Half Past: A Novel

by Victoria Helen Stone

  “Why?” Becky pressed, and it wasn’t sarcasm or disdain or disagreement. She honestly didn’t understand. Hannah could see the desperation in her pleading eyes.

  “Because, Becky . . . what if I’m just like her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, maybe there’s nothing wrong with me. Maybe I just got my mother’s personality.”

  “Hannah, stop! There’s nothing wrong with you!”

  But that wasn’t true. Oh, she’d been pleased with herself and her life for quite a few years, but the divorce meant she had to face all her doubts again. Why couldn’t she just stay in place and settle?

  Rachel had been right about that, at least. Hannah walked away from things. She ran away. She turned her back and moved on. It was what she’d always done.

  She may as well try it one more time. She wasn’t doing any good here anyway. She never had.

  CALIFORNIA

  CHAPTER 5

  California had always unsettled her. Los Angeles, especially, but even the Bay Area. The faint, fuzzy haze that blurred the air disturbed her. She wasn’t sure why.

  It was there even on clear days, adding a sheen to every view. Every landscape or city skyline or beach day was coated in it.

  She knew it was just moisture and cold from the Pacific mixing with the heat of the land, but it felt eerie to her. She was a Midwestern girl, despite her birth certificate. In Iowa, a strangeness in the air meant danger. A sign of an impending storm, and a bad one at that. Years and years of tornado warnings and trips to huddle in the basement had scarred her.

  Strange air was never good. And she couldn’t seem to reassure her brain with logic. That wall of fog that hung off the coast every morning looked like alien mist from a Stephen King novel. Anything could be lurking there. Soviet submarines, UFOs, monsters.

  Most likely monsters.

  No, thanks. She’d take a Chicago beach any day. She should never have left that city.

  If she’d stayed, she wouldn’t have found her mother’s medical documents and felt her life cleave in two, the opening filling swiftly with this gnawing doubt. And she wouldn’t be driving through California haze and traffic, squinting against a sun that somehow pounded down even as it hid behind that weird nimbus.

  The cities were the worst, of course, the haze shimmering off acres of cement. But as she drove south out of San Francisco, Hannah only found more of the same crowding. Yes, it was hillier here. More natural. A bit more spread out. But there was no true openness.

  The canyons here were the same as the canyons surrounding LA: logjams of houses that had caught on any flat surface, as if they’d tumbled in on a flash flood. Some were propped on logs and pilings to keep them upright. They sat perched on cliffs, jammed into slots, stacked one above another. So many people. So many souls. Their homes jostled for position just as their cars did on the freeway, one giant traffic jam of humanity.

  But after what felt like an endless drive, something changed. Past the freeways of San Jose, the road construction of Santa Cruz, and the glitz and money of Monterey and Carmel . . . the landscape shifted. She crossed a boundary. The two-lane highway narrowed even further. The haze faded into clouds and moisture, and just like that, she was somewhere wild.

  She drove more slowly, expecting at any moment to pass through another town of pseudo-quaint clapboard houses and manicured lawns, yet she found nothing but angry water and treacherous roads. The coast here was dangerous. Untamed. Uninhabited.

  Not that she was alone. There were other cars filled with tourists and maybe a few pilgrims like herself. But no one just passing through. No one trying to get anywhere. These roads were too slow and steep for speed.

  Clouds drifted in and out. The sea glowed gray blue below the cliffs. Tourists pulled onto gravel turnouts to take pictures, but Hannah drove on, tugged forward by the GPS directions on her phone.

  It wasn’t far now. The blinking blue dot told her that, but she imagined she could feel it in her gut too. Some sort of homing organ.

  Thirty minutes later, she drove right past the sign she’d been watching so carefully for. A soft “Oh” pushed from her lips as if she’d been jabbed in the stomach.

  The Riverfall Inn. Just a sign sticking out from the trees, too subtle to catch her attention in time. The trees were redwoods, she realized then. Her first redwoods and she hadn’t noticed them either.

