Hagar's Mother (The Bridge Daughter Cycle Book 2)

by Jim Nelson

  Cynthia ground her jaw, smoldering. She marched back to the car. Hanna acquiesced without a word. She unlocked the doors with her keychain fob. In the backseat, Cynthia stared out the window at Hanna, eyes burning. She twisted around to face away. The minivan had left a tan cloud of dust in its wake before disappearing up the county road.

  Hanna turned her attention to the strawberries. They were sold in rough pulp-paper cartons rather than the green plastic baskets the supermarkets used. Hanna picked out two cartons and a hand-labeled jar of strawberry preserves. On the ground next to the checkout stood selections of fresh-cut flowers in PVC buckets filled with water.

  Hanna knew little about flowers. Part of her corporate training included a two-day seminar on their scented products. Her company marketed several lines using floral names to evoke freshness, although all their scents were synthetics. Every ingredient was artificially derived from noxious chemicals brewed and titrated in stainless steel vats in a factory on the outskirts of Mexico City. The training also educated her on the differences between perfume—quite expensive—and eau de toilette, which most people confuse as perfume. Her company was not above profiting on that ignorance.

  Hanna held up a dripping bouquet. “What are these?” she asked the man at the register.

  “Lavender.” He said it as though everyone else in the world knew it too.

  “And these?”

  “Daffodils.”

  “What are these,” she said, indicating the flowers mixed in with the daffodils.

  “Poppies.”

  She added two bunches of the mixed flowers to her purchases. She turned and called for Ruby to hurry up. She thought Ruby was still at the produce table, leaning across the bounty of plums to examine them one at a time for defects and freshness. Instead, Ruby was gone.

  Hanna took two steps toward the table. She searched left and right. Ruby was nowhere to be seen.

  Hanna had experienced a number of these scares in department stores and grocery aisles. She probably dealt with it less often than most parents, as the twins acted as a kind of buddy system in public. If one wandered off without Hanna’s consent, the other knew where to look for her. Hanna peered out to the car. Cynthia remained fuming in the backseat, alone, wiping the wetness from her cheeks.

  She looked to the cashier for assistance. He returned her glance with blank disinterest.

  Years earlier, Hanna cut a deal with herself. She firmly told herself she would not be that kind of mother, the screechy woman demanding everyone’s help in finding her child who’d wandered off due to her own negligence.

  She couldn’t help but check the leering man in the cut-off shirt. He remained by the soda machine with his bottle of root beer. He fiddled with a pack of cigarettes jammed down in his shirt pocket, trying to fish out a smoke with one hand.

  Then Hanna realized the hitchhiker was gone too. Hanna stepped toward the nectarine table. She started to call out Ruby’s name and spotted the hitchhiker’s pack lying on the ground. Hanna approached cautiously, circling around the nectarine table.

  The hitchhiker had stripped off her pack so she could crouch down, one bare knee in the dirt. She spoke quietly to Ruby. She wasn’t considerably taller than Ruby, but crouching made their conversation more intimate. She whispered to Ruby with both hands gently on the bridge daughter’s waist. Wide-eyed and jaw loose, Ruby nodded agreement with everything the hitchhiker said.

  “Excuse me,” Hanna said. “What’s going on?”

  The hitchhiker shot up to face Hanna. Ruby, stunned, said, “Nothing.”

  “Excuse me,” Hanna said again. She reached around the hitchhiker to pull Ruby away.

  “Your bridge and I were just talking,” the hitchhiker said. “She wanted to know where I was from. Isn’t that right?”

  The hitchhiker was young and fair, dressed in a style reminiscent of the Summer of Love. On her T-shirt was a psychedelic snail with a rainbow swirling shell and Bambi eyes at the ends of its stalks. She dressed like so many young people who traveled across the country to San Francisco, some by bus, some by boutique airline, some with their thumbs out for the authentic experience. The corner of Haight and Ashbury teemed with teenagers expecting to discover love, peace, and inner light. Instead, they found chain stores, ratty hostels, and overpriced vegan cuisine.

