by Jim Nelson
“The girl came and went before I could stop them,” she said. “Ruby came into my room and took some things from my closet. I was half-asleep.”
“What things?” Hanna said, looking around.
“She just went past me like I wasn’t here,” Hanna’s mother raved, flopping her arms over the blankets. “My papers in the closet—you know, I think she’s been snooping through them.” She waved frantically toward the bedroom door. “Ruby took a bag of things from your room too. Then I heard them leave on a motorcycle. Things are deathtraps! Your father crashed a motorcycle when we were dating. I almost broke it off with him then and there—no one wore helmets back then, and that godawful machine chewed up his right leg—I tried calling you, but your phone didn’t pick up.” She took a deep, needed breath. “No, it was his left leg.” Then, as though summarizing her ravings: “That bridge of yours, I swear she’s been poking through my things while I was sleeping.”
Hanna took her phone from her back pocket and unlocked it. No signal at the farmhouse, but apparently on the road, she’d passed through an area with some connectivity. The phone reported a missed call from her mother’s landline number and a new voicemail.
“Take care of your grandmother,” Hanna said to Cynthia. “I’ll call you later to check in.”
Although Cynthia’s mobility was limited, she still moved fast enough to reach the farm yard before Hanna climbed into the Audi.
“Listen,” she breathed, hand on her distended belly, “you don’t even know where they’re going.”
“I’m going to SFO,” Hanna said.
“They’re going to Shur Spring—”
“At the airport,” Hanna finished.
“Don’t interrupt me!”
Hanna, one foot in the car, nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“I read on the Internet,” Cynthia said, “Hagar’s sisters will use code words to mean places. I don’t know all of the words. When I read their messages, it was hard sometimes to follow everything they were saying. But I don’t think ‘airport’ means where airplanes take off. I think it means something else.”
Cynthia’s reasoning made Hanna relax. “I wish we had Internet out here,” Hanna murmured, looking about as though some Internet could be had if only she searched hard enough.
“Have you ever thought you should let Ruby go?” Cynthia asked.
“What?” Hanna shook her head. “No-no-no. This isn’t up for discussion.”
“I made a decision. It was mine to make.”
No it was not, Hanna thought.
“Maybe you should give Ruby a chance to—”
“Go back inside,” Hanna said. “Keep your grandmother in bed. Wait for my phone call. If her fever climbs any higher, call me.” When Cynthia began to protest, Hanna slammed the car door, twisted the key in the ignition, and shot down the jutted lane.
—
She pushed the Audi past fifty miles per hour, fifteen over the speed limit, until she reached a stretch of straight flat road with cell phone reception. Hanna searched her phone’s contact list and speed dialed.
First, she called her father. She explained to him Cynthia was alone with a feverish Dian. She needed him at the farmhouse watching over both of them.
“Your mother doesn’t like me going out there,” he said. “Tell you what. I’ll call an on-duty nurse. I’ll pay, I’m happy to—”
“I need you to watch Cynthia,” Hanna said. “I can’t have her there by herself.” Hanna was aware of the risk she took leaving Cynthia at the farmhouse. The thirteen-year-old could easily change her mind and bolt again. “But I do need someone to watch Mom too. I’m worried. If her fever goes any higher—”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said with a weary sigh. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Thanks, Dad,” she said. “I’ll check in with you soon.”
The second call was to listen to her mother’s voicemail. Sure enough, in a sticky hoarse voice, coughing, her out-of-breath mother warned Hanna that “some girl”—Piper—was in the house and directing Ruby what to pack. The voicemail recorded her mother yelling at Piper and Ruby. It seemed the girls simply ignored her and left.
Ruby, flat-out disobedient to Grandmother. Hanna could not imagine it.
