Hanna stood up and stole quietly over to the radiator underneath the windowsill. She crouched down and placed a hand on its side, only to find the metal frigid to the touch.
“It’s not working,” a voice said.
Hanna looked around the darkened room. One of the twins was snoring. Emily was facing Hanna, but her eyes were closed, her mouth half-open. Hanna’s other brothers and sisters were fast asleep. Only one was awake. In the bottom bunk by the doorway, Charliss’s eyes were wide-open.
“Go back to sleep,” Hanna whispered. “I’ll go downstairs and fiddle with the radiator in the living room.”
She tiptoed across the room and had just opened the door a crack when Charliss said, “You should be dead.”
A chill shot through Hanna’s body. Her skin tingled under her nightdress. Outside, the trees creaked, settling in the cold, and, for a fleeting second, Hanna felt outside herself. Strange in her skin. Afflicted. Haunted. You should be dead.
“What do you mean?”
“The fall from the rooftop. I watched you land. Your head hit first. Then your neck. Then your back. It was like it happened slow and fast at the same time,” he said. “A fall from that height should have killed you. Or broken your neck or split your head open. It should have hurt you somehow.”
“Shh,” Hanna said. In the next bunk, Emily was shifting in her sleep. Down the hall, Jotham had turned in for the night with Belinda. “You have to whisper. You don’t want to wake everyone.”
Charliss was still gaping at Hanna, the moonlight swimming in his eyes.
“What is it?” Hanna said.
“How are you still alive?”
She took Charliss’s hand and sat down on the floor next to him. So much had happened since her fall—the police station, Makala’s cruel taunts, rushing off to see Daniel, Hanna’s second unabashed rebellion in as many days. Life had inserted itself. She’d almost forgotten the pink afterglow that swept over her in the wake of her fall.
Hanna wanted to offer Charliss some comforting words, to explain why the fall from the rooftop didn’t injure her, to assuage him. Nothing came to her. Hanna could hardly make sense of it herself. She refused to believe it was sheer luck or a twist of fate. These past few days, Hanna had finally asserted herself. She was finally controlling her own choices.
“I’m glad you survived,” Charliss said.
Hanna leaned her head against Charliss’s arm and ran her hand across his back. In a few short years, after Charliss had been forced to leave Clearhaven, his brothers and sisters would exist only in his memory and Hanna would be a ghost to him. The trouble with leaving people behind is that they’re as good as dead, and the days that would follow for Charliss would be a tangible afterlife, wandering through the future without ever knowing whether the past really existed.
She kissed Charliss on the forehead and stood up. Hanna pulled the door open, held it tightly to stop it from creaking and then slipped into the hallway.
The heat was still on downstairs. The radiator’s side valve had loosened as the base cooled, causing it to stay lukewarm and interfere with the pipes leading upstairs. Hanna climbed to her knees and turned the valve with all her might. She wedged it shut with a hardcover book and then waited to make sure it held in place before standing up.
Out of nowhere, a figure appeared in her window.
Hanna gasped. A scream rose in her throat.
At first she saw only eyes and a mouth, ghostly and pale in the moonlight. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her mind erupted with thoughts of men from a faraway land storming through the front door and murdering everyone inside. She took a single terrified step back and prepared to run upstairs.
Then the face came into full view. It was Daniel, standing by himself outside. He waved to her and Hanna looked over her shoulder to make sure they were alone. Her gaze drifted to her nightdress, to her exposed neckline, her bare arms and legs. She grabbed a blanket and wrapped it over her shoulders. Carefully, so as not to make a sound, she opened the window a crack. Hanna expected Daniel to say something, but he just tilted an eyebrow at her.
“You scared the life out of me,” she said. A gust of cold air seeped inside and Hanna shivered. “It’s freezing outside.”
Daniel didn’t say a word about the cold. He looked past Hanna to the stairwell where up above the family lay sleeping. In the distance was a car, his car. “Want to go for a ride?” he asked.
