Say That Again (9 page)

Always, though, I thought of myself as Echo. Echo the Survivor. Echo the Wise.

Every morning, I wished for a friend like Tinker or an owner like Mr. Beekman. And at night when I fell asleep, hungry and chilled, I dreamt of the two of them, him in his chair, her curled up beside him, as he read a book, soft music playing from an old radio somewhere.

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T
en days after the accident, on a Sunday morning, Jenn and Hunter walked into the hospital room to find their daughter staring at a blank wall.

“Look what I have, sweetie. It’s Faustine!” Jenn said, taking the giraffe from her oversized handbag. “And see, she’s all nice and clean. I even added another eye and fixed her neck so her head doesn’t flop around anymore.” She held Faustine out. “What do you think, Hannah?”

Hannah’s head turned toward the sound of her mother’s voice. She smiled and reached out to receive Faustine.

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—o00o—

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M
aura placed a necklace of shells that she’d made herself in Hannah’s palm. Two weeks had passed since Hannah had nearly drowned. In that time, Maura had been inconsolable, weighed down by guilt.

“I want you to know I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Maura said, folding Hannah’s fingers over the necklace. “And I hope everything turns out okay.” Sniffling, she rubbed the back of her sleeve across her eyes. “I miss you and I want you to come home. The house is so quiet without you.”

Hannah’s lips moved and a raspy sound came out.

“What?” Maura said, bending closer so her ear was mere inches from Hannah’s mouth.

Hunter put down the bag of clean clothes that Jenn had sent with them. Before he could reach Hannah’s bedside, Maura drew back and looked at him in disbelief.

“What is it?” he asked.

Maura glanced at her sister. “She said ‘thank you’.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” She flung her arms around her father and squeezed tight.

“What’s this for?”

“Just happy, is all. I’d hug her, but she likes to scream whenever someone touches her too hard, so I’m hugging you, instead.” Maura tilted her head back and they shared a smile. “Can I call Mom?”

Hunter handed her his phone, but instructed her to make the call in the waiting area down the hall. He watched her go, then sat carefully on Hannah’s bed.

She looked at him through a fog, but when he took her hand, she held on firmly.

“Hannah, sweet pea. You know how badly you wanted a dog for your birthday and, well, we told you that you weren’t old enough? I’m thinking maybe we were wrong about that. If we had a dog ...
If
we had a dog, you could probably change his water and brush him sometimes. Maura could walk and feed him. You could both play with him. You’d have to share, though. Would that be okay?”

She didn’t respond — not that he expected her to — but he went on anyway. “First, though, you have to get better, okay? And I know it’s hard, but when people ask you questions, you have to answer. That way we know you hear us and understand. Okay?”

She nodded, barely, and breathed a single word, “Okay.”

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—o00o—

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A
month after she spoke again, the Hannah they took home was not the same girl who had fallen into the river that cold December morning. She was quieter, less curious, and more withdrawn. It still seemed like she was having a hard time grasping thoughts and shaping them into words, but as Dr. Pruitt explained, it would take a while yet for her full mental capacity to return — and her personality might never be completely the same. She’d been traumatized and the effects of the tragedy that had very nearly claimed her life could last well into adulthood.

As far as her motor functions went, however, she was almost normal for her age. Almost. Hunter couldn’t help but notice the slight shake in her hands when Jenn handed her a drink the morning they were packing her belongings in the hospital room. Hunter paused as he was folding her pajama bottoms, watching. Hannah brought the cup greedily to her lips. It was mango juice, her favorite. Juice dribbled down her chin. Undeterred, she wiped it away and drank until she had emptied the cup.

He glanced at Jenn, but she was chattering away gaily, so happy to be taking Hannah home. A spot of guilt stained Hunter’s conscience. Through it all, Jenn had never given up hope, never wavered; while he had been convinced more than once that Hannah would never again draw breath, or look into their eyes, or speak. Perhaps it was because of what he’d been through himself as a child and then as a young man, but he wasn’t afraid of death like most people were. It was not a finality, an ending. It was merely a transition. And what waited on the other side was more beautiful than anyone else dared believe. It was a place not of rapture, but of peace and contentment. Where there was no yesterday or tomorrow, no there or that or then, but simply here and this and now.

