What's Left Unsaid

by Emily Bleeker

  No.

  She clicked on the small, circular image in the top left of the screen. It was of Alex smiling, his fiancée’s face snuggled up next to his, also laughing, in a professional photograph. Janie’s hand was up against his face and casually displaying her engagement ring. Tears poured into Hannah’s eyes, stinging as they accumulated. Damn him.

  She couldn’t bring herself to click on the nearly one hundred comments on the picture. At least half the “What a cute couple” messages would likely be from people who would have left the same message on a picture of Hannah and Alex a few years back. She did check her notifications and quickly read the messages in her inbox from Tricia, her college roommate, who was pregnant with her third child, and Alex’s aunt Carrie, who still checked in occasionally. No big news. No “I made a mistake” message from Alex. An entire day had passed in the virtual world, and no one even noticed she was gone. Then an old question, similar to the one she’d just read from Evelyn as she contemplated drowning in the gap, echoed through her mind: Would anyone notice if I were gone?

  Hannah closed the internet browser and Facebook along with it, a creeping chill crawling up her neck and tensing her shoulders, scared by her own thought. She shuddered and took a deep breath, remembering how Laura had taught her to center herself in her last session before she was released from the hospital and in countless sessions after.

  “Breathe like it matters,” she would say when encouraging Hannah to talk about the tough times instead of bottling them up or pretending they didn’t exist.

  “One,” she whispered, after blowing out her first breath and before taking another.

  Her mother would notice if she were gone.

  “Two,” she said after her second, her heart rate already becoming steadier.

  Mamaw would notice.

  “Three,” she said after the final breath dissipated into space in front of her.

  Her brother would notice.

  Carla would notice.

  Laura would notice.

  Monty would notice.

  Evelyn would notice.

  Well, not Evelyn, but . . . The front door opened and shut with a swoosh-bang followed by Monty’s heavy footsteps, snapping Hannah out of her thoughts. Back to reality, Hannah shoved the folders on her desk into her bag and collected the last few items she needed to take home with her. It was hard to imagine being away from internet access for another night, but at the same time it was better not to be able to pick the emotional scabs that were finally starting to heal.

  Hannah turned off her screen and pushed in her rolling chair.

  “’Night, Monty!” she called as she rushed out the front door without waiting to hear his response. Cold turkey might be the only way to get over her addiction.

  CHAPTER 10

  The clock above the workbench on the back wall of the garage showed 6:00 p.m. on the dot. She’d been gone from the house for almost twelve hours that day.

  Evelyn’s story gave Hannah a purpose, and while she worked on it, she could convince herself that she was still a good journalist who hadn’t nearly offed herself six months ago after being dumped, or at least that’s how her friends and work had seen it, she was sure. But it was hard to explain depression to someone who hadn’t experienced it. It was like explaining salt without using the word salty—pretty much impossible. Worse than the embarrassment of her attempted suicide last May was that as she was trying to end her life, her father had been fighting for his. She used to wish there were life transplants—that she could just pass hers on to him, since she’d lost her ability to use hers to the fullest. She didn’t think those things anymore, not often, not unless something brought her back to those bleak days steeped in depression and blurred with sleeping pills. The numbing properties of Senatobia, Mamaw, and her increased focus on Evelyn’s life were much healthier than Ambien. No one ever overdosed on research, right?

  The articles had finally caught up to 1929, the year Evelyn was shot, and the list of suspects was growing with each document recovered. Harry Westbrook. The first full name Evelyn had left in her bread-crumb trail of clues. There had to be a reason she revealed his name and no one else’s. Could that mean he was the one who pulled the trigger? She tried to imagine what the love interest, or lead suspect, might have looked like, how old he must’ve been to be out drinking with the older kids, how he’d set his sights on the waifish Evelyn. Too many questions and too few answers currently, but with this bit of information, she had more to go on.

  Up until his name showed up, Evelyn seemed like she’d been careful not to use full names. Hannah was still unsure whether Brown was even Evelyn’s stepmother’s real name before her marriage to Evelyn’s father, after a search of the land records in Senatobia in the twenties.

