Samuel and Christobelle materialized in the half-light, their arms wound together. Hannah looked away as they passed by her, but her mother’s sharp-boned hand closed around Hannah’s chin and swung her head around.
“I could stay, child,” Christobelle whispered, her breath musty as swamp water. “This is still my house. But I’ll go, because I’ll relish it more when you come to me. And you will.” Hannah wiggled in her mother’s strong grip as her face came closer. Between words, her tongue wiped the front of her teeth. “Do you remember Jacob?”
Hannah flinched. Her legs began to shake, her own body’s weight suddenly too much. Christobelle leaned close and licked the palm of her hand, her tongue flicking up over several fingertips. Before Hannah could stop her, she pushed up Hannah’s shirt and ran saliva-wet fingers over her stomach. A long line down, and a shorter line across. “You are not alone,” she whispered as Hannah pushed her away and all the men exhaled in unison, a scent of sweet rot lingering briefly in the air then dispersing.
Hannah stood in the open doorway, wiping her stomach, long after the boat disappeared beneath the trees. She tried to understand Christobelle’s words, but what made her heart pound was that somehow her mother had known about Jacob. Her greatest shame.
Sarah Anne’s bedroom had been blindingly white, and a blown-glass vase on her nightstand held a bouquet of yellow roses. At home, Hannah’s own dingy striped blanket was smeared with peach jam and cornbread crumbs.
“It looks impressive, doesn’t it?” Sarah Anne asked wryly. She ran her hand over the top of her dresser and showed Hannah her clean fingers. “They have a maid clean it three times a week. My mom’s a little bit obsessive compulsive when it comes to the house. She feels weird about being a stay-at-home, but really, what else could she do? Bag groceries in town?”
Sarah Anne pulled out a thick hardcover book of fairy tales. “My mom likes to pretend she doesn’t drink, so she chose our maid very carefully.” She cracked the book’s spine to reveal a cutout chamber with a large rectangular flask inside where the pages should have been. There were worn initials carved into it. “She doesn’t snoop.”
Hannah shot her foot out behind her to close the door.
“It’s absinthe.” Sarah Anne ran the open flask under Hannah’s nose. The fumes made her head spin. “I met a boy in town who gives me a bottle every once in a while. When he doesn’t come through, I fill it with rum from the cabinet downstairs.”
“What does he ask for in return?”
Sarah Anne raised her eyebrows and took a small sip. She wiped her mouth daintily and smacked her lips. “Nothing too scandalous.” She handed the flask over and Hannah tipped it into her mouth. It tasted a bit like anise and she felt a thrill in her pelvis.
“I’ve never really made out with a boy before.” Hannah sat on the bed, running her hand over the silky cotton. A year back, there’d been a pale boy with glossy hair who had offered her a crown woven from cattails, but they’d gone no further than a wet, uncoordinated kiss that had left her feeling anxious.
Sarah Anne hopped onto the bed, covering the opening of the flask with her thumb, and crossed her legs. “Why not?”
Hannah avoided the question. “Why do you do it?”
Sarah Anne took another long sip. “It’s fun. It gets me things, but I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.” Hannah flinched as Sarah Anne’s nails touched her cheek. “You really are pretty,” she mused. Ignoring the jerking muscles in Hannah’s face, Sarah Anne pulled a tube of lipgloss from her pocket and ran it across Hannah’s lips. “Smack for me,” she instructed, and Hannah tasted synthetic strawberries. “You have an unusual face.”
Hannah grabbed the flask. “Unusual. Exactly.”
Sarah Anne ran a finger down one of her pin curls, straightening it to its full length. She studied its crisp, slightly frayed end. “It must be nice, not trying so hard all the time.”
Hannah took a long gulp of the absinthe and her shoulders slumped. It made her giddy even as it sapped her body of strength, and the rain began to fall in a soothing rhythm, turning the world outside to watercolor.
Sarah Anne yawned as she rose to close the curtains. The darkness was immediate.
“The rain always makes me so sleepy.” She punched Hannah’s leg. “Scoot over.” Hannah sat clutching the flask as Sarah Anne fidgeted out of her skirt and lay in bed. From the corner of her eye, Hannah saw long tanned legs crossing and the fading yellow splotches high up on the thigh. “Are you going to have a nap, too?”
