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AGNES POLLOCK

LOOKS LIKE HANA BY DCTB

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i.

There is fear in Bentwood, Alabama. [break][break]

It’s hardly noticeable if you’re not looking for it, although many might say that they can feel it in the air like they can feel a biting wind in the dead of winter. [break][break]

Bentwood, Alabama.[break][break]

Population: four thousand, four-hundred and sixty-eight -- and like most of the other towns in the area (Bellamy, Whitewood, Whitfield, York), it’s built on a grid system -- navigable by numbers and difficult to get lost in if you’re not really trying. At the center of these city grids: a courthouse, city hall, a community center shrouded in warmth and welcome. [break][break]

The citizens of Southern Alabama have nice, tight-knit communities centered around this grid; and whatever lies in the middle of the grid most certainly defines the town. The people. The culture.[break][break]

The center of Bentwood is a church -- the towering citadel of Bentwood Baptist, a looming figure on a foggy horizon. [break][break]

The church is a formidable presence in the town -- a monstrous facility laced with stained glass and white clapboard siding. If you watch closely, you’ll see hundreds of tired, sunburnt bodies drag themselves through the front door every Sunday morning to hear earth-rattling sermons from Bentwood’s most respected citizen -- Lucas Pollock.[break][break]

There is fear in Bentwood, Alabama.[break][break]

Maybe it’s the mud that sucks at the feet of weary passerby, desperate, desperate, like it’s begging them to stay. Maybe it’s the way the shutters of the little white homes lined up like soldiers are always shut fast to the outside world — if we can’t see them, they can’t see us. Maybe it’s the way the wind chimes made of old sea glass and animal bones tinkle softly in the hot afternoon breeze, echoing a gentle warning as the sun sets. Or maybe it’s the coyotes that roam the hills -- shrieking with delight in the early, creeping dawn when they’ve managed to land themselves an unsuspecting clutch of rabbits or a fat, basking lizard. [break][break]

There is fear in Bentwood, Alabama. [break][break]

It hums beneath the earth like a second skin; a distinct warmth beneath the feet of wandering travelers. You look into the eyes of its citizens -- get out of here, they seem to say, pupils blown wide in the bright afternoon light. They smile, welcoming, beckoning, but there is terror here -- it’s sewn into the seams of their linen dresses and the shoulders of their dark flannel shirts and they wear it like they’d wear an old hand-me-down. The citizens of Bentwood nod eagerly at you, smiles wide -- come in, come in![break][break]

They take your hand and pull you into the church, the epicenter of the earthquake. It’s alive with activity and hushed voices and mutterings of gossip best left to the frustrated wives and the widowed old women. People mill about like cows in a pasture, not much to do and nowhere to go. You’re pushed to the back, crushed into a pew with the smokers and the tobacco spitters and the nursing mothers. [break][break]

The churchgoers smile. Their mouths are too big, with too many teeth[break][break]

There, in the third row, is the man who survived being drowned in the river beyond the hills by his own father. He refuses to have children of his own, lest he make the same mistakes. [break][break]

In the fourth row, there, the ethereal young woman who lost her wealthy husband to an untimely heart attack. At least, that’s what the coroner said. Must have been a bad glass of whiskey.[break][break]

And just in front of you -- the woman who lives at the end of Harper street. According to the kids in town, she’s a witch who snacks on little arms and legs in her free time. Her hair is a wild white nest and when she sings, her voice shakes the room around you.[break][break]

In the front, standing behind a pulpit — a tall man with sandy blonde hair, hazel eyes and a pearly white smile. He exudes power; it leaks from him like sweat, and he fills the room with his presence. The churchgoers bend towards him like flowers to sunlight, and when he smiles, the canines in his mouth flash dangerously. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a predator unnoticed.[break][break]

And next to you in the back pew -- squashed between yourself and the armrest like a sardine -- is a beautiful woman with dark eyes (haunted eyes) and what seems like miles upon miles of brown hair. In her arms she holds a baby -- a little girl, by the looks of it, blonde as Apollo with impossibly dark eyes to boot.[break][break]

If you watch closely, it looks as though there’s a bruise blooming on the woman’s collarbone -- but she shifts, and it’s covered by the neck of her blouse before you can say anything about it. The baby in her arms makes a soft cry -- like the mewl of a newborn kitten -- and the woman leans down, her hair a curtain around her face as she says, ”Hush, Agnes. Hush.” [break][break]

The preacher lifts his arms and the walls of the church shake. He shouts, he screams, he bellows great balls of fire, and yet the people love him. Maybe they fear him. Maybe they adore him -- you’re not quite sure. When he stops to take a sip of his water, you notice the clattering of your knees, as if the preacher’s just struck the fear of god into your very bones. The man up front is smiling, a wolf on the prowl. You don’t know how he still has a voice. How he’s still standing, arms thrown wide, hazel eyes alight with vicious euphoria. The man spits hatred, spits fear, black nothingness spewing from his mouth and splattering against the churchgoers like hot black tar. [break][break]

The woman next to you looks enraptured in the man’s speech. Her thumbs drift across the forehead of the baby in her arms, and you take a moment to examine the child -- she’s swaddled nicely in a little brown terry cloth blanket, tiny feet socked in white with frilled ruffs on the ankles. You catch her gaze -- and the baby, a few months old at most, holds your stare with all the ferocity of a grown woman. It unsettles you -- and after several moments of this you understand, undoubtedly, what this little girl has seen. Those eyes -- they match eyes of the woman beside you. You can see the intensity in her gaze, the ferocity of her soul in the curl of her mouth. She’s only a child, but you can tell -- right then and there -- that she’ll be a force of nature. [break][break]

ii.

