The Air We Breathe (13 page)

C
LAIRE
N
OVEMBER
2002

Hanna had called and asked her to bring ice cream when she came. The girl could eat ice cream every day and never choose any flavor but mint chocolate chip. Claire had bought her a half gallon of Breyers a few weeks ago, but her mother wouldn’t let her have it too close to bedtime, since anything like ice cream or milk had always given her nightmares. She said she didn’t mind them, though. “Sometimes it’s scary, but fun, too, in a way. Like watching a horror movie.” Horror movies and bad dreams must be a welcome relief for her. God only knew what that little girl saw in her head when she was awake.

She said she hadn’t liked the Breyers all that much, sort of icy and gritty, not smooth like the mint chip at Stewart’s. And not green, either.

Claire didn’t care for cold foods since the weather had changed, and autumn had settled over them fully, nights barely
above freezing and layers of brown leaves in her yard. She needed to rake, but couldn’t find the motivation. Caden had loved ice cream year-round, too, but he’d picked a different kind every time. They would drive past the convenience store while running errands or taking Amelia to occupational therapy, and he’d say, “Can we just stop, please?” And she would let him, of course, pulling in front of the shop with the car running, allowing him to run inside by himself, his coat unzipped, a dollar fifty in his hand and a bit more responsibility growing him taller every time.

Claire took the long way to the Sullers’, nearly a twenty-minute drive for a three-mile trip. No left turns. She still couldn’t make them, though some mornings, when she sat at the stop sign on the corner of Fifth and Rockland, she’d almost swept the side of her hand down over the directional rather than up, could almost feel her body listing left, waiting to go, wanting to. She could be there for minutes, debating, arguing in her head, until another car rolled up behind her and honked, prodding her to make the right.

Amelia had been left-handed.

She had told Heidi once that her children haunted her. Now, sometimes, she could just have memories of them, little thoughts that made her smile. Like when Caden wanted to make it into the
Guinness Book of World Records
for the longest consecutive days chewing the same piece of gum—after seeing
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,
of course—and decided to go to bed with the gum in his mouth. He woke up with it in his hair and refused to let Claire cut it out. So she scrubbed with peanut butter, held ice on it, washed his hair in baby oil. Nothing worked. Finally, Daniel convinced Caden a buzz cut was the cool way to go. Claire hated seeing
her son’s black curls on the bathroom floor, but he gained the swagger of his daddy that day.

Or when Amelia performed in her first dance recital. She had been so proud, and Daniel bought her the biggest bouquet of roses he could put together, driving to every florist in Avery Springs, collecting more than one hundred yellow and pink and red and white flowers. Oh, she had been the envy of her class, and then all the flowers had to be in her room. Claire needed five vases to hold them, and Amelia smelled each one of them every morning until they shriveled and died. They collected the petals in a box, and Claire tied a ribbon around it and tucked it on the top shelf in her daughter’s closet.

They buried that box with her.

Sometimes the memories still came with stinging tentacles, wrapped around her limbs and pulling her down, down, down, and those were the times Claire went to bed, forcing herself to sleep, to forget. Or she opened her puzzle books and focused on the clues, the words. The letters. That’s what crossword puzzles were, letters in boxes. She had been living her life in those boxes; if she moved outside their black lines, the world came back to her. But she was learning the letters only had meaning when put together in the correct order, written out to match the clues, fit perfectly in the squares. Letters alone meant nothing. Life alone meant nothing. All the crossword puzzles and the fourteen-hour nights wouldn’t bring her children back.

But God had given her Hanna.

No, she wasn’t her child. But Hanna gave her a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The girl needed her, wanted her around. When was the last time someone had wanted her? Other than Andrew.

Their second date had been nice, as had their third. They spoke on the phone an evening or two during the week, not a long time, maybe a half hour if one of them felt particularly chatty, but both were still trying to find their way in this dance of dating, two adults who’d never expected to have to do the
finding the right one
thing again.

She liked him.

