Chapter 7 The Only Two Humans on the Earth
THE ONLY TWO HUMANS ON THE EARTH
Baker is gone from the bed when Hannah wakes the next day. Hannah finds her in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal and talking to Clay’s mom.
“Good morning, Miss Hannah!” Clay’s mom says, far too loud and bubbly for Hannah’s current state. She clutches a coffee mug and wears a floral-patterned robe. Baker sits next to her at the table, but she doesn’t raise her eyes from her cereal.
“’Morning, Mrs. Landry,” Hannah says.
“What would you like to eat?”
“I’ll just get some Raisin Bran, thanks.”
She pours the cereal into one of the delicate ceramic bowls, then fills a plastic cup with ice water.
Clay’s mom resumes her conversation with Baker, asking her about how she’s going to choose a roommate for LSU.
When Hannah sits at the table with them, Mrs. Landry glances away from Baker to give Hannah a welcome smile, but Baker keeps her eyes trained on Mrs. Landry.
Hannah tries hard to make eye contact with Baker, but Baker only looks between her cereal bowl and Mrs. Landry. A cell phone rings, and Mrs. Landry peels herself gracefully off her chair to answer it.
“Hold on, girls, I’ve got to take this one, it’s one of my Bible study babes,” she says. “Hello? Well, good morning to you, too!”
Hannah plays with the raisins in her bowl, burying them underneath the milk, until Mrs. Landry walks onto the back porch and closes the door behind her.
“Hey,” Hannah says quietly, looking over at Baker. “You all right?”
Baker meets her eyes for a fraction of a second. “Fine. Are you?”
“Yeah.” Hannah taps her spoon against her bowl.
They say nothing else to each other.
Baker doesn’t speak directly to Hannah after their friends wake up and fill the space around them.
They walk down to the beach again, and the sun beats hot on Hannah like it has every other day this week, but Baker doesn’t catch her eye or smile at her, and every joke or remark Hannah says to the others seems to materialize from a scared, hollow place inside of her.
The boys spend a long time in the ocean. Hannah stays on the sand with Joanie and Baker, pretending to read while the two of them hit a volleyball back and forth. After a while, Joanie plops onto her towel and puts her headphones in her ears, and Hannah and Baker are left in hot silence.
Baker kneels on her towel to reapply sunscreen, and Hannah focuses so hard on the text of her book that the letters blur.
She can see Baker out of her peripheral vision, squinting beneath her sunglasses as she lathers her shoulders and arms. Baker reaches behind her to rub in her back, and Hannah watches her struggle for a moment before she can no longer take it.
She flops the book onto her towel and sits up to help her.
“I’m fine,” Baker says.
“Just let me get your back.”
“I am getting it.”
“Not very well. Just—here.” Hannah rubs lotion in between Baker’s shoulder blades, and Baker leans forward, her shoulders tense.
“Okay?” Hannah asks.
“Yep.” Baker wrenches out of Hannah’s grasp and walks purposefully down to the water, and Hannah is left kneeling on her towel.
There’s pizza for dinner that night. Mrs. Landry apologizes to the group for not having the energy to cook something, and Dr. Landry laughs heartily and says, “This is fine, honey, we can eat pizza for one night.”
Hannah sits on the back porch after dinner, playing Apples to Apples with Wally, Luke, and Joanie. She tries not to think about how Baker is still sitting at the kitchen table with Clay and his parents.
“Clay’s probably so uncomfortable,” Joanie laughs, tossing down a card. “You know he hates his mom getting involved in anything.”
“Yeah, but she wouldn’t be Clay’s mom if she didn’t interview the prom date,” Luke says. “Or girlfriend. Or whatever.”
“I think she’s been interviewing her all week. Yesterday I heard her asking about Baker’s brother and how he likes New Orleans and all that.”
“Scopin’ out the family,” Luke says, hiking his eyebrows. “Mama Landry’s got long-term plans.”
“Could you imagine them married, though? Clay would be like, ‘Honey, I’m home from coaching Little League and junior football and all these other manly sports, is dinner on the table?’ and Baker would be like, ‘Hold on, Clay-Clay, I’m finishing up these city council papers and all of my other overachieving activities! ’ It’d be a nightmare.”
Hannah’s stomach clenches and the ache inside her chest hurts more than ever. Please make it go away. Please just let me be normal. Please just let me find this funny, like they do.
“Okay, really?” Wally says, bringing them back to the game. He holds up the cards they’ve submitted for the category he’s judging. “‘The dump,’ ‘Your grandma,’ and ‘Herpes’? For the Delicious card?”
