He shot the murky brown liquid down his throat and poured himself another. Jessamina also gulped her whiskey down as quickly as she could. The other wives were more restrained. Belinda raised her glass to her lips and took a short sip. Katherine did the same and instantly began coughing, then laughing, then coughing some more. Kara took a taste and then stuck out her tongue and scrunched her nose. It was only Hanna who hadn’t touched her drink.
The entire family watched Hanna swirl the whiskey and breathe in its vapors, like burnt toast and molasses. She placed her tongue inside the glass and felt the sensation of burning ice. Jotham was still watching. For years he’d been watching Hanna, isolating her, biding his time until she grew into a young woman, until he could work out a better arrangement with Edwin. This liquid in Hanna’s glass was Jotham’s lifeblood, his crutch, the one thing he couldn’t live without. Hanna wondered what would happen if she set the glass down and refused to drink it. Or better yet, if she dared to pour it out on the floor, wasting valuable drops. She almost did. Then she looked at her brothers and sisters lining the stairs, at her mother’s bruised face and thought: Is this the one rebellion I should afford myself? Is it worth the bedlam that would ensue?
Hanna tilted her glass. She poured the whiskey into her mouth, felt it like a bee sting against her cheeks. Hanna gulped the whole mouthful down and immediately regretted it. The whiskey singed its way down her chest and into her stomach where it bubbled and boiled, threatening to lurch back up. Hanna braced her arm against the wall. She sneezed inexplicably and shook her head. One second passed and then another before the desire to throw up was replaced by a rousing surge resonating through her body. It started in her stomach and then quickly soared to her rib cage, where it spread like wildfire, filling her arms and legs and fingers and everything in between with an unparalleled zeal, a feeling of being invincible, unhampered by burdensome thoughts, brilliant and gleaming like a bright red sun. She pushed her glass toward Jotham.
“More.”
The entire room burst out laughing. Only, Hanna wasn’t joking. She stared straight at Jotham, imploring with her eyes, and while he took his time, he eventually poured her a second, smaller glass. She drank it straight down.
The celebration was still in full swing thirty minutes later. The children were sucking on ice pops and Charliss was chasing them between the kitchen and the living room, growling like a monster and swinging his arms. Rather than tell them to keep quiet, Belinda made repeated, hushed calls on the telephone, all while holding her free hand over her ear to block out the sound of Katherine gossiping excitedly out the window to the neighbor’s wife. A curious, unfamiliar energy raced through the air. Every word, every movement of the children running by, every clink of a glass and trickle of water from the kitchen tap was amplified, accelerated by a fraction of a second. Hanna’s feet felt light, the alcohol fresh in her belly, its effects stronger than she’d expected.
She had just joined Kara at the counter to help prepare supper when Jotham called the women over to the kitchen table. He unfolded a detailed geographic map of Clearhaven.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Jotham said. “The river that leads to the marshlands drains in the wrong direction.” He dragged his finger to the eastern portion of the woodlands. “This inlet is only half as full as it should be. If we redirect it here, the water will flow back to the inlet and from there into the lake. The engineer we met with today is convinced that once the water flow changes, the marshlands will dry right up. Not right away, of course. But within three months we’ll be able to bulldoze all the way from here to here.” He dragged his fingernail again.
Jotham arched his back. He undid his tie and rubbed his neck until Belinda reached up to help him. Since the men left, Jotham had slowly been removing his suit. First his jacket and then his belt. Now his tie flew through the air. Jotham laughed boisterously and there was a swagger to his step Hanna had never seen before. She’d never seen him so happy.
“Francis is providing the money. Edwin secured the contracts and I’m going to supervise the construction. I’ll be running the show,” he said proudly.
“Why?” Hanna said.
The women all looked at Hanna. Jotham shifted his gaze, as well.
“I mean—what are you going to build? Another church?”
“Houses,” Belinda said.
“Not just houses. Estates,” Jotham said. “Huge homes you’d be proud to live in.”