The Suller house came up on her quickly, like always, tucked back behind an island of landscaping. It was on the west side of the city. The money side—where people had driveways and carriage houses and perfectly painted trim around the windows. Susan had started interviewing nannies, Hanna told her.
“It’s too sad for her to stay home with me. She’s going back to work.”
And this twinge of resentment built, the idea that she was a better woman to take care of Hanna, that Hanna needed her more than her own mother, that she deserved the girl’s love because she knew how to give love back in the right way.

Parking in the driveway, she prayed, as she always did before seeing Hanna. She knew from Diane Flinchbaugh that the girl had yet to open up about the trauma she experienced. Sometimes Claire thought Hanna wanted to tell her things, would if Claire only asked. But she was afraid to; she didn’t want to know what Hanna had gone through, not really. Didn’t want to know what men were capable of when it came to innocent children.

Claire had a hard enough time living in the real world without having those pictures in her head.

Still, Hanna had sounded a bit, well, more distant than usual on the phone. She usually spoke little, but there was a hitch in her voice, a distractedness. Claire thought maybe
Susan didn’t know she was making the call—it was the first time Hanna had phoned her; usually her mother did, if any messages needed to be conveyed—and that would explain the tightness. She knew the girl wanted to talk about something, but with Susan hovering while they visited, she doubted they would have any opportunity to speak openly. She had been surprised to learn Hanna had taken one of those Gideon Testaments but was glad. Claire wanted to buy her another Bible, one written in a translation she could better understand, but also didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the precarious balance she found herself trying to keep—building a relationship with Hanna without increasing Susan’s clear distrust.

She wasn’t doing it all that well.

The light beside the front door hadn’t been turned off yet, which surprised Claire. She knew from Hanna it was one of the first things Susan did each morning—it used to be Hanna’s job—and she glanced at her watch even though she’d looked at the time seconds ago, before leaving the car: 10:07 a.m.

She knocked on the door, expecting it to open, expecting both of the Sullers to be standing there, Hanna in her coat with a shy smile glossing her lips, Susan trying not to let her daughter see she hated her going out. But no one answered. The half-gallon box of ice cream cold and sweaty under her arm, Claire knocked again, waited, tried the doorknob. It turned—unlocked; also unusual for the Suller home—and she pushed the door open, stuck her head inside, and called, “Hello?”

Silence.

There weren’t any lights on in the house, either. Claire felt a spidery sense of concern scurry up from her stomach to her head. “Hanna? Are you home?” She found the three
light switches near the door, flipped them all on. The lights came on in the upstairs and downstairs hallways. The closet door was open, and Claire didn’t see Hanna’s purple coat. Hangers tangled on the closet floor.

“Anyone here?”

She thought briefly of calling the police, but the idea was so fleeting it left her before she fully knew it was the rational thing to do. Walked down the hallway toward the kitchen. And then she saw it, on the ceramic tile floor.

Blood.

Not slick and shiny, but coagulated, nearly black in some places, gloppy. No neat puddle, either; it looked as though someone had pulled themselves through it, smearing it along the floor. There were half handprints on the counter, the back doorjamb, the wall. On the stove, a cast-iron frying pan lay bottom up, half covering one burner.

Saliva flooded Claire’s mouth; she swallowed it down, inhaled and held the air in her lungs until her desperation to breathe overtook her desire to run, to vomit. To scream. She grabbed the pan—had never used a cast-iron one before, so its weight surprised her—and climbed the stairs yelling, “Hanna? Hanna?” All four bedrooms were empty. She checked the closets and under the bed. In the bathroom she hesitated a second, images of
Psycho
in her head, and then pulled the shower curtain back with a quick jerk.

Empty.

Downstairs again, she dropped the pan on the floor. Cell phone. No, her purse was still in the car. She reached for the phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen above some skinny, high-backed stool. Dialed 9-1-1. Gave the information and hung up. Then she called Andrew.

“She’s gone, she’s gone. And there’s blood all over here, and she’s gone. Oh, Lord, please let her be okay. Andrew, we need to pray.”

