Chapter 1
Hannah sat at one of the tables in the back room of the restaurant doing her least favorite side job at Bella Via: prying the bases of melted candles out of the votives that sat on every table using a butter knife. She’d chop at the wax and try to wiggle the knife along the edge the way that Jennifer, her waitressing idol, had shown her, but she could never achieve that easy pop that she had seen Jennifer perform with the knife, the disk of wax coming out neatly in one piece.
As she worked, her mind returned again to the conversation she’d had with her landlord, Mr. Harris, that morning. She still couldn’t believe it. She felt as if she had been slapped, a hand flying at her face out of the blue.
He called her and that had been the first clue that something was up, as he usually walked across the lawn from the big house where he and Mrs. Harris lived, stopping by for a quick visit about some small favor they needed or to let her know about something that was going on at their house, a party or a group of workmen who would be on the property doing renovations. Often, it was to see what new improvement she had made on the old carriage house that she rented from them on their property in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“Hello, Hannah! How are you doing? Well?” Mr. Harris’s voice took a minute to recognize over the phone.
“Uh, oh! Great! Thanks! And you?”
“Fantastic! We’re very excited. Ginny is graduating from Colgate – a little behind schedule, but with honors. We’re very proud of her.”
Hannah had heard occasionally of their youngest daughter, Ginny, a child that had come late to the couple when they were well into their mid-forties. While their youngest was just finishing college, their two much older sons were married with school-age children and settled in Boston, Massachusetts and Boulder, Colorado respectively. She had often seen Ginny in passing when she was home for a visit, roaring by in her Jeep on the road near the house, straight brown hair flying. They had been formally introduced at the Harris’s Christmas open house this last December, Ginny smiling dutifully while Mrs. Harris rhapsodized about the improvements Hannah had made on the carriage house.
“That’s wonderful! Congratulations!” Hannah said into the phone while turning and walking to a window to look at her garden. Once a thicket of weeds and brambles, the area was now a carefully tended cottage garden filled with colorful flowers and enclosed by a new white-painted picket fence.
What favor would it be this time? Watch the house and feed their cat while they went away? Babysit for the grandchildren while the family was in town to celebrate Ginny’s graduation? Whatever it was, it would be worth it. The Harris’s charged her a very low rent in return for an on-site all-around helper who also happened to be willing to fix up their little outbuilding which had been literally disintegrating when Hannah moved in, the roof bowed, the walls falling in.
“Thank you! We’re going to have a big celebration, and of course, we’d love to have you join us. Nan was thinking of a big barbecue here at the house.”
“Sounds great! I’d love to come,” Hannah said, waiting.
Mr. Harris paused and said, “There’s something else I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. Do you have a minute?”
“Of course! What’s up?”
He cleared his throat and said, “Well, we were thinking. Now that you’re engaged, you’re probably planning on moving in with your fiancé, correct?”
Fiancé. Would she ever get used to the idea? She glanced at the 2-carat emerald cut diamond on her left hand and then looked away. “Moving in? Ah, I wasn’t really thinking about it yet. You know, we haven’t even set a date, and-“
“Oh, but we thought most engaged couples lived together these days?”
Living with Daniel? In the city? And leaving her precious little house? She’d worked so hard on it…and, oh, it was weird to even think about not being alone, having to be with someone all the time. All that forced conversation and togetherness. God! “I’m probably going to stay here, for now anyway. Daniel and I haven’t even talked about where we’d live when we do get married. Who knows what we’re doing? Ha! Maybe we’ll live here!”
There was a pause, and then Mr. Harris said, “There, in that little place? The two of you?”
No, she couldn’t imagine that either. She didn’t want to think about it right now. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s too small. Well, we’ll figure it out when the time comes.”
Mr. Harris sighed. “That’s the thing. We…ah, Ginny was planning on coming back home, but we already made her bedroom into a guest room. She kept talking about living in the city when she graduated, so we were sure we lost her for good. Anyway, we were thinking…maybe the carriage house might be available, since you’re getting married and everything. It would be perfect for Ginny. Close enough so we can know she’s safe, far enough so she feels independent. You know how hard it is for parents to let go of their little girl.”
No, she didn’t. The door had practically slammed on her butt on the way out when she left home at eighteen. And her little house! The pile of rubble she’d turned into a home! Hours of work: replacing the peeling linoleum in the kitchen with tiles, sanding and painting the new walls, putting fresh shingles on the roof herself after the roofer had handled the structural work. She made nice with a general contractor in New Canaan who let her scavenge at his construction sites, and found many things including a beautiful mahogany front door was well as a pretty pale blue porcelain pedestal sink, all tossed aside at the multiple construction sites in the area where they were doing a tear-downs in order to build more McMansions.
