back of her throat. “Kim and Shawn had to go,” she said, her words an accusation. “They had to go to school.”

  “Bunny, what are you saying? You want to stay here and go to school with the eight farm kids who live here all year long? You want to live in an unheated trailer this winter?”

  Hannah sniffed and rubbed her eyes hard against her hand. “No,” she said, her face still down. “I want to go to a school like the one I used to go to.”

  Northton, on the few occasions it came up, was never mentioned by name. “We can’t go back there,” Mary said.

  Hannah finally turned to face her, the whites of her eyes shot with red, her lashes slick and moist. “Why?” she asked.

  “We just can’t.”

  And Hannah turned back to the floor. “I knew you’d say that.”

  For a long time, the Chase sisters lay next to each other in silence, Hannah under the bed, Mary on the floor beside it. They lay there as the sun began to sink, until the light through the window was yellow gold, until their hair was wet with sweat. They lay there as all the towns and all the time and all the boys since they left Northton took their turn in Mary’s mind. They lay there until Hannah spoke, her voice weak. “I don’t want to drive anymore, Mary.”

  Mary reached under the bed and put her hand on the back of Hannah’s head, feeling her damp curls, feeling the dip at the base of her skull. “I know, Bunny,” she said. “We don’t have to anymore. This’ll be the last time. I’m gonna find some place better for us. Some place where we can stay.”

  The next morning, they drove for hours before they reached the interstate, through endless stretches of corn that covered the Midwest like a landlocked sea. The only signs of humanity came by way of the occasional silo or farmhouse, silhouettes against the early-morning sky. They didn’t talk during the first stretch of that drive. And as Mary let her head rest against the seatback, she thought of the infinity of miles she had traveled in that truck. The Blazer that was still running due to minor miracles and boys who knew how to rebuild engines and change timing belts. Its passenger’s-side door didn’t open anymore, rust had eaten away a small hole in the floor of the truck bed, and the exterior was spray-painted a matte black, but the Blazer still ran.