The Air We Breathe (7 page)

“I don’t believe you.”

“What do you know?”

“I know my grandfather has lived his entire life five miles from where he was born, took over his father’s business. My own pops is the same. I don’t want that.” He kneaded the back of his neck. “I got accepted to Cornell as a transfer in the fall.”

“Oh,” Molly said. “That’s not around here, is it?”

“New York.”

“Oh,” she said again, quieter this time. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s good.” He paused. “You could come with me.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“I don’t mean that way. Apply to school there. Or any of the other schools around there. There’s a ton. I’m sure you’d get in to one of them. We could rent a trailer, load up my car, and drive together. You’d know someone. So would I. It would be really great.”

“I’ll probably just do college online.”

“Why?”

“It’s cheaper. And Mom needs me here. To help.”

“She doesn’t, Molly.”

“Yes, she does.”

“No.”

“Tobias, stop. You don’t understand.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Well, you don’t.”

“Then tell me.”

She wanted to. For the first time since that horrible day she wanted to pour out her story to someone who wouldn’t melt with the heat of a butane lighter. But she couldn’t tell
him, not really. He would be horrified—by her past, the lies, the Chamber of Horrors she kept in her head. She would lose the little bit of him she had.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Molly!” He yanked off his hat, dark hair partly matted to his head, partly standing up in greasy spikes. “I don’t know what to do here.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“It’s the truth.”

“It’s not. You know it, and I know it.” Tobias shook his head. “I guess this place has a few secrets after all.”

H
ANNA
S
EPTEMBER
2002

She slept with her mother every night now.

When Hanna had first come home, Susan would tuck her into the twin bed, stroke her hair, and whisper sweet words to her. When her mother tried to leave, Hanna shook and squeezed Susan’s arm until she climbed under the blankets and said, “Baby, I’ll just stay until you fall asleep.” If her mother tried to get up before then, Hanna would whimper and cling some more until, eventually, Susan dozed off and Hanna settled into some half-slumbering state where she was as aware of each house-shifting creak as she was of her own dreams.

It was hot and crowded in the twin bed. Her mother—struck unaware by sleep and missing her father—cemented to Hanna’s back, creeping in closer and closer so Hanna had to move into the crack between the mattress and the wall to get away from her. She liked that cramped space, though,
the wall cool against her, the scent of paint and dust and the memory-foam topper Henry had bought for her—before . . .

When it became clear Hanna wouldn’t be staying alone at night anytime soon, Susan put her to bed in the master bedroom, and they would both fall asleep in the glow of MSNBC.

Hanna was still getting used to the new mother. For eleven years, Hanna had only known the other Susan—the one who was affectionate and attentive, who worked as the curator of the university museum but still always made it to Hanna’s classroom parties and choir concerts. The one who cut her peanut butter sandwiches into hearts and wrote little notes on her napkins to find at lunchtime. The one who bought the Disney Band-Aids instead of the plain tan ones, even though Henry complained it was a marketing ploy and decried consumerism’s effect on society. Her mother would laugh and pull a
Lilo and Stitch
toothbrush from the shopping bag.

The new Susan looked mostly the same, though in past months had taken to pulling out her hair. Sometimes on her head, but mostly on her arms and face; her eyebrows were wide and patchy, and she hardly had eyelashes. She cleaned constantly, moving tornado-like from room to room, scrubbing walls and washing drapes, and cleaning the dust from the piano keys with Q-tips. Hanna had followed her around at first, until one day Susan snapped, “Can’t you find something else to do besides stare at me?” After that, Hanna spent more time in her room alone, even though her mother apologized. Susan spoke to her less, touched her less.
Saw
her less.

And she never, ever laughed.

But neither did Hanna.

They used to giggle all the time, making silly poems about the things they saw, talking in Mary Poppins accents around
her teddy-bear tea parties, teasing Henry about what they called his absentminded professorisms—like shutting his car keys in the refrigerator or forgetting his shoes under the seat of the airplane when he’d taken them off while flying to Toronto.

Dr. Diane said the laughs would find their way back. Maybe sooner, if Hanna would talk.

She wasn’t not speaking on purpose. She tried sometimes, but the letters jumbled and their pointy edges stuck in her lungs, because even though the words were in her head, the sounds came from her chest, her diaphragm quivering up and down, trying to push them out. She felt them all the time, though, all the unspoken words lumped together and filling her up. Dr. Diane said she might explode if she didn’t talk. Hanna believed her.

