Safe with Me: A Novel

As much as she hates leaving Olivia and Maddie alone with James, Hannah knows she doesn’t have a choice. Driving north on I-405 toward the 520 floating bridge, she wonders if telling them who she is in the middle of them trying to figure out how to leave James was the best decision she ever made, but in her gut she knows she couldn’t keep the truth from them a minute longer.

Grateful she thought to put her headset on before leaving the Bells’ driveway, she uses the voice commands on her phone to call Sophie, crossing her fingers that her friend answers.

“I’m so glad you called,” Sophie says when she picks up, in lieu of an actual greeting. “I feel awful about this morning. I shouldn’t have lectured you like that.”

“No, you were right. And I did it. I told them who I am.” Hannah sniffles and fights back her tears. “But there’s more to the story, Soph. I need to talk.”

“Oh, honey. Of course. Come on over. I’ll send Robert home.” Hannah can hear the low rumble of a man’s voice in the background.

“Can you meet me at the storage unit instead?” Hannah lets the words rush from her mouth before she can stop them. “I’m on my way there now, but I don’t have the keys. Isaac gave you a set, right? I want . . . I just . . . I need to be with her.” A rough sob escapes her and she bites her bottom lip to stop it. “I’m sorry to interrupt your night . . .”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Sophie says, ignoring her apology. “You just hold on. Everything will be okay.”

Hannah thanks her and then hangs up the phone, quickly instructing it to call her brother. He doesn’t answer, so she leaves him a voicemail. “I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch,” she says. “I’m going through some stuff, but I’m okay. I’ll be fine. Sophie and I are going to the storage unit tonight. It’s time. I’ve put it off long enough.” She sighs. “I love you, Isaac. Talk with you soon.”

A few minutes later, Hannah turns in to the parking lot of the facility Isaac chose last year to hold her and Emily’s possessions. She isn’t sure why, exactly, she feels so driven to go through her daughter’s things now, but she isn’t in any shape to figure it out. She only knows that she needs to reconnect with a part of herself she shut down when Emily died. Maybe before that, even. Before Devin. If she’s ever going to be happy, she needs to find a way to let go and try to move on. Not to forget her grief over losing Emily—she will never forget it—but to ease it somehow, to lessen its icy grip around her heart.

While she waits for Sophie to arrive, she can’t help but think about Olivia and Maddie and worry about how James will react to the knowledge of who Hannah actually is. She’s so certain that he will hurt them, she’s tempted to call the police and report a domestic disturbance. But she’s also certain that if he isn’t hurting them—if Olivia decided it was safer not to tell James about Hannah’s identity, just like she decided not to tell him about Maddie’s arrest—then the police showing up at their front door would only put Olivia and Maddie in more danger. And that isn’t something she wants to risk.

A few minutes later, a pair of headlights shine in her rearview mirror and Hannah recognizes the grille of Sophie’s black Camry. Her friend pulls up next to her, and they both quickly get out of their cars, Sophie rushing over to hug her. Hannah breathes in her friend’s sweet perfume, grateful for her strength when Hannah feels so weak.

“Thank you for coming,” she whispers. “You’re such a good friend to me . . . I know I don’t say it often enough—”

“Shush!” Sophie says, squeezing her once more before pulling back. “You don’t have to thank me. I love you, chérie.”

“I love you, too.” Hannah takes a deep breath to try to relax the muscles in her chest. “Did you bring the keys?”

Sophie pulls out a single silver key from her pocket. “I almost forgot Isaac gave me this,” she says. “I had to search for it and the address. I brought a flashlight, too.”

Moments later, Hannah and Sophie enter the storage unit, careful to lock the door behind them. Sophie finds the light switch and flips it on, the space suddenly illuminated in the weak glow of a single bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. Seeing the sheet-covered furniture and haphazard stacks of boxes—each labeled HANNAH or EMILY in her brother’s scrawling script—Hannah’s eyes sting with tears. She reaches out and runs her fingers over Emily’s name. “God, I miss her,” she whispers. “It feels like . . .” She trails off, and the muscles around her stomach convulse.

“Like what?” Sophie asks gently.

