Second chances didn’t come along often enough to be ignored or taken lightly. It was too late to change things for Hannah, to be of any use to her, to change what happened so many years ago. But it wasn’t too late for her sister’s child.
He heard her shuffling papers and moving around.
“I need time,” she said. “To think. And I can’t just drop everything here and take off for two weeks. When would I have to be there?”
“Your mother’s funeral is scheduled for Monday morning at ten.”
“Christ, Grady, will you give me a break? I have a life. I can’t possibly—”
He cut her off. He didn’t want to give her too much time to think. And it wasn’t only her life they were talking about. “This will be Anna’s second funeral in five years. She shouldn’t be alone.”
“Who’s—?”
“Anna. That’s her name. It’s short for Hannah.”
The background noise ceased and she waited a beat. “Are you making that up?”
“Nope.” He laughed silently. “Frankly, I never would have thought to . . . but I did save it for the very end. Just in case.”
Chapter Two
Hannah turned down the car radio and drove straight through town. She didn’t slow down to gawk at the changes or hark back to the good old days. There weren’t any good old days as far as she was concerned, and she wasn’t deceived by Clearfield’s quaint country charms. No one knew better than she that the tree-lined streets and the pristine gazebo in the middle of the town square were a facade of down-home living and the American way. It could have been Any Small Town, USA, but it wasn’t. It was Clearfield—home to a dark, festering truth for which she was now the final vessel.
She took her foot off the gas and slowed down for an unexpected red light at the intersection of Main and Merchant—an upgrade from the four-way yellow blinker that dangled there before. She closed her eyes and tried not to laugh, hysterically, at the sizzling anger bubbling up inside her. It was a testament to her wild, erratic emotions at the moment—pissed off at having to obey anyone or any-thing in this town and the giddy, unreal sensation of being there in the first place.
Using her thumb and index finger to push her sunglasses up, she rubbed the sweaty impressions they left on the bridge of her nose and then let them slide back in place. She reached over and cut off the heat. It registered forty-two degrees out and was as bright as July; freezing cold winds blew tree limbs like whips and she was sweating. The March weather made as much sense to her as finding herself parked at a red light in Clearfield—in other words, none at all.
“Heavy traffic.” The four o’clock rush hour got a sniff of disdain. She and an old man in a faded green pickup truck were stopped on opposite sides of the intersection for three other vehicles. Those now long gone, the two of them sat and stared at each other, waiting for the light to change again. Clenching her teeth, she darted a look to both sides of the road—at the full bumper-to-bumper parking along the sidewalk and the lone pedestrian entering an antique store called Granny’s Attic—then back at the old man across from her.
Hannah blew out a deep breath to ease some of the tightness in her chest, and put a hand over the knot in her belly. With her elbow on the car door she jammed her fingers into her straight dark hair and rested her cheek in the palm. She wanted to scream.
The old man’s wrist perched loose over the steering wheel—and he must have felt her looking at him from behind her glasses, because he suddenly lifted his hand in greeting. She startled and gasped, then just as quickly stomped down on the extra surge of paranoia.
This isn’t a trick, she reminded herself. People in small towns wave at strangers all the time. He doesn’t recognize me. He isn’t going to tell on me. There’s no one to tell, remember? This isn’t a trick. Grady wouldn’t trick me.
The light changed and she gunned the engine. The lumbering green truck rolled out from the opposite direction and she watched as the old man passed her by without a second look.
See? Simply a nice, friendly old gentleman. Not a trick. No one to tell, right? Grady wouldn’t trick me.
At least she hoped he wouldn’t. People change . . . but not that much. She’d keep the doors locked and the motor running until she was sure, of course, but she knew all too well that there were times when believing and taking a leap of faith were her only options. Besides, she’d taken a leap with Grady before and—
She shook her head and shuffled him to the back of her mind. She wasn’t here for Grady. She came here to meet the girl. Her sister’s daughter. Ruthie’s baby girl. Why did that seem like such a strange concept?
Twenty years was a long time. Wasn’t that what Grady said?—It’s been a long time . . .
It was a long time—to run, to hide, to fear. To hate. She could have, would have, gladly lived another twenty or a hundred years without coming back to Clearfield, had it not been for the call from Grady Steadman.
Talk about a blast from the past. More like a nuclear meltdown. Out of the blue like that? Foosh! Four years of expensive psychotherapy down the toilet in a heartbeat.
She could still feel that horrible, sickening sensation as the blood drained from her face and her stomach roiled with the shock and terror of being found and caught—like a fugitive—as if she’d been hiding under a rock all this time. The past rolling up on her like a tidal wave, crashing down on her, washing her back into the past as if the last twenty years had never happened.
But they had happened. Every single month, day, hour, and second of them had transpired with her blessing, she assured herself, then flipped the left-hand turn signal when she spotted the neat little red brick church up ahead. She was not, in any way, the same Hannah Benson who left this miserable, dinky, white-picket-fenced town so long ago. She had changed; she’d made a point of it.
