by Laura McHugh
“No. Thank you.”
She lit her cigarette and took a deep drag. “All they got around here is those freaking fake things, tastes like cotton candy. Makes me nauseous. You mind cracking the window?”
“Sure.” I crossed the room to pry open the stubborn sash, and cold air eased in. Hannah sat cross-legged on the twin bed and I sat at the edge. The simple block quilt on the bed was hand-tied with pink yarn, the flowered fabrics faded and beginning to fray at the seams. A sewing table was wedged in where a nightstand might go, and much of the floor space in the cramped room was taken up with storage bins and fabric remnants. A hastily prepared guest room.
“I wish I had something stronger right now,” Hannah said, ashing into an almost-empty Gatorade bottle. “I keep telling myself Macey wouldn’t want that. That was the whole reason Roger said I was an unfit mother. He didn’t believe I’d stay clean. But I did. I didn’t give in all this time I’ve been waiting for her to come home. But I don’t know now. It’d be so much easier if I couldn’t feel this,” she said. “If I could just be numb.”
“Is there something else I can get you?” I almost mentioned the margaritas I had in the car before realizing how stupid that would sound, offering alcohol to someone in recovery. I had no idea whether Hannah still drank. She had invited me out for drinks at the Barred Owl once, years ago, but I hadn’t gone.
She shook her head, not looking at me. She was quiet for a few minutes, nursing her cigarette down to the filter. I didn’t know what to do or say, whether she wanted me to stay or go.
“I had to leave my place,” she said. “News crews showed up to get shots of it. Here’s the shitty trailer where that poor little girl used to live.” She finished the cigarette and dropped the butt down into the bottle, swirling it around in the purple liquid at the bottom.
“I knew it was a possibility,” she continued. “I’ve known it since the beginning, since I hadn’t heard from her. She had my phone number memorized, her grandparents’, too. I was sure she’d call me if she could, find a way to get back to me. You’d think that’d make it easier when the news comes, right?” Her voice faded to a gravelly whisper. “But it doesn’t. Not one bit. I kept imagining her coming home. All the things we’d do. She wanted to get her ears pierced.” Hannah looked up at me. “Remember when we took the girls to Walmart that time, and I wanted so bad to pierce her ears, and the lady whipped out that big-ass stapler thing and Macey started screaming?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.” Lily had started bawling, too, even though I’d had no intention of piercing her ears, and we had to hustle them over to the frozen foods aisle and rip open a box of Popsicles to calm them down. Well, Hannah had said, once the girls’ sobs had stopped drawing stares, that didn’t go quite like I pictured it. We had burst out laughing.
Our friendship had revolved around our children, though I’d probably enjoyed our playdates as much as Lily and Macey had. At the time, I was eager for any excuse to get out of the house and talk to another woman. Hannah and I were opposites in some respects—motherhood had exacerbated my tendency toward caution and worry, while she remained free-spirited and impulsive—but the two of us had clicked in a way that neither of us had with the other stay-at-home moms. It had felt like we were on the verge of crossing the invisible threshold from a superficial friendship to a real one, though we never got the chance. On the way home from the Barred Owl, Hannah’s car had been T-boned on the highway, and everything had changed after that.
“Well, she told me she was finally ready. She had the studs picked out and everything. Little gold hearts. We were gonna go on her birthday.” She rubbed her eyes with the hem of her cardigan, her shoulders sagging. “I feel like it’s my fault….I shouldn’t have let him take her that weekend. Sometimes she wouldn’t want to go, and he blamed me for that, but he hadn’t been around, hadn’t made the effort to be part of her life when I was in rehab. I didn’t want to piss off the judge, make things worse than they already were. I had to let her go with him. Things got so nasty between Roger and me, with the divorce. But I didn’t think he’d do this.”
“It’s not your fault, Hannah. You couldn’t have known.” The temperature had dropped, the cold air still spilling in through the open window.
