What Happened to Hannah

by Mary Kay McComas

  And so she picked at the smoked salmon, broccoli, and penne pasta casserole in some sort of rich creamy sauce as her niece went back for seconds and helped herself to more salad and a second dinner roll. They talked about school—Anna’s favorite subject was History. They went over the packing process. Anna didn’t want to take much, thank heavens—some of the stuff in her room, a small box of mementos; her clothes and the computer she’d earned half the money to buy working at the Tastee-Freez last summer. And a short while later Hannah wolfed down five brownies while Anna wrapped two in a paper towel to eat in bed while she read.

  Jackie Sprat and her aunt, she thought, amending the nursery rhyme to suit. It had been that sort of day.

  It appeared that Anna’s thoughts and views were as lean as her legs. Her memories were sad but nothing that couldn’t be washed away with fresh, clean water. She was trim and healthy in every way possible—unlike her aunt whose solid layer of adipose tissue, no matter how hard she worked on it, wasn’t just for insulation; it didn’t just surround and protect her vital organs—it was heavy and greasy inside. Foul and poisonous. The monsters that lurked in the shadows of her mind were plump with secrets and fleshy with painful scars.

  Anna knew what she wanted—in her life and from the house she’d grown up in. Hannah hid in an insurance office and couldn’t bring herself to throw anything away from her childhood. Anna was sweetly in love with the Steadman boy, and Hannah was running from his father.

  Hannah savored what she was determined would be her last brownie for the night and listened to her niece’s steps as she walked down the hall toward the stairs. They were so unalike and had so little in common and yet it was their handful of similarities and the few commonalities that were touching, opening avenues of understanding and binding them together.

  And it felt good.

  She grinned, sighed, and slouched back in the kitchen chair, extending her legs out in front of her, crossing them at the ankles. So THIS is the feeling most people know when they thought of family. Not fear, not resentment, not the burden of responsibility beyond their years. This is what it was like to have your heart bloom with gladness and pride for someone . . . not you, but close—if that made any sense at all. And maybe real families didn’t . . . make any sense, that is.

  God knew, and she knew, that living in a house with people related to you by blood didn’t make you a real family. Not really. But individual, unique people trussed together on a visceral level, who were kind to and considerate of one another, who taught and learned from each other, who cared and looked after one another . . .

  Hannah jerked straight up in her chair hearing . . . first a soft muffled cry and then a clattering thud coming from the bathroom down the hall from the kitchen. After that silence, and then a gut-wrenching sensation that something was terribly wrong as she dashed from the room.

  “Anna?” She couldn’t recall the last time she’d used her voice to shout out loud. It made a queer noise. “Anna?”

  A peculiar/familiar odor in the air filled her with dread as she reached the door below the stairs. The bathroom door was closed and the instincts she’d honed in that very house so many years ago came tearing back. Run. Hide. Curling her fingers into fists as she always had, she whispered, “Anna?”

  She picked up a sad little moaning noise on the other side of the door.

  “Anna? Are you all right?” She waited a breath. “May I come in?”

  Hannah wasn’t sure why she knocked on the door—to preserve the girl’s privacy or to prolong her entrance, but then she didn’t hesitate any longer to grip the doorknob firmly and twist.

  Anna groaned again and Hannah pushed the door open wide. It wasn’t the stench of the vomit on the floor and in the toilet that had her stomach roiling; it wasn’t the confusion and misery on the girl’s face that pulled at her heart. It was the sight of the blood in the sink and dripping from Anna’s mouth and nose that had her tamping down the shriek in her throat and reaching for her phone.

  Chapter Ten

  Her complexion was as white as the petals on a daisy when he entered the emergency room through the sliding glass doors. She paced in front of a treatment room—her hair disheveled; the look in her eyes a little wild. Hugging her coat in her arms, she looked like a baby with a security blanket, but the relief in her expression when she looked up and saw him was anything but infantile.