It had been four months almost since her father died. She couldn’t remember much about the two weeks she’d been held captive. She vaguely recalled her escape but had clear pictures of being in the hospital after she was found. The aides had restrained her with thick Velcro after she tried to bite the nurse with the big nose. Despite being older than Hanna’s mother, that nurse moved faster than the young one in the Mickey Mouse shirt. Hanna managed to gouge some skin out of her cheek when she stuck in an IV needle. Several pairs of hands held Hanna down while others strapped cuffs on her arms and legs, and then the big-nosed nurse gently slid a syringe into her upper arm—it didn’t hurt at all, not even a pinch, unlike the IV, which had felt like a dull nail hammered into her vein—and shushed her softly.

Not long after, Hanna became all rubbery and soft. She wanted to wipe her eyes, but being tied to the bed, she could
only wiggle her fingers. She tried to picture them growing long, curving up to her face so she could wipe away the sleepiness, though the image did nothing to satisfy her itch.

She didn’t want to close her eyes.
They
might come for her.

She had twisted her wrists in the restraints until her skin stung. It kept her from dozing off.

Hanna’s wrists. Hanna’s wrists. I love to scratch Hanna’s wrists.

She remembered the curtains being drawn around her bed, but the big-nosed nurse hadn’t pulled them until they met in the middle, so Hanna could peek through the window into the hallway. Then she heard the door open, and her mother yanked one side of the curtain. Susan wrapped herself around her daughter’s body, kissed her hair, her forehead. When she realized Hanna hadn’t hugged back, she looked down, tore open the restraints.

Hanna still didn’t lift her arms.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s going to be okay.”

Her mother looked like her mother but smaller, as if all her bones had shrunk while Hanna was gone, and her skin—too brown from the tanning salon already—had wrinkled in with deep creases. Her eyes were deeper in her head; if they sunk back any more, she’d lose them in her skull.

After Susan came, there had been questions from police officers and doctors she didn’t answer. There had been X rays and blood work and a physical exam. And there had been that
other
exam, with her feet in the stirrups—like the women having babies on television—and the white sheet over her legs, and the hawk-nosed nurse poking around
down there
while her mother had held her hand and silently wept.

“Morning, baby,” Susan said, waking, hugging her too
quickly against her blouse—she’d fallen asleep in her clothes. “Breakfast?”

Hanna nodded.

“Meet you downstairs.”

Hanna scurried to her own bedroom, put on socks and a pair of leggings under her nightgown. Then she wriggled into a sweater, the nightgown falling like a skirt from her waist to knees. In the kitchen she found a bowl of Lucky Charms with milk. Before, her mother would never buy sugar cereal, except once a year for camping trips; then she let Hanna have those little boxes with Fruit Loops and Frosted Flakes, the ones where her father cut back the flaps and Hanna ate right out of the box.

“You don’t see Diane today,” her mother said, shaking coffee into the maker. “I thought we could bake cookies. Or we could try a walk again.”

Hanna scooped some cereal onto a fork, was lifting it to her mouth when someone pounded on the front door. She jerked, the soggy marshmallows jumping onto the table, sticking to the front of her sweater. Susan tensed, too. When the knock came a second time, she told Hanna, “Wait here,” and went to the door, where Hanna could see the shadow of a person behind the white cotton panel covering the long glass pane.

Her mother moved the curtain aside, then unlocked the chain and dead bolt.

“Mrs. Suller, how are you this morning?” Detective Woycowski said.

Susan relocked the door after the detective stepped inside. “Fine. Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, I’m good. I was hoping I could talk to you for a moment. Privately. And then maybe to Hanna, too.”

“You’ve found something.”

“Maybe.”

“I wish you would have called.” Her mother looked at Hanna, sighed, and directed the officer to the room that used to be her father’s study. “Give me a minute.”

Back in the kitchen, Susan ran water over her hands and combed her fingers through her hair, used the pads of her thumbs to wipe the crusted sleep from the corners of her eyes. She tucked her blouse into her jeans and wiped a napkin over her teeth. “Finish your cereal,” she told Hanna.

And Hanna waited, listening to the cloudy murmurs from the study, behind the pocket doors, low at first, then her mother’s voice louder and tenser. Finally footsteps in the hallway, and the detective came in with Susan. He sat in the chair next to Hanna. “How are you today?”

She mixed her Lucky Charms around.

“Hanna, your mom and I were talking, and I’d like to show you some pictures again?”

Hanna swallowed. She churned the cereal faster. A tingling swept over her, like she was being washed in tiny red-hot stingers, starting at her feet and working upward, to her stomach, chest, face. She’d been stung by a wasp once; it felt like that all over. She nodded again, because she had to, because her mother was looking at her, wanting her to.

