Wildwood (33 page)
Authors: Drusilla Campbell
Hannah turned off the television and made her way to the kitchen where she warmed milk for cocoa. The clammy tiles stuck to her bare feet. Outside the branches of the olive tree scratched the kitchen windows, and she was aware for the first time of the wind breaking through the trees. She opened the back door and stepped outside into a rush of cool air. Clouds tumbled and chased across the sky like children playing. Gooseflesh rose on her arms and she rubbed it hard. There was weather on the way at last.
Wednesday
“Y
ou’re early, Hannah.” Betts looked up from her paperwork. She glanced at the clock on the wall over her desk, stood and gathered a stack of papers into a bulging file. “I didn’t expect you until ten.”
ou’re early, Hannah.” Betts looked up from her paperwork. She glanced at the clock on the wall over her desk, stood and gathered a stack of papers into a bulging file. “I didn’t expect you until ten.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” Hannah found her cup and poured coffee.
“Everything okay with you?”
“The weather’s made me edgy.”
“The guy on Channel Ten said rain by noon. That high pressure system seems to have moved.”
“A big storm, I heard.”
“I’m due at the staff meeting this minute. Want to sit in?”
“For a while.”
Staff meetings at Resurrection House were held in what had been the mansion’s dining room in the glory days. Hannah found a seat on an ancient overstuffed couch near the door and folded her legs under her. In more optimistic times the home’s dilapidated rooms had inspired her with all that soap and water, paint and time, energy and commitment could accomplish. That was before she learned about percolating damp and mold and cockroaches four inches long. Overhead fecal-brown water stains the size of hubcaps marked the ceiling. Underfoot, the carpet remained a grimy brown despite vacuuming and whirring carpet cleaners. Everywhere she looked she saw symbols of a futility progressed far beyond the reach of suds and paint and willing volunteers.
Hannah knew each of the eight other women in the room but today she said nothing, greeted no one as she sat with her legs curled under her, holding on to a cup of bad coffee with one hand while the fingers of the other beat on the arm of the couch. She wore sweatpants, a plain gray sweatshirt, and running shoes. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she’d left the house without applying makeup—not even lipstick. Her plan had been to look anonymous. An unremarkable middle-aged housewife, a suburban frau born to shop at Wal-Mart ’til she dropped, unnoticed.
Betts addressed the group. “We need to move along this morning. Sheila and Lupe are minding the store for us but let’s not take advantage of them.” She opened the notebook on her lap. “I have only three agenda items.”
She mentioned the problem of cigarette smoking. Maryann moved that the screened laundry porch be designated a smoking area. Someone else said outside on the front veranda. A vote was taken and the veranda won.
The next item of business surprised Hannah.
“Shannon came by yesterday to tell me she’s got a job.”
“I hope you didn’t take her word for it.” May’s laugh was caustic.
Hannah shifted her legs out from under her and planted them on the carpet. Inside her running shoes her toes began to wriggle impatiently.
“I called the company and they verified. Apparently she was completely candid with them about living with us and having Angel. The man I spoke to said he thought she was a good employment bet. Highly motivated.” Betts checked her notes. “The company does bulk mailing. Third class stuff.”
“A real career opportunity,” May said.
Betts shot her a look. “It’s a start and that’s all we’re asking at this point. I’ve gone over the house contract with Shannon. She knows the rules and she told me she’ll follow them.”
Maryann asked, “Where you going to put them?”
“The room at the back, the one that overlooks the side yard,” Betts said. “There’ll be plenty of room for a crib.”
Betts: so determinedly optimistic, so everlastingly cheery. And so wrong, so completely blindly wrong.
Hannah had read Shannon’s core as surely as a psychiatrist decoding responses to a Rorschach test. Shannon had beguiled every woman at the meeting—except perhaps May—with her girlish smiles and promises, blinded them to her shifty, restless, sideways eyes. Angel needed commitment and sacrifice, a lifetime of devoted and selfless care if she was to rise up whole and bright. Shannon didn’t have it in her.
Betts began to speak of another girl who had applied to live at Resurrection House. Her baby was still in the preemie ward. She stopped in midsentence. “You okay, Hannah?”
Hannah picked up her purse and rose from the couch. “I need some air,” she said and managed to smile. The folding doors squeaked as she pulled them back. She shrugged apologetically to the group. “Hot flash.”
Benign smiling faces watched her out the door.