Truth told, after the first six months, she’d stopped running and she didn’t bother to hide anymore. She was young, a few weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday when she woke up one morning, close to dawn, curled up tight to stay warm under a pew in the Sixth Baptist Church of Our Lord in Baltimore. She lay there, so cold, listening to the silence, to the occasional creak of wood contracting, and realized, as if God had whispered in her ear, it was over. She could stop running, stop hiding, because there was no one chasing her, no one coming after her, no one looking for her . . . and there never would be. She had survived, escaped, and was free.
After that, only the hate and mistrust remained, growing up inside her—growing up with her, she supposed. Like two massive twin sentries guarding and protecting her as they faced the unknown together.
And love? Well, she’d buried that with her decision to run. Even then she knew there was no going back to it. What she hadn’t realized was that she’d never find it again, either.
She slowed to make the turn with barely a glance at the Catholic church where she and her mama and sister had gone to eight o’clock mass every Sunday—in modest hand-me-down dresses that were always too long, but long enough to hide the scrapes and bruises. She felt again the insane urge to laugh, but didn’t. What a paradox that was, huh?—listening to sermons about a good and benevolent God on Sunday morning . . . after a Saturday night at home with her daddy.
Of course, the occasional limp or black eye that often elicited a Monday-morning call from the school nurse—Nosey Bitch was her name at their house—were grounds to remain in the truck, in blessed peace, during the service. Sort of a special, well-deserved treat, she always thought.
The closer she got to her destination, the tighter she gripped the steering wheel. The faster her stomach rolled, the louder it growled. The back of her throat swamped with salty saliva and the metallic taste of bile.
It didn’t seem to matter how often or forcefully her mind registered that she was being foolish and behaving irrationally, she couldn’t shake the overwhelming need for positive, tangible proof of her safety. It would be foolish and irrational to stray too far from the car without pro
of, came a countering logic from deep inside her where instinct or intuition or . . . whatever it was that she relied on so heavily to keep her alive and well dwelt.
Hannah took the next right, and because there was no one she trusted more than herself, her hand didn’t go anywhere near the key in the ignition after she stopped and put the car in park.
Amazed, she found a certain comfort in the leafless trees and bushes surrounding the rolling field of tan and brown grass in front of her. The whole place looked dead, or at least sleeping—harmless, in any case. One of two squirrels searching for food, scampered up a tree while the other sat on his hind legs, picking at something it had found in the grass, ignoring her. Peaceful was a word some dark corner of her mind seemed to recognize.
She wasn’t sure if it was a bad or good thing that there wasn’t another human in sight.
Detached and robotic, her fingers pulled on the door handle and she got out. The exhaust from the car’s engine curled at her ankles. She debated against closing the door, but the constant ping-ping-ping alert that the keys were still in the ignition ate at her last raw nerve. She silenced it with a gentle thump of the door. Then all she heard was the constant, well-tuned hum of the car’s engine and the barely there sound of the wind wafting through the empty trees—like background music almost.
Walking straight ahead, she knew where to go—covering the same territory she’d prowled a thousand times in her dreams. She took straight lines and sharp angles like strolling through neighborhoods, one after another, staying off the lawns, head down, not looking at the houses or reading the addresses until she came to her block where all the Bensons laid together for all eternity.
She knew grandparents and uncles and aunts, though her visits had been few in the past. Intuitively, she sought out the newer flat markers, rather than those that were upright or leaning at odd angles. His was the third she came to.
Karl Aaron Benson
June 11, 1936—November 23, 1992
That’s all it took. Her throat closed. Her heart went wild. She tried to suck in air and heard herself wheezing. She pulled her sunglasses off as her vision blurred. She couldn’t swallow. Panic and adrenaline chased through her arteries, sent everything careening out of control. Her mind, her body, the rotation of the earth. It was as if his hand—strong, practiced, and vicious—shot out from his grave to grab at her throat again.
The last of her courage gave way to the old fears. Memories glutted her senses. She gagged and sobbed at the same time, reached out for something to hold on to and found nothing.
She moaned as screams from the past pierced her ears again . . . and her vision dimmed to gray. Over and over, the shrieking tore at her. It would not stop. Her hands shook violently. The cries bounced in her brain like ricocheting lightning, sharp and burning. Her right hand fisted around something cold and hard and heavy, but when she looked down both hands were empty . . . and covered with blood. Blood everywhere. So much blood. She covered her ears with them and sank to her knees, and with a heave that came from the center of the universe, she vomited.
She heard herself gasping and gagging, sobbed as the screams grew distant. Coughing and spitting. The blood turned to tears. Her heart hammered in her chest and her lungs worked hard to feed her more oxygen. When she could trust her eyes again she opened them to find herself on all fours, staring down at her father’s headstone.
He was truly dead. Dead and vomited on.
The symbolism didn’t escape her as she pushed back to sit on her legs. The landscape settled to its previous state of rolling, sloping terrain. The adrenaline drained away slowly as she sat there numb and staring.
“I’m back, you son of a bitch,” she said, her voice a bare whisper in her ears. “I win.”