Lucas Pollock never planned to have children. It wasn’t in his agenda, not at the start. He’s eighteen when he meets Anneliese Keller--the choirmaster’s daughter, small in stature with the voice of an angel. It’s clear at once that they’re compatible. She’s quiet, soft-spoken. Where she lacks the strength of body, Luke fills in the gaps. To most, they’re the perfect couple. One of Luke’s hands could easily engulf both of her own, and one of his favorite tricks is sweeping her into his arms and kissing her senseless. He likes to joke that she’s nothing but a paper doll--practically weightless in his grip, as simple to hoist as an empty cardboard box. When he steps around the car to open the door for her when they drive to church together on Sunday mornings, it’s hard to think that they’d be anything but happy.[break][break]

It seems like your classic teen romance. Boy meets girl, girl meets boy. He fixes her broken down car and leaves his phone number in the glove box. The Keller family likes the Pollock family, and the Pollock family likes the Keller family. It seems right. It seems good.[break][break]

But Bentwood, above all else, is religious. Conservative. Ruthless.[break][break]

So when Anneliese discovers that she’s pregnant, she decides on her own that carrying the baby to term is the only option she has. No ifs, no ands, no buts. She also knows that there’s no way to have a baby without first being married--and Luke is sympathetic, at first. He proposes to her straightaway and they’re married very shortly afterwards in the Bentwood chapel. No flash, no flair. They don’t even honeymoon. Only one photo is taken, of Luke and Anneliese standing on the front steps of the church with empty smiles and stiff poses. [break][break]

The wedding is rushed. Anneliese isn’t even showing yet--barely a month into her first pregnancy, and she’s suddenly thrust into wifehood. She and Luke move into a house a few blocks from the church and settle down. Things are quiet for a while. Luke moves in and out, drifting between the church and his work at the car shop on main street. He comes home with a bowed back and tired hands, but he’s kind. He’s gentle. Anneliese wonders how he can be so sensitive, so tender, after everything--his father is always shouting gospel, always angry about something. Kevin--the Bentwood head pastor--speaks of a vengeful, wrathful God. Luke believes in a generous God. A God to trust, not fear. It’s a wonder that Luke hasn’t picked up his father’s hateful propaganda, she thinks to herself as she watches Kevin Pollock preach to a trembling audience of churchgoers. She can see Luke’s kindness in his easy smile, in the tilt of his head as he brushes his fingers through dark blond hair.[break][break]

iii.

It’s early August. It’s dark and stormy--wind snaps through the Bentwood valley, accompanied by deafening bolts of thunder and lightning that shake the newlyweds’ modest little house to the foundation. Luke, Anneliese has come to learn, can sleep through just about anything. On most nights, he’s out like a light--once his head hits the pillow, he’s asleep until the sun hits his eyes the following morning. Anneliese is not so lucky. A particularly loud clap of thunder wakes her and she practically jumps out of her skin as she sits up in bed. The sheets are bunched around her waist, and she’s breathing hard as she leans back on her hands. Her eyes drift to her husband’s bare back, sleeping peacefully as always. [break][break]

The lightning flashes through their bedroom and illuminates the room from floor to ceiling in quick, rapid bursts. It takes Anneliese a moment to adjust to the sporadic beams of light--but when she does, she sees the blood almost immediately.[break][break]

Spotting the bedsheets, just between her legs. [break][break]

It looks like nothing more than what she might see during her time of the month--but the fear that twists her stomach and her heart into knots is far more fear than she’s ever known. [break][break]

Luke Pollock can sleep through anything--but it’s not the ravenous thunder that swallows up the hillside that wakes him that night. It’s Anneliese’s hysterical sobs as she grips his arm with iron fingers and thrashes him out of his slumber.[break][break]

iv.

Luke is not the same after the miscarriage. He drives Anneliese to the nearest hospital, not a word escaping him as his wife sits in the front passenger seat and weeps. They both mourn the loss of their baby, in their own ways. Luke becomes quiet. He insists on being the one to tell their families and only days later begins searching for answers in fevered prayer. He spends the next week at the church, kneeling at the altar. Anneliese doesn’t know if he eats, or if he sleeps. He never tells her. [break][break]

She changes the sheets and then spends the week in bed. Crying until she’s got nothing left, until all she can do is heave with empty sobs and wait for sleep to take her into open arms. Four weeks is all it took for her to fall in love with her baby. Six weeks is all it took for the cruel hand of the world to take that love away. [break][break]

It feels like the blood might not ever stop. And then it does, a week later. Luke crawls back into their bed and pulls Anneliese close and plants a kiss on her forehead. They can come back from this, Anneliese thinks. They can heal. They’re young. They have so much time.[break][break]

And they do. For a time, they do. After the casseroles go bad and the gift cards are spent, Anneliese returns to church and takes over her father’s job as choirmaster. Luke is promoted to head pastor, a force of his own at age nineteen. It’s business as usual, for the most part. [break][break]