What was the worst was that Mr. Harris knew exactly how much hard work and tender care she’d put into the house. Her life was that little house and her writing. How could he? But the carriage house was his, it was on his property, and it was his daughter, so what was Hannah supposed to say?
“I…I wish I knew what my plans were. Um, can I get back to you?” Hannah had said finally after she realized how long the silence had stretched out, and got off the phone as quickly as she could. Now, she wished she had been more firm. No! If it wasn’t for her, that house wouldn’t even be livable, just a pile of rotten wood. They wouldn’t even be considering letting their darling oh-so-perfect daughter live there! Hannah jabbed at the wax in the votive she was cleaning, her lips clenched in a tight line.
Her tips from the lunch shift had been awful. Between it being a slow lunch in late August when every self-respecting Greenwichite was in Nantucket or the Hamptons or abroad and the fact that the few tables she had gotten were tightwad types who gave exactly fifteen percent to the penny on a lunch bill that wasn’t much to start with as they had been drinking water and hadn’t ordered appetizers or dessert, she had made less than $15. To top off her bad day, she had an Advil-resistant headache that meant her period was coming and, even worse, her least-favorite manager, Josephine, was working.
Josephine hated Hannah on sight. In fact, if Hannah had walked into Bella Via two years before looking for waitressing work when Josephine was on duty, Hannah wouldn’t have gotten the job. Hannah didn’t understand why Josephine harbored such an instant and endless animosity toward her, but it was there.
Luckily, Hannah had walked in when the owner, Manuel, was there and he had the opposite reaction to her. He had the pure red hots for her, so instead she had been hired on the spot and had gotten almost all of the good high-paying dinner shifts – rarely working the poor-paying lunch shifts and managing to wiggle out of the slave-labor runner shifts by begging Manny to take them off of her schedule.
“Do you know how rare it is to have blue eyes and dark hair?” he had asked the first time he met her, his eyes sweeping over her again and again.
Hannah had noticed since she’d hit puberty when her figure started filling out, that suddenly the pairing of her blue eyes and dark brown hair was something men commented on. It was a look that was subtle and seemed to appeal mostly to men with brown eyes. Sometimes she liked the attention, but other times men like Manny made her feel alarmed, protective of herself.
Hannah put down the knife and rubbed fingers that were aching from clutching the butter knife so hard and was jarred, once again, by her ring. Her beautiful engagement ring from Daniel. It was perfect. It was terrifying.
She had analyzed this mixed feeling of wonder and fear since she first felt it immediately after Daniel slipped the ring on her finger out on his sailboat one beautiful early summer evening in the beginning of June, the first truly warm day after a very cool and wet spring. They had moored in a little cove and were sipping champagne out of plastic wineglasses – that should have been a clue, the minute he produced that bottle out of the cooler her antennae had gone up – and then he had gotten this strange strained expression on his face right before he’d gotten down in front of her.
She examined the ring, its brilliant rainbows shooting into her eyes. This wonderful perfect man, this man she had trouble believing was her boyfriend, wanted to be her husband? And what was a husband supposed to be like? She had never witnessed husbandly love up close at home, only the celluloid version on TV and in movies. Her mother hadn’t married until three years ago at the age of 38, a year after Hannah had moved out.
All of the Barefooters, her mother’s closest friends who had functioned in Hannah’s life as both aunts and godmothers, had many bad experiences with men. Aunt Amy had a series of emotionally abusive boyfriends who had played endless games with her head before finally meeting Uncle Gus and finding real love. Aunt Pam had never married again after her first marriage at age twenty nine, which had only lasted two years and produced one child, Jacob, who was shuttled between the warring exes for his entire childhood. Whenever Hannah tried to find out what had gone wrong with the marriage, or why they still hated each other so vehemently, Auntie Pam said, shaking her head, “You don’t want to go there, honey.”
Even the slim, chic, and ridiculously wealthy Aunt Zo, Zooey Walker Delaney to outsiders, had been through two husbands and was on her third. The third marriage had failed to be the charmed one she’d hoped for and the lit-up way she used to talk about love had left her. The only time she glowed these days was when she returned filled with enthusiasm from her travels to yet another exotic place, when she was with the Barefooters at any of their innumerable parties, and when they all went back to Captain’s Island every August, kicked off their shoes and were the Barefoot Girls again.
Hannah stared at her ring and the scattering of reflected light it created on the tablecloth. Her life was scaring her. Her fiancé was too perfect for her. The novel she had labored over for a full year in what used to be the potting shed of the carriage house, freezing in the winter with a space heater burning her ankles and sweating in the summer with a fan whipping her hair into her eyes, had actually been sold to Knopf a year ago and had finally hit store bookshelves two weeks before. Her mother and all the Barefooters had gotten advance copies from Hannah, of course.
