Girls of Brackenhill(12)

“I’m sorry,” Hannah repeated, and Alice dipped her chin, her ponytail falling over her cheek.

“What about Stuart?” Alice finally asked.

“He still needs you. In fact, I’m not sure what role Fae played in his care, but we may need more of you for a bit, if you can manage it, and then I’d like to find him placement.”

“Placement?” Alice repeated. “As in a home?”

“Yes. I can’t stay and care for him. I have a job in Virginia. I . . .” She let her voice trail off.

Alice was visibly shaken, her hands smoothing her hair in a nervous tic and her eye twitching. Hannah knew she seemed cold. She couldn’t seem to say the socially acceptable words and felt a strange temporary amnesia: What were the words she should be saying? Fae and Stuart were strangers to her now. After Julia had disappeared, they’d faded into the woodwork of Hannah’s life, relegated to a dusty, sepia-toned past. She found out brief updates from her mother: Stuart’s cancer was in remission, and then it was back. Her mother’s contact with them was sporadic and informational. Then again, her mother’s relationship with everyone but God became transactional.

In the rare moments that Hannah had let herself remember the castle, Julia, Fae, and Stuart, she wasn’t entirely sure it had happened. After all, it had been a total of five summers from the time she was eleven to fifteen. Cumulatively, it was fifteen months. A little more than a year of her life, peppered throughout her early teens, when so much of that time would have passed in an adolescent fever dream anyway.

But those summers had happened, and Julia was gone forever. The truth was laid bare in her mother. After Julia disappeared, Trina shrank her entire life down to the head of a pin, rarely leaving the house. She’d lived the rest of her life on state disability, depressed and anxious, mostly hermitic, except for Sundays, which were for church—a new development.

Wes, tired of Trina’s depression, lasted two years before he split. Trina bought out the house using an insurance policy she’d taken out on Julia when she was a baby. Trina died of congestive heart failure in the winter of early 2018 at only fifty-eight, likely exacerbated by anorexia over the course of a decade. The few times Hannah had visited, her mother’s refrigerator had been nearly empty. Hannah had grocery shopped, filling the shelves with fruits and vegetables, meats, potatoes. Trina, seemingly more frail with every visit, had merely shaken her head. “I’ll never eat all that,” she’d said, and Hannah had asked her, “What do you eat?”

“Mostly eggs. Sometimes yogurt or granola.”

“What about carrots or broccoli?”

“I can’t be bothered to cook.” Trina waved her hand at Hannah. “It’s all such a fuss.”

Hannah had heard that phrase her entire life, it’s all such a fuss, about everything from school activities to sports to Brackenhill. Even Julia’s disappearance had seemed too exhausting to fully focus on. Trina was predictable in her complacency, in her desire for routine.

When Julia left, it was like Hannah’s heart shut off. She couldn’t find the empathy or patience for her mother’s insularity. She came home when she had to, once because Huck seemed to disapprove of her nonchalance toward her mother’s health (he’d chided her—only twice, but it had stuck because he never, ever did that), and she worried that he’d think less of her, that he’d think her cold and unfeeling. But what was expected of her? When Julia left, Trina retreated into herself. Like she only had one daughter worth giving her full self to, and it wasn’t the one who had stayed.

What Hannah struggled to explain to Huck was that Trina had left her first. She was merely following her mother’s lead.

Trina’s funeral had been short and sparsely attended. She’d become active in the church before she died, but it was a small congregation. Hannah performed the funeral tasks, picking out the casket, the burial plot. She paid for it with another life insurance policy, significantly smaller than the one Trina had for her children, and Hannah could never quite figure out what that said, if anything, about her mother.

“Are you okay?” Alice asked.

Hannah’s attention snapped back to the present. “Yes. I’m fine.” And then, “Are you?”

“I’ll be okay. It’s a shock, of course. Does Stuart know?”

“I’ve told him,” Hannah offered helplessly, her hands splayed.

“He likely doesn’t hear or understand you.” Alice sighed, wiping the tears from under her eyes with a tissue she’d fetched from her handbag. “He should have been admitted to hospice a long time ago. Fae was insistent that she care for him. And she did a wonderful job! Never missed an afternoon PT. Now I’m not sure what will happen. We may have to hire someone. There are occupational and physical therapists who will come in, of course.”

“Hospice, you think?” Hannah mulled this over. “How long does he have?”

“Could be days or weeks or months. It’s so hard to say. He stopped eating a few months ago and has a feeding tube. We thought that would be the thing.”

Hannah again tried to feel something—sadness, grief—and came up blank. She remembered the Stuart of her childhood, quiet and sometimes silly. Pulling quarters out of her ears or standing to her right and tapping her left shoulder just to watch her turn one way, then the other while she giggled and he feigned surprise. She remembered Stuart down the embankment behind the castle, by the Beaverkill, showing her how to fly-fish and, later, clean the fish they’d caught, but first he’d made her admire the beauty of an eighteen-inch rainbow trout, its mouth pulsing with the last gasps of life. She remembered how it had tasted, fresh and delicate, and Stuart, who rarely said anything, had swelled with pride, telling her, “Nothing tastes better than food you catch or grow yourself.” She remembered thinking then that this was how a father should be. How would she have known? Her own father was a ghost, her stepfather a drunk.