Chapter 17
Hanna
Ty doesn't leave.
He drives me back from Missoula in his truck, one hand on the wheel and one on the center console where my hand is.
The drive is an hour. I don't remember any of it.
The highway is dark. There are elk on the roadside somewhere around Lolo, and I look at them and don't register they're elk until we're five miles past, and I say, flatly, to the windshield, "Those were elk. "
"Yes," Ty says.
We don't speak for the rest of the drive.
At ten fifty-eight we pull into the driveway at my mother’s house.
"Upstairs."
"Okay."
"With me."
"Okay."
I'm barefoot on the stairs by the time I remember I have shoes on. Ty is behind me. The door closes. My turnout boots are by the mat — I don't know when I got my turnout boots. The whole evening has a stutter in it.
"I should eat something."
"Okay."
"I'm not going to eat anything."
"Okay."
"I'm going to shower first."
"Okay."
"Come with me."
"Okay."
The bathroom is the small kind, the shower the kind with a curtain.
I turn the water on and stand with my back to Ty while I take off my uniform.
He stands with his back against the sink, and neither of us touches the other, and neither of us speaks.
The water takes a long time to come up hot.
I put my hand under it — my hand is shaking — and I say, without turning around:
"My hands are shaking."
"Because you ran medical on your brother." His voice is quiet behind me.
"That's — "
"You did a good job, Hanna."
"Okay."
"You did."
He comes around me — not to hold me, just to turn the water down a half degree. He knows my temperature. He sets it and steps back.
We don't speak for a long time.
I'm under the water. He's behind me. His hand is on my back, not moving — a warm weight between my shoulder blades.
The water is coming down over both of us, and my hair is sticking to my face, and I'm crying again, not the way I cried in his bed the other morning.
This is a smaller, uglier cry. This is the cry of a woman who's, in the last few hours, nearly lost her brother — who hasn't, technically, lost her brother — but who's been shown, in the specific way the highway shows people things, what losing him would look like.
Who's had to put the board under him herself. Who can't unsee it.
Ty's hand doesn't leave my back.
"He's going to be okay." Near my ear, very quietly.
"I know."
"Concussion, Grade 2 — "
"I know, Ty."
"I know you know. I'm — "
"I know what you're doing. Thank you."
"Okay."
"Don't say anything else reasonable."
"Okay."
I turn around. My face is a mess. The water is warm.
His face is the face I've been looking at since forever — wet, hair stuck to his forehead, same eyes — and he isn't here with a plan.
He's here because I asked him to be. He's here with his hand on me because I asked him to be. He isn't doing anything else.
"Touch me."
"Hanna — "
"Touch me, Ty."
"Are you — "
"I'm not okay. I'm not going to be okay. I don't want to talk about it. I want you to touch me. Not fix me. Touch me the way you touched me yesterday morning."
"Yesterday." He tips his head. "That was this morning, Hanna. Yesterday was the barbecue."
"Oh my god."
"Yeah."
"It was yesterday."
"It was yesterday."
"This has all — "
"Yeah."
"Touch me."
He does.
It isn't the bedroom. It's a shower with a plastic curtain and water starting to cool, and we're two people in a four-foot space with our hands on each other because the world nearly took the third leg of the tripod we've been balancing on for years.
The tripod has wobbled. The only answer my body can generate to the wobble is to be held.
He holds me.
Specifically.
Attentively.
He knows what he's doing. He's known since he was twenty-three.
He didn't lose the knowing in the ten years we didn't touch each other.
If anything the knowing got worse for him, because Ty Brennan, left alone with a thing he cares about, pays attention to it harder the longer he's denied it — and the memory of me he carried through a decade of not touching me has been refined into something I'm having a very difficult time keeping my balance under.
"I almost lost him."
"I know." His hand moves at the small of my back.
"And if I — if I had — "
"You didn't."
"If I had, I'd have lost you too, because you'd have — you'd have — "
"Hanna."
"You'd have left the station. You'd have — "
"Hanna."
"You'd have gone away from me because I'd have been his sister and you'd have been the reason and I — "
He turns the water off. He wraps me in a towel without stepping out of the tub — both hands, around me — and then he takes my face in his hands and says, with the specific flatness I've spent weeks being undone by:
"I wouldn't have left. I'd have been with you tomorrow.
With you the day after. In that kitchen with your mother, the way I've been in that kitchen since I was a kid, watching her through the worst thing that's ever happened to her for the second time.
I wouldn't have gone anywhere. Because she's my second mother and you're — "
"Don't."
"You're — "
"Ty."
"You're my person, Hanna."
The towel is holding me up. His hands on my face are holding me up.
I cry harder than I've cried in front of another human being in the years since my father died — like a woman who's been saving it the way my mother saved her speech — and he catches all of it.
He doesn't say another reasonable thing.
He doesn't tell me it's going to be all right or tell me to breathe, and when I can breathe, I reach up, put my wet hands on his jaw, and pull his mouth to mine.
"Come to bed with me."
"Okay."
The bed is a bed.
The lamp, this time, I turn off — I'm not putting on a front for anyone, and I don't need light to witness any of it — but I leave the hall light on so the edge of his face is still there, the specific silver line along his jaw.
