What Happened to Hannah

by Mary Kay McComas

  She watched through the screen as he drove away. Wiser to stay out of it, she decided. The fewer references she made to the past the better the chances the past stayed buried. And Anna and Cal? She closed the door and glanced up the stairwell to the second floor. Wiser to stay out of that, as well, perhaps.

  She started up the steps to make sure the young people had everything they needed—to check on Anna again, if truth be told. She’d slept away most of the day and hadn’t complained of any pain when she woke during one of Hannah’s frequent visits—too frequent probably, unnecessarily frequent perhaps, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Something inside her required constant reassurance of the girl’s well-being.

  “Have you told her yet?” she heard Lucy asking. She stopped four steps from the top not meaning to eavesdrop exactly—but only to discover what she may or may not have been told yet and if not, why not.

  And okay, she had a feeling it was the same thing as eavesdropping but, still, she listened.

  “No,” came Anna’s soft, disheartened voice. “And I’m not going to.”

  “Why not? It’s your life.”

  “I told you, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Your dreams, your future, everything you want, everything you’ve worked for doesn’t matter because what she wants matters more?”

  “No. But I’m the one messing up her life. She didn’t ask for me, you know. I’m not sure she wants to take me yet, and I have nowhere else—”

  “So what if she doesn’t. You don’t need her, you have us.”

  “I know but . . . Lucy, she’s the last real family I have. Your Dad and Gramma and you and . . . and Cal are great but . . . that’s your family. She’s mine . . . whether she takes me or not, she’s all I’ve got. And I’m . . . I’m scared. She doesn’t seem to mind that I got sick, but I’m not taking any more chances. If she wants to leave here a week from Saturday and if she wants to take me with her, then I’m going.”

  “And you’re willing to give up everything for her?”

  After a long silence, Anna’s voice came again. “Everything but you.”

  “I can’t believe you. At least tell her you want to stay till the end of the year. What’s the worst she—”

  “Shut it, Lucy,” Cal snapped. “You’re making her feel worse.”

  And, once again, she’d proven that listening in on other people’s conversations led to no good.

  Not that any of it was news to her.

  Slinking one step at a time back down the stairs to avoid any creaking, she knew the fear and desperation in Anna’s voice would linger in her mind. Part of her was thrilled that she thought of her as family, and she wanted to be that person for her, but another part was terrified.

  She sighed when she reached the bottom—in both relief and resignation. There came a time in all things new and different and frightening when one simply had to bully through to the other side or turn and run in defeat. In the past she’d done both: She’d run from her home and from love, and she’d bullied her way through to a new life. She knew the heartache and rewards of both; knew both were monumentally difficult. But not so monumental as her motivations—fear, anger, survival.

  And now? Well, the situation was similar, wasn’t it? Run in fear for her own comfort and survival or face and defeat her doubts about the future with the love and compassion she had for Anna.

  She sat on the bottom step and let her body slump against the wall. The friends laughed about something above and she smiled at the happy noise. If she were a praying person this would be the moment when she asked for enlightenment or at the very least a good clue as to what to do. As it was, she was tired of thinking about it. It gave her a headache. And she had enough on her plate for the moment.

  In fact, her plate was beginning to tip and things were falling off . . .

  “I wasn’t aware we could load things up today. Or have you settled with someone for the entire lot?” Jacob Grover from Yesteryears Antique Emporium asked in a testy tone when he spotted the U-Haul on the front lawn. She sipped on a much-needed late-afternoon cup of coffee. “I hate to think I’ve been wasting my time here the last couple of days.”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Grover, I feel like you and your colleagues have been wasting my time the past couple of days, and my time is limited. I mean, I know there’s a lot of junk here, but there has to be a better way of assessing the value of it other than by wandering around looking at it for days on end.

  “So to answer your questions, the truck on the lawn is mine for the things my niece and I will be taking to Baltimore with us. I have not settled with anyone for the entire lot and you may begin loading up the things you want tomorrow. There will be a procedure to follow, which I will explain to all three of you in the morning, that I think will make the entire process as fair as possible.”

  He took a curt leave of her, making it clear that people with no knowledge and no real interest in the value of antiques were the bane of his existence.

  Like she cared.

  “It’s simple,” she told Joe over the phone the next morning. “Anna and I are sitting here on the couch with a bag of snicker doodles and a couple of glasses of milk. Almost everything is marked at least twice with their different-colored stickers. Their assistants bring it all by us a piece or two, or a boxful, at a time. If Anna doesn’t want to keep it, they make written bids for it once and then it goes out the door and into the truck of the highest bidder. We’ve been sitting here since eight thirty this morning and I have to tell you, we’re getting pretty sick of these snicker doodles.”

  She laughed when Anna looked at her and grinned. It was good to see the healthy light in her eyes again. She had acquiesced to staying home another day and returning to school on Monday with no heavy lifting or running until after her follow-up with the doctor on Wednesday. Hannah could tell she was restless and cramped up and missing her daily runs, but she never once complained about it. Instead she leaned over and whispered, “Tell him how much they’re going to pay for that rusty old cast-iron kettle.”

