Say That Again (16 page)

“Hannah, I don’t want you to ever be sad. You understand?”

Her blond locks rustled against the pillowcase as she nodded. “But you lied. You and Mommy always tell me it’s bad to tell lies.”

“You’re right. I did and I shouldn’t have.” He tapped the button on her alarm clock and the sound of a babbling brook came from it. The thing had two dozen different white noises on it and for whatever reason Hannah found this sound calming. It helped her fall asleep. Hunter would have thought, given her experience nearly drowning, that it would be the last thing she’d want to hear, but whenever he tried changing it to something else, like birds chirping or falling rain, Hannah clamped her hands over her ears and started making a noise that was half shriek, half moan.

Anger and blame were gone from her face. She gazed at him softly, relaxed but fighting the pull of sleep. There was something he had to say to her before she drifted off. Something she had to understand.

“You remember when you told me after you fell in the river how you heard the bluebird and the fish talk to you?”

Her eyelids snapped open briefly as she nodded.

“Well, each of us has something very special about us. Something different. And sometimes we’re so different that it’s hard for other people to understand us.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. Clearly,
she
didn’t understand
him
right now. He may as well have been speaking Mandarin. She wasn’t good at catching implications. He needed to be more direct.

“It’s okay if you tell me, or maybe even Mommy. But when animals talk to you, Hannah, you probably shouldn’t tell anyone else, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because other people can’t hear them, sweet pea. They’ll think you’re making it up.”

“But I’m not.” She dangled her hand over the edge of the bed. Echo licked her fingers, as if to remind her he was there, then he lay down in his usual spot on the braided rug.

“I know, I know. It’s just ... Just don’t, okay? You’ll understand why when you’re older.” A thought flickered through his mind. What if he got Hannah a book about Dr. Doolittle? On second thought, he decided against it. It would only encourage her to cultivate her ability.

For now, the more she kept this special talent under her hat the better. Especially since she was starting kindergarten in two weeks. That alone was bound to be traumatic for the entire family.

And to think, he’d been the one to talk Jenn out of homeschooling her. Maybe that was one argument he should’ve let her win.

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M
oonlight flooded the room in a silver haze and the lightest of breezes parted the curtains. Hunter lay in bed, his back to his wife, listening to the rustle of sheets. She couldn’t sleep either, apparently.

A week had gone by since the baby bird incident. That meant they were a week closer to Hannah heading off to school. Jenn had tried to be strong about it, but Hunter could sense her anxiety. Working with Hannah had been her life for the past several years. It was hard to hand that responsibility over to someone else.

Meanwhile, Echo’s presence had been a godsend. With that dog at her side, Hannah was the confident little girl she’d been developing into before the accident. Away from the dog, she was once again the little girl afraid of her own voice. If anything ever happened to Echo ...

Turning over, he ran a hand from Jenn’s shoulder to her elbow, then slipped his arm around her waist. “I know you’re worried, honey. And it may not go perfectly, but if we don’t do this —”

“She’s come a long way, Hunter.” Jenn rolled onto her back to stare up at the ceiling. “I remember when they told us she might never talk.” She scoffed. “They were
so
wrong.”

He traced a finger over her collarbone, resisting the urge to plant a kiss at the base of her throat. She was beautiful. Still. Even after fifteen years he never got tired of waking up next to her. But now wasn’t the time for passionate overtures. She needed reassurance. “You’ve done a great job with her, Jenn.”

“Not me.
She’s
done a great job. She’s special, Hunter. And I don’t mean that in a backhanded compliment kind of way.”

“What
do
you mean?”

For several moments she didn’t answer. “After the accident, I kept thinking she’d never catch up to where she was before that, but look at her now. She’s changed so much. She wasn’t even home a week when she started reading on her own. Reading, Hunter. Not just sounding things out, but saying whole words on sight. She’s ahead of where she should be at this age, but whenever I take her to have her tested, it’s like this door closes and they can’t get anything out of her.”

While Jenn had had great success teaching Hannah to read, write, and do basic math, getting her to connect socially was another matter entirely, and one that frustrated her to no end.