This isn't a fight.
This isn't a decision.
This isn't gravity.
This is a very slow, very deliberate conversation between two bodies that have been holding their breath.
He unwraps the towel the way you'd unwrap a gift you didn't intend to rush.
He lays me down, then himself, and he doesn't hurry — specifically doesn't hurry.
He lets me be the thing that dictates the speed, and the speed I dictate is the speed of a woman who's spent an hour in a hospital hallway, who's spent hours before that running a call at highway speed with her brain half-watching her brother bleed, and who needs not the gravity version of this but the tenderness.
He gives me the tenderness.
He gives me the tenderness the way he pours coffee: thoroughly, without comment, as many times as I need.
Between things he says my name.
Not like a line. Like an acknowledgment.
Hanna, when I look away from his face. Hanna, when my breath catches in the bad way.
Hanna, when it catches in the good way. The name is the anchor.
It pulls me back into the room every time my head tries to go back to the gravel.
He's never said my name this many times in one night in years of knowing me.
I'm counting them by accident. By the time everything is — I've lost count, which is the whole point, which is what he's doing, and which is working.
Afterward, he lies on his back next to me, his hand flat on my sternum.
"Your hand."
"Yeah."
"Is right on my heart."
"Yeah."
"Leave it."
"Okay."
Neither of us moves for a long time.
The ceiling has no duck. This is my ceiling — smooth paint, a crack in one corner that's been there since I moved in. The hall lamp throws a yellow rectangle across the floor. Ty's hand rises and falls with my breath.
"I have to tell him tomorrow."
"I know."
"Even though he's — "
"I know."
"I almost lost him, and I still have to — "
"I know."
"Mom said — " I stop.
"Tell me what Mom said."
"She said I'm a runner. And I said I know. She said the difference between running and staying is that the cost of running is never having had any of it, and the cost of staying is losing it later. And she said she'd rather have had my dad and lost him than never had him."
"That sounds like your mother."
"She saved that for ten years."
"I know."
"How do you know."
"Because I've watched your mother watch you for years, Hanna."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
A beat.
"Is your hand going to stay there all night."
"If you want it to."
"I want it to."
"Okay."
We lie there for a long time. My body is too full of something to sleep — not fear anymore, not desire.
A word I don't have yet. A word like staying, if staying were also a verb.
I'm staying. For the first time in my adult life, staying: in a bed, with a man, in a town, with my family, in the middle of a crisis, with no plan to go anywhere.
At two in the morning my phone buzzes on the nightstand. Ty lifts his head an inch.
"Your phone."
"I see it."
It's Mom.
Mom: Cal is stable. Sleeping. I'm at the hospital. I'll stay tonight. Go to sleep, Hanna. I love you.
I read it twice.
Me: I love you too. Thank you. Tell him when he wakes up I'm coming in the morning.
She writes back almost immediately.
Mom: Is Ty with you.
I stare at the phone. I look at Ty. I type.
Me: Yes.
Mom: Good. Tell him I love him.
"My mother says she loves you."
His eyes are closed, his hand still on my chest. His face does something I've never seen it do — not a smile, not a frown, nothing you could put a name to. It's the face of a man being loved by a mother he needed for years without ever being told.
"Tell her." Very softly.
"Tell her what."
"Tell her I love her too."
I type:
Me: He loves you too.
Mom: I know. Go to sleep.
I put the phone down. Ty's hand hasn't moved.
"I'm going to tell Cal tomorrow. In the hospital."
"You don't have to do it there."
"I know. I'm going to. Because if I don't do it there, I'll do it Tuesday, and Tuesday I'll do it Wednesday. I have to do it tomorrow."
"You want me to come."
I think about it — Ty at the foot of Cal's hospital bed while I say the sentence. Cal, concussed, hearing it for the first time with Ty in the room. Cal's face. What's fair to each of them, and to me.
"No. I want to do it alone. And then I want to call you. You and I do the next part together — but the telling part, I have to do alone. I'm the one who has to do it."
"Okay."
"Not because you shouldn't be in the room."
"Okay."
"Because he needs to hear it from me first. Not see you standing there while I say it. He needs to hear his sister, and when he's done being angry at his sister, he can see you."
"Okay, Hanna."
"Am I doing this right."
"Yes." His thumb moves once, against my sternum. "Because it's the thing you've been trying to figure out since you decided to tell him, and you just figured it out without a joke. You're doing it right."
I put my face against his shoulder.
I sleep hard and without moving, the way you sleep when your body finally believes the person next to you isn't going to leave while you're under. I haven't slept like this in years.
In the morning, Ty is still there, his hand on my chest.
I wake and look at him — he's asleep. His face has lost the patience it's been carrying for weeks. Asleep, it's just a face. There's a small smile line at the corner of his mouth. His hair is a mess. He's mine.
I lie there for a long time and look at him.
Then I get up. I make coffee. I dress. I don't wake him. I write a note on the back of a grocery receipt — Going to hospital. Call you after. — H. — and leave it on the pillow next to his hand, and I go to tell my brother the thing I've been not telling him for years.