Hannah turns to look at her friend. “Like a piece of me has been amputated. Like I’m stumbling around without a prosthetic for the part of me I lost.” She swallows, hard. “I know I didn’t handle the situation with Olivia and Maddie the right way. I know that. But it was like I couldn’t help myself. Meeting Maddie was almost like being able to see my daughter again . . .” She pauses to wipe away a few tears with the back of her hand. “I mean, I know she wasn’t Emily. I’m not totally crazy.”

Sophie gives her an understanding smile and reaches out to hold her hand. “No, not totally.” Her friend sighs. “Maybe you just needed to see that you made the right decision. Not just the whole of-course-it’s-the-right-thing-to-do-to-save-other-people’s-lives thing, but on a deeper level, just for you and Emily.” She cocks her head to one side. “Hell. Now I sound crazy.”

“Oh, good.” Hannah lets loose a sound that is half laughter, half cough. “I’m pretty tired of being the unstable one.” She takes a deep breath and looks around the unit again. “I think I’m going to donate her clothes and toys to an organization that helps pay for families to stay near the transplant center,” she tells Sophie. “Zoe—that coordinator I told you about?—mentioned it in passing once and said that the kids who have to stay there rarely have anything other than the bare necessities.”

“I think that’s a lovely idea,” Sophie says. “You’re donating all of it?”

Hannah shrugs, then opens the box next to her and reaches inside to pull out a blue sweater that Emily had particularly favored. A spasm of grief seizes her throat, and she pushes the sweater against her nose, trying to find a trace of her daughter’s scent, but there’s nothing there, only a stale, cottony smell of fabric packed away too long. Emily is gone. “Yes, all of it. I want her art projects and schoolwork, but except for some of what she wore as a baby, I don’t need her clothes and toys. They should be put to better use.”

She sighs again, trying to release the stress that buzzes through her body, a feeling that reminds her of the one she had in the hospital the day Emily died. She reaches into a box stuffed full with papers and begins reading the stacks of notes Emily wrote her through the years. There are the ones she drew in preschool—stick figures of Hannah and Emily standing together in front of their house, Emily attempting to write her own name in barely recognizable letters. There’s the one she pushed under Hannah’s door on a Saturday morning when she was seven that read: I am watching cartunes. Can I have Luky Charms for brakefast today? Mark Yes or No. Below this were two boxes for Hannah to indicate her answer.

“She was such a little sugar fiend,” Sophie remarks fondly as Hannah hands her friend this particular note.

Hannah nods, unable to speak. Her throat clenches as she reads through her daughter’s many I love you, Mommy notes, trying to remember the specific instances that prompted Emily’s affectionate declarations. But it’s harder than she thought it would be to recall the reasons why Emily decided to express her feelings. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps all that matters is that Emily loved her.

With this thought, Hannah dissolves into tears. Hiccuping sobs shake her body; her muscles quiver and quake. She cries for Emily and for herself. For her parents and for her brother, for Olivia and Maddie. She lets the pain take her to a place she’s avoided for over a year—the deepest, darkest space inside her—and lets it breathe, lets loose the despair that has dragged her down, kept her from moving forward. Sophie puts her arm around Hannah, not speaking, just holding on through the waves of grief, letting her know she’s not alone.

Finally, Hannah’s tears begin to lessen, and Sophie gently pulls away. “You’ll be okay,” she says. “Everything will be okay.”

Sniffling, Hannah nods, trying hard to believe her friend’s words. As they go through the boxes, Hannah tells Sophie the entire truth about Olivia and her marriage to James, along with everything else that has happened that day. She lets Sophie read Maddie’s letter, and ends by explaining how James walked through his front door.

“It’s a sad story, yes. Horrible, even,” Sophie says as she lifts up a box filled with all of Emily’s old Halloween costumes. “These, too?” Hannah nods, and Sophie goes on. “But ultimately, don’t you think that what Olivia does with her life is her own business?”

“What about Maddie?” Hannah says, feeling desperate. “Shouldn’t I report James to CPS or something? That there’s suspected abuse? Maybe they could help.”

“You could,” Sophie says, nodding. “But you just finished saying how there isn’t any proof. And as far as you know, he’s not hitting Maddie. So you’d basically be getting CPS involved for no good reason.”

“It’s not fair for him to get away with this,” Hannah says, frustrated that there’s really nothing she can do to help mend the situation.

“You’re right. It’s not. But it’s not your call to decide how Olivia handles it. Especially now . . . no?”