Hannah looked around the room. Shadows swam across the walls. They looked like wingspans, extinguishing the light. “What about your brother?”
“He’s fine. He can entertain himself.”
“Don’t you ever worry, leaving him alone?”
The silence prompted her to turn around. Sarah Anne was staring at the ceiling, biting the inside of her cheek. “Jacob is much stronger than people think. Sometimes I think the rest is an act he puts on to be left alone, and I—I almost understand it.” The corner of her mouth was wedged between her teeth. “Look under the bed.”
Hannah leaned over the edge of the bed and glimpsed a dark pool of shadows, and a spider dangling from the bedframe. It seemed out of place amidst the perfect order of the bedroom. When she lifted the bedspread, it dropped onto the floor and scurried away. “Why?”
“Look.”
Hannah lowered her head to the plush carpet and saw small mounds laid out in a circle. “Are those stones?” she asked, and when she touched them, they were warm.
Sarah Anne’s voice was gruff. “I had to ask around town for a while before someone told me about that.” To Hannah’s bewildered face, she whispered, “They’re for protection.”
Hannah swung back onto the bed. “What I saw the other day, Jacob grabbing you like that—” She hesitated. Sarah Anne’s expression was pained, and she didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “I don’t think stones are going to solve it. You should tell someone.”
“It’s not him,” Sarah Anne said quickly. “At least, not always. I wake up in the night and—” She fisted her hands against her sternum. “Something’s sitting here, holding me down. I feel like I can’t breathe. The woman in town called it a cauchemar, a spirit. She said they can’t count, and stones in a circle will keep them busy all night.”
“Sarah Anne,” Hannah began, then stopped. She could hear her friend’s conviction, and she watched as the girl scratched at her cuticles intently.
“I know it sounds silly.”
Hannah sighed. “Do they work?”
“Some nights, but then it comes back, and I think maybe it’s just toying with me,” Sarah Anne said distantly, then shook her head. “I’m so tired. Let’s close our eyes for a bit.”
Hannah sunk back against the pillow. The scent of vanilla and liquor was cloying. “Just for a bit,” she said cautiously. “It’s like I’m in a bowl of potpourri.”
Sarah Anne nuzzled her curls, solid as a starched collar, against Hannah’s face and Hannah forced herself to lie still as Sarah Anne inched closer. “The maid sprays everything. Some days it smells like a garden. Other days, it’s muffins.”
Hannah listened to the rain pounding against the window. She could feel Sarah Anne’s heartbeat against her arm. “Does he hurt you?”
Sarah Anne clutched Hannah’s hand. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Hannah nodded.
“He’s been different since we moved here. My parents don’t like to talk about it, but I know.” Sarah Anne squeezed her hand. “It’s not him anymore.” Hannah didn’t know where to look. The whites of Sarah Anne’s eyes were absolute. “He’s someone else now.”
“Sarah, he’s still your brother,” Hannah said gently, but the girl spoke over her.
“When we first moved here, our furniture was a week late. My brother and I slept on air mattresses
downstairs.” Her eyes glazed over. “It started out so slow. He’d make these sounds in his throat, and they sounded so small. I went to touch him and he woke up, but he was crying. He asked me why I didn’t hear him screaming.” Sarah Anne paused and sucked in breath. “Then he said he couldn’t move, that someone was sitting on top of him, running blunt nails up and down his chest all night. It sounds like such a silly detail, those blunt nails, but he showed me what they can do, if they have hours to scratch. Then he stopped talking. The priest that we came here to see, the one that was taking care of him, has given up on him. He says it’s too late. Jacob only speaks to me now.”
“What does he say?” Hannah asked in a choked whisper.
“He talks about what it feels like to die. He says you can feel it, when your heart stops.”
Hannah swallowed hard. “Did someone hurt him?”
Sarah Anne nodded, and then added casually, “He talks about you, too.”
“Me?” Hannah asked, bewildered in the trance of absinthe. “What about me?”
