Hanna pictured herself a month from now, settling into Edwin’s home, preparing supper along with his other wives. Their combative conversation. Paedyn’s delicate hand touching her back. The tall woman’s spiteful barbs. Only six sleeps remained until her wedding day. Time was now sprinting by. Even this moment, alone in the woods, listening to the starlings’ coo and watching a chipmunk scamper behind a shrub, had become precious.
Her mother would be expecting her soon. Kara was probably watching through the window, anticipating her arrival. Perhaps Jotham was at her side, Jotham whose shadowy figure swayed back and forth in the rocking chair, his outstretched hand chasing its courage. Beyond the path and past the riverbed was the old Grierson place. Time was a clock in the sky, ticking away.
Hanna pictured Daniel leaning against the outer church wall, those wisps of hair dangling across his forehead. She recalled his conversation, the thoughts he’d shared. As much as she wanted to go to him today, she’d never been so bold before. Her hands became clammy and her chest nervous and warm at the thought, not just of defying Jotham’s expectations by visiting a strange boy but of carrying the guilt with her, of sitting down at the supper table tonight with her family and knowing she’d been deceitful. Hanna imagined Emily finding out, her sister’s eyes growing wide and then turning sharp, Emily accusing her of being false-hearted and untrustworthy. By calling upon Daniel, Hanna would be defying the Creator. She’d be confirming what she’d long believed: that she didn’t understand the way Brother Paul expected her to. Hanna would be failing her family, her fiancé, what she’d been taught her entire life.
But by not visiting Daniel, she’d be failing herself.
Hanna quickened her step and set down the path to the old Grierson place.
She spotted the smoke from a mile away, puffing like melted sugar cakes piled one on top of another, until it faded and finally dissolved into the gray-blue sky. As Hanna approached, her heart beat faster. Her breathing quickened. Hanna’s stomach started to churn, in disbelief that she was really going through with this.
She saw the fire pit at the edge of the pier, its flames standing almost two feet high. In the backyard was a small lake, too deep to stand in but narrow enough that a child could easily swim across. Hanna remembered this pool of water from when she was just a girl. When the rains came heavy in autumn, the lake would overflow and swallow the pier whole. It remained submerged until the water drained out into the marsh.
As she reached the driveway, Hanna passed a shiny blue truck. Compared to the rusted old jalopy Belinda drove, this vehicle looked state of the art. The back windows were tinted and Hanna could see her reflection in its glossy blue paint. It must have been only a few months old.
Past the truck, sitting close to the fire on a chair at the edge of the pier, was Daniel. Hanna saw the outline of his hair first, Daniel’s profile against the ice-covered lake. He was playing a guitar, his fingers shifting smoothly along the strings. A nervous tremor shot through her as Hanna realized there was no turning back now.
At first Hanna could hardly make out the sound of Daniel strumming his guitar. Her boots shuffled on the ground and in the distance, a loon was calling for a mate. As she drew closer, the melody became clear. He was playing on the higher strings, the pace alternating between fast and slow. The sound was beautiful like that of the viola one of Brother Paul’s wives had played at the old tower cathedral, only less sad. Hanna found herself resisting the urge to hum along.
She stepped onto the deck and suddenly Daniel stopped playing.
He turned around, startled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
“No. It’s okay.” He set the guitar down and stood up. “It’s just, if I’d known you were here, I would have played better. I’m still learning.”
“It sounded wonderful.”
His gaze drifted to the salad bowl in her hands.
“I was at lunch,” Hanna said. “It’s my sister-mother’s bowl. She might very well kill me if I lose it.”
Daniel smiled and sat down on a blanket hanging over the edge of the pier. Hanna saw the empty space at his side. She understood the implicit invitation for her to sit next to him and wanted to think Daniel impudent for being so bold. But it was Hanna who had shown up at this boy’s home unannounced, a week before her wedding. It was Hanna who’d been bold.
She set the salad bowl on the deck chair and sat down beside him. Hanna’s feet dangled over the edge, an inch above the frozen lake. Up close the cracked ice reflected the light like slivers of stained glass, the water underneath black and, toward the center, almost purple. Hanna glanced over at Daniel, who hadn’t said a word since he sat down. She had no idea what he was thinking, whether Daniel felt comfortable in the silence or whether his mind was racing, struggling to come up with something to say. All the same, she felt compelled to talk.
“You spend a lot of time outdoors.”
Daniel motioned toward the old Grierson place. A patch of pine trees separated the house and the pier, yet they were close enough to see in through the windows. “It’s weird inside my house these days,” he said.
“How do you mean—weird?”
“It’s hard to explain. My brothers have locked themselves in their rooms. They literally won’t come out.”
“Are they upset?”
“My dad’s forcing them to move to the city. And they’re furious about it.”
“Are you leaving too?” Hanna said.
“My dad needs one of us to stay. It’s really complicated.” Daniel shook his head. “It’s all Brother Paul’s idea. I still don’t know why he wants James and Kenneth to go.”
“To eliminate the competition?”
“I’m sorry?”