But she wouldn’t let herself think about the book at work as a rule, because all she wanted to do was write, not wait tables or scrape wax candle nubs out of votive holders. The clash of her dream and her daily reality became painful if she thought about it on the job. She picked up the butter knife and resumed scraping and chopping at the next votive holder.
At that moment, Josephine walked into the room. She stopped and made a loud tsking sound before walking over to where Hannah sat. “You shouldn’t be doing that on a tablecloth. You’ll ruin it.”
Hannah looked at the tablecloth with its wine stain and chocolate smears. “What do you mean? It’s dirty.”
“I mean that the wax could get into the fibers and you can’t get that out.”
Everyone that was stuck with this job did it at a table with a dirty tablecloth and Josephine never said a thing. Except when it was Hannah.
“Fine, I’ll roll it back.” Hannah moved the votives to a chair and stood up to roll back the linen tablecloth and expose the cheap wooden table underneath.
Josephine smiled her non-smile and reached into her shirt pocket, pulling out a piece of paper. “Hey, I heard about your book. Congrats. Thought you might find this interesting. It’s a review by your hometown newspaper. Fairfield, right? Seems they’re interested in anything if it’s about a hometown girl. Really fascinating review. I clipped it for you.” She put the newspaper clipping on the table.
Hannah looked at it and knew immediately it was bad. She looked up in time to see the small mean smile play across Josephine’s lips, and forced herself to smile nonchalantly. “Thanks.”
Josephine stood a moment, waiting for Hannah to pick up the clipping, read it. Hannah picked up the butter knife and a votive and started digging at it, ignoring Josephine.
Josephine waited a beat longer. Then she turned to go before turning back. “Now, don’t forget about the tablecloth again.”
Hannah didn’t look up. “I won’t.”
After finishing up with the votives, Hannah stuffed the review in her apron pocket, carried her cleaned votives in to the dishwasher and cashed out.
Hannah had intended to read the review in her car, but then she saw Josephine in the parking lot talking to one of the waiters and decided it would have to wait until she got home, even though she was dying to know what it said. She just couldn’t take the chance of Josephine seeing her read it, give her the satisfaction of seeing her reaction.
How would she react? What did it say? On the way home each red light seemed unusually long, each driver in front of her an obstacle. She thought of taking it out to read at one of the lights but knew that once she started reading, she wouldn’t be able to stop.
Pulling into her cottage’s driveway that ran alongside the original estate, an old dirt and gravel driveway that was merely flecked with gravel now as no one bothered to refresh it over the years, her heart beat faster and she had to control her urge to speed up which would only make her car’s wheels dig up soil and gravel and make ruts in the driveway that would turn into holes in the rain. She let the car roll through the tunnel of greenery that led to her house and drew to a stop in front of it. She glanced at the little house, which seemed to perk up and smile at her through the climbing roses that arched over the front door on a trellis she had recently installed.
Now she could read it. She wiggled it out of her apron pocket, lifting her butt off of the car seat in order to get her hand deep enough to get at it, and unfolded it.
Her cell played “Under the Boardwalk”, her mother’s programmed song, the song of the Barefooters and Captain’s Island, her childhood summer home.
Answer it? Read? It was close to five, so her mother would have already had her first drink. The first drink was okay, it was the one that made her mother cheerful, not maudlin or paranoid as the subsequent ones sometimes did.
She flipped open her phone. “Hi Mom!”
“How could you?” The voice on the other end was not the cheerful and still-sensible voice of one drink. It was sloppy and loose with lots of expensive wine, the kind her stepfather Ben kept in large supply for his beautiful and volatile younger shiksa wife. Ben’s response to any criticism of his wife’s drinking was, “She’s an artist of life - she feels! What does it matter if she needs a drink or two?” He drank, too, but in moderation.
“How could you?” her mother repeated. “The first time I read the review, I thought, I must be going crazy. I’m imagining things.” Keeley paused. “I just couldn’t believe it. You know why? It’s my daughter this stupid bitch is talking about, and my daughter would never do something like that to me. My daughter loves me. She wouldn’t betray me like that.”
“Mom, what? What are-“
“Be quiet! I don’t want to hear it. You’ve done enough talking, enough spreading lies about me all over town. Do you know what? I can’t go back to Fairfield now. My life is over. I might as well climb under my bed and just live there! How could you? How could you do this to me? I admit, I made mistakes, but telling lies! You’re a big liar!”
Hannah felt cold then, something shifted inside with a thud. “I did not lie about anything, what do you mean?”
Keeley made an impatient sound and took a loud slurping sip of her chardonnay. “I did not neglect you! I admit I went on a lot of dates, but you always had some kid from the neighborhood or one of the Barefooters watching you. You had more love in one day than most kids get in a year. And I did not ever ever in your life abandon you!”
Colder, shrinking sensation. How could she forget? “Oh, Mommy, but you did.”
