Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Hannah woke before Thomas.
His arm lay beneath her neck, heavy and warm.
She lay still and listened to him breathe and thought: she had married him because she had found no reason not to, and that seemed an extraordinary thing now, because none of the precautions had prepared her for this — the weight of his arm, the warmth, the feeling of a person beside her who would be there tomorrow and the day after that.
His eyes opened, slow and unguarded.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning.”
A floorboard creaked in the passage.
“Papa?”
“Go downstairs, Lucy.”
Footsteps retreating, the creak of the stairs. Thomas caught Hannah’s eye and they both held still for a moment, and then Hannah pressed her face against his shoulder and laughed.
Lucy was sitting at the kitchen table when they came down. She had set out the oatmeal and the bowls and was waiting with the patience of a child who knows she has disrupted something and is enjoying the power of it.
Her eyes went to Thomas. Then to Hannah. Then to them together. Something in her face shifted, the small recalibration a child makes when the adults in her house have changed overnight and she is working out what the change means for her.
Hannah went to the stove. “Oatmeal?”
“Yes, please.”
Hannah made breakfast. Thomas made coffee.
Lucy ate. The kitchen was quiet in the way kitchens are quiet when everyone in them is thinking something they are not saying, and Hannah let the quiet be, because some things did not need to be spoken to be understood, and Lucy was ten and would understand what she needed to understand when she was ready to understand it.
Harlan arrived. He ate. He and Thomas discussed the day’s work: fences, hay, the trough at the lower pasture.
Then they left. Thomas kissed Hannah before he went, briefly, his hand at her waist, in front of Lucy, as though it were a thing he had always done.
Lucy watched and said nothing, and Hannah stood at the door watching him cross the yard, and when she turned back Lucy was still watching her.
“What?” Hannah said.
Lucy shook her head. “Nothing.”
Hannah let it go. She cleared the table. Lucy helped, and they washed the dishes together in a quiet that had become comfortable between them, the quiet of two people who had fought and come through it and were still deciding what the coming-through had made them to each other.
After the dishes, Lucy said, “The jar can stay where you put it.”
Hannah stopped. She was wiping the table, and her hand stopped on the cloth.
“The blue one?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
Lucy shrugged. “You need the shelf.”
Hannah looked at her. The shrug was Lucy’s way of making a thing seem smaller than it was, the way Thomas’s silences were his way of carrying something without showing its weight.
The jar had cost Lucy something, and the giving of it was costing her something more, and Hannah did not make too much of it.
“Thank you,” she said.
Lucy nodded. Then she reached for the flour Hannah had been measuring. “Can I make the biscuits?”
“You may help.”
“I know how. Mama let me cut them.”
Hannah heard it — the careful way Lucy said it, Mama let me cut them, offered quietly this time, a piece of how things used to be.
“Then you may cut them,” she said.
Hannah heard the horses after four.
Hannah heard him in the yard and went to the door, and Lucy reached him first, which was to be expected, but what Lucy said was not.
“Can I have Mama’s blue dress?”
Thomas stopped. He was halfway through the door with his coat still on and snow on his hat, and he stopped.
Hannah closed her eyes briefly. She had spoken to Lucy about approaching this gently, about asking at the right time, about giving Thomas room — and Lucy had waited approximately four seconds after he walked through the door, because she was ten and patience was not her strongest quality and she had been sitting with the wanting all afternoon.
Thomas turned to Hannah. She saw the question — did you put her up to this? — and shook her head — not now.
“What dress?” he said.
“The blue one. In your chest.”
Thomas’s face closed — the shutting, the way a door shuts when a draft catches it — and Lucy’s face tightened the way it tightened when she knew the answer was going to be no and was bracing for it.
“No,” Thomas said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s put away.”
“I know. That’s why I want it.”
“No.”
Lucy looked at Hannah. Hannah kept still.
“Go wash for supper,” she said.
Lucy went. Her disappointment stayed behind in the kitchen like a third person.
Thomas hung his coat. Hannah waited until Lucy’s footsteps reached the top of the stairs.
“Why not?” she said.
Thomas’s shoulders stiffened. “Hannah.”
“She asked for a dress. Her mother’s dress.”
“I heard her.”
“Then why can’t she have it?”
“Because I said so.”
Hannah met his eyes. “That may satisfy a ten-year-old. It did not appear to.”
Thomas looked away first.
“Lucy thinks speaking of her mother makes you put things away,” Hannah said.
His head turned. “She said that?”
“She said that when you get quiet, she’s afraid you’ll put more things away. She is living in a house where her mother’s things are disappearing, Thomas, and she doesn’t know which ones will go next.”
Thomas sat at the table. He put his hands flat on the surface and looked at them, and Hannah let him sit with it, because this was not a thing she could push him through. He had to walk through it on his own.
“Sarah wore that dress the last Sunday she went to church,” he said.
Hannah’s irritation vanished. She sat beside him.
