The Air We Breathe

by Christa Parrish

  “My mom is mad I’m here,” Hanna said.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I just know.” She’d thought it would be fun to use a straw today, to stick it deep into the ice cream and pull it out, the middle plugged with mint chip, and then suck it out the end. But it didn’t work well at all, like a too-thick milk shake. She chomped down on the plastic and scraped out the cream, jabbed the straw in again. “I wanted to go with you by myself. Without her following.”

  “She’s trying to do what’s best, Hanna. She doesn’t want something to happen to you . . .” Claire stopped, and Hanna knew that she had almost added again but stopped herself. “And, really, she doesn’t know me. Neither do you.”

  “I do.”

  “Not really. I could be . . . not a nice person.”

  “You’re not.”

  “No, I’m not. But your mother is right to be cautious.”

  Ice cream dripped over Hanna’s fingers. She went to the counter, asked for a bowl, and the teen girl with the messy ponytail and eyebrow ring gave her one, smiling, and a lid, too. “Don’t forget a spoon,” she said, and Hanna took one. She turned her cone upside down into the plastic bowl and sat back down at the table.

  “You’re not hungry today?” Claire asked.

  She shrugged, unsnapped her coat pocket. “I took this,” she said, gently pushing the Bible toward Claire, the cover curled back, corner creased. Jagged paper triangles stuck out from the pages, like teeth. “The sign said I could.”

  “That’s fine, sweetie.” Claire touched her hand. “Have you been reading it?”

  “Some.”

  “Is this what you have questions about?”

  Outside the window, a horn blared—two short bursts—and Hanna looked out to see her mother motioning, tapping her wrist.

  Claire said, “You’d better go. We can talk Saturday, or maybe next week.”

  But Hanna shook her head. “You have to tell me first.”

  “What, Hanna?”

  “You have to tell me . . .” She felt a cold puff of air on her hair and heard her mother’s voice.

  “I know you saw me, Hanna-Bee. We have to go. I have to be at Cindy’s in less than fifteen minutes.”

  Hanna slipped the book from the table back into her pocket, snapped the flap closed with one hand, pushing the metal buttons against her hip until they popped into place. “Claire can take me home.”

  “Hanna,” her mother said, in that don’t start this again voice. “We have to go now.”

  She didn’t want to leave, but Claire had the same look on her face as her mother—two adults ready to back each other up, like adults do—and so scooted from the booth. Susan closed her coat for her. “Want the rest of your ice cream?”

  Hanna shook her head.

  “Throw it out, then.”

  She did, the sides of the plastic sticky with melted green goo, and after pushing the bowl through the swinging door of the trash, she wiped her fingers on her jeans.

  “I’ll see you later, Hanna,” Claire said.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  Her mother jerked her head toward Claire in acknowledgment and then, holding the door open for Hanna, bumped her through and outside and into the van.

  “I told you not to do that again in front of her,” Susan said.

  “She’s nice.”

  “I don’t care, Hanna. You don’t know everything. Remember that.”

  “I know that Cindy canceled. I heard it on the machine.”

  Her mother turned around, her face scrunched with anger. “Okay, little girl. I don’t want to hear another word out of you. You may think you can get away with whatever you want, and maybe I’ve let you, but not anymore. No more Wednesdays and Saturdays with Claire. I don’t care what Diane says. We don’t need her. You don’t need her.”

  Little girl. She called me little girl.

  She suddenly felt threatened by her own mother, and it scared her. Susan meant nothing with the words—not like he did—but it still brought up all the things she’d been trying to push down deep, to keep down deep—like when she had been sick with the flu in first grade, and she had to throw up but didn’t want to, because she wanted to go to school that day for the Christmas party, and she kept her hand clamped over her mouth, swallowing any tickle of vomit that inched up her throat. She managed then, even ate one of the candy-cane cupcakes Mrs. Torino had made, white with red swirls in the cake, and red icing, too, with crushed candy canes sprinkled all over the top. She didn’t know, though, how long she could keep what was inside her now from coming up. Each time Dr. Diane asked questions, it got harder not to remember.