  At first, anyway. At first she looked like any other powerless parent of a vulnerable child—terrified, dazed, a little crazy. At first, but then . . .

  “Where the hell have you been? Is this what you call an emergency response time? What if she’d set herself on fire?”

  “I came as soon as I could. I called ahead; they said she was stable. I’m here now.” He reached out to support her but she wasn’t in the mood yet. She swung out and whacked him on the arm, then took a step toward him to rest her forehead on his chest. Both responses were so normal, so natural, he smiled. “She’s going to be fine.”

  “You said permissions slips and food and sell the farm. You didn’t say anything about vomiting blood and ulcers. She was so pale and she looked so frightened.” He began to see the problem with her hair when she sent her fingers straight into the crown, then straight up from the top saying, “Then when I looked back from calling 911 for the ambulance, she was on her hands and knees, crying, trying to clean up the bathroom, saying she felt much better, that it was probably just food poisoning.”

  “Was it?”

  “Not unless the casserole had razor blades in it. You should have seen all the blood.” She held out her hands and used her own health as proof. “And I’m fine. She has an ulcer and she was afraid, very afraid, I wouldn’t want her if she was sick.”

  “They’re pretty sure it’s an ulcer, then?” She nodded. “Poor kid. The stress got to her. Is she inside here?”

  He moved to enter the treatment room, tucking away for later a decided disappointment, and no little annoyance, that Hannah wasn’t at the girl’s bedside. He couldn’t think about that now. It wasn’t as if she’d kept her lack of child care experience a secret—though common compassion and sympathy were paramount if she planned to be the girl’s guardian.

  “No. They took her to surgery.”

  “What?” It was more an exclamation than a question, but he wanted answers, too.

  “Not, not for surgery, precisely.” Perhaps she wasn’t as insensitive as he thought—she’d picked up on his anger. “Just to look. Into her stomach with a tube. An endoscope, they said. And it’s not necessarily stress, either. I mean, I thought that, too, that it was my fault, the stress and all, but the doctor said no, they don’t think that way anymore. There’s a bacteria. Here, I wrote it down so I could look it up.”

  She handed him a slip of paper with Helicobacter pylori (or H. pylori, for short) written on it.

  “Apparently it’s a bacteria that can simply be there, in the stomach, without making trouble most of the time, but it thrives when there’s extra gastric acid produced like when you’re constantly hungry, like she is . . . and stressed, of course, but he thinks the bacteria had already weakened the stomach lining long before Mama died and I entered the picture. He said it’s very common and relatively easy to fix, and that it might have been caught earlier if she hadn’t been feeding the pain in her stomach, thinking it was simply hunger.”

  He kept staring at the notepaper, feeling foolish and not wanting her to see it until Tom Kelsey, the ER doctor, called out to him and reiterated most everything Hannah had just told him. He’d been very quick to condemn her for being thoughtless and unfeeling toward Anna when, in fact, it was clear she’d taken full responsibility and that the whole ordeal had been harrowing for her.

  A nurse emerged from the treatment room with Anna’s purse; her clothes and shoes were stuffed in a plastic bag, all for Hannah to transport to a room on the second floor, where Anna would sleep overnight for observation before going home in the morning.

  “I�
��ll go up with you,” he said, following when she turned in a circle to look for the elevators.

  “That’s not necessary, but thanks. I was—” She broke off, embarrassed. “I was a wreck before, and I appreciate you dropping everything to come to my aid but . . .” She looked back down the hall. “But I feel so much better after listening to the doctor say the same thing to you that he said to me. It’s ludicrous, I know, but—”

  “But what?”

  She shook her head, planning not to answer before she suddenly did. “I don’t trust doctors. I was ready to hijack the ambulance and head for Charlottesville if the ER doctor who used to treat me was still here.”

  “Dr. Pageant? He’d be, what, a hundred and forty years old by now?”

