Hanna woke up to a mixture of comfort and discomfort.
She was surrounded by warm, soft blankets and a fluffy pillow but her mouth felt dry and her eyes and throat were sore. Rubbing her face, Hanna cracked open her eyes and looked around, blinking away the cloudiness of sleep until she could see the tiles on the ceiling above her.
The blankets around her were thick and dark; definitely not her own.
A lamp sat on a bedside table next to her and Hanna wondered if she should turn the light on. A dim light was shining in from the hallway and she decided that blinding her already-sore eyes was not the best way to start this odd morning.
Hanna rested her head back on the pillow and took a deep breath, the events from the day before rushing back to her. It was like getting hit by a train but Hanna hardly had the energy to dodge it. Taking another deep breath and then another, she tried to just let the bad feelings wash over her, hoping if she forced herself to relax they would wash away eventually.
Hanna was angry, betrayed, hurt, and still so confused on how her sister and mother had worked together to do something so harmful. They mingled in her stomach and made her nauseous. She was also embarrassed, having to push through her vulnerability to come and ask Barry to basically step in as her therapist.
It had been a lot to ask, Hanna realized.
Hey, I haven't known you for all that long, but can you stand in as my therapist while I have a full-on meltdown about this horrible past I never intended on telling you about? Hanna almost cracked a smile at her own sarcastic thoughts. Barry had taken it all in stride, never writing down a note or making Hanna feel like she was something he was studying or dissecting. He probably had a lot of questions; she had caught some of his confused expressions and saw his curiosity burning but he never asked any probing questions...letting Hanna share what she was comfortable with and accepting that she wasn't ready to share every single detail.
Hanna felt warm and safe talking to Barry, but that didn't erase the fact that it was also embarrassing to be so emotional in front of someone she cared about. Would he think less of her now? Would it change anything between them?
Before she could let herself drown in those feelings again Hanna opened her eyes and shook her head.
She propped herself up on her elbows and shifted under the blankets to stretch her legs. Hanna was still in her work clothes from yesterday – she had a vague memory of being guided into the bedroom after having fallen asleep on Barry's chest.
Didn't she ask him to stay?
Hanna blinked at the ceiling, remembering that she had asked Barry to lay down with her...with the most innocent of intentions. Seeing as she was laying alone in the large bed, he had either refused outright or laid down with her until she fell asleep again and left. Her memory was fuzzy on the details.
Deciding to get up, Hanna pulled the blankets back, swung her feet to the edge of the bed, and found her socks and shoes placed neatly on the floor beside her. She pulled them on quickly and turned to straighten up the blankets, it felt rude to sleep in his bed and not at least straighten the covers and pat the wrinkles out of the pillow.
Beside the lamp on the bedside table was a tall thin vase with a bright yellow flower. Hanna reached out and touched one of the soft petals; it was a real flower. Not one of those fake plastic kind that felt waxy to the touch. She wondered if it was Barry that liked the flowers or if there was another flower-loving person somewhere in that body.
Hanna tiptoed out of the bedroom and found herself in the room where she had spent time spilling her guts out on the couch the night before. It was just as dark as it had been earlier with most of the light coming in from the kitchen, but Hanna could still see the large lump under the dark blanket on the couch.
A hand was sticking out and laying limp, finger tips almost touching the floor. Hanna smiled at his gentlemanly gesture and took quiet steps into the kitchen. Trying to be as silent as she could, Hanna found a pad of paper and a pen held up to the fridge with a magnet. Pulling them down, she jotted a note down and ripped the paper off of the pad before placing them both back where she had found them.
It was a simple note; thank you for being there – Hanna. She had tried to keep her handwriting as neat as possible but her fingers still trembled of their own accord.
Hanna decided to leave the note on the short coffee table in front of the couch where she also found her cellphone. She slid that into her pocket and took a last glance at the man on the couch, engulfed in the large blanket except for that one stray hand.
