The Air We Breathe by Christa Parrish

Claire after the accident. They’d had a passing acquaintance before—from an occasional Bible study, a small group, a fellowship dinner—but hadn’t known each other. Heidi was nearly fifteen years older, with two grown kids; Claire was busy with homeschooling and running her children to piano lessons and gymnastic classes. But whenHeidi came to her at the funeral, Claire recognized grief on her—the particular grief of death, a watermark seen only when held up to the light in just the right way, and only those who had gone through the same knew where to look. So when the sea of casseroles and prayers and encouragement cards retreated in the low tide, leaving all the debris of Claire’s life damp and exposed in the sand, Heidi stayed.
    She understood, having lost her husband of thirty-three years, never expecting Claire to just snap out of it and get on with it and be thankful they’re with the Lord. She’d lived the paradox of believing in something bigger, something better, something beyond—alongside the smallness of her own human sight, a tunnel vision straight through to the ache of longing that didn’t go away because a certain amount of acceptable time had passed.
    Would enough time ever pass?
    “I’m not ready,” she said.
    “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered. But I worry about you. You sit home with your pencils and puzzles, beating yourself up over something you can’t do anything about.”
    “It wasn’t something . I killed my children.”
    “They died in a car accident. An accident, Claire.”
    “You don’t understand.”
    “No, I don’t,” Heidi said. “But I don’t think you do, either.”
    Claire pushed her chair back, stood. “You don’t need a ticket today,” she said, slinging her tote bag on her shoulder, walking toward home. Heidi didn’t follow, or at least not closely enough for Claire to notice; she didn’t turn around.

6
    H ANNA M AY 2002
    Thin Man kept her in a cage, six sides of square black grids. “A safe place,” he’d told her. A kennel for a dog; for a large one, like a Labrador. He’d given her a cushion to sleep on, and a waffley baby’s blanket, yellow with a washed-out Cookie Monster appliquéd in one corner. She could fit under it if she rolled into her chest and squeezed her chin between her knees. She wanted to sleep like that anyway, so she could reach her feet and rub them, as her mother used to when she was little, singing the song she made up— “Hanna’s feet. Hanna’s feet. I love to rub Hanna’s feet” —tickling and pinching and patting and kissing her way up Hanna’s entire body, ending with a bear hug and a pillow fluff before bed.
    Sometimes singing the song was the only way she could remember her own name, after days of being called little girl by Thin Man. She didn’t know how many days had passed.Two. Three. Ten. She had tried to keep track of how many times she’d gone to sleep but found herself constantly dozing on and off. They gave her something to make her drowsy—at least she thought they did—a clear plastic cup of fizzy liquid with a thick pink layer at the bottom.
    Things kept disappearing on her—little pieces of her memory, coherent thoughts, things that made her more a girl and less an animal. She thought of the drawing hanging in her father’s office, the evolutionary stages of man, from prehistoric to modern, each figure getting less hunched and less hairy. She was going backward, each day curling more tightly into herself, looking more like a pill bug, a spiral conch, an infant.
    The only thing still clear in her memory was her father. Not the living, smiling, loving one. The dead one, facedown in a lake of blood. She clawed her eyes and yanked her hair and rocked against the wall of the cage. Nothing helped. That imaged stayed.
    After they had taken her from the bank, the three men drove for some time, Thin Man and Fat Guy in the front seat of the car, Short One in the back with her. He’d