At the very top of the narrow trail with its obstacle course of glacial erratics and old, nearly nude pines, part of the mountain had crumbled off into a sheer cliff, leaving a view that was worth the miles of hiking. Far below, small clearings were scattered here and there with cabins like dollhouses set neatly inside them, invisible from anywhere but this high above. The Susquehanna snaked around the town to where it swallowed Pine Creek, and on clear days the mountain ranges went on forever, disappearing into the distance like endless smoky blue waves.
Hannah had intended to spread Joel’s ashes from the edge of the mountain that day, to let him go and say goodbye. She’d opened the can and looked at the gray coarse sand and bits of bone that were all that was left of the only family she had, but standing there, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was the pieces of bone, the dirty, chunky reality of them that stopped her. A human being reduced to the contents of a can, not in a smooth, final way, but in a crumbly, uneven mess. Instead of a graceful cloud of ash drifting away on the breeze over the mountaintop, there would be bits and pieces tumbling down the endless cliff to be part of the dirt at the bottom. Hannah had screwed the cap back on and made her way down the mountain, heading back home in the fading light.
A tap of the brakes, a clunk of metal, and seconds later her life had changed so much she didn’t recognize herself.
6
“Okay then, I’ll just leave it on the porch again,” the voice called through the door. “The bill’s on it.”
Hannah held still until she heard the crunch of retreating footsteps and the delivery truck backing up and pulling away. Only then did she get up from the kitchen table and open the door to the front porch. She wouldn’t have bothered, but if she let the box of merlot sit outside in these temperatures too long it would freeze, and it was crappy enough wine to begin with.
Her bill was rolled up and jammed into the cardboard hole that was the handle; today there was a bright pink flyer stapled to it. Get Ready to Spring into Savings! it said, a childish clipart tulip between the heading and delivery price list. Huh.
Spring then. Time had drifted by unnoticed, and somehow in the haze of days she’d managed to entirely miss her birthday, the new year, and a few odd months on top of that.
There may have been some text messages and voicemails to mark the occasions, but Hannah didn’t recall. Everything had chittered by like stones skipped across water. A couple of cards in bright envelopes stood out like flags, shoved between the unopened bills and junk mail in the pile that threatened to spill off the counter and onto the kitchen floor, but she hadn’t opened any of them, just jammed them into the stack. It was only standing because it had grown large enough to touch the underside of the top cabinet.
Stuffing the wine in the fridge she slid back into her seat, still in a groggy haze from the medications that were supposed to help her sleep and keep the nightmares away. Were supposed to, but didn’t. Maybe she’d just stop taking them, with what little good they did. There had to be a notice somewhere in the stack of envelopes that her health insurance had lapsed—the prescriptions had started ringing up full price—so she probably wouldn’t be able to afford them much longer anyway.
The insurance bill was just one of many being crushed to death in the mountain of mail. She hadn’t worked since the accident, and at some point the publisher she edited for stopped sending her jobs. The lights were still on, so her bank account hadn’t dried up completely, but that was probably because she’d stopped paying almost everything but the bill for the Beer Barn.
Pushing aside a pile of old newspapers, Hannah stared at her laptop. When she wasn’t walking the woods, she was huddled at the table in the unkempt kitchen and scrolling through websites, looking for the face that consistently haunted her dreams. She looked over at the police sketch that still hung on the cork board. There was a cleft in his chin from the mug she had thrown at it. She found the look quite dashing.
Obituaries and crime reports, faces in crowds at accidents and rallies, until her eyes were sandy. When the actual news sites were thoroughly exhausted, she poked a finger into less reliable sources, delving into seedier stuff that gave her the urge to look over her shoulder, like she was about to be caught watching porn.
