Her Name in the Sky (13 page)

“Alright,” Clay says, with quiet satisfaction. “This is definitely where I wanna be right now.”

“It’s a beautiful house,” Baker says.

“Well come on,” Dr. Landry says, climbing the stairs to the second-story entryway. “Let’s have a look around.” 

The eight of them tour the house together, Hannah and her friends trailing the Landry’s through the kitchen, the hallway, the basement bedroom, and the pool area. Clay tugs off his t-shirt and Sperry’s and jumps into the pool right then and there, splashing them all with water.

“Clay—!” his mother starts.

“Come on!” Clay calls to Luke and Wally. “We don’t need to see the upstairs anyway, we’re not sleeping up there.”

Wally looks to Mrs. Landry. She rubs a hand down her face and rolls her eyes. “Go ahead, Wally, Luke,” she says. “You’re on vacation, anyway.”

They leave the boys in the pool and tour the upstairs. “This must be the master,” Dr. Landry says, circling around a bedroom on the third floor. “Nellie, I’ll get our things and bring them up here.”

“Okay,” Mrs. Landry says, popping her lips, “and let’s see the other bedrooms—”

She leads them into a room across the hall from the master bedroom. It has a queen-sized bed and a Jacuzzi in the bathroom.

“Oh my god,” Joanie says, eyeing the Jacuzzi. “I have to sleep in here.”

Mrs. Landry laughs as she crosses the room to open the curtains. “So does that mean Baker and Hannah want to take the fourth-floor bedroom? Or do you want to share with your sister, Hannah?”

Joanie spins away from the group and heads into the bathroom, her eyes on the hot tub, unconcerned with Hannah’s answer. Hannah looks to Baker before she can help it, realizing too late that she is asking a question with her eyes. Baker meets Hannah’s eyes for only the sharpest second before she looks away.

In the time it takes her to inhale, Hannah knows an infinite moment of turmoil as her mind wrestles with her heart.

“I’ll go upstairs,” she says.

“Great,” Mrs. Landry says. “Let’s go on up and see it.”

Hannah and Baker follow Mrs. Landry up the stairs to the very top floor, where they find a small landing with a white door leading off of it. Mrs. Landry nudges the door open with a light touch of her fingers to the wood, murmuring “Let’s see” under her breath.

This room is smaller than any of the others in the house. The walls are sea green, with a paper border of seashells cresting along the top. There are two rectangular windows with pearl-colored, airy curtains that transform the bright sunlight streaming through them into something gentler, less powerful, so that it coats the room in a tempered glow. Hannah notes a dresser, a white wicker rocking chair, and, to the right of the door, a queen-sized bed with a seashell pink comforter. To her left, she sees a small bathroom.

“Oh, this is so cute,” Mrs. Landry says, stepping toward the windows and parting the curtains. “I think you two got the best room in the house!”

“It’s perfect,” Baker says, her eyes shining as she surveys the room.

“It is,” Hannah agrees. 

“Well, I’ll get out of your hair so you can unpack and get changed,” Mrs. Landry says, crossing the room with a pleased smile on her face. “I’m going to make some sandwiches for y’all to take to the beach. Turkey okay?”

Hannah flops back on the bed after Mrs. Landry leaves. She stretches her arms above her head and listens as Baker unzips her tote bag and pulls items from within.

“You unpacking already?” Hannah asks, her eyes on the ceiling.

“If I don’t do it now, you know I’ll stress on the beach.”

“True. Hey, did you bring toothpaste? I forgot mine.”

Baker laughs softly. “Yeah. I brought every toiletry I could think of because I knew you’d forget something.”

Hannah sits up on the bed, a smile already on her face. “What? I never forget anything.”

“Freshman retreat, your deodorant. Sophomore summer—at the lake—your razor. And remember skiing with my family last year? You forgot your toothbrush and Nate had to go buy you one?”

“Fine,” Hannah laughs. “You’re right. As usual.”

“I know,” Baker says, a smirk on her face as she holds up her toothpaste. “Okay, let’s get changed and head downstairs. We should help Clay’s mom with those sandwiches.”