“Slow down. Who’s gone? Who’s bleeding?”

“Hanna. I’m here in their house, and there’s blood and she’s gone.”

“Call the police.”

“I did. They’re coming.”

“Then get out of there, Claire. Get in your car, lock the doors, and wait.”

“Sirens. I hear them. Please, come.”

“I’m on my way.”

M
OLLY
F
EBRUARY
2009

The ocean had decided to shake off the cold, at least on Dorsett Island. The springlike temperatures had brought people to the town and through the museum. She’d sold a dozen admissions, and three hours still remained until closing. Outside the kitchen window, the round thermometer with a faded smiling rainbow background read fifty-nine degrees, matching the record high.

Dorsett Island was the third and smallest island in an archipelago, the population of all three totaling eleven hundred year-round. The museum was the last building at the end of the island, a converted Dutch Colonial with traditional gray clapboard siding, more gray from the ocean air. In the late 1940s, Mick’s father had taken a chain saw to the entire front of the house and installed the huge window after he’d seen a wax figure display on a boardwalk at Coney Island. The House of Wax was Lou’s baby; he had traveled all over the United States to buy figures and to see other museums.

It had been popular in the ’50s and ’60s, when Dorsett Island was popular, when vacations meant summering at a quiet beach in a picturesque location. But now vacations meant Six Flags and Disney Cruises and other places built around constant consumption and entertainment. A small, rocky outcropping in the northern Atlantic could only entertain for half a day, maybe—two dozen photos of lobster boats and wild sea, a clam roll and some homemade saltwater taffy from the quaint local businesses, an overpriced jar of Maine blueberry jam, and tourists had wrung all they could out of Dorsett Island.

She could see a part of the beach from the front window, a small wedge of rock and sand at the end of the street. Two desperate sun worshipers wore bikini tops with their jeans, hoping for an authentic layer of bronze over their store-bought tans, despite the ragged wind. An older couple carried their shoes and stood close to the water, the waves crawling in to lick their toes. One little boy built a sand castle. A girl with white-blond hair ran with a kite—a vibrant butterfly attached to the string clutched in her hand, the purple and blue and orange ribbons twisting from the bottom tips of its wings. Molly watched the little girl run until she had no more room, her path blocked by a sharply rising, forested bluff. She turned and went back the way she’d come, moving fast and careless down a thin finger of granite reaching into the sea.

She’d had a kite once, a plastic one her father bought from the dollar store because she was with him, and she begged, even though he said it would fall apart in an afternoon. She wanted it anyway, picked out one with an American flag design, and he paid for it along with his batteries and paper plates for their camping trip. Then the three of them headed
to a campground in Lake George—Molly, her father, and her mother—towing the rented pop-up and playing letter search, trying to find A through Z on the signs they passed, even though it was only a thirty-minute trip. The camping area was wooded, with tall pines and little sky, but Molly ran that kite up and down the dirt road in front of their site, no more than six feet of string behind her, the red-white-and-blue triangle bouncing along the ground more than floating in the air. That had been July. She never would have imagined she had less than a year left with him.

“Oh, awesome! Can we go in? Please?”

Molly heard the voice outside the window, drifting in through the open door Louise had propped open with a chair that morning. A young boy, maybe ten, bounced between two adults, his hair thick gold and windblown, his jacket tied around his waist.

“I don’t know, kiddo,” the man said. “It looks—”

“—so cool.”

“I was thinking infested.”

“Oh, please, please? Come on. It’s vacation.”

“We could see how much it costs,” the woman said.

“Awesome,” the boy said again, and Molly watched him shake them off, bouncing into the lobby as the man called, “We’re just checking.” Then the adults, too, were inside, telling the boy not to touch anything.

“I’m not,” he said, staring at Elvis. “He looks dead. Like embalmed or something. Can I poke him?”

“No,” the man said. “We already told you that.”

“It’s okay,” Molly said, and the three twitched, turning to her as if surprised to see something
alive
. “Just don’t poke too hard.”