None of it was actually risqué—or at least the majority of it wasn’t. Some of it came disturbingly close to what she was looking for. Disappearing bodies and people who should be dead mysteriously walking around weren’t unheard of—if you were a conspiracy theorist or super-duper religious. But those sites were as near to familiar ground as she’d ever gotten, and something kept her from going too deep into that world. Maybe because there was an underlying fanaticism that hit a little too close to home. Some of these people sounded completely off the rails. What did that say about her?
Once, just once, she thought she’d really found him. In a grainy scan of a photo from a crime scene she caught a glimpse of a head far above the others, someone in the background of a crowd of spectators. Hannah had squinted, sure it was him, for a moment unable to breathe, turning blue while she dialed the phone.
“Sheriff Morgan, it’s Hannah. You’re not going to believe this but…” She’d let the phone slide out of her hand and back to the table with a clunk. She’d read the caption under the photo.
It had been taken outside the home of a serial killer from the 1960s. Maybe it was a relative? It had to be, he looked so similar. She examined it from every possible angle, made every adjustment she could to the low-resolution image. Hannah even tried to contact the newspaper, which turned out to be long-since defunct—big surprise there—and the photographer had died in 1978. In the end she’d ignored the phone when the sheriff called back and had tacked the image up on the board with the rest of the dead ends.
Shaking her head to clear it, coming back to the present, Hannah repeated a familiar mantra in her head. He doesn’t exist. If he was real you would have found him, dead or alive. That man you think you see but can’t ever catch—it’s because he isn’t there. No one else believes because there’s nothing to believe. You made him up.
And a tiny, even less welcome voice chimed in after it.
You’re sick. Sick in the head. That’s the explanation that makes the most sense. Accept it and it will all be over. You’ll stop seeing him when you admit he was never there.
Some days one of the voices resonated, sometimes both. Some days it was nothing at all. Today was one of those days.
Hannah just couldn’t let go of it, couldn’t accept that her mind might be so badly damaged it had created such a detailed false reality. How could she have created an event and a person so real that even though none of what happened made sense, she couldn’t accept that it hadn’t been real.
She let out a sigh, exhaling a plume of white. Spring might be coming, but it wasn’t here yet, not by a long shot. It was still miserably cold, the way the end of February here always was, making you question whether warm weather would really ever come. The sun that managed to fight its way through her window was murky gray and carried no warmth with it, and she shivered.
“Wine would have been frozen inside today.” She heaved herself out of her chair and went into the living room. The little plastic toggle that operated the thermostat moved when she nudged it with her index finger, but there was no familiar click and rumble of the furnace trundling itself to life. Hannah went down into the ancient stacked stone cellar where the boiler sat wreathed in cobwebs, and brushed the film of dust off the gauge on the tank. Seeing it buried below empty didn’t surprise her. Having it filled hadn’t been a priority.
Back up the stairs, she paused at the top and watched her breath puff out white in front of her, then yanked the string hanging from the bare bulb in irritation, swearing when it broke off in her hand. Shrugging on a coat, she sat back down at the table, pulling the worn collar up around her ears. It still smelled like her uncle, retaining ghostly scents of old leather and coffee. She wished he was here.
Wh
at would you make of all this, Uncle Joel? she wondered. Would you be sitting here, freezing to death because you hit someone with your car and they disappeared? Even if you were sure it wasn’t a tree or an animal, could you convince yourself that somehow you blocked it out, replaced it with something else inside your head. What would you have done? At what point would you have just accepted it and moved on?
She didn’t know. She wouldn’t ever know what he thought again.
I wouldn’t have sat there and frozen to death, a small voice that sounded like his whispered inside her head. Hannah Cirric, get the hell up, the voice said a little more loudly. Now that sounded more like him.
“What’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?” she said out loud. It sounded strange in her tomb of a house where there was only ever silence. Great, now she was answering the voices in her head.
Get the hell up.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
But she got up.
She only paused in the mudroom for a knit hat and work gloves before she braced herself and stepped out into the yard.