  There had to be articles about the shooting from 1929. In addition to the mass of random files, clippings, letters, photographs, notes, and references in the basement, Monty kept original proofs of every edition of the Tate County Record, even back to when it was the Tate County Democrat. The morgue. At the Tribune the morgue took up a whole floor, but here years of papers fit in a wall full of drawers. She’d seen Dolores take the top copy of a pile of papers each week and slide it into a plastic envelope that was then filed away in one of the massive metal cabinets lining Monty’s office walls.

  Hannah had no idea how to ask him to search through the files without telling him the whole story, and even then, she wasn’t sure he’d let her ransack them without good reason.

  Hannah slunk into the house at two minutes past six. Carla peeked her head out of the kitchen.

  “There you are, dear,” she said, with all the warmth Hannah could ever hope for when returning home after a long day. Then the smell hit her. The house reeked of fried fish, which made her nose wrinkle.

  “Good evening, Carla,” Hannah said, trying to hide her reaction to spare the housekeeper’s feelings. Hannah wasn’t a fan of seafood and had to do her very best to make fake “I love this” sounds every Friday. Why Carla, a Baptist, insisted on meatless Fridays Hannah would never know, but she’d given up trying to explain the Catholic origin of the tradition. She found it easier to choke down a few bites and then nibble on other leftovers in the middle of the night after Carla had gone home.

  “I’ve put your Saturday dinner in the fridge, and there are plenty of eggs for breakfast. I picked up a roast at Piggly Wiggly today in case you wanted to try your hand at a Sunday dinner. I wrote out the instructions and put them on the refrigerator.”

  Carla didn’t work weekends but had filled in for the first few weeks after Mamaw’s accident. But now that Hannah was taking up new duties, Carla had decided she could be trusted with more responsibility. Hannah was eager to help, but any form of housekeeping, especially cooking, seemed so overwhelming that she usually ended up ordering takeout on the nights she was in charge of making dinner. Mamaw still didn’t know she was eating KFC on Sundays and recently told Carla she should ask Hannah for her fried chicken recipe. She’d never seen Carla’s eyes bulge quite so big.

  Hannah was getting better at hiding the evidence of any fast-food meals and even attempted to bake the chicken Carla had left for her last week, which ended up overcooked and bland, but at least she’d tried. But this weekend, Hannah had other things on her mind than how to trick her grandmother and her grandmother’s housekeeper into believing she’d made a pepperoni pizza with stuffed crust from scratch.

  “Carla, can I ask you a question?” Hannah asked, sitting down at the kitchen table and hanging her bag over the back of her chair.

  “I put all the instructions on the fridge, hun,” she said, continuing to stir whatever she had cooking on the stove.

  “No, not that. Something having to do with work. Your family has worked with Mamaw’s family since you were a little girl, right?”

  “Before me, hun. My grammy was hired to work for your great-grandpa, Calvin Patton, when she was sixteen years old, I think when he married your great-grammy Flo
rence, and they settled on Camille Boulevard. My momma followed Miss Mable when she married, and I took over when my momma got too old to keep up with your daddy and Sammy.”

  “Damn, that long?”

  “Yes, indeed. But my Kami wanted to be a teacher, and it’s not like you or your momma will be hiring a housekeeper anytime soon. So I’m the last in a long line.”

  “Have you ever wanted to do something else?” Hannah asked, tapping the space next to her at the table. Carla didn’t take the hint and remained standing in the kitchen. She rarely let Hannah into her world.

  “I’m happy with my life, hun. And I’m proud of my girl. Only wish I have is that I could see my grandbabies more often. But that is enough of that. I know you didn’t set out wanting to ask me about my hopes and dreams.”

  “I like hearing them, though.”

  “Eh, you’re a sweet girl, but I have work to do unless you have something more pressing to talk about.”

  “Well, I need some help,” Hannah said.