  The hitchhiker, however, was not quite as fresh-faced as Hanna first surmised. The difference was in the girl’s physique. She bore a gaunt waxy face, like the sullen Eastern European models Hanna’s company employed for shows in Hong Kong, Paris, and Los Angeles. She was thin, too thin, and her bare legs were bony, giving her a knock-kneed appearance. She appeared healthy enough from afar, but up close, Hanna could only think drugs.

  Hanna pulled away Ruby, who did not object or drag her feet. Hanna paid the cashier, gathered her things, and took Ruby to the Audi.

  As she backed the car away from the fruit stand, gravel crunching beneath the radials, Hanna noticed the hitchhiker approaching the green step-side truck. The man had finished his root beer and was smoking a cigarette. With a crooked smirk, he threw her backpack in the bed of the truck and helped her up to the cab. Hanna couldn’t help but think the girl was brimming with bad judgment that day.

  Nine

  As Hanna pulled the car around the roundabout, Hanna’s father emerged from the house bearing a massive smile. He opened the driver’s door, helped her out, and hugged Hanna deeply.

  “So glad you could make it,” he said into her ear, then kissed her on the cheek. He leaned down to peer at the backseat. “And how are these two doing?”

  “Fine,” the girls said, almost in unison.

  Hanna’s father lived in a stucco California ranch-style home. Sloping yards of trellised grapes extended out from all sides of his property, although he grew none himself, only renting his spare acreage to wine conglomerates. The ovoid front driveway hugged a massive oak with crisp green leaves and arthritic limbs. The tree was there before the home was built, and was the reason her father had purchased the land four years earlier. He liked the stability it represented, he once told Hanna.

  Once they’d emerged from the car, he hugged the twins in turn, rocking them in his arms. “My little girls,” he said twice.

  “They’re not so little any more, Dad.”

  “They’re not, are they? Stand up; let’s see you both.”

  Cynthia and Ruby stood straight, doing their best to become taller. “Look at this one!” her father said, gripping Cynthia by her upper arm. “What’s going on here?”

  Cynthia curled her right arm and produced a taut muscle. Hanna’s father squeezed, impressed.

  “Quite the bruiser,” he said.

  “Barry,” a woman called through a kitchen window. “Invite them in, for God’s sake.”

  Inside the spacious, groomed house, Hanna and the girls followed Barry to the kitchen. An oversized wood-topped island monopolized the center of the kitchen. It surface was covered with cutlery blocks, clean pans and pans in use, and a large wood bowl holding a tossed salad. A big Italian lunch was in the works, red sauce stewing and pasta boiling in pots.

  The woman who called through the window greeted them with a warm smile. “Welcome, all of you,” Jackie announced. She preferred the continental style. Hanna—feeling ridiculous—leaned in to accept a kiss in the air beside her cheek.

  Ruby presented to Jackie the two cartons of strawberries and the jar of preserves. Jackie directed the bridges to the deep sink. Ruby washed the strawberries in a colander. Cynthia stood beside her and watched, looking a little helpless. Hanna asked about the menu.

  “Spaghetti and meatballs,” Jackie said to her. “Barry’s favorite.” She said to the girls, “It’s all yours. Just ask if you need to know where anything is at.” She made a warm smile to Hanna and suggested they retire to the rear porch.

  Ruby required no further instruction. She removed an apron hanging on a rack and tied it on with the cool practice of a surgeon preparing for the operati
ng theater. Ruby knew Jackie liked a jalapeno in her three-bean salad. She set about washing one and finely chopping it up.

  On their way out, Hanna instructed Cynthia to set the table, just to give her something to do. Jackie, who’d been holding a glass of white wine the entire time, asked Hanna if she cared for any.

  “Just one,” Hanna said, mindful she’d be back on the road in two or three hours.

  Jackie produced a bottle from the refrigerator, a California Sauvignon Blanc vinted at a winery not far from their property. They belonged to some sort of wine club. Jackie poured forth about its membership benefits with as much generosity as she poured the wine into Hanna’s stem glass.

  “So what are these girls up to?” Barry called out.

  Ruby wordlessly continued her preparations. Cynthia shrugged and returned to setting the table.

  “Barry,” Jackie said, “leave them be. They’ve got work to do.”