  After making a careful turn on a steep dirt road, she edged back onto the highway, driving more slowly lest she miss the turn again. She spotted the sign just in time, and then the paved narrow lane that slipped into the trees past it.

  At first she tried to ease up the rising hill, tentative in this unfamiliar car, but that didn’t work. She had to gun the engine to hop up over the steep rise. After that, the road leveled out and curled through the trees.

  The paved road turned to dirt. Now she was driving through a false dusk. Tunneling into a strange forest. A hidden house appeared next to her before she even realized she’d reached her destination. Hannah slammed on the brakes, and the car slid to a dusty stop.

  Heart racing, she turned off the engine and stared at the inn. It looked just like the pictures. A two-story blue farmhouse with white railings around the front porch. Lovely round lanterns flickered on either side of the redwood door. The Riverfall Inn. Beautiful and expensive. This was where she’d been born, but the high-end finishes made it feel like a movie set instead of a truth.

  As she stepped out of the car, she looked around for the cabins and saw only trees and ferns. Water rushed somewhere in the distance, but she couldn’t see even a hint of it from here.

  The house before her was so covered in vines and brush that she couldn’t tell how old it was, though surely these plants had been growing for decades. Hannah walked up the steps and carefully opened the door. Her arms felt too light, as if she were a visiting ghost.

  The girl behind the counter glanced up over her glasses without lifting her head. “Welcome to the Riverfall Inn.”

  The insincerity of her words matched her dreary clothes and dark makeup. Hannah glanced around the tiny front room and found it was all wood and natural colors, the sleek lines polishing away any hint of the farmhouse it had once been.

  “Hi,” Hannah ventured.

  The girl—Jolene if her name tag was correct—sat straighter and stared.

  “Um. I rented a cabin?” Hannah couldn’t recall the last time she’d sounded so uncertain about anything. This place didn’t give her any feelings at all, and there were no cabins around. If it were the right place, wouldn’t she have a sense of coming home? A reaction in her bones?

  “Your name?”

  “Smith,” she answered, unsure of even that. “Hannah Smith.”

  “Have you stayed with us before?”

  Yes. Maybe. “No.”

  Jolene whipped out a map. “You’re in cabin three. We’re here.” She pointed at a large rectangle on the map labeled CHECK-IN, then slid her finger across the paper. “You’re going to take the right fork in the road and park right here.” She made an X and then circled one of the six little squares that were laid out in a semicircle. “Maid service includes new kindling each evening, and there’s breakfast here in the dining room from eight to ten every morning. You’re here for four nights?”

  “Yes.”

  “With four nights, you get a complimentary bottle of wine.”

  “Oh. All right.” She stared, unable to wipe her confusion off her face while too many questions pushed against the back of her teeth.

  “It’s already in your room,” the girl prompted.

  “Sure. Thank you.”

  Jolene’s forehead crumpled into an irritated frown for a bare second. “Here’s your key,” she offered, placing an old-fashioned motel key on top of the map. “Will you be exploring the area?”

  Hannah blinked several times, worried she was acting suspicious enough to prompt questions. Then she realized it was a canned phrase. Exploring the ar
ea. As if Jolene gave a damn what anyone did around here. She was someone’s teenage daughter, eager to escape this place as soon as she could. She probably wanted to get out of the fog of the coast and into the haze of LA.

  “Yes,” Hannah finally answered, “I’ll be looking around. Big Sur, I mean.”

  Jolene produced another sheet of paper. “Hiking map.” This one had smaller squares and rectangles. “Here’s your cabin. Here’s the river. The river trail is great.” If it was as great as the tone implied, the trail was likely packed with dog shit and trash.

  Hannah gathered up the papers and the key and stuffed it all into her purse. “Thanks.” She was three steps toward the door when her tongue finally shoved out a question. “Do you know what this place was before?”

  The girl had already slumped into her chair, but she straightened when Hannah turned back to face her. “Before?”

  “Yes. Before it was an inn.”

  “It was another bed and breakfast.”