Sarah Anne sat up. Hannah could feel the girl’s toes flexing against the mattress. “Something whispers your name to him at night. I’ve heard it, too. Sometimes I can’t tell who’s speaking, whether I’m awake or asleep. It feels like a fever. Like my body isn’t my own anymore.” Sarah Anne pulled distractedly at her cuticles as she spoke.
Hannah looked pointedly at the bruises on Sarah Anne’s thigh. “You need to tell someone about this.”
“No.” Her voice was low and urgent. “I thought you of all people would understand. It’s like I’m communicating with another world through him.” Sarah Anne’s eyes were wide, imploring. “You do understand, don’t you?”
The shadows were coalescing again, their feathered tips brushing along the wall. “Sure.” Hannah squeezed the girl’s hand.
In a quick movement, Sarah Anne straddled Hannah. Her eyes were wild. “When it comes in the night, it holds me down, just like this,” Sarah Anne leaned forward. “Do you want me to kiss you?” she asked. Hannah could see the line of her jaw, the edges of her white teeth, the inside of her nose. A complicated bouquet of peppermint, berries, and licorice rushed out with each breath.
“No,” Hannah said slowly, but she wasn’t sure she meant it. There was something magnetic about the other girl’s intensity. Curious, she touched a pulsing vein in Sarah Anne’s throat.
Sarah Anne’s eyes widened. The pulse quickened under her finger and Hannah could almost feel the girl’s heart palpitating behind her thin ribbed cotton top. “Come on,” she goaded. “You can practice on me.”
Their lips touched, although it seemed like neither of them had moved.
In the dark, anything was possible. The bed seemed to fade beneath them, the dimensions of the bedroom changed. They could’ve been in a field, crushing strawberries and mites as they writhed. Red seeds braiding themselves into their hair. The tongue pressing for entry, then sending a live-wire charge through the tip of her own tongue, could have been a caterpillar.
Hands slipped under her back and began to roll up her shirt, and still she didn’t open her eyes, didn’t feel the smallest twinge of self-consciousness as her young nipples, flat and brown as moles, touched bare skin.
Thunder cracked to their right and Hannah had time to open her mouth wider, ready for the fall of rainwater, before an inhuman grunt sounded.
“Jacob,” Sarah Anne said calmly.
Hannah wiggled out from under the girl, pulling down her shirt. The dreamy high veered into nausea.
To Hannah, it looked as though rage was moving across Jacob’s face like bruised clouds. The absinthe had set down barbs in her mind. Hannah noticed the door was splintered where he’d forced it open.
Jacob opened his mouth and let out an animalistic howl. Hannah covered her ears and turned away just as Sarah Anne dove off the bed and rushed toward him. He caught her in his vast arms, and turned her around like a rag doll by her right hand. He mashed her face against the door so quickly that her whimper of hurt was cut off.
Jacob held Hannah’s gaze as Sarah Anne struggled under his grip. Her efforts barely registered in the muscles of his arm.
Hannah held out a plaintive hand. “Jacob, calm down,” she pleaded.
His head jerked back and forth as if he was being tugged. The light coming in through the hallway backlit him; Hannah had to squint to make out his features.
“Go,” Sarah Anne said to Hannah, and when Hannah hesitated, she screamed the word.
Hannah stumbled to her feet, unsure what to do. “You have to let her go,” she began, flinching as he pummeled his other fist against the door, barely missing Sarah Anne’s ear.
“Leave now. Go.” Sarah Anne’s voice was different, echoing, and Hannah realized that she spoke in time to the thunder that was growing closer. When the lightning struck, the blue light picked out tendrils emanating from Jacob’s mouth, little sprigs of light sprouting from his head.
“Please,” Hannah tried again, and dropped to her knees, “I can’t leave until you let her go.”
Risking a glance upward, she saw Jacob release the girl’s head as if it were a sack of groceries. The effort she’d used to brace against his hand brought her backward against him. She slumped briefly, her face hidden by her curls. Hannah nudged forward to touch Sarah Anne’s leg. Too late, she saw Jacob’s foot lift. And move backward as if Hannah’s hand were a canebrake rattlesnake. As if Jacob feared her touch.
A hiss filled the air and it took her a moment to realize it was coming from Sarah Anne.