  The adults retired to the back porch with the bottle of chilled wine and a cutting board of wine crackers, cheese slices, and figs in oil.

  Ruby’s preparations proceeded with efficiency and focus. In a small way, Hanna thought it a shame Cynthia was not more like her twin sister. Hanna sensed a telepathic cooperation when bridges came together for a task. They locked it down, psychically coordinating between themselves without fuss or bickering. She’d witnessed it at Cynthia’s and Ruby’s school when the bridge daughters put on musical productions, or when the school ran their sidewalk bake sale during Berkeley’s Founders Day parade.

  Cynthia dragged her heels setting the table. She was the exception. Never satisfied, she would feign sickness to get out of school activities, although Hanna could see through her wiles. Unwilling to squabble with Cynthia in front of family, Hanna finally told her to join them on the back porch. It was better to keep an eye on Cynthia than to leave her on her own and let her get into mischief. Her father had a computer, after all, and Hanna doubted he password-protected it.

  The real problem, though, was convincing her father to leave Ruby alone. Within minutes, he was back in the kitchen. He sat on a bar stool asking Ruby questions about school and books she’d read and how many friends she’d made. Ruby’s answers were curt and to the point, not out of rudeness, but due to her devotion to the task at hand. After a few minutes of this, Jackie leaned forward in her rattan chair and yelled through the screen door for him to quit bothering her and come back outside, which he did. Minutes later, he returned to the kitchen for another beer and started peppering Ruby with more questions.

  The back porch was shaded by a wood-slatted rotunda covered with contorted, leafy grapevines. Jackie poured herself more wine and prodded Hanna with all manner of questions about fashion, perfume, shoes, and living single in the city. Hanna reminded her they didn’t live in the city, but in Berkeley. For Jackie, that was close enough.

  Hanna understood why her father had remarried. After her parents’ divorce, he seemed magnetized to loneliness. He was a man who made few friends but was emotionally ill-suited to solitude. In his bachelor years, he subsisted in one apartment after another while holding down a series of contract jobs in every town big and small in the North Bay. With every visit, she could see the isolation chipping away at his soul and sanity. The evidence was in his hangdog smile when she arrived at his door, and it was in the deep-breath sigh he emitted when she told him it was time she got going. Every apartment he lived in smelled funny, and each smelled funny in a different way.

  He’d dated on and off over the twenty-year span between his two marriages. None of the women offered anything close to fulfillment. A few seemed to subtract fulfillment, as though exacting an honorarium from him for their efforts. Jackie was the first woman to offer something substantial of herself to Barry, although Hanna could not name what the mysterious substance might be.

  Barry, tall and gaunt, his hair a shock of auburn-white, was over sixty. Half his age, Jackie was a brittle blue-eyed woman with a fussiness about her. The only attractive thing Hanna detected in her was her figure. Hanna’s mother called Jackie’s bridal gown “absurd,” a lace-and-cleavage affair more fantasy than matrimony. Hanna simply could not believe her father’s paralyzing loneliness was solved by Jackie’s body. Perhaps it was her devotion to him, which seemed as genuine as her smile and continental greetings.

  “Ruby is so darling,” Jackie told Hanna. “And Cynthia is developing so fast.”

  “It’s taken all of us aback,” Hanna said absently.

  “All of us?” Jackie pounced. “Tell me more about ‘us.’”

  Hanna verbally stumbled. “Me,” she sputtered. “It’s taken me aback.”

  Jackie yelled at Barry to stop bothering Ruby.

  “Can you sit straight,” Hanna said to Cynthia. She’d been squirming in her rattan chair her entire time on the porch.

  “Can I play with Grandpa’s computer?” Cynthia asked.

  Hanna unlocked her smartphone and handed it to her. Cynthia greedily accepted it and began tapping and swiping across its glass display.

  “I tell all my girlfriends what a juggling act you are,” Jackie said, eyeing the phone. “A career woman raising two bridge daughters on her own.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Hanna said.

  “You’re not worried…?” She nodded at the phone in Cynthia’s hand.

  “It’s only until lunch is ready,” Hanna said.

