The nursery emptied, and Hattie settled into a rocking chair, plucking a copy of The Giving Tree from the little bookshelf. Ansel scrambled into her lap and she rocked, reading the story as he pointed at the pictures and shouted his version of words.
“Twee, twee,” he said enthusiastically as she turned the page.
“Yes that’s the Giving Tree isn’t it? And there’s the little boy.”
Hattie read the words, but her mind flicked repeatedly to that aged newspaper and the two little girls.
The door creaked open and Hattie looked up to see the young man who’d arrived late to the service that morning.
His tall frame filled most of the doorway and his shaggy blond hair fell past his ears. Eyes the color of a lake when a storm is gathering watched her beneath long golden lashes. He dressed casually in dark jeans and an olive sweater.
“Hi,” he told her smiling. “I’m looking for Pastor Greg’s office, apparently this is not it.”
He cocked an eyebrow, and she stumbled through her mind looking for words.
He walked into the room and shifted his attention to Ansel. “Hey there, little man, what’cha reading?”
“Twee!” Ansel shouted and pointed to the picture of the tree.
“Ahh the Giving Tree, one of my favorites too.”
“His office is at the end of the hall,” Hattie told him finally swallowing the lump in her throat. “There’s a little plaque on the door with his name.”
“Great, thank you.” He held out a hand. “My name is Damien. I’m sorry to interrupt your story.”
“Not at all,” she said, wondering at the fluttering in her stomach when her eyes met his. “Hattie, that’s my name.”
The man left and Hattie returned to the story, but she found it hard to concentrate.
Hattie had rarely considered boys. They existed, sure, but she noticed them in the same way she noticed spider webs or wall clocks. They took up space and sometimes she might bump into one, but otherwise they held little interest.
She often marveled at her older sister’s preoccupation with the opposite sex. Jude did not just notice boys, she lived and breathed them.
Hattie, on the contrary, had no time for boys and, honestly, not much time for girls either. As a child she played alone. She traipsed through the woods and built rock villages, hunted for salamanders and spent weeks coercing squirrels to eat from her hand. She played with other kids when they were thrust upon her, but she did not seek out friendships or feel their absence once gone. Hattie preferred writing stories and painting elaborate pictures of the thoughts in her head.
She also talked to ghosts.
The first had been the girl in the yellow dress, though Hattie never spoke with her.
Later she encountered Kitten. A little girl with red frizzy hair who sometimes appeared by the stream on Gram Ruth’s estate. Hattie would wade in the water searching for shiny pink stones and suddenly the girl would be staring back at her. Hattie only saw her in the water’s reflection. When she looked up, the girl was nowhere to be found, but return her gaze to the water and she stared back, as if caught in the surface of the rippling stream. She called her Kitten because her small dark eyes reminded Hattie of a kitten she’d once seen in a children’s book.
David visited her in Gram Ruth’s house. He hung himself there a century before in the cellar after his daughter died of pneumonia. He talked to Hattie about hunting elk in Canada, fighting in the war, and how to shine your shoes. He asked Hattie questions, but he never listened to her answers unless they reminded him of his daughter and then he would interrupt her and tell her about his daughter’s doll collection, or how she liked to braid her mother’s hair. Hattie did not enjoy talking to David, but he would pester her until she listened to him, sometimes pacing around her room in the middle of the night if she tried to ignore him during the day.
Her favorite ghost was Amelia. Amelia was a young woman who rode horses as a girl. She told Hattie about her horse, Francis and how her black coat gleamed like molten silk. She played with Hattie too. They ran through the forest together, hiding behind bushes and racing to the tops of the trees. Amelia told Hattie secrets about Gram Ruth and Jude and Peter. Amelia was the first to refer to herself as a ghost.
“I’m dead, silly,” she had told Hattie one day while they hunted for wild raspberries. “So of course, I’m a ghost.”
After that, Hattie went to church. Not because she believed the ghosts were bad, but because she wanted to be closer to the other side. She spoke to Pastor Greg about the ghosts only one time. He responded in a kind, but bemused sort of way, and Hattie understood that for too many people seeing was believing.
“Hattie?”
Hattie startled and looked up to find Katherine standing in the doorway, holding a small casserole baked for her by one of the congregants. Ansel had fallen asleep on Hattie’s lap and his bottom lip quivered with his baby snores. Hattie yawned and blinked, trying to clear her mind of the memories.
“Sorry Katherine, I was drifting.”
Katherine smiled knowingly. Anyone who grew up around Hattie knew her tendency to slip into her thoughts, sometimes for hours at a time.
“Thank you for watching him, Hattie,” Katherine told her, scooping Ansel up with her free arm. She adjusted him so that his head drooped on her shoulder.
“Can I help you?” Hattie asked gesturing toward the casserole.
“No, my mom’s upstairs,” Katherine reassured her. “And Pastor Greg wanted you to stop by his office on your way out.”
Katherine backed out of the nursery, and Hattie took an extra moment to get her bearings. She thought again of Amelia and wished that she still saw her. Amelia had stopped visiting her after Hattie’s sixteenth birthday. No reason, no farewell, she just never appeared again.
Hattie stopped at the drinking fountain and let the cool water flow across her forehead. She wiped her face on her sleeve and then knocked lightly on the Pastor’s door.
“Come in,” he called,
She pushed open the door. Pastor Greg sat on a little couch. Damien was perched on the edge of the Pastor’s scarred desk.
“Damien tells me the two of you have met?” the Pastor asked, beckoning Hattie towards a vacant chair.
She flicked her gaze at Damien where those startling gray eyes followed her with interest.
“Yes,” she agreed, focusing on the Pastor’s face.
“Damien is a doctorate student in psychiatry at a Christian University. He needs help with his thesis and I believe you might be the ideal young person to assist him,” the pastor told her, beaming.
“Psychiatry?” Hattie mumbled, at a loss for what the word meant let alone how she could help him. “Insane people?”
Damien smiled, but Pastor Greg nodded.
“We at the church tend to believe such individuals have merely lost the path. Though I do support what you do, Mr. Ross, or is it Dr. Ross?” Greg asked.
“Damien, please. I’m not quite ready for formal titles just yet. I still have a year of rotations left in addition to my thesis.”
Hattie looked at the floor, allowing her eye to follow the dark carpeting to the base of the wall where tiny hairline cracks ran into the plaster. A million different pathways for a wayward ant.
“What do you think, Hattie?” the pastor’s voice broke through her thoughts and she snapped up, looking at him.
“About what?”
Damien stood and grabbed a battered-looking leather briefcase. He pulled out a sheaf of papers.
“I’m studying existential psychology in the homeless population,” Damien told her, crossing the room and settling into the chair next to hers.