The Air We Breathe

by Christa Parrish

  Claire offered to help.

  “No one complains about ugly cookies,” Beverly said. “Just as long as they taste good.”

  “These do,” Claire said, swiping a bit of dough.

  “Shame, shame. You should be resting.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Claire threaded her hand through the handle of her mug of tea. No dainty china cups for Beverly. All her beverages were served in sturdy, thick-lipped stoneware, dark, earthy colors with the glaze dried dripping down the sides. They’d been handmade by a potter acquaintance years ago, Beverly had told her yesterday, even though Claire knew that already. Her friend repeated things more often, forgot things. Age? The stroke? Something else? That Claire didn’t know. But she worried about Beverly. Stubborn as a boar, she’d been on her own all her life and would never admit to needing help, even as she opened the oven and, arm shaking, slid the baking sheet inside without wearing an oven mitt because she couldn’t put it on herself.

  “These will be done in fifteen minutes, if you want one cooked,” she told Claire.

  “I just might. I’m going to call Jesse now, though.”

  “And Andrew.”

  Claire didn’t answer, carried her mug upstairs, settled in on the made bed, on her side—the left side—and used her cell phone to dial her sister-in-law’s number. Jesse talked excitedly about all the things he’d been doing with his cousins, playing soccer in the snow, helping the neighbors with maple sugaring, and riding the four-wheeler.

  Jesse wasn’t an only-child type kid, entertaining himself for hours in his room with Legos or model airplanes. He was Mr. Social, like his mother, and Claire was his secretary, juggling play dates and trips to the museum art program and Tae Kwon Do classes and basketball at the YMCA. Every day something else. Even with the new baby, he’d still be an only. Two only children, almost eleven years apart.

  “You are doing school out there, too?” she asked.

  “Of course I am. Aunt Jane is more of a stickler than you. She makes me do all the problems in math, not just the odd ones.”

  “Really.”

  “And I got a ninety-eight on my last test. Multiplying fractions.”

  “Maybe I should start making you do all the problems, if that’s the results.”

  “Mom.”

  “Just thinking out loud,” Claire said, laughing. He’s such a light. And he was—the stepson she couldn’t love more if he were her own, the one who could make her smile just walking into the room. “Anything else?”

  “Simon’s doing a poetry unit, and I’m doing it with him.”

  “Hmm. How’s that going?”

  “Fine, because I missed all the boring stuff and we’re doing the fun stuff, like writing limericks. Want to hear one?”

  “Should I be scared?”

  Jesse giggled. “Okay, here goes. There once was a woman named Claire, who kept tripping all over her hair—”

  “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

  “Just listen, Mom.”

  “I am. I am. Go ahead.”

  “She took out her knife, and for the rest of her life, poor Claire had to walk around bare.” He laughed some more. “And that’s not even my best one.”

  “Spoken like a true ten-year-old.”

  “I gotta go. Simon and me are heading to the Robinsons’ to sled.”

  “Simon and I.”

  “Mom,” Jesse said, and she could hear his voice roll with his eyes. “We’re done with school for the day.”

  “School is never done for the day. You know that.”

  “Do you want to talk to Aunt Jane?”

  “No, I’m good. You have fun, and be careful. I don’t want your poor aunt to have to rush anyone to the emergency room for stitches or broken bones.”

  “The hill isn’t that big.”

  “Well, be careful anyway.”

  “I will. Love you.”

  “Love you, too,” Claire said, unsure if the boy heard her before he dropped the phone. She pictured him struggling into his snow pants and cramming his double-socked feet into his boots. He’d put his gloves on first, like he always did, because he wanted them to stay under the cuffs of his coat, but then he wouldn’t be able to zip, so he’d ask Jane to do it because Claire wasn’t there.

  What am I doing?

  She looked at the numbers on her phone’s screen, blinking, indicating the nine-minute call had ended. It was nearly one o’clock. She scrolled through her contacts and dialed Andrew’s office. His assistant answered.

  “Uh, yes, could you tell me if Andrew Brenneman is in his office?” Claire asked. She deepened her voice a bit.

  “I’m sorry, he’s at a lunch meeting, but I’ll put you over to his voice mail.”

  Andrew’s recorded message came on, the same one he had when they first met. When his voice ended, another electronic one began, giving Claire all the options she already knew, and she pressed one. A beep and then, “Hi, Andrew, it’s me. How are you? Lisa said you’re in a lunch meeting, so I guess we’ll catch up later. I just talked to Jesse and he’s having a great time. This is good for him, I think.” She hesitated. “Anyway, we’ll talk later. Have a good day. I miss you, you know. Bye.”

  She closed the phone, left it on the bedside table, and wriggled her swollen feet into her shoes. Downstairs, she snagged a cookie from the plate in the kitchen. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Maybe on some of the walking trails.”

  “Not the ones along the bluffs.”

  Claire shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry you like that.”

  “Hmm. Do you have your phone this time?”

  “Yes.”

  Beverly slid the spatula under a cookie on the baking sheet, transferred it to the plate. “If you’re going to the museum, I think you should take my car.” She didn’t drive anymore but kept her Olds in the garage, lending it out to people whose vehicles were in the shop or who temporarily needed a set of wheels.

