Late Magnolias

By Hannah Paige

Jade Handan has murdered her father. For the past twelve years, she's been forced to forego discovering who she is and become the mother who abandoned her. Snapping from the abuse, she leaves his dead body in her California home and is wandering the highway without a plan when Beatrice Hazeldine rescues her. 

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637529416

Hannah Paige

Hannah Paige has been writing since she was six years old when her mother gave her a journal for the first time. Since then she has made it her life aspiration to become a published author, and at seventeen she is taking the first step in achieving this. She has a close relationship with her older sister, who inspired her first novel, Why We Don't Wave.

Book preview

Part One

Seeking Directions From

A Bird And A Bulldozer

You can run away from yourself so often, and so much, just because the broken pieces of you cut your feet too deeply if you stay around for too long. But then what if someone were to come along and pick up those pieces for you? Then you wouldn’t have to run away from yourself anymore. You could stop running. If someone sees you as something worth staying with—maybe you’ll stay with yourself, too.

―C. JoyBell C.

One

I should start in California, where I killed my father. It’s where I was born. I didn’t leave there until I was eighteen years old, but I don’t consider that state the place where I grew up. To grow up, you have to undergo some kind of transformation. I try my best not to remember the kind of transformation of myself in those eighteen years. It would be like looking at the whales held in captivity and aligning their curved dorsal fins with a child’s first haircut. It is not something anyone wants to look at.

California, however, is something many people want to look at. There are two undisputable truths about its existence that future observers (in their rented Toyota Camrys with their expectations skyrocketed by the commercials about everyone surfing, everyone smiling), however, should be aware of. First, the state is brown. It may be called The Golden State, but there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that the state’s terrain even slightly resembles the fourteen-karat, overpriced metal identified as AU on the table of elements. The grass is brown, the dirt is brown, the hills are brown. Let that be a lesson in false advertisement.

Second, the state is enormous: stand-at-the-edge-of-the-sea-and-see-no-end enormous. In almost every other state in the country, if you drive four or five hours north or south, chances are you’ll have gotten out of the state you started in. You might have even passed through two or three, depending on the region in question. Not in California. A person can drive seven, eight, even nine hours north and south from where they started, and wouldn’t you guess it? They’re still in California. Driving east and west isn’t much better. It’s like it wants to keep you trapped in that gargantuan strip of land between the icy Pacific Ocean and the glitzy Vegas casinos. Actually, it’s not like that; that’s exactly what the state wants. Its grip will tighten.

My house was a rancher positioned in a town called Truckee and painted the color of the underside of a slab of leather. The porch stilts sagged, slowly becoming less of a structure, less of what it was intended to be. The pitiful flower bed beside the faded brick walkway to the driveway was abandoned. Looked over, with its unkempt borders, it might have once held blooming geraniums, maybe vibrant azaleas—something alive. By the time my father and I moved in, weeds and the arid dirt had suffocated the plot’s potential.

There was a white panel fence that lined the property. It taunted me, this thing that had been so close to me that somehow remained blindingly unblemished, the color of purity and children and light. I wanted to paint it green upon moving in; at least then that color would be represented in the westernmost state. I never did. It’s astounding the number of secrets a white fence can hide, the sounds it can stifle from the neighbors, the words, slung like smooth, unassuming river rocks, that it can absorb without leaving a mark on its outward sheen. My white panel fence was indestructible, insurmountable from the outside and in.

The day I left that tan rancher was a Wednesday: Wednesday, June 13th, 2007. I was walking home from school. The other grades had finished the day before, but seniors had to go back that morning for graduation rehearsal. My shoes pinched the skin on my toes and the strap on the sandals rubbed the tender spot between my first two toes. I probably should have taken that as an omen. Bad days always start with uncomfortable shoes.

I want it clear, before I tell this story. The shoes were possibly an omen, something I could blame, but my father was a human being and those are much harder to condemn neatly in a box. There’s simply too much to them. They are not just straps and buckles. I didn’t hate my father. I pitied him most of the time. The rest of the time he was more of a puzzle to me, one that I stared at for years trying to decipher how exactly all the pieces I had collected throughout my childhood fit into the man I lived with.

When my mother left, he turned to prescriptions. Orange bottles stocked our pantry, our cupboards, where pots should have been, and the cabinet under his sink. A person doesn’t take that many blue and white pills without paying a price. He got confused sometimes. That was all. Between the insomnia, the dizziness, and the headaches from his medicinal concoctions, it was the perfect storm to disrupt his rational thoughts. He missed my mother so much that sometimes he thought I was her. It was hard when I was younger, but as I got older, I fell into my role as his sometimes-daughter-sometimes-wife, like one might fall into bed after a long day—the fatigue from everything prior is overwhelming and it’s easier to forget.