  She related several items both she and Anna would have labeled as trash that got very high bids and drew some very unexpected poor sportsmanship from the dealers who lost them.

  “And they’ve hardly made a dent in it, Joe. I swear, if it were up to me I’d take Anna by the hand, toss a lit match at it, and walk out the door.”

  Her peripheral vision caught the girl turning her head to look at her, so Hannah gave her a wink and smile in an attempt to assure her that she’d squeeze every cent she could out of the place for her—even if it took years. But the girl stood and hurried from the room.

  “Oh, God, Joe, I think I may have said something wrong. I’ll call you back later.” She cut her cell phone off and jumped to her feet, only to meet Anna in the hallway returning with a metal box a little smaller than a milk crate in her arms.

  “That better be full of hot air, young lady,” she scolded despite the enormous relief she felt to see the girl smiling. She held out her arms to receive the box. “What’s all this?”

  “What you said to your friend Joe, it reminded me. Gran used to say almost the exact same thing. She’d say ‘If we had anywhere else to go, I’d burn this place to the ground.’ Then after she had her first heart attack she made this box. I should have given it to you right away, I guess. I forgot.”

  The box was cold to the touch; condensation was forming on the outside. A key attached to the handle by a long black shoelace dangled loose on one side. A lockbox stowed away in the freezer for safekeeping, not by the fearful, ineffectual mother she knew but by the grandmother Anna knew—a very different woman.

  The lid popped up with a turn of the key and displayed a series of marked files and folders inside.

  “Gran said if anything ever did happen, like a fire, these would be safe in the freezer. She said her and I and this box were the only important things in the house and that everything else could be replaced. I wasn’t supposed to
try to save anything else. She made me promise.”

  A very different woman indeed, she thought, skimming through insurance documents and birth and death records . . . and a copy of a proper, legal will that most Bensons wouldn’t have thought to bother with. And because it was a very different woman, closer to her granddaughter than she’d ever been to her eldest daughter, Hannah asked, “Mind if I read this? Do you know what’s in it?”

  Anna shook her head, no, to both questions.

  A simple, straightforward declaration that the farm and everything on it was to be divided equally between her children if any survived her and/or their descendants; that temporary custody and guardianship of the minor child Anna Ellen Benson went to Grady Steadman until such time as a suitable and caring home could be found for the girl.

  Huh. Surely her mother had asked Grady to take on the responsibility of Anna should anything happen to her rather than simply assigning it to him. And Grady would have taken that commitment very seriously when he agreed to it—which meant he’d have taken Anna into his own home before he let her become a ward of the state, as he’d mentioned in his original call.

  She considered being annoyed that he’d gotten her to come under some . . . minor, but still false, pretenses; but glancing over at Anna while she refolded the document to put it back in the box, she suffered no animosity toward him at all. How could she? Overnight Anna had redefined the concept of family for her.

  Sliding the will into its designated folder, her fingers brushed against an envelope at the bottom of the file. Slipping from one document to the other, she lifted it out. In her mother’s scrawling script the name Hannah Benson was written in the lower right-hand corner and under that the word Private.

  She almost laughed out loud at the strange buzz that rippled across her shoulders as she realized that this woman . . . this very different woman her mother had become, was trying to speak to her from the grave. That’s how it seemed anyway. Just as she’d almost reconciled herself to the fact that her mother had sent her away, that she’d become a stronger person to take care of Ruth and Anna for all those years and had completely forgotten about her first child, here was a letter from her.

  “So are we going to have to do this every day,” Anna asked, startling Hannah. “I mean, how are we going to do it when I go back to school Monday? Do you need me for this? I don’t mind helping if you do but—”

  “No.” She let the letter fall back to the bottom of the file and closed the lid on the lockbox. No telling what her mother’s last written words to her would be, but if they were as stunning and hurtful as her last spoken words, Anna didn’t need to know about them . . . and Hannah sure didn’t want to read them. “As far as I could tell there wasn’t one thing they carried out of here today that either of us wanted, so I think it’s time for a new plan—especially now that we have the truck the sheriff brought us.” Anna raised her brows to show she was all ears. “If there’s anything outside your room that you want, you tell me. We’ll move it straight into the truck so it’ll be safe. You pack up what you want from your room, which is still off limits to the dealers, and we’ll move it box by box into the truck until it’s time to leave.” She decided to go first. “I think we should take the little rocker and . . . maybe Mama’s sewing machine, too. Anything else?”

  “I’d like . . . there’s a pin she used to wear to church all the time. Would it be okay if I kept that?”

  “You can keep anything you want, Anna. Even if you’re not sure you’ll want it forever, take it now anyway. We can always get rid of it later.” She once again envisioned her three-bedroom condominium bulging with junk . . . no, Anna’s life-treasures. She shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, we can buy a bigger house.”

  Suddenly, amazingly, it was that easy now.

  Hannah woke up suffocating, crying, and gasping into her pillow until she rolled onto her back, covering her face with both hands as the screaming faded into the distance—or had it? She came more alert, straining her senses to separate nightmare from nighttime, hoping she hadn’t done anything to disturb Anna.