  “I mean before that. The history of the property.”

  Jolene shrugged, just as Hannah had known she would. It was a dumb question to ask a disaffected teenager.

  “Is the owner around? I’d like to speak with him.”

  “He’s out surfing. He’ll be here in the morning, though. Or you could try coming by later. The cell reception sucks, so don’t count on your phone.”

  Hannah nodded and let herself out. As she took a deep breath of woody air, she realized she was thankful it had been Jolene checking her in instead of the owner. She hadn’t gotten her bearings yet. Didn’t know what she wanted to ask, much less what answers she was hoping for. She should know. She’d spent hours on the plane and in the car thinking it out, but she felt muffled and disoriented now that she was actually here.

  She hopped in her car and drove deeper into the woods.

  The shocking beauty of the coast had let her forget why she was traveling, if only for a few heartbeats at a time. But the urgency was back now. The reason. The weight of it was an odd, pressing knowledge that wasn’t knowledge at all. It was question. Doubt. Erasure. Fear. As deep and primal as these woods.

  The car bounced into a pothole, shaking her as she rounded a curve, and then the cabins were in front of her.

  She pulled into the space marked #3, turned off the car, and sat there, too scared to get out.

  The engine ticked to silence. She waited for that feeling again. A sense of belonging or coming home. The cabins were just small brown squares that blended into the trees. She’d meant to stay in the inn itself, but it had been sold out, so she was here without even knowing if the cabins were the right place. Shouldn’t she feel something?

  But she never felt the right things, did she? She’d never felt pulled toward community, never appreciated the love and security that everyone else craved. Her mother and sisters had always been so close, so content. And everyone in her family was still on a first marriage, while Hannah was relieved to be leaving her second. She was wrong. Always wrong. Why had she expected to conjure up the right emotions here?

  The sun began to set, and true dusk settled in, shrouding the woods and Hannah’s fear.

  She got out of the car and walked toward whatever answers waited.

  CHAPTER 6

  There were no answers here.

  As soon as she walked into the cabin, she knew she would’ve been better off just calling the owner to ask as many questions as she could. Even if these cabins had been here in ’72, everything but the foundations had been stripped out and rebuilt years ago.

  The floors were smooth, heated wood, the walls were glossy layers of warm plaster, and the interior doors were frosted glass. And the bathroom . . . well, Hannah heartily doubted anyone had installed river-stone shower floors in the 1970s.

  She dropped her bags on the self-warming floor and collapsed into a deep armchair. Tears burned her eyes. She let her head fall back so the tears could run into her hair and disappear as if they’d never existed.

  “Not fair,” she growled. “Not fair, not fair.”

  She might have screwed up important things in her life, but this was one thing she hadn’t deserved. This, at least, was something simple that every child was promised. Here is your father. Here is your mother. Here are their names, even if you’re adopted and have never met them. Here is a legal document to tell you who you are.

  She’d always found it strange that so many adopted kids became obsessed with that question: Who am I? She’d felt sorry for them. Didn’t they know who they were already? Did they need someone else to tell them? You were who you were, no matter who’d given birth to you.

  But now she saw the flip side of it. There’d been one tiny correction to her path, and she suddenly needed to know the truth. She needed to see it. See herself carved into someone else’s face. A mirror of her features. The original sketch of her genetics.

  But why? What could it possibly matter? She was who she was, regardless. There were no answers here. There was no genetic sketch. And the only mirror was a backlit oval perched over a ridiculously shallow ceramic sink.

  Hannah wiped the wet trails from her temples and pulled out her phone. Without even thinking about it, she pulled up Jeff’s name and hit “Call.”

  It was only as she waited for the ringing to start that she wondered what the hell she was doing. He wasn’t her husband anymore. He wasn’t even her friend. They were adversaries now, fighting over the money she’d earned with her own hard work.

  “Bastard,” she said automatically, even as she crossed her fingers that he’d pick up.

