Girls of Brackenhill(49)
Rink stopped walking and spun in a circle, barked at the air. Hannah tugged on his leash, pulled him forward, back onto the path she’d walked a hundred times as a kid. Away from the courtyard in the opposite direction of the river. If she kept walking, she’d eventually meet up with Valley Road, not too far from where Aunt Fae’s car had crashed. Still, that was at least three miles. She had no intention of walking that far.
But Rink would not move. She snapped his leash. “Come on, Rink,” she said firmly. He acquiesced but whined while following her, his head bent low, his ears folded.
The shed came into view, the door slightly ajar. Hannah felt a stab of annoyance at Huck. Why wouldn’t he leave it how he’d found it? Uncle Stuart would have locked it back up; he never left anything unlocked. Too many kids broke into the grounds of Brackenhill, just to explore or drink or party.
Next to her Rink whined.
Hannah pushed the door open all the way. The inside of the shed was illuminated by a swath of tree-dappled sunlight. Dust swirled up, clouding the air and settling. The shed looked unremarkable. A row of gardening tools hung on the left, shovels and trowels and rakes all lined up according to size. The space was large for a shed, fifteen by fifteen, but everything had a place. Uncle Stuart was—had been—a fastidious gardener. So odd to think of him in the past tense, especially as he lay breathing only a few hundred yards away. Hannah still couldn’t reconcile the man she’d seen earlier with the one she’d once known.
A tractor sat in the middle of the shed, small by tractor standards but dwarfing the room. Hannah edged around it, eyeing the shelves along the back, lined with stacked pots in bright cobalt, fiery red, and muted clay colors. Another shelf contained bags of potting soil, fertilizers, gloves, and hats. Hannah found herself picking each item up, examining it, and replacing it.
Why had she come here? No idea. She had things to do, calls to make, a day to commence. And yet.
She picked up an old straw hat, frayed on the edges, and turned it over in her hands. Held it to her face and inhaled, looking for some remnant of life: a tang of sweat, the sweet fragrance of fresh-cut grass, a hint of Uncle Stuart’s Irish Spring. Instead she smelled only must and age, generic. It could have belonged to anyone.
The metal roof sloped asymmetrically, the back of the shed a foot shorter than the front. In the corner, along the back wall, sat a stack of blankets, topped with a white pillow. How odd that it contained very little dust, as though it had been placed there recently.
Hannah searched for a spark of memory, closed her eyes and tried to intuit a sensation, something that would make her think this building was significant. That it held any piece of the puzzle. She came up empty.
They’d played here as kids; that was all she remembered. Hide-and-seek in the woods, knocking a shovel off its hook, sending it clattering to the wooden floor. Julia flinging open the door with an aha!
Hannah turned to leave, frustrated but unable to articulate why. What had she expected? Her foot kicked at something—a stone perhaps—and sent it skittering across the floor. The stone glinted in the sunlight, winking from the corner.
Hannah crossed the room, bent to pick it up. It was a ring. A flat black stone and a dirty gold wire tied with a jeweler’s knot on either side. It looked homemade. The stone was large—the size of a dime—and even with a layer of dust, Hannah could almost see her own reflection. She brushed the stone off, polished it with the edge of her T-shirt until it shone in the dim light.
It slid onto her right ring finger effortlessly and looked an odd counterpart to the simple, silver-set one-carat diamond on the other hand.
Had it been Fae’s? Fae had never worn jewelry in her life that Hannah could remember. She was plain, preferred dirt and sweat to perfume and makeup. Could it have been Julia’s? Ellie’s? Hannah had never seen it before, had she?
Then a sudden memory, quick as lighting: Julia gathering flowers with Aunt Fae in the garden, Hannah sulking behind her. That last summer, when everything had been off kilter. Aunt Fae talking about the incoming storm, the wind whipping around the garden, making everything look green, the sulfuric smell of electricity. Julia handing her a large glass vase, barely glancing at her, her eyes skimming off Hannah’s shoulder, the top of her head, anything but her face. Hannah took the vase from her sister and saw the ring, gleaming like a new penny on her index finger. She’d opened her mouth to ask, but Julia spoke first. “I’m riding my bike into town later.” No invitation to tag along. No question if Hannah wanted to go. In the past she would have phrased it differently: Do you want to or What if I or What if we. Julia had been gone all morning, and Hannah hadn’t known where she went. And then she was leaving again.
Now with the memory sitting in her chest like a boulder, Hannah had a ridiculously childish thought: Had Wyatt given her the ring? Julia hadn’t had it before; Hannah knew that for a fact. Before that last summer, Hannah had known everything there was to know about Julia and vice versa. She’d known every item of clothing in her closet, every pair of shoes, every hair barrette. So many of those items had been shared, the doors between their rooms open and belongings exchanged like currency. At any given time, each room contained half Julia’s and half Hannah’s things: clothes and books and shoes and tchotchkes strewed evenly between them.
Until that last summer, when Julia began to shut the door between the bedrooms. So Hannah had shut hers too. Hannah had envisioned Julia’s secrets piling up, filling in the narrow space between their doors, until one day Hannah just stopped opening her own. She stopped hoping.