Hanna stammered. Daniel was speaking so freely that she replied without thinking. Worse: these weren’t her words. They were Jessamina’s words coming out of Hanna’s mouth. She composed herself as best she could. “My sister-mother Jessamina told me Brother Paul sends Clearhaven’s young men out into the world to remove the competition for his middle-aged followers, so they can marry whomever they choose, as often as they wish. She says it’s simple mathematics. If James and Kenneth were allowed to stay, then Brother Paul would have two more rivals to compete with. Your father would have two more rivals. My father would have two more. There wouldn’t be enough young brides to go around.”
“What do you believe?” Daniel said.
Hanna tapped the frosted lake with her boot. “It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“Of course it matters what you believe. The only things that matter in life are what you do, what you say and what you believe,” Daniel said, joining Hanna in pressing down on the ice underfoot.
Hanna watched him curiously. The boy she half remembered from a year ago was long gone. One moment Daniel’s eyes would drift off into the distance and the next his gaze was fixed on her, hanging on Hanna’s next word like the fate of the world hung in the balance. Hanna glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching.
“Where are your parents?” she said.
“They’re inside. My mom’s taking a nap. She sleeps a lot. I think my dad’s on the phone with Brother Paul again.”
“What about your sister-mothers?” Hanna said.
“I’m not sure,” Daniel said. “They’re probably cleaning. They’re always cleaning, even when the house isn’t dirty.”
“Don’t you have any brothers or sisters for them to look after?” Hanna said. Her question wasn’t really a question. She knew very well that Daniel had no younger siblings.
Daniel tousled his hair. He brushed the soft strands out of his eyes. “My parents had James, Kenneth and me, one, two, three, all a year apart. Then my dad had an accident. He was fixing his car in the garage and it slipped off the lift. He got hurt pretty badly.”
“Oh no.”
“Don’t worry,” Daniel said. “It was a long time ago. He’s fine now. Well, mostly fine. After that, he couldn’t have any more children.”
“But he still decided to marry again?”
“Yes. I mean, he never really discussed it with me. It’s not like we sit around the fireplace, smoking cigars and talking about his crushed pelvis and new wives. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“I didn’t mean to pry. Or to be bold,” Hanna said.
“That’s okay,” he said with a smile in the corner of his mouth. “I’ll tell you if you’re ever being a little too bold.”
“Is that how people are in the big cities—bold?”
Daniel thought for a moment. “I don’t know if I’d use that word. But there were definitely more people. In some places, the streets are teeming with them. And everything moves faster: the cars, the people, the conversation.”
“What about the buildings?” Hanna said. “Are they really as tall as the sky?”
“Some of them. Some cities have buildings as far as the eye can see. The cities we visited had skyscrapers taller than the old tower cathedral, buildings that reached all the way up into the clouds.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Trust me,” Daniel said, “it’s possible. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
“What else did you see?” she said and then immediately regretted posing yet another question. Daniel must have felt like she was interrogating him. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”
Daniel rubbed his hands together to keep warm. “No. It’s fine. I was really curious too.” His eyes drifted upward into the hazy gray clouds and then back to Hanna again. “I did see something amazing a few months back. There was a street preacher at the corner of a busy intersection. He was standing on a wooden crate, calling out words from a book in his hand. It was like watching Brother Paul deliver a sermon, but people kept walking by not paying attention. As the preacher was talking, he saw a little old lady across the street in a wheelchair. I don’t know how he knew her name, but he started calling to her. ‘Angela! Angela!’ he said. ‘Rise and join me!’ His voice was so loud that people stopped to watch. I stopped to watch. And then the most amazing thing happened. The old lady—Angela—stood up out of her chair. She took a single shaky step and then another. Then she walked right into traffic. A car almost hit her. It screeched its tires and the driver honked its horn, but she didn’t even look at it. She kept walking, her eyes glued to the street preacher.
“By now a crowd had formed. We all watched the lady shuffle toward the sidewalk. She almost stumbled as she stepped up to the curb, and then slowly, gradually, she reached the preacher. He stepped off his crate and took her in his arms and the entire crowd cheered.”
“That really happened?” Hanna said.
Daniel nodded. “Right in front of me. My brother said it was probably a trick. You know, a way to get people to believe in something and give the street preacher money.”
“I don’t know. That sounds like a miracle to me.”
Daniel raised his eyebrow. “There are no such things as miracles,” he said. “Plus, the lady’s name was Angela, which means angel. And as far as I’ve seen, there’s no such thing as angels either.”
“How can you know that for sure? It’s a big world out there, and you only saw part of it.”
“So you believe in angels and miracles?” Daniel said.
Hanna searched for the right words. “All I know is that if you don’t believe in miracles, you’ll never experience one.”
Daniel looked at her curiously. The silence between them went on for quite some time until Hanna shied away from the young man’s eyes. She reached back and plucked a single string on Daniel’s guitar. A thin, metallic sound rang out across the frozen lake.
“Where did you learn to play guitar?” she said.
“A girl taught me during my family’s trip.”
