Page 1 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
1
Hannah
Hawthorne Lane
Hannah Wilson stands in the driveway of 5 Hawthorne Lane looking up at her new house. The drive up to Sterling Valley from New York City hadn’t been a long one, yet Hannah feels like she’s arrived in a distant, faraway land. As she and Mark traveled north, the scenery changed from gray to green, cold concrete giving way to lush foliage. Billboards were soon replaced with canopies formed by mature elm trees, and silvery rivers slicing through shorn stone gorges began to flow alongside the highway. As traffic dwindled to a few slow-moving cars trickling down a sinuous stretch of road, they finally reached the town of Sterling Valley. It looked to Hannah like something out of a fairy tale: quaint little shops—a bakery, a florist, a book store—with glittering display windows and carved wooden signs painted with gold; flower boxes brimming with summer blooms and trailing vines beneath open shutters; old-fashioned streetlamps with their long curved necks and ornate lanterns.
Hannah adjusts the moving box in her arms, shifting its weight to her hip. She’s never lived in a place like this before. It all feels so…big.She knows this doesn’t make sense, that she’s coming from Manhattan—a city brimming with millions of people and soaring skyscrapers—but something about this place, about the expanse of blue sky overhead and the thick woods surrounding the cul-de-sac, gives her the impression that they could go on forever. And then there are the houses. Towering over her, stately and dignified with their neat rows of bricks and their white pillars gleaming bright in the summer sunlight.
She tilts back her head, squinting against the sun, to take in the details of the house in front of her. (Herhouse, she reminds herself.) The stiff peaks of its roof, the riotous colors blooming in the garden, the wide porch that stretches across the front of the house like a smile. It seems far too large for only two people. Hannah has never even been inside a house this big, never mind lived in one. She imagines what it will be like living here. She imagines herself and Mark wandering the halls, their footsteps echoing in the cold, empty rooms, and then she imagines filling them. It’s why they chose this house, after all. She can vaguely picture the cribs and baby bottles, the soft blankets and impossibly tiny socks, but it all feels so far away. A daydream only half formed.
The box begins to feel heavy in her arms, and Hannah sets it down at her feet. Mark will want to start trying for a family as soon as they’re settled in the new house, and Hannah is ready. At least shethinksshe’s ready. How is she supposed to be sure? How can anyone ever be sure? It’s times like these that she misses her mother the most. If her mother were still alive, Hannah would have asked her. She doesn’t know what her mother might have said. Hannah was too young when she died for them to have had the kind of relationship where they could talk like friends about adult things, about the things that Hannah would someday have to figure out on her own. But she likes to imagine that her mother would have poured them each a cup of tea and told Hannah that she once felt just like Hannah does now. That no one is ever sure about these things, but Hannah should follow her heart. It’s not exactly the most helpful imaginary advice, but it’s all she has to work with.
Hannah’s phone buzzes in her pocket and she checks the screen. There’s a new post in the Hawthorne Lane community forum. She only just joined on the drive up, and already she’s received a notification. It’s from someone named Georgina Pembrook about a festival being held on Halloween. She gathers from the effusive text that the fall festival must be an important event on Hawthorne Lane. Hannah scrolls past this post to find the one below it. This one was also shared by the same Georgina person.
Please welcome our new neighbors at 5 Hawthorne Lane!
That post was Liked by Libby Corbin, Audrey Warrington, and a gaggle of others whose names she doesn’t recognize but that she imagines she’ll soon come to know as her new neighbors. She can already tell that living here is going to be a change. She’d grown accustomed to being another anonymous face in the ever-changing sea of New York City. But she likes the idea that here, she and Mark can belong to something bigger than themselves.
“I think that’s the last of it,” Mark says as he dusts off his hands, rubbing them on his jeans. He hooks an arm around Hannah’s waist and plants a kiss on the side of her head.
She loves the scent of him, clean and crisp, even in the heavy summer heat. In his arms, she feels at home. For a moment she can see it, snapshots of their future here: children learning to ride their bicycles on the lasso-shaped street, tires crunching over piles of burnt-orange leaves; bare feet running across the Technicolor lawn in the summer, melting Popsicles clutched in tiny palms; shucked-off rain boots scattered haphazardly on the porch. A sense of peace washes over her and she closes her eyes, listens to the chirp of the birds, the buzz of a distant lawn mower, breathes in the loamy scent of the surrounding woods. They’d made the right decision coming here. This is the beginning of their Happily Ever After.