“I don’t know what to do to change that,” she continued. “It doesn’t matter how smart she is. God, she could be a savant, for all we know. I’m starting to think she is. But if she won’t talk to anyone besides us ...” She grabbed the pillow from behind her head and screamed into it. “Arrrrgh!”

“Hey, hey, hey.” Hunter pushed the pillow away and brushed the hair from her face. “We have to be patient, all right?”

She slapped both hands to either side of her head. “At first they were saying mild autism, and then sensory processing disorder, but every once in a while they throw out Asperger’s syndrome , which lately they’ve latched onto ... I mean, how am I supposed to deal with her if I don’t know what her problem is?” Both hands flew up to cover her mouth. Slowly, she lowered them. “Ohhh, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant —”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Jenn. I get it. But maybe we need to stop looking at what she isn’t and accept her for what she is. It could be a whole lot worse, you know. Every time I see a parent pushing a kid with severe disabilities around in a wheelchair, it hits me just how lucky we are. Hannah’s healthy. She’s highly functioning. She’s smart. She can do anything a normal kid can do. She just doesn’t know how to handle herself socially. She’ll learn how, but it’s going to take time. Anyway, a lot of famous people have had Asperger’s.”

“Really?” Jenn sat up, the lines in her face softening. “Like who?”

“Thomas Jefferson.”

“Oh, no way. He was not. He was just freakishly brilliant.”

“Mozart.” He’d been doing his research ever since the last child development specialist bantered about the Asperger’s label.

“Now that one I can believe.”

“My point is, we need to stop —”

“You mean
I
need to stop.”

The curtains snapped as the breeze from outside picked up. Clouds had crawled across the moon, shutting out its light, and there’d been a definite drop in temperature since they tried to go to sleep two hours ago. “Fine,
you
need to stop stressing about this. Just because she’s different doesn’t mean —”

“Should I get her lined up for piano lessons? Or maybe violin? You can tote a violin around anywhere, but they sound so screechy when someone’s just starting out on one. What do you think?”

“Ask her.”

“Ask Hannah?”

“Sure. She might not be interested in either. Have you ever seen her get enthralled with the classical radio station when we’re driving somewhere and you’re flipping through all the stations?” Hunter got out of bed and closed the window just as rain began to pelt the side of the house. “Try whatever you want, Jenn. But don’t push her. If she has some special ability ...
if
she does, it may take a while to come out. And it may not be what we expect or hope for.”

Grabbing a shirt, Hunter headed for the door.

“Where are you going?”

Lightning flickered through the window, followed by the low rumble of distant thunder. “Downstairs to read for a while. I don’t want to keep you up. Good night.”

“Night, Hunter.” Jenn slid back under the sheets. For several moments they stared at each other, something unspoken hanging in the air.

What Hunter didn’t say — would never say — was that Hannah needed to go off to school for them as much as for her. Ever since she was a year old and they’d had a hard time making eye contact with her, their lives had revolved around Hannah. Everything was always about Hannah. Just having Echo around had freed them of some responsibility for having to watch or entertain her every single moment.

It wasn’t enough, though. Hunter was ready to let her go out into the world. It was Jenn who needed to let their little fledgling take wing.

They couldn’t protect Hannah from the world forever. She needed to learn to deal with it on her own terms.

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—o00o—

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T
he limb lying across the fence was as big around as Hunter’s waist. He grabbed it, pushing up, while Brad put a shoulder into it from farther up. No matter how they leveraged it, no matter which way they pushed, it wasn’t budging.

Last night’s storm had generated sixty-five mile per hour straight line winds that had peeled the roofs from several barns in Adair County, downed power lines, and toppled two semis on the interstate. The winds had left a swath of destruction from Elizabethtown to Knoxville. Fortunately, no one had been hurt, but their weather was all over the national news.

It had kept Hunter up half the night. He’d gone outside at first light to discover a dozen shingles missing from the roof and their trash cans on the far side of the hayfield next to the house. He never did find the lid for one of them. Jenn and Maura headed off to Somerset where the storm damage had been negligent to stock up on groceries. Jenn was convinced if she wasn’t first at the store, they’d sell out of stock and the kids would go hungry.

