The Air We Breathe (15 page)

M
OLLY
F
EBRUARY
2009

Her mother wasn’t speaking to her. She couldn’t say she was particularly bothered by the silent treatment or that it hadn’t happened before. Louise’s favorite weapon was silence, and most of the time Molly gave in first—she couldn’t handle the grating tension around her—apologizing for whatever she had said or done or hadn’t done. Today, though, she refused to be the one to cry “uncle” with the first words.

I can be stubborn, too.

She used to be feisty. Her preschool teacher had called her parents in for a meeting not long after the year began, because Molly had claimed the play kitchen area as her own kingdom, and those who wanted to cook play fruit in the oven had to pay half their plastic bounty to her. Her father had told her she needed to share, and she did because he’d asked, and when Mrs. Conroy had thanked her for being kind, she told her, “I’m doing it for my daddy, not for you.” But that
was when she was Hanna, before her father’s death and the kidnapping and her mother vanishing inward.

And then they ran, and Molly dropped little crumbs of Hanna along the way, like Hansel and Gretel, hoping to find her way back. Instead she lost the little girl who wanted to survive and became a young woman who didn’t know how to open a door.

She showered, sat on the floor of the tub, and lathering her legs with a bar of Dove, shaved from her ankles to the tops of her knees. When she finished, she toweled dry and dressed in her favorite brown corduroy pants and a cotton turtleneck.

Claire would come for her in seven hours. She had that long to find a way outside. She’d start with the words.

She licked the tips of her fingers and stuck them to a sheet of white paper in the printer, pulled it toward her. Then she fished the scissors out of the desk drawer and cut the paper into strips, at first as thick as her wrist, as long as her hand. Then she trimmed those down to the size of half a playing card, a matchbook, a Chinese-cookie fortune. She could admit she was Hanna now, allow herself to take part in the things that used to be
her
. Like the words. On the smallest paper she wrote
breathe
. Folded it into her front jeans pocket.

Louise, from the kitchen table, rattled the newspaper as she opened it somewhere in the middle. Molly gathered her schoolbooks and went into the lobby of the museum to slump on the stool for the day and wait. She spent the first hour picturing herself holding open the museum’s front door, listening to the cackle from the speaker above, saying to Claire, “After you,” and then allowing the glass door to puff closed
as she let go, leaving the wax behind her. Leaving her mother. Leaving it all.

How did she end up stuck in a museum, inside and alone?

Gradually, like a frog in a pot, the water slowly heating, the amphibian not realizing it was being boiled to death. It started with too much wind and sea and not wanting to be outside with her friends. Even then, though, she could still go places with Louise—to the grocery store, to the mall in Portland, to a diner or movie theater. But those outings soon became more difficult, her anxiety building on the car ride, growing until Molly would ask to ride in the cart, even though her almost-thirteen-year-old legs were too long, but her mother said that was certain to draw attention. So she’d laced her fingers around the thin, cold shopping cart bars until the metal was the same temperature as her hand and she couldn’t tell one from the other, sidestepping strangers and formulating plans in her head should someone try to touch her.

There’s the closest exit. The best place to hide is in those clothing racks. No one will find me if I curl up behind all those bulk packages of paper towels.

Soon all those thoughts tingled in her skull, working their way down her arms, her legs, making her limbs heavy and numb. Her breath thickened in her lungs like pudding and she was certain she’d suffocate. Every man looked like Thin Man or Fat Guy or Short One. Molly started crying and shaking when Louise made her go to the store with her; once she passed out in the pharmacy section at Target. Those were attention grabbers they didn’t need, so Louise let her stay home.

The museum had dead bolts, alarms, and nothing worth
taking. Molly locked her bedroom door and pushed her dresser in front of it when her mother had to leave to buy milk or toilet paper, drew her curtain over the window, and balled herself up in her blankets, hoping it would look only like some teenage girl had forgotten to make her bed. She’d stayed there, contending with her hot breath bouncing back at her, filling the blanket tent, heating it until the sweat sprouted between her fingers and toes, until her mother came back. Then she’d jump out of bed, move the dresser, and with a smile help put the food away, shrugging off Louise’s concern when she said Molly looked a little flushed.