“Oh.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Daniel said. “She was old and hideous. She wore the same dirty, pink bathrobe every day and she had only one eyebrow.” He ran his finger between his eyes. “And her breath smelled like onions. And you probably won’t believe me, but her hair was gray, except on Sundays when it suddenly turned black.”
Hanna smiled and then fought hard to turn her smile into a frown. “You’re teasing me.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes you smile,” he said. “At least it makes you want to smile.”
Hanna did smile this time. Above, a slight part appeared in the clouds, allowing the sunlight to glisten off the upstairs windows of the Griersons’ old house. Hanna imagined Francis Rossiter peering through the glass, watching her, a telephone to his ear, reporting Hanna’s whereabouts, her brazen behavior. All of a sudden, she felt an overwhelming urge to leave.
Hanna was about to stand up when Daniel picked up his guitar. For a brief moment, she thought he might serenade her, but then the young man brought the guitar to his lap and turned it over. He shook it until something inside fell against the strings. Daniel pulled out a single piece of folded paper.
“I wrote something for you,” Daniel said.
“Like a letter?”
“More like a poem or a song,” he said, unfolding the paper. “Do you want to read it?”
Hanna’s stomach swirled. She strained to see the ink on the page. Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to take it from him. “You read it to me,” she said.
He shifted one leg underneath the other. Daniel held up the paper and then read—
Champagne Girl
only you are sacred...
...the flickering aroma of your skin
leaps through
my naked voice
as I
whisper hard
a promise
to remember
your gentle
touch...
Daniel stopped and Hanna realized the poem was over. It went by so quickly that she barely had time to process it.
Daniel’s eyes drifted to the plum-colored ice under their feet. “You don’t like it,” he said.
“No, of course I do.”
“I was going to write some music to go with it, so it would be a song, not just words on paper...”
“When did you write this?” she said.
“Last night, after everyone went to bed.”
“And I am?”
“The Champagne Girl.” He looked down at the page. “Champagne is a French word for sparkling wine, the very best in the world.”
Hanna’s chest flushed. For the first time this afternoon, the struggles of the day—Belinda’s demands, Edwin’s wives, the expectations of powerful men—slipped away. “Thank you,” she said. “Truly, no one has ever done anything like that for me before.”
Daniel smiled. He refolded the paper and held it between his hands.
Together they sat watching the water ripple under the ice. Slowly, inadvertently, Hanna’s thoughts turned to Jotham, his bloodred eyes, that purple vein that throbbed in his forehead when he was hard at the drink, the screams of her brother Pratt as Jotham whipped him just days ago, the bruises Jotham had left on Charliss’s back last month when Charliss accidentally broke a lighting fixture in the pantry. She pictured Daniel’s parents bursting through the back door of their house, demanding to know why she was trespassing on their property. Hanna stood up quickly, without a word, and picked up Belinda’s salad bowl from the deck chair.
“Leaving so soon?” Daniel said.
“I’m getting married.”
“Not today, you’re not,” he said with a puckish grin.
Hanna gave him a look of disbelief.
“You can’t just throw around words like that in this town.”
The playful look slipped from his face. Daniel met Hanna eye to eye and his expression shifted further, becoming inquisitive and yet serious and unexpectedly empathic. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. Hanna felt something inside her, like a voice had broken an unbearable silence. Everything—the air around her, the feel of the sun-warped boards under her feet, Hanna’s awareness of her body, her flesh and blood and skin—intensified when Daniel was looking at her.
“We could both get in real trouble,” Hanna said.
He folded his arms. Those strong, wiry hands wrapped around his elbows. “You’re right,” he said. “We could.”
Hanna tore herself away. She stepped around the chair and walked quickly along the deck. Hanna didn’t look back. But she wanted to. As her foot touched the dirt road, the words—Champagne girl—ran through her mind. She wanted to turn around, to see that look in Daniel’s eyes, to speak to him one more time. Instead, she headed straight for home.
10
Hanna wrung her hands as she walked, twisting them, entwining them, grinding her knuckles from side to side. She had finally done something she wanted to do, not what Edwin wanted, not what Jotham or Brother Paul demanded, and she should have been elated, replaying the conversation with Daniel over again in her mind, reliving the feeling deep inside when he read the Champagne Girl poem. Instead, she couldn’t stop thinking how close she’d probably come to getting caught. Mere minutes after departing Edwin’s house, Hanna had gone to visit a young man she barely knew. And not just any young man; she’d visited the son of Brother Paul’s benefactor. She’d sat beside him, spoken to him without a chaperone, shared confidences with him. All this with Daniel’s parents inside their house, mere yards away. If Jotham found out, there was no telling what he would do.
For the life of her, Hanna couldn’t imagine why Jotham had granted her this small freedom of traveling unaccompanied. At first she imagined it was part of some well-reasoned plan, perhaps a reward for her compliance in her engagement to Edwin. The longer Hanna walked, the more she thought it might simply have been a case of miscommunication. Perhaps Jotham believed that since Hanna was now betrothed, it was Edwin’s responsibility to provide a chaperone. And perhaps Edwin was too busy with work and his own family to consider that Hanna was walking by herself.
Hanna Who Fell from the Sky Page 9