  “Now, that is something I’d like to talk to you about,” Carla said, grabbing the iced tea from the refrigerator and bringing over two glasses, which tinkled against each other. Hannah had rarely, if ever, seen the woman sit down while working, but when Carla took the chair beside Hannah, she knew Carla was willing to talk. She probably thought they’d be discussing men, like Guy Franklin, or gossiping about the newspaper.

  “Now—what’s on your mind?” She placed a glass with a printed floral pattern on it in front of Hannah and filled it with the amber liquid. Hannah had not grown up with sweet tea and still preferred the half-flavored bite of a diet soda or the calming effect of a glass of wine with dinner, but in Mamaw’s house, it was water, milk, or tea, and she was parched from her bike ride. She took a deep, long drink and licked her lips before starting into her questions.

  “I’m researching an article right now about something that happened in Senatobia in the twenties. I’m having the hardest time fact-checking this thing. Did your grandma ever tell you about a shooting from when she was younger? A girl named Evelyn, shot in her home somewhere in town? I can’t seem to find any actual records other than a first-person account of the incident, and . . . I guess she could be making it up, but . . . I don’t know. It all feels so real.”

  Carla took a sip of her tea and then smoothed the doily at the center of the table with her fingertips. She clicked her tongue like she was thinking deeply.

  “I don’t know that story in particular, but one thing I learned from my grammy was that every family has darkness they face. My uncle Louis’s wife shot him because she thought he was an intruder on a night when he was late comin’ home from work, and Terrance, my little cousin, found his daddy’s gun and shot the little neighbor boy he was playing with, and . . . well . . . that’s in my family alone. If you look too closely at any life, you’re gonna find tragedy. I think it only gets remembered if people tell stories. But people don’t like sad stories, especially stuffy families round here, if you know what I mean.”

  Carla held Hannah’s gaze for a moment. The cloudy brown of Carla’s irises seemed to leak into the whites of her eyes, and Hannah did know what she meant. Carla had been the one to find Uncle Samuel in Papaw’s office. She’d been the one to try to hold Mamaw together as she fell apart in her arms, and she’d been the one to bleach the walls and the floor and to buy the circular area rug that covered the bleach stain that was almost worse than the bloodstain that had once been there. No one from her father’s family had ever said the word depression or suicide—Mamaw’s tolerable fiction was an accident while Sam was cleaning his firearm, but accidents didn’t usually come with a goodbye note.

  “I know. Mamaw never wants to talk about what happened to Uncle Samuel.” Hannah said it instead of tiptoeing around the tragedy. Even her own father struggled to talk about why his brother took his own life. If it wasn’t for her mother’s usually annoying bluntness, Hannah may never have known.

  “It’s hard to talk about such things, hun.” Carla placed her warm hand over Hannah’s and gave a squeeze. “Brings up all the pain again. But I think holding all that poison inside can be worse than how much it hurts comin’ out, you know?”

  Alex. Just the name in her mind rustled up the ache of loss in her chest and the image of him laughing with Janie. Indulging that pain had led her to disturbing places in the spring. She didn’t want to get back to that place, so it seemed safer to lock away the pain and dole it out in nibbles of sorrow and regret rather than feasting on them to the point of gluttony.

  “But this story is old. It shouldn’t hurt anymore. I just need to find some hard evidence. Or at least someone who knows the girl’s full name or has some recollection of the crime. Without a full name, it’s difficult. And it happened so long ago that anyone who would remember is gone now. I do have a man’s name,” Hannah recalled, lost in her stream of consciousness, “and the name of the facility in Memphis where the girl in the story may have lived when she was paralyzed. I might be able to find her name there, but . . .”

  Carla collected the empty glasses from the table and balanced them in one hand. Then she grabbed the glass pitcher with the other, and Hannah knew she’d lost her attention.

  “I need to find a place to look up some old records. The town hall had a few, but I only have a first name. It was from so long ago . . .”

  “You know, when Kami was doing a research paper for some history class at the University of Memphis, she found some interesting things down at the university library. They have these films with the newspapers copied onto them—”

  “Microfiche,” Hannah filled in the blank for Carla, perking up. “That’s exactly what I need.”

