Now she squeezed Henry’s pale hand, soft and round as sorrow, and watched his face, hoping for his eyes to register the touch or the sigh or the puzzle book or her leaving.
Once in a while, out of nowhere, he would be suddenly present, wide-eyed and able to recognize her, as if his mind had simply wandered off somewhere, gotten lost in a wooded dream and then unexpectedly emerged through a clearing. At these times, she, too, would feel instantly awake, her heart lit up as if on a wick. Each day she sat waiting for it. A tight prayer in her chest that this time he would stay. Maybe tomorrow, she thought when it didn’t come.
She leaned in and kissed his untroubled forehead just below the cowlick. The faint bready smell on his neck—that scent of home, of the breathing soul inside—always gave her comfort. Then she walked out into the hallway, passing rooms inhabited by people so much older than both her and Henry. In the last was Mrs. Miller, all cotton-ball hair and lived-in eyes tucked inside a shriveled brown face.
“High five, Mrs. Miller,” she said when she spotted her sitting in her wheelchair, hunched but alert, in the doorway of her room.
The old woman raised her delicate, tremoring hand for Hannah to slap. Hannah couldn’t remember when or how they’d developed this ritual, but it always buoyed her to see her youth reflected in the wistful gaze of Mrs. Miller. It was as if the old woman could see the expanse and promise of Hannah’s life, and for that moment Hannah, too, could imagine it, could almost believe in something beyond her small routine.
“Are those new slippers?” she asked, pointing to the old woman’s leopard-print footwear. “I’m telling you, Mrs. Miller, you’re bringing sexy back.”
“Ninety is the new eighty-five,” Mrs. Miller said with a wink, and Hannah watched with something like envy as the full history of her laughter crinkled across her face.
Mrs. Miller reached up and Hannah bent to her hand, which caressed Hannah’s cheek. “You seem tired,” Mrs. Miller said. “You come every day. I don’t know how you do it. But you’re not going to do him any good if you don’t take care of yourself too.”
“I do,” Hannah lied. “I’m fine. Really. Thanks though.”
She said her goodbyes and hurried out the door into the breezeless, sticky summer evening.
Moments later she was on the Metro, watching the tunnel walls flash past, wondering as she always did how all that graffiti got there. The train shrieked and rumbled, and she imagined the crash of steel on steel as the car coming from the opposite direction bore down on them. She turned to the businessman beside her and envisioned a bomb going off from inside his briefcase. She looked up at the three teenagers looming over her, pictured one pulling out a gun. Finally, she caught her own reflection in the window, her red hair too bright and conspicuous, her body tucked into the smallest package she could be. She doused her hands in Purell, closed her eyes to the world.
The Metro chimed at her stop and the doors opened. She was jostled with the crowd, pushed toward the steep stairway, climbing up to the small square of sky at the top. Her apartment was a short block away.
Her cell phone rang. She glanced at it, saw that it was Maya. She hit Ignore. She loved Maya, but right now the world felt like too much, and she would have to call her back on a day when it was less so.
Once in the safety of her small apartment, she took off her clothes and put them in a plastic bag, zipping it tight so that whatever Metro germs were on them wouldn’t leak out. Maya often told her how neurotic this was, as if she didn’t know it. Sometimes she watched those television shows about extreme obsessive-compulsives, and a gnawing worry would hatch in her chest that someday she might be one of them. She could see how it could happen, how each day you needed to do just a little bit more to make yourself feel secure, until one day you woke up to find your entire apartment wrapped in plastic, no hole to breathe through.
“Why don’t you just get a hazmat suit and call it a day?” Maya had said recently.
Maya had limited tolerance for Hannah’s anxieties, which Hannah actually appreciated. Something about the way Maya trivialized her concerns helped to shrink them, took some of the terror out. Hannah had laughed the comment off, not admitting that she thought it was a great idea. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out. She’d even priced them on Amazon.
Her cell rang again. She sat down on the couch, pressed herself against the pillows and waited for it to stop. A moment later, a text from Maya appeared on the screen.
Pick up the phone, loser.
Hannah rolled her eyes and smiled. But still she didn’t answer. She was just too tired today. Every day, really.
I know you’re sitting in your apt. ignoring me.
She sighed.
Unless you’re dead.
Are you dead?
Hannah considered the question.
The phone rang again.
This time she picked up, realizing that the calls wouldn’t stop until she did. “I do go out, you know,” she said.
But Maya, who never listened, wasn’t listening. “Hold, please.”
There was a series of clicking noises, Maya muttering to herself and then silence.
“Okay,” Maya said finally, “I’ve got Blue on the line too.”
Hannah frowned. They never did three-way calls. Something must be up. “Hi, Blue,” she said.
“Hey, you,” Blue said.
“Okay, ready, Hannah?” Maya asked.
“For...?” Hannah braced.
“My great idea!”
Ever since they were kids, Maya was always having “great ideas” that not only weren’t great but, in fact, were epically terrible.
“No really, this time it’s a good one!” Maya said into Hannah’s pointed silence. “Nothing like that time we got locked out of my house and I said that you could fit through my doggy door.”
“That was me, actually,” Blue said. “I still have the scar.”
“No, Hannah has the scar.”
“Different doggy door,” Hannah said.
Though they talked often on the phone and through varying forms of social media, it had been a while since Hannah had seen either of them in person. Adult concerns had slowly eclipsed superfluous things like fun, and the seductive promise of technology had rendered in-person visits seemingly unnecessary. The last time they’d been together was for Blue’s father’s funeral a few years back. Hannah had taken the train from DC and Maya drove in from New Jersey, and the three of them had gotten so bombed in Brooklyn after the wake that they almost missed the service the following morning. Hannah and Maya knew it was what Blue needed, how she honored the man who had never been present for her—through dark-humored toasts and temporary obliteration. In retrospect, Hannah’s life had been slightly more expansive back then—each year it seemed to shrink a little further, the way people’s bones do as they age. Occasionally Blue would come to DC on a work trip and they’d have lunch, and those visits were always the highlight of Hannah’s small life. But it had been twelve years since all four of them, including Renee, had been together in one place. Twelve years since the summer that would both haunt and link them and Henry together for the rest of their lives. Shortly after that, Blue had taken off to some small school in Vermont with a name Hannah always forgot, Maya to Ramapo College in New Jersey before dropping out entirely, and Renee, their long lost fourth, to Duke. Only Hannah had stayed in DC, her plans to attend UCLA with Henry shredded. She went to community college instead, unable to leave him behind. It was never even a question. It was what he would have done for her.