Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“I’m sorry to be bothering you like this,” I said.

“Blue. Please. I’m always here for you. You know that.” She said the words and the meaning — well, it was there, but it was also sort of grabbing its suitcase and heading for the door. “I’m sorry if I seem a bit…out of sorts. It’s been a long night.” She sighed, and staring at me, reached forward and squeezed my hand. “Really, I’m glad you showed up. I could use the company. You can stay in the guest room, so forget about driving home tonight. Now tell me everything.”

I swallowed, jittery about where to begin. “I had a fight with my dad,” I said, but then to my surprise — just as she picked up the paper napkin and, biting her lip a little, set about folding it into an isosceles triangle — the phone began to ring. It sounded like human screams — Hannah had one of those bleating 1960s telephones, probably picked up for a dollar at a yard sale — and the sound made my heart throw itself melodramatically against my ribs (see Gloria Swanson, Shifting Sands ).

“Oh, God,” she whispered, visibly annoyed. “Hold on.”

She disappeared into the kitchen. The ringing stopped.

I strained to hear her voice, but there was nothing to eavesdrop on, only silence and the pings of the dogs’ collars; they nervously raised their heads off the floor.

Almost immediately, she reappeared, again with that small smile shoved onto her face like a tiny child forced onstage.

“That was Jade,” she said, returning to the couch. With secretarial concentration she became absorbed with the teakettle, lifting the lid, scrutinizing the floating tea bags, tapping them with one finger as if they were dead fish.

“I take it you two had quite a night?” she asked. Glancing at me, she poured the tea, handed me the I HEART SLUGS coffee mug (not reacting when some hot water dripped off the side onto her knee) and then, as if I’d been begging her all night to pose for an oil portrait, she stretched out across the entire couch, glass of red wine in hand, her bare feet pushed beneath the cushions (Visual Aid 16.0).

“You know, we had a terrible fight,” she said. “Jade and I. She left here absolutely enraged with me.” She was speaking in an odd, teacherish voice, as if explaining Photosynthesis. “I don’t even remember what it was about. Something mundane.” She tilted her head toward the ceiling. “I think it was college applications. I told her she needed to get organized or she might not make it. She flew off the handle.”

She took a sip of wine and I sipped my oolong tea feeling pangs of guilt. It was harrowingly clear Hannah knew the things Jade had said about her — either for certain, if Jade had called her and confessed (Jade could never be a confidence woman, mortgage shark or shyster due to her overwhelming need to explain things to her victim), or simply assumed it given their argument. Most spectacular of all, though, Hannah was visibly irked by it. Dad said people do all kinds of odd things when they’re on the defensive, and now Hannah was frowning as she rubbed her thumb around the rim of her wineglass, and her eyes, they kept moving between my face and the wineglass and the piece of apple pie (that looked like it’d been stepped on) back to her wineglass.

VISUAL AID 16.0

I couldn’t help but stare at her (her left arm boa-constricting her hip) like an investigator inspecting fingerprints on a bedpost, desperate to find the truth — if only a smudge of it. I knew it was an absurd thing — lunacy, guilt and love couldn’t be eked out by connecting freckles, or shining a tiny light in the dugout of a collarbone — but I couldn’t help myself. Some of the things Jade had said had stuck to me. Could she have purposefully drowned that man? Had she really slept with Charles? Was there a lost love hiding somewhere in her outskirts, her periphery — Valerio? Even when she was in a sullen, distracted mood, as she was now, Hannah still grabbed one’s headlines, shoved other less captivating stories (Dad, Fort Peck) to page 10. FADE OUT: Dad, Fort Peck (my dream he’d go play Che in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). FADE IN: Hannah Schneider twisted along the couch like a piece of shimmering trash that had washed up on a beach, her face speckled with sweat, her fingertips nervously playing with the seam meandering through her dress.

“So you didn’t make it to the dance?” I probed, my voice flimsy.

The question shook her awake; it was obvious she’d forgotten the question of why I was here, that I’d just shown up in a four-door Chevy Colorado truck in Sunburst Orange, unannounced, with no shoes. Not that I minded; Dad was a man who always assumed he was the Primary Subject, Group Focus, Chief Plan Under Discussion, so the fact that Hannah, after I’d mentioned my fight with him, blatantly snubbed him, shook him off as a nonevent — it was kind of fantastic.

“Things ran late,” she said blandly. “We made pie.” She looked at me. “Jade went, didn’t she? She stormed out of here saying she was going to find you.”

I nodded.

“She can be a strange girl. Jade. Sometimes she can say things that are — how should I…well, they’re horrifying.”

“I don’t think she means anything by it,” I suggested quietly.

Hannah tilted her head. “No?”

“Sometimes people say things simply to fill silence. Or as a way to shock and provoke. Or as exercise. Verbal aerobics. Loquacious cardio. There are any number of reasons. Only very rarely are words used strictly for their denotative meanings,” I said, and yet Dad’s comments from “Modes of Oration and the Brawn of Language” weren’t making the slightest dent in Hannah. She wasn’t paying attention. Her gaze was snagged somewhere near the piano in the dark corner of the room. And then, scowling (lines I’d never noticed before darting through her forehead), she reached over the arm of the couch, yanked open the end-table drawer and seized a half-empty pack of Camel cigarettes. She tapped one out, windmilled it agitatedly between her fingers and looked at me with anxious interest, as if I were a dress on sale, the last in her size.

“Surely, you must realize,” she said. “You’re such a perceptive person; you don’t miss anything”—she interrupted herself—“or maybe not. No. She hasn’t told you. I think she’s jealous — you speak so lovingly of your father. I’m sure it’s hard for her.”

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“Do you know anything at all about Jade? Her history?”

I shook my head.

Hannah nodded, and sighed again. She fished a pack of matches from the drawer and lit the cigarette quickly. “Well, if I tell you, you have to promise me you won’t say anything to any of them. But I think it’s important that you know. Otherwise, on nights like this, when she comes to you so angry…she was drunk, wasn’t she?”

Slowly, I nodded.

“Well, on occasions like — well, like tonight, I can understand if you’d feel”—Hannah thought hard about what’d I’d feel, biting her lip like she was deciding what to order off a menu—“ confused. Disturbed, even. I know I would. Knowing the truth will put everything into context for you. Maybe not immediately. No — you can’t understand what something is when you’re close to it. That’s like looking at a billboard an inch away. We’re all…what do they say…farsighted…or is it near — but later, no, that’s when”—she was talking all of this over with herself—“yes, that’s when it always becomes clear. Afterward.”