Her Name in the Sky (18 page)

“Just let me get your back.”

“I am getting it.”

“Not very well. Just—here.” Hannah rubs some lotion in-between Baker’s shoulder blades, and Baker leans forward, her shoulders tense. Hannah pours more sunscreen onto Baker’s back and lathers it down her spine, all the way down to her hips.

“Okay?” Hannah asks.

“Yep,” Baker says, with an edge to her voice, and then she 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 waves off the apology and says, “This is fine, honey, we can eat pizza one night this week.”

Hannah sits on the back porch after dinner and plays 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. “You know he hates his mom getting too 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 here-and-there all week,” says Joanie, choosing one of her cards and tossing it down to match the category. “Yesterday I heard her asking about Baker’s brother and how he likes New Orleans and all that.”

“Scopin’ out the family,” Luke says. “Mama Landry’s got long-term plans.”

“Could you imagine them married, though?” Joanie laughs. “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 thing 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, holding up the selection of cards 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? Alright, I’m gonna go with…‘Your grandma.’”

“Yes!” says Luke. “That one 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 and talk. 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 doll house until we were, like, 12 and 13, didn’t we, Han? We were way past the age where we should have been playing that. 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 the decorations.”

“And we had that butler,” Hannah says. “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 doll house parents weren’t looking, so it became this whole subseries within our doll house universe.”

“And we had the babies, too. The triplets.”

“Oh, god. Okay, so Hannah’s favorite character was this baby boy we named ‘Oliver.’ And he was definitely the cutest baby. And one day 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 that she couldn’t find him. And she was like, ‘Joanie, now I understand what pain is.’”

Hannah laughs along with her friends, and without even meaning to, almost as a reflex, she looks at Baker, and she sees something deep and longing in Baker’s face. Hannah catches it and holds onto it for a split second, but then Baker’s eyes flicker away, almost in fear, and so Hannah looks away, too.

Wally tries to kiss Hannah a while after that. He intercepts her when she’s returning from the bathroom and places 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.”

And then he walks off toward the bathroom, and Hannah stands in the hallway that leads to the pool 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. She thinks of Baker’s lungs, working somewhere inside of her to keep her breathing—to keep her here with Hannah—and of her heart, pumping blood throughout her body and, most mysterious, keeping her deepest secrets nestled within her.

Hannah and Joanie leave the beach and walk back to the house around midday. They both have to pee and Joanie says she wants to make another sandwich, so they walk quietly up to the house, enjoying the break from the hot sand.

“What’s going on with you and Baker?” Joanie asks while they mill about the kitchen.

“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 like you usually do.”

“We’re fine,” Hannah says. “I think she’s just been in a bad mood. Stressed about college or something.”

Joanie munches on her potato chips for a few seconds while she stares at Hannah long and hard. “Okay,” she says finally, and then she grabs a water bottle and leads the way back to the beach.

On Thursday, their last full day in Destin, they stay on the beach until six at night, long after the sun’s heat has thinned into cool air. The six of them lie on their backs on the sand, each of them facing the sky, the waves lulling them into that meditative state between life and sleep.

“I don’t want to leave,” Clay says, breaking the silence.

None of them respond, but Hannah knows they must all agree with him. She opens her eyes to the filter of her sunglasses and the rose-tinted sky. She wonders how the six of them must look to the clouds. Lined up across the sand, their half-naked bodies spread out in offering, their burnt skin and newly-formed freckles proof that they are not afraid of the sun, that they believe only in this day and their own immortality.

“I don’t want to leave, either,” Wally says.

“Me neither,” Joanie says.

Hannah searches the clouds, the gulls, the sun. She wants to leave and she wants to stay. She wants to raise her hand to the heavens and command that everything stop, that time stills, that the rules and the laws retract their grip so nature can have her way. Hannah wants to sit up off her towel and look across her friends’ lined-up bodies, frozen in time beneath the sky, and she wants to pull Baker out of their midst, out of time, and walk with her along the shoreline, following the infinite ocean, nothing moving on the whole green earth except for the two of them and the water and the sky.