Chapter Three
Hannah wasn’t one to linger too long where she knew she wasn’t welcome—or near foul deposits of vomit, for that matter. It was a culmination of raw nerves and high anxiety, and there was no denying the release gave her some relief. Granted, she was now disappointed in her lack of control. Sorry, too, that she’d given into her darkest fears and the wild imaginings of the paranoia she’d worked so hard to conquer but . . . she was also human. And every day it got easier and easier to admit it. She slipped. She made a mistake. She needed to move on.
After a few more minutes, she brushed her tears away and searched the pockets of her jacket for a tissue. Pulled together, she picked up her glasses, got to her feet and walked away. It was just that simple, wasn’t it?
He was dead and she was safe. Everything else she could handle.
Despite the sour taste in her mouth the air blustered clean and crisp, cool against her skin. Her black jeans were wet from the knees down and that felt good as well. The cemetery bolstered an energetic sense of life inside her. Life and strength and youth.
She passed the graves of two stillborn children—both named Boy Benson, four years apart—born three and seven years before her. Mama used to pick the last chrysanthemums of the season and deliver half to each on All Soul’s Day—which is how she’d come to know where to find the dead Bensons.
She’d never attended a funeral until several years ago when her partner and truest friend Joe Levitz lost his wife—which could be thought of as odd by some, considering all the dead relatives she had. But if all funerals were as sad as Julie Levitz’s, she couldn’t believe she’d missed much.
It took her several minutes to find Ruth—as far from Karl as the Benson plot allowed. Mama’s work, no doubt, as there was a new, fresh-dug grave laid out and draped under a canopy nearby.
She avoided looking into it, keeping her eyes directed elsewhere.
And wasn’t it just like her mama to think that she and Ruth would find more peace this way? As if Karl could continue to torment them in the hereafter if they were laid too close to him?
One side of her mouth curled upward. The last forty-eight hours demonstrated that that sort of thinking ran in the family, she supposed.
Ruth Ann Benson
Daughter and Mother
April 20, 1975—December 2, 2007
Short. To the point. Sadly, too few people carved epitaphs on gravestones anymore. What would Ruthie’s have said? She was fourteen when Hannah left town, still a child in truth. What sort of woman had she been? A woman too young to die, obviously—but had there been time for her to pull her life out of the hellhole they grew up in? Was she happy? Productive . . . aside from having the baby?
Buried with the Benson name, did she never marry? For the same reasons Hannah hadn’t? Were hers not too long, not too complicated nowhere relationships with impossible men, too? Did they at least have that in common? Who was Ruth?
Hannah tried to remember her and kept pulling up images of blond baby dolls with vacant blue eyes and frilly pink dresses. Quiet. She couldn’t recall Ruth ever speaking in anything but a whisper—in the dark, from across the room—it was always a strain to hear her. Even when she cried.
But then, none of them cried very loudly back then.
She sighed and tried to feel sadder but the plain fact was, she hardly knew her sister; and if she felt anything at all for her, it was guilt.
Ah, guilt! Oh, that pang, where more than madness lies, the worm that will not sleep and never dies. A quote from Byron that her therapist, Dr. Fry, had engraved on a small smooth metal disk for her to carry around in her pocket; a gift that came in the mail months after their sessions ended. Even now it floated around on the bottom of her purse somewhere. Though they’d done their best to work through parts of Hannah’s guilt, Dr. Fry must have known it would worm its way back to bite her on the butt from time to time. Like now.
Of course, there were things you could tell your therapist and also things you didn’t dare tell anyone.
Staring at Ruth’s name carved deep into cold rose marble, she found it hard to keep telling herself that she wasn’t responsible for anyone’s actions but her own; that she couldn’t control the choices other people
made. She’d come to terms with the choices she’d made, learned to live with them on a day-to-day basis. But there were always those nebulous queries as to how her choices had affected others—Ruth and Mama . . . and Grady. What would their lives have been like now if she’d made different choices?
And this girl, this niece of hers? Well, if her choices didn’t mess up the girl’s life, the girl was indeed going to mess up hers. She wanted to see that thirty-six-year-old woman with the near-perfect life she’d designed to suit herself who willingly takes a teenager into her home without having a psychiatric disorder named after her. Where was she?
Like a deer with her ears to the wind her head lifted at a sudden noise . . . actually a sudden lack of noise as she realized the engine in her car had gone quiet.
Swinging around, she saw a large brown SUV parked near the rear of her car—a blue and red bar of light across the top and a yellow-gold county sheriff’s emblem painted on the door. A man in khaki brown pants and a thick, darker brown jacket—also bearing a yellow-gold county sheriff’s emblem—straightened up out of her car and stood to face her.
“Ho-ly shit,” she muttered once the knee-jerk–cop-sighting alarm quit tripping her fight-or-flirt responses.
She couldn’t say she would have known him anywhere, but here in Clearfield and with the memory of him so close to the surface of her mind she not only recognized him, but she enjoyed an intense ripple of glad relief as it passed through her.
What Happened to Hannah Page 2