“The honeymoon phase,” Kelly, her coworker at the coffee shop, had called it. “The shine wears off all of ’em sooner or later. You’ll see.” But Hannah doesn’t believe that. It’s true that she and Mark are newlyweds, having been married in a small, private ceremony (much to his mother’s dismay) only six weeks ago, but Hannah knows that what they have is real. The kind of love that’s built to last.
She looks up at him now, her husband. She loves that she gets to call him that. She loveseverythingabout him. She loves the way his hair sticks up at odd angles on the days that he doesn’t wrangle it with wax, and she loves the dated, wire-rimmed glasses he can’t seem to part with. She loves the grays that have started to pepper his temples and the way his eyes crinkle in the corners when he smiles. Which is often. But most of all, she loves how easy it is to love him. From the moment they met—just over a year ago now—falling for Mark felt like the easiest thing in the world for Hannah to do.
Hannah knows that not everyone understands it. After all, she,at twenty-six, is nearly twelve years younger than Mark, the quiet, thirty-eight-year-old accountant she’d chosen to spend her life with, and she’d often heard his friends back in the city teasing him that she was out of his league. Mark would always laugh, play along with the joke: “I don’t know what she sees in me.” But it hurt Hannah’s heart to hear him speak that way. She knows exactly what she sees in Mark: He’s a good man. It’s as simple as that. The easy, uncomplicated love they share is all she’s ever wanted.
“I’ll take this one too,” Mark says now, lifting the last box from the pavement at Hannah’s feet.
She watches him as he trots up the front steps of their new house, the contents of the box jangling in his arms. The memory almost overcomes her then. In her mind, she sees another house. A dusty porch, a single, empty rocking chair creaking in the wind. But she pushes it back into the dark recesses of her memory before it can break the surface.
They’re going to be so happy here on Hawthorne Lane. No matter what it takes.
2
Libby
Hawthorne Lane
Libby Corbin’s phone vibrates on her kitchen counter and she eagerly snatches it up, expecting a message from her ex-husband explaining why he’s not yet at her front door to pick up their son, Lucas, as promised. He should have been here by now, and Libby is going to be late for work if he doesn’t make an appearance soon. But it isn’t a message from Bill that interrupts her anxious pacing. It’s a new post in the Hawthorne Lane community forum from Georgina reminding everyone about the fall festival. Libby reads it, and it conjures an image of her neighbor in her mind—her homemade pies and flawless smile, her immaculate house andBetter Homes and Gardens–worthy yard. Nowthere’sa woman who can do it all, unlike Libby, who doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going most days. She likes Georgina—she might have once even considered her a friend—but most of the time she finds it difficult not to compare herself to the other woman, especially when Libby always seems to come up short. Libby closes the post with a twinge of guilt. She just has so much on her plate right now that the thought of taking on another obligation, even one three months away, is enough to make her eye twitch. She’ll volunteer to help with the fall festival as it gets closer, she promises herself. Shewantsto. And she’ll make it a point to go introduce herself to the new neighbors one of these days too. Yes, Libby is going to get around to all of it, just as soon as she finds a spare moment…
She clocks the time on her phone screen and frowns.Where thehell is Bill?Would it have killed him to let her know he was running late?
“Mom!” Lucas shouts from somewhere in the depths of his bedroom.
“Yes?” She drops her phone and picks up a sponge. She might as well get a start on the dishes piled up in her sink, do something productive with her time if she’s going to be forced to wait on Bill. Again.
Jasper, her beagle, lets out a tired groan at her feet.
“I know, Jasp,” she says as he looks up at her with his wide eyes surrounded by graying fur. “I feel exactly the same way.” He’s getting up there in years. Libby is beginning to see it in the way he moves, his legs a little stiffer, his pace notably slower. They’ve had him since he was just a puppy, and his frailty is not something anyone in the Corbin family is ready to deal with.
“Mom!” Lucas shouts again, irritation rising in his adolescent voice.
Libby drops a plate onto the drying rack and tries to force her mind back to the days when he was a child. Back to when Lucas was a sweet, loving little boy who worshipped his mother. So much has changed since those early, simpler days.What’s that expression? Bigger kids, bigger problems.It certainly feels that way to Libby lately. Sometimes she doesn’t know how she’s going to survive his teen years.
“Yes?” Libby calls back, louder now, trying to sound as unbothered as possible. She often thinks that talking to teenagers is like approaching an animal in the wild: no sudden movements, speak in gentle tones, and never let it sense your fear. Although Libby knows that they’re almost on the other side of things. At seventeen, Lucas is nearly a man now, and he’s starting to look it too. It seems to Libby like he grew up all at once this past year. A light smattering of stubble now darkens his jawline, and there’s definition in his long legs that were once gangly and thin, poking out from the bottom of his basketball shorts like two sticks.
