One
Hannah
As the moving and storage truck pulled away from the curb, Hannah Sawyer waved as if friends were leaving instead of her, a stranger, staying. The two young movers had wrapped her IKEA furniture in blankets like it was custom-made. Watching a box of ordinary white plates delicately touch down on her wood floor brought a sting of tears to her eyes. That some men could be so careful, so aware of the breakable world.
It had poured just the day before, a too-warm Thursday, flooding Tamsen Creek, muddying the trails that wound through the lower eastern part of the neighborhood, across the street and down the gulch from Hannah. A rain like that could give rise to another world: earthworms, grubs, centipedes. It could also weaken cardboard and drown electronics, and Hannah had looked to the sky repeatedly throughout the day, worried it would start again.
As they’d put down brown paper to protect her floors from mud, Hannah had asked them if they’d done any jobs yesterday, and the guys had said yeah, the water had risen so high in their client’s driveway, they couldn’t use the dolly or hand trucks.
Her son, Miles, had listened intently, maybe pondering rain and earthworm capture or, Hannah thought, considering moving furniture as a career. He asked questions about their equipment. They’d shown him how to work the hydraulic lip of the truck. The intoxicating smell of oil, gasoline, and rubber. Did anything else in Miles’s middle-school world of algebra and video games smell like that? It reminded Hannah of the grinding start of the car wash, so different from the detergent wave, rising and foamy, at the end.
If her son wanted to own a moving company, she’d be fine with that. Totally. She wasn’t going to be one of those moms who insisted on engineering, medicine, consulting. They were off to a good beginning, she thought. She wished she had video of it all to show her ex-husband, Mike. There, she’d say. See your son’s smile? He’s fine now. He was just acting out at the other school to get your attention. Trying to be tough to compete with you. Didn’t you tell me once you had to eat the cheek of the first fish you caught? Smear the blood of the first deer across your forehead? Did you make the mistake of telling him that shit, too?
“So I guess if the rain stopped, the rumors aren’t true,” the driver had said as he finished and loaded up the last of the quilted blankets, folded in even squares, stacked just high enough that they wouldn’t fall.
“What rumors?” she had asked, tensing a little. He was young, barely out of high school, but which one? Could he know someone else in her former neighborhood, a child at Miles’s old school?
“More of an old legend, I guess,” he said, wiping his hands against his jeans. “Not that you’re, you know, old.”
“Illuminate me,” she said.
“That Tamsen haunts this whole street cuz he’s pissed his heirs broke up his estate into all these properties. Figured that was maybe why the previous owners of your house had trouble selling.”
She blinked. “Trouble?”
She’d bought from the couple directly, introduced by her sister. No brokers, no fees. Hannah had assumed she’d been at the front of the process, not the end. Her forehead wrinkled in annoyance, confirming her old status. Not because she believed in ghosts but because she believed her sister had known something and kept it from her. Another one of Hillary’s stupid tests?
She thought of her sister at the walk-through days before, shrugging at the balloons tied to the copper mailbox across the street, saying she didn’t know the people, their kid was young, third marriage, she’d heard. Inside, surveying the sanded floors, fresh paint, new wallpaper hung in the kitchen and bathroom. How little time it had taken to walk through a house so snug, how nothing at all could have happened except for the dance of you go first, no, you outside the bathroom. And yet for all the exclamations of floors look awesome, love the paint color, Hillary’s eyes had narrowed—Hannah hadn’t imagined it—at the black-and-white toile wallpaper in the kitchen. Trying to place the historical print? The hill, the hound, the picnic, the tiny fox ears hiding in the bushes, which Hannah hadn’t seen until the paper hanger had pointed it out with his wide, callused finger, and she couldn’t decide if it was funny or tragic. Hillary’s look reminded her of how she used to side-eye Hannah’s flaking nail polish, never saying a word, then proclaiming, “What? Nothing. Don’t be paranoid,” when Hannah asked what was wrong.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” the driver had said. “Just rumors and a little rain.”
“Right,” she had said. “No need to be paranoid.”
“Exactly.”
The driver had closed the back of the truck and saluted to Miles, who stood on the porch.
She had tipped him a hundred dollars, and before he said thanks, he also said whoa. She supposed it was too much for a small house. She’d also paid the contractor that week, paid him overtime to finish so it would just be done and she wouldn’t have to do that on top of everything else before the school year began. No matter about the cost. The monthly retainer from Boxt Pharmaceuticals would be there by the end of the week, and everything she’d done to get herself and Miles into this carriage house without Mike, without the boys from their old school district, would be worth it.
She paused for a moment on Brindle Lane. From this vantage point, she could almost visualize how the neighborhood, which held nearly fifty sprawling homes, no two alike, was once one enormous 120-acre estate. The sycamore trees flanking the road like soldiers. The sloping hill up Brindle Lane, past Hillary’s house, splitting into four or five lanes—Rose Lane, Linden Lane, others she couldn’t remember—before dipping back down to the covered bridge to the Tamsen farm, the only five acres that remained in the Tamsen family. The steep drop across from her driveway to the east that led to the creek and the gulch and all the walking trails that eventually rose and twisted back into the lanes. And behind her house, through another copse of trees, Brigham’s Ford Road, running parallel to her street, connecting to the other tributaries at the southern crest.
All those homes, people, pets, and yet, cushioned by landscape and leaf, so little noise.
As she walked back up to the driveway, she heard no cars passing, no dogs barking, no basketballs bouncing. Just Tamsen Creek, bubbling and alive.
Soon, next door, around the brick circle, up the wide bluestone steps that led to the double entry doors, Hillary would be back, carrying in Morgan’s stuff from camp. Hillary’s husband, Ben, would return from his business trip or his office in Malvern or wherever he was, and they’d all be together. Miles had already asked when Ben and Morgan would be home, glancing out the kitchen window in a way that made Hannah both happy and sad.
They would begin a new September together in the same great school district, a life as fresh and satisfying as newly sharpened pencils. Sisters as neighbors, cousins hanging out with cousins, their mother, Eva, just a few neighborhoods away, with a promise to babysit at any time.