Finding her way out wasn't too hard. There was only one large hallway attached to the living room and it lead around a corner to the familiar door. Unlocking the deadbolt, Hanna tried hard to open the door without it creaking and closed it just as carefully, hoping she hadn't been loud enough to wake him up. A few voices reached her ears as soon as she stepped into the sunlight and she froze, waiting for them to fade away before peaking around and realizing they were very close to a visitor's path, hidden by some tall flowers and vine plants that formed a makeshift fence.
Hanna took a moment to try and make herself look as normal as possible, running her fingers through her hair and straightening her shirt. A cold breeze blew past her and ruffled the leaves of the plants around her and Hanna was thankful that it was not quite as cold as it had been last night...though she did wish she had gone back for a jacket.
Crossing her arms over her chest, Hanna pushed past one of the bushes carefully and made sure there weren't any guests walking around when she stepped onto the path.
Hanna realized she should have checked the time but a child yelled somewhere about a monkey and she figured she could pass as a guest enough to just walk out the exit.
Following the few signs she could find, Hanna finally made her way to the entrance of the zoo, keeping her arms crossed to hold in some semblance of body heat and kept her head down until she made it past the turnstiles and out into the entrance to the zoo. It looked different in the daylight with people meandering around...warmer and less exposed.
It was colder out in the open and Hanna rubbed the goosebumps on her bare arms.
She made it quickly to the bus stop and glanced at the sign that marked the times the bus would be coming. Hanna pulled out her phone and after clicking past the several missed calls saw that she would only be waiting for five more minutes before a bus would come.
Hanna rubbed her arms and waited, staring down the street at passing cars until her phone vibrated in her hand.
Barry: Are you okay?
Hanna smiled, feeling a little guilty that her leaving must have woken him up. She tried to still her fingers enough to text back.
Hanna: Yes, thank you for everything last night.
Barry: Anytime. Dennis can be mad all he wants, you're always welcome.
Hanna smiled again at that, clearing her sore throat and rubbing her eyes. A particularly loud car went flying down the street and her phone vibrated again.
Barry: Are you going to see Dr. Fletcher?
Hanna: Yes, I think so.
She wasn't entirely sure when, was the thing. And now that she had spent the entire night talking to Barry it felt like she didn't even need to go and talk to Dr. Fletcher. But Hanna did remember leaving that voicemail and God she had been sobbing. She cringed at how pathetic that message must have sounded.
Barry: Maybe we shouldn't tell her you stayed over last night.
Hanna: Yeah, that's probably a good idea.
Barry: What are you doing this weekend?
Hanna paused, her fingers hovering over the keys after she typed out her message and wondering if it was too forward. She decided to send it anyway.
Hanna: Doing something with you?
Barry: Sounds great. :)
The bus came around the corner and Hanna shoved her phone into her back pocket and searched her front ones for the crumpled up dollar bill she knew she had. She smoothed it out just as the bus pulled up to the curb and the doors noisily slammed open.
The ride home felt like it flew by before Hanna found herself jogging up the stairs again, turning the last corner and fishing her keys out of her pockets. Before the door had even opened an inch an angry meow sounded from inside.
"Oh, Benny, I'm so sorry," Hanna cooed when she was bombarded with an irate orange cat pacing at the front door. He let out a loud long meow and went to sit by his food bowl, giving it a sniff before turning and meowing impatiently again.
Hanna dropped her keys on the kitchen counter and grabbed a can, making quick work of opening it and dumping the entire contents into Big Ben's bowl. His meows finally quieted down while he chowed down and Hanna threw the empty can into the trash.
She knelt down to pick up her purse off the floor, gathering the things that had come spilling out of it when she had tipped it over the night before. Her chap-stick had rolled into the kitchen and a few receipts had gone flying around the room, but once Hanna had straightened the mess up she felt a little bit better and set her purse down on the kitchen counter.