“Thank you,” the boy said shyly. He stretched up and touched the tip of the wax figure’s nose, petted his face. “Weird.”

“It’s twenty-five for all of us,” the woman whispered to the man. “What do you think?”

He nodded, and she waddled to the counter, her pregnant belly swelling from between her mostly unbuttoned cardigan; only the top two were closed. “Two adults and a child,” she said, taking out her credit card.

“We’re going?” the boy asked. When the man nodded again, he posed with his hands on his hips, squeezing one eye shut so the side of his lip pulled up. “Thank you, thank-you-very-much.”

“Funny,” the man said.

Molly ran the card through the machine without checking the name, handed it back to the woman, distracted by her face. She looked more than familiar. Known, somehow. Brown hair, layered and slightly wavy to her chin. Thick brows, but not bushy. Dark eyes. Pretty, like Brooke Shields’s in
The Blue Lagoon—
a movie she saw late one night on Lifetime. Her voice dislodged something inside Molly, and she thought of ice cream, of the two most important waffle cones of her life—the one she never had that took her away, and the one that brought her home.

The woman signed the credit slip.
Claire Brenneman.

No. Rodriguez. Claire Rodriguez. It’s not her. It’s not her.

“Thank you,” the woman said, taking the small white paper and folding it, first the long way, and then in half again, before sticking it into her back pocket. “Ready?”

“Oh, yeah,” the boy said.

Molly stood there, the phantom scent of mint chocolate chip
in her nose, holding the edge of the counter so she wouldn’t fall over. Her feet tingled, and drops of sweat slid from her armpit down her side, catching in the band of her bra.

“This way?” the man asked, pointing to the curtained entrance, and Molly managed to nod, croaking out something like “Have a good time,” forgetting to give them a brochure or instructions about following the signage.

When they were through the door, Molly’s breathing turned loud, shaky, her vision graying over like static on the television. She took some time to straighten up the counter and the lobby displays and then walked through the office to the apartment door, unsteady, her fingers frigid, and went in to find her mother working on the couch, bookkeeping files mounded on the coffee table.

“I heard people,” Louise said.

Molly nodded. “I’m not feeling well.”

Her mother looked up. “What’s wrong?”

“I just need to lie down.”

“You look awful.”

“I know. Please, will you just do the desk?”

Louise glanced at her pile of work. “Give me fifteen minutes. There are a few things I really need to finish up yesterday.”

“Mom—”

“Ten. Okay?” She held Molly’s gaze.

“Okay,” Molly said, and somehow managed to find her way back behind the counter. She felt like wax, one solid mass of inorganic matter, void of faith or feeling. She couldn’t make herself bend to sit down, so she leaned against the stool. Claire would be coming back soon; Molly would have to force a smile, a word or two, but as hard as she tried, there were no words or smiles, or thoughts even. Only the past six
years of secrets, dropping away like Shirley’s fingers before she could catch them.

Finally, Claire, the boy, and the man pushed their way through the exit draperies, the boy grinning with enthusiasm. “The Chamber of Horrors was so cool. Did you see how that guy’s brains totally looked like they were spilling out around the ax? I mean—”

“I think I’m done hearing about brains,” the man said.

“Unless you can tell me the three main parts of it,” Claire said.

“Mom,” the boy said, drawing out the
ah
sound. “It’s vacation.”

Claire laughed. “Learning never takes a vacation. Tell me and you can pick one of those postcards.”

“Even one with the ax guy?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“The cerebrum. The cerebellum. And that other one.”

“Which is?”

“Um. The brain stem. Does it have a fancy name?”

“Not that you learned,” Claire said, laughing again. “Go ahead, pick your postcard.”

They ignored Molly, a family, the boy flipping through glossy pictures of movie stars and monsters, the man picking up the wax candy displayed in cardboard boxes on the small souvenirs area—chewable lips and fangs and mustaches. “Claire, do you remember these? I loved these things as a kid,” he told her, showing her the Nik-L-Nips, old-fashioned bottle shapes filled with different-colored sugary liquid.