At least she didn’t need to hide in her bedroom anymore.

Her mother realized, at some point, that Molly had stopped leaving the building, even to pull the sandwich-board sign inside during the summer months. And Molly was sure Louise was happier with the situation like it was, her daughter safe from anything in the outside world and, seemingly, never going away.

She opened her physics book and read about states of matter. Solid, liquid, gas. Plasma. Bose-Einstein condensates. She didn’t understand that one completely; something about multiple atoms superimposed over one another, sharing the same space as to be indistinguishable. Multiple lives superimposed over one another. Molly over Hanna.

She would have to lie to Claire. She lied every day, every time she told someone her name, every time she answered to it.

“But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.”

The move to Dorsett Island had brought a relief in anonymity, a distance between past and future that comes only when
one’s past is erased and one’s future shimmers in uncertainty. But now, with Claire’s arrival approaching like the waves she watched from the window, Molly felt the two halves of herself poised to collide.

Tobias came first, and when Molly saw him walk through the door, panic spurted up her throat, bitter and raw. She swallowed the acidic mouthful back down, asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“I just mean . . . I thought . . . Don’t you have class?”

“Molly, I’m on break. I told you that two days ago.”

“Oh, right.” She fiddled with a paper clip, straightening the curves, bending it into a circle.

He stretched, arching his shoulders back toward each other; his knapsack—army surplus with ink drawings covering it—slipped down his arms, and he caught a strap in one hand. “I brought a movie,” he said, opening one of the pockets. “Popcorn. Yeah, the microwave stuff, but it tastes really good with a whole lot of butter melted over it.”

“Tobias—”

“I know, I know. Don’t say it. You don’t have butter, right? Well, ta-da.” He opened another pocket, pulled out two sticks of Land O’Lakes butter and a plastic ice pack. “I’m prepared.”

“My mom is home.”

“Does she have something against movies and popcorn?”

Something moved in Molly’s peripheral vision, and by the time she turned her head toward the window, Claire had entered to the cackle, her cheeks dressed in February, pink and shiny with dry skin. She wore a fleece poncho, shook off
the hood and lifted her hair out from beneath the fabric. “I hope it’s okay I came in this way. I knocked on the side door, but no one answered.”

“It’s fine,” Molly said.

“I’m surprised you keep this place open in the winter.”

“Tell me about it,” Tobias said. “Hey. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Oh, sorry. Claire, this is Tobias. His family owns the pizza place across the street. And this is Claire. She’s here . . . visiting.”

“Nice to meet you, Tobias.” Claire extended her arm. “Your folks keep their business open, too, all year?”

“Ayuh, but people gotta eat, locals as well as flatlanders.”

“That pesky food thing. Who knew it would be so important?”

Tobias and Claire laughed, and their voices scraped along Molly’s spine, vibrated through her pelvis, into her stomach, churning her lunch around until she felt nauseated. She waited for the inevitable, the
How do you know Molly?
question, and it came seconds after she thought it, falling out of Tobias’s mouth, smacking Claire in the face. She wrapped an arm around her stomach. “We both lived in Avery Springs, before Hanna moved here.”

“Molly,” Tobias said.

“What did I say?”

“You said Hanna.”

Claire reddened, swatted the emptiness in front of her nose. “Pregnancy brain. Really, half the time I can’t even remember my own name.”

Tobias looked from one to the other. She saw the wheels turning.

“So, are you ready?” Claire asked.

“I’m not sure I can now,” Molly said.

“I’ll speak with your mother.”

“It’s not that. It’s just . . . I’m not sure I can now.”

“Okay,” Claire said. “I don’t leave for a couple more days. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” Molly whispered. The room tilted. She smoothed her fingertips over her eyelids, pulling the corners outward until she saw the world through thin, blurry slits.

