Mary picked up the can of Aqua Net, shielding Hannah’s face with her hand as she sprayed. Hannah used the opportunity to close her eyes. “Does he even have your address?”
Hannah nodded. “I sent him a letter as soon as we knew it.”
“Well, he might not have gotten it yet,” said Mary. “We only just moved in.”
“I asked in the grocery store. They said it probably only takes three days for a letter to get from here to Kansas.”
As Mary set the can of hair spray on the gold-and-white-flecked vanity top, her eyes darted discreetly to Hannah’s face. “Did you guys say you’d write each other?” Mary knew Hannah liked him, but she hadn’t realized how much.
Hannah nodded. “He said he’d write me like every day. He just needed my address.” The emotion in her voice breached the levies, but only just.
Mary set the can of hair spray back on the vanity and looked at Hannah. “Give it a couple more days, Bunny,” she said. “If you don’t get a letter, forget about him.”
Hannah opened her eyes, and they hung on to Mary like she could save her. “He said he liked me.”
“There’ll be other boys, Bunny,” said Mary, her words soft.
“I don’t want another boy.”
Well, then, thought Mary, before she could stop herself. Maybe you are just like your mother after all.
ON THE WAY TO WILLIAM BROWN MIDDLE SCHOOL, Hannah rolled down her window and let her elbow rest in a position intended to be casual.
“So when we get there, just go to the main office,” started Mary. “They’ll take you to your classroom. They’re expecting you.”
Hannah nodded. “I know,” she said.
Mary felt the rhythm of the road beneath her. “What are you gonna tell people?” she said. “When they ask where you’re from?”
Hannah was silent for a moment. “I was just going to say that we’re from Sandy Bank. But we’ve lived all over.”
“That’s good,” said Mary, as they came to a stoplight. “You should just tell them that I work in tourism, so we used to move around a lot.”
The closer the girls came to the school, the more intent Hannah seemed to become on making it look as though she didn’t care. When the Blazer came to a stop, she opened the door quickly and hopped out, all in one fluid but shaky motion, like a newly born colt. Hannah wanted to seem like she belonged, and Mary allowed her the dignity of the act, remaining in the car. “I’ll see you later, okay?” she said, as Hannah nervously adjusted her backpack. It was too big, a camping pack; but they didn’t have the money to get her anything new yet.
“Okay,” said Hannah. Then she looked at her sister, her fingers hooked onto the straps of her bag. “Bye,” she said. Then Hannah turned and she walked into the school.
Mary watched Hannah’s feet as they propelled her toward the door. She was wearing her Keds. Mary had washed them for her in the sink the evening before. Like their hair, they smelled of the shampoo from Sea Cliff. There were kids beside her now, all walking inside. A girl ahead of her pushed through the glass door and held it behind her for Hannah. “Bye, Bunny,” she said, when Hannah disappeared into the yellow halls and was engulfed in the crowd of bodies, all moving in the same direction. Upstream. Onward. “I love you, baby.”
OVER THE NEXT WEEKS, the Chase girls found their pace, settled in, as they often did in a new place. The first weeks were all discovery and newness. The first weeks were all promise. When Mary would get home from work, she’d find Hannah still asleep, and she’d crawl into the sleeping bag next to her, and for a few precious minutes, the girls would lie like they did on so many countless nights—their breath, their bodies, each facing the other.
Hannah would leave for school while Mary slept, quietly making her breakfast and getting dressed, packing her lunch and leading her bike down the stairs.
Mary would be up by the time Hannah arrived home. They would have from then until Mary left for work to sit on the floor and eat American cheese while Hannah did her homework and Mary drew. She’d draw what she saw, what she had seen, people and places and the eyes of a cat she once found in the swamp. And when she was alone, she’d sit in front of the mirror and draw herself naked. Like a scientist trying to find elucidation in the repetition of study, she was curious as to the power of the beauty that others so coveted.
“Do you know what everyone at school calls Mr. Loogar?” asked Hannah, a textbook open between her legs.
“Who’s Mr. Loogar?” Mary was drawing Hannah as she did her homework.
“My social studies teacher.”
“What do they call him?”
“Lefty Loogar,” said Hannah, trying not to reveal just how hilarious her peer-starved mind found this. “He only has one ball.”
Mary made a face as she turned the pencil and erased a line. “What do you mean ball?”
Hannah blushed and pointed between her legs.
“What’s where the other one should be?”
“I don’t know,” said Hannah, the life in her eyes quick and brilliant like the silver flash of darting fish. “It’s probably just empty.”
“Hold still,” instructed Mary. Hannah bit her lip, her face settling in as she realized she was being drawn.
The pencil moved quickly in Mary’s hand as her eyes moved from Hannah to paper, paper to Hannah.
“You should sell your drawings,” said Hannah, trying to keep her chin lifted, her face at the same angle.
Mary chuckled as she worked. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, they’re really good.”
“Thanks, Bunny,” she said, and then she fell silent as she worked, putting Hannah not in their tiny apartment, but in front of a range of mountains that lifted through the sky with an ocean to her left and a desert to her right, and the boundlessness of infinity all around her.
AT WORK THAT NIGHT, Mary stood at the desk as she listened to the low constant buzz of conversation coming from the hotel’s bar. There was a boy who worked at the Sea Cliff golf course staring at her, as he often did, from his stool. It was the point in the evening when the bartender would lean against the mahogany that separated him from his guests and top off their drinks with a titch more on the house and begin wiping down the wood. Mary would watch them stumble out, the weight of their lives temporarily lifted as they took uneven steps, swaying to music that wasn’t there, inhabiting the safe corner of their minds they could find only with drink.
Mary always felt kindly to the guests; the people who came to Sea Cliff did so to sit by the sea and mourn. That’s what grand old hotels by the sea were for: mourning. Mourning the loss of prestige or prominence. Mourning the loss of love. Mourning the children who no longer spoke to you or the person you used to be or should have been. Mourning the loss of freedom or beauty. Mourning a time when all could have been set right again. Mourning the sedimentary layers of mistakes that constituted a life. For that, hotels were sacred ground.