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“Let’s go ghost hunting.”
Fifteen minutes later as they made their way down the rocky path in robes and flip-flops, the pleasant effects of the gummy not yet taking hold, the errand seemed less fun and more irresponsible. Not to mention scary.
“I don’t feel anything, do you?” asked Hannah. She hadn’t been high since—when? She couldn’t even remember. College maybe? Maybe she’d forgotten how it felt. Or maybe her mom brain wouldn’t allow it. Like, it just wouldn’t take or something.
“It takes a while,” said Cricket, looping a strong arm through Hannah’s. “It said in the article that Mandy was planning to leave him. Her parents—they were waiting for her and the kids.”
Hannah had read the same, imagining those poor people waiting and waiting for their daughter, their grandchildren who never came home.
“The medical examiner deduced that he killed Mandy first,” Hannah said. “Her husband strangled her. The little boy was found in his bed. But the little girl must have run. He chased her down to the lake.”
“Maybe on this path,” said Cricket, looking around them.
It was depraved, wasn’t it? Like those people who listened to endless crime podcasts, sifting through the details of cold cases, all the different ways people can torture and kill each other. In the listening, in the examining, things seem like fiction, stories told to explain, to frighten, to excite. But these stories were real—a mother and her children had died in pain and terror, their deeply disturbed killer, a person charged with caring for them, then taking his own life. So much pain. There was so much pain in the world. Hannah clung to Cricket and the woods seemed dark. Hannah felt small.
“I don’t think it’s much farther.”
Behind them, Hannah could see the porch lights glowing. Above them the stars wild and violent in the velveteen black of the sky. The Big Dipper. Ursa Minor. Orion’s Belt. Mars glowed red. Venus blinked, always the brightest star in the sky.
One Christmas, her father gave her a huge telescope. Mickey and Sophia had no interest in the night sky. But Hannah and her father spent so many late evenings out on the porch with the big device, and piles of books. This was before all the apps that you could hold up to the sky now, that revealed all the galactic secrets.Before, you had to do your research. They spent hours searching, discovering, naming, watching for meteor showers or other astronomical events.
“We’re so small, tiny,” Leo said one night. It was late. Mickey was out, and Sophia was inside watching television. She had her dad all to herself. “We’re ants. Not even.”
He said it softly, with a kind of wonder. Hannah knew she was small. The youngest in the family, the quietest with the easiest personality. But not him. Not her dad. He was strength, security. He had all the answers, the bear hugs that banished monsters, piggyback rides forever. He was huge.
“You’re not tiny, Dad.”
He looked over at her, then pulled her into the crook of his arm, pressed her to him tight.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Look out there. All those points of light. Massive explosions, light-years away. That’s where we all came from, all of us. There’s stardust in our bones.”
The telescope was at Hannah and Bruce’s house now. She couldn’t wait to share it with Gigi.
There. A shooting star. She made a wish. Her everyday wish. May all people be happy, safe, and free.
That’s where we all came from, all of us.
The Origins test.
It was another hum in her subconscious.
Bruce had opted out. But Hannah had spit in the vial and sent it off—without too much of a thought. Just something to talk about with her family when the results came back. Maybe they’d find some long-lost relative, or some strain of the family they’d never otherwise have known. She did the full suite—ancestry, medical, and traits. She’d even ticked the box to allow any searching relatives to get in touch via the app. Why not?
It was a curiosity, nothing more. After all, sheknewher family. Sheknewwhere she came from. On her mother’s side, she had a big group of aunts and uncles, a passel of cousins all over the country. Her mother was of Scotch-Irish descent whose parents had come to the US in the thirties and settled in Brooklyn. Hannah’s grandmother had been a seamstress, her grandfather a chauffeur. Eventually, the warm Florida weather called them south, and that’s where Sophia was born and stayed. Hannah’s father was Italian, both maternal and paternal grandparents from Naples. He was an only child, parents passed before he was fully grown. He lived with relatives before he joined the army. There were aunts and uncles, cousins who were less a part of Hannah and Mickey’s life than Sophia’s family. But she knew them—cards at Christmas, random visits, once a big family reunion at Disney.
Hannahhad beencurious. What would she learn about her ancestry, about herself? Who, if anyone, would reach out claiming this connection or that? She’d read that all humans share about 99 percent of the same DNA. That it was less than a 1 percent difference that makes you who you uniquely are, that connects you to the people you call family. There was something about that that she liked; this idea that all people, no matter what they thought or believed, were essentially the same.
But the results when they came were—confusing.
“Earth to Hannah.”
She jumped, startled back to the moment. “What?”
“You have that look.”
“What look?”
Cricket tapped her temple. “Thatthinking too hard, lost in your head look. Your brother does that, too. Just blanks out, goes on some kind of internal journey.”