It was brazen, Piper in the farmhouse itself, kidnapping a bridge daughter. If she was caught, she’d be thrown in prison for the rest of her life. Of course, Hanna reasoned, Piper would go to a bridge house simply for undergoing a bi-graft. Blanchard’s Procedure was treated as infanticide by most states, “dereliction of life” in others. A bridge daughter who’d undertaken the procedure rarely lived past twenty-five years of age, and never thirty. Even ten years in custody was a life sentence for Piper. As long as she evaded the authorities, Piper had little to lose.
Now with three bars on her phone, she called the farmhouse. Cynthia answered.
“Grandmother’s trying to get up,” Cynthia said. “She said she’s fine now.”
“She’s not fine now,” Hanna said. “Let me talk to her. Wait—Cynthia? Grandpa will be there soon.”
Silence. “You don’t trust me to watch Grandmother?”
She now had to take Cynthia seriously. Their talk on the side of the road, that was Cynthia demanding to be accepted as a responsible young adult and not a child. Improvising, Hanna imagined she was talking to a teenage boy, the boy Cynthia carried. She would have to start talking to her as though she was speaking to a teenage boy: Brash, cocky, and ever under the weight of a yoke of his own making. Young men followed an unwritten code they did not understand, a set of standards defined by others they foolishly thought they’d devised themselves.
“Honey,” she told her, “our family is under attack. Can you see that?”
After a quiet moment, Cynthia said, “Yes. I do.”
“We need all the help we can get right now. We need allies. Your grandpa is an ally.”
“I understand,” Cynthia said. “I’ll have him call you when he gets here.” Some commotion could be heard in the background. “Here’s Grandmother.”
“Did you say Barry’s coming here?” her mother said without a hello.
Highway 101 neared. Hanna would soon have to merge with traffic, and she did not want to be on the phone while doing so. “Mom,” she said, “are you in bed?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. The news of her ex-husband dropping by seemed to have invigorated her. She sounded more alert now. She also did not sound like she was in bed.
“I want to know what Ruby packed,” Hanna said.
“I had Cynthia take an inventory. Looks like Ruby took some of her clothes and her toothbrush. And Ruby Jo.”
Of course. Where Ruby goes, so goes Ruby Jo.
“You said she was in your bedroom?” Hanna said into the phone, cradling it on her shoulder so she could navigate a turn.
“She got into my old papers,” her mother said. “She found Ritchie’s stuff, and some old photos of mine. She took—”
Hanna heard her mother cover the phone. Although muffled, she heard her mother direct Cynthia to go into the kitchen and make something to eat. Hanna understood the ruse was for privacy.
“I didn’t tell you before,” her mother said, voice lower. “When you were gone this morning, and later, after you went looking for Cynthia, Ruby started asking me a lot of questions about Hanna.”
“Hanna?”
“Your bridge mother,” Dian said, whispering it like an incurable disease. “She wanted to know all about her. What she liked, what clothes she wore, what she named her wenschkind. Hanna had no use for those baby dolls, of course. I thought it was all just, I don’t know, curiosity. But then she started asking about Hanna running away. Did you tell Ruby your bridge mother ran off?”
“Mom,” Hanna reminded her, “you never told me that. I only found that out a little while ago. And I certainly never told Cynthia or Ruby.”
“Well, they know somehow. And she wanted to know why she ran away. Ruby—she thinks she’
s clever—but I know, she was leading me. Trying to get me to admit to something she already knew.” Before Hanna could ask, Dian said, “Do you know your bridge mother tried to have a Blanchard’s? When she ran off, she nearly got one done?”
The cassette tape—Hanna realized how Ruby, and perhaps Cynthia, would have known. They must have listened to it when Hanna was unaware.
“I know,” Hanna said. “I only learned that recently too.”
“Your father told you,” Dian said accusingly.
“It wasn’t Dad,” Hanna said. “Just tell me, what was Ruby trying to find out?”
“I don’t know, that’s what’s got me,” Dian said. “She asked about the kinds of books Hanna read. How Hanna loved flowers and wanted to go to college, all that. And she wanted to know what the notebook means.”
“What notebook?” Then Hanna recalled the leatherette notebook, pages of names, numbered from one to one thousand, each name crossed-out.
