Cauchemar (13 page)

Their boat ride home was silent. Each time he tried to touch her, she struck him with a force that surprised them both. The moment the boat docked, she rushed off, almost tripping in the dark. She slammed the back door behind her and raced up the stairs into their bedroom, where she allowed herself to keen for several seconds. Even having seen it, she couldn't quite believe it. The image of them together seemed like a half-remembered scene from a nightmare. When she heard his steps outside the bedroom door, she rushed into bed.

He lay down beside her and she kept her gaze fixed beyond his shoulder, on the moon outside Mae's bedroom window. Months later and the room still felt borrowed. Some mornings, she still woke to the feeling that her feet had been warmed between old hands.

“It's not what you think,” Callum said in a low voice and wormed his body closer. His hand clutched hers.

“You wouldn't know what I think,” she answered.

“I can guess. Can you let me guess? She really is nothing,” he began. “No, that came out wrong. Maybe there were feelings once, but they were never real. They don't even come close to touching what we have here. This,” he said, tightening his grip on her hand, “is real, this is what I want. That was a mistake that will never happen again. All you saw was a moment of weakness and too much tequila.”

“Is that all I saw?”

She waited through his silence. He was fitting together words in his mind, casting off the rotten ones, those that had been proven wrong. There were too many words, but still too few to balm the ache inside her.

“Yes, definitely. Say something,” he urged.

Hannah shook her head in the darkness. She couldn't parse through all of her feelings. “Are you on drugs again?”

His hand released hers, then quickly squeezed it again. “How do you know about that?”

Anger throbbed through her, so strong that she felt it like an injury. Warm to the touch and red, across her breastbone. Anger that he would do this, anger that he would do this after having put a child in her. As she thought this, the anger became almost indistinguishable from fear as she touched her belly. It was the fear that kept her in the bed, even as she shrank back from his damp touch.

“Well, I certainly didn't hear it from you.” Hannah turned her body into the mattress.

He gave chase, lifting up her slip, and pressing his thigh against hers. “Because there was nothing to tell. It was a rough time, but it's long over. It has nothing to do with this, with us.”

They were two furnaces, drawing from each other. She felt mosquitoes crawling sluggishly along her skin, poisoned by the layers of bug spray but determined.

She swatted his leg away.

“You've been so distant,” he began, and she stiffened. She heard him hesitating, cutting off words at the roots. “Sometimes I think you don't want this. Me, I guess.”

“Because I didn't say it back? That I love you? So tonight was, what, payback?”

“You don't even want to marry me,” he insisted, propping himself up on his elbow.

“I do,” she hissed. “On both counts, I do. Just don't rush me. Can't you be patient?”

“Yeah, but don't write me off and don't shut me out. I'm sorry.” His voice broke. “I'm so sorry. It was a mistake.”

She turned her head and his mouth was waiting, a warm salve for her chapped lips. “There's something good here,” and their lips were so fastened that although Callum spoke, the words seemed to come from both of them.

She pulled away from his mouth, and saw his wide, frightened eyes. “I don't know,” she said, very quietly, and immediately knew it to be true. After several minutes of silence, he began to snore but she remained awake.

She felt with a sudden ferocity that she'd never really deserved this love to begin with, but still she was angry at having been fooled. And below the anger, shame. At her own dumb hope that her happiness might last. Happiness was meant for saints. Jacob's face, smiling and complacent, appeared before her eyes, a piercing condemnation.

“Come over and meet my friend, little bear.” Sarah Anne had called from the foyer of her house. “He likes to hide.” Sarah Anne closed the heavy wood door, inlaid with stained glass, behind them, then took Hannah's hand.

“It's okay.” Nerves danced along Hannah's shoulders. “Let's not bother him.”

“It won't.”

“Sarah?” A blonde boy wearing faded denim and a long-sleeved tee appeared in the hallway. Hannah sucked in air. He was beautiful, otherworldly. His eyebrows and eyelashes were pale, which brought out the teal of his eyes.

“Jacob, this is Hannah.”

Sarah Anne's brother, several years older and towering over them both, brushed a lock of blonde hair from his forehead. “Hannah,” he intoned, by way of greeting. His arms, thick with fisted muscles, should have been hoisting Southern cheerleaders over his head. His arms were the sort that made old men revise their own histories, retrieve false memories of hunting and wrestling in the rain.

“Hi Jacob,” Hannah said. Something flickered in the boy's face, as if he were a turtle at the bottom of a deep well, roused by a pebble.

Sarah Anne moved fluidly to her brother's side. “What have you been up to?” she asked him.

He moved away, and with a shrug, Sarah Anne followed him into the backyard.

The backyard smelled of freshly cut grass. A green and white striped patio set was planted in the middle and Sarah Anne plopped down on the chaise, kicking off her shoes. Wildflowers were scattered along the fence.

“This is his favorite thing,” Sarah Anne called back. “He's pretty good at it, don't you think?”

Jacob's work sat in the shade by the back fence, neatly ordered rows upon rows of carefully constructed birdhouses and birds' nests. “Wow,” Hannah breathed.

Jacob sat down cross-legged in front of a large wicker dome. Rocking back and forth, he resumed building.

Hannah moved through the rows, resisting the urge to touch the structures. They were impeccable. Birds' nests more perfect than those that any bird, imprinted with the knowledge from birth, could ever make. Speckled eggs sunned themselves in some, and a squawk startled her. A starling unfurled its flinty, polka-dot plumes from a bed of straw. Three pale turquoise eggs sat beneath it.