  Her BlackBerry read 2:36 A.M. and she scrunched back into her warm spot between the sheets—for soul-comfort more than the threat of frostbite now that they were leaving the furnace on at night. Still the wet spots on her pillowcase from the tears were cold against her cheek, and she couldn’t find the courage to close her eyes again.

  She lay awake in the dark unable to keep her thoughts from spinning around like a top. Her mind was fragile and weary but she couldn’t turn it off. For days now she’d been thinking and rethinking—second-guessing her assessments; fighting off memories—hoping and fretting and so unsure she was making the right decisions for Anna, much less herself, pulled between the desire to make it work and the possibility of utter emotional disaster . . . for both of them.

  Two episodes in a week. She knew what was happening.

  Being here. In Clearfield. On the farm. Allowing everything from a rocking chair to the county sheriff to stir up memories she’d fought long and hard to come to grips with; to lay to rest and forget.

  She couldn’t let it happen again. That’s all there was to it. She’d have to be more vigilant, less susceptible to the memories that were becoming as thick and plentiful as the dust motes under her mother’s furniture.

  In the days that followed, Hannah hosted an array of dealers and experts who combed through piles of magazines and newspapers. Antiques and thingiewajigettes left the house in tonnage proportions. The Dumpster she ordered arrived, and over the weekend and then every day after school Cal, Biscuit, Lucy, and the two 4-H boys, Sam and Jeremy Long, hauled armloads of trash out the back door and threw them in. It was decided they’d recycle as much as they could—paper, glass, aluminum, and some of the plastics. The young people’s idea, not hers. To her, dropping a bomb on the house was more the way to go.

  Meanwhile, the metal lockbox lay on the hall table between a picture of Ruth and Anna as a baby and the lamp Hannah still left on at night to guide her to the bathroom.

  She walked by the box fifty or maybe a hundred times a day and thought about the letter inside, yet her curiosity still couldn’t overcome the dread she suffered at what it might have to say—her greatest fear stemming from the fact that her mother had left Anna to the care and custody of Grady, not her. And not once had Grady mentioned that the idea of Hannah taking custody of Anna had been anyone’s idea but his.

  Not that Hannah cared what her mother wanted now. She planned to make a family with Anna and that’s all there was to it. Still if her mother’s letter was disparaging or discouraging in any way . . . well, she didn’t need or want to know it.

  “Man, I thought my mom had some canning jars, but compared to your mom she don’t have hardly any at all,” young Jeremy Long stated when he spotted Hannah standing at the top of the basement steps. And this observation came after the antique dealers had taken most of the blue Ball Mason jars, many in a darker green or amber as well as a few in cobalt blue, coddling them in bubble wrap and packing them light and loose in boxes.

  Jeremy was maybe eleven. He had a wiry frame with thick sandy blond hair in a bowl cut that hid his eyebrows but let his mischievous mud-colored eyes shine through. He looked too scrawny for the load but Hannah was sure she was younger when she started bringing the Mason jars up from the cellar every summer to help her mama can everything from strawberry jam to apricots and zucchini.

  She could almost feel the sweat break out on her forehead and neck as she remembered those long hot summer afternoons in her mama’s kitchen. Kettles of water boiled from dawn until suppertime, a stationary black fan blowing air up off the floor. Scalding and cooling peaches and tomatoes to peel them; coring pears by the dozens, picking through crates of cherries and snapping millions of beans.

  Ruth particularly liked the sweet watermelon-rind pickles Mama used to make, and it was Hannah’s particular job to skim the crock of sauerkraut in the backyard every morning after breakfast
because the smell didn’t upset her stomach like it did Ruth’s.

  Looking back, she knew the elephant’s load of the work had been her mother’s, particularly when she and Ruth were young—and yet she always gave them a lion’s share of what little praise came their way from their daddy.

  And, of course, it became a way for her to keep all three of them safe and out of the way, hidden in the kitchen . . .

  “Hi, Mama.” Hannah hung her backpack on the hook just inside the back door, noting the tiny scratches on the back of her hands that she’d gotten from Old Mrs. Phillip’s rose garden. When she had her own garden there would be no roses in it. The last place anyone should feel any kind of pain was in their flower garden, and she didn’t care how good they smelled. “Sorry, I’m late.”

  “You’re late?” Her mother turned a frantic eye to the clock on the wall. The air in the small kitchen was thick with the steam from canning and summer humidity. It smelled of at least one batch of burnt sugar, Mama’s sweat, and the Ivory soap she used to wash the jars.

  “Only a few minutes.” She’d planned it that way so her parents wouldn’t guess that she’d taken another ride home with Grady Steadman.

  A strange boy—Grady. She wanted to like him but she knew better. She hadn’t spent the last ten years growing up a weed in the lush garden of Turchen County children without having been picked at, teased, attacked, and in general made the brunt of every trick in the book—including false friendships. He didn’t seem like the sort of boy who would be so unkind as to pretend to be her friend, but how could she tell? How could she test him?

  And did he really think he was making her life easier by getting her home an hour and fifteen minutes before she was expected?