The Air We Breathe (19 page)

M
OLLY
M
ARCH
2009

Molly was careful not to jangle the hangers in the office closet, and with movements as smooth and precise as neurosurgery she slipped on her mother’s long wool peacoat, drowning her thin frame. She wrapped a scarf three times around her neck and pulled it up over her mouth, breathing into it until it became damp. “My mom’s,” she told Claire when she stepped back into the lobby. “I don’t have a jacket. Haven’t needed one.”

“It’s not that cold out there.”

“I’m always cold.”

Claire held the front glass door open; Molly waited at the threshold, closed her eyes. She inched her foot over the metal frame, feeling around, as if looking for a drop-off or a step down. Her breath wheezed in the back of her throat, but she brought her other leg forward, stood outside for a minute, eyes still scrunched closed. “It’s all spinning.”

“Take your time.”

She noticed the air first, how it felt in her throat, cold and raspy, like the salt from the ocean had been taken up into the sky, and she breathed in the grittiness of it, scraping down into her lungs. The world was gray around her—the sky, the clouds, the water, even the sand. She wanted to run back into the museum, to grab the bright red knit hat Mick had given her for Christmas last year, the one she knew he bought at Dollar General as an afterthought. She wanted color out here. She wanted something vibrant to focus on, something to remind her of who she used to be. But Claire took her arm and crossed the street with her, then let her go, starting down the steps to the beach. “Coming?” she asked.

Molly nodded. She didn’t want to be alone so followed Claire down the stone stairs, her bare hand on the wooden banister, smoothed by years of other hands sliding over it.

Gloves would have been a good idea, too.

Claire waited for her at the bottom, where the steps turned to gravel, and they followed the path past the cement barriers placed at the road’s end, the yellow-and-black-striped reflectors a warning for cars to stop before careening down the rocky embankment into the sea. And then the gravel gave way to sand, to uncertainty. There was nothing more uncertain than the path of a grain of sand. It might be taken up by the wind, carried away in the tread of a shoe, in a dog’s paw. Shoveled into a bucket and moved down the beach. Clutched by the waves and carried . . . well, wherever the water went when it left the shore. As her feet sunk into the granules, she pictured the sand holding her there. She wanted to be held there.

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can,” Claire said. She took Molly’s elbow and tugged.

The sand shifted under her feet, into her sneakers. She had to think about walking, told her legs to move.
Why am I out here?
She trembled, everything so wide open. No, she needed to be kept inside. Caged.

“A safe place,”
Thin Man had told her.

“Claire, I need to go back. I need to.” The tears came now, the shaking.

“No. Not yet. You’re so close.”

“I’m out here. It’s enough. Please.”

“Just touch the water.”

“I can’t.”

Claire took her gently by the shoulders. “You know He helped you escape, Hanna. Do you think He did that so you could lock yourself up somewhere else?”

Help me, Gee.

She still found herself calling Him that sometimes, like a child’s pet name for her older brother, created when she couldn’t quite form the letters of the real name. Sometimes those names stuck forever. Did God consider the name sacrilegious? She didn’t mean disrespect at all. She meant it in love, because it reminded her of the time she needed Him and He answered. She asked herself sometimes why He didn’t answer her prayers like that anymore, with immediacy, with clarity and theatrics. And then she answered her own question.

She had stopped expecting Him to.

Without realizing it, Molly had convinced herself she was only allowed one miracle. She’d used up her allotment and didn’t deserve any more. That preacher, that day, had said if people didn’t ask, they wouldn’t get. Molly didn’t know how
to be afraid then, afraid of
not
getting. But once she had gotten, then she knew it was possible. And if she asked and her prayer wasn’t answered, then surely it meant she’d fallen out of God’s favor. She couldn’t handle that. She couldn’t take the risk of trusting and having that faith be broken. If He didn’t answer, maybe it meant she was as bad as she thought she was.

It was easier to trust with nothing on the line.

“Okay,” Molly said. “The water. I can do that.”

“He’ll help you.”

She focused her eyes on the waves, listening to the sound they made as they leaped toward the shore, thundering like a herd of wild gray stallions, jumping and rolling and frothing. Just five yards. Each step brought chest pain, and she recalled the story of
The Little Mermaid
, not the sanitized Disney story, but the original, where the mermaid was given her legs but it felt as if she walked on scissors, her feet bleeding. The pain had been worth it to her, for her chance at love, of gaining an eternal soul, instead of ceasing to exist in the sea foam.

