In January, we started family therapy at Karen’s treatment center in Dayton. Once a week, on Wednesday nights. Me, Dad, Karen, and a counselor named Ms. Abernathy in a small room with a box of tissues on every surface.
The first session was terrible. Karen cried the whole time. Dad didn’t say a single word. I sat with my arms crossed and stared at a poster on the wall about the stages of change.
The second session was a little less terrible.
By the sixth session, Karen and I were laughing about the time Mom tried to make sushi and set off every smoke alarm in the house. Dad laughed too. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh in three years. It came out rusty and surprised, like a door that hadn’t been opened.
Karen finished her ninety days in February. She moved into a sober living house in Dayton with five other women. She got a job at a coffee shop. She started going to meetings every day.
She called me on Sunday nights. Sometimes we talked for an hour. Sometimes for five minutes.
“Sixty-one days,” she’d tell me. Then ninety. Then a hundred and twenty.
“I’m proud of you,” I’d say.
“Don’t be proud of me yet,” she’d say. “Be proud of me in a year.”
She paid back the insurance company. Her lawyer worked it out as part of the drug court agreement: $1,140 for the two fraudulent prescriptions, at fifty dollars a month from her coffee shop paychecks. The online clinic in Florida was shut down in March. The state attorney general’s office sent Officer Daniels a letter thanking him for his report.
Dad sold the house on Linden Street in April.
He told me on a Saturday, at Aunt Diane’s kitchen table, after Marcus left.
“I can’t live there anymore,” he said. “Every time I walk past that front door, I hear it. The lock.”
I didn’t say anything. I heard it too.
“I found a place,” he said. “A little two-bedroom ranch. Closer to Columbus. Forty minutes from here instead of ninety.”
“Two bedrooms,” I said.
“One for me,” he said. “One for you. Whenever you want it. Whenever you’re ready. Even if that’s never.”
Roz came to my sixteenth birthday party in May. She brought a sweet potato pie and a card with a fifty-dollar bill in it and a note that said: For your first winter coat that’s entirely yours. Pick a warm one.
I hugged her for a long time. She smelled like cocoa butter and church.
“How are your fingers?” she asked.
“They hurt when it’s cold,” I said. “But I have all ten.”
“Good,” she said. “You keep all ten. You hear me? You keep every single one of them.”
At the six-month review hearing in June, Judge Harlan read the reports from Mrs. Bell and Ms. Abernathy and Dr. Okonkwo. She read my report card, which had a B-plus in algebra.
She looked up at Dad over her glasses.
“Tutoring seems to be going well,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dad said.
“Hannah,” she said. “Where do you want to live next school year?”
I looked at Aunt Diane. She squeezed my hand.
I looked at Dad. He was holding his breath. I could see it.
“I want to try living with my dad,” I said. “Part time. Weekends, for the summer. And then we’ll see.”
Dad let out his breath. He didn’t cry this time. He just nodded, and nodded, and kept nodding.
Chapter Twelve: The Key
It’s October again now. A year since the storm.
I live with Dad most of the time. I have the second bedroom in the little ranch house. I stuck glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Karen came down from Dayton on a Saturday and helped me put them up, standing on my desk chair the way she did when I was seven.
She has three hundred and thirty-four days clean. She’s thinking about nursing school. Roz is helping her fill out the applications.
I spend every other weekend with Aunt Diane, who says her house is too quiet without me and keeps buying cereal I don’t eat.
Last Tuesday, a storm came through.
It came in from the west, a big red and purple blob on the Weather Channel. The rain started around dinnertime. By seven, it was coming down so hard it bounced off the porch railing. The wind bent the little maple tree in our new front yard almost sideways.
I was at the kitchen table doing homework. Geometry now. Proofs.
Dad was in the living room. He got up and went to the window and stood there for a long time, watching the rain.
Then he came into the kitchen and sat down across from me.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Hey.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just sat there. He stayed there for the whole storm, two hours, doing nothing, reading the newspaper and then just looking at it, while I did my proofs.
I knew why. I didn’t say anything. I let him sit.
Around nine-thirty, I needed to get something out of the car. My geometry book. I’d left it in the back seat of Aunt Diane’s Honda when she dropped me off.
I got up and went to the front closet. I took out my coat. My winter coat, the one I bought with Roz’s fifty dollars and some of my own babysitting money. It’s dark green and puffy and goes down to my knees. It’s the warmest coat I’ve ever owned.
I put it on and zipped it all the way up. I put my phone in one pocket. I put my house key in the other.
Dad gave me that key in June, the first night I stayed over. He put it on a ring with a little plastic tag that says in his handwriting: Hannah. Always.
I opened the front door. The porch light was on. It’s always on now. Dad put it on a timer the week he moved in, so it comes on at sunset and doesn’t go off until sunrise, no matter what.
The rain was blowing in sideways. I ran down to the car, grabbed my book, and ran back up the walk.
When I got to the porch, the door was closed.
I stood there for a second, rain dripping off my hood. My heart did something strange in my chest. My left fingers ached. For one second, just one, I was fifteen again, standing under a dark porch in a wet sweatshirt, waiting.
Then I heard a sound from the other side of the door.
The deadbolt turned.
Click.
The door swung open. Dad was standing there in his socks, holding it wide. The light from the hallway poured out onto the wet porch boards.
“Get in here,” he said. “It’s freezing.”
I stepped inside. He closed the door behind me.
And he left it unlocked.
I said at the beginning that my name didn’t matter as much as what happened to me that night.
I was wrong about that.
That night, I was a dark shape on the side of the road. A name on a bottle somebody else picked up. A sick daughter. A garbage bag in someone’s headlights.
And then a stranger saw a white sneaker in the rain and backed up fifty feet on a dark road and knelt down in the gravel.
My name is Hannah Grace Walls. I was fifteen. I died on County Road 9 for fourteen minutes, and a nurse named Roz Okafor counted out loud in the rain until I came back.
The sound I remember most from that night is a lock clicking shut.
But it isn’t the sound I hear when I come home now.
THE END..!
