The Air We Breathe

by Christa Parrish

  When they first moved to Dorsett Island, Louise had tried to make it a home, a new start. She painted all the paneled walls a pale, cheery yellow, purchased bold art prints and hung them in every room, and made real dinners almost every night—meat loaf, baked macaroni and cheese, spaghetti with buttery garlic bread.

  During the off-season they’d done school in the office between the lobby and their apartment, with the museum sign turned to Open—Molly working through her first encounters with Pythagoras, her mother listening for the telltale cackle on the rare occasion someone came through the door. In the summers, Louise worked the counter and Molly kept the candy stocked or gave brochures to those who wanted them, never far from Louise’s watchful eye.

  They’d laughed at their disastrous attempts in wax working. They remembered, sometimes, Molly’s father, and Molly would find her mother squinting through wet eyes at the only photo she had of him, a small, fading candid shot taken during one of their camping trips that Louise had cut to fit her wallet.

  It had only been since autumn that things had begun to crumble, like a preserved moth specimen, wings shedding crumbs of chitin each time it was touched, no matter how delicately. Louise’s headaches increased in frequency, about one a week now, and when she wasn’t in bed she was redecorating the living room or making grand plans to improve the museum.

  Distraction had always been Louise’s most trusted escape route, and Molly, for her part, also retreated into her own spaces. She daydreamed about Tobias, hope and impossibility mixing into a sludge of depression. She felt time pressing down on her, and the uncertainty that had been there all along grew more dense as it was squeezed into the short weeks until he left for Cornell. The pressure made her irritable and choked off her mother’s attempts to reconnect; she snapped at Louise more, spent more time in her bedroom or the museum.

  After dinner—Mick eventually goaded Molly to eat half a breast, and she picked apart a biscuit, too—Louise pulled all the board games out of the cupboard under the television and she and Mick debated what to play. She wanted Trivial Pursuit, he Pictionary. “Moll, you decide,” her mother said, and she told them she’d rather just watch a movie. So Louise stuck a disc into the player and snuggled under Mick’s arm, her feet folded up on the cushions and pressed against Molly’s legs, his on the rattan chest they used as a coffee table. Molly crooked her arm and rested her head in it, falling asleep to Tommy Lee Jones chasing Harrison Ford on the screen.

  She woke on the couch, covered with the quilt from her bed, neck stiff. Louise hummed from the kitchenette area, the water in the sink running. Molly stretched, her breastbone cracking. She smelled bacon. Uncle Mick must have brought it; it hadn’t been in the refrigerator yesterday.

  “Morning,” her mother said, coming out to sit next to her. “I tried to wake you last night, but you were zonked.”

  “I guess.”

  Louise reached under the blanket and started to rub Molly’s feet.

  Not ready for her mother’s attention, Molly squirmed and said, “I’ll get dressed, get out to the desk.”

  “Wait,” Louise said, tightening her grip on Molly’s feet.

  She looked at her mother. “Okay.”

  “Mick asked me to marry him.”

  “I thought he was married.”

  “His divorce finalized in August. We’ve been talking about it . . . for a while.” With her thumb Louise twisted the new ring on her finger. Her other hand was still under the blanket. “What do you think?”

  “What am I supposed to think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You already said yes.”

  “But I’m still asking.”

  Molly closed her eyes, focused on her mother’s touch, now at her ankles, a little above. “I don’t know.”

  “He wants us to move in with him.”

  Her chest tightened. “When?”

  “Whenever we want. Soon.”

  “Before the wedding?”

  “We’re not having a wedding—just going to the JP.” Louise closed one eye, her fingers plucking at her skin, seeking lashes that weren’t there. She’d pulled them all out a long time ago. “So probably in the next month or so.”

  “What about the museum?”

  “Mick will find someone. Or, there’s another option. I thought . . . well, that you might want to stay here.”

  “Alone?”

  “You’re eighteen. And, you know, I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be living with Mick and me. That maybe you’d be ready for your own place. Mick would still pay you, and we’d hire more help in the summer. I know you’ve been talking about online college. You’d have time to do that, and I’d be close. I mean, what am I going to do all day? I’d probably be here more than there.”