“I’m dizzy.”

“Close your eyes. It might help. I’ll guide you,” Claire said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Try.”

She forced her lids together, covered them with one hand. Claire took the other, her hand warm against Molly’s skin, and walked. Molly had to move or fall over from the tugging. It did help, reducing the huge outside world to only a sound—the ocean—and a sensation—the wind over her face. The rest was blackness, and the dark never scared her. No one could find her there.

Claire stopped.

“We’re here.”

Opening her eyes, Molly looked down first, her feet on the packed sand, the surf just brushing the rubber toe of one sneaker. Then she looked out, at the ocean, at all its vastness. It had been more than four years since she’d been down to the beach, that last time with her mother, who had somehow lured her from the museum with a picnic lunch, though she remembered how she had kept looking over her shoulder, stuffing the chicken-salad sandwich in her mouth as quickly as she could so she could get home all the sooner.

“It’s so big.” Without thinking, she bent down and put her hand in the water. It stung, like ice, but she held it there until her fingers numbed. She touched them to her lips, tasted the salt, thought of the day she tasted another forbidden water, the holy water at Katie’s church, the day she saw Jesus for the first time as a man, not a life-sized plastic baby in the Nativity scene outside St. Catherine’s every winter. She had forgotten the saltiness was so strong.

She kicked off one shoe, balanced on her left foot, and stripped off the sock, too, cramming it under the laces so it wouldn’t blow away. Stood with her bare foot in the air, like a crane, and then slowly stepped into the wet sand. It enveloped her foot in a clammy cast, and the water slid down into the divot her footprint made, filling the spaces around her toes. She sucked the air between her teeth.

“That’s cold.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Claire said. “Roll up your pants. Let’s walk a little more, if you want.”

Molly nodded. She stripped off her other sneaker and sock and cuffed her jeans to her knees. Claire didn’t remove hers, stayed in the dry places, but Molly kept moving closer to the water, until the waves bit at her ankles, her calves. She focused
on one feeling at a time. The wet. The cold. The shivering air. The almost pavement-like firmness of the tide-packed sand; she stomped down to make a footprint in it.

And then she started running. She couldn’t say why. The thought didn’t pop into her head to run. It just happened, her legs extending as far as they could—she felt the muscles stretching, tearing almost, in her thighs—and her arms pumping, urging her forward. And then she was at the rocks, climbing them, slabs of metamorphic-derived sandstone that looked so much like petrified logs the tourists all took photos in disbelief. She felt her lungs swell with an exertion she hadn’t experienced in years and gasped at the grayness around her, her mouth dry, her cheeks hot. She brushed her frozen feet over the little patches of yellowish seaweed. The little girl had run here with her kite into the sea, the rocks forming a natural jetty of sorts. But Molly could go no farther. And, as she stood with her hands clasped behind her head, she heard someone say her name.

Tobias was there, off a little ways, at the bottom of the rocks, knee-deep in the water. He wore a wet suit, a surfboard under his arm.

“You’re crazy,” she told him.

“You’re out,” he said.

She was embarrassed, like he had seen her naked. In a way she was, no longer wearing the walls of the museum. He looked at her lovingly, the way her father had peered at his most prized Lepidoptera, the Madagascan sunset moth, its gorgeous wings shifting from blue to gold-green to yellow and fuchsia as the viewing angle changed. The wings were pigmentless, the rainbow a refraction of light on its ribbon-like scales.

She had the color she had been looking for now, in her memory. In her father.

Tobias anchored his board between some stones and climbed up to her.

“I thought I was hallucinating from the cold when I saw you.”

Molly poked the lichens with her toe. “I came out with Claire.”

“Now you don’t have any excuses. About going places with me, I mean.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

He smiled. “No, I guess not.”

“Walk me home?”

“Do you have to go back right this instant?”

She glanced around. Her pants were wet, sticking to her legs, her skin tightening in gooseflesh. The waves suddenly sounded louder, menacing. And she was so high up. “I think, maybe, I do,” she said, tugging at her hair.

“Ayuh,” he said. He peeled off his wet suit and stood for a moment shivering in his swim trunks. Giving her a quick smile, he pulled on his clothes and then held out his arm to her. “Take my hand?”