They pull their swimsuits out of their bags, and now the energy in the room changes from giddy to awkward. They haven’t thought about this part—about how to change in front of each other after what happened on Mardi Gras. Hannah digs further into her bag, pretending to search for something else, buying time to figure out what to do. But then Baker stands up and heads into the bathroom, swinging the door after her so that it doesn’t fully shut, but doesn’t remain open, either. And Hannah understands, as she hears the rustle of Baker’s clothes falling to the floor, that she is supposed to change out here, in the bedroom, in her own space.

“Are you finished?” Baker calls through the bathroom door.

Hannah finishes tying the top of her turquoise two-piece. “Yeah, I’m good.”

She merely glances at Baker when she comes out of the bathroom: a glance just long enough to see that she is wearing her favorite red bikini. “All set?” Hannah asks, just for the sake of making conversation, just to keep herself focused on something other than Baker’s toned olive skin.

“Yeah. Are you bringing anything?”

“Couple of books.”

Baker’s eyes land on Hannah’s skin for a lightning-quick second. “Yeah. Good idea.”

The beach sand is hot under Hannah’s feet as she and her friends saunter down toward the water, their towels slung over their shoulders, Baker and Joanie carrying beach bags, Clay carrying a food cooler.

“Feel that sun,” Clay says, arching his neck skyward. “So awesome.”

“Good thing we brought SPF 50,” Joanie says, “or Hannah and I would fry like bitches.”

“Joanie, what does that even mean, ‘fry like bitches’?” Hannah says.

“You know what I mean. Don’t ask me to explain my genius mind to you.”

They drop their towels and bags on a patch of hot, smooth sand about twenty feet from the water, and without further ado, Clay, Wally, and Luke sprint down to the ocean, shouting and waving their arms as they go. Hannah, Baker, and Joanie spread out their towels and survey the beach to see who else might be here, but they don’t recognize anyone from St. Mary’s.

“Okay,” Joanie says, pulling twin bottles of sunscreen from her bag and tossing one to Hannah, “let the sunscreen process begin.”

“Should I time this?” Baker says.

“You should probably put some on,” Hannah tells her. “Remember last summer? How burnt your shoulders got?”

“I know, Mom,” Baker says, smiling as she crouches by her bag. “But I’m not using your bottle. I brought SPF 30. I want to get
some
color.” She pulls a bright orange bottle from her bag, then lifts her tank top over her head. Hannah stares pointedly at the floral pattern on her beach towel.

“The boys are gonna burn,” Baker says, squinting toward the ocean as she rubs white lotion all over her upper arms.

“Wally will make them come back in a minute,” Hannah says. “You know he will.”

“Here,” Baker says, watching Hannah struggle to apply her sunscreen. “Let me get your back.”

She spins Hannah away from her, and after a long second, Hannah feels the startling cold of sunscreen lotion on her skin. Then Baker’s hands are there, warm and soothing, rubbing over her shoulders and upper back, then trailing down to her lower back and her hips.

“Are you using the 50?” Hannah asks, struggling to keep her voice even.

“Of course,” Baker says, her voice bordering on tender. “I don’t want you to burn at all.”

And then Hannah feels Baker’s fingers on the back of her neck, playing with the stubborn wisps of hair that have escaped from her ponytail. “All set,” Baker says, her voice still harboring some of that tenderness.

“Thanks,” Hannah says, turning around to offer her a half-smile. 

“Can someone do my back?” Joanie says.

Baker’s eyes tick away from Hannah, and for a shining hot second she seems to be looking at nothing, but then she blinks and focuses her eyes on Joanie. “Sure,” she says, her voice back to its normal cadence. “Did you get your shoulders yet?”

On that first night at the beach, hours after Clay’s parents have gone to bed, Hannah and her friends sit by the pool and drink whiskey-Cokes. Hannah can feel the sun’s latent heat trapped beneath her skin, can taste the salt on the air when she takes a breath, can hear the ocean’s rhythm playing deep in her ears.