“Hanna? Are you sure you’re okay?”

Tobias scratched beneath his hat. “Why do you keep calling her that?”

“Because it’s my name,” Molly said.

She sank down against the window, night seeping through the glass, through the thin fabric of her gray shirt, her skin. She hugged her knees and rocked, tears coming hard and fast, her body shaking with the cold and the crying. Claire didn’t move, seemed stunned, but Tobias crouched down next to her, cupped his hand under her chin. “Molly?”

“Don’t touch me,” she shouted. “Don’t.”

Louise burst out of the apartment, pushed Tobias aside and, falling to her knees, blanketed Molly with her body. “Go away, both of you.”

“I don’t—”

“Tobias, for once in your life, just leave.” Louise’s eyes looked past him, to Claire. “You see what you’ve done?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You see. She was fine before you showed up here. We were fine.”

“It was only dinner.”

“You bring it all back to her.”

“I—”

“Get out.”

And suddenly Molly was being lifted, her mother stumbling backward with a grunt, shifting Molly up a little higher with a jostle, bracing her fleshy shoulders on the window for support. Too tall for Louise to carry her, Molly leaned against her, stumbling into the apartment, to her bedroom.

“Lie down, baby,” she said.

Molly pushed the blankets aside, crawled into the flannel sheets, her clothes crackling with static electricity, and in the darkened room she saw small sparks of light in between her pants and the bedspread. When she was a child, she’d hide under the covers and try to make the sparks happen. Like fireworks. Like lightning bugs.

Animalia. Arthropoda. Insecta. Coleoptera. Lampyridae.

“Don’t go,” she told her mother.

“I’ll only be a second.”

Louise returned shaking an orange bottle. She pressed down on the lid, turned, bounced two tiny blue pills into her hand. “Sleep. It will go away if you sleep.”

That had always been her mother’s refuge, one or two bitter dots to usher her into forgetfulness. She took them after Molly’s father died. She took them during the long days Molly and Louise rattled around the house—after the tutor and their daily walk and television filled up all the time it could, but there was still more, always more, and nothing left to eat the hours. She took them the days Mick wasn’t around, pleading a migraine and covering her head with a wet washcloth while she stretched out on the couch. She wanted that escape now, too, letting Louise drop the pills into her own hand. Molly popped them into her
mouth, drank the water her mother gave her. “Don’t go,” she said again.

“I won’t.” Her mother lifted the blankets and Molly scooted to the wall, giving Louise room to lie down. And it was like before, wedged in the gully between the paneling and the mattress, but this time Molly fell asleep first.

C
LAIRE
F
EBRUARY
2009

Claire left the museum, Tobias behind her, and they waited outside, huddled under the awning, both silent in their own ways—she completely still, him a mass of facial ticks and joint popping. She didn’t know what they waited for, but neither spoke for several minutes. When the lights in the lobby shut off behind them, Tobias finally asked, “What is going on?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not mine to tell. You need to ask Ha—Molly.”

“Hanna. Molly. What is all this? How do you know her, really?”

“I told you. We lived in the same town, when she was a child.”

“There’s more.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t say anything else.”

Tobias motioned helplessly to the window. “We can’t just leave her in there.”

“Her mother will take care of it.”

“I think her mother’s the problem.”

Her uterus contracted; Claire inhaled a short, wheezy breath. She needed water. Closed her eyes, leaned back against the door and massaged the twinge in her right side. “No. She’s not.”

Tobias looked unconvinced. He peeled off his hat, kneaded it between his hands. “She never leaves, you know.”

“Who?”

“Molly. Or whatever her name is. She never leaves the museum.”

“What are you doing?” she asked. Annoyance oiled her voice.

“Packing,” he said, in that way he had—his way, his only way—the one she hated when she was upset, his tone calm, steady, making her feel flamboyant and neon and out of control.

“Why?”

“We’re leaving in two days. I thought I’d get a start on it.”

“Put them back.”

“What?”

Claire gathered her clothes from the open suitcase, dropped them in the drawer, stuffed them down and shut it. “I can take care of my own things.”

