The Air We Breathe

by Christa Parrish

  Help me, Gee.

  She scrunched her eyes shut, opened one with the tiniest slit, seeing blurry faces through her eyelashes. She opened her lid a little wider, focusing on each face. Shook her head.

  She didn’t recognize anyone.

  “That’s okay, sweetie. You did fine,” the detective said. He went back to the office with Susan, and Hanna heard her mother’s raised, frustrated voice and the placating tones of the police officer. Hanna picked the marshmallows from her bowl, pressing her pointer finger into each wet clover and diamond and rainbow; they stuck, and she licked them into her mouth.

  The front door opened and closed, then her father’s study door. The blue numbers on the microwave changed—first five minutes passing, then ten. Hanna left the soggy cereal on the table and went to her bedroom. She lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Eventually her mother would be in to check on her. How long that would take, she didn’t know. Every day the space between her and Susan grew. Her mother hated the silence, couldn’t bake enough cookies and deadhead enough perennials to make the hours go by fast enough. Hanna—her wordlessness, her phobias—kept Susan a prisoner in her own home.

  Hanna covered her eyes with her forearm, pinching a nerve somewhere in her shoulder. Her fingers went numb first, and then the pins and needles began marching their way up her hand, past her wrist, her elbow.

  Finally her mother came in and said, “Get your sneaks on, baby.”

  She had to use her other arm to lift the numb one off her head; it flopped like one of those rubber chickens magicians sometimes have. Well, at least the comic ones.

  Hanna reached out with her big toe and kicked at her sneakers—white with a green swoosh and tied with green glitter laces. She had yet to wear them out of the house. Her mother had bought them on clearance, a seventy-dollar pair for fifteen, and had pulled them out of the storage bin soon after Hanna returned from the hospital, hoping they would entice Hanna to walk outside. Susan was a fiendish bargain shopper, even though it had never been a financial necessity.

  Hanna’s mother looked looser as she came into the room, all the tiny, tense muscles in her body suddenly letting down their guard. Her face sagged a bit more; her shoulders fell forward. She tried smiling as she picked up Hanna’s sneakers. “Come on. It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Let’s take a walk around the block, okay?”

  Hanna didn’t want to go outside and considered dropping in a heap at the front door as she’d done on other occasions her mother wanted her to leave the house. But something in her mother’s eyes made her pause—caged-animal look. Hanna had seen it before when her second grade class had taken a trip to a local animal show and the tiger paced back and forth in its enclosure, bumping against the bars and snorting.

  If she didn’t go willingly, she knew her mother would drag her out.

  Kin. She’s kin to me.

  She loved that word. Kin. So tidy and easy to say; she didn’t have to move her mouth at all, just give her tongue a little flick and breathe out. They’d been reading a book of Greek myths in Ms. Watt’s class and come across the word in a story. “That means family,” the teacher had said. Hanna wrote the word on a strip of paper and folded it into her pocket, along with squeamish and cyclops. And after a week of Hanna calling all her relatives kin this and kin that, her mother had finally said, “Cut it out. You’re driving me nuts with your Little House on the Prairie talk.”

  Hanna decided she owed her mother something for taking care of her, so she took the sneakers from her mother’s outstretched hands, placed them carelessly over her toes, and shook them around to settle them on her feet. One fell back to the carpet. Sighing, Susan finished putting on her shoes and told her to hop off the bed, and they both put on windbreakers and stepped onto the front porch.

  It felt big outside, the cool air swirling around Hanna, and she imagined little parts of herself floating away in all different directions, like hundreds of balloons released into the sky. The whole first grade did that once, all the kids tying notes to the ribbons, each hoping his or her balloon would drop into the backyard of some faraway child. Hanna had watched the colors spreading away from one another, getting smaller and smaller as the breeze carried them off above the clouds, no longer visible.

  Feeling a panic rising up in her, she grabbed on to the wooden ball on the porch railing; it came off in her hand. She dropped it, clutched the railing itself, afraid to be lifted away.