  He didn’t. Maybe he finally hated her enough that he’d blocked her number. Or maybe he was on a date and he’d silenced the phone as soon as he saw who was calling. But she didn’t hear his voicemail. She didn’t hear anything at all.

  Hannah pulled her phone back and looked at the screen. The one tiny bar of signal changed to a blank.

  “Shit.”

  She needed him and she couldn’t have him. Even if that was what she’d chosen when she’d walked away, it didn’t make it hurt less. In fact, it hurt more, because she couldn’t blame anyone but herself.

  Well, she could if she tried. She was mad at him for quite a few things. For the settlement fight. For the million arguments about her stupid dissatisfaction. For ever wanting to marry her in the first place, damn it.

  She’d warned him. She’d told him it wouldn’t work.

  The flash of familiar anger burned off some of her self-pity, and she sat forward, though the chair tried its best to pull her back into its cushions.

  Had she expected there to be an interactive exhibit waiting for her in the cabin, with pictures of the farm and its previous inhabitants? Maybe she’d thought her room would feature a framed photograph of her father with his arm looped around a strange woman, a caption offering her name.

  “Ha.” Hannah shook her head at her impatience, another constant in her life. Impatience was good for a career. Not so good for solving a forty-five-year-old mystery. Or making a marriage.

  Before she lost all the light, she opened the back door of the cabin and stepped onto the packed-dirt patio. A fire pit sat in the center, already prepped with kindling and wood. Two chairs were angled toward each other, awaiting a pair of lovers. Or Hannah and her feet.

  The sound of water drew her off the patio, and she only had to take a few steps before she saw the rushing, bubbling water of the river. No waterfall in sight, but she could hear it somewhere to the east, rumbling its existence.

  She followed a trail to the right, checking out each cabin as she passed. They were all the same style as hers, eco-chic or some such descriptor. When she reached a fence that said PRIVATE PROPERTY, she turned back and tried the other direction as the air turned twilight blue around her.

  After passing all six cabins, the trail continued uphill along the river. She followed it for a few dozen yards, then decided it was a trip better saved for the morning. The redwoods—she assumed they wer
e all redwoods—blocked the last of the pale light glowing in the west, and she needed a bit of that light to get the fire started.

  It wasn’t until she turned back, guided by the glowing windows of her cabin, that it struck her. Her mother must have walked here. Certainly her father had. He and Dorothy and her sisters had lived here for years. They’d tended a garden. They’d likely made that trail along the river themselves. Made the cabins. Made Hannah.

  She stopped at her cabin door and turned back, looking up at the trees and the sky beyond it. And finally she felt it. A shift in her body. A recognition that opened something inside her. It felt like heartache. Or like the strange, painful hope that you weren’t falling in love again when you knew damn well you were.

  God, she was tired. She’d spent the past forty-eight hours tearing through the remaining stacks of documents in her parents’ den, sure she’d find an answer. Any break she’d taken had only been to get back online and order birth certificates. For herself. For her sisters. For her father. For Dorothy. New copies to compare to the old in case any details had been forged. The birth certificates might be waiting when she got home. Hopefully they’d be useless to her by then, but she’d needed to do something.

  She needed to do something now. But instead of building the fire, she opened the bottle of wine and sat in one of the chairs. The impossibly tall trees rustled around her and blocked out the stars. Hannah drank her wine and wondered if her heart was about to break yet again.

  CHAPTER 7

  She woke with a headache and cottonmouth and the sharp smell of her own sweat. Though she didn’t remember any nightmares, it had obviously been a restless night. The sheets were twisted and damp around her waist.

  It was already nine, but that was fine. She’d needed the sleep, and she didn’t mind getting to breakfast late. Better to have the inn owner to herself than share him with ambitious sightseers.

  Hannah showered and girded her loins and hiked up to the main house for answers.

  When she found the dining room, she was relieved to see only one couple at the table, and by the looks of it, they were wrapping up their last cup of coffee. They both appeared to be in their early fifties when they glanced up from their guidebook and offered friendly hellos. Hannah smiled weakly back and took a seat.