Girls of Brackenhill(29)

“What were you doing?” Trina asked Hannah, her eyes narrowed. By this time Julia had come home, and she watched the whole exchange with incredulity and horror.

“I was looking for nail clippers.” The lie came out smooth and easy. Julia held ice to her sister’s cheek and let the tears fall down her own cheeks without wiping them away.

“I should have been here,” Julia whispered. Hannah almost told her then. Almost confessed. To everything. Wes and his nighttime visits. Wyatt hiding in the bedroom.

Wyatt wouldn’t leave until he was sure Hannah was okay. Hannah made every excuse she could think of to try to leave. She took ibuprofen. Let Julia fuss over her, blotting up the blood from her nose with a pile of tissues. Finally she pretended to be falling asleep on Julia’s bed, and Julia let her go.

She found Wyatt in her bed, waiting for her. He held the ice to her face and brushed the hair from her eyes. She could barely look him in the eyes, she was so horribly embarrassed. She just wanted him to leave her alone. Leave this stupid, trashy little house. She wondered if he’d tell anyone where they lived. Wondered if they’d go back to Rockwell in June a laughingstock.

“What will you tell your mom and sister when he wakes up?” Wyatt whispered.

“It won’t matter. He never remembers anything. He’s falling-down drunk and knocked unconscious.” Hannah was immediately mortified at this obviously regular occurrence.

She dozed off and on, waking only to apologize for the disaster that was her life. Wes hadn’t usually hit them—his anger was mostly aimed at Trina. Sometimes, though, he misdirected.

“Hannah, I’m not leaving you,” he whispered. His arms came around her, and finally, she slept soundly in the circle of his body.

When she woke up the next morning, he had gone.





CHAPTER TWENTY

Now

“I think they found Julia in the woods.” Hannah sat next to Uncle Stuart, who remained unmoving. “I think they found her bones.” She stroked his hand and remembered the scar near his ring finger, visible when he was younger but now hidden among paper-thin creases in his skin. The scar had come about the day he’d built them a tree house. It was more like a platform, not a full house, per se, in a maple fifty feet down the path that he and Hannah had picked together. He’d used a chain saw to cut a few larger branches to make room for the platform but reached for his trusty hacksaw to trim a few smaller offshoots. Julia had found them just as he started sawing, exclaimed, “Oh my God, don’t fall!” as Uncle Stuart balanced, a foot on each remaining bough. He turned his head, startled, and slipped, slicing his hand from second knuckle to wrist.

Aunt Fae ran out, summoned by Julia, and met them in the courtyard, bandages and gauze in hand, barely batting an eyelash at the gushing blood. Hannah was reminded of Wes, the wound on his forehead pulsing red on the bathroom floor, and their mother, verging on hysterics, blotting his eyebrow with a red-soaked paper towel. Aunt Fae was impassive, clinical. She sent him back down the path with a bandaged hand and asked that he “please be more careful with a hacksaw, or you’ll chop your fingers clean off.” She’d retreated back into the castle, shaking her head.

Hannah retold the whole story to Uncle Stuart, fingers seeking the scar, that raised red ridge, and finding nothing. She paused, let the hiss of his oxygen fill the silence. Then, “Today is Aunt Fae’s memorial. Do you know that? Can you hear me?” She studied his face. His skin was translucent, his eyelids fluttering. “Remember how I told you she passed away in a car accident?”

His eyes opened, the whites milky, the blue almost gray, clouded with cataracts maybe. He wasn’t terribly old, but he looked skeletal. Hannah felt her breath catch, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Uncle Stuart, can you hear me?” she asked, louder. “It’s Hannah. Your niece?”

Slowly his eyes met hers above the translucent green of the oxygen mask, and he nodded. Hannah reached out and squeezed his hand, and he almost imperceptibly squeezed back.

“I’m sorry I stayed away so long,” Hannah apologized, but she wasn’t sure what for. She’d been a child. If anything, her aunt and uncle should have tried to call her, contact her. She’d still been a child. At least for a while.

But Uncle Stuart was dying and had spent his whole life being deferential to his beloved Fae. It seemed likely their estrangement from Hannah had been Aunt Fae’s doing. But why? What could Hannah have done to drive her away, at only fifteen? She barely remembered the days between Julia disappearing, all the police combing the property, and Wes behind the wheel of the rattly Buick, coming up the driveway, stones kicking out from underneath the tires. Her mother conspicuously absent, and later, the Rockwell police making the trip to interview Trina and Hannah for the second (third?) time.

It wasn’t until she was an adult that she’d asked herself why Trina wouldn’t have come to Brackenhill. She’d always grumbled about the drive—it couldn’t have been that, could it? Her mother rarely left the Plymouth city limits, aside from two yearly trips to Rockwell. She’d asked Wes, in the car, where her mother was, and he simply grunted, “She’s too sick to come.” Sick how? With grief?

In the immediate aftermath, Trina refused to leave her bedroom. Then later, it seemed like she sometimes believed the narrative that emerged from Rockwell: Aunt Fae had killed Julia, but no one could prove it. The police never outright alleged it, but people talked: Fae, always eccentric and insular, had lost her mind in that stone castle and killed her niece. It seemed that Trina believed that story, too, no matter what Hannah said: “She ran away. She got scared of something; I don’t know what.” Hannah never saw anything in Aunt Fae that would lead her to believe she’d kill. Especially her niece. It never made sense. No, Julia left them. For reasons Hannah would never know. She’d long since accepted it.