He beamed when the word estates came out of his mouth. Hanna gazed down at the map and back up at Jotham’s smiling face. So this was his plan. Jotham wasn’t just planning on supervising the construction of these great houses. He was intending on living in one of them. Jotham was going to leave the squalor of his meager home behind to live in luxury and all he had to trade for the opportunity was his first child. So these were the intentions of grown men: power and wealth, comfort, extravagance.
Belinda hung off Jotham’s shoulder. “Show them, show them,” she said.
Jotham waffled, like he couldn’t decide whether it was worth the effort to explain. However, this was his victory day. It didn’t take much to convince him. He pulled out a second map and laid it over top of the first. “Here to the south is where the mansions will go, right along this ridge. This spot right here, in the corner, has already been claimed,” he said, patting himself on the chest and smiling even wider. “And over here will be a concourse and a playground with all-new equipment. To the north will be the Rossiter estate—”
“But the Rossiters live in the old Grierson house,” Hanna said.
“It’s too small.”
“It’s huge,” Hanna said.
Jotham shook his head. He slurped his whiskey. “Not for the boy who would be king.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Francis is financing the construction so his male heir, that boy Daniel, will have a place to live.”
“By himself?” Hanna said.
Both Jotham and Belinda laughed.
“Of course not,” Jotham said. “Once he’s of age, Francis will find the boy a suitable wife. Several wives, actually.”
Hanna suddenly felt flushed. She couldn’t believe what Jotham said, his casual, flippant tone, how he thought nothing wrong with Francis deciding how Daniel should live, nothing wrong with him deciding whom Hanna must marry, nothing wrong with planning to sell her off when she was just a child only to back out when the terms of the deal didn’t meet his liking. A hot, red swell gushed inside her. Hanna’s hands began to shake. She looked from Belinda to Katherine and back to Jotham again. They all looked like strangers, like this was the first time Hanna had ever seen them.
Jotham pointed to another spot on the map and began explaining technical terms like directional drilling and trench excavation. The other wives looked on with interest while Kara sat in a chair in the far corner and picked at her fingernails.
“Who’s Daniel going to marry?” Hanna said.
Jotham scratched his bristly cheek. “Whomever his father decides. That’s who he’ll marry.”
Hanna stepped back to the counter. Daniel hadn’t mentioned anything about his father clearing the marshlands, nothing about Francis building him the grandest estate Clearhaven had ever seen. This must have been those mysterious plans Brother Paul had for him. Her legs wobbled. Hanna’s head ached, a stabbing in her temples so painful that she had to grab the counter for support. Meanwhile, Jotham was leaning over the kitchen table, firing his proud words into the air, his gleeful wives eating them up like candy. The liquor still swam through Hanna’s veins. From her vantage, Jotham looked small and weak, like a sniveling brown toad. Jotham’s considerable frame shriveled before her and suddenly Hanna felt like a giant.
She laughed out loud. The adults turned her way and Hanna stared back defiantly.
A crinkle formed in Jo
tham’s forehead. “Do you have something to say?”
“You think you’re such a big, strong man, don’t you?” Hanna said.
Jotham’s eyes sharpened. “What did you say?”
Kara rushed over. She stepped between Hanna and Jotham and held up her hands. “It’s the whiskey. She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Kara said.
Jotham’s face grew redder, the vein pulsing in his forehead. He glared at Hanna furiously but also with a hint of bewilderment, like it had never occurred to him that Hanna could be angry, that she could communicate anything other than submission or servitude. He looked as though he was on the verge of bursting when Belinda whispered in his ear, something to pacify the man. He squinted and sneered, and then he turned back to his victory party.
But it was too late. A cannon had gone off inside Hanna’s brain. Her blood had been replaced by fire.
“No!” Hanna yelled. “No. No. No! No! NO! NO! NOOOO!!!”