She sits in a love seat with seashell-patterned cushions, and Baker sits next to her, her legs pulled up toward her chest and her arms wrapped around her calves. Clay sits on the ground with his whiskey glass secured between his feet, and every other minute he lifts the glass, shakes it, takes a swig from it, and spits the ice cubes back. Joanie and Luke sit tangled up in the same chair, her knees bumping into his stomach and her elbow resting on his shoulder, and Hannah watches as Joanie plays with one of Luke’s curls. Wally sits opposite them, in the other chair, occasionally catching Hannah’s eye and smiling in his steady way.

They talk for hours, one of them always heading inside to pee, another always heading inside to fill the ice bucket, another always carrying the thread of conversation so that nothing ever truly stops. They take turns shushing each other so as not to wake Clay’s parents, and Baker and Wally take turns announcing the time and insisting that they should all go to bed, but they continue to sit in the cooling air while Clay tells the story of the time he broke a classroom window in second grade, and Luke tells the story of the time he got a crayon stuck up his nose in kindergarten, and Baker tells them about the boy she punched at Vacation Bible School. They laugh hard at each other’s stories, leaning forward in their seats to point at each other and say “You
would
do that,” and all the while the ocean plays for them in the background, quiet music in the their teenaged cathedral. 

“I’m getting tired,” Baker says, bumping her shoulder against Hannah’s. “You ready for bed?”

“Want me to make you one last drink?” Hannah asks, her heart beating happily, her fears quelled by the alcohol and the ocean’s magic.

A tipsy smile plays across Baker’s face. She shakes the ice cubes in her glass, then shakes her head with that same lax smile. “Just sleep for me,” she says.

They say good night to the others. Clay whines that they ought to stay down here for a while longer, ‘cause don’t they know they’ve got a whole handle of whiskey and a whole ocean of water to keep them company?, but Baker yawns and shakes her head no.

“Tomorrow night,” she promises. “When we don’t have to get up for Mass the next day.”

“Fuck,” Clay says, at the same time that Luke says “Shit.”

“What time is it?” Joanie asks.

“Almost four,” Baker says. “And Clay’s mom said we had to leave by 9:15.”

“I don’t know why they can’t give us a Sunday off,” Clay says, wiping a hand down his face. “I’m sure the Good Lord would understand that we’re on vacation.”

“And drunk,” Luke says.

“It’s Palm Sunday tomorrow,” Baker says, her voice flat, her eyes glazing over.

“Alright, whatever,” Clay says, picking himself up off the ground. “I guess we should all head to bed and continue this tomorrow night.”

“Let’s get some water first,” Wally says. “We’re gonna be hungover in the morning.”

“This is why I don’t like Catholicism,” Luke says as they clean up their glasses. “It seems to get in the way of everything.”  

Upstairs, in the quiet of their bedroom, Hannah and Baker get ready for bed with a comfortable calm between them. They stand in front of the bathroom mirror and brush their teeth together, crossing their eyes at each other’s reflections. Baker washes her face while Hannah changes, then Hannah washes her face while Baker changes. They peel back the covers of the bed and shimmy their bodies beneath the sheets, and the linens are cool on Hannah’s bare feet and legs.

“I feel tipsier than normal,” Baker whispers. 

“We had a lot of whiskey,” Hannah whispers back.

Baker closes her eyes, then shifts closer to Hannah so that they’re lined up, front to front, like two hands meeting in prayer.

Hannah smoothes Baker’s eyebrow with her thumb, then runs a hand down the back of her head. Baker shifts even closer, until her face is on the edge of Hannah’s pillow. 

“You okay?” Hannah asks, her heart beating fast, fast, too fast.

Baker opens her bleary eyes. “Yeah,” she says, her voice drunk and only half-there.

They stay like that, facing each other, until Hannah touches Baker’s cheek and tells her to go to sleep.

“Only if you do,” Baker whispers.

Hannah closes her eyes and dreams.

They are all hungover the next morning. Mrs. Landry watches them warily while they cross the church parking lot, her eyes somewhat suspicious, until Clay tells her the partial truth: that they were awake until four in the morning, hanging out by the pool.