  “I’d like some air.”

  “Remember what happened yesterday.”

  “I’m good to walk.”

  “You’re stubborn.”

  “You’d know.”

  “It’s fine on your own time, my dear, but don’t be stubborn with that baby you’re carrying.”

  Claire sighed, closed the top three buttons of her coat. “Where are the keys?”

  “Good girl. In the drawer right on the end there.”

  “Bev,” she said, slipping the ball chain around her finger and closing her hand around the keys, a mix of shiny silver and dull brass. When she opened her palm again she could smell the warm, sweaty metal. “It’s a small island. Do you know anything more about Hanna, at the museum, or her mother?”

  “Just gossip.”

  “Gossip you can repeat?”

  Beverly added more dough to the cookie sheet. “I’ve talked to the mother several times. She’s friendly and personable and I know has helped with several town fund-raisers—for the library addition and such—and has some closer friends on the island. Linda Johnson’s daughter was killed in a car accident, and she’s helped her a lot. People ask her for decorating advice all the time. I’ve never met the girl. She’s quite shy, I hear. And I believe there was talk of them moving here to get away from some past drama, to start over. Perhaps an abusive husband or boyfriend. I never bothered with the details. That’s about it.”

  Outside, Claire yanked up the garage door, pushing it over her head. It rocked down again and she caught it, nudged it up more gently. It stayed, and she started the car, let it run for a minute, then backed it out into the road. Left the garage door open. She wouldn’t be out long.

  She drove to the museum, parked in the lot again, but walked over the frozen lawn rather than taking the path. She knocked, waited. A shadow passed by the window. The door opened, and Susan stood there, staring back at her. “Molly’s around front.”

  “I’d like to
talk to you, if you have a little time.”

  “Time’s about all I have these days.”

  Claire followed Susan through the mudroom, this time piled with boxes instead of laundry. Boxes lined the dining room table, some taped shut and labeled, others open and half filled.

  “Going somewhere?” Claire asked.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “I’m getting married. We’re moving into my fiancé’s place. Well, he’ll be my husband then.”

  “Hanna’s going, too?”

  “Molly. Yes, she’s going.” Susan stacked a pile of DVDs in her arms, dropped them into the cardboard box on the coffee table. “What do you want from us?”

  “I’m worried about your daughter.”

  “That’s right. My daughter. Let me worry about her.”

  “She needs help.”

  “Playing savior again?”

  “Is she in counseling?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “So she’s not.”

  Susan looked as though she wanted to snap back another retort but instead closed the box in front of her, overlapping each of the flaps, folding the last one under the first so it stayed shut by itself. She sagged, motioned loosely around her with a flap of her hand. “For better or worse, I’ve done what I thought was best. Please, just forget you’ve seen us and leave Hanna alone.”

  She called her Hanna.

  Claire watched the woman in front of her, thicker than she remembered from six years ago, eyebrows penciled on, hair dyed the same color as her daughter’s, but still well groomed and well dressed in dark-wash jeans and a camel-colored duster, belted at the waist. As Susan stared down at the creased cardboard box, inspecting it as if it were the most important thing on earth, Claire saw she was terrified—of her, of what she could do to her. The woman had lived the past six years pulled into her shell, Hanna crammed in there with her, two snails sharing the same protective coating. And here came Claire with her two-pronged escargot fork, ready to pry them from the safety of their home, sauté them in garlic and butter, and serve them up to whoever waited on the other side of their past.

  “I’m not planning on saying anything,” Claire said, and she heard the way the words came out, coated in a threat she didn’t mean but left hanging there because it served her purpose. I’m not planning on saying anything. Not planning to, if I get what I want, if you answer my questions. “But will you tell me . . . Does Ha—Molly leave the building?”

  “She went outside for you.”

  And Claire heard it in her voice, the same feeling that had come over her when Caden was three and he had fallen on the cement, scraping his knees and, with blood trickling down his chubby legs, had run to Daniel. He scooped the boy up as she watched from the lawn, stunned that her baby had chosen his father over her.

  It was the first time and she didn’t know what to do with the intensity of her—what? Disappointment? Displacement? Plain ol’ hurt? It was ridiculous, she knew, resenting Daniel for, in that moment, usurping her place in the pecking order. He was her husband, for crying out loud. And Caden’s father. But her heart didn’t care. Her body had carried Caden. She rocked him through his colic and nursed him night after night, sacrificing her sleep and her perky breasts and daily showers and waistline. She was the most important person in his life.

  And then she wasn’t.

  Susan had that look, the one that cried out, It’s not right. She did for you what she won’t do for me. It was how the woman must have felt the day Hanna spoke to Claire, on the swing, and every visit afterward.

  “I guess she did.” Claire hadn’t fully appreciated it at the time, seeing the girl inch out on the sidewalk, shoulder and hipbone pressed against the glass, creeping unsteadily toward her. The pain, the worry, it was all too great. But afterward, in the ambulance, once the contractions lessened and the oxygen cleared her head, she blinked and thought, Dear Lord, she crawled to me. And now, because it was the only thing she could think of to add, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, you always had part of her.”