  “Come on,” her mother said, taking her other hand. She tugged Hanna down the two steps, and they made their way around the block, Susan mostly leading her, pulling her along. It was one of those times when Hanna had no juice in her and just wanted to stand still and let the world spin around her, ignoring her. Other times all the fight exploded all over, in spitting and scratching and tears.

  If she closed her eyes and looked inside herself, she could imagine every feeling inside her as a little person, those naked, plastic troll dolls, a different color hair for each—orange for anger, blue for sadness, red for pain, pink for happiness, green for something she couldn’t quite put a name to—and they took turns popping in and out of their holes at the strangest moments, making her jump in surprise. Hanna had no control over them, couldn’t choose which troll to let out and which to hold down. She just had to wait and hope the good ones came and the bad ones didn’t, even though Dr. Diane said none of them were bad.

  Dirt smudged her sneakers. Hanna licked her fingers and bent over to wipe the brown marks away.

  As they walked, her mother babbled, filling Hanna’s silence with grocery lists and random childhood memories, asking questions without pausing for answers. They managed to get around the entire block, and when they returned to their house, Susan waved to Mrs. Davis across the street.

  Every time Hanna saw her, she remembered the time her mother had fainted and fallen down the stairs. She’d been six at the time, and Susan, pregnant. Hanna had run across the street to Mrs. Davis’s house, forgetting to look both ways, pounding on the door until the elderly woman finally opened up and, after listening to Hanna, called 9-1-1. She kept Hanna as the ambulance took Susan away, fed her meatballs and Heavenly Hash and tucked her into a musty-smelling bed in the back of the house.

  Her father had brought her mother home three days later with no baby and two Beanie Babies for Hanna, who didn’t tell them she already had those same ones.

  “I’ll make you a grilled cheese sandwich,” Susan said, opening the front door and nudging Hanna through. “You want tomato? I don’t think we have any. There’s ham, though. I’ll make grilled cheese and ham, okay?”

  Still talking, Susan buttered bread and dropped it into the huge cast-iron pan she always kept on the stove. She narrated each step—“I’m adding the cheese now. Two slices or three? Yes, three. I’ll split the top piece in half so all the cheese is even. Two pieces of ham? Okay, you got it”—and Hanna wondered if she needed to run across the street again. Then her mother dropped the spatula in the pan and turned, stared at her. “Say something. Please just say something.”

  Hanna wished she had one of her words in her pocket now, and that she could take it out and read it and make her mother happy. Instead she stood there, staring back, trying to talk with her eyes. Susan went to her, fell to her knees, and wrapped her arms around Hanna’s waist, squeezing until it hurt. Her head jammed against Hanna’s middle, she started to cry, and all Hanna could think of was her mother’s head pushing through her skin, into her stomach, the tears rinsing all the dirtiness away. And Hanna saw her mother hadn’t colored her hair recently, brown roots on either side of the part. She touched the place where the dark and light met, the line dividing happiness and sadness, a time before Hanna knew the difference between the two, and a time after.

  Susan pulled away, took Hanna’s hands and kissed them. Stood.

  “I think I burned your sandwich,” she said. “Let me make you another.”

  And Hanna sat the table, waiting for her lunch.

  9


  CLAIRE

  SEPTEMBER 2002

  The playground pulsed with streaks of green and gold and blue, children running from monkey bars to slides, laughing, crying, jabbing shovels in the wood chips beneath the equipment. Claire huddled in the midmorning sun as Heidi bumbled behind her chubby-legged grandson, Landon scooting away from her with all the enthusiasm of a two-year-old each time she tickled his ribs with a gentle poke. “I’m gonna get you,” she said, and the toddler squealed, grinning as if nothing mattered except his grandmother’s attention.

  Claire watched the scene uncensored, allowing all her envy and anger and sadness to pool low inside her, in the empty place between her hipbones; the emotional soup swished with each Landon giggle, and finally she said, “Enough.” The young girl on the swing beside Claire’s bench looked up from the pile of chips she’d built with her sandaled feet.