  She was so afraid of living it all again.

  At home, she ran into the house and slammed her bedroom door, locking it.

  “Hanna. Hanna, open up,” her mother called through the door, and when she didn’t, Susan went away, returning minutes later, and Hanna heard scraping in the doorknob as her mother tried to jimmy the lock. It opened, and Susan came in to find Hanna facedown on the bed, coat on, boots on. Hanna felt her mother touch her back, but she didn’t speak, didn’t roll over. Eventually Susan left without closing the door. And Hanna waited until she heard the murmur of her mother’s voice on the telephone before she snaked her hand into her pocket to touch the little book. Just holding it calmed her.

  She had two questions for Claire. She wanted to know if Claire felt it, too—that jump in the womb, that Holy Ghost who wasn’t scary at all, the pull when she and the woman were together.

  And she wanted to know if the friend Claire talked about—Jesus—would still love her if He knew she’d been the one who made the decision to go to the post office first, and not the bank. If she had chosen the other way, her father would be alive.

  Oh, Gee. Jesus, I mean. Jesus. Help me.

  Only she didn’t know what help she wanted this time.

  15

  CLAIRE

  NOVEMBER 2002

  Hanna had called and asked her to bring ice cream when she came. The girl could eat ice cream every day and never choose any flavor but mint chocolate chip. Claire had bought her a half gallon of Breyers a few weeks ago, but her mother wouldn’t let her have it too close to bedtime, since anything like ice cream or milk had always given her nightmares. She said she didn’t mind them, though. “Sometimes it’s scary, but fun, too, in a way. Like watching a horror movie.” Horror movies and bad dreams must be a welcome relief for her. God only knew what that little girl saw in her head when she was awake.

  She said she hadn’t liked the Breyers all that much, sort of icy and gritty, not smooth like the mint chip at Stewart’s. And not green, either.

  Claire didn’t care for cold foods since the weather had changed, and autumn had settled over them fully, nights barely above freezing and layers of brown leaves in her yard. She needed to rake, but couldn’t find the motivation. Caden had loved ice cream year-round, too, but he’d picked a different kind every time. They would drive past the convenience store while running errands or taking Amelia to occupational therapy, and he’d say, “Can we just stop, please?” And she would let him, of course, pulling in front of the shop with the car running, allowing him to run inside by himself, his coat unzipped, a dollar fifty in his hand and a bit more responsibility growing him taller every time.

  Claire took the long way to the Sullers’, nearly a twenty-minute drive for a three-mile trip. No left turns. She still couldn’t make them, though some mornings, when she sat at the stop sign on the corner of Fifth and Rockland, she’d almost swept the side of her hand down over the directional rather than up, could almost feel her body listing left, waiting to go, wanting to. She could be there for minutes, debating, arguing in her head, until another car rolled up behind her and honked, prodding her to make the right.

  Amelia had been left-handed.

  She had told Heidi once that her children haunted her. Now, sometimes, she could just have memories of them, little thoughts that made her smi
le. Like when Caden wanted to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest consecutive days chewing the same piece of gum—after seeing Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, of course—and decided to go to bed with the gum in his mouth. He woke up with it in his hair and refused to let Claire cut it out. So she scrubbed with peanut butter, held ice on it, washed his hair in baby oil. Nothing worked. Finally, Daniel convinced Caden a buzz cut was the cool way to go. Claire hated seeing her son’s black curls on the bathroom floor, but he gained the swagger of his daddy that day.

  Or when Amelia performed in her first dance recital. She had been so proud, and Daniel bought her the biggest bouquet of roses he could put together, driving to every florist in Avery Springs, collecting more than one hundred yellow and pink and red and white flowers. Oh, she had been the envy of her class, and then all the flowers had to be in her room. Claire needed five vases to hold them, and Amelia smelled each one of them every morning until they shriveled and died. They collected the petals in a box, and Claire tied a ribbon around it and tucked it on the top shelf in her daughter’s closet.

  They buried that box with her.