He had never spoken of his near-death experiences to anyone. Not even Jenn. How do you explain the hereafter to someone who doesn’t believe in soulmates or reincarnation or even God? It wasn’t about being secular or religious, though. It was about the spiritual. About believing there was more to any living thing than the body or even the soul. Even Hunter didn’t fully understand it. He simply accepted it.

Except for Jenn’s monologue, the ride home was quiet. A thin layer of snow had fallen over a coating of ice, making the roads treacherous. Hunter gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white, going slowly. Salt trucks were a rarity this far south in Kentucky, so he kept to the highways as much as he could, where the constant friction of vehicle tires had at least crushed the sheet of ice into a thick slush.

Every once in a while, he glimpsed his youngest daughter in the rearview mirror. Hannah stared out the car window, expressionless. Even when they pulled into their driveway. Their house was on a five-acre plot carved out of his parents’ farmstead. The land had once belonged to a sheep farmer named Cecil Penewit. Hunter had never met him, but Aunt Bernie, who was not really his aunt, had gotten engaged to Cecil the same night Cecil suffered a heart attack and died at the Adair County Fair. Bernadette had graciously taken over managing his affairs, even in the wake of his funeral. The farm was slated to be sold to a land development company at auction, but Hunter’s mother had stepped in and made a preemptive offer and the deal was done before it ever went on the block. At the time, Lise had just returned to the area after several years in Covington. She needed a place to raise her children, Hunter and Cammie, and someone to help with them. Bernie, recovering from hip surgery, moved in with them. Lise married Brad Dunphy, the sheriff of Adair County, and later they had a child together, Emily.

After Hunter returned from vet school and took over Doc Samuels’ practice, Lise and Brad had gifted him a parcel of acreage, where he built his home. Soon after, he and Jenn started their family. It was an idyllic life, even with Hannah’s unique issues. One that Hunter would not trade for the world.

If anything, he realized as the car tires crunched over the limestone gravel of his lane, Hannah’s near catastrophe had only served to spotlight everything in life that was precious. When your child’s life hung in the balance, matters like material possessions and career or financial ambitions paled in comparison. And quibbles, like who forgot to replace the toilet paper, weren’t worth bringing up.

What was more, they had all come through it stronger as a family. Before the accident, Hunter had been immersed in his practice, feeling obligated to answer every after-hours voicemail and taking on new clients by expanding his workday. Jenn had buried herself in reading books and blogs on educating special needs children. Late at night, she’d catch up on internet forums, where parents of such children shared their daily challenges and occasional woes, and celebrated each other’s triumphs. Hunter was proud of Jenn for what she’d taken on, but he often felt like she had sacrificed too much of herself and gone as far as smothering Hannah with all the latest methods. It was almost as though she felt that if she didn’t do absolutely everything possible that Hannah would somehow fall further behind. Hunter, however, kept his thoughts on the matter to himself, even though Jenn’s obsession had compromised their marriage. Having thrown himself into his work, he knew he wasn’t much better.

Then there was Maura, in the middle of it all. Thank goodness she was a resilient, outgoing child with so many social connections. She may not have liked all the attention heaped upon her little sister at times, but she loved her just the same. Since the accident, she’d become even more watchful of Hannah, as if she somehow felt responsible for her safety now.

When they stopped, Maura pulled open the rear car door. “Hey there, squirt.” Reaching inside, she unbuckled Hannah’s seatbelt. “I took care of all your stuffed animals while you were gone, except the ones you had at the hospital. I offered to play with them, but they said nope, they’d wait until you got home. They were sooo excited to hear you were coming back today.”

Hunter and Jenn unloaded Hannah’s bags from the trunk and started toward the front door. Partway there, Hunter cast a glance at Maura. She threw her hands wide, shrugging.

“No luck?” Hunter asked.

Maura shook her head.