“Your bridge mother got this crazy idea in her head to make a thousand paper cranes,” Dian said. “It happened during her pons anno. She numbered all of them, like serial numbers. When she gave one to someone, she wrote their name in a little book.” Her mother paused. “After her finality, we discovered she’d crossed out all the names for some reason. On top of that, she folded another thousand cranes! What got in to her, I’ll never understand. We found the birds in her suitcase under her bed. We sent her to a camp in the mountains. They kept her busy up there, but somehow she had enough spare time to fold another thousand of those little paper birds.”
“Susanna Glen,” Hanna said.
“That’s right. Then, on top of asking me all those questions, Ruby took my only good photo of your bridge mother—”
“At Susanna Glen,” Hanna said again.
“That’s right.” A long cackling pause followed. It was the interference of the old phone lines running to the farmhouse, lines unchanged since the 1950s. “Have you seen that photo before? What does she want with it?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Hanna said. “Ruby is a sentimental one.” Hanna thought of the breakdown that morning, Ruby crying how she wanted to mother the child she bore.
“Not Ruby,” Dian said. “That girl on the motorcycle. She told Ruby to take the photo.”
Now Hanna paused. What could Piper want with a photo of her bridge mother?
“Mom,” she said, “I’m coming up on the highway. I need to go.”
“I wish you’d gotten someone other than your father to come here.”
“Mom, please. He’s doing us both a favor.”
“He’s not the man you want on your side right now.” Her cough turned into a phlegmy hack.
Hanna started to say goodbye, the onramp looming ahead, but her mother’s bite caught her. She pulled over to the shoulder and shifted to Park, leaving the engine idling. Houses lined the street here, large characterless homes built in the 1970s, as well as an AM-PM on the corner with gas pumps and a touchless car wash. Atop the arch of the Highway 101 overpass, a blurry stream of cars and eighteen-wheelers shot past. She felt she was encroaching on civilization again. Or, perhaps, civilization was encroaching upon her.
Hanna said, “What exactly does that mean?”
“It’s nothing,” her mother said.
It was uncharacteristic of her mother to say something catty, then say she’d said nothing at all. Hanna called this type of social game chicken shit, a useful term she’d picked up from her Midwestern father.
“That’s my father you’re talking about,” she told her mother.
Hanna’s mother made a harrumph into the phone.
“Dad’s apologized for what happened,” Hanna said. “He’s apologized to me two dozen times, I think.” She could almost hear her mother ignoring her. “You never saw him when he was drinking. He was a mess. He spent whole weekends locked in his apartment living off microwave dinners and beer. Jackie turned him around.”
Dian’s pish at the woman’s name came down the phone line.
“I don’t care for her either,” Hanna said, “but he’s happy and he’s my father. You might cut him some slack.”
Her mother exhaled a deep breath, sending with it a flurry of static. “Your father loves you and will always be there for you,” she said.
“Then what are you saying?”
After a long pause, her mother spoke. “Your father loved our bridge daughter the way a father is supposed to love his real daughter. I told him to temper it. I told him he had to reserve his love for you, not her. But Hanna was a special little girl.” She exhaled another flurry of static. “She was bright and generous and giving. But then she ran off and tried to get a bi-graft. She wanted to take you away from us, Hanna. And for some reason, she decided against it. She came back to us. She did what was right.”
Like Cynthia. “Why do you think she came back?”
“She was a scared little girl,” Hanna’s mother said. “She was only thirteen.”
Hanna waited for more. She thought that was the story, the whole reason her mother detested Hanna’s father. Perhaps her feverish mother had lost her train of thought.
Then, without warning, her mother continued.
“After your bridge mother returned,” she said, “your father had a change of heart. He wanted Hanna to have a bi-graft. We would treat her as our real daughter. Just, I don’t know…pretend she was not a bridge. Ridiculous. I refused, of course.”
“Dad said that to you?”
“Several times. We fought over it.”
