Girls of Brackenhill(34)
Inside the diner, they took a booth in the corner. The waitress approached the table and poured them all a cup of coffee. They ordered their brunch, and she eyed them suspiciously. Two newcomers and Jinny Fekete—Hannah was sure the curiosity was killing her.
“Jinny,” Hannah said after the waitress departed. “Who was Ruby? Stuart said something to me today—”
“He spoke? I didn’t think he spoke anymore. The last time I ever heard of him talking was months ago!” She clapped her small hands together. She looked up toward the ceiling. “They’ll be together soon. Don’t you think it’s a shame? We don’t do this kind of thing to our pets. He just lies up there, waiting to die.”
“Who was Ruby?” Hannah pressed, trying to redirect Jinny’s wild thoughts.
“You didn’t know? Fae and Stuart had a child.” Jinny shook her head, lowered her voice. “She died when she was five.”
“She died?” Hannah’s stomach dropped. It seemed impossibly young. Oh, her poor aunt. Hannah felt a deep stab of despair. Under the table, Huck squeezed her knee. “When? How?”
“It must have been . . . oh, now, almost twenty-five years ago. Let’s see, she was born in 1991, I think. I think she died in ’95 or ’96.”
“How did she die?” Hannah’s voice cracked. Hannah and Julia had been alive, preschoolers, but they’d been born when Aunt Fae had a baby. How had she not known? Hannah remembered the few times Trina talked about her sister. Had she told them about a cousin? Had she mentioned a cousin who died? Surely not—that would be entirely too troublesome for small children in Trina’s mind.
Hannah had a vision then—Aunt Fae crying for seemingly no reason, her pervasive, unshakable melancholy, the rooms in the castle that had remained closed. One in particular that had been locked—the turret room that faced Valley Road. The way Aunt Fae seemed so surprised when Hannah and Julia had made her laugh: like she’d forgotten that she could. And then a darker memory. Julia knew about Ruby. She’d broken into a locked room, and she and Fae fought about it. There had been a shouting match; Hannah had forgotten all about it. If I find you in that room again, I’ll send you both home!
“I simply cannot believe that no one has told you this.” Jinny slapped her hand against the Formica table, and even Huck startled. A few feathers from her hat came fluttering down to rest between them.
“Jinny, I came to stay with Fae when I was eleven. Who would tell an eleven-year-old about the death of a child?” Hannah was exasperated. “How did she die?”
“That ridiculous castle she lived in. Over a hundred and fifty years old. No safety measures at all.” Jinny reached out, gripped Hannah’s hands, her long plum nails digging into Hannah’s wrists. “The poor girl fell out a second-story window.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Now
The night after Aunt Fae’s memorial, Hannah had another dream. This time, Julia appeared in her doorway, mostly silent again, her hair pulled back in a tight chignon, her skin seeming to glow in the darkened room. Julia led Hannah to the locked turret room, and they tried in vain to open it. Julia pulled bobby pins from her bun and wiggled the lock with no luck. The doorknob appeared stuck. In the dream Hannah kept saying, “This door isn’t green; are you sure it’s the right one?” She awoke standing in the hallway in front of Uncle Stuart’s door, listening to the rasp of the oxygen tank, the rhythmic beep of his heart monitor. She crept back to bed and woke in the morning before Huck, exhausted. At least this time she hadn’t ended up in the woods; she checked her feet and the hem of her nightgown to be sure.
Hannah hadn’t sleepwalked since she was a child, and now, suddenly, it was becoming a regular occurrence. When she googled it, she found correlations with stress and PTSD. She wondered if she was experiencing a small amount of latent trauma just from staying in Brackenhill. While she still felt uneasy in Rockwell, she was surprisingly comforted by the house, the memories of her aunt and uncle, even the memories of her sister. It hadn’t felt as traumatic as she would have expected. She felt more at home here than she ever had at her mother’s house, with the thin, mildewed carpeting and peeling wallpaper.
After breakfast, Huck took Rink back out in the woods. He’d been quiet at breakfast, his conversation surface and polite. She’d asked him, “Are you okay?” and he’d said yes, but quietly, his smile pasted on.
“You want to go.” She’d said it like a statement, but it was a question, and she held her breath.
“Whatever you need to do,” Huck said.
“I just have to find a place for Uncle Stuart, okay?”
He’d nodded and escaped outside. She resisted asking again, tugging his arm—No, really, are you okay?—because that had always seemed pathetic to her: begging to be seen. She should have told him about the sleepwalking. But he’d been oddly quiet since yesterday. Jinny’s bombshell about Ruby hadn’t helped. She’d brought it up on the truck ride back to Brackenhill.
“What do you think it means?” she’d pressed.
“It’s sad that their daughter died, Han. But it doesn’t change your childhood. Your life with Fae and Stuart. Your memories.”
It was so like Huck to paint over everything with a sunny brush. To make light of dark things. It used to be Hannah’s favorite thing about him. But here, when she needed a partner, someone to bounce ideas off, his optimism felt like a slap. It didn’t feel like support; it felt like a rebuke.