It’s so easy to fool them, she thought.
Hannah went immediately across the foyer downstairs and along the hall to the nursery where it was quiet except for baby sounds and the scratch of an oak branch against the eaves. Swaddled in a blue blanket, Angel lay on her back sucking her fist. Her open eyes stared unfocused at the ceiling.
“Hello, baby girl.”
A blink and then Angel recognized her and squirmed excitedly. Hannah picked her up. At ten months the bundle in her arms felt more like three or four. Small splayed hands batted her face. Hannah grabbed one and kissed it. Pressing her face against the baby’s warm damp neck, she whispered, “Angel, my Angel.”
With Angel in her arms Hannah left the nursery and went quickly to the front of the house. From behind the closed dining room doors, she heard laughter and the sound of paper shuffling. She scribbled on the chalkboard:
Gone to the park. H and A.
Gone to the park. H and A.
She grabbed her jacket from its hook and hurried out the front door and down the steps, across the yard and around the corner to where she had parked the Volvo out of sight of the house. She shifted Angel to her hip and rummaged in her bag for keys. She opened the back curbside door. Eddie’s infant car seat was anchored in the back on the side opposite the driver. To fit Angel, Hannah had to loosen her blanket and then adjust the angle of the seat to an almost reclining position. The lever stuck. She needed both hands to budge it. She laid the baby on the backseat and groped under the car seat. Her hands were slippery with sweat. Behind her a door slammed and a dog barked. She turned around expecting to see Betts or Maryann hurrying toward her, but it was only a woman from the building next door retrieving her newspaper.
The lever released with a jerk, sending a startled squirt of adrenaline through Hannah’s system. She brushed her hair back off her face and rested her forehead against the roof of the car until her heartbeat slowed and her hands stopped shaking. Then she settled Angel in the car seat, closed the rear door, went around and opened her side, got in and turned on the ignition. The engine fired and immediately Angel began to cry.
Hannah smiled because tears were exactly what she had expected. The movement of the car and the purr of the engine would lull Angel to sleep. But she had forgotten how a baby’s raw screams take on substance in a car’s interior, filling up the space with a noise like shards of glass. She laughed and felt young and pleasantly harried and entirely competent.
She focused on the road ahead. Angel finally quieted. Hannah craned her neck around to check if she was breathing. Of course she was, there was no reason for her to stop breathing. But once Hannah started worrying, she couldn’t stop. It had been the same with Ingrid and Eddie. At the next exit she pulled off 101 and switched the car seat to the front passenger side.
Angel cried again, barking shrieks of distress Hannah could not silence with touch or talk. This was exactly the sort of problem a girl like Shannon would not know how to handle. She would probably end up hitting Angel out of frustration, but Hannah would never do that because she understood any break in routine overstimulated a crack baby. The next few hours would be difficult for Angel, but Hannah had prepared for that. She kept one hand on the wheel and the other stroked Angel’s thin arm. A few miles down the freeway the baby’s tears subsided again into woeful snuffles, and at last she fell asleep. Her long black eyelashes glistened and every minute or so she shuddered, shaking off the last of the tears.
To the right of the highway a mass of plum-colored clouds insinuated itself eastward over and through the passes of the Coast Range. Drained of color under a heavy sky, the parched landscape of live oak, eucalyptus, fields and orchards lay in dun desolation. In the wind the trees arched their spines like ballerinas; and beside the road, a string of fishing lakes shone like pewter plates. Hannah checked the rearview mirror. A blue-gray wake of empty road stretched behind the Volvo, and she imagined she was looking back at the receding shoreline of her old life. Reflected in the rearview mirror she saw an untidy middle-aged woman with too much frizzy hair. She smiled at herself. Everything was going according to plan and expectation.
Once she saw a highway patrol car on an overpass, and for an instant a cold clarifying wind keened through her mind, and she knew she should turn around. But the thought passed as quickly as the scenery.
Hannah knew what she was doing. The flight with Angel was kidnapping and literally against the law, but she had thought this through and right and wrong could not concern her anymore. What jury would convict her for saving a baby’s life? In Hannah’s care Angel had a chance, with Shannon she did not. Simple. True.