A gasp on the other end of the line. “I…oh! How dare you!” Another smaller gasp. “How dare you? You’re…, horrible horrible! I, I, can’t even talk to you! Apologies, now that’s what I expected…but this! What? I, I can’t even talk to you. How could my own daughter, who I gave up everything for, treat me this way?”
There was a click. Hannah looked at her phone and saw the call had been ended. Her mother had hung up on her.
She put down the phone slowly, feeling the old familiar ache in her heart, one she had felt for most of her life. It was the feeling of being consciously loved and unconsciously hated in equal measure by the one person in life who is supposed to only feel a total and encompassing love for you. A mother’s love, that holier than holy love.
Hannah sat and stared at nothing, her eyes unfocused, feeling the pain throb in her chest. Minutes went by. A fly flew in through the open car window, waking Hannah from her stupor.
She opened the folded piece of newspaper in her lap and read.
It was a glowing review, speaking of Hannah’s beautifully crafted prose and the perfect pacing of her story. Beth Hiller, the reviewer, called Hannah’s Wait Another Day a “moving novel that offers deep insights into the dark side of the mother-daughter relationship”.
That was bad, “dark side”. Then she saw the last paragraph.
However talented a wordsmith, this reviewer calls into question how a child of twenty could write so astutely without plundering her own memory stores. It seems likely that the writer’s rumored childhood as a neglected and often abandoned daughter of an alcoholic parent is still a sore point, one she is working out using the medium of fiction to seek resolution. That is the novel’s ultimate weakness in the end as it never truly leaps into the realm of fiction. It would have been a better book, a great book, if Ms. O’Brien had been honest with herself and her readers and written it as a memoir.
“Oh, no,” Hannah said, her voice low and gravelly with a new stabbing pain that clenched at her throat. “Oh, Mom.”
Tears filling her eyes, she picked up her cell and dialed her mother’s number. The phone rang twice and was picked up.
“Mom, I’m-“
Click. The connection was broken.
Hannah dialed again. Again, when the receiver was picked up, it was put back down as soon as Hannah started to speak. She tried two more times and then simply sat, the clipping in her lap, the phone in her hand, tears rolling and dripping on her shirt and into her mouth, feeling an exhaustion so deep she couldn’t find the energy to weep aloud.
The late summer evening wound down around her, the locust ratcheting chatter giving over to the gentler chorus of crickets. Then darkness settled. Hannah stirred, climbed out of her car, and went into the house. Upstairs in the bedroom, she crawled on top of her still-made bed, and fell asleep in her uniform, curled up on her side with her phone still in her hand and the clipping on the bed next to her.
Two hours later her cell rang. It wasn’t her mother’s ring, but Daniel’s – Al Green’s “Here I Am (Come and Take Me).”
Hannah moaned and scrambled looking for it, running her hands over the bed’s quilt, as it had fallen out of her hand in her sleep. She found its cool smooth shape.
“Hey,” she said, her voice hoarse from sleep and tears, pulling herself up to a sitting position.
“Hey sweetheart! Did I wake you up? What time is it?” Daniel said, who never knew the time, was always turned around from his flight schedule as an airline pilot. A pilot! When Hannah had first started dating Daniel, she thought it was a romantic career. Now that she knew the truth of their crazy hours and stressful lifestyle, she wondered how anyone could see it as a fun or glamorous.
“It’s-,” Hannah looked over at her bedside table. “Nine-eighteen. It’s early. I’m, I…, I had a really bad fight with my mom. I just had to lie down.”
“Oh, no. What happened?”
Hannah sat up a little straighter. “You read my book, right?”
“Of course.”
“Would you say it’s a work of fiction, or a memoir?”
“Well, um…, no, it’s a novel. You’ve told me some stuff about your childhood, and, yeah, a little could have ended up in it. But it’s a novel. Why?”
“There was this book review in the Fairfield Tribune and the woman who wrote the review implied that it was a true story.”
“Balls! What did it say?”
Hannah laid back on her bed, leaning against the pile of decorative pillows she hadn’t removed earlier, “Oh, it was very flattering until the last paragraph. My head grew two sizes before being shrunk to the size of a peanut. She said that the book was obviously a memoir and it should have been one outright. The worst is really in one sentence; uh, let me find it.” She reached over and turned on the bedside lamp and looked all over her bed before spying the folded clipping on the floor where it had fallen. Picking it up and unfolding it, she read, “’It seems likely that the writer’s rumored childhood as a neglected and often abandoned daughter of an alcoholic parent is still a sore point, one she is working out using the medium of fiction to seek resolution’.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “Whoa.”
“That’s what my mother said. And then some.”
“Well, it’s easy to understand why she’s upset.”
