CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Then
August 1, 2002
It was a terrible cliché that the worst fight of Hannah and Julia’s relationship would be their last one.
“There’s a picnic in town.” Julia stood in the doorway between their rooms, wearing a white, gauzy off-the-shoulder dress and red wide-brimmed hat, looking like a model. Her hair was shining, ringlets cascading down her back. So different from Hannah’s floaty wave. “For the Rockwell Fish Fry.”
Rockwell was a fishermen’s town. The Beaverkill was the most popular trout stream in the country, and Rockwell’s entire identity came from fly-fishing. The downtown contained fly shops and bed-and-breakfasts that catered to out-of-town fishermen. At the end of every summer, the town held a fish fry.
Hannah had been lying on her bed, reading, and she looked up, startled at her sister’s sudden appearance. It used to be their normal, but lately, an unspoken wall had been erected. The doors between their rooms remained firmly shut. She didn’t know when the divide had happened. The first week of June had been joyful, pancake breakfasts with whipped cream and strawberries from the garden and quiet games of checkers in the evening, and then slowly, Julia had changed. By the third week in July, they’d barely been speaking. Hannah could never figure it out (and she tried plenty). Julia had turned sullen, quiet, moody. She was either gone, destination undeclared; hunched over a little brown journal; or secluded up in her room.
Julia hadn’t asked Hannah to come to town with her in weeks. She ducked out after breakfast, leaving Hannah behind. Slipping back in right before dinner. Shrugging off any questions. Rolling her eyes. Acting in general like Hannah was a pest, which she’d never done before.
“Okay,” Hannah replied cautiously, licking her lips.
“Are you going?” Julia inspected her nails, painted bright red and gleaming. Manicures were things that they used to do together but that now Julia did alone and Hannah had no knowledge of. She’d always worn pale pinks, sometimes purples or blues, making her hands look like a corpse’s, and Hannah would make fun of her. Now, red. So many differences in such a short time.
“Do you want me to go?” Hannah’s voice was small, wheedling, and she felt sick of herself. No wonder Julia preferred her friend Ellie, with the wild red hair and skimpy bikinis, or even Dana Renwick, another girl in their group, with a short blonde asymmetrical bob and fuchsia lipstick: bold and confident, with a loud mouth and brash laugh.
“Of course,” Julia said, like nothing had changed. Hannah thought of Wyatt. He’d kissed her, fingertips grazing the skin under her T-shirt, soft moans into her mouth, her back against the concrete of the pool snack stand in the early evening after closing. She’d been riding there for weeks, helping him clean the fryers, keeping up a steady stream of chatter. When they kissed, they both smelled like old grease.
He found everything she said interesting, sometimes even asking her days later to retell a story, something about Trina or Julia, or that Tracy or Beth had said, or about boys at school (they all seemed so childish now). She told him about going out on Beth’s dad’s boat and catching a trout once. Beth’s dad showed Hannah how to hit it on the head with a pipe, and she was so horrified she cried, and Beth’s brother laughed so hard he fell off the boat. They ate the fish later, and Hannah couldn’t even take a bite, and Beth’s gross, acne-riddled brother chased her around their backyard campfire with a square of flaky trout wobbling on the end of a fork, held together with blackened silvery skin, laughing meanly, his voice cracking.
Wyatt was riveted the whole time.
She followed him home, curled up in his bed at his father’s little white cape cod a block off Main Street. They taught each other about skin and touch and warmth and want and, yes, sex, too, but other things that Wyatt had never known of and Hannah had only read books about. She wondered if Julia had done this yet, felt a man’s naked legs between her thighs, the downy coating of hair on his backside. If she’d ever known how powerful it sometimes felt just to be a woman. Because that was what she was now, not a child.
She was drunk on love and lust.
What Julia had vacated, Wyatt filled. She didn’t even miss her sister during the long crystallized silences in the castle as Fae and Stuart worked outside and Julia was off wherever on her bike now. Hannah had spent much of June and July roaming the halls during the day, exploring the unlocked but empty rooms, looking under beds, finding old books with illegible scribble in the margins, smelling like mildew and rot. Feeling abandoned and sorry for herself but also, conversely, free. Julia wouldn’t want to dig through boxes in the attic, finding old photo albums of people Hannah didn’t know. She would have called it “pointless.”
But now she was suddenly back, present, asking to be with her, and Hannah forgot about Wyatt, his kiss, his fingertips on her skin, his shared horror at the fish story.
“Okay.” Hannah said it again, like talking to a stranger.
“Okay,” Julia said, softer now, and then turned back to her bedroom.
They rode into town in silence, Julia leading the way and Hannah watching her sister’s bike tires spin faster and faster as they took the switchback turns too quickly, gravel kicking out under their tires. Hannah felt the burst of fear in her chest, followed by joy. Maybe whatever had plagued Julia all summer had passed.
The park was decorated with red, white, and blue bunting left over from the Fourth of July, and the amphitheater stage held a band covering Bruce Springsteen and Neil Diamond and all the songs Uncle Stuart listened to on transistor radio in the greenhouse. Hannah hummed along, then stopped because she suspected that it wasn’t cool to know all this music, classic rock. The air was thick with the smell of frying fish: deep fryers and pan fries on grills behind fish stands. People sat around on lawn chairs listening to the band, eating fish, drinking beer, lamenting the end of summer.
Wyatt stood with Reggie, who flashed her a white smile. They stood apart from the group of kids, laughing and joking, until one girl reached over and swatted him on the arm. Hannah recognized Dana, the cigarette dangling between her fingertips.
Wyatt raised his eyebrows when he saw Hannah. Their relationship had existed in a vacuum, and now here it was, thrust into the open. Would he finally acknowledge it? Did she still want him to? She hadn’t pushed him again since that first night back in June. She liked the bubble they’d lived in—no friends or sisters to mess it up. She bit her lip, gave Wyatt a nervous smile.
Wyatt came over with cheeseburgers, and Hannah ate greedily, hungrily, with two hands. She was starving. Julia picked at her bun and put the plate down next to her folding chair. She held a red Solo cup that another girl—Yolanda something, maybe—kept pouring something into. Hannah realized too late, like a dumb little girl, that it was beer. The Coke can in her hand felt clunky and idiotic.
They had a secret, though, Wyatt and Hannah, and that alone made Hannah feel above them all. She could tell they idolized Wyatt, all turning to him after they told a story or a joke to get his reaction. If he laughed, the girls preened, sharing smug smiles.
Dana hardly acknowledged Hannah. The other girl, Yolanda, with black spiral curls down her back, studied her interestedly, like she was a new pet. Julia ignored Hannah altogether.