Girls of Brackenhill(54)



Hannah jolted. “Can you talk to Julia?”

“Ah, now you’re suddenly a believer. Most are when confronted with something personal. A possibility.” Jinny stood behind Hannah, resting her hands on her shoulders. She smelled of oil, something richly organic. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she pressed her palms into Hannah’s shoulders. “Watch the light in the ball, and let your eyes unfocus. Start with something simple: a blue dot, the size of a marble. Visualize it in the center; truly see it. Don’t just imagine it. Imagine it looks like the earth, swirls of white clouds and oceans and green mountains.”

Hannah’s vision went blurry, the tears behind her eyelids sudden and unexpected. She wondered how many times Julia had sat in this chair. Could she see the blue dot? Had she laughed at Jinny, shooed her hands away? No. She’d believed in magic in ways Hannah never had.

“Bring your mind back to the present; place your hands on the table. Feel the tablecloth beneath your palms. The table is tangible. Your mind is not. Close your eyes and slowly open them. Take a deep breath.”

Hannah tried to conjure a blue dot. She imagined a marble, swirled with green and white, like Jinny had asked of her. She placed the marble inside the gazing ball in her mind, turning it one way, then the other, until she felt as though it were possible that she was actually viewing a marble, not just imagining it. The marble moved from one side of the gazing ball to the other and then winked just out of view and back. In a blink, the marble had become real, trapped inside the shining glass of the gazing ball, which was once so clear but now almost black in the darkened room. Hannah felt the breath in her lungs, the blood in her veins, the table beneath her fingertips, the floor against the balls of her feet in her sneakers.

And then. Julia. Not in the ball itself but suddenly filling the room, Jinny gone, the table and the floor vanished. Julia sat in the corner, against a wooden wall, her hair tangled, her knees bloodied, wearing a yellow bathing suit cover-up that Hannah remembered. She looked up and saw Hannah, opened her mouth to speak, but Hannah could hear nothing. Julia held up her hands to show her sister: blood running from her fingertips to her wrists and pooling on the floor around her, and she turned, pounded and pounded on what Hannah had believed to be a wall and saw now was a door, a rusty iron bar secured across the wood. Julia swung her legs around and, with incredible force, kicked the door with both feet. The door moved with every thrust but made no sound. It was as though Hannah were watching a silent film, a horror movie on mute. Julia looked seventeen, but her long hair was stringy and greasy. Other things Hannah noticed: Julia’s sunken cheekbones, a missing tooth, a gash across her protruding collarbone. She looked like she was starving. Injured. Hannah felt her heart constrict, and without volition her feet moved her toward the apparition. Her stomach lurched, and for a moment, she felt like she might vomit. She covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut, and heard the moan of pain before she recognized it as her own: Stop! Her sister turned then, as though she heard Hannah. Julia met her eyes, stared right at Hannah, her mouth forming what could only be one word.

Help.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Now

Hannah had stumbled home from Jinny’s with a blinding headache and gone straight to bed. Jinny said it was common for divinations to bring on migraines. Hannah had never had a migraine in her life, and what she’d seen was hardly a divination. It was an overactive imagination brought on by fatigue. Stress. Emotional burnout.

Julia’s word came back to her: Help. Over and over and over again. She tried to reconcile the vision—it was, simply, a vision. An apparition. Hannah had never been particularly susceptible to suggestion, but Jinny was persuasive. She was taken in by Jinny’s store, her reasoning, her voice, the candles, the incense, the room. What was starting to feel like desperation clawing under the surface. All her random digging the past few weeks. She’d almost forgotten what home felt like, what normalcy felt like. She wanted to find Julia. She wanted, for the first time since she was fifteen, a sense of closure. She wanted Huck and her life and her job back, but this time with no tether to the past. No shadowy, unknown parts of her, just a clear understanding of what had happened that last summer, what happened to her sister. She’d go to therapy if she had to. She could do that. Huck deserved an emotionally balanced wife, and right now, she was anything but. Her insides felt wild all the time, her mind careening like a roller coaster.

Sleep was elusive. Hannah had started going to bed early right after Huck left—three days ago, or was it four?—sometimes around nine o’clock, her body exhausted. She woke up several times a night, her heart pounding, blood running fast in her veins. Visceral dreams—not nightmares but something more real. Waking up all over the house, the yard. The other night she came to in the basement, the overhead fluorescents buzzing and flickering like a strobe. She stood in the center of the maze of small rooms, unsure how to get back upstairs. She made her way through a series of small doorways, only to realize that she was heading toward the back of the house, not the stairwell, and had to pivot and return the way she’d come. She felt fluttered fingertips against her neck, a chorus of whispers chasing behind her. When she’d finally stumbled up the stairs, heart in her throat, she’d slammed the basement door and stood in the kitchen, sweating. It had been four in the morning.

Hannah was afraid that one day soon she’d come to consciousness standing thigh deep in the Beaverkill. If she drowned, who would know? Who would find her, call the police? If she told Huck, he’d make her come home. She felt like she was making progress—more than Wyatt, perhaps, at least concerning her sister. She wasn’t quite ready to leave it behind and . . . what? Return to Virginia no better off than when she’d left? No.

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