But then Luke begins to preach. His words aren’t those words of kindness Anneliese had once known, though. They’re the words of Luke’s father before him--fire and brimstone, hate and fear. Anneliese can’t quite catch her breath as she stands with the choir and sings the post-sermon hymns. Luke turned into someone else up behind that pulpit. Something else. Her hand drifts to her belly, her brow dipping into a furrow. The miscarriage changed them both. Maybe moreso than she’d previously assumed.[break][break]

She asks him about it on their way home from the service that Sunday. His hands are white-knuckled around the steering wheel as they pull into the driveway. “It’s punishment,” he whispers, barely speaking at all. His eyes find her own, and she’s shocked to see the pain that fills them. “You were pregnant before we married.” His mouth dips into a deep grimace. “The miscarriage--it was our punishment.”[break][break]

Tears spring to Anneliese’s eyes, but she doesn’t let them fall. “You think losing the baby was an act of God?” [break][break]

He doesn’t have to answer, but she knows that he means it.[break][break]

v.

Luke is different. He walks different, talks different, acts different. Something in him had changed, that stormy night in August. Something inside him had broken loose--had snapped like a wire pulled too tight. Anneliese can’t imagine how the kind mechanic who’d fixed her car had become so hateful--how every step he took no longer looked graceful, but full of heavy wrath and contempt. Once, he’d slumped and hunched over--trying to downplay his height, trying to make himself smaller than he was. Now he holds himself at his full stature--a mountain of a man, with the face of a bulldog. [break][break]

And he’s only nineteen.[break][break]

He looks wise beyond his years, but he’s only a boy. He speaks with the rage of a thousand generations, but he’s only a child.[break][break]

Anneliese is almost afraid of him. If it weren’t for that memory--that knowledge that her husband is in there, somewhere--she might have left him. Might have started new, somewhere else. But he smiles and she sees those pearly white teeth and those dimples and she knows that her Luke is in there. The Luke she sees isn’t Luke--it’s Kevin. Kevin Pollock, who believed that the only way to discipline a child was to crack a belt across their backside and then force them onto their knees to pray for forgiveness. [break][break]

She thinks that redeeming himself might save him. Might pull him out of that emotional pit, might bring back her smiling, golden-haired husband. The boy she’d fallen in love with, all those years ago. [break][break]

So she slips into bed with him and slides her hands up the plane of his chest, dropping kisses on his forehead, his lips, his jaw, his neck. He jolts with surprise, but then his hands find her hips and he grins with a hunger that sends a fearful shiver bolting down her spine. [break][break]

vi.

October. [break][break]

It’s October, and the air is cool. Anneliese and Luke are sitting down to dinner and as they finish their food, Luke sits back in his chair and lets out a satisfied sigh. These are the times when he seems most human--when he seems the most like his old self. Content, happy, with a full stomach to boot. Anneliese folds her napkin in her hands and quietly mutters, “I’m pregnant.”[break][break]

Hopefully this is the redemption he needs. Hopefully this is where he becomes himself again. [break][break]

Luke’s content smile slips from his lips and his eyes widen, almost imperceptibly. He sits forward in his chair and plants his palms on the table. “You are?” He asks. His voice sounds neither happy nor upset. He’s blank, tilting his head like he didn’t quite hear what she just said. He’s unbearably unreadable--she can’t get a hold of those threads of interest, no matter how far she reaches for them.[break][break]

“Yes,” she says, one hand instinctively drifting to her belly. There are no signs of a baby yet, but she’s been to the clinic. She’s sure that there’s a child growing within her, and as Luke comes around the table to kneel next to her chair, she can tell that he knows. That as he presses his hand flat against her abdomen, something in him knits back together. A torn seam being resewn, pulled taut. [break][break]

He looks up, and the brilliant grin he gives her is enough to send a shiver of absolute relief through her tense limbs. He leans onto his toes and pulls her down for a triumphant kiss.[break][break]

Luke is back, Anneliese thinks.

vii.

She’s always wanted a little girl. It’d long been a dream of hers--and Luke was willing to let her name the child, knowing full well how long she’d been waiting to be a mother. She’s only twenty, but she knows exactly what she wants--she’s always wanted a little girl, she tells Luke. Katherine, she says excitedly, the moment he suggests that she name the child. I’ve always wanted a Katherine. [break][break]

Neither one of them want to know their baby’s gender until the baby arrives. Their families excitedly speculate, waving pendants and pocket watches over Anneliese’s swelling belly to see if gravity might reveal the answers they’re seeking. [break][break]

He arrives the following July. He’s quite a large baby--Anneliese had been forced to give birth surgically to save her life. The pregnancy goes smoothly, to say the least. Other than the baby’s sheer size, everything goes according to plan. He arrives on time, wailing from the instant his lungs taste hospital air. [break][break]

He’s not a girl, but as Anneliese takes him into her trembling arms for the first time she finds that she doesn’t much care. He’s gorgeous. He’s got his father’s eyes, his mother’s nose. She can’t take her eyes off of him. For nine months, she’s whispered to him--her fears, her joys, her secrets. The bond she feels with him seems unshakable. She and Luke get about five minutes of time with him--and then the doctor gently takes him from her arms and carts him away for his first bath.[break][break]

