Sandy and I sat down at a long table in the back with the yearbooks the librarian had collected for me. The room was crowded with mothers and young children waiting for story time. I caught Sandy watching them with a mix of amazement and longing that I knew too well myself. Maybe even a little anger because I knew that, too. Is that the kind of childhood other kids get? Yes, I thought. Yes, they do. And after raising Ella, I knew that much was true.
“Why don’t you start with these?” I said, handing Sandy the earlier and more likely irrelevant years. “Look for anything that mentions any of the nicknames. Here.” I pointed to a spot under one senior’s name in The Ridgedale Record Class of 1994. “Some of them put their nicknames right with their pictures.”
But no one else seemed to have a nickname listed anywhere. My plan was starting to feel decidedly hopeless until I reached the team pictures at the back of the book—runners, hockey players, football players. Each had a formal group shot with several candids under it. The formal portraits had only players’ full names, but the candids had nicknames, lots of them.
My eyes slid over the wrestling team and then swimming and then the varsity football players. No Captain, no Tex, and no Two-Six. I moved on to basketball, searching the faces of the assorted teenage boys, the skinny, acne-spotted ones and the ones who looked like they got all the girls. There were buzz cuts and mullets and one or two Mohawks. Aside from the snug, dated shorts and all that hair, they were the same kind of boys who could have been found in any current yearbook, in any town, anywhere in the country.
I looked down at a blurry, overexposed candid beneath the basketball team photo. It was impossible to make out the figures clearly—their faces fuzzy and indistinct—but there were two boys, close up against each other; one was shorter, clean-cut, with a square jaw and a flattop, and had his hand on the shoulder of a taller boy with longish hair and maybe a handsome face. In the background, a few feet away, was a much bigger guy, his back to the other two, shooting a basket. And beneath it a caption: Tex showing up Two-Six and the Captain. Even though the boys’ faces in the candid weren’t clear enough to compare to the group photo, their numbers were clear as day.
My heart was pounding as I scanned the team photo. And there they were, standing in a row, right above their names:
The Captain, Number 7, was Thomas Price. The boy Jenna had loved so much and who had brutalized her so.
Two-Six, Number 26, was Simon Barton. The one boy who hadn’t made it out of the woods that night alive.
And Tex, Number 15, was Steve Carlson. The boy whose love had scared Jenna most of all.
Barbara
The doctors were back. They had work to do, and they wanted space to do it. But Barbara wasn’t going anywhere. She was sure the final blow would come the second she left Hannah alone. That her daughter would slip away for good and there would only be Barbara to blame.
Or so Steve would think, apparently. Because he was already punishing her. He’d barely spoken to her since he’d rushed from the house to find Hannah. Had hardly looked at Barbara since she’d arrived at the hospital four hours earlier to find him standing gray-faced and soaking wet at Hannah’s bedside.
How easy it must have been for him to make the whole thing Barbara’s fault. Never mind his sins of omission.
Barbara had since learned the details of what had happened, prying them from a distant Steve one by one. Hannah had been in the water when he finally found her at the creek, flat on her back, her filmy light blue nightgown floating around her like a cloud. Steve actually said that, “like a cloud,” describing it for Barbara as if seeing it all over again. Her eyes had been closed and she’d been dead white. In fact, Steve had been sure his daughter was dead when he’d leaped into the creek—with superhuman agility, one of the other officers had said—to rescue her.
Luckily, Hannah had gotten wedged up against some rocks on the side of the bank; otherwise, they might not have found her in time. Hypothermia was her official diagnosis, and she hadn’t regained consciousness yet. Time would tell the extent of the damage, the doctors said. In the meantime, they were warming her slowly and saying their prayers. It was all they could do.
The only thing that mattered now was that Hannah got better. But it was hard not to think about what else the doctors had quickly discovered upon examination: She’d delivered a baby recently. There would be a DNA test—assuming Hannah didn’t wake up and confess—but Barbara and Steve didn’t need that to know the truth: That baby had been Hannah’s, not Sandy’s.
“I don’t think she was trying to kill herself,” Steve had said straight off. Like he wanted to keep anyone from even hinting at suicide.
“Then what was she doing in the water, Steve?” Barbara had pressed anyway. Because how blind was he going to be?
“Maybe she wanted to be close to her—to the baby.”
“Well, isn’t that romantic?” Barbara had said. “Too bad that didn’t occur to Hannah before she dumped her out there.”
Barbara was supposed to be worried, frantic. She wasn’t supposed to be angry at Hannah. But she was. She was furious.
“For Christ’s sake, Barb,” Steve had snapped. “Let it go.”
How was Barbara supposed to “let it go” when it made no sense? When had it happened, and with whom? How had Hannah hidden some boy so completely—and her pregnancy? It was true that many people had not known Barbara was pregnant right up until the end. Carrying small was probably genetic. And those stupid sweatshirts. How convenient for Hannah, that that was the way she’d always dressed. It was as though she’d been planning it from the start.
“You two should take a walk, get some coffee,” said the older, gray-haired doctor with the big clunky glasses. Barbara had been told several times that this utterly underwhelming man was head of the ER, but she was having a hard time believing it. “It’s important that you take care of yourselves. Stay fresh. Hannah will need you once she wakes up. Right now she’s stable, I can assure you of that.”