  She looked up at him and saw what he wanted her to see—that he wasn’t making light of her feelings, merely putting them in perspective. Also, that he knew what she was talking about. That the fine physician had tended her injuries—her mother’s and her sister’s wounds—over and over again without ever actually helping them. If she was bitter, she had the right to be; and if she wanted to talk about it, he wanted her to know he’d listen.

  “Really, I’m fine.” She pushed the up button to call the elevator—she was blowing him off. “The nurse said Anna would be sleepy. They’ll start her on an antibiotic and two different acid blockers tonight and send her home in the morning. But, do you think your mother might be willing to pick us up and take us home? I came in the ambulance—”

  “I’ll come.”

  “No. I don’t want to take you away from your work any more than I already have. Please, ask your mother for me.” He sighed and agreed as the elevator doors opened. She stepped in and turned back to him smiling—still blowing. “Besides, I need you to make sure that Lucy understands that none of this is my fault. I don’t want her gunning for me.” She gave a soft laugh. “Maybe she could visit Anna after school tomorrow.”

  The doors had begun to close when he saw it in her eyes, the relief, the satisfaction that she had once again made a clean getaway from him—leaving no trace of her true self behind. He’d seen it at the cemetery and earlier in the day when they spoke while they waited for Anna to return from school. Hannah was hiding something from him—and it was starting to annoy the hell out of him.

  Plus, it was probably why he’d been so ready to believe she’d been derelict with Anna. Maybe. Maybe believing the worst of her was better than not knowing what to believe . . .

  He shoved his hands deep into his jacket pockets once she was out of sight and the elevator was lifting her up and away from him. He wasn’t surprised by how tempted he was to take the stairs two at a time and meet her when she got off; wrap his fingers around her throat and choke her secret out of her, but, as he recalled, fighting Hannah was never as effective or as expedient as . . . finessing her.

  He turned on the heel of his boot, and headed for the door, deep in thought.

  He’d tried overhauling an old pickup truck with Cal a couple summers ago, but kids were different today. When Cal turned sixteen, he wasn’t interested in waiting while the two of them gave an old Ford a face-lift, he just wanted to go.

  He laughed at himself as he pushed through to the parking lot, the midnight chill refreshing on his face. Come to think of it, that’s all he’d wanted at sixteen—a set of wheels, freedom. His parents each had a car for work and it was—help his Dad with the abandoned ’62 Ford truck from the farm, or borrow theirs every time he wanted to go somewhere.

  The remains of the teenage Grady shuddered inside at the thought of dating girls in his mother’s car. But in a fully restored tomato red pickup-mobile, he’d perfected the art of finessing girls. Well, the one girl he’d ever needed to finesse, anyway . . . the one he’d wanted enough to bother with finessing.

  He hadn’t been driving it long—a week, maybe two—still grimacing every time he turned onto the dirt road that led him home because the dust was so hard on his new paint job. Even driving less than the speed limit kicked up a fine film he’d feel compelled to sham off before going into the house.

  However, that morning, that first morning of his Finesse 101 class, he was hungover from having passed out beside the campfire he and a bunch of kids from school had been partying around the night before. His mission: to get home and into bed before the sun was fully up in the sky to avoid detection by his parents . . . and the extra chores they’d pass on to him when they discovered he’d been out all night again.

  So he was speeding a little, furious about all the damn dust and bracing himself for the extra pain in his head on the down side of the short rise in the road he was taking when he saw her—halfway down the next rise, on foot, coming toward him.

  Hannah Benson.

  “Fuck!” He lost his concentration and the jolt to his head from the gravel road made it feel like a bell clapper on Sunday morning. His eyes blurred a little, but he didn’t lose sight of her and his mind, despite the ringing in his head—or perhaps because of it—was at a total loss to imagine why she was out walking the road barely after dawn.

  Always modestly dressed, it was summer and she had succumbed to black shorts that hit her just above the knee and a pressed white cotton shirt that might have been one of his—the tail out, sleeves rolled up above her elbows. While there had always been catty rumors of the Bensons’ getting last pick from the charitable donations at their church, he’d always thought Hannah’s choices were classic and tasteful if not particularly hip. That day she looked as tidy and fresh as he felt hung over and stale.