“Guess we’re all on the same wavelength here,” says Luke.
“These are absolute shit.”
“Oh, Walton, we always forget that you like to play this game literally,” says Joanie.
“Aren’t you the one who taught me that you’re supposed to play to the judge? All right, I’m gonna go with … ‘Your grandma.’”
“Yes!” says Luke. “That was mine.”
There’s more drinking that night. Clay produces a bottle of Wild Turkey American Honey, which Hannah has never tried, and they all take turns swigging from it while they sit around the pool.
Wally makes everyone laugh by describing his series of Yu-Gi-Oh!
Halloween costumes from elementary school, and Joanie entertains the group with stories about growing up with Hannah.
“And we played dollhouse until we were, like, twelve and thirteen, didn’t we, Han? We were way past the age where it was cute. But we had a whole collection of families that lived together in this house, and we used to spend hours setting up the furniture and decorations.”
“And we had that butler,” Hannah says, relieved to be carried away on the happy memory. “That really ugly figurine that we took from some other play set, and you drew angry eyebrows on its face and we named it Hector.”
“Yeah, and we used to laugh so hard because we would have the eight-year-old daughter boss Hector around, but like only when the dollhouse parents weren’t looking, so it became this whole subseries within our dollhouse universe that she was this awful bratty tyrant who was secretly controlling the entire household. ”
“And we had the babies, too. The triplets.”
“Oh, god, okay, so Hannah’s favorite character was this baby boy we named Oliver.
He was this dimply little thing with red curls and a blue onesie, and Hannah was like absolutely obsessed with him.
But then one day, I don’t even know how it happened, we just lost him.
And Hannah spent two months looking for him, like absolutely upending the house on her search to find him.
Like whenever she had a spare moment, she would go Oliver-hunting.
And one time I caught her crying in the laundry room because she was so upset, and I tried to comfort her, and she was like, ‘Joanie, now I truly understand what pain is.’”
Hannah laughs along with her friends, and without even meaning to, almost as a reflex, she looks at Baker and sees something longing and tender in her eyes. Hannah tries to catch it, hold on to it, nurse it like a salve, but the moment escapes too quickly.
Wally tries to kiss Hannah a while after that. He intercepts her when she’s returning from the bathroom, framing his hands around her face before she fully realizes what’s going on.
“Whoa,” she says against his mouth. He kisses her again, then starts to run a hand through her hair.
“I’ve wanted to do this all week,” he says. His stubble burns against her chin.
“Hold on. Wally, hold on.”
He pulls away. His eyes are drunk; his lips are wet.
“Not tonight,” Hannah says. “I just—I don’t feel that great. Sorry.”
“Okay.” He nods his head a few times. “Okay. Can I—can I get you some medicine or something?”
“No, really, I’m okay.”
“Okay,” Wally says, his expression crestfallen. “Well … I’ll meet you back out there, I guess. Um. Feel better.”
And then he walks off toward the bathroom, and Hannah stands in the hallway with her chin smarting and her chest aching.
On Wednesday, Hannah wakes before Baker. Her sleepy mind twitches with irritation, and she remembers, vaguely, that she dreamt of something sad.
Baker sleeps with her head turned toward the door.
Hannah watches the rise and fall of her back, imagining her lungs working somewhere inside of her, expanding, contracting, keeping her here with Hannah.
She watches the steady pulse point in Baker’s neck, imagines her heart pumping blood through her body.
Her heart, that mysterious organ, calling out to Hannah over and over again, even while keeping Baker’s deepest secrets nestled within her.
At midday, after several hours at the beach, Hannah and Joanie trek back to the house for what Joanie has taken to calling her “daily intermission.” They both have to pee, they need a break from the burning sun, and Joanie wants to make another sandwich.
Hannah walks along and feels that strange, uncertain dynamic she often feels with her sister when it’s just the two of them away from their friends.
“What’s going on with you and Baker?” Joanie asks while they mill about the kitchen.
Hannah freezes in the act of opening her Diet Coke can. Joanie’s voice is casual, but Hannah can tell she’s been waiting for the right moment to ask. “What do you mean?”
“Y’all are being weird. You’re not, like, all obsessed with each other and laughing at each other’s jokes and finishing each other’s sentences all the time.”
“We’re fine,” Hannah says, shooting Joanie a look that means she’s completely out of her mind. “I think she’s just a little off. Stressed about college or something.”
Joanie munches on her potato chips and stares at Hannah long and hard. “Okay,” she says in a voice that means she can see right through Hannah. Then she grabs an entire jug of sweet tea and leads the way back to the beach.