  “Yes, micro-fish. That’s right.”

  “That is good to know. And while I’m in Memphis, I could check out the old hospital. See if they have records or logs or pictures or something.” Hannah knew this was the next step in her research. She’d need to find a way to get to Memphis. It was only forty or fifty minutes by car, but it seemed like an eternity away to Hannah. She had work during the week and Mamaw in the evenings and on weekends. And though Mamaw often offered her Buick to Hannah for any “social calls,” she hadn’t taken her up on the offer yet. Hannah used to think that was because she hadn’t made any real friends here in Senatobia. But every time she thought about venturing outside the comfort zone of the town, anxiety clamped down on her ability to make decisions, leaving her to wonder if the isolation the town provided acted as a protective buffer, an excuse to stay stuck exactly where she was.

  “What pictures?” Mamaw cut into the conversation, rolling in from the back hall in her wheelchair. Her hair was fluffed up and held in place by what was likely half a can of Aqua Net. She had on a pair of blue slacks and a floral button-up, her nails painted a coral that matched the flowers on her blouse perfectly.

  “Don’t you look pretty? Mr. Davenport is gonna be speechless,” Carla said, pushing Mamaw’s chair into the living room next to her favorite armchair. Hannah had been so busy with her problems, she hadn’t noticed the tray of appetizers there. How could she have forgotten? Mamaw’s gentleman caller was coming for dinner tonight. It was his first official visit since the accident, though he’d snuck in a few “just in the neighborhood” hellos over the past few weeks.

  The doorbell rang. All three women froze.

  “Do I look all right, darlin’?” Mamaw asked Hannah, like she was a schoolgirl getting ready for an ice-cream social.

  “You look beautiful, Mamaw,” Hannah said as Carla went to the door, kissing her grandmother’s cheek. “But I should go change.”

  She hadn’t even taken the time to shower that morning, and her clothes were musty from dust and sweat after sifting through the archives.

  “You know you always look beautiful to me,” Mamaw said, patting Hannah’s cheek before she stood up. “But . . .”

  “But I should probably freshen up,” Hannah added with a wink. Carla was greeting a
sport-coat-clad Mr. Davenport at the front door, so Hannah grabbed her bag and dashed through the fishy-smelling kitchen without being seen.

  As the murmur of polite conversation persisted in the living room, Hannah snuck into the hall bathroom to change, the anxiety of venturing to Memphis on her own pushing against the desire to keep the investigation moving forward. Completely preoccupied with the internal debate and planning her theoretical trip to Memphis, she quickly pulled on a clean shirt, brushed her teeth, combed her hair back into a fresh ponytail, and dotted on a thin layer of foundation and mascara. After applying a slather of lip gloss, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The red in the striped shirt brought out a light blush in her cheeks, and there was a touch of sparkle in her eyes that had been missing for a long time. She didn’t look numb; she looked almost . . . happy.

  Hannah rarely took selfies, but if Alex could look happy and like he’d moved on, she wanted to look like she didn’t care anymore. And if she looked a little bit hot in the process, so be it. She grabbed at her back pocket for her phone when she remembered. Damn it. It was still dead, sitting in a Ziploc of rice in her bag.

  Hands against the counter, leaning forward and biting at her glossy lip, she stared into the mirror, examining her reflection. There was something different about her, something bright that went beyond makeup or complementary wardrobe choices. Hannah let go of her lip and tried to smile with no teeth, the waxy flavor of lip gloss lingering on the tip of her tongue. Old Hannah was there. The one who could still call her dad on the phone and who chased a story like it was her calling. The Hannah that had imagined what it would be like to walk down the aisle and be called “Mom” one day.

  With two swift tugs, she yanked a handful of tissues out of the crocheted box on the back of the toilet. The light-pink gloss came off in a few swipes, barely bright enough to stain the tissue paper. She talked to Laura endlessly about how hard it was to get over Alex, but she never wanted to actually get over him. As long as she still had her love for him, her hope that he’d come back, she didn’t have to start over and truly accept that her life was going to move on without him.