by Fran Kimmel
Hannah waited for more but it didn’t come. “I already know about Sammy,” she whispered, afraid something might hear. “Should I go back to my room?”
Ellie grabbed her arm then, not lightly, and almost dragged her into the open sunlit space and toward the big table, motioning her to sit in the empty chair beside Daniel.
Hannah sat down stiffly. She kept her eyes on the plate of roses in front of her and tried not to fidget. Thorn squeezed himself under the table and laid his head on her feet.
Then everyone talked at once. Even though she had dreamed about not being alone at a table and having people all around her saying things she wanted to hear, she had a sudden longing for silence. The sun poured in from the window behind her, shooting a spray of yellow across the table’s wooden slats. She could feel the absolute stillness beyond the glass. If she were on the other side, they could send a hundred people out looking for her and she’d never be found.
But here at this table, their noise was too loud. She sat on her hands to stop from covering her ears. The sergeant was asking if she liked pancakes, and Daniel was asking if the bed screeched every time she moved, and the man wanted to know if she was the nurse, and Ellie was telling them all to be quiet, but they weren’t listening.
Then Ellie clapped her hands hard. Suddenly there was no sound but the whoosh of the furnace pushing hot air through the vents in the floor.
Ellie said, “Sammy and Walter, this is Hannah. She’ll be staying with us for a few days.”
Hannah lifted her eyes without raising her head and glanced across the table. It was a little boy, not a monster, and he looked frightened to see her sitting across from him. His eyes were pale green with a dark-blue rim around the irises. The same as Mandy’s.
Hannah knew fear. The little boy was scared of her. He started slapping his arms against his thighs and Daniel said here we go and Ellie reached over to say it’s okay, but that made the arms slap harder. He stretched back rigid as a post and the chair tipped back—and then forward with a thunk.
Sammy stood and ran down the hallway and disappeared. Ellie looked at the sergeant, threw her napkin on her plate, and followed. Eric passed Hannah the plate of pancakes. How could she eat pancakes after that? She mechanically lifted her fork and reached for the one on top.
“Thank you, Sergeant Nyland.”
“I’m not a sergeant anymore. You can just call me Eric.”
Daniel reached for the pancake plate and dug three from the stack.
They all stayed quiet except for the old man named Walter, who said he was going to town for two-by-fours and concrete mix. He had chopped his pancake into a thousand little pieces and was pouring a lake of syrup onto his plate.
Eric took the bottle away. Then he looked at her and said, “Well, now you’ve met Sammy.”
Hannah turned Sammy’s face over in her mind, his look of fear, and the way he rocked back and forth until his view of her would be blurred and less real. He was not a monster; he just didn’t want her in his house.
“Sometimes Sammy gets like that when he meets someone new,” Daniel said. “Especially since he started kindergarten. Now that he’s in school he has more to be scared of. They call him a freak.”
“Don’t say that,” Eric said.
“I don’t,” Daniel said. “I would never call him that. It’s those other kids. Like Johnson. He gets Sammy wound up just to watch him spin. They make it into a game. Let’s get up in this kid’s face and see what he’ll do.”
Eric shook his head. “We’re working on that, Dan. We’re talking to the school.”
That’s not going to help, Hannah wanted to whisper. If people wanted to do bad things, you couldn’t stop them. She scooped a small wedge of butter from the bowl to her pancake, which didn’t melt even a little, so she smeared it around with her knife.
Thorn licked his way up to under her knees and she reached down and scratched his ears. Eric poured orange juice from a plastic box into small blue glasses and passed two to Daniel, who slid one down to her.
Eric said, “It takes Sammy a while to get used to new things, that’s all. I don’t blame you if you don’t want the bacon. It’s beyond burnt.”
She reached for a piece. She’d never tasted anything so delicious. And the cold pancakes too—she dipped piece after piece into her syrup, barely stopping to chew before she reached for another.
Daniel’s pocket buzzed multiple times and he pulled out his phone, glanced down at the number, and looked at his father.