  “I think I’m getting too old for this,” Heidi said, dropping next to her. Neither she nor Claire had mentioned the Andrew Brenneman incident again, but both knew all was forgiven.

  With the side of her hand Claire tucked her skirt between her legs until it looked as though she wore pants. “You’ll say that until Meghan leaves with him, and then you’ll be lost.”

  “You got me,” Heidi said. “Are you okay? You look—”

  “Tired. Just tired. I didn’t sleep all that great last night.”

  “Any reason in particular?”

  “No,” Claire said, meaning yes. Meaning always. Meaning I can’t tell you because you’re happily running around with your grandson and I’m alone.

  After their years of friendship, Heidi knew not to believe her; she opened her mouth and in went the breath of question beginnings, but Landon came and, gripping his grandmother’s first two fingers, tugged her off the bench. “More,” he said, dragging Heidi to the bottom of the twisty slide to wait for him. She stood there, waiting for him, and when he came down she caught him, whispered something in his ear. He went running to the sandbox and waved for her to come. She did.

  Beside her, Claire sensed the slightest sense of motion and saw the young girl still looking at her, the swing quivering from the child’s weight suspended there. Her white-blond hair puffed out from a purple plastic headband, the kind Amelia had complained pinched behind her ears, and her skin seemed almost translucent, as if it hadn’t been seen by the sun in a long time.

  Claire didn’t think it odd she wasn’t in school, though the girl looked at least ten, maybe eleven, and strangely familiar—she had homeschooled her own children and often took them out midmorning but doubted that was the case here. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find the girl was battling some sort of long illness. She had a frailty about her, a glassiness. Perhaps she was too weak to pump the swing.

  “Can I push you?”

  The girl looked over her shoulder, to a woman who stood perhaps ten feet away, speaking to another woman, gesticulating, eyes wet, mascara smudged at the corners. Then the girl nodded. Claire stood but not wanting to put her hands on the girl from behind, she stood in front of her, took the chain in each hand, low, where it met the rubber seat, and gently pulled forward. The swing rocked back and forth, and the girl held out her legs, straight, so Claire could push the bottom of her feet. She used to swing Caden like that, listening to the same squeaky rhythm of the chain in the metal eyehooks, the same light thud against the palms of her hands. Suddenly the girl leaned back as far as she could go, eyes closed, hair dragging on the ground, and Claire didn’t touch her. After three passes, she sat up again, skidding her feet through the mulch to stop.

  “Your necklace,” the girl said, voice brittle. Uncertain.

  Claire touched the crystal cross she wore every day beneath her clothing, dropped it back into her shirt. It must have fallen loose when she bent over to start the swing. “My son gave it to me.”

  “I saw one like that before.”

  “In the store?”

  “On TV.” The late-morning light revealed fine, nearly transparent hairs on the girl’s legs; her face was expressionless. “It hurts you.”

  “What does? The cross?”

  “When you say about your son.”

  Claire squeezed the cross now, feeling it prick her palm. The nails. His nails. “How do you . . . ?” She stopped, and then in a moment of confusion and defeat, of transparency that seemed to descend on her, coming from outside her body, said, “Yes.”

  “My mom,” the girl said, cool blue irises flickering toward the woman with the smeared makeup, “looks at me like that, too.”

  “Hanna?” The woman crossed to the swing in heavy, defensive steps. “What’s going on? What did you say?”

  The girl lowered her head.

  “You said something. I heard you. I know I heard you.” When her daughter didn’t respond, she moved in toward Claire, desperate, seeking—she, too, seeming vaguely familiar. “What did she say to you?”

  “She asked about my necklace,” Claire said, not intending to lie, not really. But the little girl didn’t seem to want her mother to know her words, and Claire felt the same. What had been exchanged between them went inexplicably deeper than a handful of short sentences about some ugly cross Caden saved for to buy with his own money, one she wore every day because it came from him. She’d told him she wore it under her shirt so it could stay against her heart, and he liked that answer.