* * *
Daniel drove slowly, without his headlights on to avoid detection. In the passenger’s seat beside him, Hanna had her jacket over her nightdress. Twice she’d turned around to look back at Jotham’s house but couldn’t see it in the dark. They were two streets away when Daniel asked Hanna where she wanted to go. Before she had a chance to think, the words “the tower cathedral” popped out of her mouth. Daniel nodded and turned onto a main road.
The car’s headlights lit up, casting a sheen on the weathered aspen trees lining the way. With their broad leaves still absent for winter, the frosted tree branches looked like crooked white chalk lines drawn by a child on the darkness. In any other instance, Hanna would have found these foreboding, the blackness surrounding the car overwhelming, reason to turn back and return to the relative sanctuary of Jotham’s house. But Daniel’s quiet presence, the way he shifted his strong hands along the steering wheel, the tenderness in his voice as he asked her if she was comfortable, whether she knew how to drive, quelled Hanna’s nerves.
They turned down another street and then another before entering the beating heart of Clearhaven. At night, the tower cathedral was steeped in shadows. It stood taller than any other structure in Clearhaven and yet was so dark. Daniel and Hanna might have missed it if not for the new church, Brother Paul’s pulsing white orb, lighting up the sky. The new church’s glow reflected off the tower cathedral’s stained glass, the accumulation of dust concealing the deep reds and cobalt blues. Hanna asked Daniel to pull his car up to the tower’s unlit side, where the white light split and nighttime loomed. The vehicle came to a stop and Daniel climbed out. He hurried around and opened Hanna’s door.
They’d parked directly across from a small cemetery atop a grassy knoll. The scattered tombstones glistened with frost, their inscriptions crumbling, unreadable after so many years. When she was younger, Hanna had been fearful of this small graveyard. It wasn’t just that bodies were buried underneath the ground. It was that they were corpses of people who’d lived before her time. Hanna didn’t know them. She’d never known them. The unknown dead were far less trustworthy, far more restless, far more likely to haunt her dreams.
“Do you see that?” Daniel said.
Hanna turned around to see a handful of fireflies skittering and gliding in short, swift bounds at the woodlands’ edge, peppering the tree line for the briefest of moments and then vanishing into the dark, only to reappear again. Last summer, hundreds of glow bugs had swarmed the forest near Jotham’s house, but Hanna had never seen them so early in the year. Watching them now, she wondered whether there was purpose in their flight, what they were searching for, what secret drove them to dance. The fireflies plunged deep into the tall grass and Hanna shifted her gaze upward. She pointed to the top of the cathedral. “That’s where we’re going.”
Daniel looked up. “It’s awfully high.”
“It’s very high,” she said. When Daniel gave her a skeptical look, she said, “From up there, you can see The Road. I bet we can see the big city, the tip of the horizon and everything beyond.”
“And you don’t think we’ll get caught?” Daniel said.
“I’m positive,” Hanna said. And she was positive. Hanna knew how the township was managed. The brothers Paul didn’t patrol the innermost regions of Clearhaven at night. They lurked on the outskirts, more concerned with who was trying to get in or out than with what was happening at the church. It w
as because they were being brazen that Hanna had no fear of being discovered. If Jotham were to find her missing, the last place they would look would be the old tower cathedral.
Together they walked to the front of the cathedral where two large doors were bathed in light. Daniel pulled on the handles as hard as he could. When that didn’t work, he pulled again.
“Maybe we should drive past the marketplace, see what’s happening there,” he said.
Hanna ran her hand along the thin divide where the doors met. She looked up, to the left and the right. Just minutes ago, she’d left Jotham’s house in the dead of night and driven off in a young man’s car for the very first time. The tower cathedral was her idea. She couldn’t imagine turning back now.
“Never give up until you exhaust all options,” Hanna said.