In her back pocket, Hanna's phone rang and she flipped it open, feeling nauseous again even seeing the word 'mom' pop up on her screen. Hitting the end call button she decided to wander over to the couch and threw herself down, grabbing the remote and throwing on the news before flipping her phone open again and checking the messages.
"Hanna, please pick up. Come on, I'm worried about you!" Hanna hit delete.
"Han, seriously. I just want to know you're okay. Can we all just talk about this...like adults? Call me." Hanna hit delete again.
"Hanna," she paused with her finger hovering over the delete button. Her father's deep voice was not what she was expecting to hear; it had been so long since they had talked she almost forgot how raspy he was...he was probably still smoking a pack a day. "Your mother is worried. Call her."
He sounded disappointed and annoyed, and Hanna rubbed her forehead and hit delete.
Several more messages from her mother went by all sounding roughly the same with varying degrees of hysteria before she finally found one that was different.
"Hello Hanna, this is Dr. Fletcher. I just got into my office and got your message. You can call me back anytime today and come into the office whenever you can – I have a few appointments but I will work you in around them. Please come in, I would like to hear about what happened."
Hanna hit delete again and flipped her phone shut when there was no more messages.
She didn't feel like going into Dr. Fletcher's office and playing over everything in her head again...and she didn't think the therapist would hold back her probing questions like Barry had so they likely would have to talk about more than the bare basics of what had happened. But she didn't want to have the doctor show up to make a house call if she ignored her after leaving the kind of message that she had late at night.
Hanna sighed and rested her head back against the armrest and shut her eyes, wishing she could find a way to push all of the uneasiness out of her even just for ten minutes. Big Ben seemed to finish up his meal quickly and stalked passed the couch to hop up onto the bed.
"Fine, don't cuddle with me," Hanna mumbled to the cat who was curling up on her pillow. "I've gotta leave anyway."
Standing from the couch and running her fingers through her hair Hanna grimaced at how greasy the strands felt to her skin. She grabbed a hair tie off of the couch and threw her hair up into a messy bun, hoping it would disguise how badly she needed to wash it.
Hanna found her shoes – one by her bed and one near the bathroom door – and slid into them before grabbing her purse and making sure she had her phone and keys. She grabbed a glass of water and let the sink run for a moment while she grabbed her medicine from the cupboard, deciding that doubling up her dose might help her through the rest of the day. Hanna washed the pills down with a tall glass of water and shut the faucet off, leaving the glass on the counter and heading out to take a bus over to Dr. Fletcher's office.
Hanna reached the top of the staircase of Dr. Fletcher's building and stopped in her tracks when she saw a woman on the couch. She relaxed when she realized it wasn't who her instincts told her it was, the dark hair and sharp features looked nothing like her sister.
She smiled at the woman when she looked up and Hanna wondered if she should come back later. If Dr. Fletcher had a line-up of clients she didn't want to have to wait hours before she could assure the older therapist that she was in fact okay.
"We'll be done soon," the sharp-faced woman said, her pearly white teeth gleaming as she grinned and motioned to the doctor's door. "Should only be another few minutes."
"Okay," Hanna said, feeling as if she should be accustomed to feeling uneasy by now as she took the seat furthest from the woman on the couch. She felt eyes on her but tried to ignore the way it made her stomach turn and occupied herself with pretending to look at her phone. She found herself spacing out several times, her mind being brought back sharply with each shift the waiting woman made.
Thankfully she only had to sit in awkward silence for another few minutes before she heard footsteps in Dr. Fletcher's office and the door opened. A young child, a boy who couldn't be older than twelve, followed the doctor out of her office and smiled shyly at Hanna. His mom stood up from the couch and reached out, grabbing his hand and thanking the therapist. It almost sounded like she was going to start making small talk when she was cut off by the older doctor.
"I'm glad you came," Dr. Fletcher said, forgoing any introductions between Hanna and the patients who were leaving and giving a brief goodbye to the child before tilting her head to her office. "Come in. I've got plenty of time before my last appointment of the day."
"Thank you," Hanna said, following Dr. Fletcher in as the mom and child started down the staircase.