The woodpile was buried under a crust of iced-over snow. Hannah scraped off the large, round section of tree she used for a chopping block, stood up a short section of log, and hitched the heavy axe, praying that everything wasn’t so frozen she’d bounce the blade through one of her legs. God she was out of shape; it felt like she was lifting a cinder block.
She took a breath, hitched the axe up again, then brought it around, the sharpened head whistling as it cut through the air. The section split neatly in half and she tipped one of the halves up and split it again, quartering it down to size so it would fit in the stove. She propped up another, then another. Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades and she shed the coat, flinging it aside onto the snow where it landed splayed like a sad brown snow angel. When she was gasping for breath she buried the axe in the block with a crack that echoed around the snowy yard. Scooping up as much split wood as she could carry, she wheezed her way to the door.
The kitchen wood stove was an ornery black dinosaur that had been in the house longer than she had been alive. It protested its age by being next to impossible to light, especially when fed unopened mail and pieces of empty wine box. The cold, uncured firewood that should have been split and stacked months ago didn’t help, but after blowing and pleading, the flames finally took. She left the grate open and plopped down on the slate in front of the stove, hands outstretched toward the warmth.
The fire cracked and popped while she sat, and little by little it grew, until the frigid air around it was steaming. It was snapping and roaring by the time she was finally warm enough to move. Hannah used the wire coil of the door handle to carefully close it and groaned her way to her feet.
When she spun around to warm her back, the coffee maker on the counter stared at her and she swallowed. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she used it, and for once the thought of a warm drink didn’t instantly give her the phantom taste of rot and blood in her mouth that soured her stomach and killed her appetite. Instead, she could almost feel the coffee warming her from the inside out, and taste the hot bitterness, cut with just a little bit of milk to tame the acidity.
Rummaging through the cupboards, she pushed aside boxes and canning jars until she found the sadly crumbled remains of a bag of grounds; there was maybe enough for two stingy cups. She gagged and almost changed her mind when she saw the mold farm growing on the old grounds in the top of the machine. Dumping them into the sink for lack of room in the overflowing garbage can, she rinsed them down, then scrubbed out the filter and pot tolerably well.
It smelled glorious. While the pitiful pot brewed, she opened the refrigerator. No milk, no cream, pretty much no anything, except some ketchup in an interesting shade of brown and a box of wine trailing a sticky stream of red from the spigot to the bottom of the refrigerator. A search of the mostly barren pantry produced a single dusty can of evaporated milk. It would do, probably.
Suddenly she laughed out loud. It was a bizarre sound here, where there hadn’t been anything like it in so long. It had just come out when she’d looked at the date on the can.
Expiration dates are only a suggestion. That’s exactly what you would have said if you were here, Joel. She could almost hear his voice saying it.
He would have been right; the canned milk wasn’t going to kill her, though by normal standards it was probably an awful cup of coffee. To her, it tasted amazing. She poured the last drop into her cup and added another slop of the milk, then wrapped her hands around the ceramic mug.
Hannah sipped thoughtfully, staring at the steady drip from the kitchen faucet. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her stomach tightened and growled audibly. It took her a moment to place the sensation; she didn’t remember the last time she’d actually felt hunger.
Little by little, on those rare occasions when she both remembered to eat and could get past the terrible taste in her mouth, she had picked her way through the carefully labeled glass mason jars of spiced peaches, pie filling, apple rings, and the dill and bread and butter pickles. After that she had made her way through the odd jars of things like sauerkraut, bean salad, and relish, the back-of-the-cupboard, old-lady concoctions put up to avoid wasting what grew in the garden. Waste not, want not—she’d heard it a million times growing up, but she had made the preserves without ever actually planning to eat chow-chow or pickled watermelon rind.
She was never going to be hungry enough to eat the pickled watermelon rind, but miracle of miracles, there was a quart jar of applesauce hiding behind a crumpled box of pasta. Hannah pried off the lid with the edge of a spoon, releasing the vacuum with a pop. Nearly half the jar was gone before she came up for air, sticky sweetness dripping down her chin. Sighing, she let the spoon fall into the jar with a clunk and set it down on the table.