Eric nodded and then added a warning. “Make it quick. And you do not talk about what’s going on here. Not a word. Understood?”
Daniel hopped up and went past Hannah to the window, mumbling words they couldn’t hear. When he sunk down in his chair a few minutes later, his mood had changed. He looked gloomy and mad.
“Who was on the phone?” Eric asked.
“Just Matt.”
“Everything okay?”
Daniel shrugged. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Hannah had finished her plate, and she wished she had taken more time to taste all her bites. When she looked up, she realized Eric had been watching her. He smiled and asked if she wanted more. She shook her head and wiped her mouth with her napkin. Her stomach had stretched like a balloon filled with water.
The Christmas music had run out and the room was quiet except for Daniel’s crunching on bacon, Walter’s fork scraping across his plate, Thorn’s heavy breathing at her feet.
“I’m sorry Sammy didn’t get his pancakes,” she said.
Walter looked up, squeezed his eyes tight, and yelled across the table, “Who the hell are you?”
“Jesus,” Eric mumbled and curled his fingers into a fist.
Daniel rolled his eyes. “Hannah, Grandpa. Still Hannah.”
Walter squinted at her, frowning. “You the nurse?”
“She’s only eleven,” Daniel said loudly.
“Almost twelve. But I’ve got my emergency first-aid training.” Hannah couldn’t bear to have the old man run away from the table too.
Walter eyed her skeptically.
“I know how to check your breathing and find a pulse, and if you’re not breathing, I can do CPR, thirty compressions and then two rescue breaths, but first I’d tilt your head and get your tongue out of the way.”
“That’s cool,” Daniel said. “Did you ever have to use it? On a real person.”
“Not yet,” she said. “But I practise so I won’t forget the steps.”
“What do you practise on?”
“A pillow.”
Daniel laughed, but not a mean laugh.
“And I can do the Heimlich if you’re choking, like if a hard candy or a peanut goes down the wrong way.”
Daniel grabbed his throat and made gagging noises.
“It’s a bear hug mostly and an upward thrust like this.” She crossed her arms and gave herself a hard, thumping squeeze.
A searing pain ripped across her chest. It came back to her in a flood then, being swept off her feet and dragged down to the cellar by her hair. Nigel’s wet spit. Mandy hissing and jerking and that terrible cry.
She yanked at the neck of her sweater. She couldn’t catch her breath, the room spinning round and round. She was drowning from lack of air, her mouth so dry she might choke on her tongue. She had to get out and into the cold to open up her lungs.
Eric lifted her chair with her in it and turned it around, bending in front of her. “Take slow, deep breaths if you can. That’s it, just slow and deep.” Both Eric and Daniel were counting now. “One, two, three, four . . .”
Her chest burned but she counted along with them. Daniel had hauled his chair away from the table and had swung around too, staring intently at his father and her.
“She’s got PTSD,” Daniel said. “Like soldiers when they come home from war.”
> Eric had his hand on her shoulder.
“Just breathe. That’s it.” One, two, three, four.
Thorn paced back and forth, snorting, flashes of black in front of her legs.
“PTSD—post traumatic stress syndrome. No, that would be PTSS. Dysfunction. Disintegration. What’s the D for?”
Hannah concentrated on Eric’s hand pressing on her shoulder, the weight of his fingers, anchoring her to her chair, breathing. One, two, three, four.
Daniel said, “Those guys come out of there and they think they’re still on the hill and they hear the wrong noise and they’re ready to burn the world down just to stop it from happening again. You get it after you’ve been traumatized.”
“That’s enough about PTSD, Dan.”
“I studied it in school, Dad.” Daniel leaned forward, hands on knees. “When we were doing World War II. Wendy Wilsbee had a fit during Social and had to go to the nurse’s office ’cause her mom has PTSD. From her car accident near the Pick-N-Pack. The whole front end smooshed in.”