  Sometimes the memories still came with stinging tentacles, wrapped around her limbs and pulling her down, down, down, and those were the times Claire went to bed, forcing herself to sleep, to forget. Or she opened her puzzle books and focused on the clues, the words. The letters. That’s what crossword puzzles were, letters in boxes. She had been living her life in those boxes; if she moved outside their black lines, the world came back to her. But she was learning the letters only had meaning when put together in the correct order, written out to match the clues, fit perfectly in the squares. Letters alone meant nothing. Life alone meant nothing. All the crossword puzzles and the fourteen-hour nights wouldn’t bring her children back.

  But God had given her Hanna.

  No, she wasn’t her child. But Hanna gave her a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The girl needed her, wanted her around. When was the last time someone had wanted her? Other than Andrew.

  Their second date had been nice, as had their third. They spoke on the phone an evening or two during the week, not a long time, maybe a half hour if one of them felt particularly chatty, but both were still trying to find their way in this dance of dating, two adults who’d never expected to have to do the finding the right one thing again.

  She liked him.

  The Suller house came up on her quickly, like always, tucked back behind an island of landscaping. It was on the west side of the city. The money side—where people had driveways and carriage houses and perfectly painted trim around the windows. Susan had started interviewing nannies, Hanna told her. “It’s too sad for her to stay home with me. She’s going back to work.” And this twinge of resentment built, the idea that she was a better woman to take care of Hanna, that Hanna needed her more than her own mother, that she deserved the girl’s love because she knew how to give love back in the right way.

  Parking in the driveway, she prayed, as she always did before seeing Hanna. She knew from Diane Flinchbaugh that the girl had yet to open up about the trauma she experienced. Sometimes Claire thought Hanna wanted to tell her things, would if Claire only asked. But she was afraid to; she didn’t want to know what Hanna had gone through, not really. Didn’t want to know what men were capable of when it came to innocent children.

  Claire had a hard enough time living in the real world without having those pictures in her head.

  Still, Hanna had sounded a bit, well, more distant than usual on the phone. She usually spoke little, but there was a hitch in her voice, a distractedness. Claire thought maybe Susan didn’t know she was making the call—it was the first time Hanna had phoned her; usually her mother did, if any messages needed to be conveyed—and that would explain the tightness. She knew the girl wanted to talk about something, but with Susan hovering while they visited, she doubted they would have any opportunity to speak openly. She had been surprised to learn Hanna had taken one of those Gideon Testaments but was glad. Claire wanted to buy her another Bible, one written in a translation she could better understand, but also didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the precarious balance she found herself trying to keep—building a relationship with Hanna without increasing Susan’s clear distrust.

  She wasn’t doing it all that well.

  The light beside the front door hadn’t been turned off yet, which surprised Claire. She knew from Hanna it was one of the first things Susan did each morning—it used to be Hanna’s job—and she glanced at her watch even though she’d looked at the time seconds ago, before leaving the car: 10:07 a.m.

  She knocked on the door, expecting it to open, expecting both of the Sullers to be standing there, Hanna in her coat with a shy smile glossing her lips, Susan trying not to let her daughter see she hated her going out. But no one answered. The half-gallon box of ice cream cold and sweaty under her arm, Claire knocked again, waited, tried the doorknob. It turned—unlocked; also unusual for the Suller home—and she pushed the door open, stuck her head inside, and called, “Hello?”

  Silence.

  There weren’t any lights on in the house, either. Claire felt a spidery sense of concern scurry up from her stomach to her head. “Hanna? Are you home?” She found the three light switches near the door, flipped them all on. The lights came on in the upstairs and downstairs hallways. The closet door was open, and Claire didn’t see Hanna’s purple coat. Hangers tangled on the closet floor.

  “Anyone here?”

  She thought briefly of calling the police, but the idea was so fleeting it left her before she fully knew it was the rational thing to do. Walked down the hallway toward the kitchen. And then she saw it, on the ceramic tile floor.

  Blood.

  Not slick and shiny, but coagulated, nearly black in some places, gloppy. No neat puddle, either; it looked as though someone had pulled themselves through it, smearing it along the floor. There were half handprints on the counter, the back doorjamb, the wall. On the stove, a cast-iron frying pan lay bottom up, half covering one burner.