  He slowed the truck down, leaning his aching body over the seat to roll the rider’s side window down, then came to a complete stop when he rolled up beside her.

  “Hey. Good morning, Hannah. What are you doing out here?”

  She’d stopped and turned toward him, but stayed near the side of the road instead of approaching his truck—unlike any other girl in town would have, considering who sat inside. And if the other girls didn’t want to flirt with him, they’d at least have expected him to take them up and deliver them to wherever they were going. But not her. She didn’t approach, she didn’t care, she didn’t want or expect anything of him. And, God, it was maddening.

  “I’m going to work.”

  “Now?”

  She nodded. “Mrs. Phillips hired me to help out Old Mrs. Phillips for a while this summer. She needs help bathing and cleaning and cooking, things like that.”

  “Old Mrs. Phillips? Who lives on this end of Dempsey?” She nodded again. “Every day?” Another nod. “And you walk every morning.” No nod necessary. “How long does it take you?”

  She shrugged. “Hour and a half or so.”

  “So you get there by what, seven?”

  “Yeah, about.” That reminded her not to dawdle and she turned to walk away.

  “Wait a second.” Patiently, she stopped and turned again. He kept his foot on the clutch and let up on the brake so the truck rolled backward to frame her face in the window again. “Do you want a ride?”

  He regretted the offer instantly. Every second he wasted here with her was a second closer to his father’s alarm clock ringing at six thirty; to his mother rolling out of bed; to her pulling on her robe and scuffing out of the bathroom and down the back stairs to start breakfast. Being summer they let him sleep until eight, sometimes nine, but his mother was unpredictable. Sometimes the sound of her slippers would simply pass by his door. More often they would slow down. The handle on his door would rattle when she carefully opened it; she’d stand for several loving seconds watching him sleep and then close it again. If she stopped there today, there’d be hell to pay.

  What was he doing?

  He asked himself the question, then watched as Hannah’s telling eyes asked it as well. Her gaze roamed over his beloved tomato red Ford but gave nothing of what she was feeling away—no envy or scorn or admiration. Just confusion and distrust . . . of him.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Why
not? Are you afraid?”

  “No.” She began walking and he started rolling backward again.

  “Wait a second, will ya? Why don’t you want a ride? I can get you there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Then what would I do until seven?”

  He stopped the truck to consider her point, then let it start rolling again. “We could talk for a few minutes.”

  There. He’d finally lost his mind. And it was all her fault.

  “Talk about what?”

  Normally that question would have made his head explode because she’d used it on him before, a couple of times, and the tone of it always made it seem like they had nothing to talk about. Which they didn’t. But he was ready for it this time.

  “Well, I saw a bird in our barn last week and I wondered what kind it was. You said you knew about birds.”

  Whatever punishment his parents doled out wasn’t worth mentioning in light of the look of surprise on her face. Suddenly, he knew that every tiny little crack he made in Hannah’s shell would make him feel extraordinary things inside his chest. Suddenly, Hannah Benson made some sense to him.

  Push and she’d push back. Pry and she’d close up tighter. Attention confused and flustered her. Interest surprised her. Kindness was never expected.

  “It’s all blue,” he went on, dreaming up the bird as he went. “Top and bottom but not like a blue jay or a bluebird, with a little black on its wings, I think. It flew by pretty fast but I don’t remember ever seeing—”

  “I . . . I said I had a book of birds. I didn’t say I knew anything about them . . . only if I happen to see one that’s not familiar . . . I . . . I look it up and mark it in the book.”

  “Oh.” It was imperative that he not sound disappointed, he had a feeling disappointment was an everyday thing in her life. “Good. So you’re not one of those people who sit in the weeds all day or hang out of trees in safari suits with a camera and binoculars around their necks waiting to see double-billed, tri-eyed, single-winged, chartreuse doodas?”