“Hey! Whose side are you on?” Tears started to prick at her eyes again. What was this? Couldn’t she just stop crying?
“Yours, Hannah. Always yours,” Daniel said. “No, I meant upset with that book critic. She should sue. You could sue.”
Hannah put down the clipping and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “But Mom’s upset with me. Not the critic,” She shook her head. “She won’t even talk to me. She just keeps hanging up.”
“Crazy mothers. She’s probably freaking out…”
“What am I going to do?”
“She won’t talk to you, huh? Wait, why not write her a letter?”
“Do you think she’ll read it?”
Daniel laughed. “From you? Yes! She loves you. She’s just upset, justifiably upset. She’s not justified in blaming her daughter, but her being pissed off is totally normal. I’d be ballistic if someone questioned how we raised our children. When we raise them.”
Hannah gasped, remembering. “Oh, honey. She did abandon me, though. I wasn’t writing about her, but she did. I told you. The thing is, oh, it’s amazing. It’s crazy.”
“What?”
The ache was back in Hannah’s throat. “She doesn’t remember.”
Three days later, Hannah’s letter of apology was winging its way to Manhattan, where her mother lived in a huge fantasy-worthy apartment overlooking Central Park with her Manhattan real-estate mogul husband, Ben Cohen.
Ben had entered her mother’s life shortly after Hannah had moved out. Keeley and Hannah had come to a cease-fire in Hannah’s late teens, but it was a tense and cold agreement and Hannah was glad to go. Hannah’s blossoming beauty and her strict need for structure and peace battled with her mother’s increasing need to act and feel young and free, creating a tumultuous home life. Keeley started to throw lots of wild parties and Hannah was usually the one to clean up after them, sometimes breaking them up if the neighbors complained about the noise.
Hannah moved out right after graduating high school, started waitressing, and quietly started writing short stories as well as her novel, a novel she had been thinking about for years that would draw on her life but, of course, be fictional. Meanwhile, Keeley joined a local singles group in Norwalk. One night the singles group had an event in Manhattan at the Monkey Bar. Ben had been sitting at the bar with a colleague. Noticing Keeley from across the room and liking what he saw, he launched his pursuit immediately, cutting short his conversation with his colleague and walking right up to her with his usual confidence. The romance had taken off quickly, both of them equally enamored with the other and well-matched: fiery and passionate, they both took life by the horns.
The first time Hannah met Ben was at a dinner her mother had arranged for the three of them in Greenwich at La Figaro restaurant, a little French bistro on Greenwich Avenue. When Keeley left the table to use the restroom, Ben leaned over to Hannah while watching Keeley walk away, her signature saunter making her hips swing. “You know what made me fall in love with your mother? She’s alive. More alive and just plain happy than any other woman I’ve ever met. Beautiful, yeah. So were the rest of the women I’ve dated, and they had less years on them than your mom, let’s be honest. But no one knows how to live like your mother! What a woman.”
Hannah had to agree. No one was like her mother. Hannah wondered what Ben thought of his stepdaughter’s novel and the disastrous review. Would he see it was all just an overblown mess? No, he would stand by his wife – was probably furious with Hannah. Better not to think about it. She had done the best she could with the letter.
September 10, 2010
Dear Mom,
I’m so so sorry. I never meant to hurt or embarrass you. The book is 100% fictional. I’m not Rebecca, I’m Hannah. You’re not Shelley, you’re Keeley. I have no idea why the reviewer wrote what she wrote.
You always did your best with me, I know that. We may not have agreed on everything over the last so many years (since I started being Hard-ass Hannah per you), but we always had each other. I miss you desperately. I miss your brilliant sense of fun and your genius for making things magical. I miss YOU, Mom! Please call me or pick up the phone when I call. Please let me come see you.
Love,
Hannah
Two days after Hannah FedExed the letter to her mother, Daniel returned. He’d had an overnight to Hong Kong, a brief break at his apartment in Manhattan, and then a turn in Berlin. Sleep deprived, he’d arrived on the train from New York so out of it that Hannah had simply left him to sleep on the hammock strung between two trees in the corner of her front yard while she went about her business and left messages on her mother’s voicemail that weren’t returned.
Hannah squatted in her garden late that afternoon, pulling weeds and occasionally looking over at Daniel, asleep with his mouth slightly open in the hammock. She felt a wash of tenderness looking at him like that, looking so vulnerable splayed out and asleep. Such a difference from the strong man that she had grown to know over the last year; a man who had the strength to leave what his family had handed him on a silver platter and seek out his true love: flight.
At twenty eight, after six years in the creative department of his uncle’s advertising firm, Daniel had done the unthinkable. He’d left advertising, the business his father, uncles, cousins and one brother lived and breathed, for flying. It all started with a gift of a flying lesson for his birthday from an old girlfriend. It had seemed like an odd gift at the time. Daniel had only briefly mentioned an interest in flying once, and then there was the gift certificate.