I had improved at figuring out what days would be manageable and what days would be best spent in my room until my father came to get me for whatever he needed me to do that night. Usually, just by walking in the door, I knew how I would spend my nights, what bed I would be sleeping in and how much clothing I would have on. Most of the time I knew. But sometimes, as was the case on June 13th, when my mind was elsewhere, on more positive prospects like graduating and putting on the cap and gown and looking like everyone else just for one day, it hit me upside the head like a hot California wind: unexpected and nauseating.

I heard the song playing first. It was their wedding song, one I had heard a thousand times, usually at night; that was often my last cue that I would not fall asleep in my own twin bed. The Beatles’ Yesterday cut through my eardrums, gnawed at my nerves, and I flinched. I forgot everything I’d been doing prior to hearing that sound. I emptied myself, turned into a shell, Pavlov’s dog, shivering and drooling uncontrollably. What do you need me to do? What is my purpose?

He was sweating, chewing on the drawstring that laced around the hood of his sweatshirt. It was ninety degrees out. Where the front door led into the kitchen, it was unbearable. It smelled like charred metal and gasoline. I ran to the stove and cranked the gas knob off, wondering how long he had been stewing in the fatal environment.

The stove was on, I said, turning back around to face him.

He rocked back and forth in one of the mismatched kitchen chairs. His thumb scratched his opposite forearm, making a kind of railroad track pattern of raw, red skin. Do you remember when we danced to this? Do you remember that night? You were so beautiful. His voice was high and thin, crisp, a taut piece of wire in the air.

I closed my eyes, trying to think of the best way to respond. On a few rare occasions, I could escape the conversation with silence, but that was only when he was so deep in the cloud that it swallowed him up, on his worst days and my best ones. More often than though, he responded best when I went along with his delusions. He enjoyed company in his own little reality. No one likes to be alone.

Opening my eyes, I crossed the plywood floor and knelt in front of his threadbare corduroy pants. I got a good look at his milky eyes, thick with the fog in his head, and I knew. Rob? Rob, can you look at me? I spoke in a tinny, hollow voice.

He didn’t move. You thought you looked fat in your dress, three months pregnant and all. But I never thought that. Never. . . never did. You were beautiful, Ruthy. He blinked and tilted his chin slightly, bringing his eyes to meet mine. They swam around in his head, unable to fully focus on me. Where have you been all this time? You look. . . different.

I do, don’t I? That happens sometimes, Rob. People change. Sometimes they have to change so much they don’t even resemble who they started out being. I thought about how I used to tie my hair up in braids because I thought I looked older and therefore more appealing to my mother that way. I used to brush it and brush it until my hair, the color of the ocean at night, almost blue it was so black, hung straight enough to weave into intricate braids. I was six when she left, and I stopped wearing my hair in braids by the time I pierced a wilted, yellow cake with seven candles. My mom wore her hair down, it was tame enough for her to just roll out of bed in the morning without having to do a thing with it. My father liked hair like that: natural. I didn’t wear braids anymore. When I was thirteen, I chopped my hair off, cropped it all the way to my chin. I didn’t spend that night in any bed, but in the bathroom with antiseptic and a needle and thread, trying to patch myself up like a quilt falling apart at the seams.

It’s funny how something as simple as a haircut can change a person. It’s even stranger that it was the first thing I thought of when I let myself remember the way I once was. Hair came first, then my clothes, then my disposition. I used to wear white. White shorts, shoes, headbands. I used to think of myself as one pattern, all my own, with my walnut skin and my dark hair and my beautiful, creamy clothes, pure as warm milk.

But mom didn’t used to wear white.

I used to be the most honest girl in the world. Once I even told my best friend in the fourth grade that I thought it strange that her father had stopped spanking her a long time ago. I got sent to the counselor’s office after that and my best friend pretended I didn’t exist anymore, which was almost true. There was a price with being good. Before that, I wanted to be a good person. I thought that was what my mom would have wanted. I thought that was what my dad wanted too, until I came home that day, with a note from my school counselor. Dad called me Ruthy and went off about how much a psychiatrist was going to cost the two of us. Why do you need a shrink when you’ve got me? For better or for worse? Remember? If you’re feeling worse, you share it with me. After that, I gave up trying to be good and settled for getting through the day.

