Girls of Brackenhill(6)

In the end, Hannah would return home alone, and never come back to Brackenhill.





CHAPTER SIX

Now

Rockwell Mountain Road was two narrow lanes with sharp curves, flanked by a steep ravine and the Beaverkill to the west and an imposing vertical wall of shale and slate—the tumbled face of Rockwell Mountain—to the east. As Huck drove, Hannah studied the guardrail, looking for signs that a car had blown through. A mile from town she found the breach—a post had been violently uprooted, the wood splintered. Instinctively Huck punched the brake, and the car jerked and slowed. Hannah couldn’t see over the side, down to the bottom of the ravine. Was the car still there? How long had Aunt Fae lain there, bleeding and in pain, before she’d been helped? On impact, she remembered. Hannah turned her head away from the ravine, toward Huck, and he reached out to grasp her fingertips.

“Turn on Castle Drive at the top of the hill,” Hannah said.

“Inventive.” Huck squeezed her fingertips and gave her a half smile. Hannah tried to form her lips into what would pass as a smile but found she couldn’t. The thrum of dread pulsed in her ears, her chest.

The gate at the end of the road was swung wide, the driveway looming in front of them like an open mouth, the stone archway like large yellowed teeth. Huck inched the car forward, and Hannah held her breath as the tower points came into view.

Hannah’s heart lodged in her throat. She hadn’t been to Brackenhill since a week after Julia disappeared. Her clearest memory of the end of that summer was the house receding in the rear window of the Buick as the car sped down the driveway. She remembered Aunt Fae holding a handkerchief over her face. Uncle Stuart’s left hand raised, unmoving, his face gaunt and stricken.

Her stepfather had steered the car with one hand and rested the other on the empty front seat. Trina, her mother, hadn’t made the trip to retrieve Hannah, and for the rest of the summer she rarely left her bedroom. It was after Julia vanished that her isolated piety turned full-blown zealous. Julia had been hers. A special mother-daughter bond that Hannah used to study, try to understand. Hannah and Trina had never been close. Hannah was too exuberant, too much. Everything Hannah did seemed to exhaust Trina, particularly after Julia left.

Hannah’s mother took to carrying rosaries with her everywhere, her lips always moving, her fingers rolling the black beads in small circles around the pads of her thumbs.

Now, in the early-morning light, the castle looked ethereal, a black shadow lit pink from behind. Only as they edged closer could Hannah see its age: Crumbling stone and missing mortar, sagging flashing along the roofline and dangling slate shingles. Window ledges with peeling paint in various shades of white, tan, even green, like Aunt Fae had run out of one color and just used whatever she’d found in the basement.

The basement. Hannah closed her eyes, her nose and mouth filled with the smell of rot, whether real or imagined, she couldn’t say. The maze of small rooms connected with no discernible pattern by a series of arched doorways. They’d played hide-and-seek there, convinced the rooms shifted, the house accommodating their wild imaginations. They’d tried to tell Aunt Fae once. A labyrinth in the basement that seemed intent on trapping them, keeping them hostage. Fae had laughed, waved her hand around in a circle, dismissive. “Everyone tells stories about this house; don’t feed them,” she’d warned. But the rooms had moved. As a child, Hannah was certain of it.

“Holy shit, Hannah,” Huck whispered next to her. “I had no idea.”

Of course he didn’t. He didn’t know about any of it. Hannah felt a burst of impatience with him, a quick bolt of frustration at his inability to keep up. She didn’t want to explain Brackenhill, her aunt and uncle, her family, her sister. More than not wanting to—she couldn’t.

Hannah approached the building to search for the key. She heard Huck’s sharp intake of breath next to her as she led them through a stone archway and into the courtyard. Aunt Fae had kept up the garden: green and full, bursting with color, pinks and blues. Even in the hot August months, when perennials would be wilting, Fae’s garden looked lush as spring. Dappled with birdhouses and fountains.

Hannah found the cobalt-blue flowerpot in the corner and lifted it; the brass key glinted in the sunlight. Brackenhill never changed.

Inside it smelled like a memory: damp and sweet, musty carpets and layers of perfume. Aunt Fae’s banana bread. Peeling paint along the concrete walls. Dust trapped in fluted moldings. The ceilings were uneven—barely above Huck’s head in some areas, looming over fifteen feet high in others. Their voices echoed. Rink ran in a circle, barked, the sound ricocheting off the stone walls.

“Hannah.” Huck stopped. The question unspoken. He touched her elbow. His eyebrows pinched as he searched her face. There was never a moment when Hannah looked at his face, his gray-blue eyes sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes bright with love, and didn’t feel the gentle tug of something wonderfully sweet. Love. Desire. Admiration. Even now, in this castle, her heart a trapped bird inside her rib cage, her breath sour in her mouth, she loved him. He deserved some kind of explanation, of course.

“This house,” she said, her voice wobbly and unsure to her own ears. She began again. Squared her shoulders, stood up straighter. “For five years, we came here every summer, my sister and I. From the time I was eleven to the time I was fifteen. My stepfather was a drunk. My mother was incapable. Brackenhill was . . . our sanctuary. But something happened to my sister here, and that was the end of it. I was fifteen. Julia was seventeen. She was acting so strangely that summer . . .” Her voice trailed off, her thoughts winding back to that August: Julia’s bed empty, the sheets cool, the tug of jealousy in Hannah’s core, the girl with the long red hair. What was her name? Evie? Ellie. The new feeling of a boy, the first boy, the weight and smell of him (his name she’d not forget, and she still woke up with it full in her mouth—Wyatt). Wondering if it had all started, or ended, because of a teenage boy who was loved by two girls who happened to be sisters.