  Claire thought she wanted to add more, but Hanna came through the door, calling, “Mom, do you think we can . . . ? Claire.”

  “How are you?”

  “No, how are you? Is the baby okay? Oh, I’m such an idiot. Of course it’s okay or you wouldn’t be standing here.”

  “The baby’s fine.”

  “I wanted to make sure . . . We called the hospital, but you had already left. Mom thought she knew who you were staying with, but I wasn’t sure I should . . .” The girl’s voice faded and she tucked her hair behind her ears. “I was worried.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good. That’s good. I was really worried.”

  “It’s close to dinnertime, so I should get going. But, can I go through the front?”

  Susan sucked her upper lip into her mouth until it disappeared, emitting a long, soft squishing sound. But Hanna nodded, motioned through the office door.

  In the lobby she unlocked the dead bolt. Claire touched her arm. “Thank you . . . for yesterday.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You did. You did.” Just say it, Claire. “The other evening, you know, after I came and you . . . Well, I spoke to . . . Oh, what’s his name again, the pizza guy. Thomas?”

  “Tobias.”

  She nodded. “Yes. He said that it’s hard for you, sometimes, to leave the building—” The girl opened her mouth, but Claire shushed her. “So I know . . . I know that yesterday was . . . a big deal.”

  “Claire?” Hanna said.

  “Mmm?”

  “I want to go down to the beach.”

  “Okay,” Claire said slowly.

  “With you. Now. Before I change my mind.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think I have to. If I wait, you might go home. He sent you to me again. He’s giving me a chance.” Hanna wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t want to be stuck here forever.”

  She was the girl on the swing then, frail, broken. But Claire also saw a glint of something more, a bubbling potion of bravery and tenacity and hope. “Well then. How about a coat?”

  24

  MOLLY

  MARCH 2009

  Molly was careful not to jangle the hangers in the office closet, and with movements as smooth and precise as neurosurgery she slipped on her mother’s long wool peacoat, drowning her thin frame. She wrapped a scarf three times around her neck and pulled it up over her mouth, breathing into it until it became damp. “My mom’s,” she told Claire when she stepped back into the lobby. “I don’t have a jacket. Haven’t needed one.”

  “It’s not that cold out there.”

  “I’m always cold.”

  Claire held the front glass door open; Molly waited at the threshold, closed her eyes. She inched her foot over the metal frame, feeling around, as if looking for a drop-off or a step down. Her breath wheezed in the back of her throat, but she brought her other leg forward, stood outside for a minute, eyes still scrunched closed. “It’s all spinning.”

  “Take your time.”

  She noticed the air first, how it felt in her throat, cold and raspy, like the salt from the ocean had been taken up into the sky, and she breathed in the grittiness of it, scraping down into her lungs. The world was gray around her—the sky, the clouds, the water, even the sand. She wanted to run back into the museum, to grab the bright red knit hat Mick had given her for Christmas last year, the one she knew he bought at Dollar General as an afterthought. She wanted color out here. She wanted something vibrant to focus on, something to remind her of who she used to be. But Claire took her arm and crossed the street with her, then let her go, starting down the steps to the beach. “Coming?” she asked.

  Molly nodded. She didn’t want to be alone so followed Claire down the stone stairs, her bare hand on the wooden banister, smoothed by years of other hands sl
iding over it.

  Gloves would have been a good idea, too.

  Claire waited for her at the bottom, where the steps turned to gravel, and they followed the path past the cement barriers placed at the road’s end, the yellow-and-black-striped reflectors a warning for cars to stop before careening down the rocky embankment into the sea. And then the gravel gave way to sand, to uncertainty. There was nothing more uncertain than the path of a grain of sand. It might be taken up by the wind, carried away in the tread of a shoe, in a dog’s paw. Shoveled into a bucket and moved down the beach. Clutched by the waves and carried . . . well, wherever the water went when it left the shore. As her feet sunk into the granules, she pictured the sand holding her there. She wanted to be held there.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can,” Claire said. She took Molly’s elbow and tugged.

  The sand shifted under her feet, into her sneakers. She had to think about walking, told her legs to move. Why am I out here? She trembled, everything so wide open. No, she needed to be kept inside. Caged.

  “A safe place,” Thin Man had told her.

  “Claire, I need to go back. I need to.” The tears came now, the shaking.

  “No. Not yet. You’re so close.”

  “I’m out here. It’s enough. Please.”

  “Just touch the water.”

  “I can’t.”

  Claire took her gently by the shoulders. “You know He helped you escape, Hanna. Do you think He did that so you could lock yourself up somewhere else?”

  Help me, Gee.

  She still found herself calling Him that sometimes, like a child’s pet name for her older brother, created when she couldn’t quite form the letters of the real name. Sometimes those names stuck forever. Did God consider the name sacrilegious? She didn’t mean disrespect at all. She meant it in love, because it reminded her of the time she needed Him and He answered. She asked herself sometimes why He didn’t answer her prayers like that anymore, with immediacy, with clarity and theatrics. And then she answered her own question.

  She had stopped expecting Him to.