  They drank their wine. Jackie sipped hers. Hanna drank heartily, debating if she could manage two before getting back behind the wheel.

  “Are you having trouble?” Jackie asked as she refilled Hanna’s glass. The wine slopped from the neck of the bottle in running leaps.

  Cynthia lowered the phone to stare at Hanna’s filling wine glass. She made an exaggerated sigh, set the phone aside, and scurried off to the kitchen.

  “No, I’m doing fine,” Hanna said. She wondered what her father had told Jackie. Money was tight, but who couldn’t use more money?

  With a knowing smile, Jackie said, “I meant, are you having trouble in the man department?”

  Squeals rang from the kitchen. Hanna leaned back in her chair to peer through the screen door. Inside was a sight completely foreign to her as a child, but becoming wonderfully familiar to her in adulthood. Her father was on one knee. He had pinned his arm around Ruby’s chest. Cynthia was backed up to the corner of the kitchen countertop squealing at the top of her lungs. Her father tickled Ruby in the ribs with one hand, Cynthia in the neck with the other. They laughed and struggled and cried out for him to stop. Baking flour dusted Barry from forehead to waist. Through the screen door he flashed a wide grin for Hanna that made her melt.

  —

  The hearty Italian lunch blunted Hanna’s second glass of wine. She quit feeling bad for accepting it, and halfway through the meal, she accepted a third.

  Hanna asked her father to walk with her. The sun was lowering in the sky. A welcome coolness settled across the tree-dotted property. The cicada buzzed in the distance. Her father seemed at perfect ease as they circumnavigated the property. He discussed dealings with the wine conglomerates and the varieties they’d planted. The pool had plumbing problems again. He was contemplating building a guesthouse on the property.

  At a lull in their conversation, she said, “I went to the old house last week.” She added, “In Concord. It’s for sale.”

  “You don’t say. How’s it looking?”

  “The neighborhood’s not like it used to be.”

  “That was a good house,” he said. “Sturdy.”

  “You won’t believe who I met while I was there,” she said. “Erica Grimond.”

  “Across the street?” He furrowed his brow. “She’s the youngest, right?”

  Hanna nodded. “She’s about my age.”

  “That’s right.” He whistled softly. “Her bridge mother was a piece of work. What a dark little girl. No sense of humor at all.”

  “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.” Fearin
g they were walking too fast and would reach the house too soon, Hanna halted. “Erica’s bridge mother made a diary. On audio cassettes. She recorded all these things about her life. I listened to one of them. She talked about Hanna.”

  “That’s right,” he said, old memories coming to life. “Hanna and Erica knew each other.”

  “How well?”

  “Not well, I don’t think.” He looked to the ground. “The Grimonds moved across the street only about, oh, a year before Hanna’s finality. We didn’t really make friends with them. Your mother didn’t get along at all with the wife. What was her name?”

  “Vivian.” Hanna pushed her hands in her back pockets and arched her spine, trying to appear relaxed. She spoke nonchalantly. “One of Erica’s diaries said Hanna ran away?”

  He nodded carefully. “That’s right. Did it talk about both times she ran?”

  “She did it twice?”

  “Twice to San Francisco,” he admitted. “She ran to your Uncle Rick the first time.”

  Hanna pondered pushing her luck. She was an adult, she was raising her own bridge daughters, but still Hanna sensed she was treading delicate ground, even thirty years after the fact.

  “The diary said Hanna tried to get a bi-graft?”

  The medical term cut the air, seemingly silencing the cicada who also waited for an answer. Barry, lips pursed, rocked on one foot, testing the ground between them. His eyes remained down and away from her.

  “I wish you’d not heard that,” he said. “Hanna was a strong-willed girl. Stubborn, in a good way. And quite smart.”

  “Apparently, she saved a lot of money for it?”

  “We don’t know where she got the money,” Barry said. “Dian found her stash, something like five hundred dollars. We took it away from her, but she still ran on us. When she came home, we found another six hundred dollars on her.” He spread his hands. “Where does a little girl get that kind of money?”

  “The tape says she got it from Erica,” Hanna said. “It sounds like she strong-armed it out of her.”

  Barry shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like my Hanna,” he said.