“Here, take this.” He handed her a backpack full of Hannah’s picture books and set the rest on the ground. “Put it in her room. We’ll get the rest.”

While Jenn and Maura transferred Hannah’s things to her room, Hunter took her into the kitchen and made her favorite lunch of grilled cheese, cut diagonally. Triangles, Hunter learned when she was three, were acceptable; rectangles were not. Rectangles were cause for a screaming tantrum. The week before their trip to the cabin, Maura had handed Hannah half a PB&J — in rectangle form. The noise had been enough to bring Jenn and Hunter running inside from the garage, thinking that Hannah was fatally wounded. But no, it was just Hannah being Hannah, communicating her displeasure over some minute detail in her world being out of balance.

As Hunter sat and ate with Hannah at the tall stools on the back side of the kitchen island, Jenn sorted laundry, while Maura busied herself upstairs arranging the stuffed animals on the shelves and dresser tops. Hunter took advantage of the alone time to reach out to his daughter.

He opened his palm and placed it next to Hannah’s hand. She stared at it awhile, but did not reach out.

“Hannah, you’re home now. Safe. There’s nothing to be scared of, okay?”

She kicked at the cupboards beneath the counter, her toes tapping against the door in a soft but monotonous rhythm. If Maura had been doing the same thing at this age, he would have told her sternly to stop, but this was Hannah and sometimes it was better just to let her do her thing. As Jenn had once explained to him after he tried to stop her once from rocking in her chair in the waiting room of the doctor’s office and she erupted into full-blown hysteria, these little tics were soothing to her and took her mind off whatever was threatening to overload her senses. But looking around right now, Hunter couldn’t figure out what might be bothering her. Had someone moved the fruit bowl? Rearranged the magnets on the refrigerator? Hunter seldom noticed small things like that, but Hannah was acutely aware of every detail. There was no telling what could set her off. Since the accident, though, she’d been abnormally sedate. He wasn’t sure yet if that was a good or bad thing.

Hunter tried asking her other things, like what she wanted to do today. He’d taken the whole day off just to be with her and even if all she wanted to do was sit in front of the TV and watch her princess movies, he was good with that. But all she did was munch on her grilled cheese and stare out the kitchen window. There was nothing there to look at except the naked branches of a tree against a wintry sky. The snow and ice had melted off, so there wasn’t even that to look at now.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Waiting for the bluebird,” she said softly.

“It’s winter now. Not many birds out there except crows and a few sparrows. You might see some of those.”

She kicked harder at the cupboards. “No. Bluebird.”

Don’t push it
, Hunter told himself.
She’s talking. That’s progress.

“So have you seen any bluebirds lately?”

She swung her gaze on him. “Yah.”

“Where?”

“By the river.”

A tingle buzzed deep down inside him. He wasn’t sure how far he wanted to take this, but maybe it would give him a clue as to what was going on inside her head. “The river by the cabin, you mean?”

Nodding, she stopped kicking the cupboards and stared at her empty plate. Although she was quiet now, Hunter could tell there were thoughts churning inside her and that she was having a hard time remembering the right words.

“Did it fly away?” he prompted.

Her head snapped up, bewilderment in her eyes. “I don’t know. I fell in.”

No, it was too soon to go there, he thought. For him, at least. He had nearly lost his daughter. Even though he knew there was more beyond this life, the event was still too raw. Time to change the subject. “Hey, Maura picked out all your favorite movies and put them by the big TV. We can hang out on the couch and watch them and eat snacks all day, if you want. How’s that sound?”

But if there was one thing Hannah didn’t like, it was a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Her lower lip thrust out. She began huffing — a precursor to hyperventilating.

“I’m sorry,” Hunter hurried to say. “The bird, the bird. Did you want to tell me something about the bluebird?”

She swallowed little gulps of air, her head bobbing up and down.

“Tell me, then. Was it pretty?”

“Yah.”

“What else?”

“It flewed.”

“Yes, birds are good at that. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could fly, too?”

She looked at him blankly, as if he were speaking nonsense. Hannah may have been in her own little world at times, but she was smart enough to know people couldn’t fly.