I vowed to be a chameleon and change to become whatever was necessary for me at the time, however I needed to be seen. Wives were best at keeping their husbands’ company, making sure they didn’t get lonely on cold nights. But when my dad needed cheering up, I needed to be a kid. Children can pull a smile out of anywhere. They’re the ones that can still catch fireflies, carry them around in a jar with them.

He shook his head. That’s not true, Ruthy. That’s not true at all, you told me that, remember?

I frowned and shook my head. What did I tell you?

Ruthy, people don’t change. They just get better at masking who they really are.

I recoiled as if he had snapped at me, sunk a pair of venomous teeth into my neck. I wanted to shout at him that it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. People had to be able to change, or else there would be no hope for me. But good wives agree, if they know what’s best for them. And I don’t ever remember, in my limited memories of her, my mother disagreeing with him.

I pulled in a tight breath and held it there, saying, That’s right, Rob. I did tell you that, I just forgot.

Dance with me, Ruthy. I want to dance. You’ve always been an incredible dancer, justhebest.

I jammed my fingers into my palms as I heard his voice shift and his words start to slur together. I stood up. Not right now, Rob. I’m kind of tired, I think maybe a nap would do me good.

His hand gripped my wrist with strength that always surprised me but shouldn’t have. Just because he couldn’t differentiate between fantasy and reality didn’t mean he wasn’t just as powerful as he once was with a functioning mind. He did at least still have a body. Ruthy, please. You never say no to a dance.

That afternoon should have been different. I should have made it different. I wish I had said no to a dance on June 13th. But as I said, I didn’t pay attention to my aching feet like I should have.

He spun me around on his unsteady feet. He whirled me in circles and pulled me into his chest, so that my ear touched the sweaty cotton shirt plastered against his skin. I could smell the rancid, plastic scent that clung to him and oozed onto me the longer he held me against him, running a hand through my hair. I felt his fingers stick to my frizzy, tangled strands before he yanked his blotchy, thin fingers free, pulling some of the blue-black follicles out in the process. I barely felt my scalp tingling though. I was more focused on his other hand, slinking down my waist.

I don’t know why I pulled away just then. Maybe it was because my birthday, the one that meant I was a free woman in the state of California’s mind, had been two days prior. Maybe with that little sideways infinity that accompanied my age I thought came some power. Maybe—and this is the reason that stands out the most in my mind—it was because I was tired of playing the woman in drab clothes with long hair that hung at her waist. Perhaps it was a spark inside my chest, one that I thought had long ago died with my dignity and pride and self-worth, that shot out a distress signal: save me, save me, it’s almost too late. It was my last firefly.

It was a bittersweet moment, finding my last firefly. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t all gone. But what I had to do to hang on to that glowing insect inside my heart made it bitter, something that stung the back of my throat for the rest of my life.

***

June 13th will forever be the longest day of the year for me. It’s burned in my memory, permanent enough for me to run my fingers over the brand of it. I don’t remember ever sleeping that night. I do remember running. That was when I realized how much my feet hurt from those pinching, awful shoes I had to wear for graduation rehearsal. I wished I had never put them on in the first place.

It’s odd what crosses a person’s mind after they have just lived through a defining moment of their lives. You don’t get many of them, if you’re unlucky, as I was. And if I had the chance to go back to that moment and insert a different thought, a more dramatic or meaningful one in my head, then I would. Maybe I would think about how much of my life I regretted, or consider what I was thankful for, or even have a revelation to change the kind of person I would be. But this was not the case for me that night. I thought of shoes and how, if I had just gone with the sensible pair of sandals that had worn themselves into a shape that contoured to each foot, I could have at least spared myself some pain.

***

June 14th was hot. The pavement scalded my feet—mostly numb from the previous night but still sending up a few signals of heat. My throat was parched and the skin across my knuckles cracked; raw, pink scales, distressed abalone, peeked up at me from underneath the old layer. I had scrubbed them so hard the night before that the soap must have dried them out. That, paired with the air that blew constantly around me, the kind that was arid enough to lick every trace of evaporation from glasses left unattended outside, didn’t leave my hands as such adequate contenders.

Summertime in Truckee was usually bustling. Tourists swarmed the area to move into their summer cabins for the months of June and July, sending their kids to summer camps while they lounged by the lake. Evenings were spent at the pool, where people sat on checkered blankets and crossed off squares on their bingo tiles and hoped their kids didn’t win a squirt gun they would have to bring home. I lived in Truckee for eight years, a nomad of the rundown, reject cabins in the area, and every single one of those years had been the same. But on June 14th, it seemed different.