"So what happened last night, Hanna?" She wasn't going to beat around the bush like she often did during their regularly scheduled visits. Hanna thought about shrugging and trying to play it off as a bad anxiety night but she remembered how the voicemail had sounded and she didn't think that was something that could be sneaked passed the therapist.
"I, um, I got a visitor last night." Hanna glanced around the room before taking her seat on the couch, pulling her jacket tighter around her shoulders as if it would offer some of the same comfort she had felt when Barry wrapped his arms around her shoulders last night; it didn't.
Dr. Fletcher hummed, taking her seat across from Hanna and straightening her glasses.
"My sister was waiting for me when I got home." Hanna picked at the hem of her jacket but found her fingers started to tremble again so she clasped them together tightly in her lap.
"Lillian," Dr. Fletcher said slowly, thin eyebrows drawing together.
"Yeah." It was unnerving that the therapist already knew who her sister was and what her sister had done despite never talking about it before. "My mom told her where I lived."
Dr. Fletcher seemed to be at a loss for words for a moment until she gathered her thoughts and thankfully set her writing pad to the side. "That was grossly out of line for her to do that."
Hanna felt a rush of relief, having walked into the office unsure of whether the doctor would side with her or her mother on the topic.
"Yeah, I think so too," Hanna said, looking down at her shaking hands again before placing them beside her on the couch and out of her sight.
"When your sister was there, what did you two talk about?" Hanna bit the inside of her cheek, mind wandering back to the moments after she found herself frozen in the hallway.
"Well, she wanted to talk...I didn't. I sort of, I think I just started yelling at her."
"Do you remember it clearly?" Hanna remembered the fear, the flashback to her childhood, the pain that had almost cost her her entire life and the terror that her sister had come back to finish what she hadn't been able to finish when they were children.
"Not so much, no. Just kind of a blur. I was pretty upset." She tried to keep her voice light, but 'upset' was the understatement of the year.
"I have to say, you sounded more than a little upset when you called me." Hanna felt her cheeks warm in embarrassment and Dr. Fletcher quickly shook her head. "I don't want you to ever feel any sort of shame for calling me, or telling me what is going on or how you were feeling." She offered Hanna a comforting smile but Hanna was studying the small stain on the knee of her work pants, face feeling red hot under the doctor's gaze. "You will never be judged here, and certainly never by me."
Hanna nodded, using the edge of her thumb to rub at the stain before bringing her attention back to Dr. Fletcher.
"I feel like there is something other than just being upset that's bubbling somewhere under that surface," she said, eyes studying Hanna closely and motioning vaguely to her with the tip of her pen. "What else were you feeling when you saw your sister?"
Hanna gulped. Perhaps she hadn't given Dr. Fletcher enough credit; the woman had clearly seen through any attempt at passing this all off as just some anxiety. She thought about any other thing she could say to hurry up their impromptu session and get out of there fast, but she was certain anything other than the truth would give her away in a heartbeat under the skilled therapists eyes.
When Hanna finally spoke, she wasn't sure if the word had actually passed her lips or not. "Guilty."
She chanced a quick glance up at Dr. Fletcher's face. The woman's face had softened, no longer prying and searching.
"You had no responsibility in this. In what happened last night or what happened when you were seven." When that didn't seem to make a difference Dr. Fletcher shifted in her seat. "Do you feel responsible in some way?"
"I mean, I kind of am," Hanna said slowly, taking a breath and gripping her hands tight in her lap when a lump threatened to raise up into her throat. "There was something so wrong with me that Lillian thought she had to kill me."
"What Lillian had were delusions, and they were so far removed from reality."
"She wasn't crazy before it happened." Hanna had been wracking her brain for years trying to understand what had driven her sisters actions and every time she came up blank. Lillian had never hurt animals, had never been an angry or wild person or threatened her before...she was a normal teenage girl who worried about boys in her class and her hair. "Maybe she just wanted to do it. Maybe she still does."