The day before Hannah had shopped for supplies and cashed a large check at Wells Fargo. By the time Dan learned how large, she would be gone. The cooler was in the trunk full of ice and basics. In one cardboard box were the cans of soup she had got for herself and the jars of baby food Angel would need until they settled somewhere in Mexico and Hannah could puree fresh produce as she had for Eddie and Ingrid. In another box was an old microwave she hoped still worked. The first night they would stay in a little housekeeping motel she remembered in the Carmel Valley. It was off the road and quiet, sparkling clean and smug in its plain utilitarian style. The next day she would trade the Volvo for a used car, pay cash, and drive to the border.
Hannah tried not to think about Dan and her children, but everywhere along the road she saw things that reminded her of those she had left behind. In a paddock a man stood beside a horse, and she knew she could depend on Dan to feed Glory and the foster animals. She imagined him beside the mare, resting his forehead on her neck. At first he’d be too worried and confused to be angry. Then he would beg God to help him understand why she had left him. He would fight off anger until, exhausted, he had to let it in. For a while it would take over his life. But some part of him would never give up hope that she was coming back. He would be a good father and a comfort to the children.
She pushed down the faces of Ingrid and Eddie when they came into her mind; but like buoys in rough weather, they popped to the surface again. Someday she would write them.
I love you, I will always love you.
She shook her head to clear away the syllables.
You two gave my life its meaning.
She clenched her teeth until her jaw ached.
I love you, I will always love you.
She shook her head to clear away the syllables.
You two gave my life its meaning.
She clenched her teeth until her jaw ached.
At the age of six or seven Ingrid’s favorite book had been
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
Peter returned home and found the window barred and bolted and saw his mother with a new baby in her arms. Ingrid asked to have the chapter read aloud to her again and again and sobbed as if she would die—then put herself to sleep planning revenge on Peter’s behalf. Ingrid would hate Hannah for leaving home and would dream of retribution. Eddie would make her a stranger and be sure she had never loved him, from the beginning.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
Peter returned home and found the window barred and bolted and saw his mother with a new baby in her arms. Ingrid asked to have the chapter read aloud to her again and again and sobbed as if she would die—then put herself to sleep planning revenge on Peter’s behalf. Ingrid would hate Hannah for leaving home and would dream of retribution. Eddie would make her a stranger and be sure she had never loved him, from the beginning.
Flying down the highway, she heard their baby fists rap on the tightly closed car windows and their voices begging to be let in.
Liz ran down Casabella Road, daring the rain to come. Her joints creaked and her muscles stretched like old bubble gum. She had woken in a slough, glum to her toes. Running sometimes helped. The sky was low and gray and misty on the edges, spilling down the hills like water over rocks.
She detoured left on Las Robles. It had been an oak-strewn hillside sloping down to Bluegang when they were kids. Now manorial edifices of stone and brick rose on quarter-acre lots, surrounded by bright green lawns despite the water shortage.
I’m not against new houses. I’m not against change.
I’m not against new houses. I’m not against change.
Nothing is forever, Liz thought as she skirted a place in the road dug up for underground power lines. Everything dies eventually, and friendships sputtered out from inattention, dishonesty and cowardice. The incident at Bluegang comprised but a fraction of a day in childhoods otherwise rich in light and laughter; no wonder she and Jeanne and Hannah had believed they could coast through the years on what they had agreed to remember. Their complicit silence had been a way of denying time and change. If Liz had not been visited by nightmares blacker than any secret, if Gerard had not been there to counsel her, if she had not come back demanding that they talk about Bluegang, if she had not come back to get an abortion—so many contingencies, so many opportunities to reconsider or turn back—they might have floated on down into old age reminiscing like codgers in a sentimental movie. But she had returned to Rinconada and now, while Liz hoped she and Jeanne might have taken their first tentative steps outside the box and begun to truly see and know each other, she and Hannah were estranged as never before.
She recalled the fierceness of their childhood fights, always them against her and rarely over anything more important than a whim: notes passed around her, snubs and giggles and whispers and Liz left in the dust as Hannah and Jeanne rode off on their bikes. Two in the box and one outside longing to be invited in. A classic pattern and, inevitably, Liz so hated being left out she would apologize even if she didn’t always know what she’d done. She’d make something up and say how sorry she was and please, please, please would they be her friends again? The apology always satisfied Hannah and Jeanne and they magnanimously forgave her and moved over and let her snuggle back into her own warm corner of the box. She had wanted to be Hannah, to be Jeanne, to be anyone but who she was and her place in the trio had been based on that. Recalling now her willingness to play the timid underdog, her heart ached for the girl she had been.
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