I walked past the pool parking lot near the highway entrance and noticed only one Jeep was parked out front. I didn’t hear children shrieking as they launched their bodies off diving boards, casting their limbs to the wind. Nobody was on the sidewalk that morning, taking an early stroll before the heat settled in for the day. That day, there was no beating the heat. It was 8:30 in the morning and frying outside.

I once read an article in a magazine about how the summers in Alabama were boiling. I always wanted to say the same for California, but you need water for anything to boil. And California had none of that. Water was for drinking and nothing else. People put bricks in their toilets to conserve water and children knew what it felt like to run through a sprinkler in the same way that someone knows that the moon is overhead: a far-away sort of knowledge, a sort of knowledge that never really sheds its ignorance. Californians didn’t know what hydropower was, but they certainly knew the fire department’s regulations on clipping their lawns short to prevent a flash fire from catching. You could have dropped a match and the whole state would go up in flames.

I found myself wishing for rain that morning. I wished for it to wash my seemingly spotless hands clean. I wanted it to cool my feet and cleanse my face. I wanted to close my eyes and tilt my head up. I wanted to be the girl that caught raindrops in her eyelashes.

But I suppose if the sky had opened up and dumped its tears on me, then two things would have happened. First, California would have been swept away into the ocean. Without flood preventions, there would have been no stopping the state from drifting away like a wayward fishing boat in a tempest, or in California’s case, a light drizzle. And second, I would not have seen the purple bus.

Two

As the VW hippie bus barreled past me, I caught a glimpse of curtains billowing out the open driver and passenger windows. Over the engine’s noise, I heard music for a split second streaming from inside but couldn’t place the artist. The only band I knew without hesitation was The Beatles.

I stopped in place on the side of the road past the pool, but not quite to the highway yet. I watched the giant red and yellow tail lights glow as the bus puttered to a halt a few yards ahead of me. I had a fleeting sensible hope that nobody else would come driving down the road and crash into the purple bus. The silver, gleaming wheels rolled backwards until the bus was right beside me. The music had been shut off and the vehicle heaved to a silent stop, sighing into place on the road.

A velvety, white hand fluttered out the window, drawing the lace curtain to one side. The woman in the driver’s seat was breathtaking. She had hair like Spanish moss: gray and spindly and like something I might want to reach out and touch, but knew that I shouldn’t.  It looked satiny to the touch as it crinkled, half dry in the morning air. Her face was narrow, her chin pointed with pale pink lips perched above it. She had deep set wrinkles around her mouth and crow’s feet at the edges of her blue-gray eyes. They looked deep enough for me to dive into, cover myself in the crisp light in those eyes. Two creases folded the center of her forehead, dividing her eyebrows with squint-lines that told me her tender blue eyes hadn’t kept her from gazing up at the sun on its brightest days. Lavender pearl earrings studded her ears and tugged at her earlobes. To say she was old would have been insulting. She was a precious artifact that, if I’d possessed a camera, I would have taken a thousand pictures of so that I could look at her forever. Her skin said, ‘I have lived a thousand years’ with its freckles and wrinkles and faded pigment. But the rest of her said, ‘I have nowhere near reached the end of my rope. Here, you need some extra line? I’ve got plenty to spare.’ A thin layer of sweat already glistened on the woman’s face, causing her to shimmer in the summer light.

I tented my hand above my eyes so that the sun poking through the car windows from behind the woman’s head wouldn’t blind me.

Well don’t you look like a pickle in a jar of olives. Those were the first words that Beatrice Hazeldine ever said to me. With those wonderfully puzzling and whimsical words, she sucked me right into that purple bus before I’d even said a thing.

Her voice was like a t-shirt that you’ve held onto and slept in night after night for years, and at the same time, a sheet after its first wash, taught from the package and snapping boldly in the wind.

I’m Bea. She stretched her hand all the way out the window, and I reached up, noticing that my fingers were trembling. At her touch, she squeezed her confidence into me and I felt her hand support mine. Her strong bones pressed into the malleable clay that made up my body and I felt myself going weak at the knees. I held on to her hand just a second too long and tried to find a perfectly good explanation for my behavior. My eyes caught on the rings that dotted her fingers, and I let go. One giant turquoise rock dominated her middle finger and two