“She’d written Valerio all over it,” Lu said heatedly. She had a funny way of wrinkling her nose, which made it look like a tiny bunched-up sock. “Like a million times. Kind of crazily too, the way a psycho killer writes things when the investigator breaks into his house on CSI. The one word over and over, like she was talking on the phone, unaware of what she was drawing. Still, I do stuff like that, so I didn’t think anything of it. Until she walked in. She picked up the notepad immediately, facing the pages toward her so I couldn’t see it. I don’t think she put it down until I was in my car, driving away. I’d never seen her act so strange.”
Strange indeed. I took the liberty of looking up the word in Cambridge etymologist Louis Bertman’s Words, Their Origin and Relevance (1921). Valerio was a common Italian patronymic meaning “brave and strong,” derived from the Roman name Valerius, derived in turn from the Latin verb valere, “to be in healthy sprits, to be robust and sturdy.” It was also the name of several minor saints in the fourth and fifth centuries.
I asked them why they didn’t simply ask Hannah outright who he was.
“Can’t do that,” said Milton.
“Why?”
“We already did,” said Jade with irritation, exhaling smoke from her cigarette. “Last year. And she turned a weird red color. Almost purple.”
“Like we’d smacked her in the head with a baseball bat,” said Nigel.
“Yeah, I couldn’t tell if she was sad or pissed,” Jade went on. “She just stood there with her mouth open, then disappeared into the kitchen. And when she came out, like, five minutes later, Nigel apologized. And she said in a fake administrator voice, oh, no, it’s fine, it’s just that she doesn’t like us snooping or talking about her behind her back. It’s hurtful.”
“Total bullshit,” said Nigel.
“It wasn’t bullshit,” Charles said angrily.
“Well, we can’t bring it up again,” Jade said. “We don’t want to give her another heart attack.”
“Maybe it’s her Rosebud,” I said, after a moment. Naturally, none of them were ever thrilled when I opened my mouth, but this time, every one of their heads swiveled toward me, almost in unison.
“Her what?” asked Jade.
“Have you seen Citizen Kane?” I asked.
“Sure,” said Nigel with interest.
“Well, Rosebud is what the main character, Kane, searches for his entire life. It’s what he’s desperate to get back to. An unrequited, aching yearning for a simpler, happier time. It’s the last thing he says before he dies.”
“Why didn’t he just go to a florist?” asked Jade distastefully.
And thus Jade (who, although sometimes very literal, had a flair for the dramatic) enjoyed fashioning all kinds of exciting conclusions out of Hannah’s mysteriousness whenever Hannah happened to be out of the room. Sometimes Hannah Schneider was an alias. At other times, Hannah was a member of the Federal Witness Protection Program after testifying against crime-tsar Dimitri “Caviar” Molotov of the Howard Beach Molotovs, and was thus chiefly responsible for his being found guilty of sixteen counts of fraud. Or else, she figured Hannah was one the Bin Ladins: “That family’s big as the Coppolas.” Once, after she happened to watch Sleeping with the Enemy at midnight on TNT, she told Leulah that Hannah was hiding in Stockton in order to avoid detection by her ex-husband, who happened to be both physically abusive and clinically insane. (Naturally, Hannah’s hair was dyed, her eyes, colored contacts.)
“And that’s why she hardly ever goes out and pays cash for everything. She doesn’t want him to trace her credit cards.”
“She doesn’t pay cash for everything,” said Charles.
“Sometimes she does.”
“Everyone on the planet sometimes pays cash.”
I humored these wild speculations, even designed a few interesting ones of my own, but of course, I didn’t genuinely believe them.
Dad, on Double Lives: “It’s fun to imagine they’re as epidemic as illiteracy or chronic fatigue syndrome or any other cultural malaise that graces the covers of Time and Newsweek, but sadly, most Bob Joneses off the street are just that, Bob Jones, with no dark secrets, dark horses, dark victories, or dark sides of the moon. It’s enough to make you give up on Baudelaire. Mind you, I’m not counting adultery, which isn’t dark in the slightest, but rather clichéd.”
I thus secretly concluded Hannah Schneider was a typo. Destiny had been sloppy. (Most likely because she was overworked. Kismet and Karma were too flighty to get anything done and Doom couldn’t be trusted.) Quite by accident, she’d assigned an outstanding person of breathtaking beauty to a buried mountain town, where grandeur was like that slighted tree always falling in the woods and no one noticing. Somewhere else, in Paris, or Hong Kong probably, someone named Chase H. Niderhann, with a face compelling as a baked potato and a voice like a throat clearing, happened to be living her life, a life of opera, of sun and lakes and weekend excursions to Kenya (pronounced “keen-YA”), of gowns that went “Shhhhh” across a floor.
I decided to take control of the situation (see Emma, Austen, 1816).
It was October. Dad was dating a woman named Kitty (whom I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of swatting away from our screen), but she was of no consequence. Why should Dad settle for a Standard American Wirehair when he could have a Persian? (I can blame Hannah’s croony music taste for my wayward vision, old Peggy Lee and her incessant whining about the crazy moon and Sarah Vaughan sniveling about her lover man.)
I acted with uncharacteristic vehemence that rainy Wednesday afternoon as I set my Disney-inspired plan into action. I told Dad I had a ride and then asked Hannah to drive me home. I made her wait in the car, giving her a lame excuse (“Hold on, I have a great book for you.”) before I ran inside to pry Dad away from Patrick Kleinman’s latest tome published by Yale University Press, The Chronicle of Collectivism (2004), so he’d come outside and talk to her.
He did.
In short, there was no world on a string, no tender trap, no wee small hour of the morning and certainly no witchcraft. Dad and Hannah exchanged moonless pleasantries. I believe Dad even said, “Yes, I’ve been meaning to attend one of those home football games. Blue and I will see you there,” in an effort to clothespin the silence.
“That’s right,” said Hannah. “You like football games.”
“Yes,” said Dad.
“Don’t you have a book to lend me?” Hannah asked me.
Within minutes, she was driving away with my only copy of Love in the Time of Cholera (García Márquez, 1985).
“Touched as I am by your efforts to play Cupid, my dear, in the future, please allow me to do my own riding into the sunset,” Dad said as he walked inside.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Even though I’d never said anything to Hannah, and she’d never said anything to me, a certain foolproof Thesis had been floating around in my head, that the only plausible explanation for her including me in the Sunday soirees, for her brutally shoehorning me in with the others (determined to pry open their airtight clique like a frenzied housewife with a jar opener) was that she wanted Dad. Because I couldn’t have mistaken, at least back at Surely Shoos, her eyes hovering a little fretfully over his face like green dragontails over a flower (Family Papilionidae), that sure, she’d smiled at me back at Fat Kat Foods, but it was Dad whom she wanted to notice her, Dad whom she wanted to stun.