“Are you alright?” Hannah whispered urgently.
Sarah Anne righted herself and shook out her hair. She looked down at Hannah with an expression of contempt. “Of course,” she said, patting Jacob on the chest. A red ribbon of blood trailed from her nose, and she lapped it with her tongue. “Christ, can’t anyone hold their liquor?”
Hannah tottered as she stood. Her eyes moved between the siblings and the door, which wore a small spatter of red.
“Come with me,” she said under her breath to Sarah Anne. The dizziness was overwhelming. She wanted to flick away a bit of clotting blood from the girl’s nose, but Sarah Anne’s expression was so imperious, that Hannah’s hand dropped weakly to her side.
Sarah Anne flicked on the light switch. Jacob rolled his neck and staggered against the doorframe. He looked at Hannah with his usual sweet blankness, and his lips quivered just short of a smile.
“You should go,” the girl told Hannah, and snaked her arm around her brother’s. “My parents asked me to make lunch for Jacob, and I guess I forgot. Are you hungry?” A charged, private look passed between them. Jacob nodded.
“Sarah Anne,” Hannah said slowly, and then looked around the room. Everything was unchanged. Porcelain figurines of ballerinas remained ordered on top of the dresser, fenced in by a rainbow of nail polish bottles. The bed was slightly mussed, two fuzzy white teddy bears toppled in the white waves of the duvet. Even the thunder was receding, taking with it the last hints of menace. When she turned around, she was met with twin expressions of flat, polite curiosity.
“What are you waiting for?” Sarah Anne asked. She seemed unaware that she stood on one foot, the other flexed against her shin. Her red toenails scratched insistently.
“Something happened,” Hannah said dumbly, and Sarah Anne shook her head.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore. Sometimes girls are stupid. We got a bit drunk,” she explained, giving her brother a sheepish half-lidded look. His mouth committed to a smile, innocent as a baby’s.
“I mean, what happened afterward—”
“Enough,” Sarah Anne said firmly, and then lowered her voice. “Let’s not make a thing of it.” Her eyes crinkled sympathetically as Hannah opened her mouth and found only silence waiting in her throat. “I have to take care of my brother now. You know the way out.”
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Almost in a trance, Hannah stood stiff-backed as Sarah Anne maneuvered around her and returned with a windbreaker from her closet.
“Here,” Sarah Anne said, hinging the jacket over Hannah’s shoulders. The fabric didn’t feel real against Hannah’s stunned body. She waited for something else, some explanation or reassurance, but none came.
“Okay,” Hannah said. She felt her lower lip begin to tremble, the twitch moving up her cheek and into her quickly flooding eyes. “I’ll see you around.”
Hannah ran from the landing, almost falling as her bare feet slipped on the carpeted stairs. At the door, she hurriedly put on her shoes. Faint conversation trickled from upstairs, Jacob speaking calmly. “It’s not her time,” she heard him say.
She was halfway down the driveway when she remembered the windbreaker. As she slipped it on, the pelting rain a welcome wake-up call, she turned back to the house and squinted at the upstairs window. The blinds were drawn.
CHAPTER
SIX
Hannah woke at dawn to a sky swollen with storms. Gently, she unclasped her hands from Callum’s. Her legs felt populated, and when she lifted the covers, every inch of bare skin was dotted with mosquitoes—swollen, sated, and dead. The sheets were stained with a constellation of blood.
Cringing, she rushed to the bathroom, where she lay her head on the lip of the bath as if she were guillotined and turned on the faucet. The mosquitoes drifted even from her hair, dozens of dark bodies. They clumped in the drain. She sat on the edge of the tub, her feet hovering over the thick river of mosquitoes parading down the ceramic, and ran warm water up and down her legs, then cleaned her arms with a washcloth. The fabric became a landscape of slight wings and slender legs.
The house was hushed and expectant, waiting for the thunderstorm. Hannah moved down the stairs, stroking her fingers through spiderwebs and dust. When the swamp held its breath, all the birds and crickets watchful under their temporary truce, Hannah felt like a ghost, moving through some unpopulated middle plane. It was a beautiful privacy.
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