Girls of Brackenhill(90)

Hannah ambled through the basement labyrinth. Never again had the rooms shifted. She’d long ago collected all the cards and stacked them up on one of the boxes. It could have been stress. Anxiety scrambled your thoughts, played tricks on the eyes. She no longer believed in magic, not the way she used to anyway.

She believed in stress. She believed in the fallibility of the human mind. The ability of the mind to box up certain events and file them away in a locked cabinet. Throw away the key. She believed in the effects of sleep deprivation and emotional trauma. She believed in temporary psychosis. She’d spent the last six months reading psychology articles online. Wandering the grounds of Brackenhill, willing a memory to come rushing back. Furious and clenching when she could not.

Despite Wyatt’s protestations, Hannah knew what she’d done.

Sometimes when you push people, they break.

Julia knew Hannah better than Hannah knew herself.

Perhaps Hannah had confessed to her crime knowing Wyatt wouldn’t believe her.

Julia hadn’t broken out of the storm shelter, run away, and lived happily ever after in some tropical paradise. There was only one outcome that made sense.

Hannah had buried her.

Hannah had slices of memory. It had always been there, but without context she’d always believed it to be a dream vignette.

A shovel full of sandy dirt.

The permeating smell of death, days old.

How had Julia’s purse ended up in the Beaverkill? Again, there was only one answer. Hannah couldn’t remember the rushing water, the purse sailing through the air, the gentle swish as the current swept it away. She would have been the one to do it, but she had no memory of it.

She had no memory of any of it.

Hannah must have gone back. She had to have returned at some point and found Julia dead. She’d turned it over so many times in her mind and always came to the same conclusion. She’d returned to maybe let her sister out, and Julia had been dead. It was the only possible scenario.

Wes came to retrieve Hannah four days after Julia went missing. She had no clear memories of those four days. Jumbled snapshots. Like photos that fell out of an album, mixed up and out of order.

Four days wasn’t enough time to die of hunger or even of dehydration necessarily (although it was possible, according to Hannah’s research). As much as Hannah could figure, Julia had died trying to get out of the storm shelter. Perhaps something had fallen on her. Perhaps she’d cut herself trying to break down the door.

She asked Wyatt. “There would have been remains, Hannah. You didn’t do what you think you did.”

Hannah said nothing.

Instead, she spent hours in the storm shelter, trying to shake something loose. Any memory remained locked up tight. Just one image: dirt sifting over the curve of a spade with a red handle.

You might never find her. Wyatt’s voice was gentle when he said it, but the words always felt like a slap. She knew what he thought: that she was broken and maybe even crazy. He encouraged her to see someone. Talk to someone. Hannah admitted he was right about that. And yet if she confessed, even to a therapist, would she go to prison? Then who would find her sister?

She’d tried to make sense of the after: She’d gone back to Plymouth. Her mother had stayed in her room, prayed for Julia’s return, and barely spoken to Hannah. Her stepfather never again came into her room, never laid another finger on her. She went back to start her sophomore year of high school. Did she just pick up where she’d left off?

No.

She shunned her friendships. Tracy and Beth had been confused, then distraught, then later, after months, indifferent. She’d been the girl whose sister disappeared. Died. Hannah remembered floating through the rest of high school. Probably failing but getting a pass for being so wrapped up in tragedy.

Her sister should have graduated. Hannah had one sharp memory, one moment where she might have held tight to the memory of what she’d done. The guidance counselor had called her down to her office and presented her with her sister’s graduation cap. “You should have this,” she said. She meant it to be kind.

Hannah had cried. “It’s my fault.”

Everyone thought she meant it to be dramatic. Maybe metaphorically. Maybe because they’d fought. The guidance counselor had clucked sympathetically and placed her hand on Hannah’s head. “Darling girl,” she’d said.

She saw a therapist only once: a young twentysomething blonde woman in a bright office who clicked her pen relentlessly. She looked astonishingly like Julia. The same blonde curls. The same graceful flit of her hand. Hannah never went back.

Hannah pushed through the green door and followed the tunnel that wound approximately a hundred yards. The length of a football field. A few months ago, she’d strung up heavy-duty construction lights. With the flick of a button, the tunnel illuminated, bright as a snowy Catskill morning.

As far as she could see, she’d dug wide holes—trenches, really. The floor of the storm shelter itself had already been completely unearthed, the newly turned dirt a raw reddish-brown color. She’d dug a perfectly measured four feet down.

It had taken her months. If she didn’t find what she was looking for in the tunnel now, she’d go back to the beginning, back to the shelter in the little hill, and dig another four feet down. If she had to.

She’d do it forever. She owed it to her sister.

She owed Julia that much.