Chapter 16 - The Glass Between Us
A hand like a weathered oak branch came down on Hannah’s wrist.
Julian didn't twist it. He didn't wrench her arm. He simply closed his fingers around her joint and stopped her forward momentum dead, as if she had run into an iron bollard.
Hannah let out a sharp, indignant squeal. "Let go of me! Derek!"
Derek took two steps forward from the car, his chest puffed out under his greasy hoodie. "Hey, old man, take your hands off my—"
Julian didn't even turn his head toward Derek. He just shifted his shoulders slightly, letting the ash mallet hang loose from his left fingers. Julian was six-foot-two, with the shoulders of a man who spent twenty years hauling wet pine timbers out of coastal swamps. Derek took one look at the mallet, one look at the cold, pale blue eyes set beneath Julian’s heavy brow, and stopped six feet away, his mouth half-open, looking like a fish that had swallowed a hook.
"Miss," Julian said to Hannah, his voice as quiet as a falling tide. "You are trespassing on private dockyard land. You are screaming at a woman who doesn't owe you the dirt beneath her boots. If you don't take your arm back and get in that rattling tin can, I am going to have Sheriff Barnes impound it for operating with an expired county sticker and no commercial dock permit."
Hannah tried to jerk her wrist free. Julian let go immediately, not wanting to touch her an instant longer than necessary.
She stumbled back down the two steps, clutching her wrist against her chest, her chest heaving with outrage.
"You people are crazy!" she yelled, looking wildly between Julian, Martha, and me. "Claire, tell these hillbillies who I am!"
Martha stepped into the path, cutting off Hannah’s line of sight to me. Martha was not tall, but she had lived through seventy-two years of hurricanes, bad freezes, and men who thought they could shout their way through a bill.
"We know who you are, child," Martha said, her voice dropping like lead weights into water. "You’re the rot that Eleanor Vance grew in her parlor. You’re the reason that girl up there had no marrow left in her bones when she came to us in the spring."
Martha pointed a flour-dusted finger toward the lane.
"Now take your sorry little carcass and that boy who smells like an unwashed hound, and get off my landing. If you're still on this road when the noon bell rings at the church, you won't be dealing with the sheriff. You’ll be dealing with me, and I don't need a mallet."
Hannah looked at Martha’s face. She looked at Julian, who stood balanced, motionless, watching Derek like a hawk watching a field mouse.
For the first time in her life, Hannah encountered an audience that did not care about her tears, her panic attacks, or her theatrical fragility. To them, she wasn't the precious, wounded baby of the family.
She was just an ill-mannered stranger making noise in a decent yard.
Hannah’s jaw worked silently for a moment. Then she turned on her heel, her cheap shoes slipping in the loose oyster shells, and scrambled into the passenger seat of the Hyundai.
"Let’s go, Derek!" she screamed through the open window. "Get us out of this filthy hole!"
Derek didn't need to be told twice. He threw the car into reverse, the tires spitting shells and dust across Martha’s cyclamen, before slamming it into drive and tearing down the lane with the muffler rattling like an old tin can full of rocks.
The red dust hung in the quiet salt air for a long time.
Julian didn't speak. He reached down, picked up a single white cyclamen blossom that had been sheared off by Derek’s tire, and laid it gently on the top step beside my shoe.
"You all right, Claire?" he asked.
I looked at the dust settling on the lane. I looked at the marsh, where a solitary heron was lifting off into the blue, its great wings beating slow and steady, untroubled by the shouting of little people.
My hands were not trembling.
"I’m fine," I said. And the miracle of it was that it was the absolute truth. "Martha, what time does the train leave for Oakton on Monday?"
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Martha smiled—a thin, hard, beautiful line. "Seven in the morning, darling. And I’m packing us enough fried chicken to feed the whole circuit bench."
***