And Hannah wants to ask her things. What does she think about in those last few seconds before she falls asleep at night? Does her mind swim in colors when she listens to music? How does she feel when she walks beneath the trees in the Garden District? When does she feel most afraid? Does she realize when she is acting brave? When she prays, does she mean it? Has she ever known God? Does she want to? When it’s late at night, and the world feels uncontainable, and the air is warm on her skin, who does she think about?

“I want to stay here forever,” Clay says.

Baker says nothing. Hannah says nothing.

Dr. and Mrs. Landry tell them to eat dinner on their own that night; they want to attend a Holy Thursday service at the local church and go out on their own afterwards. “Why don’t you visit that salad bar restaurant?” Mrs. Landry says while she dabs aloe on Clay’s sunburnt neck. “Eat something nice and healthy.”

“Yeah, Mama, we probably will,” Clay says.

After the Landry’s leave, the six of them prepare a feast of macaroni and cheese, Hot Pockets, Ore Ida French fries, and Coca-Colas, and instead of sitting down at the table, they carry all the food out to the back porch and eat during the sunset.

“Talk about a Last Supper,” Wally says between bites of French fries.

“This is my Hot Pocket,” says Luke, holding it before Wally’s face, “which will be given up for you.”

They spend their last night swimming in the pool and the hot tub. The Landry’s come home late and wave down at them from the balcony, and Hannah and her friends wave up at them and wish them a good night.

“I’m gonna miss this place,” Wally says while Hannah sits with him in the hot tub.

Hannah looks down toward the pool, where Baker sits on Clay’s shoulders and chicken fights Joanie and Luke. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, me too.”

Around midnight, feeling tired and wrinkly from staying in the pool for so long, they grab towels and tiptoe upstairs to the family room. Clay turns on a movie and they all lay around on the couches, clutching their towels around their wet bodies and trying to stay awake on their last night.

Wally dozes off halfway through the film, and when his head falls onto Hannah’s bare shoulder, she let its stay there, thinking there’s no point in fighting it.

When the movie ends, Clay rises sleepily from the couch and turns the television off. Joanie and Luke are asleep on the couch to Hannah’s left; Wally is asleep on her shoulder; and Baker appears to be asleep on the couch to Hannah’s right. Hannah closes her eyes before Clay turns around.

“I’m going to bed,” he whispers. His footsteps move back toward the couch he and Baker were sharing. “You want to come?”

There’s absolute silence for a moment—Hannah’s heart dangles on the edge of something—but then Baker says, “Not tonight. Too tired.”

Hannah opens her eyes a fraction of an inch and watches them. Clay stands over Baker, still cloaked in a pool towel. Baker sits motionless on the couch.

“Alright, fine,” he says, and then he moves away from her and turns on a lamp. 

Hannah keeps her eyes closed while Clay rouses Luke and Joanie, and then she feigns waking up when he draws close to her and Wally. They stretch and fix the cushions on the couch, and then everyone walks off toward their separate bedrooms, none of them speaking in their tired states.

Hannah has reached the first landing of the stairs before she realizes Baker hasn’t left the couch. She’s the only one who remains in the family room: the boys have already gone down to the lower level, and Joanie has already climbed the stairs ahead of Hannah.

“You coming?” Hannah whispers.

Baker tears her eyes away from whatever she was looking at and glances briefly up at Hannah—in the dim light of the lamp, her eyes look black and dead.

“In a minute,” she says.

Hannah hesitates, wondering if she should go back down and talk to her, but Baker has already looked away.

Hannah lies awake for minutes and minutes, turning over the week’s events, wondering if things will be better when they’re back in Baton Rouge, desperately trying not to feel out the ache in her chest. She lies there for what seems like forever and still Baker does not come. One horrified part of Hannah thinks that maybe Baker changed her mind and went down to Clay’s room. Another part of her starts to worry: she can’t stop picturing that black, dead look in Baker’s eyes.

She rises from bed and tiptoes downstairs. Baker is no longer in the family room, nor is she in the kitchen. Hannah walks out to the back porch, but Baker’s not there, so she walks downstairs to the boys’ room and pauses outside the door, listening. She opens the door as quietly as she can and hears the boys’ even breathing. She looks around at their single beds, but Baker isn’t in any of them. She breathes a sigh of relief. Then she walks outside to the pool, but Baker isn’t there, either.