She walked around to the back entrance that led to the bridal preparation room, the one where husbands came to claim their young brides in the minutes prior to their weddings. Hanna peered in through a closed window. Just days from now, she and Edwin would be praying together in this very room, alone, with Hanna in her white wedding gown and Edwin in his grandest attire. Somehow the night and the hazy white light made it all feel unreal, like Hanna’s visit to Edwin’s house, her upcoming wedding, this life she was expected to live without complaint was all part of a bizarre fiction she’d conjured up in her head.
Hanna pulled on the side door and found it locked as well, but up above, just beyond her reach, a window was cracked open.
“Lift me up,” she said.
Daniel glanced upward. “You’re insane.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “Lift me up all the same.”
Hanna stepped toward Daniel, surprised at how forward she was being. Underneath her jacket, Hanna was wearing only her nightdress. Daniel had seen her bare skin when he came to her window. She exposed herself further when she stepped out onto the porch, when she discarded the blanket, placed her jacket over her shoulders and the two of them slipped away like ghosts in the night.
Hanna braced herself against his shoulders and lifted her foot to his stomach. Daniel steadied himself and then cupped his hands and hoisted her up to the window. She pried it open and lifted herself through. This was where the difficulty arose. Hanna had no real plan for how to climb down. The cathedral was dark inside, far too dark to see and Hanna wasn’t sure what was on the other side.
“Is everything okay up there?” Daniel said.
Hanna dangled on the other side, her feet swaying in the air, her fingers struggling to maintain their grip on the windowsill. The fall from Jotham’s roof returned to her memory—that stiff twinge of terror, time evaporating, the immovable sky, the scream erupting out of her mouth; the powerless feeling the instant before she hit the ground. Below Hanna the darkness waited to swallow her whole. It was the darkness she feared, the unknown. Hanna’s fingers started to slip.
“It’s better to leap than it is to fall!” Daniel called from the other side.
Hanna steadied her resolve. She bent her knees and let go, fully expecting to plummet into a vacuous pit of some kind. Instead, her feet touched the floor less than two feet below. Hanna groped through the dark. She fumbled aimlessly about a nearby desk and discovered a single candlestick. Hanna felt her way through the desk drawer for a pack of matches and lit the candle, and then she unfastened the dead bolt and opened the door.
Daniel stepped inside. He rubbed his eyes until they adjusted to the candlelight.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Hanna pointed to a set of stairs. “Up.”
* * *
The candle cast an eerie sheen over the cathedral. The pews, the stairs and the stage, the carpets turned red in the flickering light. Hanna’s breath hung like mist in the cold air and through it she saw the Creator’s face etched in the stained glass hanging high in the rafters, his eyes all but concealed by dust, his somber countenance shrouded in black.
Hanna stepped on the stage. Last autumn, she’d watched a child bride burst into tears on this very spot. The girl’s father ran to her, not to console her but to stop her wailing. He grabbed her by the wrists and held her in place. Her father shouted in his daughter’s ear, while the groom—a hunchbacked poultry farmer with one bloodshot eye—stood absolutely still, a haze of disinterest surrounding him. It took almost an hour for the girl to stop crying long enough to complete the ceremony. That was the greatest defiance Hanna had ever witnessed and still it achieved nothing. The girl was married and whisked away. Months later, Hanna saw her in the new church, her belly plump and round.
“Is this where you’re getting married?” Daniel said.
Hanna nodded. “Brother Paul still insists on performing all marriage ceremonies here. I don’t know why he and your father built that new church if they don’t intend on using it for everything.” Hanna really did wonder why. As her wedding day approached and she’d started to picture the ceremony in her mind, she could only imagine Brother Paul still used the tower cathedral because it was a link to the past, to his past, to the time of the first settlers. “Did you witness any marriage ceremonies while you were outside Clearhaven?” she said.
Daniel stepped onto the stage with her. “No. I didn’t have a chance. We were moving around from place to place a lot. I did meet a lot of people, though, mostly families. They were really different.”