Eric said, “Dan. Hush. ”
Hannah wanted him to keep talking. Above her, around her. She felt lulled by the sound of their voices, drawing her out of her cellar.
“Mrs. Wilsbee has nightmares. She jumps whenever she hears a siren or screeching tires. They can’t watch TV—not even Wendy’s allowed—’cause they might show a car crash. It can happen to anyone.”
“That’s not what this is.” Eric pulled his hand away, stepped back, and looked at her more closely. Her breath was coming steadier now, the spinning nearly stopped, a merry-go-round run out of push.
“You’re getting some colour back in your cheeks,” Eric said. “Are you feeling better?”
She nodded, less dazed.
Daniel added, “Does your heart feel like it’s pounding out of your chest?”
“Give it a rest, Dan. Let Hannah sit quiet for a minute.” Then Eric turned to Daniel. “Let’s change the subject, shall we. We’re going to get the tree this morning. When you’re finished breakfast, we’ll head out. We can take the van.”
She felt almost like herself again, back in her sore body, and calm enough to look at Daniel and his father. She liked having them both so near. She wanted Ellie to come back and tell her that Sammy was okay, that he’d changed his mind about her. She strained to hear down the hall, but there was no noise coming from behind the closed doors.
They were talking now in quiet voices about getting the tree. About getting out and back before the wind picked up, about coming storms and the hardness of winter. Hannah was grateful to them for giving her more breathing room, letting her crawl back into her skin.
Daniel thought Sammy should go too, that he’d get a kick out of trudging through the snow. They talked about what trees were best, spruce or fir, bungee versus rope, ways to keep Sammy away from the axe.
Hannah watched the way Eric looked at Daniel and the way Daniel considered his answers. She wondered how it would feel to be part of this family and to pass food back and forth and talk about the weather or about keeping Sammy safe or about where to put the tree.
She wished she could go get the tree with them. She pictured a row of small figures slogging through the white wilderness in search of a forest. She wanted to swing the axe, hear the echo of the cracking wood, and see the branches crash down and bounce up, flinging snow everywhere. But they wouldn’t invite her and she was too worn out anyway.
She felt as if bricks had been strapped to her feet. At least she did not want to burn the world down, which was what the wrecked soldiers would do with a match. She was breathing normally again, no hitch in her side, so if she had the PSTD, it had come and gone as quick as a wink.
Eric turned to her. “You need to rest. Do you think you’ll be okay here for a bit?”
Her stomach rolled. Without them beside her, she was sure to make a wrong move. “Should I go back to my room?”
Eric laughed. “You don’t have to, but you can if you want. You can go back to bed or flop on the couch here, watch TV or raid the fridge or play Angry Birds or . . .” He’d run out of ideas.
Daniel snorted. “Angry Birds is for little kids, Dad.”
Eric smiled at his son. “Weren’t you playing it just the other day?”
“I was helping Sammy,” Daniel said, his eyes darting toward hers, then away. He seemed to be studying a piece of lint on his sweater sleeve.
“We won’t be gone long,” Eric said. “We’ll drag the tree in through the front door and stand it up over there and stick decorations on every branch and more all over the place. It’s a tradition. You’ll see. Christmas at the Nyland house.”
Eric went off down the hallway to collect Sammy. Thorn rested his head on her thigh, and as she bent to pat him, she looked across the table to Walter, who had finished his pancakes and was rising unsteadily, both hands on the table, pulling himself up.
“I’ve got work to do,” he announced, reaching for his cane. He thumped toward the table in the far corner of the large room. Weaving his way along the back of the couch, he turned back, looked right at her, and said, “You can take my pulse if you want.”
“Okay,” Hannah said.
“But you’re not getting my blood,” he warned her.
“Needles,” Daniel told Hannah under his breath. “He says he’s allergic, but he really just hates getting his skin poked.”
