Her Name in the Sky (27 page)

“Sure thing, Hannah,” Ms. Carpenter says, her voice gentle. “Stop by anytime if you need to talk through it again.”

“Why do you look so depressed?” Joanie asks as they walk to the car.

“I’m just tired.”

“What were you talking to Ms. Carpenter about?”

“Are you speaking to me again?” Hannah snaps.

Joanie shuts up, but on the drive home, Hannah feels her watching her.

“First day of May,” Wally says at lunch on Tuesday. “It’s officially graduation month.”

“God, I can’t even process that,” Hannah says.

“That means finals and AP exams start next week.”

“Well, fuck me.”

Wally stifles his smile. “Want to meet me after practice today and we can study?”

“Sure.”

“Great. I need your help on some AP Gov stuff.”

“Cool.”

Then they run out of things to say. Hannah doesn’t mind: she lets herself be absorbed by the lunchtime chatter, her mind drifting back to Ms. Carpenter’s words yesterday. But she’s distracted when Father Simon walks into the senior courtyard with a proud smile on his face: she recognizes it as the one he wears when he thinks he’s going to win students over.

He takes a red sharpie and writes something on the outdoor poster that Baker and Michele hung to track the rankings for the Diocesan Cup. The seniors in the courtyard slip into silence, waiting to see what he wrote. After a minute, he steps back from the poster, caps the sharpie, and smiles his proud close-lipped smile again.

“Our service hours log just pushed us a mile ahead of Mount Sinai,” he says.

The courtyard breaks into applause. Michele looks smug where she sits with her friends. Clay wraps his arm around Baker, and Hannah knows he’s thinking of the service projects she organized in the fall.

Wally doesn’t clap much.

“Not excited about the Cup?” Hannah asks him.

“It’s like you said months ago,” he says. “The whole thing is kind of weird.” 

Hannah shrugs. “Whatever gets people excited.”

Wally frowns. He rustles his hand around a bag of Cheetos, lost in thought.

“Hey,” he says after a moment, “I’ve been meaning to ask you…have you talked to Baker at all?”

“You know I haven’t. Why?”

Wally hesitates. “Clay’s really worried about her.”

“What? Why?”

“We went for a run yesterday and he was telling me that she hasn’t really been eating.”

Hannah’s chest constricts. “She’s not eating?”

“No, no, I mean, she is, I think she’s just not eating as much as she used to, you know? She told Clay she hasn’t really had an appetite.”

Hannah shifts on the bench to get a good look at Baker. She sits in the middle of her crowded, lively table, smiling and talking to the people all around her. But there’s something different about her, and Hannah can see it now that she’s truly looking for the first time in days. Baker is skinnier. Paler. Her smile less bright.

“She’s probably missing you, Han,” Wally says.

Hannah says nothing. 

As they shift into May, the days grow longer and the earth grows greener. Hannah hears the birds when she wakes and the crickets when she falls to sleep. The whole world holds a feeling of balance, like a tightrope walker poised on a wire, waiting for something, restless in the heat.

The ache in Hannah’s heart starts to scar over, so that it no longer feels fresh, but more like a routine part of her. She sits on the back porch at night and wonders how long she will carry it within her. She breathes slowly, asking air into her lungs, and feels the air shape around the outline of the ache, as if too frightened to go near it.

On the first Saturday of May, Hannah rearranges the jewelry on her sink while Joanie gets ready to go out to a party. “Turn off that stupid emo music,” Joanie says when she comes into the bathroom to grab her makeup bag. “You’re making me depressed.”

Hannah hangs out with her parents after Joanie leaves. She helps her mom cook baked ziti while her dad plays Fleetwood Mac songs through his laptop speakers, and then she and her parents fall into the big couch in the family room and watch
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
on AMC.

Joanie calls her sometime after midnight, an hour after their parents have gone up to bed. Hannah ignores it. Joanie calls again.