Hanna thought of her father at the house, hugging Cynthia and Ruby, tickling the bridge daughters as they prepared lunch in the kitchen. A new aspect of her father unfolded before her.
“Your father loves you, honey,” her mother said. “He never forgave me for sending your bridge mother up to the mountains. And after you were born, he loved you, but he still loved the other Hanna too.”
“And that’s why you divorced?” Hanna asked, voice cracking.
“He never forgave me, even after you were born. We were either arguing or he would cut me off from him. He started drinking. It got to the point that I had no choice but to tell him to leave.” She said firmly, “Do you understand now?”
“I think I do,” Hanna said, but she was hoarse.
“He wanted a different daughter,” her mother said. “Or maybe both daughters, you and the other Hanna. He thought that made sense. Maybe he still does.” She sighed. “This is not a man you want standing at your side, Hanna.”
Eighteen
Fumbling with her cell phone while speeding south on Highway 101, Hanna cursed at herself for not buying the hands-free package offered at the car dealership. With both hands, she held the phone at the steering wheel’s twelve-o’clock position so she could thumb through the contacts list while driving. She located “McManus, Todd” and stabbed the dial button. He answered on the fourth ring.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Is the site down?” She imagined him hurrying to reach a computer keyboard to start troubleshooting a technical problem with their company’s web site. Hanna thought Todd McManus to be the type of person never far from a computer keyboard.
“I’m sorry to call you on a Sunday,” Hanna said. “It’s personal, to be honest.”
“Oh.” He almost sounded disappointed that the call was not about a technical problem. “What’s going on?” Then, “Is this about your bridge daughters?”
“Why do you say that?” Hanna snapped.
“We talked a lot about them before,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Hanna told herself to calm down a bit. She was driving on edge, unwilling to stop for even a bite to eat, and feeling raw and drained for it.
“You told me about the code words used by Hagar’s sisters,” she said. “Did you ever hear them talk about the airport?”
“Why?” he asked. “What’s going on out there?”
“Todd, I just need to know what that means,” she
said. “I don’t want to explain why I need to know. But it’s important.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “The airport is Crissy Field.”
Hanna said, “Wait—why?”
“A long time ago, Crissy Field was a landing strip,” he said. “For biplanes and the old China Clipper line. I think Amelia Earhart landed there once.”
Crissy Field was now a park and wildlife habitat near the San Francisco end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Tufts of surf grass lined a wide stretch of gray beach along the bay waters. On the weekends, Crissy Field was thronged by joggers and outdoorsy folk throwing Frisbees for their dogs. The weather near the bridge was predictable year-round, generally cold and wet from the ever-lingering fog and sea spray coming off the bay. It was the kind of park you brought your jacket and a muffler, even in the summertime. It was also a highly public place, an odd choice to hold a secret meeting.
“Is your bridge daughter talking about Shur Spring again?”
“Todd,” Hanna said, “thank you. I need to go.”
“Am I going to see you tomorrow?” The question sounded furtive. Every time Hanna interacted with him, she feared he was going to ask her out for a date. Oh, if Todd McManus’ passive approaches were her greatest problem.
“I’m out of the office all week,” she said. “I’ll see you next Monday.” She offered him a quick good-bye and hung up.
—
Sunday afternoon traffic on the bridge held her up, and so Hanna reached Crissy Field at a quarter after four. The mounds of grass and gray sand stretched a quarter mile, a bare flat plain with tidal-marsh habitats fenced-off from the public. A handful of WPA structures remained standing, whitewashed and red-roofed, such as administration buildings converted to gift shops, bathrooms, and a hut offering respite from the ever-lingering fog. She slowly circled the field by car searching for any sign of Ruby, Piper, or a congregation of young women milling about.
She felt the fool. Hagar’s sisters would never meet in broad daylight. They were in hiding for a reason. They would meet under the cover of night, when the cold, wet field was devoid of activity. The field stood far from any nightlife, surrounded on all sides by the wooded Presidio.