When Lise called an hour later, Hunter went right over to help clean up, Hannah and Echo riding gunshot, since they were all up early too anyway. Several old growth trees had come down in the storm — one across the driveway and two had taken down sections of fence — and he and Brad were trying to move what they could through sheer manpower. It quickly became clear, however, that they were going to need to get the chainsaws out and cut some logs.

Brad put on his earphones and safety goggles, and pulled the starting cord on his chainsaw. Standing near the barn, Hannah clamped her hands over her ears and darted inside, where her Gramma Lise was. Echo trailed after her.

Mere moments later, Lise ran out of the barn, waving her arms in the air as if trying to flag down an airplane. “Brad! Hunter!”

Brad turned his chainsaw off and set it on the ground, then removed his earphones. “What is it?”

“The sheep — they’re gone!”

“How?”

“The light pole fell and took out a section of stock panel. I didn’t even think to look in the small arena this morning to check the fence. There was just so much else going on.”

“Any idea where they went?” Hunter said.

“Judging by the tracks, they headed off to the creek. It was a cow pasture once, maybe thirty years ago, and pretty wide open, so we won’t have a hard time finding them. But half the fences were taken down at some point. Beyond that, it’s nothing but woods and wild hills.”

“I’ll get the ATV,” Brad said. “Between the three of us, we can round them up.”

“You’ll have a hard time of it down there,” Lise said. “The creek bed cuts pretty deep into the earth and takes a lot of bends. You’ll no sooner get around to the far side and they’ll disappear into a gulley and race off in the other direction. And if anything has spooked them, they could have already split in half a dozen different directions. There’s no telling what the situation is until we get over that line of hills and take a look.”

Hunter glanced toward the barn. Hannah stood in the open doorway, Faustine dangling from one hand, Echo at her knee. “I wouldn’t count on three of us. Someone needs to watch Hannah. Rounding up a hundred sheep like that could take us hours.”

Lise’s gaze drifted to Echo. “Times like this I wish Halo was still around.” She tilted her head, mulling the possibilities. “Hey, what if —?”

“No,” Hunter levied. “Don’t even go there. Just because Echo’s an Australian Shepherd doesn’t mean he knows a sheep’s head from its butt. I’m afraid he didn’t get the herding instinct gene. Last time I brought him into a pen with sheep, he hid behind me, shaking. He’d probably just as soon eat their droppings as herd them. Hell, if he even got up the courage to approach them, he could very well chase them all the way to Lexington. Then not only will you have lost your entire flock, Mom, but Hannah will have lost her dog.”

“So you’re saying ‘no’?”

“Very perceptive of you.”

“That’s a shame. He’s such a smart dog.”

“I’d say we could call on the Listons with Spin, their Border Collie, to help,” Brad said, “but they’re in Illinois visiting their daughter. Is there any way you could call Jenn back home, Hunter? Maybe Maura could keep an eye on Hannah and with Jenn’s help we could get this job done in no time?”

Hunter rubbed at his neck, lost for a solution. “I wish, but it’d take her a good hour to get here — and that’s if she answers her phone right away. Knowing Jenn, she probably has her phone turned off.”

“Think you could try?” Lise said. “You can stay here with Hannah until Jenn gets back. Maybe Brad and I will be able to get something done? If nothing else, we can figure things out while we call around for more help. This just might take a village.”

Satisfied they had a plan for now, Brad went off to the spare barn to gas up the ATV, while Lise made a few phone calls to neighbors on the other side of the valley and down the road. There had been no sightings, which was a bad sign.

Sitting at the kitchen table with Hannah, who was arranging her carrot sticks in some kind of geometric pattern, a break from her usual neat rows, Hunter regretted not having exposed Echo to livestock more, but there really hadn’t been a need to. The last Aussie his mom had owned died a few years ago. Since then, she hadn’t even entertained the prospect of getting another dog. Brad was only months away from retirement and they wanted to travel while they were still young enough to get around. Having a dog would make that more difficult.