What she was saying no to—her wedding, Daniel being forced to marry half the women in town, Jotham’s very presence in this room—Hanna wasn’t sure. She tried to push past Kara, to lunge at Jotham, except Kara’s grip was strong. Hanna lunged again, unsure what she would do if she reached him, whether she had it in herself to actually strike the man, what she would do if he struck her back.
Jotham slammed his fist on the table, powerfully, violently, sending the other wives scattering. His shoulders tensed, his face large and wide and so close that Hanna could almost reach out and touch it. Jotham’s teeth gnashed the air. “You don’t speak to your father that way!” he shouted.
“Father?” Hanna said. “Father?!”
She was so caught up in the moment, with years of suppressed rage billowing to the surface, that she couldn’t get her words out. Hanna wanted to tell Jotham that he’d never been a father to her, that a father was a protector and a provider and a giver of unconditional love. That if Kara were to be believed, Jotham hadn’t had a thing to do with creating her, that he was a thief who’d stolen her away in the middle of night. That Daniel would never be like him. That he wouldn’t be like Francis or Brother Paul. That she’d finally known kindness. She’d finally known passion—however brief, however fleeting—and that nothing Jotham ever did could take that memory away from her. What emerged instead was a deafening scream. Hanna shrieked as loud and as long as she could until all the breath left her body.
It was only when she fell quiet that Kara whispered, “Angel, be reasonable.”
Only Hanna was beyond all reason. She took another wild swipe at Jotham, but she didn’t come close this time as Kara wrapped her arms around Hanna’s waist and heaved her toward the hallway. At the last moment, Hanna gripped the door frame. She locked eyes with Jotham, who looked ready to strike anyone who came near him. Jotham glanced down at the maps on the table and back at Hanna. A smirk twisted the corner of his mouth.
“Not the happiest bride I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Belinda laughed. Jessamina joined her from the next room, cackling at the top of her lungs. Jotham looked from his one wife to the other, a maddening, self-satisfied pride beaming on his face. He glanced down at his map again and then met Hanna’s eye. Jotham chuckled—a cruel, heartless snicker that dug into Hanna’s flesh from across the room. Then he averted his gaze without a second look, as though Hanna were an insect he couldn’t be bothered to swat away, her outburst unimportant, the passion that triggered it inconsequential.
All the while, Belinda and Jessamina kept laughing.
Hanna went to leap forward. To scream once more. To finally strike Jotham down. Before she could move or say another word, Kara pulled her down the hallway, away from their taunts and jeers.
23
When Hanna was six years old, a baby fell out of a woman’s belly at the marketplace. At least it looked like a baby. It was small and red and covered in pink ooze, and Hanna saw it the moment it escaped from the womb.
It was a bright summer’s day and a stubborn heat had made the air dense. Hanna could still remember the bright blue, cloudless sky, the flowers along the roadway wilting under the sun’s rays, the perspiration evaporating before it could drip down her forehead. Charliss was only three that summer and Hanna was holding his hand as they waited on Belinda and Kara, who were bartering (or, rather, Belinda was arguing) with the man who ran the vegetable stand.
The woman in the green dress appeared right before their eyes. Hanna knew her well. Almost a year ago, she’d come to live with Jotham, the sound of her constant chatter reverberating off the walls in his house. The pregnant woman’s face was covered in lines, her blood throbbing under her skin. She was carrying a loaf of bread in one hand and a bag of milk in the other. Without warning, she started to tremble. The woman shrieked, her voice awash with terror. She spread her legs and pulled up her dress, grasping at her undergarment to find it soaked through, red like crushed grapes. Then the baby dropped. It fell as though she’d been holding it in her hands and the baby hit the ground with a thump.
Hanna covered Charliss’s eyes.
“My baby!” the woman screamed. But she didn’t pick it up. She stood there as though her feet were locked in place, tremors rattling her body. The milk burst when it hit the ground and now the baby lay motionless, dangling from between her mother’s legs like a puppet with one string, the pasty white umbilical cord. Hanna remembered its head looking three times smaller than that of any baby she’d ever seen, the milk turning the dirt a muddy pink color, the frenzied looping of insects between the woman’s legs.