The boy, having decided on his postcard, joined the man at the shelf. “What are they?”

“Candy. You bite off the tops and drink them.”

“You had weird stuff back then.”

“Do you want some?” Claire asked.

“Nah,” the man said, but she took two packages, and the postcard, and brought them to the register.

Molly wanted them gone. She shook open a small paper bag, dropped the items inside, and folded it over, giving it to the little boy, who waited next to Claire. “Free?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Claire said. “How much?”

“Uh, one sec.” Molly fumbled around for the calculator. She couldn’t remember the price of anything. She couldn’t make her fingers move. The boy said, “I can do it in my head,” and he blinked a few times before blurting, “Four-ninety. Unless there’s tax.”

“There isn’t,” Molly said. “Have a nice day.”

The woman looked at her, not with recognition but with bewilderment. She scrounged through her purse for a five-dollar bill, held it out. Molly pressed her thumb against a dime in the cash register, slid it up the drawer; it fell under the counter. “Sorry. Let me get another,” she said.

But Claire brushed her arm. “Don’t worry. Just leave it.”

Her fingerprints stayed on Molly’s arm, warm in the spot Claire had touched, a place close to her wrist, exposed because she wore three-quarter sleeves. She rubbed at it, trying to erase the sensation.

The boy grabbed a couple of brochures and stood by Elvis, putting his arm around the figure’s waist. “Take a picture, Dad.”

“A quick one,” Claire said. “And then back to Beverly’s. I think this nice young lady might want to close up.”

The man wriggled a small digital camera from his front jeans pocket, snapped two photos, and Claire told the boy to put his jacket on. “And zip up. It’s getting cool.” As the
boy worked the metal teeth into the zipper, the door behind Molly opened, and she heard her mother’s voice. “Moll, I’m done . . . No, it can’t . . .”

In front of her, Claire’s lips went white, her face yellowing, and her hand moved to her stomach as she wheezed slightly. She was looking over Molly’s shoulder, at Louise. “You.”

Molly didn’t turn around.

“I’m sorry,” Louise said. “I think you must be con—”

“Susan Suller.”

“No.”

“Claire,” the man said, coming close behind her, his hand now on her stomach, too, fingers laced with hers. “What’s going on?”

The woman’s head pivoted slowly away from Louise. She shrugged off the man’s arm and stepped around the counter until she stood just inches from Molly. With cautious fingers Claire touched her hair, dyed brown for the past six years, and looked straight into her face. “Hanna?”

Her mother stepped between them, bumping Claire away. “You’ve got this all wrong—”

“Yes,” Molly said. “Yes, it’s me. I’m Hanna.”

Silence.

Louise stared at Molly, her proud shoulders rounding forward. Claire slapped at her eyes, coughed. “I went to your house . . . The blood . . .”

“Just go,” Louise said.

“I can’t leave. I need to know what happened. I searched for you. I thought—”

“Claire,” Molly said, and the woman blinked. “Please.”

Claire nodded slowly. “Okay. Okay, but Hanna, can we . . . talk?”

Molly breathed deeply, feeling empowered, like her two halves had started melding together. “Yes.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Come back at seven. Come around to the side door. It’s for the apartment.”

“I will.”

“No you won’t,” the man said.

“Andrew,” Claire said.

“I don’t like it. You don’t know—”

“I’ll be here.” Claire took the man’s arm. “Let’s go. Beverly’s going to be wondering after us.”

The boy tore off a small corner of the small brown bag he held—his precious postcard tucked inside—rolling the paper in his fingers and pushing it between his lips. He chewed it, swallowed, ripped another piece. The man took the bag from him and folded it into his back pocket, then spread his arms over the boy and Claire and shuttled them out the open door. Louise pulled the chair away; the door fell shut and she fell on it, her entire body against it, fighting to keep out the past. She twisted the lock, dropped into the chair. Her handprints and forehead prints smudged the dusky glass. “You didn’t have to say who you were,” she said.

Molly closed her eyes. “Someone needed to.”