The girls would stay in a town for two months or maybe three. Mary would find temporary work washing dishes or cleaning rooms or doing whatever work for whichever business needed an extra hand. Sometimes Mary would take money for other things. She wouldn’t talk about what those were, but neither was she ashamed of them. The things she did to survive were automatic, reflexive, and once they were done, they were no more than dust in her tracks.
She liked the Midwestern boys, with their awestruck professions of love, with their earnest, down-on-one-knee sentimentality. She liked their pale backs and strong tanned arms. She liked their simple minds. She always chose the docile ones. The tame ones. The ones who would do anything for her. Or, rather, she let them choose her. Mary’s instincts were keen enough to steer clear of the ones with dark eyes and matching hungers. When she encountered one of those, it was time to leave.
Mary marveled at how many towns there were in this swath of the country, how many that seemed just alike. It was a safe place for her to have Hannah. The authorities didn’t bother much with truancy, and their homeschooling laws were lax to nonexistent. These were places were kids grew up working on farms, not sitting in classrooms. But Mary was diligent about Hannah’s schooling, and they would often spend their evenings scratching out equations or reading whatever Mary could find. She taught Hannah algebra by the time she was eight. They’d find owl pellets in fields and dissect them, organizing and identifying the rodent bones. And at night they’d sit together reading the same page in the same novel, Mary waiting for Hannah to finish before she went on to the next.
Hannah grew up during those years. Grew taller and leaner, her fledging breasts just starting to become visible under her T-shirts. Her sense of privacy blossoming with her body. They were staying in a trailer in an RV park where Mary was helping out for the summer when Mary opened the bathroom door without knocking.
“Hey!” Hannah yelled, bumping her hip against the open door, but not before Mary saw her pull her shirt down. Hannah had been looking at herself in the mirror.
“Bunny,” scolded Mary. “Relax. It’s not like I’ve never seen boobs before.”
Hannah pushed her way out of the bathroom, mumbling something unintelligible and storming out of the trailer. “Pretty mature!” Mary called after her, the door clanging, then swinging wide open. “Keep acting like that, and those boobs are going to crawl right back up into your chest!”
She watched the back of Hannah’s form as she stomped over the dry dirt, then Mary went back into the bathroom.
“Jesus,” she moaned, when she saw the state of it. Her makeup was spread all over the counter and her razor was in the sink still covered with shaving cream. “It’s not like you have any hair yet!” she called to the sister who couldn’t hear her. “Come on, Bunny,” she muttered to herself, rinsing the razor clean. Hannah had been getting into her things more and more, slicking on lipstick and splashing on the Jean Naté that some boy had bought her in some town.
They’d be leaving the park in the morning. Mary hadn’t yet told the owners, but the tourist season was nearly over; there was no longer any reason for them to keep her around. After she cleaned up the bathroom, she began packing. She had done it so many times and they had so wonderfully little, it was a mechanical act. They had clothes and shoes, they had sleeping bags and coats. Mary had makeup, a hairdryer, and some books that she kept. Hannah had Barbies and some stuffed animals. Their lives were containable and transportable. Home wasn’t a place.
When their backpacks were packed and fully zipped, Mary set them beside the thin metal door of the trailer, then went to go find Hannah.
It had been a dry summer so the grass was sparse—ragged yellowing clusters holding to the dry dirt. The park was starting to clear out, only cinder blocks and bare earth marking the spots vacated by the summer people’s RVs. Mary wondered if there was a place on the planet that didn’t have summer people.
She walked to the small aboveground pool where she could usually find Hannah, taking the steps up to the wooden platform. Helen was in the water. Helen came up from outside Oklahoma City every summer. All day long, she’d glide from one end of the pool to the other like some huge pelagic mammal. “You looking for your sister, honey?” she asked, drawing closer to Mary like a surfacing walrus.
Mary nodded, then she brought her hand to rub the back of her scalp. It had been hot in the trailer. “Have you seen her?”
Helen reached the edge of the pool by Mary’s feet, turned and pushed off again, her pale thighs powering her off the wall. “I saw her walk by a little while ago,” she called behind her. “She was walking toward the fields.”
“Thanks,” said Mary. She paused before heading back down the steps. “Have a good swim,” she called behind her.
“You, too, honey,” replied Helen, as she absent-mindedly dunked underneath the water.
The park was surrounded by thousands of acres of slender green stalks of corn. Mary and Hannah had walked in those fields a few times, their eyes following the lines of the plants up toward the blue sky above, knowing that they were concealed by the terrestrial. In another month or so, the combine harvesters would descend on that land like massive churning beasts, leaving nothing but yellow ankle-high husks.
When Mary reached the field, she walked along its edge. Hannah was mad at her, as she had been more often lately. There were some kids at the park Hannah had become friends with. They would leave together when Mary started work and run in a pack all day long. Mary would see them at the pool, she’d see them at the playground, she’d see them sitting on the ground by the shady side of the trailer, their backs in the dirt, their heads on one another’s bellies. It was Hannah, another girl, and a boy. Hannah, Kim, and Shawn. Kim had left a week ago and Shawn, just the other day. The night he left, Mary had lain next to Hannah in bed and listened to her crying and fiercely wiping her eyes in the dark, letting out only nearly inaudible high-pitched whines. That was when Mary decided it was time to go, time to push on to the next place.
It was getting close to suppertime, and Mary turned around and headed back to the park; Hannah would be getting hungry soon. She pushed open the door to the trailer, feeling the tinned warmth hit her. They kept the windows open, but the late afternoon was always insufferable. “Bunny!” she called from the threshold, not wanting to go inside. In reply, there was only silence. But on the floor, just beside the door in a neat little parallel, sat Hannah’s dingy white canvas sneakers. “Bunny, I know you’re home,” called Mary, kicking off her own shoes, feeling the dampness of her soles. “I see your Keds!”
There was no real answer, but from the bedroom, Mary heard a muffled cry of frustration. It was just like Hannah to go to the trouble of hiding only to reveal herself with orderliness.
Mary pushed into the bedroom, and her eyes scanned the empty room. “Where are you?” she asked.
From below the bed where Mary and Hannah’s sleeping bags lay, Mary heard Hannah’s voice. “I’m not leaving.”
“Bunny, come out from under there.”