  I don’t think you can leave this place, Molly translated. I’ll bring you groceries each week, and check in on you, and make sure you’re still breathing. I’d rather pretend it’s about you growing up than deal with the fact I’ve let this go on too long.

  “Do you not want me to come?”

  “Of course not, Molly. It was just an idea. If you come, Mick will find somebody else to work the place. If you want to stay, well . . . Whatever you decide.”

  She wanted to stay. A half hour away sounded like halfway around the world. What would she do there, anyway? Take some online courses. Clean the house. Stare out windows. Disappear. In all the years they’d been on the island, neither of them had considered what came next. Now next bore down on them, the square headlights of a speeding car in the darkness, and Louise’s idea was her only way of lunging out of its path. Avoid, avoid, avoid. They were so skilled at it; that was where all things began. Never how do we handle this?, but how can we fold ourselves up small enough so it won’t be there anymore?

  “What have you told him?” she whispered.

  Louise tugged at her new ring. “Everything.”

  Molly shook off the blanket, stood, the tender time between them swallowed up by reality. It had a way of doing that, consuming each moment of her life that resembled a bit of the past, a scrap of the before.

  “I need to think about it,” she said.

  Her mother strode toward the kitchen, stopped, left hand gripping the molding. She didn’t turn around. “Take as long as you need.”

  So Molly went the other way, into her bedroom, blown there by Louise’s words. She was held hostage, not by her inability to go outside but by her failure to get the things within her to the outside. Guilt. Shame. Hurt. Anger. Fear. Her emotions bloated her so much now she could no longer fit through the front door.

  She dug her Bible out from under her pillow. It was the last thing she looked at before switching off the light clipped to her headboard. She didn’t have a nightstand, and it didn’t seem right to put it on the floor, so she slept on it at night. She didn’t want to read it now but opened to the title page and read the inscription:

  God says, “Thou shall not steal.”

  But we want you to take this book!!!!!

  It can change your life. If it does, let us know, please.

  Write to P.O. Box 1286, Colorado Springs, CO 80906

  Molly had stared at those words for years. The penmanship looked, to her, like teen print—a girl’s, maybe thirteen or fourteen, still trying to find her place through the letters she wrote, forming each a with a fancy curl and each exclamation point with a star instead of a dot—enough flourish to set her apart from everyone else out there. There was more there, perhaps a name, scribbled out under blue-black permanent marker. Molly had been twelve when she found the book in the drawer of a hotel, smuggled it out of the room with a sense of deceit, even though the previous owner had apparently given her permission.

  Maybe God still considered it stealing. She didn’t know.

  She thought about the person who left it. She’d written many letters, probably once a month, and kept them all, though now she couldn’t imagine sending any of them. Once she’d addressed an envelope and snu
ck a stamp from Louise’s desk, but she chickened out. So whenever she wrote a new one, she folded the letter into the envelope and carried it around with her in the Bible, using it as a bookmark, until she wrote another, and then she’d trade them out, adding the old one to the growing pile she kept in a folder labeled English in her backpack.

  Sometimes she looked back through the letters. The first ones were tentative, a few lines of formality. Hello. I found your Bible and took it. Thank you for leaving it for me. I really like reading it and I love God, too. As she got older, and as she imagined the person—a girl, she was certain—who left the Bible growing older, as well, her letters became more like a living journal, and the girl became a friend. Her only friend, outside of the wax figures, before Tobias.

  She wrote about what she’d read and why it touched her spirit, about her mother and the arguments they had, about her schoolwork, her job at the museum, and the strange tourists who came through in the summer. She wondered if the Bible leaver might have ever vacationed on Dorsett Island, if they had seen each other and not known it.

