Re: hannah and david: woods
She glanced over at him, and the smile on her lips was a soft thing built on knowing. "I know I'm not really a blank, but I think it's easy to see me that way. Not as a mystery, because they don't really try to figure me out, not really. They plaster me over with the images they imagine, and I think sometimes they really believe I'm that plaster girl, and they don't realize there was even something beneath for them to hide in the first place," she explained, and it was life as she understood it, as she'd understood it since a house tried to eat her when she was very, very small.
And her smile remained, the one after she said she'd found something, but on she went. Words and words, thoughtless in the confessional of the tree-lined evening. "You never met Mom, but you would've liked her. She was always dreaming. Her feet hardly ever touched the ground, and she danced everywhere, and Dad loved her so much. She said all houses had hearts, souls and bellies, and she saw things in the world that other people didn't see," she explained, and she wasn't sure why she said those things, but she didn't stop to think and think about it either. Instead, she continued on and on, to Marcus, to the moment she'd seen him go dark. "It felt good," she admitted of shooting Marcus in the face.
She shook her head. "No. Dad isn't right. He's broken too. Mom tried to kill him, tried to kill Si and me too. He was a skeptic, and then he had to face the fact that things really lived in the dark, and then he had to go back and watch Mom die, and he had to leave her there, and he had to leave the little girl she'd killed there, and he was never right after. I think our stepmother made the decision about Mars. I think she didn't want to raise us all, and Mars looked most like Mom, and she was so little. Dad, he's only partly here. He has one foot in reality, but the rest of him isn't here." Another smile here, a sad one. "I can't give Mars her kidney back anymore, but I would if I could," she confessed. "When Mars first found me here, she said she was going to steal her kidney back," and her smile became fond. "Mars is brave."
But words and words and words, and it had been a long night, and she just squeezed his arm, there, where it was looped with is, and she leaned against his side. Shhhh, she said to him, and she smiled over at him in the moonglow. "Let's just walk," she said.