The grandpa had completely missed the to-do on her side of the table. Jessie’s grandma was confused like that too. She lived in a home out at Kelby, too far for Jessie’s family to visit except on long weekends, when Jessie wouldn’t miss a day of school. Jessie hated getting dragged out there. She said the place smelled like diapers and everyone slumped in their wheelchairs like cows in a field and one of the old ladies was wrapped in a blanket from head to toe and held onto a doll for dear life—the kind that was soft like a real baby—and it was all she could do not to run away screaming.
All those times with Jessie, stretched out on Jessie’s bed as she ranted about her toothless old grandma, how her grandma babbled to the plastic palm tree beside the nurse’s desk, drooled down the bib hung around her skinny neck, fell out of bed onto the mat on the floor each night, gummed her Arrowroot cookies into a soggy mess. All those times, Hannah kept quiet, even though she knew better: her mother had told her to imagine trading places for a day. Imagine needing groceries, your legs too weak to get you to the store. Standing in a crosswalk, too unsteady to step out. Imagine having so much to share and no one left to listen.
Hannah watched the old man make his way to the puzzle table. If he fell down, someone would be right there to pick him back up. She wouldn’t have chosen a friend like Jessie, but there had been no other houses along that road. There were no other houses along this road either.
Hannah was left at the table alone then, just the dog at her side. By the front door, Daniel had the phone in his ear, reaching up with one hand to pull down scarves and hats from a shelf in the closet.
She turned in her chair and stared out the window at the grey sky; the trackless white fields stretched out to forever. What a stupid girl she’d been. She’d kept trudging through the snow and not getting anywhere, when all this time she should have just crossed the road.
Seven
Ellie followed Sammy into his room and watched him slump on the floor. She had to explain why there was a girl at his table, taking over his house, but how? The snippets of information that Eric had passed along would hardly do. Yet he could not be blamed for this.
“Just for a few days, Sammy,” she began. “She’s going to stay in Grandma’s craft room. We’ve made her a bed. Hannah doesn’t go to your school; she’s too big. And she doesn’t go to Danny’s school because she’s too little. She’s right in the middle, like Goldilocks.”
Sammy turned his back to her.
“She’s been havin
g a hard time. And she’s very nice.” Ellie kept her voice light and even. “Hannah has a kind face, don’t you think? There are things we can do, you and me and Dad and Danny, all of us, to make her feel welcome.”
He wouldn’t turn to face her. She was making a mess of it.
“Hmm, let’s think. Maybe Hannah would like to make special cookies cut into stars with lots of icing and sprinkles on top. Or we could go to the store and buy her a Christmas present and we can wrap it with shiny paper and a bow.”
Kindnesses she should have thought of naturally, without needing a five-year-old’s tantrum to bring them to mind. How the girl’s eyes had lit up when she looked in the mirror at her braided hair.
“What do you say, Sammy?”
“What do you say, Sammy?” he repeated, an edge to his voice.
“Sammy, use your own words. Tell me what you think we should do.”
“I don’t like words. I like numbers.”
“Numbers are excellent, and you’re the best numbers boy I know, but we need to use words too. Some words are very nice. Like jabberwocky. Or how about kapow? That’s a good word.”
“Kapow is too pointy. It’s all black.”
“How about bubblicious?”
“Bubblicious is round. And red. Bubblicious.”
Sammy loved red. She imagined the dial in his brain turned to high. Her son could repeat phrases, full sentences, exact intonations from conversations he’d overheard months ago. How crowded it must be in there.
“Words fly in your head and don’t get out,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts. “I don’t like words.”
Sammy was a big boy now, but he’d never been one to be easily fooled by assurances. Cookies and milk wouldn’t soak up the school bus taunts. His routines were his comforts, swaddling him like a security blanket, containing the crash. He had one safe place left, here in this house, with people he knew and trusted. Now it too had been invaded, a strange girl invited in, stealing his family’s air.
Ellie changed tactics, suddenly and without reservation. “You don’t have to talk to her, Sammy. Not one word. She won’t come in here. This is your room and you don’t have to share it.”
