Girls of Brackenhill(19)
“You don’t own the property. You can’t consent to anything.” Reggie’s voice was sharp and—it could have been Hannah’s imagination—gloating.
Hannah rubbed her hand across her forehead, the events of the past few days catching up to her. Alice hung out a moment longer, caught in limbo, unsure what to do next, how to handle the bone discovery. Before she left, she whispered furtively, “Do you think the rest of it’s back there?” And Hannah’s face must have looked stricken, because Huck ran interference, walked Alice to her car.
Hannah had assumed Alice didn’t know the story, but of course, people talked. She imagined Alice, upon taking the job years ago, learning of the castle’s sordid history. She wondered if she’d been worried, scared? Perhaps she didn’t know that Hannah was the missing girl’s sister.
After everyone had gone, Hannah was instantly exhausted, her eyes drooping before she even reached her bedroom. Huck followed behind her, up the stone stairs, down the hall, and into the room they’d slept in the night before. It had been her room as a child, and it felt like second nature to take it back now. He dimmed the lights, closed the brocade drapes, and lay next to her.
“What do I do if it’s her?” Hannah whispered and felt Huck’s hand reach for hers in the dark. “What do I do if it’s not?”
Who else would be buried in Brackenhill? It could be anyone, Hannah reasoned. The property was almost two hundred years old. In fact, it seemed unlikely that the skeleton would be Julia at all.
But what if it was?
She pressed herself into the space between his chin and chest, his arm curled around her waist.
“Tell me about her,” Huck said softly and stroked her hair, winding it around his index finger.
It was like saying, Tell me about the ocean. Vast and consuming, stormy, complicated. How did you describe where it began and ended? Not knowing where to begin wasn’t a good reason to never begin at all.
“There’s so much, and still so little. She could be thoughtful and kind and funny. She could also be dismissive and cruel and cold. She was my best friend—for much of my childhood, my only friend. When we were small, my mother would never drive us anywhere, so while other kids got to know each other through playing and sports, I was home. Later, we had friends from school, but even then, we had to find rides places. I was with Julia more than I wasn’t.” Hannah closed her eyes, the smell of Julia hitting her memory: sweet and light and fruity, like gum and lipstick. Her voice drifted. “She was a writer. A lot of people didn’t know that. She scribbled in journals and loved pencil more than pen—so she could erase, make it perfect. She was a perfectionist. Everything in her room had a place; it had order. If it didn’t have a home, she threw it away. Nothing was sentimental. She didn’t get attached to things, she said.” So different from Hannah, whose spaces were always stormy—belongings strewed about, papers buried under clothing, subway tickets from vacations long over, small programs from museums, pamphlets from a whale watch she hadn’t even gone on. She tried to be tidy; it never worked. “She hated being alone. She was always looking for people, searching for something else, something better than what she had. She was an extrovert. She was funny. Always poking fun at people in a way that others called charming.”
“Like you,” Huck said, kindly. Too kind, really. Hannah’s humor ran more cutting, often called more bitchy than funny.
“No, people loved her. They tolerated me to get to her. Julia was everything more than me: prettier, funnier, kinder. I wanted to be just like her.” Hannah let out a short laugh, and Huck pulled her tight. Meant for comfort, but something about their newfound confidence made her heart quicken; she felt a pull down low in her belly, and she coiled a leg around his.
In the dark, Hannah’s mouth found the hollow of Huck’s throat, and he held her. He tasted of salt and skin, and she felt his sharp intake of breath. Her body moved to his, melted against him, and he whispered against her hair, her neck, “I love you, Hannah,” and she knew that he meant it. And that now, someday soon, he’d want to know all of her, the parts she’d kept secret: Wyatt. Julia and Aunt Fae and Trina. Wes. She’d never told anyone about her stepfather, not even Julia. She couldn’t imagine telling anyone now; it felt like it had all happened in another lifetime, to another person.
And still predominant, the circling uncertainty: Would Huck have loved her more had he never come to Brackenhill? Had he never seen with his own eyes the complications of her childhood, of her family? And what if he had never known the secrets of the castle, the ways in which this visit would change her, change them, because surely it would if it hadn’t already done so. She tried to push away this feeling—that this was an ending for them, not a beginning—and found she couldn’t. And maybe it was a necessary end: the end of false happiness. To be married, you had to be real. True. Complicated. Messy.
When they shed their clothes, Hannah had the disorienting feeling that she wasn’t in bed with Huck but with Wyatt. She remembered the first time, her first time ever, in Wyatt’s bed in his dad’s house, with the shades drawn in the middle of the day. She remembered the way he’d smelled—musky and woodsy—the way he’d moved, carefully, fervently, how fast it had been over. And the second time, that same day, hours later, when she’d climbed on top of him, clinging, desperate.