Looking up at Luke, at his towering, formidable frame, Anneliese can’t help but laugh. In her delirium, she begins to giggle. The almighty Luke Pollock, prophet and healer, looking small in scrubs and a hairnet. He frowns at her, but he can’t hold it--after a moment, his mouth breaks into an astonished smile, and he bends down to plant a kiss on her cheek. [break][break]

She falls asleep, a laugh caught in her throat.[break][break]

When she wakes up again, she’s in a different hospital room. Her gown has been changed, and the baby is being wheeled in on a little cart by a nurse in pink scrubs. Luke is dozing on the chair by her bed, his cheek propped in his hand. Anneliese is groggy, but her vision tunnels to her son in an instant. “Luke,” she says, and even though her voice is hoarse, his eyes snap open and he sits up, looking just as blurry as she feels. [break][break]

The nurse lifts the baby from his cart and gently passes him to Anneliese, who waits with baited breath as she pulls back his little blue blanket and presses a soft kiss to his puppy-soft forehead. He seems so delicate. So wrinkled. He truly does have his father’s eyes. The palest caramel brown, nearly gold in the hospital lights. His hair sits in gold tufts atop his head, nearly white. Anneliese coos at him, and he lets out little grunts and squeaks as he squirms inside his swaddle.[break][break]

“So much for Katherine,” Luke says, and Anneliese can almost hear some humor in his voice. She squints, then tilts her head. [break][break]

“Not necessarily,” she says, lifting her eyebrows. Her eyes find Luke’s, and he offers her a smile.[break][break]

viii.

Luke is better, after Kather. [break][break]

For the most part, he plays the role of responsible parent. He dresses Kather, feeds him, changes his diaper. But something about him is different. There’s a hole in him, somewhere. A disconnect. Something that Kather can’t fill, something that Anneliese can’t fill. So he turns to the church. He goes to his father for advice, and learns that the only way to fix the emptiness in his life is to turn to God for guidance.[break][break]

Luke gets more practice preaching.[break][break]

Anneliese doesn’t notice it at first--she steps out of sermons regularly to breastfeed, and for several months she hardly attends church at all. Her full focus is on her baby--and rightfully so. He’s turning out to be quite the handful, and despite Anneliese’s mother offering her assistance, Anneliese insists that she’ll handle Kather on her own. She has to, or she’ll never be satisfied. [break][break]

Kather is two when Anneliese finally surrenders him to the daycare center at the church. She attends and listens to a full sermon for the first time in quite a while--and what she sees, what she hears--it frightens her. [break][break]

Somewhere, she’d slipped. She doesn’t know where, doesn’t know why. The miscarriage had broken a dam in Luke, somewhere dark. Kather’s birth had plugged it, but not by much. The dam is overflowing--and apparently, Luke hadn’t figured out how to patch it up. Hate spills from his mouth at the pulpit, and the people of Bentwood are so afraid of him and the God he worships that they have no choice but to listen. He spits fire and brimstone and hot black tar wherever he stands. Annelise is afraid. She’s terrified.[break][break]

But then he drives them home and asks to hold Kather and the look on his face is so tender and gentle and she wonders which Luke is the real Luke. His smile is deceitful. His love is a facade.[break][break]

But she buys it. Oh, does she buy it.

ix.

Luke’s temper sits on a hairtrigger. He’s a ticking time bomb, able to explode at any moment without much warning. The older Kather gets, and the longer Luke preaches--the worse the shrapnel, the worse the concussion. [break][break]

There are moments of clarity--when he becomes that person that Anneliese had fallen for as a teenager, when he sweeps her into his arms and makes her feel like she’s the only woman on earth. These moments are what keep Anneliese going. Knowing that her husband isn’t gone, that he loves their son as much as she does. It’s why she’s present for Kather. Doting, loving, a gentle hand to guide the boy through the whims and woes of Bentwood, Alabama. She winks at the little boy as she stands sings with the choir, and he claps and laughs and dances in his grandmother’s arms. He’s so pure. So innocent. A gift, surely.[break][break]

Kather has a voice on him, that’s for sure. Anneliese ushers him into singing and he finds a niche with the other members of the childrens’ choir. He’s three years old--a beautiful boy, with long flaxen hair and the biggest hazel eyes imaginable. He’s a big guy, too. Taller than his classmates, twice as big. His attention span isn’t great, but she can tell he likes to sing. He likes to learn.[break][break]

Luke’s mood swings, quite frankly, frighten Anneliese. She talks to him about seeing a specialist, and he cracks the back of his hand across her face so fast that she has no time to process what he’d done. Minutes later, he’s apologizing, doting on her, stroking her hair as she shivers in his arms. She doesn’t bring it up again.[break][break]

Maybe he needs a little more redemption, she thinks. [break][break]

x.

