Chapter 8 Broken
brOKEN
Hannah wakes to a knocking sound. “Girls,” a voice calls through the door. “Are you awake?”
The first thing she realizes is that she is naked. The second thing she realizes is that Baker is naked, too.
They stare at each other with horrified eyes.
“Girls,” Mrs. Landry calls again, knocking louder this time. The doorknob rattles as she tries to turn it, and Hannah and Baker wrench the sheets over themselves. But the door stays closed, and Hannah remembers, through her adrenaline rush, that Baker locked it the night before.
Get in the shower, Baker mouths as she scrambles off the bed. Hannah darts into the bathroom, turns the shower on, and listens at the door.
“Oh, good morning, Mrs. Landry.” Baker tries to sound casual, but there’s a clear strain in her voice. “Sorry, I just woke up.”
“Are you two all right in here? Did you mean to have the door locked?”
“Oh—no, ma’am, I’m sorry. Um. I heard weird noises last night, so I locked it. Sometimes my mind gets away from me.”
There’s a short pause before Mrs. Landry speaks again. “That’s all right. Are y’all ready to start packing and cleaning? We have to be out by noon.”
“Yes, ma’am, absolutely.”
“Great. Let me get your sheets while I’m here. I’ve already started the laundry—”
“No!” Hannah hears the sound of Baker sidestepping Mrs. Landry. “I mean, no, please, we can get them.”
“That’s all right, I’ve already washed the boys’—”
“Please, no, my mom would disown me if I didn’t wash my own sheets. Seriously, it’s so nice of you, but I promise I can get them.”
There’s an awkward pause. Hannah holds her breath at the bathroom door, the shower whistling behind her.
“Well, all right,” Mrs. Landry says hesitantly.
“Thanks,” Baker says, her voice overly cheerful. “We’ll be right down!”
Then there’s the sound of a door closing, followed by silence.
Hannah waits several seconds, her breasts pressing against the doorframe, her heart racing in her chest. When she cracks open the bathroom door, Baker is standing beside the bed, her shoulders hunched, an old HABITAT FOR HUMANITY T-shirt covering her torso.
“Hey,” Hannah calls softly.
Baker doesn’t turn around.
Hannah leaves the shower running and steps into the bedroom, self-conscious about her naked body in the bright morning light. She comes to stand behind Baker, places a gentle hand on her arm.
Baker flinches and jerks away like a skittish animal.
“Are you okay?” Hannah asks.
Baker averts her eyes from Hannah’s naked body, and Hannah is suddenly sick with white-hot shame. She folds her arms over her breasts and crosses her legs together, desperate to hide herself.
“You should get in the shower,” Baker says tonelessly, gazing at the bedsheets like she can’t bear to touch them.
A loaded silence follows: a heavy, crushing, suffocating silence that makes Hannah want to scream. “Okay,” she says, releasing the word into the room to see what happens. “But are you all right?”
Baker doesn’t answer. Hannah takes a step toward her.
“Don’t,” Baker says, flinching again.
“What’s—?”
“Please just get in the shower.”
Something in the room, some invisible tether between them, has broken.
Hannah can almost see it: A vine that had once connected them, had once wrapped them together, now lies, butchered, on the floor.
She takes a step backward and feels her navel tugging on her broken half.
It retracts into her body, coils around her stomach, clogs her throat.
She retreats to the bathroom without another word. But after she locks the bathroom door behind her, she stands in front of the mirror and studies her naked body, trying to remember every place Baker touched and kissed.
They clean their rooms, they clean the kitchen and the pool area, they load up their bags, and then it’s time to leave. Hannah falls in line behind her friends to thank Dr. and Mrs. Landry, and she’s not sure if it’s her imagination, but Mrs. Landry seems to hug her with rigid arms.
They take a picture in front of the house—Hannah squeezes next to Wally and smiles like she’s the happiest seventeen-year-old girl on earth—and then separate between the two cars.
Hannah slides into Baker’s passenger seat and lets the sound of Luke and Joanie’s jabbering roll over her.
Baker scrolls through her music without asking Hannah to deejay like she normally does, and Hannah clutches her arms around her stomach, feeling hollow and sick.
Then Baker starts the car and backs out of the driveway, away from the house, away from the upstairs bedroom, away from their barest selves.
They arrive back in Baton Rouge just before 4:30 P.M. Baker guides the car down familiar streets, past familiar banks and restaurants, and Hannah swells with hope that this anchoring, common place—this place their friendship is rooted in—will restore the two of them.
