Book of Hannah

The walls of Hannah Allen’s bedroom were still lavender.

Her mother had painted them when Hannah was a child, moving the bed into the hallway and spreading old sheets over the carpet. For several nights afterward, the room had smelled of fresh paint, and Hannah had slept with the door open while Denise assured her the smell would fade.

It had.

The color remained.

There were pale rectangles where posters had hung. Near the closet, a scuff marked the place where a desk had once been dragged too close to the wall. The room had grown smaller without changing its dimensions. Books occupied the floor beside the bed. A chair could not be pulled out without striking something.

Hannah was eighteen now.

Newly enrolled at the community college down the street.

Still living in the room where her mother had once checked on her after nightmares.

That evening, she stacked her textbooks on the desk and rested her phone against them.

The first arrangement pointed the camera too low.

The second leaned sideways.

She took a thinner book from beneath the stack and tried again.

On the screen, her own face looked unfamiliar.

Too close.

Too young.

Behind her, the lavender wall made it seem as though she were about to talk about school or a disagreement with a friend. Something small enough to be contained within the room.

Hannah adjusted the phone until it stood level.

She wiped her palms against her trousers.

Then she pressed record.

“The shelter on—”

She stopped.

Watched the little counter continue moving.

Pressed the screen.

Deleted the recording.

For several seconds, she sat without trying again.

Through the wall came the muffled sound of a television. Somewhere in the apartment building, a pipe knocked. A door closed on another floor.

Ordinary sounds.

People finishing dinner.

People settling into the places where they expected to spend the night.

Hannah looked down at the notes she had made.

The shelter had closed.

That was the fact around which every other fact had gathered.

A door had been locked.

People who had gone there expecting somewhere to sleep had found that they were no longer permitted inside.

She set the notes beside the phone.

Pressed record again.

Her voice trembled.

Her hands did not.

She placed them flat on the desk, on either side of the textbooks, and began with what had happened.

A homeless shelter in her neighborhood had been shut down without warning.

She did not make the sentence more dramatic than it was.

It did not need help.

Families had been displaced. Older people had been left outside with bags they struggled to carry. People who already owned very little had been required, once again, to gather it up and move.

Where they were supposed to go remained unanswered.

Hannah spoke carefully.

She had expected anger to make her stumble.

Instead, it made her precise.

She described the people outside the shelter.

Not as a crowd.

Not as a problem that had migrated from one part of the neighborhood to another.

People.

An older person looking up and down the street as though the next place to go might become visible if they looked long enough.

Families trying to keep their belongings together.

Adults attempting to answer children without admitting that they had no answer.

Hannah had seen the waiting.

That was what stayed with her.

Even after the closure had been explained, people had lingered near the entrance.

Some had stood close to the door.

As though there might still be someone inside who understood that a locked building and a human need could not simply be left facing one another all night.

She spoke about the response afterward.

The explanation that explained nothing useful.

The language in which no one appeared to have made a decision, although the consequences of one stood plainly on the pavement.

She had read the words more than once.

They seemed designed to make the closure sound like something that had occurred on its own.

No hand on a key.

No name beneath an instruction.

Only circumstances.

Procedures.

Regret.

And outside, people who still needed somewhere to sleep.

Hannah leaned slightly toward the phone.

“You can explain why a building is closed,” she said. “That doesn’t explain what’s supposed to happen to the people who were inside it.”

She paused.

Her own words surprised her.

They were not eloquent in the way she had imagined eloquence. She had not prepared them to sound important.

They were simply what she meant.

For once, she did not feel obliged to apologize before saying it.

Beyond the phone, Denise stood in the doorway.

Hannah had not heard her arrive.

Her mother’s arms were crossed, but not in anger. One hand held the opposite elbow so tightly that the knuckles had paled.

She listened without interrupting.

Hannah could see her at the edge of the screen.

A narrow portion of her shoulder.

The shadow she cast across the wall.

For a moment, Hannah almost stopped recording.

Then she continued.

She did not know who would see the video.

She did not know what anyone watching could do.

But the silence around the closure had begun to feel like another locked door, and she could no longer bear the thought of helping keep it shut.

When she finished, she remained still.

The counter continued.

Her face on the screen looked flushed.

She reached forward and stopped the recording.

The apartment seemed unusually quiet afterward, though the television beyond the wall was still playing.

Hannah watched the video once.

She disliked her voice immediately.

Disliked the way she glanced down.

Disliked the brief hesitation before one sentence and the way her mouth tightened after another.

She watched herself trying to be understood and felt the urge to erase the attempt.

Then she listened to what she had said.

The shelter was still closed.

Nothing about her embarrassment changed that.

“Hannah.”

Denise’s voice was soft.

That made Hannah look up more quickly than if her mother had raised it.

“You don’t know what kind of trouble you’re inviting.”

Hannah glanced back at the phone.

The final frame showed her leaning toward the camera, one hand lifted slightly from the desk.

An unfinished gesture.

“I’m talking about a shelter, Mom.”

“I heard you.”

“They put people outside.”

“I heard that too.”

There was no disagreement in Denise’s face about what had happened.

That made the warning harder to dismiss.

She was not defending the closure.

She was looking at her daughter.

Hannah swallowed.

“Someone has to say something.”

Denise lowered her eyes for a moment.

When she looked up again, the worry had not eased.

“Someone older.”

Hannah waited.

“Someone safer.”

The second word remained between them.

Hannah looked around the room.

The old paint.

The textbooks.

The bed pushed close to the wall.

Nothing here suggested power. Nothing about her seemed likely to trouble anyone accustomed to making decisions behind desks she would never approach.

She was eighteen.

She had no audience.

She had not even learned how to look directly into the camera without checking her own face.

Yet her mother was afraid.

Hannah understood then that Denise did not need to believe the video would matter to fear what it might cost.

The recording waited on the screen.

There were ways to keep it.

Ways to put it aside.

She could save it and watch it again tomorrow, when she felt less angry. She could rewrite the parts that sounded awkward. She could decide that she needed more information, more experience, a steadier voice.

She could spend a long time becoming ready.

Beyond the apartment, night was coming.

People were still outside.

Hannah typed a short description.

Read it.

Changed one word.

Her mother remained in the doorway.

“Hannah.”

“I know.”

She did not know.

Not what would happen.

Not whether anyone would care.

Only that she had reached the point at which doing nothing would also be a decision, and she would have to live with having made it.

She pressed Post.

Nothing happened.

The room did not change.

Her phone returned to a familiar screen.

Denise stood watching her, and Hannah found she could not quite meet her eyes.

Then her mother uncrossed her arms.

For a moment, Hannah thought she might come forward and ask her to take it down.

Instead, Denise rested one hand against the doorframe.

“Don’t stay up all night,” she said.

Hannah nodded.

Her mother left the doorway.

The hall light remained on.

She had no followers.

No one was waiting for the video.

For a while, it existed almost entirely between Hannah and the small screen on which she had made it.

She set the phone down.

Opened a textbook.

Read the same paragraph three times without understanding it.

Then the phone lit.

Someone had watched.

Not many.

Enough that the number was no longer zero.

Later, another person saw it.

Then someone sent it to someone else.

The video traveled without Hannah, entering rooms she would never see, held in hands she would never recognize. Her uncertain voice began again and again beneath unfamiliar ceilings.

In her mother’s apartment, she sat at the desk against the lavender wall and listened to the building settle around her.

The world had not answered.

But, slowly, it had begun to listen.