When he had told Hannah about his first flight, his face lit up. “There’s nothing I could say that explains it, it’s an incredible high. Still! I still get that buzz – even now!”
And she knew what he meant. She had it when she was “in the flow” and writing. That was when the words came fast and furious, when everything just flew out of her and on to the page. It was exciting, like being pulled by a powerful current, out of yourself, floating along with it.
Their relationship was like that, too, at least now that they were in the flow at last. When she’d first met him, she wrote him off as a playboy, a player. But Daniel wouldn’t let her write him off and, with time, she saw that she was wrong; or at least that things were different when it came to her. With her, he abandoned the smooth act, brought out the big guns of honesty and vulnerability. In letting down his guard, he gave her the permission she needed to let down hers.
Hannah threw another weed on the growing mound beside her and stopped to look at her ring. Why couldn’t she just be happy? She was getting married; it was supposed to be a time of excitement and joy. Why this terror, cold and gnawing at her? Sometimes when she caught sight of her ring out of the corner of her eye, her stomach immediately clenched and a wave of nausea swept over her.
There was a sound from the hammock. Hannah looked up. Daniel had raised his head and was looking at her. “Hey you,” he said.
Brushing the dirt off of her hands and then wiping them on her jeans, Hannah stood and walked over to him. “Hey, yourself.”
“Come here.” He opened his arms. She crawled into the hammock carefully and curled up in his arms. This was why she loved his beefy arms, they could wrap completely around her. He smelled good, a toasted smell, warm with a hint of soap.
“Whatcha doin’?” He said into her hair, nuzzling.
“Oh, this and that. I was on my laptop all morning. Just needed to stretch and the garden needed weeding. I turned my phone off. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
Daniel paused and said, “Well, maybe she hasn’t gotten it yet.”
“I overnighted it. She got it yesterday.”
“Maybe she’s gone away? She could be with those barefoot women she’s friends with.”
Hannah sighed, feeling like she couldn’t get enough air. Her chest had been heavy since yesterday afternoon when she simply knew her mother had read the letter and had not forgiven her. She simply knew the way she always knew how her mother was feeling, like she had some special type of emotional mother-radar.
“No, she got it. And she’s not with the Barefooters. They all just got back from a month on Captain’s Island, a whole month-long annual party-thon they have together. You witnessed only a weekend of it. No, they all do their own thing in September. Aunt Pam goes full throttle with her business plus her son, Jacob, goes back to school. Aunt Amy gets another seeing-eye dog to train and her three boys all have sports on top of school so she never has a minute. And Aunt Zo travels, of course. Mom usually redecorates the house, and starts planning parties for all the holidays.”
Images came to her of her mother’s seasonal decorations: miniature haunted forests with wisps of ghosts in a long container filled with twig trees and mosses of different colors for Halloween, sparkling white winter fantasies under domes in their living room with colorful birds and glistening holly leaves and bright berries for Christmas, delicate arrangements of forced blooming branches in the early spring that were Zen-like in their simplicity.
Daniel said, “They’re quite a gang – it was fun meeting them. They’ve been friends since they were kids?”
“Yeah, they’ve been friends forever. They’re really amazing people, too. Ben is always saying that there’s no one like my mom, but, really, there’s no one like any of the Barefooters. They’re just special.”
“It must have been great having them for aunts growing up. Didn’t you say they babysat you a lot?”
Hannah laughed a little. “Constantly – I mean, they were definitely my main babysitters. Especially Aunt Zo. Mom really couldn’t afford even the neighborhood girls. Yeah, they were around a lot and definitely always on Captain’s. It was a party!” she said, smiling.
Daniel looked down at her. “Well, there it is. Your next book.”
“What?”
“Why not write something nonfiction this time. Write about your mother and her friends. Honestly, every story you tell me about them is fascinating. Maybe that’s your next book.”
Hannah had started feeling unmoored and anxious a week after she finished Wait Another Day and the feeling had only grown over time. She missed writing. Yet she couldn’t figure out what was next. Every idea she had felt wrong. But the Barefooters?
Hannah shook her head a little. “I don’t know. After everything that’s happened…, I don’t know. It seems wrong. Invasive.”
Daniel propped himself up on his elbow to look at Hannah. “Invasive? Wouldn’t your mom be thrilled to see a book about her and her friends? They must all be so psyched to have each other. Damn, I haven’t stayed in touch with one of my friends from high school or college. And these were guys I hung out with constantly!”
Hannah could see what he was saying. The Barefooters were a phenomenon. But it felt oddly like trespassing, even though it was her life too. No, she’d find stories elsewhere, off of her mother’s turf. Wasn’t it always this way? Wasn’t she always stepping all over her mother’s turf, getting in her way by being born in the first place? She felt something hot and acidic in the back of her throat, a pulse of nausea.