Hannah doesn’t respond for the simple reason that her friend is right. Olivia confided in her, and at this point, the very least Hannah can do is sit back, honor Olivia’s wishes, and keep her mouth shut.

•  •  •

The next morning, Hannah wakes up and as usual, goes for a run. She and Sophie stayed at the storage unit well past midnight, sorting through boxes, deciding which tangible items of Emily’s Hannah wants to keep. In the end, they carried only two boxes back with them to the cars, filled with Hannah’s favorite pictures of her daughter, several of her art projects, all of her I-love-you-Mommy notes, and a purple scarf she liked to wear. She’ll ask Isaac to help her get the remainder delivered to the transplant center’s charity. Her furniture and other belongings in the unit will have to wait until Hannah decides if she’s going to stay in her apartment above the salon. “Maybe I’ll sell the old house and buy a new one for myself,” she told Sophie last night. “Maybe it’s time to really start over.”

Now, as she sets out down the sidewalk at a slow, warm-up pace, Hannah thinks the truly important things for her to keep from Emily are the intangible ones—the way her daughter looked when she first stumbled out of bed in the morning, the stink of her breath and the warmth of her skin. Hannah will forever keep the memory of how it felt for her daughter to climb up in her lap, stick her face against Hannah’s neck, and whisper, “I love you, Mama.” She’ll hold on to the bubbles of Emily’s laughter, the way she sometimes sang “C Is for Cookie” in a Cookie Monster voice purely for Hannah’s amusement. Thinking back, Hannah realizes that for the most part Emily was a joyful, happy child, and despite any mistakes she’s made along the way, this is what she needs to hold on to—not mourning, not grief, not loss.

When she gets back to the salon, an hour later, dripping with sweat and breathing hard, she decides to pick up the phone before jumping in the shower. Her mother answers on the second ring. “Hi, honey,” she says. “What a nice surprise.”

“I hope it’s not too early,” Hannah says. “I just got done with my run and I figured you’d be up.”

“You know me,” her mother says, chuckling. “With the roosters.” She pauses. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” Hannah pauses to run a finger over a small crack in the plaster. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ll definitely be home for Thanksgiving. I’m scheduling myself the whole week off so we can have a good long visit.” Unexpectedly, she tears up as she speaks. “I’m sorry I haven’t been home more this year, Mom. It’s been . . . well . . . it’s been hard.” She knows “hard” is too simple a word to describe what the months since Emily died have been like, but it’s the only one that comes to her.

“Your dad and I understand, sweetheart. We worry about you . . . that’s all.”

“I guess that never goes away,” Hannah says affectionately. “No matter how old I get?”

“No, it never does,” her mom agrees. “You’ll always be our baby.”

“I’m glad,” Hannah says, her throat thickening again. “I love you, Mom. I’ll talk with you later, okay?”

They hang up, and it strikes her that for the first time in a year her mother didn’t bring up the subject of her moving home; she wonders if her adamant refusal has finally made its point. Hannah vows to have a long talk with her parents over the holiday about finding someone else to help Dad manage the farm—someone he can trust and someday turn the operation over to so they don’t have to sell any more land than they want to for their retirement. She is lucky, she knows, to still have her parents with her, and she plans to be more attentive to them.

Her next call is a harder one to make. Surprisingly, Olivia answers her cell on the third ring. “I’m so glad you picked up,” Hannah says. “I wasn’t sure that you would.”

Olivia sighs. “I only did so I could tell you that I really can’t talk with you anymore. It’s just not a good idea.”

“Did you tell James about me? About Emily?”

“No. But I can’t risk that he’ll find out another way. If he figures out Maddie wrote that letter . . .”

“I thought you were going to leave him,” Hannah says.

“It’s not that simple,” Olivia whispers. “I have to go now. Please understand that it’s safer for us if you just pretend we never met.”

“Olivia . . .” Hannah begins, her voice breaking. She clears her throat so she can continue. “I just need to say that if I could go back to that day when you both walked into the salon . . . when Maddie sat down in my chair and talked about her transplant, I swear, I would change everything. I would have told you right away that it was possible Emily was her donor.”

“I know.” Olivia sounds as though she is about to cry, too. “But you didn’t.”

“I’m so sorry,” Hannah says.

“Me, too,” Olivia responds, sounding more hurt than angry. A moment later they hang up, and Hannah sits on her couch, staring at her phone, hoping that someday, there might still be a chance for them to be friends.