  Saliva flooded Claire’s mouth; she swallowed it down, inhaled and held the air in her lungs until her desperation to breathe overtook her desire to run, to vomit. To scream. She grabbed the pan—had never used a cast-iron one before, so its weight surprised her—and climbed the stairs yelling, “Hanna? Hanna?” All four bedrooms were empty. She checked the closets and under the bed. In the bathroom she hesitated a second, images of Psycho in her head, and then pulled the shower curtain back with a quick jerk.

  Empty.

  Downstairs again, she dropped the pan on the floor. Cell phone. No, her purse was still in the car. She reached for the phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen above some skinny, high-backed stool. Dialed 9-1-1. Gave the information and hung up. Then she called Andrew.

  “She’s gone, she’s gone. And there’s blood all over here, and she’s gone. Oh, Lord, please let her be okay. Andrew, we need to pray.”

  “Slow down. Who’s gone? Who’s bleeding?”

  “Hanna. I’m here in their house, and there’s blood and she’s gone.”

  “Call the police.”

  “I did. They’re coming.”

  “Then get out of there, Claire. Get in your car, lock the doors, and wait.”

  “Sirens. I hear them. Please, come.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  16

  MOLLY

  FEBRUARY 2009

  The ocean had decided to shake off the cold, at least on Dorsett Island. The springlike temperatures had brought people to the town and through the museum. She’d sold a dozen admissions, and three hours still remained until closing. Outside the kitchen window, the round thermometer with a faded smiling rainbow background read fifty-nine degrees, matching the record high.

  Dorsett Island was the third and smallest island in an archipelago, the population of all three totaling eleven hundred year-round. The museum was the last building at the end o
f the island, a converted Dutch Colonial with traditional gray clapboard siding, more gray from the ocean air. In the late 1940s, Mick’s father had taken a chain saw to the entire front of the house and installed the huge window after he’d seen a wax figure display on a boardwalk at Coney Island. The House of Wax was Lou’s baby; he had traveled all over the United States to buy figures and to see other museums.

  It had been popular in the ’50s and ’60s, when Dorsett Island was popular, when vacations meant summering at a quiet beach in a picturesque location. But now vacations meant Six Flags and Disney Cruises and other places built around constant consumption and entertainment. A small, rocky outcropping in the northern Atlantic could only entertain for half a day, maybe—two dozen photos of lobster boats and wild sea, a clam roll and some homemade saltwater taffy from the quaint local businesses, an overpriced jar of Maine blueberry jam, and tourists had wrung all they could out of Dorsett Island.

  She could see a part of the beach from the front window, a small wedge of rock and sand at the end of the street. Two desperate sun worshipers wore bikini tops with their jeans, hoping for an authentic layer of bronze over their store-bought tans, despite the ragged wind. An older couple carried their shoes and stood close to the water, the waves crawling in to lick their toes. One little boy built a sand castle. A girl with white-blond hair ran with a kite—a vibrant butterfly attached to the string clutched in her hand, the purple and blue and orange ribbons twisting from the bottom tips of its wings. Molly watched the little girl run until she had no more room, her path blocked by a sharply rising, forested bluff. She turned and went back the way she’d come, moving fast and careless down a thin finger of granite reaching into the sea.

  She’d had a kite once, a plastic one her father bought from the dollar store because she was with him, and she begged, even though he said it would fall apart in an afternoon. She wanted it anyway, picked out one with an American flag design, and he paid for it along with his batteries and paper plates for their camping trip. Then the three of them headed to a campground in Lake George—Molly, her father, and her mother—towing the rented pop-up and playing letter search, trying to find A through Z on the signs they passed, even though it was only a thirty-minute trip. The camping area was wooded, with tall pines and little sky, but Molly ran that kite up and down the dirt road in front of their site, no more than six feet of string behind her, the red-white-and-blue triangle bouncing along the ground more than floating in the air. That had been July. She never would have imagined she had less than a year left with him.