She swallowed, fighting the rising bile. “No. I’m not – I don’t know. Can we talk about something else?”
A week later, another letter was on its way to her mother. No reply had come in the mail and her mother’s phone continued to go straight to voicemail.
Hannah’s innocently written and maliciously reviewed novel had managed to deeply hurt her wonderful loving but flawed mother, causing the first significant rift between them. And there was no one she could turn to. Her maternal grandparents were deceased and there were no other relatives that she knew of. Daniel loved her, but what could he do? The Barefooters loved her too, but with the reserve of women who knew full well that this was not their child but the child of their best friend, invisible do-not-trespass signs everywhere. Aunt Zo was the only one to breach that barrier, occasionally calling Hannah after Keeley had declared war, reassuring her that the review was obviously false and slanderous and that, somehow, everything would work out eventually. But even as she reassured, she begged in the next breath not to be outed to Keeley for calling.
Hannah knew she had to find a way back in, that the labyrinth of her mother’s heart had secret entrances and one entrance that was not a secret at all: the Barefooters. Daniel was right, but it would be a novel.
September 19, 2010
Dear Mom,
You’re so angry. I wish I could talk to you, to explain, but the fortress is locked and the walls are high. The moat is filled with piranhas and even the Barefooters won’t return my calls. I wrote a novel, not a memoir. That reviewer was wrong, but what she said still hurt you horribly. I’m so sorry.
Anyway, I would keep on apologizing, but I’m pretty sure you’re not interested in hearing it. The reason I’m writing is I need your help. You know from my telling you one billion times that all I want in life is to be a writer. The kind of writer that can live off of her earnings, not wait tables or be a secretary to earn a living, scratching out a few words on a page here and there. My next project, with or without your blessing, is about women’s friendships. I want to write a novel about a gang of girls, ones eerily like the Barefooters. Of course, it wouldn’t be a memoir and I wouldn’t name names. I would change it up so much you’d probably barely recognize yourselves.
But I need your help to write this. I witnessed your four-way friendship all of my life, but I know nothing about your childhood except that you and Grandma never got along. I do know that you Barefooters met on Captain’s Island as children. I’ve overheard a few stories here and there from those days, but they’re not enough.
Please help me, Mom. Help me write something beautiful and honest about your friendship with the Barefoot Girls (fictionalized). You have something remarkable that women around the world would love to hear about, something I think I can put on paper and make breathe. And I can’t write it without you. As you know, I’ve always been a loner. I’ve always prayed for just a drop of the people-magic you have by the bucket.
I hope hope hope that you’ll call me, or just write me about this. If you don’t want to do it for me, do it for all the women in the world who crave great girlfriends and would be touched to their very cores by your story.
Love,
Hannah
Two and a half weeks later, Hannah woke with a start from a dream where something huge and dark with catlike eyes was whispering to her, telling her she was hateful, that everyone hated her, but kept it a secret. The creature slithered cold and shiny against her, furry and serpentine at the same time, its red raw mouth inches from her ear.
In the dream, there were people in the next room trying to break down the door to the darkened room she was in with the creature, but the door wouldn’t open, only pulsed and swelled as they pushed at it. The huge creature had wrapped around her and was squeezing. “Everyone hates you. Hates you!”
Falling back on her pillow, Hannah blinked in the solid darkness that was unbroken by moonlight. She looked in the direction of Daniel’s side of the bed. It was so quiet over there. She listened. No sound, not even gentle breathing. She reached over and felt the empty cold sheets. He was gone.
Suddenly, the sweat coating her chest and arms felt icy. He was gone. Daniel had left her. Because she was horrible. Hateful. She was all alone. Her mother would never speak to her again. She had rescinded her mother’s stormy but brilliant love, pushed it away, leaving nothing.
Daniel knew. Keeley had called him and told him the truth: that Hannah was despicable, an ungrateful and blindly cruel person. He had been warned and had wisely left.
Hannah’s breath started to hitch. She would die. She didn’t want to live. Write a book about friendship! What a laugh! She didn’t have a friend in the world and didn’t deserve one.
Hannah curled up on her side, her knees against her chest and felt that old feeling, one she felt often as a little girl. The one where the world was either growing bigger, or she was growing very small. The walls rising up, ceiling stretching away. Oh, God, help me.
Then she heard a creak on the stairs, and jolted. Another creak. She sat up. Someone was there, on the stairs. She tensed her muscles, straining not to run. Let it happen. Let whoever it was kill her. Let it be over.
The door swung open revealing an even deeper darkness beyond. Hannah’s control faltered and she let out a little squeal.
The black hallway said, “Honey?”
It was Daniel.
Of course.