Hannah glanced sharply at me. “What about you? You knew him nearly as well as I did, back in school. Did you think back then—did you ever think—that Roger would do something like this? Did you see something I missed?”
I wondered if that was the main reason, aside from the cigarettes, that she’d asked me to come. Roger and I had ridden the bus together since kindergarten, and he and Shane had been close friends for years. Every day of high school, Roger wore Wranglers with a Skoal-can impression in the back pocket and his Future Farmers of America jacket, navy blue with bright yellow embroidery. I remembered him explaining to me, with great seriousness, that the FFA emblem was not a gold medallion, as it might appear, but the cross section of an ear of corn. He’d been part of homecoming court senior year with a group of guys who wore cowboy hats and boots with their tuxes. His crowd had keg parties in an abandoned barn and tucked lumps of spearmint chewing tobacco in their lower lips, spitting the juice into Pepsi bottles. He’d seemed like a decent guy, hardworking, genuine. Had plans to take over the family farm, but his parents had sold the land. He’d been bitter about that, which was understandable. Hannah had alluded to his prickly temper early in their marriage, though I’d never seen it for myself.
“No,” I said. “Nothing. I don’t think anybody could have predicted this. Are they…are they sure it was him?”
Hannah pushed her hair back from her face. There was red polish on her painfully short nails, most of it scraped off. “I don’t know, but that’s what everybody’s thinking. They’re looking for him. Alive or dead. Detective said people…when they do this, they might kill themselves after.”
She lit another cigarette. “I know I was a shitty person when I was high,” she said. “I wasn’t me for a while. But I really could have used a friend after rehab. Everybody who was still alive scattered like roaches in daylight.”
I’d long felt guilt for abandoning her, though the dissolution of our friendship had been a gradual progression, much like her addiction. She hadn’t woken up one day and started shooting heroin in the alley behind the Conoco. She’d gotten hooked on oxy like plenty of other people, after her car accident left her with lingering pain and a generous doctor kept refilling her prescription with an increasing number of pills. Macey was in kindergarten at the time, and I helped Hannah out, giving Macey rides home from school some days, or taking her and Lily back to our house to play. One afternoon when I tried to drop Macey off, Hannah wasn’t home. I couldn’t reach her by phone for hours, and Roger was at work, so we ended up keeping Macey overnight. Greg had wanted to report Hannah to the Department of Family Services.
I hadn’t realized until that day how serious it was, and things got worse from there. She became increasingly unreliable, and Macey went to stay with her grandparents. Without our kids’ playdates to tether us, I rarely saw Hannah, and it wasn’t until a string of overdoses from fentanyl-laced heroin killed several people across the county—including two women Hannah had been hanging around with—that she finally got help. She messaged me once after finishing rehab, but Greg hadn’t wanted me or Lily anywhere near her. I didn’t argue, though I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if I’d accepted Hannah’s invitation to go to the bar the night of the accident, if I might have ended up in her position just as easily.
“I wish things would have gone differently,” I said.
“I was glad,” Hannah said. “When you got divorced. Thought it brought you back down to my level. Stupid, right? Like any of that matters now.”
“No. I get it.” I’d been embarrassed, to some extent, about coming back to Shade Tree without accomplishing the things I’d set o
ut to do. I’d spent my teen years loudly declaring my desire to leave and never return. My two best friends were single and childless, attending grad school on opposite coasts, and I was suddenly a small-town stay-at-home mom. I was lonely, and being with Hannah was easy. She didn’t care what degrees I had or didn’t have. She’d spent her senior year of high school planning her wedding and picking out baby names. She never judged me for caving in to Greg’s demands, giving up my career to raise Lily; she didn’t consider it a failure to move back home and start a family. Then her own family had fallen apart, and maybe she’d felt like she was the failure, that I somehow thought I was better than her. And maybe I had thought that, in a way, in certain uncharitable moments.
