The Night Swim(45)

26



Hannah


I heard your message for me at the end of the podcast, Rachel. You want to meet me. I get it. I want to meet you, too. I’ve been a fan for a long time. But trust me, right now is not the best time. One day, you’ll understand. It really is in your own best interests. What’s that expression? “Plausible deniability”?

That doesn’t mean we haven’t met, incidentally. If you can call two strangers passing by each other in a crowded courthouse plaza a meeting. Among other places where we’ve virtually rubbed shoulders.

In fact, you looked right at me this morning when I was in court today. I came in just before the guard closed the doors for the morning session. The only seat available was in the last row. I was stuck staring at the balding head of the man in the row in front of me, listening to Harris Wilson recount his role in Kelly Moore’s rape. Harris tried to sound unwitting. I didn’t buy it. He knew what he was doing when he followed Kelly from the party that night.

Still, I thought Harris’s testimony was damaging. I bet Scott Blair never imagined his loyal wingman would turn on him once the prosecutors offered him a plea deal.

I didn’t stay for long. I found the testimony too upsetting. Nothing has changed. Everyone is still up to their same tricks. I was so disgusted that I came out and scribbled this note for you instead.

Yesterday I went back to see our house. Of course, it no longer exists. Stupid me to have imagined that it was still there just as I remembered it. I’m sure the locals were happy to see it gone. The last trace of the Stills family erased.

We moved to Neapolis when Jenny was eight. I was a toddler. Too young to remember our momentous arrival in a brown station wagon where we had to sleep for weeks until the house was habitable. Mom’s grandfather hadn’t cleaned the house in the fourteen years since his wife died. Her name was Hannah, too. Mom never talked about her grandfather, but she kept a photo of her grandmother on her dresser.

Jenny told me once that Mom ran away as a teenager and only returned once her grandfather died because she’d inherited his house, along with the surrounding land. Jenny said it was her first permanent home. It was all she ever said about their life before we moved to Neapolis.

I was told plenty of stories about how Mom and Jenny spent weeks cleaning that house as I toddled around the overgrown garden in my diapers. Once they’d thrown out the junk that Mom’s grandfather had hoarded, she and Jenny scraped the dirt off the floors with trowels and grease remover.

When the house was clean, they painted the walls and window frames in a fresh shade of white. They sanded down and wood-washed the timber kitchen cupboards and reworked the grime-filled tiling in the bathroom and kitchen using oddments of bright yellow and blue tiles that Mom bought at a hardware store closing-down sale.

Our furniture was secondhand. Mom would buy furniture at garage sales or flea markets. She used to say that all it took was a few coats of paint and a whole lot of imagination.

She hid our threadbare sofas under painters’ throw sheets that she’d dyed crimson in a metal washing basin. She decorated the windowsills with painted glass jam jars that she filled with wild yellow daisies we’d pick from the fields around the house.

When she got sick, I always made sure to put a vase of yellow daisies in her room so that there was something for her to look at on the days when she couldn’t get out of bed. She was in bed an awful lot that summer.

As for Jenny, she became skinnier than ever after she was taken by those boys. She was always thin, so that was saying something. Her face became pale and her glossy hair turned brittle and lifeless. Her nails were a disaster. She bit them down almost to the flesh.

Mom was so ill that she had no idea that Jenny was hurting. Maybe I should have told her. God help me, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I kept the house going as best I could. Mopping the floor and hanging out laundry while standing on my tiptoes to reach the clothesline. It was fortunate that nobody had an appetite. There was no need to cook. I lived off jelly-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and glasses of milk. I spent the days drawing pictures on the porch and riding my bicycle.

One afternoon, I heard tapping on the screen door while I was slumped on the sofa, watching television. Visitors rarely stopped by. Through the window, I saw a woman. She was snooping around while she waited for me to answer the door.

“Is your mom home?” The lady wore a patterned dress with lipstick too orange for her complexion, her blow-dried hair sagging from the humidity.

“She’s not seeing visitors,” I said.

“She’s expecting me,” the woman insisted. “We arranged this meeting weeks ago. Tell her that Mrs. Mason has come to see her.”

I went back into the house, leaving the woman waiting outside in the clammy heat. Mom was lying in bed in a loose caftan that she’d made herself on her grandmother’s vintage sewing machine.

“There’s a lady here,” I told her. “She’s got ugly lipstick and she’s wearing a church dress. She said she’s supposed to meet with you. Said her name is Mason, or something.”

Mom nodded, like she already knew. She climbed out of bed and shuffled to the living room. Only when she was properly settled in the armchair did I let that woman inside the house.

The woman made an awful din coming up the stairs in her heels. She looked disappointed to see the air conditioner was not turned on and kept waving her hand in front of her face like it was a fan.