Anneliese announces that she’s pregnant with their second child over Thanksgiving dinner. [break][break]

Nine months later, during the hottest month of the year, she gives birth to another beautiful boy. She names him Wren to complete her dream of having a Katherine-- if God won’t allow her a little girl, she’ll fit the name in however she can. He cries like a songbird--sharp and loud. He’s big, like his brother--and his father. Anneliese strokes Wren’s forehead and her breath catches in her throat when he cracks open his eyes just so. It’s not Luke’s eyes looking back at her this time, but her own. Deep brown, nearly black. His hair is just a bit darker, and she wonders if he’ll have her brown hair. A momma’s boy.[break][break]

She looks to hand him off to Luke, but the pastor is asleep in the bedside chair, Kather propped in his lap. Kather’s confused, but alert. Unlike Luke, he’s wide awake. Anneliese beckons him over and he toddles off his father’s lap and up to the bedside. He reaches towards Wren with tiny, tubby hands--and as he does, Anneliese moves to meet him. Kather rests a hand on Wren’s cheek, and for a moment Anneliese is shocked at how aged her firstborn looks. Wise. As if he knows something she doesn’t. [break][break]

If only she had listened.[break][break]

Wren is enough to satiate Luke, for a while. Anneliese loves her boys unconditionally--she teaches Kather how to change diapers, when he asks. On the nights when Wren wakes up and cries to be fed, Kather is awake and out of his bed before Anneliese can even think about how she’s going to warm up a bottle of milk. (Luke, of course, never wakes up to help. He sleeps through it all. A trait that his youngest son will inherit, no doubt.) Anneliese doesn’t mind. It’s these times, really, that she uses to whisper to her sons how much she loves them. How much their daddy loves them, even though he might not show it.[break][break]

Luke goes back to preaching and Anneliese stays home with the boys. Kather is unnaturally dedicated to his little brother--even at his age, even when other little boys might dismiss their baby brothers as pests. Kather is glued to Anneliese’s hip, always worrying about Wren. She tells him to go play with his toys, to occupy himself without feeling an obligation to his brother. He does it with difficulty--she can feel him peeking from time to time, watching her read to Wren and stroke his hair and play with his tiny little hands. [break][break]

Anneliese jokes to Luke that Kather might love Wren more than she does. Luke levels her with an unimpressed glare and shakes his head. “That’s not funny,” he says.[break][break]

She doesn’t talk about it again. [break][break]

Luke grows more and more irritable by the day--soon, Anneliese is walking on eggshells around him, even avoiding the children in order to keep out of harm’s way. Luke must have some kind of anger disorder. He can’t possibly be sane, can he? Anneliese goes to the library, tries to find out what she can. She thinks about leaving. For her sake, for the sake of the boys. [break][break]

But then Luke will wander in with a smile on his face and in an impossibly good mood and once again she’s reminded of his kindness. Of the man she loves, of the man who loves her. [break][break]

Anneliese is certainly the forgiving type. She loves her children, but she also loves her husband. Her husband, who can crush her wrists in one hand one moment and then deliver a knockout grin in the next. Who she believes has some sort of anger management disorder, brought on by the trauma of a miscarriage. It makes sense, she thinks. His father was this way.[break][break]

Luke had always talked about not becoming his father. Of raising his children kindly, of loving his wife without contestation. He’d suppressed his father’s teachings for so long. It only makes sense, Anneliese thinks, that these feelings would be unlocked by trauma. [break][break]

But then again, he’s still so loving. So gentle. Maybe it’s the teachings at the church that get to him. Maybe it’s the time he spends with his father, going over scripture and building sermons. If he could just separate himself, she thinks. Then he’d be better. [break][break]

The very mention of leaving the church earns Anneliese a backhand and she drops the subject. She’s been silenced, rather effectively. She turns to her children for comfort. Sweet Kather, always concerned. And her talkative Wren--always chattering, always gibbering away as if he’s got something to say about everything. She loves them, she thinks. But maybe they’re not enough. Maybe Luke needs something else. Someone else. [break][break]

xii.

Wren is three and Kather is six when Anneliese gives birth to a wailing baby girl. She spends longer in the hospital this time--her daughter keeps her in labor for far longer than anticipated, and doctors are just beginning to debate a third cesarean section when Anneliese’s nurse declares that she can see the baby begin to crown. [break][break]

This time, Luke is present for everything. Anneliese crushes his knuckles in her grip as a guttural scream escapes her. This is the most pain she’s ever felt--and even with the epidural, she feels like she might soon explode from the effort it takes to deliver her daughter.[break][break]

But she makes it through. It’s messy, it’s horrid, but she makes it through. The little girl wails--louder than either of her brothers, gasping and shrieking. Her eyes are closed, her hands closed into little fists. She’s pink and wrinkly, but she’s beautiful. [break][break]

Luke is the first one to hold her, back in the main hospital room. Something about her enraptures him--he seems more engaged than he was with either of the boys, more attentive. If he were a cat, his ears would be pricked forward, pupils blown wide. [break][break]

Her brothers take to her immediately. Just like Kather had taken to Wren, the younger of the two becomes instantly attached to his little sister and he does just about everything he can to get a good look at her. Like her brothers, she’s got blonde hair atop her head and brown eyes to match. Anneliese asks Luke what she’ll be named, and Luke is answering before she’s even finished asking the question.[break][break]

“Agnes,” he says. “Agnes Jane.”

xiii.

