Chapter 6 - Grant's Awakening
The hospital room at Roanoke Memorial was on the sixth floor, overlooking the railroad yards and the neon star on Mill Mountain that burned red and white against the night sky.
The room smelled of iodine, saline, and the cold, chemical clean of a place where things are kept sterile to keep them from rotting.
Hannah lay in the center of the mechanical bed, her wrists bandaged where the rough linen restraints from the ambulance had chafed her paper-thin skin. An intravenous line ran into the back of her left hand, the clear plastic tube looping like a vine down from a stainless-steel pole.
Lily was asleep in the armchair in the corner, covered in a hospital blanket with blue and pink stripes, her thumb tucked into her mouth, her purple crayon still clutched in her other hand.
When I pushed the door open, Hannah’s head turned immediately. Her river-green eyes were wide, dilated by the dim light of the corridor.
"Rosa," she whispered.
I set the small plastic cup of ice water on the bedside table. "I'm here, child."
I sat down on the edge of the mattress. She reached out, her fingers finding my wrist, holding it with that same desperate, clawing grip.
"Is the door open?" she asked.
"The door is off the hinges, Hannah," I said. "Sheriff Miller took the whole frame down with a pry bar so they could take the photographs for the court."
She let out a long, shuddering breath that sounded like water going down an open drain. Her head sank back into the pillow.
"He was there," she said. "Grant."
"He was there."
"He looked old, Rosa. He had lines around his mouth. Like his father."
"Two years in the desert will make a boy old," I said. "And living with a lie will make him older."
She looked toward the corner where Lily lay sleeping. "She doesn't know me. When she looked at me in the hall, she looked at me like I was the dog under the porch."
"She knows you, Hannah," I said. "Every night for seven hundred nights, she sang that song through the keyhole. She didn't sing it to the wood. She sang it to you."
The door opened behind me.
Grant stood in the opening. He had washed his face in the basement restroom of the courthouse, but the water had only made his skin look paler, like tallow. He carried a small brown paper bag from the hospital gift shop.
He didn't come in. He stood on the threshold, his boots half on the tile, half on the carpet of the hall, as though he knew he had no right to cross the line without leave.
"Hannah," he said.
Hannah didn't look away this time. She looked at him with those green eyes that were too large for her skull, eyes that had spent two years staring at the four walls of the senator’s study.
"You left me with them, Grant," she said. Her voice was not loud; it had no anger in it. It was simply the truth, cold and heavy as river stone. "You wanted the pipeline. You wanted to show your mother that you could make twenty million dollars without your father’s name on the check. And you left me in that house with Cole."
Grant’s face twisted. He dropped the paper bag. A small, plush yellow bear rolled out onto the floor, its glass eyes catching the light of the corridor.
"Cole came to my bedroom three days after you flew to London," Hannah said, her voice completely even. "He had the timber contracts. He told me that Eleanor had bought the debt on my father’s old mill in the valley. He said if I didn't sign the release, they would foreclose on my aunt’s farm in Bedford. When I told him to get out, he took Lily."
Grant’s breath caught. "He took the baby?"
"He took her down to the river," Hannah said. "He held her out over the railing of the old iron bridge while Eleanor sat in the back of the car with the window rolled up, reading the garden club newsletter. He told me that accidents happen to small children during the autumn rains. He said it was very easy for a child to slip through the iron slats."
Grant sank against the door frame. His knees gave way, and he slid down until he was sitting on the floor of the hallway, his hands covering his face. The sobs that came out of him were deep, ugly, tearing sounds, the sounds of a man whose entire understanding of his own blood had been ripped out by the roots.
"I didn't sign," Hannah whispered, looking at her bandaged wrists. "I wouldn't sign. So Cole gave me the tea. The tea that tasted like bitter almonds. And when I woke up, the study door was locked. And the chains were on the outside."
She turned her eyes back to Grant.
"Rosa saved me, Grant," she said. "Not you. Not your family. Rosa brought me the salt. Rosa brought me the clean water. Rosa told me every single day what month it was, what day it was, and what Lily was wearing when she went to the church school. If it hadn't been for Rosa, I would have drunk the bleach Cole left under the sink six months ago."
Grant didn't look up. He couldn't. He sat in the hallway of the sixth floor of Roanoke Memorial Hospital, a millionaire’s son with twenty million dollars in Dubai bank accounts, and he had nothing. Nothing but the clothes on his back and the knowledge that his mother was a monster and his brother was a beast.
"Grant," I called to him.
He raised his head, his face wet, his eyes ruined.
"Get up," I said.
He looked at me, confused.
"Get up off that floor," I said, my voice firm, the voice I had used when he was nine and had fallen off his pony into the briars. "Your daughter is asleep in that chair. When she wakes up, she doesn't need to see an Aldridge crying on the linoleum. She needs to see her father standing on his feet. Go down to the cafeteria. Buy three cups of black coffee and a carton of milk for the baby. And then come back up here and sit in that chair until the sun comes up."
Grant swallowed. He looked from me to Hannah.
Hannah didn't say no. She didn't say yes, but she didn't turn her face away.
May you like
Grant reached out, picked up the yellow plush bear from the floor, and set it gently on the edge of Lily’s chair. Then he stood up, wiped his face with the sleeve of his torn shirt, and walked down the corridor toward the elevators.
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