  Her mother told her stories like that, about how she and Molly’s father, as children, went every year to the same Brooklyn restaurant for Mother’s Day dinner because it had been a favorite of both their grandmothers. They were sure they’d seen each other then, at some point, before they ever met. Louise said her mother had complained about the noisy family with six kids, which described Molly’s father and his siblings. In a borough of two million people, it seemed rather serendipitous. At least Louise thought so. Molly called it romantic.

  Lately she sometimes mentioned Tobias when she wrote. She asked the girl questions about her life, too. And, on occasion, she wrote about the past, telling things she’d never told anyone else before—well, not anyone living. Though in a way, the Bible pen pal was no more real than the wax figures.

  She opened her spiral notebook and tore out a page, stared at the blue lines, like veins, there to hold the life of the letter. The words. But she didn’t have anything to say.

  12

  HANNA

  OCTOBER 2002

  “I want to go into a church.”

  Her mother looked at her, sparse brows wrinkled together. She still seemed startled when Hanna spoke, as if trying to connect the voice to the girl before her. “Okay. It’s nice today again. When we take our walk, we can stop at St. Catherine’s. It’s open every day.”

  “No. Claire’s church.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do.”

  “Baby, I don’t know where that church is.”

  “Call her.”

  “Do you have her number? I don’t.”

  Hanna sifted through the basket on the stool beneath the phone, a narrow oak seat that doubled as an ironing board. Her mother had bought it at a craft fair when her father was still alive, even though he told her she’d never use it. He’d been right. It sat under the telephone and collected things, like mail and laundry that needed to be put away but her mother didn’t want to carry up the stairs at that moment, and screws or little plastic pieces Susan could no longer match to what they went to, but kept anyway, just in case.

  Hanna thought about how her mother had changed since that day. Some days she tore through the house, scrubbing doorknobs and beating the dust from all the drapes. She baked her healthy carrot cookies and canned salsa after buying pounds of tomatoes from the farmers’ market, and rearranged the furniture in the family room. Other days she sulked and slept, piled mail on the table and ignored it, left the laundry in the washing machine wet and then had to rewash it when she went looking for a pair of jeans days later because it smelled of mold. Those were the dull days, and they had become more frequent than the go-getter days.

  And Hanna knew it was all her fault.

  She pulled the phone book out of the basket. “Here.”

  Susan crossed her arms. “I don’t know her last name.”

  Hanna did. Dr. Diane had said it twice in front of her. She opened the phone book somewhere in the middle, the coupon section, pages of green-bordered deals on haircuts and carpet steaming. Leafing backward, the pages rustling like leaves, she found the R section.

  “Rodriguez, Claire.”

  “We’ve bothered her enough, Hanna.”

  Hanna thought about that. When Claire came to the appointment yesterday, she didn’t say much of anything, but neither did Hanna. Dr. Diane kept trying to get Hanna to talk, but she didn’t want to, not to the therapist. Not that she didn’t like Dr. Diane. All she kept thinking of was Gee. No. Jesus. She’d hoped Claire would have taken her for ice cream again, but Claire didn’t mention it. Hanna didn’t think it was because she was feeling bothered, though.

  “I’ll call.”

  “No. Give me that.” Susan took the book, and it flopped closed, the right page disappearing into all the wrong ones. Her mother thumbed the edges and set the phone book on the table, opened to the ROB-ROT page. Dialed. “Ms. Rodriguez, please excuse us for bothering you. This is Susan Suller. Hanna’s mother. Hanna was wondering if we might attend church with you tomorrow, but we understand if that is inconvenient, or if you wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. If you want, you can call us back at 266-9083. Thank you.”

  She hung up and slid the book back into the basket. “Get your jacket. And wear your mud boots. There’s puddles today.”

  Hanna climbed up the staircase, holding on to the banister with both hands, pulling as if she climbed a mountain and the banister were her rope. In her bedroom she found her boots, pink rubber with bright dots, clamped the plastic price tag string between her teeth and pulled. The tag popped off in her mouth. She threw the paper in the trash but chewed the plastic part, like gum. She missed gum. Her father had chewed it all the time, the stick kind that didn’t make bubbles—Juicy Fruit and Doublemint. He showed her how to lick the minty wrappers and stick them on her forehead until they burned, and when Hanna pulled them off, there was a big pink rectangle on her skin. She and Henry would howl in pain and laughter, and Susan would call it that “weird nerd stuff,” but soon enough she’d have a wrapper spit-pasted to her head, too.