Hannah breathed out a sobbing gasp. “Oh, oh, God!”
“What? What? Did I scare you?” Daniel said as he crossed the room and set down the glass of water he was holding on the bedside table before climbing into bed with Hannah and putting his arm around her. They lay back down together.
Hannah couldn’t get her breath back and she gasped at the air, feeling as if her lungs were cinched by something and unable to expand to take in oxygen.
“Oh, honey, I did scare you. I just went downstairs to get something to eat. That apple pie you got at Whole Paycheck was calling my name; I couldn’t resist anymore,” he said, laughing a little. “I ate three slices!”
Hannah couldn’t speak, laugh, respond. She was suffocating. He hadn’t left this time, but he would. He would find out about her, and then he wouldn’t want anything to do with her. She couldn’t stand it, knowing this. She pulled off her engagement ring. Tears sprang into her eyes.
“What, you’re not going to tell me what a pig I am? There’s only one slice left of that pie!”
Holding the ring tightly in her right hand, she reached to turn on the lamp with her left. The room flooded with light. The room was how it always was when Daniel slept over, piles of clothing scattered on the floor, his overnight bag open and spilling out in the corner. She pulled away from Daniel and sat up in bed, hugging her knees and still holding the ring. She couldn’t look at him.
“Oh, no! Now I know I’m in trouble!” Daniel said, laughing. When she didn’t turn to face him, his laughter died.
A pause. “What? What’s up?”
She glanced back at Daniel as he propped himself up on his elbow and then looked back at her clenched hand in her lap.
“Daniel…,”
He sat up more fully, sitting next to her and looking first at her face and then down at her fist which she was staring at. She opened her hand slowly, revealing the ring in her palm.
His breath caught.
“Daniel, I need to...I know-,” she said and stopped. What could she say? The truth, at least some of it. “I’m scared. I mean, I want to marry you, more than anything. I just…, I’m just scared.”
Daniel’s voice was suddenly very deep and it wobbled a bit. He sounded scared, too. “I don’t…, why didn’t you say anything before? What…, why now? We haven’t even picked a date?”
And it was Hannah who had resisted picking a date. Or a place. Or anything. Whenever he brought it up, she managed to get out of answering, sidling out of the conversation as subtly as she could.
She said, “I just need to stop. Stop everything. I just had one of the worst, the worst panic attacks I’ve had in years.., and it’s not your fault! It’s everything. It’s my mom, it’s my book and that review. I’m all backwards and I just can’t – I just need some time.”
“So, fine…you need time,” he said and sighed. “Maybe I do, too. I mean, don’t think I didn’t notice you avoiding the subject of our wedding for the last three months. Maybe we rushed into this too quickly.”
A falling feeling swept through Hannah. She had destroyed it all! “So, so you don’t want to get married anymore?” Her voice was so small, she could barely hear herself.
There was a pause. Hannah looked over at him and saw that he was looking down, shaking his head slowly. “No, I didn’t say that.”
She waited for him to elaborate. The room had grown horribly quiet.
“What then? I don’t understand. I mean, can’t I tell you I’m scared?” The tears that had been welling in her eyes fell now, dripping down her cheeks.
Daniel looked up at her and softened, wrapping his arms around her. “Of course you can.”
Crying now, unable to hold back, Hannah choked out, “Do you want your ring back? I understand, I do.”
Daniel shook his head and hugged her tighter. “No, never,” he said and loudly swallowed. “I want you to be my wife.”
Slowly, Hannah’s tears abated. She put her ring back on and it felt good, better than it had ever felt before. Daniel saw her put it back on and squeezed her tight, pulling her down to the bed. She reached for the lamp and switched it off.
He kissed her and his mouth felt wonderful and warm, welcoming. She kissed him back and felt herself melting as their hands searched and then hungrily touched each other, stroking and then reaching for their most sensitive areas. They came together with perfect knowledge and deft skill, growing hot, sheets thrown back. Then they were pressing into each other deeply, both crying a little and then laughing before finding their release.
As they fell back asleep, tumbled in each other’s arms, morning light slowly stole under the pulled shades in the bedroom, sifting onto the floor and walls and revealing everything.
The next day, wearing her ring for his sake, she drove Daniel to the train station, kissing him over and over to soften the fact that she wouldn’t plan their next visit. She just couldn’t think that far ahead all of the sudden. A subtle darkness seemed to be closing in on her, filled with seething invisible things she feared seeing.
She didn’t tell him about something she’d realized the night before: something that all the kisses and hugs and love he could possibly give her would not erase the knowledge of. She knew he was going to leave her, and that by leaving her, it would be the last straw. She would die if she was left again.
Her certainty that she would be abandoned by him felt as solid and immovable as a mountain within her, and no matter how much her psyche tried to weave and dodge, she could feel the blow coming.