“Different how?”
“To begin with, men only have one wife. The families are smaller,” Daniel said.
“Aren’t they concerned about The Rapture?”
“The Rapture?”
Hanna held the candle up to her face. “The Creator teaches that a man must have at least three wives to be allowed into Heaven. Those without three wives must bear the burden of the forsaken. They wait in purgatory for a hundred years before the Creator looks at them again, and still, there’s no assurance they’ll be chosen. They might never live in paradise. Plural wives are a necessity. Surely you remember your teachings from school.”
“I was homeschooled, remember? We had a slightly different curriculum,” Daniel said.
“You must have heard Brother Paul speak of this before.”
“Yes. Of course. I mean, I suppose,” Daniel said, staring off into the stained glass. “My mind tends to drift.”
“I think it’s drifting right now.”
Daniel let out a short, soft laugh. “Perhaps you’re right.”
He stepped off the stage and felt his way toward the pews where he sat down. Up above, the rafters shifted. A low whistle, uncannily similar to a wolf’s howl, originated high in the belfry and bled through the structure, fading as it reached the uneven floorboards. Hanna took a step and a half dozen boards shifted under her feet. She sat down beside Daniel, the wood cold against her legs.
“Are you okay?” Daniel said.
“Why do you ask?”
“You’re trembling.”
Hanna touched her cheek. She flushed with embarrassment. Now that Daniel mentioned it, she felt like her whole body couldn’t stop trembling.
Daniel set his hand on her arm to steady her. “It’s okay to be afraid,” he said.
“You’re the second person to tell me that.”
He took his hand back and shifted one leg under the other. Daniel met Hanna’s gaze. His eyes burnt bright in the candlelight.
“Someone once told me that fear only subsides when joy is so powerful that you refuse to be afraid.”
“Who told you this?”
Daniel smiled. His gaze lingered. “Okay, you caught me. I said it. But just because I said it, doesn’t make it any less true.”
“That’s profound,” Hanna said.
“I’m far from profound. I promise you I don’t sit around waxing philosophical all day.”
“But you have these thoughts,
involved thoughts, like about people on the other side of the world. It’s a wonder you can get through your day what with everything running through your head.”
Daniel opened his mouth and then closed it again. He shifted in his seat.
“What is it?” Hanna said. “You can tell me.”
“It’s...it’s just—there’s a huge world out there, all these amazing things I’ve never seen. Sometimes I look around Clearhaven and I wonder if there isn’t something else I should be doing.” Daniel placed his hand on Hanna’s arm and then pulled it away. “I don’t mean right now. Trust me, there’s no place I’d rather be at this very moment...”
“But?” Hanna said.
“But everyone wants me to stay in this little town. It’s not just Brother Paul. My parents are planning on me being their successor. You know, their heir. Only, for some reason, whenever I’m sitting in my family’s living room or splitting firewood or cleaning out the back shed, I...”
“You wonder.”
“That’s it,” Daniel said. “I wonder and then my mind...wanders.”
A warm stream of wax dribbled down Hanna’s fingers and she turned the candle on its side, allowing it to drip onto the floor.
“What about you?” Daniel said.
“I’m not sure my thoughts are as involved as yours.”
“Come on,” Daniel said. “There must be some hidden desire, something you want to do with your life that you’ve never told anyone about.”
Hanna handed Daniel the candle and pulled her jacket in close. She tucked her nightdress under her legs. All week, her mind had been preoccupied with secrets, visions of what it would be like to walk off into the wild and never be seen again. And now here she was, in the midst of her secret life and when Daniel asked, when she finally had a chance to speak her mind—she couldn’t. Not yet.
“It’s okay,” Daniel said and then nudged her with his shoulder. “Maybe just tell me one thing?”
Hanna thought for a moment. “I’ve always wanted to wear a red dress.”
Hanna Who Fell from the Sky Page 14