“She was already sick. She shouldn’t have gone. I told her that.” He was looking at his hands, not at Hannah. “She said if she was going to be ill, she could be ill in a pew as easily as in bed.”
Hannah could hear the woman in the words, practical, stubborn, unwilling to be managed, and she wished, not for the first time, that she had known her.
“She couldn’t walk home,” Thomas said. “I carried her from the wagon. She tried to argue and didn’t have the breath for it.” He paused. “I put the dress away after she died. Haven’t opened the chest since.”
There was the truth. Not the dress. The chest. The chest was the border Thomas had drawn between the life he had with Sarah and the life he was living now, and everything inside it was on the other side of the border, and opening it meant crossing back.
Hannah put her hand over his. “You don’t have to open it tonight.”
Thomas held her gaze. “But one day.”
“Lucy is asking.”
His fingers closed around hers. He sat at the table holding Hannah’s hand and looking toward the stairs, and she could see him deciding.
Not whether to open the chest, because he already knew the answer to that, but whether he could do it now, today, with Lucy waiting upstairs and Hannah’s hand in his and the whole house listening.
“Where is she?” he said.
“In her room.”
Thomas went upstairs. Hannah stayed in the kitchen and listened to his boots on the steps, then the creak of the chest lid.
This belonged to them.
The stairs creaked twice — Thomas first, then Lucy, one step behind.
Lucy carried the blue dress over both arms, carefully, the way you carry something that might break if you hold it wrong.
It was faded and simple and smaller than Hannah had imagined, a woman’s everyday church dress, the kind of dress a woman puts on when she wants to look well without making too much of it.
Lucy held it against her chest and looked at Hannah and her face was open in a way Hannah had not seen before, eased, the way a face eases when something that has been held tight is let go.
Thomas carried a small wooden box. His face looked tired, the tiredness of a man who has opened a door he closed fourteen months ago and stood inside the room behind it and come back out.
Lucy took the dress to the parlour. Hannah helped her fold it over the back of the chair.
“Not in your room?” Hannah said.
“I want Papa to see it too.”
Thomas heard. He stopped in the doorway. Then he nodded.
Lucy went back upstairs for a ribbon. Thomas set the wooden box on the kitchen table.
“Sarah’s sewing things,” he said. He pushed the box toward Hannah. “I thought you might use them.”
The box was plain wood, well-made, with a small brass clasp. She did not open it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“They were hers.”
“I know. Lucy can have anything she wants from it. The rest is yours, if you’ll take it.”
Hannah touched the lid. The wood was smooth under her fingers, worn smooth, handled often, by hands that had opened it a thousand times.
“All right,” she said.
Thomas stood very close. She touched his cheek. His eyes were tired.
“You loved her very much,” she said.
“Yes.”
Hannah nodded. Then she said what she had been carrying since the first night.
“The chest is in my room, Thomas.”
His hand stopped.
“I sleep beside it. Every night. Your dead wife’s chest at the foot of my bed.”
Thomas’s jaw tightened. “It was there before you were.”
“And I live with it every day.”
The kitchen was very quiet. Lucy’s footsteps moved upstairs, unaware.
“I’m not asking you to throw it away,” Hannah said. “I’m asking you to move it to your room. Where it belongs.”
Thomas looked at the floor. She could see him fighting it — the reasonableness of what she was asking against the weight of what the chest meant to him. Sarah’s things. Sarah’s room. Sarah’s place in the house that had not been questioned until now.
“You’re right,” he said. The words came hard.
“I know.”
He looked at her. “You don’t always have to be right first, Hannah.”
“I don’t intend to be right first. I intend to be heard.”
Thomas was quiet a long time. Then he carried the chest down the passage to his room, and Hannah stood in the kitchen and listened to his boots and the scrape of wood on wood, and when he came back he sat at the table and put his hands flat on it and looked at her.
“What else?”
“Nothing else. That was the thing.”
Lucy came downstairs carrying a faded blue ribbon.
“Hannah?”
“Yes?”
“Will you put my hair up with this tomorrow?”
Hannah looked at the ribbon. Sarah’s. Faded, frayed a little at the ends, the colour of a sky going pale.
“I’d be glad to,” she said.
Lucy handed it to her, and Hannah held it, and the holding was lighter than she expected.
Hannah left her door open. Thomas came through it without comment.
She had wanted to write to Mrs. Sheldon that afternoon and had not had a stamp. A small thing. Thomas would have given her one without question. She had not asked.
His hands were on her skin and her mouth was against his shoulder.
Thomas slept. Hannah lay beside him and looked toward the foot of the bed where her trunk sat in the shadows.
Closed. She had taken clothes from it as she needed them, but the rest was still inside — the brooch, the curl of hair, her mother’s Bible, the two books. The small things from before Colorado.
Tomorrow, she thought.
Thomas’s arm tightened around her in his sleep.
Hannah lay still and let him hold on.