For a few minutes she stared at the bulletin board, at the black and white sketch. Her mind began to slide back into its usual rut: see his face, remember the accident, try to convince herself to accept something else, give up, repeat.
Today, though, she didn’t quite slide. Maybe it was the coffee or the activity, but something had changed. Nothing was tangibly different, but somehow there was the tiniest sliver, a thin icicle down her spine that poked at her and made her move. With a great effort, she pushed herself back in her chair and stood up.
Sliding her feet into her boots, Hannah sucked in a deep breath and threw open the door. It was still and crisp outside. The sun had managed to cut its way though the clouds and was blindingly bright against the layer of clean, white snow. Closing her eyes and resisting the urge to turn around and go back inside, she let the cold air wash her lungs clear of the funk of indoors and woodsmoke. Then she started walking.
Hannah was sweaty and out of breath by the time she topped the last small rise before Main Street. Coat unzipped and flapping open in the breeze, she covered the last couple of blocks into town more slowly, walking carefully down the uneven sidewalk that passed the smattering of buildings.
First she passed a faded flower shop that had never been open in the time she’d lived in the area, its for-sale sign swinging at an angle on a single rusty length of chain. Next, a duplex house, one side well kept with neatly swept front steps, the other side with a child’s blanket hung askew in the window as a curtain. After that came the gas station with its dirty windows and rusty, cock-eyed sign.
She trudged on for a few more blocks, past the nicer houses and the hardware store. Passing the mental health office she kept her middle fingers tucked in her pockets and frowned at the glass door. Maybe they should put her name on it, since she’d paid for it. She finally crossed the two empty lanes and walked through the small parking lot of the Shur Shop just shy of the center of town.
“Welcome to Shur Shop,” a tired-sounding greeter called out. Hannah ducked past him, head down. Inside the store it seemed overly warm and unnecessarily bright. There were only six or seven aisle
s in the store, compared to the much larger, more popular Giant Foods on the other side of town, and she registered with discomfort how busy the store was despite being the worst place in town to shop. A glance at her phone confirmed her suspicion that it was Saturday.
Slinging a red plastic shopping basket over her arm, she dodged a woman with a carseat balanced on the handle of her cart and a sugared-up toddler jumping up and down beside it. Hannah skirted the old ladies blocking the way while they squeezed wan, off-season tomatoes, and made her way quickly down the next aisle. Tossing coffee, a bag of pretzels, some pasta, and whatever else crossed her path on top of each other, the basket got heavy quickly and she headed for the checkout with her sad haul. She was near the limit of what she could carry home, small, nutritionally void selection that it was.
“Hannah, is that you?”
She jumped at the voice, losing her grip on one of the plastic handles, the box of rigatoni hitting the floor before she could right the basket. Sheriff Morgan picked up the box and balanced it back in her basket. He was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read in the second before she looked down at the linoleum.
“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of you in some time. You doing okay?”
She mumbled something with embarrassment and started to walk away, the memory of her walk of shame out of the station rushing back, reddening her cheeks.
His big meaty hand caught her shoulder. He wasn’t in uniform for the first time in her experience, the sweatshirt over the crisply ironed jeans making the whole situation seem more surreal.
“You take care, girl. Good to see you out and about. I mean it.”
Hannah couldn’t meet his eyes or stand the pity in his voice. She shrugged out from under his hand and toward the checkout.
All the foot tapping in the world didn’t make the line she was in move any more quickly. Hannah looked over at the other open checkout, which had a line twice as long. Sweet, white-haired, arthritic Betty was behind the counter, which explained the backup. Betty was the soul of kindness but not the speediest operator, so Hannah kept her place. She jiggled impatiently through a price check on condoms for a red-faced teenager, finally getting her basket to the conveyor and unloading it.
Echoes (Book 1): Echoes Page 5