Agnes looks just like her daddy. Her brothers hover, like two moons in orbit--interested in everything she does, everything she says. Under their watchful gaze, she grows quickly--and she turns six in the blink of an eye. Anneliese had appreciated the help from the boys, but she’d often have to scold them away from doing her job for her--she’d catch Kather dressing Wren for school, find Wren brushing Agnes’ hair into a ponytail when he should be reading for class. [break][break]

It’s almost amusing, really. It’s like the boys know something that Anneliese doesn’t. She watches them carefully, but she can never figure out why they do what they do.[break][break]

Luke doesn’t treat Agnes the way he treats the boys. It’s obvious to everyone, but nobody says anything about it. He coddles her, pampers her, is more engaged with her than he ever was with his sons. On the one hand, Anneliese worries. On the other, she’s comforted by the fact that Agnes is bringing back Luke. Sweet, gentle Luke. [break][break]

Luke’s episodes calm down. He’s happier, more present. Even his sermons at the church reflect his newfound happiness, and the boys begin to come out of these protective shells that even Anneliese didn’t know they had.[break][break]

She gets to see them--she gets to see her children again--unfiltered, unfettered by Luke’s temper.[break][break]

Kather is the quiet one. Smart as a whip, curious as the devil. He’d always been the mother hen type, but Anneliese wonders if it’s more than instinct for him. Sometimes she feels like she doesn’t have to help at all--that Kather’s got it covered. An eleven year old boy, acting like a grown man. [break][break]

He’s growing fast. He eats like a beast and he’s sprouting like a weed. He’s always been a big guy, but he seems especially mammoth next to his much smaller classmates. It’s lucky for him, really, that Wren isn’t far behind in the size department.[break][break]

Wren’s not so much the quiet one as he is the cheerful one. He’s never at a loss for words, even when he has nothing to talk about. He always makes time for a conversation. Sweet Wren, never without a smile on his face. He’s quite scrawny--pretty average for his age. In the coming years, he’ll sprout up, just like his brother. Like Kather, Wren is smart as a fox and has a distinct talent for singing. Anneliese puts both of her boys in the choir, and they sing with her until they’re in their mid-teens. [break][break]

Agnes is something special.[break][break]

Right off the bat, it’s clear that she’s about as stubborn as a bag of rocks. She disobeys often, talks back, is defiant to the whims of either parent. The only one she ever really listens to is Kather--he’s the only one who can pull her off a ledge once she’s put herself up there, and Anneliese is just fine to leave him to it.[break][break]

She’s smart, like her brothers. She questions everything. She presses every last one of Luke’s buttons, and still he dotes on her like he’d never doted on the boys. She’s curious, more than anything--always hovering around the parents, always wanting to be updated on everyone’s whereabouts. And most of all, she cares--she’s cheerful when she wants to be, with a wicked sense of humor. Even at her age, she’s almost singlehandedly responsible for lifting the mood of their home. Anneliese gets her Luke back, for a time. [break][break]

But not for long.[break][break]

xiv.

Agnes is ten years old when Luke has his first real meltdown since her birth. Kather is fifteen and Wren is thirteen--both on the verge of growing into themselves, shooting well above their classmates in both height and stature. Both of them remember how Luke was before Agnes, and they both remember how he is following her birth. They remember his outbursts, his destructive tendencies, his fits of rage so potent and horrid that it seems his wrath is celestially ordained. That is to say that his fire is righteous. The fires of Hell, of Dante’s fifth circle. [break][break]

Luke would take his rage out on anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the blast radius. Wren, wearing a scarf to school in August to hide the bruises on his neck. Kather, blaming a black eye on an incident at football practice. [break][break]

(Anneliese, covering welts and bruises with heavy layers of makeup.)[break][break]

Not once (not once) did he ever lay a finger on Agnes. Not once.[break][break]

Agnes is ten when Kather is learning to drive. He’s using the church parking lot and his father’s white pickup for practice--Anneliese is in the passenger seat, gently guiding her son through the basics. She gets distracted as he makes his laps, zoning out. She goes quiet, and then leans her head back against the seat. Kather looks over to see what’s wrong--ever vigilant, ever concerned--and in doing so clips a light pole, nearly shearing off the front bumper and the side of the car. Neither of them are harmed, thankfully--Anneliese snaps herself out of her haze and jumps out of the truck to inspect, declaring that it’s an easy fix. [break][break]

(Funny, Kather thinks, that she didn’t even ask if he was okay.)[break][break]

Luke doesn’t take well to the news. It’s this moment--this breaking point--that he drags Kather by the hair to the garage and declares that every cent of the repairs are going to come from his pocket. And Wren’s pocket, and Agnes’s pocket. Kather’s eyes fill with tears, but he says nothing as he’s handed a pail of tools and is told to fix it. As if Kather knows how to repair a car, as if Luke had ever bothered to teach him. [break][break]

Wren tries to help, and he’s shut down quickly with a slap. Anneliese wants to say something, but she doesn’t. She can’t risk being backhanded, not this time. Agnes begins to cry, and Wren pulls her close. She shields her face in the crook of his shoulder, and he watches his father with contempt as his cheek reddens and swells. [break][break]

Luke is gone. The Luke who had loved his children and his wife for ten years--he’s gone. And this time, he doesn’t come back.

xv.