She looked at it, hesitated, and oh, part of her was ready to grab on to him. But that part couldn’t eclipse her past. “Not today.”

He nodded, and they climbed down the rocks together, Molly concentrating, praying, not with words but with her body, each step a praise, a relinquishing of her fears to God. And then Claire came up on the other side of her. They retraced their steps, sand, then gravel, then street, Molly’s eyes on the window of the museum, the huge painted letters.
And then she was there, and inside, and she breathed back in all the familiarity.

It felt so good.

“Okay?” Claire asked.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Really, really.”

A noise in the office doorway. Louise, clearing her throat, standing against the jamb and backlit from a lamp on the desk behind her. “Mom?”

“I cooked.” Her mother’s voice cracked.

“Can Claire stay? And Tobias?”

“Mick is coming, should be here any minute. Put on something”—Louise glanced at her sandy feet—“dry. And sweep up that mess you dragged in.”

“I will,” Molly said as her mother closed the office door.

“I’ll help,” Tobias said, but she shook her head.

“It’s fine. I got it. I’ll see you later.”

“Tonight?”

She laughed a little. “Tomorrow. Maybe.”

“I’ll be here,” he said. Now he took a turn scuffing the toes of his boots in the wayward sand. “I’m glad I saw you today.”

“Me too.”

He opened the door. No cackle. Looked up at the silent speaker. “‘Ding, dong the witch is dead,’” he said. “Nothing to hold you in here anymore, Moll.”

Molly watched him jog across the street, hands in his pockets, hem of his jeans matted under the soles of his boots. She felt a smile tiptoe to her mouth, tried to hide it by rolling her lips together, but Claire noticed and said, “He’s a keeper.”

“Yeah.”

Tobias turned and waved before disappearing into the pizzeria.

She waved back. Then she looked at the closed office door, and heaviness pressed down on her shoulders again. “I’m sorry about my mom. She—”

“No apologies. You and I both understand. It’s okay. More than okay.”

Claire wrapped her arms around her, pulled her as close as the pregnant belly would allow. This time Molly squeezed back. “Thank you.”

“Ice cream next time,” Claire said. “And maybe a short walk down the road. There’s someone I really want you to meet.”

And then Claire left, and Molly took off her pants to keep the sand from spreading, buttoning the coat to wear as a temporary dress, dropping the scarf on the front desk. She vacuumed the dirt instead of sweeping—knowing from years of tourists that dustpans and brooms did little to remedy the sandy floor—and wrapped her jeans in a plastic bag before carrying them through the apartment to the laundry. Then she joined Louise and Mick for supper.

H
ANNA
D
ECEMBER
2002

They stayed with Aunt Serrie and her family through Christmas.

Hanna thought of it as a vacation, even though Susan bought workbooks at Borders for Hanna to do school—one for math, one for social studies, one for language arts. She also bought a science encyclopedia and a Webster’s college dictionary, though Uncle Charlie had both on the bookshelves in the living room. Hanna did two or three pages each day, watched the Discovery Channel, wrote out her multiplication tables, and copied entries from the encyclopedia, drawing pictures to go along with it. She focused on the insects because they grounded her in the past, in a home and a family with a dad and mom, a hope and a future. When Susan saw the drawings, she turned away, told Hanna she had dust in her eye. And when her cousins came home, Hanna ran around with them, playing, laughing even. She learned to drive the mini-snowmobile and built Lego empires.

Her mother used the time to “get things in order.” She put the house in Avery Springs on the market, and when Hanna protested, she held up her hand like a traffic cop.
Stop. I don’t want to hear it
. And Hanna didn’t bother trying to argue. Susan also sold the van. Hanna woke one morning to an engine purring in the driveway; she tried to picture her mother’s red Windstar in her head, but it wouldn’t come. She snuck over to the window, floorboards frigid on her bare feet, and pulled aside the denim curtain. A dusky gray car sat below, wipers swishing back and forth, with a delay in the middle, swatting away flakes of fat, blue snow. Swish. One-one thousand. Two-one thousand. Three-one thousand. Swish.

The engine stopped, and her mother stepped from the driver’s door, Uncle Charlie from the passenger side. They disappeared beneath the house’s overhang. Footfalls on the porch steps. A slammed door. Murmurs. Hanna jumped back under the sheets, chilled from being exposed to the attic air, turned on her side and pulled her feet up so she could rub them. Her heels were rougher than the rest of her skin. She picked at one hard spot, her thumbnail clicking against it.