“What?” Hannah answers. “I don’t want to pick you up, Joanie, I thought you were staying the night there.”

“You need to come over here,” Joanie says urgently.

“What?”

“It’s Baker. She’s really sick.”

“What happened?”

“She drank too much. She won’t let me help her. Please just come over.”

“I’ll be right there,” Hannah breathes, rushing to grab her keys. “Just stay with her. I’ll be right there.”

She speeds out of the Garden District, across South Acadian, down into Liz Freeman’s neighborhood. She squints through the darkness and sees Liz’s house on the corner, a whole gaggle of cars parked outside of it. She parks on a median and sprints up to the house with one of her shoes halfway off.

She can’t find Joanie anywhere on the first floor of the house. Several of her confused classmates call out to her, drunkenly teasing her about her messy hair and her panicked face. “Where’s the fire, Hannah?” someone laughs, but Hannah pushes past him and rushes up the stairs.

With a swell of relief, she finds Joanie in one of the upstairs bedrooms, crouched against a door.

“Where is she?” Hannah asks, her heart racing with fear and adrenaline. “What’s going on?”

“She’s in here,” Joanie says, spreading her fingers over the bathroom door. “She won’t let me in.”

Hannah tries the door handle. It’s locked. She drops to her knees in front of the door. “Baker?” she calls. “Bake? Can you hear me?”

She listens through the wood of the door, but Baker doesn’t respond. Hannah taps on the door, calls Baker’s name again, and then hears a retching sound coming from the bathroom.

“How much did she have to drink?” she asks Joanie.

“I don’t know, I wasn’t with her for most of the night, but Liz said she was drinking straight vodka for the last hour.”

“And no one stopped her?”

“I don’t think they realized.”

“Where the hell is Clay?”

Joanie shakes her head. “I don’t know. I found her slumped over the kitchen sink and tried to take her into the downstairs bathroom, but she wanted to come up here. I don’t think she wanted anyone to see her.”

Hannah lays her head on the carpet and peers through the crack beneath the door. She can see Baker’s bare legs and feet spread over the tile floor. “Baker?” she calls again. “Baker, it’s me, it’s Hannah. Can you let me in, please?”

“I tried to use a bobby pin,” Joanie says, her eyes wide and frightened, “but I couldn’t get it to work.”

“Let me see it. Where’s your phone? Look up how to unlock doors with bobby pins.”

Joanie finds a helpful article and reads it aloud while Hannah works the bobby pin in the keyhole.

“Come on,” Hannah pleads with the bobby bin, “come on.”

Finally, something clicks, and Hannah rotates the doorknob until the door pushes open and she falls forward onto her hands.

Baker is slumped against the bathtub with her feet extended toward the toilet. Hannah crawls toward her, calling her name, Joanie right behind her.

“Baker? You okay?” Hannah asks when she reaches her. Baker rolls her head on the edge of the bathtub, moaning and clutching her stomach. She has vomit on the corner of her mouth and in her hair. “Bake,” Hannah says, wrapping her arms around her, “are you alright? What happened?”

Baker nestles her head into Hannah’s shirt and starts to cry.

“Joanie,” Hannah says, looking up at her sister’s anxious face, “can you wet some toilet paper?”

They wipe Baker’s mouth and her hair. Hannah pulls her into her lap and rubs her back, whispering calming things to her and promising that it’s going to be all right.

“She needs to throw up more,” Joanie says.

“Baker,” Hannah says softly, tucking her hair back, “we need you to vomit more, okay? Okay? We’ll help you.”

Baker scrunches up her face and cries. “Can’t,” she whispers. “Hurts.”

“I know,” Hannah coos, pulling Baker’s hair back into a ponytail, “but it’s going to make you feel better, okay? I promise. Come on, we’ll help you.”

“Come on, Baker,” Joanie says kindly, “you can do it.”

Baker turns her head away from them; two more tears streak down her face. “Come on, B,” Hannah says, “let’s sit up.”