Three years pass. Kather turns eighteen the summer before his senior year of high school, and nothing changes. Nothing gets better. Luke’s temper shuts on and off, but not a day goes by where he doesn’t explode. Like a bomb, outfitted with shrapnel. Even if it’s targeted at one person, the whole house feels it. Anneliese retreats within herself--best to keep to herself and try not to invoke her husband’s wrath. Kather assumes the position of full-time parent--not that he hasn’t been one for years now. [break][break]

Luke’s anger is present in his sermons, in his behavior, in his demeanor. He quits his job at the car shop and encourages Wren and Kather to take his place. Both boys begin to learn how to fix cars, and the grueling work serves to harden and toughen both of them. Luke never once lays a finger on his daughter, but the boys use themselves as shields either way. They take Luke’s fists and his fury so Agnes doesn’t have to. She cries quietly, but stands strong in the wake of Luke’s rage. [break][break]

Never once does she back down, and never once does she let her father hear her cry. [break][break]

But the walls in their house are thin, and the boys can hear her--late at night, when she thinks everyone else is asleep--she sobs into her pillow, gasping and heaving. [break][break]

xvi.

Agnes is an artist. It’s evident from a young age that she’s got an artistic eye--she’d always insisted on dressing herself, on picking out her own clothes at the store. She’d even spend time dressing her brothers, arranging their outfits for the week and advising them if she saw something they’d put on that wasn’t to her tastes. She’s never mean about it, just curious. Gentle.[break][break]

Agnes is thirteen when she’s attending a service with her family. Squashed between Wren and her mother, in a dress she loves and her mane of blonde hair pulled back into a low ponytail. Luke is preaching up front--today’s sermon is especially brutal, full of wrath and rage and fear. This is how he always is. This is how church is. Ever since her grandpa Kevin’s death, her father’s sermons have steadily become more violent. More upsetting.[break][break]

She’s quiet at first. Hands tucked between her legs, feet crossed, just the way she’d been taught. Her father had told her never to leave in the middle of a sermon--but as her skin crawls and her face heats, she’s willing to pay the price for disobeying. She stands quietly and slides past Wren and into the main hall. Just for a moment, she can see Luke watching her. And then the door shuts behind her, and his voice is muffled enough that Agnes can finally breathe.[break][break]

The bathroom is nearby, so Agnes begins to move that way--her head is ducked low, hands clenched into fists at her sides. She doesn’t see him coming until she runs into him headfirst--a mistake that will haunt her years later, a mistake she’d regret for the rest of her life. [break][break]

The top of her head smacks into his stomach, and she looks up, eyes wide. Agnes is tall for her age--taller than most of her classmates, really--but her uncle is just as big as his brother, give or take a few inches. [break][break]

Agnes takes a tentative step back. Austin, unlike Luke, has never been unkind to her. He sends her gifts, is always gentle, and has always encouraged her art despite what Luke might say otherwise. He’s handsome, like her father--but he’s younger, so his looks are boyish in comparison, his blonde hair cut short in direct contrast with Luke’s shoulder-length locks. [break][break]

“Hey, squirt,” He says with a twinkling smile. And then he falters, eyes catching on the flush of her cheeks and the tight curl of her hands. “Everything okay? What’s wrong?”[break][break]

She sniffs, thankful for a sympathetic face. He’d always been her favorite--at birthday parties, at family gatherings--he always made her feel welcome. She doesn’t feel welcome in her own home, but Austin has never let her down. He always greets her with a smile and a wink. It’s one of Agnes’s few victories. Austin almost feels like her secret. Sometimes she even wishes he were her dad instead of Luke. Austin has a son of his own, a little guy named David. It’s selfish, but Agnes would give anything to live with Austin. Anything to escape Luke’s episodes. To escape her mother’s blank stares and empty smiles.[break][break]

She feels like she can trust him, so she says, with a surprisingly hoarse voice, ”My daddy was scaring me. I’m-” Her voice breaks, and she lifts her hands helplessly. ”I’m nervous.”[break][break]

Austin frowns, looking so perfectly concerned that Agnes could cry. He reaches for her hand, then says conspiratorially, “Follow me. I’ve got an idea.” [break][break]

So she follows him. [break][break]

She shouldn’t have followed him.[break][break]

He leads her to the janitorial closet. The church has very recently been revamped, and the closet has been moved from the chapel to the west wing. The closet is mostly empty, save for a few spare cleaning supplies and an old recliner that once sat in the women’s room. Austin closes the door behind him and turns on the light. “Look,” he says. “Can’t hear a thing, can you?”[break][break]

Agnes nods, for once relieved. She can’t hear the sermon anymore, only the steady hum of the air conditioning and the soft buzz of the lightbulb overhead. ”This is better,” she says. She looks to Austin, but the expression on his face is strange and uncomfortable. He lowers himself into the recliner and pats his leg. [break][break]

Agnes is thirteen, but she’s happy to oblige. [break][break]

She should have run. She should have run. [break][break]

Maybe, if she hadn’t walked out of the sermon, she’d be fine. But she sits down on Austin’s lap, and nothing about Agnes has been the same since.[break][break]

xvii.