The last time she’d looked at Detective Woycowski photos was two weeks after she’d been released from the hospital. Two weeks after her escape. He had come into her bedroom, sat on her bed next to her, his weight causing her to dip toward him, and showed her six pictures. She recognized the one in the uppermost left-hand corner.
Fat Guy.
Her eyes had snapped to Detective Woycowski, and he nodded.
“I know you see him, and I know you were able to escape when he had a heart attack. It’s hard, Hanna, but please, just point.”

Hanna had touched Fat Guy’s face with the tips of her first three fingers.

“That’s a brave girl,” the detective said, and left the room with Susan. The door still open, Hanna had heard them clearly, her mother cursing Fat Guy, whose uncle was a professor at the same university at which her father had taught. It was the uncle’s apartment where they had kept Hanna; the neighbor had reported an odd smell and the police found Fat Guy, also known as Bobby Bailey, or Bogus to his friends. Residents at the apartment had also noticed at least two other men coming and going, though no one had paid close enough attention to describe them much past male and white and in their twenties or thirties.

“We’ll keep searching,” the detective had promised Susan. “Maybe when she starts talking . . .” And the twisted feeling in her chest, the one that felt like her lungs were being wrung out like the dish towel her mother used to wash their van, had slowly tightened. They didn’t know about Thin Man or Short One, but were looking for them.

She wasn’t gonna tell.

Susan now took the fork from her. She fisted her hands, pressed them hard against the woven sisal place mat. Detective Woycowski gently moved her bowl to the center of the table, replaced it with a sheet of paper. “Okay, Hanna, just look at these pictures, and if you see one of someone you know, point to it.”

Help me, Gee.

She scrunched her eyes shut, opened one with the tiniest
slit, seeing blurry faces through her eyelashes. She opened her lid a little wider, focusing on each face. Shook her head.

She didn’t recognize anyone.

“That’s okay, sweetie. You did fine,” the detective said. He went back to the office with Susan, and Hanna heard her mother’s raised, frustrated voice and the placating tones of the police officer. Hanna picked the marshmallows from her bowl, pressing her pointer finger into each wet clover and diamond and rainbow; they stuck, and she licked them into her mouth.

The front door opened and closed, then her father’s study door. The blue numbers on the microwave changed—first five minutes passing, then ten. Hanna left the soggy cereal on the table and went to her bedroom. She lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Eventually her mother would be in to check on her. How long that would take, she didn’t know. Every day the space between her and Susan grew. Her mother hated the silence, couldn’t bake enough cookies and deadhead enough perennials to make the hours go by fast enough. Hanna—her wordlessness, her phobias—kept Susan a prisoner in her own home.

Hanna covered her eyes with her forearm, pinching a nerve somewhere in her shoulder. Her fingers went numb first, and then the pins and needles began marching their way up her hand, past her wrist, her elbow.

Finally her mother came in and said, “Get your sneaks on, baby.”

She had to use her other arm to lift the numb one off her head; it flopped like one of those rubber chickens magicians sometimes have. Well, at least the comic ones.

Hanna reached out with her big toe and kicked at her
sneakers—white with a green swoosh and tied with green glitter laces. She had yet to wear them out of the house. Her mother had bought them on clearance, a seventy-dollar pair for fifteen, and had pulled them out of the storage bin soon after Hanna returned from the hospital, hoping they would entice Hanna to walk outside. Susan was a fiendish bargain shopper, even though it had never been a financial necessity.

Hanna’s mother looked looser as she came into the room, all the tiny, tense muscles in her body suddenly letting down their guard. Her face sagged a bit more; her shoulders fell forward. She tried smiling as she picked up Hanna’s sneakers. “Come on. It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Let’s take a walk around the block, okay?”

Hanna didn’t want to go outside and considered dropping in a heap at the front door as she’d done on other occasions her mother wanted her to leave the house. But something in her mother’s eyes made her pause—caged-animal look. Hanna had seen it before when her second grade class had taken a trip to a local animal show and the tiger paced back and forth in its enclosure, bumping against the bars and snorting.

If she didn’t go willingly, she knew her mother would drag her out.

Kin. She’s kin to me.

She loved that word.
Kin.
So tidy and easy to say; she didn’t have to move her mouth at all, just give her tongue a little flick and breathe out. They’d been reading a book of Greek myths in Ms. Watt’s class and come across the word in a story. “That means family,” the teacher had said. Hanna wrote the word on a strip of paper and folded it into her pocket, along with
squeamish
and
cyclops
. And after a week of Hanna calling all her relatives kin this and kin that, her
mother had finally said, “Cut it out. You’re driving me nuts with your
Little House on the Prairie
talk.”