Page 121 of We Are All Guilty Here

Hannah’s bawdy laugh boomed off the hard surfaces. Emmy laughed, too. It felt so good to get out something other than grief.

Hannah asked, “Do you remember that letter Cole wrote you from camp?”

Emmy remembered. “‘Dear Mom. They said I could have ice cream if I wrote you a letter. Signed, Cole.’”

They laughed again, but it died down quickly. This wasn’t a girls’ night out. They weren’t sharing a bottle of wine at the biergarten.

Hannah said, “I’m glad you found Dylan. He’s a good man.”

“Too good,” Emmy admitted. “I kept waiting for him to leave. Then Mom got worse, and Dad got sicker, and I told myself that it was too much, that he was going to leave me, but he didn’t, so I left him.”

“Wow, so surprising you couldn’t handle your emotions so you chickened out and never spoke to him again.” Hannah had earned the sarcasm in her voice. “Is there any other circumstance in your life where you might have made a similar mistake?”

Emmy couldn’t manage a laugh this time. In the twelve years that had slowly marched past, she had never once thought to reach out to Hannah. She had waited and waited for Hannah to make the first move, and now they were here.

“It’s all right,” Hannah said. “Paul made it clear that it was you or him. Looks like we both made the wrong choice. Took me longer to figure it out, though.”

Emmy wiped her nose. She had come here for a reason. “Is that why you’re talking to me now, because you finished things with Paul two months ago?”

Hannah didn’t take the opening. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m literally a captive audience.”

Emmy’s nose wouldn’t stop running. She wiped it with her sleeve. “Myrna always appreciated that you knew how to use the word literally.”

Hannah reached back for the roll of cheap toilet paper beside the toilet. The one-ply had the texture of cardboard. She rolledit out around her hand, then offered it through the bars. Emmy leaned forward. Their fingers touched. They both held on for a few seconds before leaning back.

Hannah said, “If it helps, I finally understand why it was so hard for you to leave Jonah.”

“It wasn’t hard,” Emmy said, though the divorce had felt like death by a thousand petty manipulations. “It’s like you always said. I was too stubborn and too loyal to somebody who wasn’t loyal to me.”

“We both know how he treated you,” Hannah said. “It’s easy to look from the outside and say that you should walk away. But when you’re in it yourself, when you see how much your child needs a father, when you tell yourself the man you fell in love with is still in there somewhere …”

Emmy heard the sadness as her voice trailed off.

“I kept thinking Paul would change back, you know?” Hannah spooled out some toilet paper for herself. “I thought eventually he would—well, not move on, because you can never move on from losing a child—but I thought he’d find a different way to deal with it. To realize that he had a living child who needed him. A wife who needed to mourn alongside him. But he couldn’t pull himself out of it, and it took me too long to see that he was pulling us down with him. I waited too long. I should’ve left years ago. It would’ve prevented a lot of pain.”

Emmy tapped her throat again, reminding Hannah to be careful.

“I know,” Hannah said. “But it’s complicated, Em. It’s so much more complicated than I realized, and I’m sorry.”

Emmy felt the familiar tightness in her chest, her body’s way of warning her that she needed to keep her emotions trapped inside. But she couldn’t this time. Not now. Not with Hannah. “It’s my fault, Han. It’s my fault you lost your most precious thing.”

Hannah didn’t offer her absolution. She just smiled her sad smile. “Shewasprecious, wasn’t she?”

Emmy took in a deep breath. She felt the tightness start to release. All these years, she had lived with the sadness, but never once had she been able to share the grief. “She was.”

“The last thing I said to her was to put on some fresh sunscreen. You’d think I’d told her to climb Mount Everest. She just rolled her eyes and stomped off.” Hannah was laughing as she dabbed at her eyes. “You gotta hand it to her. She let herself get sunburned just to spite me.”

Emmy took in another breath. She remembered one of the last times she’d seen Madison. Not floating in the pond. Not even under the oak tree. Emmy was standing in the autopsy suite at GBI headquarters listening to the medical examiner call out the bright red sunburn on the back of Madison’s legs.

“All this with Paisley Walker,” Hannah said. “I keep wondering if Carol’s thinking about the last thing she said to her. Like, was it just another morning, or were they fighting about something, or were they happy or sad?”

Emmy could see that Hannah wasn’t looking for an answer to the question. Jail was nothing if not a place for reflecting on all the bad things that had happened in your life.

“The second Madison hit twelve, we started fighting. Swear to God, all she did was sit around trying to think of ways to make me feel like shit.” Hannah was smiling, but Emmy could recall the exquisite torture of Madison’s insults. “Then out of nowhere, she’d drop a compliment, like say that my dress was pretty, or my hair looked good, and I’d feel like I won the fucking lottery.”

Emmy laughed. So did Hannah.

“The thing is, you and I still saw her as a child, but she was only three years away from being an adult. Graduating high school. Going to college. Getting married. Having children of her own. But in that moment, that day she turned fifteen, she was still trying to figure herself out. Testing all the different kinds of people she wanted to be. Pissing me off. Pushing boundaries. Wanting so desperately to be a woman. Still feeling like a child.”

---