She wanted to go home.
“I’m fine,” Hannah answered quickly and pushed open the car door. “I haven’t seen her in seventeen years. I’m fine.”
It was still cool, the sun barely cresting the horizon. They rolled a window partway down for Rink, who paced in the back seat, excited, whining. Huck let him out briefly to go to the bathroom, the leash taut as he sniffed around bushes on the hospital lawn.
“I’ll come back if we’re in there too long,” Huck assured her when they locked the car door. He took care of things. He was the task man of their little team, always. What was Hannah? The compliant one, the go-along girl. Girl with big ideas, he sometimes called her, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
She walked into the hospital a good ten feet in front of Huck (briefly reminded of Josh tagging along behind Julia all those summers ago), but she couldn’t have articulated why. Inside, she was directed by the administration desk to a family-crisis center. The room was small, a few couches and a chair. A round coffee table and a sideboard with a Keurig. She touched nothing and did not sit. When a woman entered and introduced herself as a crisis counselor, Hannah didn’t flinch. Huck tried to touch her again, a gentle palm against the small of her back, but she moved slightly out of his reach, so his hand was left dangling in midair.
“I’m Claire McKinney.” The woman was older than Hannah, probably only by a few years, but her hair was streaked with gray. She took Hannah’s cue and also did not sit but instead held Hannah’s arm with both hands and spoke succinctly but kindly. “I’m afraid your aunt has passed away.”
Hannah felt the punch in her lungs, heard the whoosh of air before realizing it was her own breath. Willed her brain to focus on the woman’s words.
Claire McKinney told Hannah about the crash, the car moving too fast down the winding road, away from the castle, hitting a slick patch from recent rain, and pitching over the guardrail and into the ravine. Someone had come along and seen the lights in the car, the coiled smoke from the hood, and called 911, but Aunt Fae’s internal injuries were too serious. The rescue effort had been a bit of an undertaking. (Hannah remembered the steepness of that ravine on Valley Road, having flown away from the castle in a speeding car herself.) They were sorry, of course, but would Hannah be able to identify the body? No other family member was listed. (They were all dead now, see?) All Hannah could say was, “Absolutely, of course, anything for Aunt Fae.” Claire McKinney pushed an eight-by-ten photograph across the table—Hannah couldn’t recall sitting down—but she turned it over without thought and wished she had taken a moment to prepare herself.
The photo was a close-up of her aunt’s face, black and white. In a split second she saw the deep grooves in her aunt’s forehead between her eyebrows, the shadowy wells under her eyes, a light but familiar birthmark in the curious shape of a butterfly on her temple that had darkened in death. Or maybe it was just that her coloring had gone gray, almost white as bone. There was thick stitching around the crown of her head, a leathery incision devoid of blood. She’d been wiped clean.
“That’s her,” Hannah said, feeling like she was in a movie or a detective show and grateful she wasn’t standing inside a sterile morgue the way it was portrayed on television. She tried to arrange her face into something like sadness, as she imagined she was supposed to feel. Or maybe shock. Huck watched her carefully. She could tell he was trying to comfort her, that comfort was the normal, everyday reaction in this situation. That she should want his support. Later, maybe he’d tell her, You’re so strong, and she’d be pleased at that.
It was over that quickly, and they were back out in Hannah’s car before Huck even had to check on Rink. There was an air of formality about the whole thing. Claire McKinney’s compassion had been an act, part of her job, nothing more or less.
Hannah held a business card for a funeral home where Aunt Fae would be prepared for arrangements—which meant a viewing and a funeral, or perhaps a cremation. She supposed she should have known what her aunt’s wishes were, that the hospital would assume that as next of kin she’d spoken to her aunt during the past seventeen years.
She’d call the funeral parlor in the morning. But it was morning, wasn’t it? The clock blinked 6:52. They’d been in the hospital for less than an hour, too little time for her life to be entirely changed. And yet lives were upended all the time in minutes and seconds, not hours. Hannah knew that. Also, it felt too dramatic: her life would not be changed. She’d do whatever she’d come to do and go home, back to Virginia, her career, planning the wedding.
She’d escaped Brackenhill once. She could do it again.
“What can I do?” Huck asked, and Hannah recognized the despair in his voice. Huck hated helplessness. He was an action person, a problem-solver. He admired this trait in her more than anything else: she was always fine. He’d complained of ex-girlfriends: needy, calling and texting at all hours. Her independence, even when it frustrated him, was attractive.
“Nothing,” Hannah said, and it was true. She didn’t need anything from him, maybe never had. This time she almost asked him for one thing: Drive me home. He would have in a heartbeat. But she knew she had to head farther north, past Rockwell on the only road in, the switchback road her aunt had taken out. To her once-beloved uncle, who lay quietly dying. It fell to her to tell him about his wife.
Hannah let Huck drive, the car winding around steep curves, her arm gripping the handle at the window, white knuckled and breathless, the fear starting as a steady thrum in her legs, a jittery helplessness. From the back seat even Rink whined as Huck punched the gas, the car stuttering up the steep incline. At the top, the first of the stone turrets came into view, and the car slowed as Huck’s foot faltered.
For the first time in seventeen years, it was time to go back to the castle.
CHAPTER FIVE
Then
The castle sat high on a hill, shrouded by towering oaks and pines in Rockwell, a town in the Catskill Mountains. It had a name: Brackenhill. At the time Hannah thought it belonged in a fairy tale, which made sense because it was named after a castle in England. Before summers in Rockwell, she hadn’t known houses could have names at all.
Hannah and Julia were driven up in the old Buick, their mother’s left arm out the window. She brought it in only to light one cigarette off the other, balancing the wheel with her knee. The fingers on her right hand held the cigarette while simultaneously tapping along to the radio, the ash flying. The Buick’s vinyl seats stuck to Hannah’s thighs. Her mother parked at the end of the driveway, and the girls clambered up the gravel drive, wriggling with anticipation, dragging suitcases on wheels that caught on the stones.
Before they became part-time residents of Brackenhill, the sisters had not known the castle existed. They’d never been there, never visited their aunt and uncle. Their mother had said the drive was too far; her sister was unkind, she’d said. Then suddenly, one summer, for no obvious reason, everything had changed. Their mother had announced she couldn’t work at night, sleep during the day, and trust that they would behave themselves all summer. Julia, newly thirteen, had been caught sneaking a neighbor boy into her bedroom. Their mother, strangely pious when it suited her, had taken to praying about Julia’s virtue until she’d somehow stumbled on an elegant solution: the girls would spend the summer with her sister in the Catskills.