  Her mother had bought the pink boots just two days earlier, at Target. They were the only pair left in Hanna’s size. Well, not really her size. A couple of sizes too big, but with rain boots it didn’t matter because they always flopped on her feet anyway. Hanna walked around her bedroom a few times and decided to add another pair of socks.

  Downstairs, Susan waited on the porch, then locked the door when Hanna came outside. She never used to lock the door, but now she said she didn’t want to come home and find someone waiting for them inside. Her mother kept her so close now, afraid she’d be taken again. Hanna loved her for that. She loved her for so many things, even though she thought Susan might not love her quite as much anymore. Hanna figured that was okay. Some of her mother’s love died with Henry, and if she knew the whole, real truth she might stop loving her at all.

  My fault. Daddy is dead, and it’s my fault.

  They walked close together, their feet bumping every few steps. Hanna didn’t avoid the puddles, but she didn’t splash in them, either; just trudged through quietly so the water wouldn’t jump up into her boots and soak her socks. Her mother used to yell at her about jumping in puddles. Splashing in sneakers was the worst, Susan told her, because the water would make them smell like an old man’s boxer shorts. Or so she said.

  Hanna had never smelled boxer shorts.

  Her mother pressed her lips together, sniffled, her eyes turning pink. She swiped her fingers beneath her nose.

  They passed St. Catherine’s, and Susan slowed for a moment, her steps shortening. Hanna slowed with her, looking at the building, the gray stone blocks stacked on one another, the glass windows, colored not with pictures of people in togas with white birds fluttering over their heads but with bright patterns of seemingly random hues. Two sets of wooden doors—tall enough for giants—were fastened with black metal straps instead o
f hinges. She knew the building was old; she felt the oldness radiating from it as she walked by.

  She’d been inside a couple of times. The first was when her great-aunt Madelyn was in town for Christmas with her grandmother and she wanted to go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Hanna had only been four and didn’t remember much, except the smell—thick and spicy and cough-inducing—and that she fell asleep on her father’s lap. The other time was in first grade when she’d slept over at Katie Torino’s house and Mrs. Torino had asked if Hanna wanted them to take her home before mass or after. She said she’d go with them, since she didn’t want to go home because Henry was away lecturing for the week and her mother would expect her to help clean the house—their Sunday routine, and Hanna got stuck with the toilets and the dusting.

  But the main reason she wanted to go to mass was because Gregory Husker had told her earlier that week at lunch that if someone who wasn’t a Catholic went into the church and touched the holy water to his lips, he would be struck dead.

  “No lie,” he told her. “My CCD teacher told me.”

  She knew nothing of Catholics, other than what her mother had said of them, mostly complaining of the traffic they caused on Sunday mornings when she was trying get to Price Chopper. “If they cared that much every other day . . .” she mumbled as she drove. Her mother and father did not believe in God. She asked once, and her father told her religion was for the irrational. Her mother said nothing good came from such foolishness.

  But Hanna had been curious, so she went, not phoning her parents first. She and Katie rushed up the steps, beating Katie’s brothers, and Hanna hung on to the metal handle and leaned back with all her weight to open the front door, but not before tracing the leafy carvings in the dark, veined wood. She had the sense of having been there before, but dismissed it as simply the memory of that midnight mass and peeked through the second set of heavy doors.

  “Go, go,” Katie said, poking her in the back as Hanna hesitated in front of the marble bowl waiting at the back of the church. She watched people dip their hands into the water and touch their foreheads, their shirts. They sat behind an old woman with a funny doily on her head, like the ones her mother put under cakes when she took them to someone’s house. But the woman’s doily wasn’t paper but lace and was held in place with dozens of bobby pins. Hanna counted the windows, each with a shiny gold plaque underneath.