She found Wyatt in her bed, waiting for her. He held the ice to her face and brushed the hair from her eyes. She could barely look him in the eyes, she was so horribly embarrassed. She just wanted him to leave her alone. Leave this stupid, trashy little house. She wondered if he’d tell anyone where they lived. Wondered if they’d go back to Rockwell in June a laughingstock.
“What will you tell your mom and sister when he wakes up?” Wyatt whispered.
“It won’t matter. He never remembers anything. He’s falling-down drunk and knocked unconscious.” Hannah was immediately mortified at this obviously regular occurrence.
She dozed off and on, waking only to apologize for the disaster that was her life. Wes hadn’t usually hit them—his anger was mostly aimed at Trina. Sometimes, though, he misdirected.
“Hannah, I’m not leaving you,” he whispered. His arms came around her, and finally, she slept soundly in the circle of his body.
When she woke up the next morning, he had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Now
“I think they found Julia in the woods.” Hannah sat next to Uncle Stuart, who remained unmoving. “I think they found her bones.” She stroked his hand and remembered the scar near his ring finger, visible when he was younger but now hidden among paper-thin creases in his skin. The scar had come about the day he’d built them a tree house. It was more like a platform, not a full house, per se, in a maple fifty feet down the path that he and Hannah had picked together. He’d used a chain saw to cut a few larger branches to make room for the platform but reached for his trusty hacksaw to trim a few smaller offshoots. Julia had found them just as he started sawing, exclaimed, “Oh my God, don’t fall!” as Uncle Stuart balanced, a foot on each remaining bough. He turned his head, startled, and slipped, slicing his hand from second knuckle to wrist.
Aunt Fae ran out, summoned by Julia, and met them in the courtyard, bandages and gauze in hand, barely batting an eyelash at the gushing blood. Hannah was reminded of Wes, the wound on his forehead pulsing red on the bathroom floor, and their mother, verging on hysterics, blotting his eyebrow with a red-soaked paper towel. Aunt Fae was impassive, clinical. She sent him back down the path with a bandaged hand and asked that he “please be more careful with a hacksaw, or you’ll chop your fingers clean off.” She’d retreated back into the castle, shaking her head.
Hannah retold the whole story to Uncle Stuart, fingers seeking the scar, that raised red ridge, and finding nothing. She paused, let the hiss of his oxygen fill the silence. Then, “Today is Aunt Fae’s memorial. Do you know that? Can you hear me?” She studied his face. His skin was translucent, his eyelids fluttering. “Remember how I told you she passed away in a car accident?”
His eyes opened, the whites milky, the blue almost gray, clouded with cataracts maybe. He wasn’t terribly old, but he looked skeletal. Hannah felt her breath catch, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Uncle Stuart, can you hear me?” she asked, louder. “It’s Hannah. Your niece?”
Slowly his eyes met hers above the translucent green of the oxygen mask, and he nodded. Hannah reached out and squeezed his hand, and he almost imperceptibly squeezed back.
“I’m sorry I stayed away so long,” Hannah apologized, but she wasn’t sure what for. She’d been a child. If anything, her aunt and uncle should have tried to call her, contact her. She’d still been a child. At least for a while.
But Uncle Stuart was dying and had spent his whole life being deferential to his beloved Fae. It seemed likely their estrangement from Hannah had been Aunt Fae’s doing. But why? What could Hannah have done to drive her away, at only fifteen? She barely remembered the days between Julia disappearing, all the police combing the property, and Wes behind the wheel of the rattly Buick, coming up the driveway, stones kicking out from underneath the tires. Her mother conspicuously absent, and later, the Rockwell police making the trip to interview Trina and Hannah for the second (third?) time.
It wasn’t until she was an adult that she’d asked herself why Trina wouldn’t have come to Brackenhill. She’d always grumbled about the drive—it couldn’t have been that, could it? Her mother rarely left the Plymouth city limits, aside from two yearly trips to Rockwell. She’d asked Wes, in the car, where her mother was, and he simply grunted, “She’s too sick to come.” Sick how? With grief?
In the immediate aftermath, Trina refused to leave her bedroom. Then later, it seemed like she sometimes believed the narrative that emerged from Rockwell: Aunt Fae had killed Julia, but no one could prove it. The police never outright alleged it, but people talked: Fae, always eccentric and insular, had lost her mind in that stone castle and killed her niece. It seemed that Trina believed that story, too, no matter what Hannah said: “She ran away. She got scared of something; I don’t know what.” Hannah never saw anything in Aunt Fae that would lead her to believe she’d kill. Especially her niece. It never made sense. No, Julia left them. For reasons Hannah would never know. She’d long since accepted it.
She’d stayed away initially out of deference—she thought it was what they wanted. Then after she went to college, moved away from her mother, it was out of rebellion. She’d turned angry at the long silence. After college she lived her life the way everyone does in their twenties: selfishly. Bouncing from job to job, apartment to apartment. Figuring out how to pay bills and make doctor appointments and keep plants and fish alive. Then she’d met Huck, started what felt like her real life, and thought, fleetingly, about calling them. Visiting. It always seemed like she had time to figure out her relationship with her past. It was muddled in her confusion over Julia, if she’d loved Hannah the way Hannah had loved her. There seemed to be so much to work out, so much fog to break through, that it had seemed insurmountable. And now it was silly how possible it would have been. One day, make the drive. A lifetime of questions answered.
She should have come.
Uncle Stuart shook his head, held up his right hand, bobbing it in the air. Hannah gently pulled the mask from his mouth so he could speak.
“You,” he said. “You.”
She thought at first it was an accusation, his index finger still bobbing.
“Me, what?” she prodded gently.
“You have nothing . . . to be sorry for.” He wheezed, his eyes fluttering. “We were so . . . very . . . sorry. It was . . . Ruby. Too much.” He fumbled with the mask, and Hannah replaced it, moved it over his mouth.
Who was Ruby?
His eyes fluttered shut, and she felt the loss suddenly. Intensely. An emptiness blooming in her chest. Uncle Stuart had given her a key piece to the puzzle she’d never solve now, with him barely able to utter a sentence and Aunt Fae dead. Who was Ruby? There was so much that stayed just out of reach, so many secrets to this castle, her family, her sister, her past.
“Who’s Ruby, Uncle Stuart?”
“She was a child. Just ten . . . an accident.” His voice garbled through the plastic.
“Ruby was ten, Uncle Stuart? What happened to Ruby?”
“She never got over what she did.” Uncle Stuart’s voice rumbled, barely audible, and his eyes were drooping shut. “She loved all of you so much.”