“I can see that. Very well taken care of.” He moved the suitcase to the floor. “Want to talk about it or just throw stuff around?”

“I can’t go.”

Andrew sat on the bed. “Okay. Go where?”

“Home. I can’t leave yet.” She closed her eyes, Hanna’s crumpled face appearing in her mind, repeating Tobias’s words. “She never leaves.”

“Who?”

“Hanna. She never leaves that building.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. It’s what the pizza boy told me. He said Hanna never goes outside. She wouldn’t go with me today. She had this . . . I don’t know, breakdown. She . . . she . . .” Claire flailed her arms. “Andrew, something’s not right. And I can’t go.”

“I can’t stay. I have to be back to work.”

“I know.”

“And Jesse?”

“I can keep him with me.”

“While you’re running around trying to save the world? I don’t think so.”

“Your mother will take him.”

“For how long? A weekend, maybe. She’s too old to do much more than that.”

“Your sister, then.”

“I can ask her. But, Claire . . .” He took her hand, cupping his fingers around hers, like two Js—what he did when he wanted to make her aware he was close.
“This is us, together,”
he had told her the first time he held her hand that way, on their honeymoon night under white hotel linens. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long are you planning to stay?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“What do you know, then? Please tell me, because I seem to be missing something. My wife, who happens to be almost seven months pregnant, doesn’t want to go home with her husband and stepson, but instead plans to hang around a deserted island town to help a stranger, who may not even want to be helped by some woman from her past.”

“She’s not a stranger.”

“Yes she is, Claire. This isn’t the Hanna you knew. This is some other young woman, six years removed from her relationship with you. And you’re not the same person who she met then, either. At least, I thought not.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That we were past all this. That you were done beating yourself up over things you have no control over.”

She shook his hand off, pulled one of her shirts from the drawer. Shook it, trying to flap away the wrinkles, then flattened it on the bed. “I can’t talk to you. You don’t understand,” she said, folding the shoulders and hem toward the middle and then in half again.

“I do understand. That’s what you can’t handle.”

“I shouldn’t be long. A week, maybe two.” She folded a pair of jeans, a sweater. “You won’t even miss me.”

Andrew sighed. “Fine. You do what you need to do.” And he left the room, closing the door tight behind him.

She kept away from the museum for the remaining time Andrew and Jesse stayed in town, a day and a half of awkwardness, Beverly’s knowing eyes following them when they were at the house, Jesse’s kid radar tuned in to the tension. He ate paper when his nerves acted up, and Claire found
herself reminding him to spit the wad of napkin in the trash, gave him chewing gum to keep the pulp consumption to a minimum. When Andrew loaded their half-empty suitcase into their Mercury Mariner, Jesse squeezed Claire around the middle, both of them in Beverly’s living room.

“You’re not getting divorced, are you?”

“Oh, kiddo, of course not,” Claire said, kissing the top of his head.

“Who’ll do school with me?”

“Aunt Sharon will, and you’ll have a great time with your cousins. It’s just a week or so.”

“Promise?”

Claire nodded and squeezed Jesse tight.

When he pulled back—his eyes almost level with hers—she noticed how tall he’d gotten, his jeans short enough that his bare ankles showed above the flip-flops he insisted on wearing—
“I don’t care that it’s winter. It’s the beach.”

She wasn’t tall, could fudge five-three in sneakers, but Lizzy had been statuesque, an inch taller than Andrew, so it was no wonder Jesse grew in his sleep like some magical beanstalk. She certainly didn’t remember him coming up so high on her last week.

“Don’t worry, my love. It won’t be long.”

He nodded. “Call every night, ’kay?”

“I will. I promise.”

Jesse hugged Beverly and dragged his handled backpack down the hall, wheels catching in the fringe of the rug. He pressed the button, pushing the handle down into the case, and picked the bag up instead, pushing the front door open. Andrew met him there, told him to get in the car, and came inside.

“All set,” he said.

