What Happened to Hannah (15 page)

“Oh, jeeze.” Hannah cringed, covered her face with one hand, and held the other one up all at once. “Wait. Wait a second. I get that you’re trying to be open and honest with me, but maybe, in this case, maybe you shouldn’t. I mean, in the back of my mind somewhere I understand it. I do. I know kids do it; there’s peer pressure and all that. But I sell insurance, for God’s sake. I know the carnage of underage drinking . . . any-age drinking, actually. And . . . and I like to think of myself as a responsible adult . . . and now I’m thinking of becoming
your
responsible adult, so I’m sure I can’t approve of this kind of behavior. No matter how responsible you are, it’s still illegal. ” She wanted to grab the girl and shake her. Hard. Hadn’t they had enough booze in their lives? Instead she offered Anna a second brownie, and when she declined took another for herself. It was a brownie moment—she needed to be comforting, indulgent, and . . . chewy. “Do you drink a lot?”

Anna smiled before picking up the casserole dish and opening the oven door. “No. I tried a sip of Lucy’s beer last summer. I didn’t like the flat, icky taste of it. I could have tried hard liquor or pot, too, I guess, but aside from it throwing my hydration levels off when I’m training, I’ve decided not to risk having to live with that kind of insanity in my life anymore. Children who have addicted parents have a higher rate of suicide, lower self-esteem, an increased incidence of depression; on average total health-care costs 32-percent higher than children who don’t, and they have a greater likelihood of becoming addicted themselves. I don’t need that.” She turned and gripped the counter behind her with both hands. “Do
you
drink a lot?”

At first Hannah thought the girl was joking. But the flame blue eyes looking back at her were not simply a reflection of her own genetically, they mirrored a steely strength and determination that she knew as well . . . well, as well as she knew her own name.

“No. I don’t. And I tend not to tolerate people who do drink, which is hard on my social life sometimes.” Alcoholism was not a favorite subject for her—too many questions without scientific answers, outnumbered by memories that were as clear as HDTV. To keep her hands busy, she took a head of red leaf lettuce from the crisper and started washing it for salad. “It’s not like it used to be, though . . . in other people’s minds. Now that so many movie stars belong to AA or Al-Anon, society is more open-minded about it. They consider it a disease or an addiction and not a character flaw.”

“Do you truly believe that? Or are you saying that so I won’t hate my mom?”

Stopping mid-lettuce-rip, Hannah looked up. “Do you hate your mom?”

Anna shook her head, her eyes softened and her lips bowed in a tender smile. “I loved my mom but she was seriously damaged, inside, you know? She was sweet and gentle and weak. She couldn’t figure out how to live in the world. The drugs and alcohol made her think she was hard. Like you. She told me I could grow up to be the perfect person because I was part her and part you—I could be gentle and tough.”

“She thought I was hard and tough?” Oddly, that hurt.

“She thought . . . you were her hero. I never heard her say one bad thing about you. Ever. Not even . . .”

“What?” Anna shrugged and looked away for a moment. “Not even what, Anna?”

“Not even when you ran off and left her behind. I mean, she never put it like that. I did . . . sometimes. Because you never came back. You never wrote. You never called her. You just disappeared on her. But she explained that.”

“She did?” Panic and bile rose in her throat. Anna knew? No. She knew and could still look Hannah in the eye? No, no. She knew and hadn’t told anyone?

Anna gave a grave nod. “You and your father had a horrible fight over a boy. Sheriff Steadman, right?” Hannah nodded. So far, so right. “Gran was afraid he’d kill you and told you to run. She told you to hide and to never come back. Then the next day when you didn’t come home, he started in on Gran again, hitting her, saying it was her fault that you’d left, that she was a terrible mother and when my mom worked up the courage to step in like you always had, he knocked her clear across the room, she said. Knocked her out cold and when she came to, Gran stood over him with the frying pan in her hand and he was dead. Self-defense.”

Well. That was a nice tidy version of what
could
have happened. Told by a third party with no experience of the fear and horror one powerfully built man could reign down on a woman and two small girls with his fists and a bottle of Ten High. It came off as rational and straightforward. An open-and-shut case. And maybe it had been for her mother. Heaven knew, she deserved it. But it wasn’t so simple for Hannah.

The truth was far from out in the open, but the case would remain shut if she could avoid all the traps inherent in returning to the scene of the crime. And get her butt out of town again. Soon.

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

H
er 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.