There were murmurs all the time. Adult conversation. Plenty of “Go play in your rooms until we call you.” But there was also Christmas, with Aunt Serrie’s brined turkey and sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes, homemade cranberry compote, green beans with rosemary and garlic. And yeast rolls—the kind Hanna loved, crust glazed with butter and slightly sweet. They watched
Miracle on 34th Street
and
It’s a Wonderful Life
and
A Christmas Story
. Susan gave her a Timex watch with a stretchy purple band and a button that made it glow green in the dark. A butterfly ticked around the face on a clear disk as a second hand.

Hanna gave her mother a tiny bottle of Miss Dior—Uncle Charlie took her out to buy it—this time wrapping it herself. She tied her own gift tag to it, made from an old holiday card; she cut out the picture of Santa wearing a candle wreath on his head, used Aunt Serrie’s scrapbooking scissors to scallop the edges, and wrote a note on the plain white back.
Mom, I love you. Hanna-Bee.
Susan opened the gift and tried not to cry.

“My favorite,” she said.

“I didn’t forget.”

“No, you didn’t.” And she dabbed a bit of the liquid behind her ears. “Your daddy taught you well.”

It all went away the next day.

Hanna and the boys played video games in the family room, and the doorbell rang. Liam pushed the woven curtains aside to peek, and shouted, “Mom, some guy’s at the door.”

Aunt Serrie walked past the room and called in, “Mute that for a minute. I can’t hear myself think.” And as Paul turned the sound off, she opened the front door and asked, “Can I help you?”

“Yes, good morning. I’m looking for Susan Suller.”

“I’m sorry. Who are you?”

“I’d rather tell that to Mrs. Suller directly.”

“You have the wrong house.”

“I know she’s here, Mrs. Foulton. I just want to speak to her. I’m with the
Avery Springs Register
—”

The man’s voice disappeared in the slamming of the door. “Go upstairs,” Aunt Serrie said. “Now.”

The boys hesitated. So did Hanna.

“Now,” she said again, clapping her hands.

They scrambled upstairs, Paul herding the younger two into the room they shared, nodding at Hanna as she paused on
the landing. After Aunt Serrie passed into the kitchen, Hanna crept back down to the hallway and scrambled back to the family room, through to the laundry room, which also had a toilet, sink, and two doors; the second opened to the kitchen.

She breathed quietly, slipped into the space between the dryer and the wall, and listened.

“A reporter?” Susan’s voice.

“That’s what he said.” Aunt Serrie.

“We can’t stay here any longer.”

“Sue, just think for a minute—”

“I am,” her mother said, voice firm and jittery at the same time. “If he found us, that means anyone can.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“She’s not your daughter.” A sigh. A sniffle. “I’m sorry. But we have to go.”

They left the next morning. Aunt Serrie gave her a hug. Uncle Charlie, too. And her mother pushed her through the door, down the snowy steps and into the old-new car; it smelled like French fries and a musty garage, neither covered by the evergreen-tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

“Buckle,” Susan said.

“It’s cold.”

“Small car. It will heat up quick.” Her mother turned around in the driveway, drove slowly onto the snow-slicked road but skidded as she accelerated.

Hanna wriggled her knees up into her coat, only her toes exposed, and her head and hands, stayed that way until pins and needles filled her feet. Stretched out, keeping her legs as
still as she could; each pothole bounced her boots, shocking her with tingles that made her want to laugh and cry all at the same time. Finally her feet felt normal again. She stuffed her legs back beneath her jacket. “Where are we going now?”

Susan didn’t answer.

They drove for two hours and stopped at a Walmart to buy groceries and hair dye and scissors. Then they checked into a motel north of Boston. Susan cut Hanna’s hair to her chin and colored it brown; she cried while Susan hacked away—skinny, silent tears sliding down her face from one eye only, each one using the same path, each one traveling a bit faster than the last, like sleds in the snow.

“It will grow back,” Susan said, covering Hanna’s head in the plastic cap and using a gloved finger to rub a bit of dye into her eyebrows. She colored her own hair, too, the same shade, number fifty-eight, medium golden brown. “Now we match.”

