A folding chair sat in the corner, and she pulled it up to the bed. Bent her head close to his ear. He smelled sharp, medicinal.
“Uncle Stuart,” she whispered again. “It’s Hannah. Aunt Fae was in a car accident.” Hannah slid her fingertips underneath his palm. His hand was cold but dry. “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” Nothing.
She looked at Huck and lifted her shoulders. What do I do?
He shook his head, held his palm up. After crossing the room, he touched Hannah’s back, his hand warm. She leaned into it for the first time since they’d arrived in Rockwell. His touch felt welcoming. Comforting. Hannah felt her throat constrict. There was so much he didn’t know, couldn’t know, about her life here. So much she couldn’t tell him, even if she’d wanted to.
She had to get them both out of here as soon as possible. Their relationship had felt so perfect. Pristine in its bubble. And now Brackenhill would leave its smudgy fingerprints all over everything.
In the distance, down the hall, or in another part of the castle entirely, Hannah heard it: the soft opening of one door, the closing of another.
Creak, click.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Then
2001
“Do you think Mom would let us live here?” Hannah asked.
“You mean go to school? In Rockwell?” Julia was lying on a double inner tube, pale-pink toenails kicking up a quiet plume of water against the side of the pool. She wore a red polka-dot bikini and a large straw hat she’d found in one of the bedrooms. The pool was in the backyard through a barrel vault from the courtyard. It was old, square, with faint moss along the edges and a spray of weeds shooting up through a jagged crack in the deck. The water, though, was warm and clear, reflecting the faded blue swirls stamped into the concrete below. “Could you imagine this place in the snow? Aunt Fae said once they didn’t leave the house for almost a month. We’d lose our minds.” They’d only been into town a handful of times. The road leading down the mountain was treacherous in good weather, the switchbacks sending Mom into a tizzy every June and August, cursing as the Buick rattled against the narrow gravelly shoulder.
Hannah tipped her face up to the sky. The sun beat down, hot and bright for the first time in a week. The castle was a glorious place to spend a summer. Until it rained for seven days straight. “I think I’d like it. It would be cozy.”
Julia’s face was turned away, her eyes closed, her voice whispery. “This place is a lot of things, but cozy isn’t one of them.”
That, at least, was the truth. It was magical. Beautiful. Eerie. Looming.
“Hannah, do you ever see anything here?”
“Anything like what?”
“I don’t know. This place isn’t . . .” Julia’s voice trailed off, her eyes staring at some distant point. “It isn’t what it used to be. I feel like I’ve started to feel something bad here.”
“I don’t care how bad it feels; it’s still better than Plymouth.” Hannah shook her head. Her sister was so dramatic. Sometimes Hannah thought Julia did it for attention, always talking about auras and energy, her voice floaty. Even back home, sometimes Julia would talk about spirits and seeing things, a vague reference with her hand waving. It made their mother impatient, even frustrated.
She thought of their house back in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, squat on the dusty road, two bedrooms, one bathroom, no air-conditioning. The roof that leaked, the sound of water dripping into hallway pots any night it rained. Mom driving the rattling Buick into Wilkes-Barre, where she worked at PJ Whelihan’s next to the mall. Wes asleep on the sofa, the stink of him as he exhaled. Like BO and cigarettes, which he wasn’t supposed to smoke anymore on account of his COPD. The way he swept all the butts into a coffee can, which he emptied into the toilet before Mom came in the door. She’d caught him once, and the fight had lasted long into the night. “If you lose your disability, we’re sunk. You know that, right?” Mom’s voice had been panicky. Her mother never panicked. She never yelled, screamed, slapped. Her voice was always measured, pleasant.
The girls had never known their real dad. He’d left Mom with a colicky infant and tantruming toddler and the long-held belief that when things got tough, people left, as well as the refrain of her childhood: It’s all just too much, Hannah. The lesson that lasted, long after Mom died: Don’t ask too much of anyone.
Wes was all they ever knew of a father. They lived in his house and had for as long as Hannah could remember. Hannah hated Wes, and sometimes she found herself wishing he’d drive himself drunk off a bridge. She tried to tell Julia once, who looked shocked by the confession. She wanted to ask her sister if Wes did to Julia what he did to Hannah. She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
The first time it had happened, he was drunk, smelling like beer and piss. Mom was working, and Julia had taken to locking her room at night, but Hannah only wondered why later. Before that night she thought it had been about privacy. Or maybe she’d been sneaking a boy in. After that night she wondered, Did it happen to Julia too?
She was asleep when she felt the bed move, his hand on her thigh and then higher. She woke up fast, like being doused with cold water, his fingertips icy on her bare skin. She felt frozen, unable to speak, hardly able to breathe.
He thinks I’m Mom, was her thought that first night. A drunken misstep. The wrong door, a stumbling, dreamlike delusion.
But then it happened again. And again. Sometimes months between, sometimes only days. She never knew when she’d hear the telltale creak of her old bedroom door, the one loose floorboard that clattered. She always smelled him before she opened her eyes.
Sometimes she never opened her eyes at all.
He never spoke to her. Never said her name. Just his hands, cold, on her thighs, her stomach. Later, when she got breasts, he would touch them, pinch her nipple.
All she ever heard was the sound of his breathing, the feel of hot air against her neck as she pretended to sleep. He didn’t seem to care if she stayed curled away from him, staring at the wall, willing it to be over. Pretending to be asleep.
She swore to herself that she’d tell.
Next time.
If he did more than touch.
He never did more than touch.
She never told.
She asked her mother, later and more than once, Why do you love Wes? Her adoration of him always felt like a mystery—some secret Hannah would be let in on later, when she was older and could magically understand love. He was repulsive to her, even before that first night in her room. His eyes were mean, his teeth yellowed, his skin sallow and gray. Hannah had found a picture a long time ago: Mom in a simple white dress, Wes actually handsome in a tux. She and Julia, chubby preschoolers, clinging to Mom’s legs, the skirt puddling around them. Everyone had been smiling.
Her mother closed her eyes, tilted her head toward the ceiling, sighing. He wasn’t always like this. He’s sick, you know? Or sometimes she’d just say, out of nowhere, We need him. He gets a check from the government. We get to live here because of him.
And sometimes, I stay for you. For both of you. She’d find her mother sometimes in the kitchen alone, clutching a plastic tumbler of wine, crying. Hannah never interrupted her, never let her know she saw.
If her mother left him, where would they live? Sometimes when they drove, Hannah would study the streets from the back seat. Every house looked lived in. It was possible there wasn’t anywhere for them to go. No houses left. She knew people lived on the street—her mother had called them homeless. That would be their family.