  In all honestly she hadn’t wanted anyone seeing the tacky pink crystals, recognizing it from the late-night infomercial declaring it somehow special—holy, even—because one could peer into the secret center window and read the Lord’s Prayer.

  Again, she felt pressed down upon from . . . above? The situation before her had a weight she didn’t understand.

  “Who are you? Why are you near her?” the woman demanded, her earlier fear now anger.

  “I was just sitting here,” Claire said. She took a step away, the back of her knee bumping the bench. “I asked if your daughter wanted a push. She said yes. That’s all.”

  The woman dug through her green leather bag, flipped out her cell phone. “Don’t move.” Claire thought she might call the police, but after dialing, she said, “Dr. Flinchbaugh,” and waited, pulling at her eyebrows and blowing the tiny hairs from her fingers. A tinny mumble came through the phone, and the woman said, “She talked.”

  More distant words Claire couldn’t make out.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say it to me,” the woman said, then, after listening a moment, held the phone out. “Here.”

  Claire looked at it. “I don’t—”

  “Take it.”

  She did, wiping her hand over the keys and screen to clear away the smeary makeup residue, the sweat. “Hello?”

  “I’m Diane Flinchbaugh. Hanna’s therapist. And you are?”

  “Uh, I’m Claire. Claire Rodriguez.”

  “Mrs. Suller said Hanna spoke to you.”

  “She didn’t say much.”

  “Not much is everything. Hanna hasn’t said a word in four months.”

  And then Claire remembered why the little girl looked so familiar. Her photo had been on the front page of the newspaper, along with the story of how she’d seen her father gunned down in that bank robbery downtown and then was taken and held for two weeks. The mother had been on television, pleading for her daughter’s return, her hair blond and perfectly smooth, her clothes chic, her hips thin. And Claire had passed judgment, unable to understand how someone in such torment could look so good.

  She had hacked three inches of dead ends from her hair last week after years without attention, and most of her “skinny” clothes had long since been donated to the community center, though she held on to some of them—the ones with meaning—in the off chance that someday she’d pull herself together long enough to diet back down into them.

  Most women wanted back into their pre-children sizes; she’d have given anything to be able to fit into the pants she’d worn when Caden first rode a two-wheeler,
or the sweatshirt she had tied around her waist when Amelia said her first sentence. She looked nothing like she did when her identity wound around the words mother and wife.

  And Claire could now see this woman up close, hiding behind her flowing silk, wide-necked blouse, her canary yellow peep-toe skimmers, her manicured fingernails and toenails. She had the look Claire recognized, of someone whose world had imploded and there were no pieces large enough left to pick up and try to fit back together. Only dust.

  “Ms. Rodriguez?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I need to know what Hanna said to you. Her exact words, the best you can recall them.”

  Claire hesitated again. The little girl sat unmoving on the swing, startlingly so. Not a muscle tremored; her chest seemed neither to rise nor fall. She fixed one unblinking eye on Claire, the other buried deep beneath her bangs. “I’m not sure she wants me to say.”

  Silence on the other end of the line, and then, “I understand. Would you be willing to come and see me?”

  “I suppose,” Claire mumbled. She didn’t like it, the feeling of being dragged into their situation. A traumatized kid. That meant drama. Pain. She’d had enough of that already.

  “Hanna’s next appointment is tomorrow at ten. I’ll put you through to Barbara. She’ll give you directions.”

  She waited on the line; the secretary prattled off street names and traffic lights, and Claire pretended to pay attention, giving the appropriate uh-huhs when needed, planning to look the address up on the computer later. She closed the phone and held it out to the woman, who took it, squeezed it.

  Then the woman gathered Hanna against her, arm around the girl’s shoulders, and lifted her from the swing. “C’mon, baby,” she said, leading her away, Hanna’s rigid body propping up her own. She strapped her daughter into the middle seat of a Windstar van, slid the door closed and turned back toward the playground. But she was too far away for Claire to make out her expression, her face a flat, pale thumbprint in the distance.