The Travelodge only had doors and staircases on the outside, each room opening out to a sidewalk or a balcony, depending on whether it was on the first or second floor. Theirs was on the second, right next to the soda machine, number 217. It had a key with a turquoise tag attached to it, longer than Hanna’s hand, the number printed on the plastic. It looked like 2 7, the 1 so faded she could only see it if she looked really, really hard in the light, and even then she probably was imagining the shadow. All the other hotels she’d ever stayed in had had those credit-card keys that were swiped in the door, making the green light blink and the lock open with a
chink
.

Their room was the Sleepy Bear Den, light blue curtains and double bedspreads printed with clouds and a cartoon
bear dressed as a porter and doing various childhood activities. The carpet was plush green, the bathroom had no tub, just a stand-up shower—which was fine with Hanna because she didn’t take baths anymore. They reminded her of the bath Short One had given her.

There was a little kitchen area with a microwave, tiny refrigerator, and table for two. It had two Bibles in the nightstand drawer, both bigger than the Bible she took from Claire’s church, which Hanna had to leave behind—stuck under the couch—when they fled their house. She thought the police might have found it, if they searched the house, like they sometimes did in the movies, overturning furniture and poking in all those secret places.

The motel Bibles had bigger print, too, which she liked, and they had more stories. But the pages were the same, thin and crinkly. Both had an Old Testament to go along with the New one. But one of them had a hard, slick cover with flowers on it and was easier to read, without all the
eth
endings and with very few words she had had to look up in the dictionary. Most of the time she didn’t even bother but did what Ms. Holiday had called making an educated guess. She figured this was okay since it was a schoolish thing to do.

Inside the cover, someone had written:

God says, “Thou shall not steal.”

But we want you to take this book!!!!!

It can change your life. If it does, let us know, please.

Write to P.O. Box 1286, Colorado Springs, CO 80906

So she took it, and started reading the Old Testament. She sometimes started at the beginning with the creation, with Seth and Noah and Abraham and all those men who kept
having more sons. Sometimes she hopped around and started reading, and if she liked it she found the beginning of the book or at least the story. The battles and rules and lists of names bored her, but she enjoyed the girl stories about Ruth and Esther, and even Sarah.

Every day since she had gotten the New Testament from Claire’s church, she had read about Jesus, just a little part, and it was easy to find because all His words were in red ink. And before going to sleep, she’d said the prayer Jesus told people to pray, since she didn’t know any others, and He said it was good to do what He commanded, anyway.

“If you love me, keep my commandments.”

She wasn’t sure about that, the loving part. How did she love someone she didn’t know or had never met, who was floating in heaven—wherever that was. In the sky? That’s what the movies always showed. And what did the love feel like?

With her daddy, it had been warm and snuggly and secure, a hug and a whiff of his aftershave, the scratch of his mustache. With her mother, it was more messy, sort of like a Rubik’s Cube, but without a doubt Susan would do whatever necessary to keep Hanna protected. She showed that, right in front of Hanna’s eyes; with one action she surrendered everything for her daughter. But Jesus . . . ? Well, Hanna kept saying, over and over, “Help me. Help me,” the way she had the day Fat Guy died. And Jesus, who made promise after promise about asking and helping and giving, seemed to do nothing—not like before.

Except maybe it wasn’t nothing.

Hanna didn’t know how to explain it, except in the words of Genesis from the easy-to-read Bible.
“The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
That was how she felt, like
He was hovering over them all the time, guarding them, and when she doubted—when her mother was out and she was all alone, listening to the noise in the street below, the creak of the bedsprings, the phantom sounds that seemed to have no reason to exist, other than to frighten her—that gentle pressure settled on her and she did all she could to push back into it.

Perhaps that was love, to a child. The parent guarded, the child recognized that guardianship, trusted in it, a blind faith eventually outgrown. In that sense, she did love Jesus. She began writing out the commandments she found, numbering them, so she would remember them all, keeping the list folded up and tucked in the safest place she knew, taped to the underside of the dresser drawer.

They spent a week in that motel near Boston, her mother collecting apartment-finder magazines and classifieds in the newspaper. Susan used her laptop to search for jobs in the area, ones that would pay well but also allow some measure of anonymity. She considered traveling down to Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Then one day her mother shook her awake, early. “Baby, get up.”

“What’s wrong?” Hanna pawed at her eyes in that uncoordinated morning way, limbs still numb with sleep.

“Nothing. But I think I found us a place. A good place we can stay.”

“In Boston?”