Two visits to the closet and three instances of blackmail later, Agnes cuts off her hair. Her brothers notice, her parents notice, the church notices. As defiant as she had been before, Agnes turns up the ante on her disobedience tenfold after that fateful Sunday morning. [break][break]

It’s not like she can tell anyone, Austin had reminded her. What would happen to her? What would happen to her family? And how could she betray him like that, after everything he’d given to her, for her? It’s not anything Agnes can change, so she stays quiet. She lops her hair off with kitchen scissors in her bathroom and Luke scalps her with a torrent of insults so harsh she doesn’t come out of her bedroom for days afterwards.[break][break]

She stops dressing nicely. She cinches her belt so tight it makes her dizzy, and does everything in her power to downplay her looks. Smeared eyeliner, sunken cheeks. She stops eating. She stops taking care of herself. (Not that Austin cares. He’s always ready for her on Sunday, on the days when he feels like exerting his energy on someone other than his wife.)[break][break]

Wren and Kather try to ask her what’s wrong. But she’s done with their sympathetic looks, their gentle touches. Her skin sizzles with fire every time Kather runs his fingers through her hair, every time Wren drapes an arm around her shoulders. She snaps like a caged dog when they try to say something that hits too close to home. [break][break]

She still draws, she still paints, she still creates outfit after outfit between the pages of her journals and her sketchbooks. But she no longer shares them. Her notebook is filled with pages upon pages of heavy black scribbles, of girls like herself with blackened fingertips and bloody mouths. [break][break]

Heartbreak looks ugly in the mouth of a girl who doesn’t know what to do with it.[break][break]

Agnes begins to sneak out. In the afternoon, after school, she slips out the back door and hops the fence. The hair salon is a short walk from the house, and almost every day she’s sitting in a chair and watching the head stylist cut hair and style an ungodly amount of perms. [break][break]

Agnes convinces the stylist to let her sit in and learn. As long as Agnes provides the tools, Theresa will teach. It’s not like Theresa has that many customers to begin with. [break][break]

So Agnes starts to cut hair, to dye, to style. It’s a way to keep her mind occupied and her hands busy so she doesn’t do anything drastic. More drastic, at least, than what she’s already been doing. She keeps her hair short, rips up her clothes, defies everything her parents have ever stood for. [break][break]

Art is a way to put her feelings on paper. She closes herself off from her brothers. She can’t pretend like she doesn’t notice the way they watch her, or the way they talk about her behind her back. She can’t pretend like she doesn’t notice the gifts they leave for her on her pillow, or outside her door. [break][break]

But she can’t tell them. How could she tell them? How could she tell them without breaking their hearts? After all they’ve done, after everything that they’ve protected her from--how could she tell them about this, the one thing that they let slip through their fingers?[break][break]

xviii.

Kather leaves for college the following summer. Agnes doesn’t talk to him as often as she used to, but it hurts just as much to see his suitcase packed up in the front hallway. She and Wren stand on the front porch as Kather piles his things into the back of his car and dusts his hands on his jeans. He’s gotten into college on a football scholarship--a college in Texas, no less--and he’s already made it clear to both of them that he won’t be coming back. [break][break]

He’d asked, of course.[break][break]

He’d come to them both and he’d asked them if they’d be okay without him. The pleading look in his eyes had been heartbreaking--but both Wren and Agnes knew that he’d stay if they’d asked him to. So they’d told him to go--that they’d be fine. [break][break]

So he’s leaving. He walks back up to the front step, and Wren is the first to break ranks. He lunges forward, crushing his older brother into a hug. They’re both big guys--Kather’s finished growing, and Wren is nearly there. But they look small, there, Wren’s shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. Kather’s stoic, as usual--but even Agnes can see the redness of his eyes, as if he’s already spent hours crying over this. He rubs Wren’s back, and Wren mumbles a quiet thank you into his brother’s shoulder. [break][break]

After another several moments, Kather steps away--he barely has time to open his arms again before Agnes is folding herself into his grip. Touching him hurts, but she does it because she needs it. She needs it.[break][break]

Kather presses a kiss to her hairline, and another to her cheek. “Take care of yourself,” he says quietly, giving her a squeeze. “I love you.”[break][break]

Agnes looks up and sniffs. “To the moon and back,” she finishes.[break][break]

xix.

Agnes gets out of there as fast as she can. Without question, without contestation. She follows Kather to school in Texas, where she starts on a degree in fashion design. Wren left to become an Army Ranger a few years before Agnes, and he sends periodic letters to her when he can get his hands on postage stamps and stationary. She starts going by Aggie--the change in her name alone is enough to distance her from her family, and she begins to grow her hair back out.[break][break]

Kather’s more than happy to let her move in, and she meets his longtime girlfriend, Laura. They make an unlikely pair, but Aggie approves.[break][break]

After two years, Aggie decides that she’s not suited to a classroom. She doesn’t feel like she’s getting what she needs, so she tests out of her remaining courses and earns her degree as a sophomore.[break][break]

But she can’t keep living with her brother and his girlfriend, so she spends some of the money she’s kept in savings for a ticket to Seattle. She’s got no idea what she’ll do once she gets there, but she knows Laura has family in town. Laura has already offered Aggie a bed, and Aggie has an interview lined up for an internship at a design firm downtown. Aggie says goodbye to Kather once more, and as she presses her forehead to the cool glass of the bus in preparation for the two day trip ahead, she finally (finally) begins to feel at peace. She’s got the rest of her life ahead of her. Far from Alabama, far from her parents and her family that never cared.[break][break]

As she looks out the window, she smiles.

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call me
NORTHY

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