Chapter 25
Hannah ran down the boardwalk, her feet thudding hollowly on the wooden boards, toward the Barefooter house. The cold wind was stiff, whipping her hair back from her face and bending the tall grasses on either side of the walk sideways. In her ears rang the thrilling and terrifying words of her editor.
She hadn’t meant to be rude. She hoped Felicia wasn’t offended. But the bile had risen in her mouth, threatening; she had to get off of the phone.
She had dressed quickly, considering breakfast only briefly before rejecting that impossible notion. Then she was out of the door and running. Get away. Don’t think about it.
But..
No!
She ran and it felt good, her legs moving, her heart pumping. The Barefooter house was filled with ghosts, whispering the answers to her questions, waiting for her at the end of the boardwalk.
She threw open the gate, ran up the last section of the boardwalk, and pounded up the now-sturdy stairs that lead to the little house, the ringing and clanging of the wind chimes hanging from the eaves shrill and constant today as they were set tossing and shaking by the wind. A big puff of air pushed her into the house and slammed the door shut behind her. Inside, the noise of the chimes was muffled. Instead it was the voice of the wind in the eaves that dominated the little house, rising and falling from a shriek to a moan and then back to a shriek.
She couldn’t help herself. “Tell me! What is it?” she shouted at the room, at the house itself. In her mind’s eye she saw all the meaningful glances between the Barefooters, lips that pursed, holding back. Her mother’s quick smile and smooth change of subject when Hannah asked direct questions about her father, or about anything in the past.
The living area, usually pleasantly lived-in with piles of magazines on the floor and scattered cast-off sweaters and moist beach towels on the furniture and the occasional half-finished cocktail making rings on the coffee table, was too tidy and composed. The old hammock her mother used to sleep on was folded neatly and sat on a trunk in the corner, probably the same old trunk from Aunt Zo’s story. The many photo albums, the ones Hannah had been dying to look at for years, still waited for her on the bookshelf.
Hannah walked over and found one documenting the eighties, Hannah’s childhood, and plopped down on the couch with it, her heart still beating hard, her breath just starting to slow. She opened it and looked. Turned the page. Then another. Suddenly she was tearing at it, flipping through it madly. Where was it, the evidence of her neglect at her mother’s hands? Where were the tears? The fear?
Smiles and sunshine and days at Jones Beach wearing sunglasses too big for her little face. At a fair and smiling a chocolate-coated grin up at the camera, the half-eaten ice cream cone held in her hand. Cuddled up and reading with Aunt Zo in the hammock. Sitting next to her mother in their Sunfish wearing an orange life-preserver and smiling with excitement over one shoulder at the photographer, eyes wide. At the beach making drip-sandcastles with Aunt Amy, bent over and intent on their work, dark smears of wet sand on their legs.
Hannah slammed the album shut and selected another, flipping through it even more quickly, searching. There was nothing.
Shut that one, open another. And another.
The pile of rejected albums on the coffee table grew taller, and then toppled when she placed the fifth album on top. Hannah jumped up, grabbing at the falling albums, but was too late. They lay splayed on the floor, bindings twisted. She fell back heavily on the couch and looked around the little room.
There was nothing here. Why had she thought there was? It’s just a house. A little shack that, without the women who brought it to life every summer, was just like any other building. There were no answers in the photo albums and artifacts from the decades of summers spent here. There were no ghosts either. Nothing waited here for her, not for her. For them, for the Barefooters, the house waited and gave and loved. But to Hannah it was indifferent.
Hannah stood up slowly and left the house. Walking down the boardwalk, she looked up at each little wooden house as she passed. Blank windows returned her stare. She thought of all of the people here who might read her book, especially now that it was on the bestseller lists. What would they think? What would they say to each other, to the Barefooters? Maybe, to them, it would simply be a work of fiction by one of Captain’s children. Something good, something to be proud of, like the sailing trophies displayed prominently on many of the island’s living room mantles from past Dog Days’ races.
Back at Pam’s house again, she went into the kitchen and picked up her book off of the table. She carried it into the living room and plopped down in one of the soft sagging chairs by the huge picture window overlooking the boardwalk and the water, and flipped open the book and started to read it again, trying to be objective. Was it that bad?
She re-read the first chapter that depicted an abusive and distant mother. Well, her mother wasn’t abusive. Distant …well, yes. The majority of her childhood, Hannah didn’t know which mother she would get from hour to hour. Sometimes she would get loving-and-enthusiastic Keeley, full of fun plans for the day and lots of kisses and hugs for Hannah. Sometimes she would get a shell, a mute vacant-eyed woman who seemed utterly blind to Hannah and her needs, or worse, would literally push Hannah away, telling her to leave her alone. “Go away, Hannah. Before something bad happens,” Keeley would say in a flat voice.
The worst times were when she found her mother had actually disappeared, leaving Hannah utterly alone without a caretaker. Those times were the most terrifying, even more than the zombie-Mom times. At least zombie-Mom was physically there. Wandering alone and calling her mother’s name through their little house on Shady Hill Road in Fairfield, Hannah always felt silly but helpless to stop. She knew her mother had left, felt it immediately. The air changed, and Hannah knew she was alone without having to call out her mother’s name.
Hannah read the second chapter. This was where she got personal. It was a composite; a blending of every time her mother had disappeared for hours or even days, but it was all true. She found herself cringing as she read. She had been doing more than scratching an itch. She had been lashing out, bringing down vengeance on her mother, and, reading it now, she knew why. It wasn’t just about what had happened when she was a little girl. It was that keen and deep jealousy she had felt toward her mother for as long as she could remember.
The lighthearted full-of-fun Keeley that everyone else knew, that quality that made Keeley so immensely popular, beloved even, filled Hannah with a deep and impotent craving. She, too, wanted to be that at ease, that funny, that quick with a joke or an entertaining story. Instead, Hannah’s mouth became dry in public, her words disappearing into the air. People would look at her when they first met her, she was attractive in a dark brooding way, but would lose interest almost immediately when they witnessed her stiffness and her struggle to gasp out a few polite words.
Each photo of her mother surrounded by admirers at a party, each card or note of praise for Keeley that came in the mail, each time she heard the roar of appreciative laughter after one of her mother’s stories, Hannah took it and fed it to the jealousy she nurtured, and watched with dread and satisfaction when it grew.
Hannah read on, into the third chapter, and the words started to change before her eyes. They were alive, writhing like black ink-stained maggots on the page. It was vile. Hannah felt her stomach lurch. A dry burning puff of air came out of her mouth, leaving a sour taste on her tongue. Her mother had made mistakes, many mistakes, but what Hannah had done here, it wasn’t a mistake.
Hannah took a deep breath and ripped the page from her book. Then she tore another, and then another, ragged tears that left some of the page still attached to the spine. She threw each page in a pile on the floor, and let that pile mount as she continued her work. When there was nothing left to tear, she tucked the empty binding under her arm, gathered up the pages from the floor in both arms, and dropped them in the fireplace along with the binding. She opened the flue damper, lit a match, and touched it to the edges of the pages and watched the paper curl and turn black as the flame traveled.
The fire grew hot quickly, and Hannah put two logs on top to keep any of the burning pages from flying up the chimney, covered the fireplace with the mesh screen that stood beside it and sat cross-legged in front of the fire to watch her book burn, her mind racing behind her blank face, picking up solutions and trying them on before rejecting them and turning to the next.