But Baker drops Hannah and Joanie off first, even though Luke’s house would have been the more convenient one, and as Hannah grabs her bag out of the trunk and puts on a brave goodbye face, she realizes their shame has followed them all the way from Destin.
“Pizza for dinner tonight,” her mom says while Hannah’s gathering her dirty laundry together. “Want any veggies on it?”
“Pepperoni,” Hannah says listlessly.
“It’s Good Friday. No meat.”
Hannah drops her head. “The one time I want pepperoni.”
“Why are you so moody?”
“I’m not moody.”
“You walked in here with a dark cloud circling around your head. Did you not sleep this week?”
“I slept.”
“Uh-huh.” Her mom takes the laundry basket from her and cradles it under one arm. “Take a nap until the pizza gets here.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Then lie down and relax. We’re going to the Stations of the Cross after dinner and I want you at your best.”
Hannah sighs and tosses a stray sock into the laundry basket. “Fine.”
She fakes sick when her mom wakes her for pizza.
“I knew something was wrong with you,” her mom says, feeling her forehead, “but you don’t have a fever.”
“It’s a stomach bug or something,” Hannah says, squinting into her pillow. “Or maybe cramps.”
“Okay, well, get some sleep. I’ll wake you before we leave to see if you’re feeling better.”
She lies there in the dark until her mom comes back a while later.
“Are you feeling any better?”
“No.”
Her mom surveys her with appraising eyes. “How about some ginger ale?”
“Yes, please.”
Joanie brings it to her a few minutes later. “You’re such an ass,” she says, setting the glass on Hannah’s nightstand. “Faking sick to get out of Stations of the Cross.”
“I’m not faking.”
“Should we write out your will before I leave?”
“Shut up.”
“I want those purple heart earrings from Express.”
“Go away.”
“Jeez,” Joanie says, backing out of the room. “I’m gonna pray for you to get a better sense of humor.”
Hannah lies in bed for hours and hours, faking sleep when her family comes home from church, faking sleep again when her mom checks her around 11:00 P.M., faking to herself that everything is okay.
She sneaks downstairs around one in the morning, no longer able to ignore the hunger in her stomach. She finds leftover pizza in the fridge and eats it cold while she slumps against the counter. In the darkness, her house looks strange to her, like a pattern of shapes she doesn’t know.
She opens the back door and tiptoes into the yard. Her bare feet brush against the grass and her arms shiver in the cool night air. She tilts her head back until she’s face-to-face with sky and stars. When her neck starts to hurt, she lies down on the ground, grass and dirt molding into her back.
Is it okay?
The question bleeds forth from her and she imagines it rising into the sky, delivered on wind and air and atmospheric pressure until it reaches God.
Is it wrong? Were we wrong?
She lies there, bleeding into the sky, until the sky bleeds red with morning.
She doesn’t hear from Baker at all on Saturday.
Her texts go unanswered; her calls go to voicemail.
She spends a lot of time lying in bed, pretending to read, but the words in her books mean nothing to her.
After a while, she picks up her laptop and stares at Baker’s Facebook page like she’s praying to it.
“You are being such a lard,” Joanie says later, loitering in Hannah’s doorway.
“I’m tired from the beach.”
“Mom says to make sure you have a nice dress picked out for Mass tomorrow.”
“Ugh.”
Joanie shrugs and shoves the rest of a cookie into her mouth. “Easter Sunday, champ.”
Hannah sits through Easter Mass the next morning without processing anything that’s happening. She follows along with the readings and the Gospel mostly out of habit, and the only thing that strikes her is a selection from the Gospel of John, which the lector reads in a solemn voice:
On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved,
and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.”
And Hannah understands that even though today is supposed to be about the Resurrection—about hope, and rebirth, and renewed faith—the only thing that makes sense is Mary Magdalene’s confusion and despair.
The lines for Communion are much longer than usual, swelled with the people who come to Mass only on Christmas and Easter.
Hannah watches them process to the front of the church to receive the Eucharist, all dressed in their Easter Sunday best, the moms looking harried, the teenagers looking unimpressed.
A familiar person comes into view in the long line on the right side of the church, and Hannah recognizes Nathan Hadley, dressed in a handsome button-up and slacks, his kind eyes visible even from across the room.
Mr. and Mrs. Hadley stand in line behind him, but Baker is nowhere to be seen.