“This is amazing,” Hannah said.

Jacob squinted up at her, and chortled. The bird turned to him and chirped in response.

“Yup,” Sarah Anne said, sounding bored. “We have a whole menagerie. Our parents are so thrilled.” She clasped her hands behind her head.

Hannah leaned in close to the starling, holding out a finger. It opened its beak, and a daddy longlegs struggled to escape. She spun around slowly, seeing beaks open all around her like the vulgar lips of lilies.

“We're like a foster home for them,” Sarah Anne said, knocking her knees from side to side. “We feed them, give them nests, and then they fly away. My mom calls it practice for when Jacob and I fly the coop.”

Hannah stretched out a finger, dangling it over the starling. Black eyes reared back in its head suspiciously as she touched its wings. They were soft and smooth, slightly moist. She shivered.

“How long have you had these?”

Sarah Anne yawned. “He's been doing it since we got here. My father's sort of impressed by it. I think he's got visions of architecture dancing in his head. My mother hates it.”

Jacob braided wicker with quick fingers, his face calm and concentrated. At each errant chirp, his eyes scanned over the nests.

“Anyways, you'll be fine here, little bear,” Sarah Anne said as she stood up and walked over to her brother. Her fingertips hovered over his head.

Jacob turned suddenly and grasped Sarah Anne's thigh with one large hand under the hem of her white cotton shorts. Hannah took a step forward then stopped.

“Stay,” Jacob said. A private look passed between the siblings.

“We're going to get some ice cream,” Sarah Anne said, pulling his fingers from her skin one by one. As soon as she was free, she trotted quickly toward the house. Hannah followed, sparing a backward glance for Jacob. He sat surrounded by wicker, his fingers lost between the wet red of his lips. His eyes, however, were lucid. Predatory.

In those days, Sarah Anne's great pastime was ice cream in the uneven shade by the river. Hannah watched as Sarah Anne licked the last bead of frothy ice cream from her hand.

“He breaks everyone's heart,” she said. Her cherry-red toes bobbed in and out of the murk. “The other day, he turns to my parents and says, ‘I'm sorry I won't be able to take care of you when you're old, because I can't have a job.'”

Hannah swallowed hard, a chunk of cookie dough still lodged somewhere in her chest.

“That's the worst part, I think. It's bad enough to be wrong in the head, but somehow so much worse to know it.” She rolled up the cuffs of her shorts and rubbed the gooseflesh down. “As my mother always says, ‘It is what it is.'”

“She sounds easygoing.”

White birds swooped lazily from the willows. It was one of those beautiful moments, when Hannah could almost believe in the church of nature, in the holiness of light seeping through holes in the canopy as if God himself was punching through from above.

“Not when she's sober. My mother drinks,” Sarah Anne said, and shrugged. “I figure I'll have that to look forward to. It runs in families, I've heard.” Sarah Anne swallowed the last bite of her cone, arcing her neck back and gulping it down. “Do you want to go for a swim?”

Hannah shook her head.

“Come on,” Sarah Anne goaded, standing up. She lifted her camisole up, flashing a sweet little potbelly ballooning from her ribs. “I'm bored, and too warm.” Hannah could see the bright red lines of Jacob's fingers still on Sarah Anne's thigh.

“You have goosebumps,” Hannah said, around a mouthful of ice cream.

“And you never take your clothes off. What are you hiding under there?” Sarah Anne tugged at Hannah's cotton shirt. “I'll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Sarah Anne pulled off her top and Hannah stared at her training bra, edged in white cotton lace, supporting two budding mounds. Hannah turned away, crossing her arms over a flat, unremarkable chest. “Suit yourself,” Sarah Anne said.

Hannah listened to the stubborn shedding of clothes, the muffled whine when Sarah Anne touched a toe to the water, and then the loud splash. She glanced over her shoulder and stifled a gasp. Two more unmistakable hand spans, purple fading to a hurt yellow, marred Sarah Anne's back like wings.

Sarah Anne was frowning into the depths of the water. “What do you suppose is down there?”

“Lots of things. Garbage, clothes, vengeful spirits.” Hannah leaned over the edge of the water and grabbed Sarah Anne's shoulders with a harsh “boo,” but the other girl barely reacted.

“Do you really think there are spirits? That might leave the swamp?”

Hannah had seen women laughing as they walked on swamp water from her bedroom window. Men pulling fishing lures from their cheeks. A stark white alligator, following her always.

“There's bones, too,” Hannah said, then clamped her mouth shut.

Sarah Anne made a sound of disgust. “What kind of bones?”

Hannah stood up and brushed off her pants. “Gator skulls, mostly. Birds and lizards. Maybe a horse skull or two.”

Sarah Anne's face blanched and she moved carefully back toward the bank, her palms skimming the murky water's surface. “I had a horse once,” she murmured.

“Have you ever seen a horse skull?”

Sarah Anne shook her head.

Hannah had. The day she'd first met Christobelle, she'd seen one hanging on the wall. Hannah only had to see it once, half-lit by the dim light sliding through filmy white curtains, to have nightmares for weeks. “You don't know what you're looking at, at first. There are holes for eyes and ears, but the rest is smooth like an anteater's face. The mouth and nose look like a beetle's jaw.”