Girls of Brackenhill(62)
Hannah was sure that was true. “Girlfriend?” she pressed, before taking a sip. She picked up her phone and saw a missed text from Huck. Sorry I’ve been MIA. It’s been a real mess to clean up here. Literally. Around tonight? I’ll call at 9-ish. Xo
Hannah muted the ringer.
“Not at the moment. I dated a woman for about a year. She was an emergency room nurse.” He picked up his phone and tapped into it. The room filled with music, some folk-rock mix she’d never heard. Mellow. A quiet rain pattered at the windows.
“ER nurses and cops make strange bedfellows. Was your pillow talk all crime and death?” Hannah mused, standing up. The kitchen was connected to the great room with only the breakfast bar between them. She could roam the entire downstairs, taking in the views, the art on the walls. Several framed album posters from seventies rock bands, an original watercolor of the exact view Hannah saw when she gazed out the north-facing wall of windows: a swirl of color, greens and blues and the gray ripple of the river, the sweeping orange sky of sunset. “Did you paint this?”
“Ah, no. That would be the ER nurse. She was—is—an extraordinary painter.” Wyatt looked up, met her eyes, and smiled ruefully. The way he said things—“extraordinary painter”—touched a buried spot deep inside her. Everything he said was saturated with passion—not for Hannah or the ER nurse, just for life, simple things like cooking and music and art. Things Huck never talked about. She hated comparing them, hated that she was even thinking that way.
“The nurse was a painter?” Seemed like different sides of the brain to Hannah.
“Sure. Don’t you have a hobby?”
Hannah thought of their nights, after work. Dinner and drinks at the pub, then back to their condo, where she and Huck would sit on opposite ends of the couch and watch nineties sitcom reruns with their own laptops flipped open on their laps. Hannah would spend the night getting the art and text positioned just so on whatever project she happened to be working on. Tweaking the copy, trying to reduce the word count to enlarge the font. Huck would be preparing invoices. The picture it evoked felt comforting to Hannah, but she knew out loud it would sound pathetic. “Just work,” was all she said instead. She loved her job, she thought. That was her hobby. But did she? persisted the small voice inside. Had she thought about it? Missed it at all in the two weeks she’d been at Brackenhill?
“Your hobby, then, is collecting obscure seventies band posters?” And her eyes settled on a guitar resting on a tripod stand in the corner: golden wood and gleaming black neck. “You play!” she exclaimed.
He laughed as he chopped an onion. “Yes, I play. Have since before we knew each other. You didn’t know?”
Hannah tried to remember a guitar in his old room at his dad’s house and could only conjure his bed, the darkness of his room, his bed seemingly halo lit. The feel of his mouth. She felt herself flush; the room spun quickly and righted itself. It must have been the wine. She wasn’t used to such a heady cabernet. At home, they drank pinot grigio. Cheap, light, readily available.
Hannah returned to the breakfast bar, and they sat in comfortable silence, Wyatt humming softly along with the radio. The windows were open, the cool air smelling of summer rain. Hannah finally spoke. “Do you believe in that kind of thing? Scrying? Fortune-telling, seeing the future, or even connecting with the spiritual world? All the stuff that Jinny peddles?”
Wyatt paused in his chopping. “Not all of it. Some of it, maybe. I mean, don’t you ever think about how ridiculous every technological advancement must have seemed before it came to fruition? When Galileo announced that the planets rotated around the sun, not Earth, he was ostracized and called a fool. Advisers to Tony Blair in the nineties insisted that email would never catch on. As a society, we’re insanely bad at predicting what the future will later prove to be fact. I’m always so hesitant to say anything unproven is . . . hogwash.” He had put the knife down and was gesturing with both hands as he talked. “Also, you’ve had some pretty unexplainable things happen.” He raised his eyebrows at Hannah. He meant Brackenhill. Things he knew about: the basement, the creak of doors, maybe the red pool—she couldn’t remember if she’d ever told him that. When they were young, he’d been infatuated with all things related to Brackenhill. Then a memory she’d long forgotten: Their first summer together, the light pebbling of rocks at her window. She’d looked out and seen him below, his bike gleaming in the moonlight. How had he ridden his bike up the mountain in the dark? She opened the window and yelled out, “That’s dangerous! You’re crazy!”
“Come to the courtyard,” he said, his voice urgent, his eyes, even from two stories above, glittering. Hannah flew down the steps and through the castle on tiptoe, her insides flipping and her smile so wide it hurt. When she got to the garden, he was nowhere to be found. She walked all around the castle grounds, whisper-calling his name, until finally, she sat on the concrete bench next to the fountain and waited. She woke up in the morning curled on the concrete, her nightgown damp with dew. Later, she pedaled furiously to town, confronted him behind the pool snack stand, her hands in fists against his chest. He’d laughed at her. “Hannah, are you out of your mind? It had to be a dream. I didn’t come to Brackenhill last night.” It never felt like a dream.
Hannah shook loose the memory. The wine, the rain, and the music were making her sleepy and happy. She didn’t want to unearth an old, silly fight. She felt like turning off reality. Shutting real life down like her laptop: control, alt, delete. She glanced over at her phone, lying facedown on the counter, but she did not touch it.