She and Joanie guide Baker to the toilet. They stand on either side of her, poised like bodyguards, Joanie gripping Baker’s arm and Hannah rubbing Baker’s back.

“Doing great,” Hannah coaches her. “Now try to make yourself vomit, okay?”

“Just stick a couple of fingers down your throat,” Joanie adds, miming the action.

Baker bends forward and heaves. Joanie looks away with her face screwed up in distaste, and Hannah stares at a hand towel near the sink and focuses on drawing circular patterns over Baker’s shirt.

They stay that way for several minutes, the sound of Baker’s retching echoing around the bathroom, the vibrations from the music downstairs pulsing through their blood. Then Baker stills.  

“Feel better?” Hannah asks.

“Yeah,” Baker rasps. Hannah hears the pump of the toilet flushing.

“Careful,” Hannah guides. “Sit down slowly. We’ll get you some water, okay?”

She sits down and pulls Baker into her arms again. Joanie squats next to them, her eyes still crinkled with worry. “Do you think you got it all out?” Joanie asks.

Baker nods against Hannah’s chest. Hannah strokes through her hair and smoothes a thumb over the light sheen on her forehead.

“Can you get me a wet washcloth, Joanie? Or a wet piece of toilet paper?”

Joanie finds a washcloth under the sink, wets it, wrings it out. Hannah presses the blue cloth against Baker’s forehead, then her cheeks, then her collarbone. “How you feeling, B? Any better?”

“Yeah,” Baker breathes, sounding more like herself even though she keeps her eyes closed. She tucks her head further into Hannah’s shirt. “Thank you.”

“We’ll just sit here for a little while, alright?”

The three of them rest in silence for a few minutes, Joanie sitting with her back against the wall, Hannah sitting with her back against the bathtub and Baker tucked into her side. She can feel Baker breathing against her body, and she pulls her fingers through Baker’s hair in the same rhythm.

“It’s a good thing I called you,” Joanie says.

Hannah looks up. Joanie is wearing an unusual expression: she seems calmer and older somehow.

“Yeah,” Hannah agrees, shifting her eyes to the tile floor. “I’m glad you did.”

“I’m gonna get her a glass of water. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Thanks.”

Then Joanie is gone, and Hannah is left with Baker in her arms.

“What the hell happened?” Clay yells, bursting into the bathroom. Joanie trails behind him with her mouth open in protest and a glass of water in her hand. Luke follows last, his usually bright face falling into worry.

“She got sick,” Hannah says, sitting forward. “Keep your voice down.”

“Why didn’t anyone come get me?”

“What?”

“Baker, are you okay?” he says, falling to his knees in front of her. He runs his hands up and down her arms. “What happened, baby?”

Baby.
The word echoes loudly in Hannah’s head, then drops into her stomach and pierces her sharply. 

“Don’t move her, Clay,” Joanie snaps, stepping forward. “Here, Hannah, give her some water.”

“I’m going to get my keys,” Luke says from the doorway. “Bring her out to the car in a minute.”

“Thanks, man,” Clay says. He inches closer to Baker and brushes his knuckles down her face. “You alright, Bake? What were you drinking?”

“She can’t talk, Clay,” Joanie says impatiently. “She just vomited up a whole swimming pool of alcohol. Give her some space.”

“Here,” Clay says, reaching for the water glass from Hannah, “I’ll do it. You and Joanie go help Luke with the car.”

“What?” Hannah says, nothing making sense in her head, her impulse to hold Baker strengthening by the second.

“I’ll take care of her. I can carry her down the stairs.”

“I don’t think we should move her yet,” Hannah says.

“Hannah, she’s my
girlfriend
, okay, I can handle this. C’mere, Bake.”

Hannah watches numbly as he transfers Baker’s body weight to himself and holds the glass of water to her lips to drink. “Open up, baby,” he says, his deep voice stripped down to a gentler sound.