“She was shot,” Hannah blurted. “They didn’t say that on the news, but they told me. My baby was shot.” Hannah was crying. “It would have been quick, they said. No suffering.” She pressed her sweater to her face, muffling her words. “How am I supposed to believe that, that she didn’t suffer?”
I moved closer and wrapped my arms around her, feeling her bones shudder beneath a thin veneer of flesh. I held her and rocked her until she stopped shaking.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” I said. “But I’m here now. If you need a break—if you need to get out of here—you’re welcome at my house anytime.”
She nodded, snuffling. “I’m sorry about Shane. I should have said something back when it happened.”
“It’s okay. You had enough to worry about.” I looked around, found a crumpled tissue on the floor, and handed it to her. After a while, she got up to shut the window and stood there, staring out.
“Did Roger hate me that much?” she asked. “Did he hate me so much he killed her and left her there to punish me?”
I didn’t have an answer.
I half expected Chad’s little girl to still be waiting at the bottom of the stairs when I left, but she and her brother must have been put to bed. A single bulb burned in the entry, the rest of the first floor dark and hushed except for the unmistakable voices of a South Park rerun drifting from the living room as I let myself out the front door.
I sped home along the winding blacktop, the dead fields stretching out on all sides, switching the radio back and forth between static, sermons, conservative talk shows, and country music, in search of distraction, the Kansas City stations just far enough away to fade in and out like fickle ghosts.
Hannah’s words echoed in my head, along with the image they conjured: Macey lying alone in the woods as the seasons passed, spring to summer to fall, her small body dwindling down to bone. I couldn’t help thinking of Shane, on the floor in his living room. How long had his body lain there, cooling? How long before Crystle had come home and called the ambulance? And how long after that before she had accidentally dialed Becca? I didn’t mean to call you, she’d said. Becca had heard people in the house. A crowd, like Crystle was having a party. He was cold, Crystle said finally. He was already cold when I found him.
The sun glanced down through the cottonwoods at the edge of the river, dappling Jason’s tanned skin, still wet from their swim. He held one hand behind his back. “Close your eyes,” he said.
“Why?” She’d been spending so much time with him that the days had begun to warp, and she alternately felt like she’d known him forever or that he was a stranger who evoked a dizzying case of déjà vu.
“I got you something. This is our anniversary, you know.”
“Anniversary of what?”
“Our first kiss. It was two weeks ago.”
“Guess I forgot,” she said. “I didn’t get you anything. Because two week anniversaries are not a thing.”
“I forgive you.” He smirked, taking her hand. “Now close your eyes.”
She could tell when it touched her skin that it was some sort of jewelry. Her eyes opened to a delicate gold chain spiraled in her palm, a fat diamond at the center.
“It was my mother’s,” he said.
“No,” she blurted. Two weeks together did not warrant a diamond—certainly not his dead mother’s—and it made her uneasy that he thought it did.
“Really, it’s no big deal. My dad keeps her jewelry in a box in his closet. He can’t stand to look at it, but he won’t get rid of it, so it’s just gonna sit there until he dies.” He drew her hair away from the back of her neck and fastened the necklace, the stone nested in the hollow of her throat. “It’d be a waste, don’t you think, to keep it hidden away, when it looks so beautiful on you?”
She shook her head, unconvinced, though her fingers snuck up to touch it. “I can’t keep it.”
“Think it over,” he said.
They lay down on their damp towels, looking out across the water. A knotted rope hung down from a nearby tree, and it made Henley think of Charlie. When they were twelve years old, they’d gone fishing out near her uncles’ camper and heard screaming and splashing downriver. They crept around a bend to see a group of older kids taking turns swinging out over the river on a rope. They were about to turn around and go back when one of the girls stepped out of the water and they saw that she was topless. It was Henley’s cousin Crystle. Henley and Charlie had hidden in the weeds and watched, mesmerized, as Crystle’s friends stripped down, laughing and shrieking, flinging their suits onto the shore. Later, when the big kids had gone home, Henley had asked Charlie if he wanted to try skinny-dipping. They agreed to jump in with their clothes on and then take them off underwater. After splashing around shyly for a few minutes, careful to keep their bodies concealed beneath the surface, Henley’s dress got caught in the current and Charlie swam to retrieve it. Their fingers had touched when he gave it back to her, and his face had pinked up.