As Hanna gazed in disbelief, the man Belinda had been quarreling with over the price of cabbage leapt out from behind his stand. He scooped the child up in his apron, cut the umbilical cord with his pocketknife and ran for help.
The child lived. She was now eleven years old.
Her name was Emily and her back was twisted. The woman in the green dress was Hanna’s sister-mother Katherine.
Hanna might have just been six years old, but not a day had gone by in which Hanna didn’t regret her inaction. She could have picked the baby up, could have looked into its eyes for a sign of life, could have patted it on the bottom the way midwives pat newborns to encourage them to cry and fill their lungs with air for the first time. But she did nothing. True, she was only a child and Kara had told her over and over again that there wasn’t anything Hanna could have done, that Emily’s back would have been misshapen no matter how she emerged from the womb. But Hanna could never shake the feeling that if she’d just gotten to Emily a few seconds quicker, if she’d somehow managed to catch her sister before she hit the ground, Emily’s back never would have been twisted. She’d be able to run and play in the school yard like the other children. Emily could one day find a husband. She could live a normal life, if only Hanna had acted.
That same feeling of regret lingered in Hanna’s belly hours after her confrontation with Jotham. She had come so close to hitting him. Hanna lay in bed picturing her fist striking his jaw, the cruel, lopsided grin fleeing his face and Jotham reeling. He was big, but he was awkward on his feet and the element of surprise would have been on her side. Hanna had never lashed out before. He would never expect her to strike him now. Instead, Hanna had done nothing. She allowed Jotham to stand unopposed, stuffed with pride, basking in not one but two victories today.
What would the other Hanna say?
Through the floorboards, past the living room and the ground underneath, through the layers of molten rock and all the way on the other side of the world, Hanna’s brave other self was battling serpents. She was leaping and bounding and striking down anyone who dared oppress her. If they were ever to meet face-to-face, could Hanna look her in the eye?
I fell from the sky. I am meant for more than this.
Hanna made a promise to herself. She would never falter again. She would never be kept down or sta
nd idly by. She would soar or she would crash. There was no in between anymore.
24
The family was asleep when Hanna sat up in bed and slipped a handful of dollar bills into her undergarment. Earlier, the clouds had pressed the sun into the horizon until the purpling sky splintered into slender traces of orange. Then night fell. Hanna could hear Jotham’s whiskey-induced snores from down the hall. She pulled out the note Daniel had passed her and read it in the moonlight. In the top corner, written in black ink, were the words Dear Champagne Girl. Hanna read it one more time. There it was, the question that stopped her breath—Would you care to join me for a night of music in the city?
Since she was a little girl, whenever the house became too chaotic—infants crying, children toddling about, the adult women corralling them, Jotham storming the hallways and yelling from one room to another—Hanna would close her eyes and imagine the big city from a bird’s-eye view at dusk. Buildings as tall as the sky. People of all shapes and sizes bustling along paved footpaths and the sounds of car horns, of voices, of buzzing machinery, music emanating from every window. Lights everywhere like a moving painting, the landscape fluid and ever-changing. The fantasy would engulf her and suddenly Hanna wasn’t sitting on a threadbare couch in Jotham’s living room. She was inside a dream.
Now Daniel was waiting to take her to that very place, and instead of bursting with anticipation, Hanna found herself replaying a new scene in her mind, one in which the city dwellers spotted her from a distance, some gaping openmouthed, others pointing, each realizing with a single look that Hanna thought and spoke and acted differently, that she came from the backwoods. The vision worsened each time she replayed it, with more staring faces, more outstretched fingers. It was reason enough not to go, reason enough to stay in bed and close her eyes and drift off to sleep.
But Hanna had spent enough time worrying about what could possibly go wrong. She’d spent enough time sleeping. It was time to wake up.
Hanna Who Fell from the Sky Page 20