“Okay,” Claire said.

He put his hand on the back of her neck, pulled her into his shoulder. “You are a stubborn, stubborn woman.”

“Even if I am, I don’t have half as many flaws as you.”

“That you don’t.”

“Thank you for this.”

“Was there a choice?”

She took both his hands, held them against her stomach as the baby rolled beneath her skin. “You didn’t say no.”

“I would never do that.” He pushed back a little. “That’s not a foot.”

“Backside, I think.”

“Figures,” he said, laughing quietly. “You love me?”

“You know I do.”

“Yeah, but it’s nice to hear every so often.”

Andrew took his hands away from her belly, placed them on either side of her head, squishing her ears. He kissed the bridge of her nose, where it met her forehead, each eyebrow, her mouth, his breath smothered in her cheek. “I love you. I’ll call when I get home.”

“Be safe.”

“Always am.”

And he left, too, and Claire was alone in the living room, watching them drive away through the big picture window. Beverly waited long enough to make it seem like she hadn’t been listening, then, leaning on her metal four-footed cane, shuffled in to join Claire. “Tea?” she asked.

“I think I’m going to lie down.”

“Tired or sad?”

Claire turned to her mother’s friend. Her friend now,
in that strange way children grow up and find their identities as adults in a world that had always seemed foreign to them, forbidden, and then one day at eighteen or twenty-one or thirty are welcomed and expected to call all those people they’d previously known as Mr. and Mrs. by their first names.

It felt almost blasphemous the day she’d first called Ms. Watkins
Beverly
, and even today, almost twenty years later, she sometimes had to stop and think about it. Beverly had never married and had no children of her own, so she loved on Claire and her brothers as if they were worth all the time and attention she lavished on them. She and Claire’s mother had grown up together, dirt poor on adjacent dairy farms in upstate New York; their favorite times together had involved drinking warm milk straight from the cow and swimming in the muddy creek separating their parents’ land.

When Claire’s mother died, Beverly had stepped into the role, dulling the loss. But, after the accident, she hadn’t been there, was recovering from the stroke that weakened the left side of her body. Claire had felt her absence acutely, angrily demanding why God would not only take her children and her marriage, but deny her the comfort of her pseudo-mother, as well.

“Both, I think,” Claire said.

“I can’t help with marriage advice, but I can listen.”

Claire sat, as did Beverly, on the Victorian-inspired sofa in front of the picture window. “Do you remember when I told you about that little girl in Avery Springs? The one who disappeared?”

“Yes, I think so. You went to her home and there was some sort of . . . altercation there. Or had been.”

“That’s it.”

“That was before you and Andrew married, was it not? Is there a reason it’s coming up now?”

Claire sighed. “She’s here. In this town. The teenage girl at the wax museum. It’s her.”

“Oh my.”

“Exactly.”

“And you’re staying because . . . ?”

“Because she needs me.”

“Does she?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you need?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Claire, Claire, Claire. I have known you since you were born, and I see this restlessness in you. You’re looking for something.”

“I have everything I want,” Claire said, shifting her pregnant body on the uncomfortable sofa, the cushions too hard, the back too straight. “Andrew. Jesse. The baby. That’s my life.”

“Then why, my dear, are you still sitting in my house and not with them?”

“The girl, Hanna . . . she’s hurting. I feel like I need to stay and do what I can to help.”

“At what expense?”

“It’s not like that. Andrew understands.”

“That man would throw himself under a bus for you,” Beverly said, lips loose, a string of drool stretching from the corner of her mouth. Claire reached into the pocket of Beverly’s housecoat, found the handkerchief she always kept there, and dabbed. “Thank you, dear.”

“I think God wants me to stay. He brought Hanna into my life once. He brought her again. What are the chances?”

“Then I’m praying for you. All of you.”

“Bev . . . Thank you.” Claire hugged the woman, tucked the hankie back in her pocket. “I need a nap now. And I need to pray, too. I have no idea what to do next.”

“We usually don’t. And that’s usually where God wants us.”