“What are you thinking about?” Jason asked.
“Nothing,” she said. He moved closer and began to massage her shoulders, his strong fingers expertly working the tension out of her muscles. She’d been surprised by how attentive he was, how thoughtful. He would show up at her door with a Dr Pepper from Casey’s and a bouquet of black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace picked from the ditch. They went on long drives through the country and played cards at the kitchen table with the windows thrown wide, listening to the insects and night birds singing. He wanted to stay with her in the empty farmhouse, but Earl had pitched a fit that first night when Jason had taken her to Lonesome Hill and hadn’t come home until dawn. They hadn’t gone anyplace where people might see them together, and she preferred it that way, so they didn’t have to deal with the looks they might get or have to explain themselves to anyone. That’s why they’d come to the old Gunderson farmstead to swim. The property was in foreclosure, so no one was around, though kids sometimes snuck out there to drink at night, the river access hidden away, the channel wide and deep.
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone,” he said, bending to kiss her neck. He was always saying things like that. Tell me your favorite memory. Your worst fear. Your deepest regret. Like he wanted to know all there was to know about her. She’d never been with someone who didn’t already know her, who hadn’t known her for her entire life. The novelty was strangely exhilarating.
“You go first.”
He stretched out behind her and pulled her against his chest, so they were both facing the water.
“Did you know,” he said, “that when I was in junior high, I got sent away to a school for troubled kids?”
“No. Why? What did you do?”
“I hit my dad with a baseball bat. Fractured his hand.”
“No you didn’t.”
She felt him nod, the stubble on his jaw brushing her ear. “I got mad. He wasn’t going to let me play ball because I wasn’t keeping my grades up. I didn’t really think, I just swung.”
“That’s crazy. How long were you there?”
“I straightened up pretty quick,” he said. “They called it a ‘therap
eutic’ school, but it was like a prison. Everything was a privilege that had to be earned with good behavior—hot water, blankets, salt. Had plenty of time to think things over. I apologized as soon as they let me call him, but he made me stay the whole semester. He told everybody I was at a fancy boarding school, and then he told them I came back because I got homesick.”
“And you never told anybody the truth?”
“No.”
The sun angled lower, blazing over their tangled legs.
“Your turn,” he said.
She had plenty of family secrets that weren’t hers to tell, and few of her own that she wanted to share with anyone. Secrets were secret for a reason. He’d revealed something deeply personal, though, and she wanted to be fair. “You know my friend Charlie?” she said.
“I’ve heard you mention him. He moved away, right?”
“Yeah. Anyway. He was my first. And I was his. We never told anybody. We were always just friends, and then one night it was different.”
“When was that?”
“When we were sixteen.”
“Where?”
“Where? Why does that matter?”
“You’ve got to tell the whole secret.”
“Fine. My uncles’ camper, on the river.”
“Where on the river?”
“The very end of Hatchery Road, if you really need to know.”
“Just once?” he said. “You never thought about doing it again?”
“No,” she said. “I told you, it’s not like that between us.”
“I bet he thought about it.”
“Jealous?” she asked teasingly. She couldn’t see his face, figured he was only joking.
“I’m hot,” he said, pushing himself up and offering his hand. He grabbed the knotted rope hanging down from the tree and passed it to her. “Ladies first.”
Henley swung out over the green water, closing her eyes as she fell. Jason dove in after her. “Let’s try something,” he said as they bobbed on the surface. She raised her eyebrow suggestively, wondering what he might have in mind.