"I can't exactly speak on what is going through Lillian's head right now," Dr. Fletcher said, her words slow and professional. "I want to focus on you and how you are dealing with this situation. What did you do when Lillian left?"
"Cried," Hanna said, her cheeks burning red once more at her admission. Dr. Fletcher waited until Hanna cleared her mind enough to mull the question over. "I called my mom and that didn't help. Then I called you."
Then I texted Barry. Hanna bit her cheek and kept that last part to herself. She continued when Dr. Fletcher still remained quiet.
"I took a shower and went to bed." Hanna felt her stomach flip as the observant eyes of her therapist took in her appearance and she realized that was not the best of lies...her hair was clearly unwashed and she waited with a held breath for Dr. Fletcher to call her out on it.
The doctor's eyes dropped from Hanna's hair and she released the breath.
"Have you talked to your mother since last night?"
"No. She left me a bunch of voice mails, my dad left one too. I deleted them though, I don't want to talk to either of them."
"Some distance might be good for you," Dr. Fletcher said, crossing her legs and glancing down at the pad of paper on her knee. "Now, I don't have much information from your previous therapist on your father. How long has it been since the two of you have talked?"
"A long time. Years," Hanna added when she sensed the doctor was going to ask for something more specific. Her pen scratched something on the paper.
"Has he tried to contact you like your mother has?"
"Not until last night, I haven't tried either."
"What caused that drift?"
Hanna took a second to bite her cheek and winced when her teeth sank too deeply into the skin. A warm metallic taste spread across her tongue but Hanna tried to ignore it, already feeling uncomfortable enough as it was with their conversation. Even talking to her last therapist, they hadn't brought that topic up in years.
"When Lillian was released from that mental hospital he wanted to bring her back home. I freaked out when I heard my parents talking about it, I think I told them I would run away. My dad didn't think it was fair to keep her there after her doctors were ready to release her, so he moved out. He moved a couple towns over where the hospital was and got an apartment for them to stay. They were just going to stay until Lillian was 18 and could live on her own, but about a year after he left, they got divorced." Hanna shook her head, realizing she had been staring at the coffee table between them and pouring everything out quickly. Perhaps quickly would be the least painful way, like ripping off a band-aid instead of picking at it for weeks.
"You feel responsible for your parents divorcing," Dr. Fletcher said slowly. "They were adults, and it sounds like your father made the decision to move away on his own."
"Yeah," Hanna muttered, but the therapists words offered no relief from what had been in Hanna's mind for years. She didn't feel like she had the energy to fight Dr. Fletcher on the topic and she looked around the room, hoping another topic would come up or that they would be finished for the day. When nothing came up Hanna glanced at the door over the therapists shoulder. "I should probably be going," Hanna said slowly, waiting for Dr. Fletcher to set her pen and paper on the coffee table before standing and straightening her clothes.
"I'm very glad you felt you could come to me with this," the therapist said, a grandmotherly smile spreading across her face. "And I'm very sorry this all happened, but I'm very impressed with how you're handling it now."
"Thank you," Hanna said, offering up the meager smile she could manage and wishing the doctor a good night before leaving the office and shutting the door quietly behind her.
Hanna took a second to blink hard and rubbed her eyes, feeling sleepy and hazy. A surge of panic took over before Hanna remembered earlier in her apartment; she had taken two doses of her medication. She almost smiled at how silly she felt, her mind rushing to being poisoned.
She took the stairs slowly and took her phone out of her pocket and was disappointed to see just a few text messages from her mother. Shrugging those off and deleting them without reading them, Hanna briefly wondered if it would be too forward to text Barry again. She got as far as opening her messages and clicking on his name before deciding against it; he probably needed a little bit of space after dealing with all of her issues the night before. Hanna zipped her jacket up when she stepped outside and went to stand by the bus stop. She looked forward to finally taking off her work clothes – it felt like she had been wearing them for days - and slipping into some warm blankets...even if they were just her own.