Girls of Brackenhill(3)
Hannah reached out and gripped Huck’s hand. It was calloused, even in the summer—especially in the summer—because of his job as a landscape designer (the gardener, she sometimes called him, sexy and silly).
Huck knew almost nothing of Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart, aside from their names. He’d never met them. He didn’t know much about her childhood, and he knew nothing of the castle. He knew her mother had died. He knew very little of the summer of 2002. He knew she had an older sister who’d died when she was young, but not why or how. Well, no one knew how, Hannah supposed. He knew that she and her sister had spent summers at her aunt’s house in New York, but surely he imagined something normal: a cabin, a ranch, a colonial.
Hannah knew so much about Huck’s life before her: his idyllic childhood, his four brothers, parents who swelled with pride for their children and love for each other. His whole childhood had felt like a slap. Even after meeting the whole brood, she’d glossed over her own childhood with a broad, shiny brush. Huck’s family was loud, raucous, ribbing each other at holidays. His mom sat at the head of the table, cheeks flushed. His parents lived less than an hour from them in Virginia. Somehow Hannah still managed to find plenty of excuses to beg off visits.
Besides, they’d only gotten engaged three short weeks ago. They hadn’t progressed past the showing-off-thering stage of engagement. The word wedding had barely been uttered. They had time, Hannah reasoned. They should be enjoying this time. Not mucking it up with heavy pasts and childhood traumas.
Would she have told him about Brackenhill eventually? Of course. Maybe. She’d rarely given it a thought in seventeen years. Except for the nights she woke up sweating, crying, the faint outline of a dream tugging at her subconscious. Her hands clenched until they cramped, a deep ache across her shoulders. A heavy refrain, the memory of a sound. Click, click, thump, thump. Once and only once Huck had found her standing in the living room naked, her clothes strewed on the floor. Hannah didn’t remember it, but Huck had told her she had clawed at the hardwood, crying.
Later, when she woke up and he recounted the story, he’d laughed. “Like you were digging something up. It was bizarre.” At the time, she pretended to laugh with him as her heart raced. He hadn’t noticed. Sometimes Hannah thought what she loved most about Huck was his obliviousness. His willingness to not look too deeply.
They’d met at a brewery in the next town over. Before Hannah worked in marketing for a PR firm, she’d tended bar in the evenings while she job hunted. Huck had come in with his rowdy friends, him in jeans and a T-shirt, them in suit shirts and loosened ties. His fingernails with their blackened crescent moons had struck her as odd among all the manicures. Bartenders noticed hands. The first words she spoke to him were “You don’t fit in,” and he’d grinned at her, thrown an extra ten on the bar top. Before he left, he slid his business card under the tip, scrawled neither do you on the back.
“Are you okay?” he finally asked, the silence in the car wearing thin. He’d been more patient with her than required, but Hannah suspected this trip would try him. Huck hated messes, despised melodrama.
And now he was about to get his trial by fire and perhaps more answers than he’d ever wanted. Hannah wondered if he’d be there at the end of it. Would he stay if he knew the whole truth? That last summer, her sister, Wyatt. The knot in her stomach tightened, and she stopped, swallowed back the panic in her throat.
She’d worked so hard to relegate her childhood, her sister, and her aunt and uncle to the background of her life. She never examined her childhood in direct light, only in periphery—dreams where Julia was still alive, racing her back through the forest, the sunlight blinking between the leaves. And now they were going back. Her shiny new life, handsome fiancé, everything she’d ever wanted.
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.”