annah’s middle name was Jane–a real clunker of a name for someone so pretty, I used to think. She was a skinny, knobby-kneed girl of fourteen, with hair the color of weak lemonade. I still see her sometimes, even–as a vague, little-girl shape in my dreams; in the uneasy, sun-streaked reflections of people in storefront windows. Hannah has been dead for thirty-one years, but each time I see her she looks the same; there is always her bright and luminous young face, trapped in a body that never ages.
        I am forty-five now, and am probably crazy enough to believe that there is a reason Hannah has never quite died for me. It wouldn’t seem right for her to keep showing up, or for me to keep mistaking little girls for her, if there wasn’t a reason for it.
        But if there is, I can’t figure what it is. And people get tired of hearing about her. My editor wrote me a letter last year asking me to please, please stop writing about the girl; I answered and said I’d try, but I have been unable to write a story without her face appearing in it. I suspect Prozac might do the trick–he suggested as much–but that might mean I’d no longer see Hannah, and I don’t know that I could bear the vacancy.

There is a small community in Oregon called Ash Corners. Two hundred people live there, in small trailers and ramshackle farmhouses scattered on all four sides of the intersection of Route 17 and Farm Road 7. There is one stop sign in the town, and it is on the north side of the intersection, on 7; the south-side sign was uprooted by high school students from Klamath Falls when I was only eight; which must have been 1963, or thereabouts.
        Hannah Jane Cayhall and I grew up in Ash Corners, on the west end of town, where Route 17 split into three smaller roads. If you were to drive through the Corners to this junction, and follow the lane furthest to the right, you would have an adequate idea of where we lived. The far-right lane was called Old Forest Road, named so because it used to be a single-lane logging road that wove perilously through the thick tree walls of the forest.
        In those days, when I was fifteen and Hannah fourteen, you could blow your tires out if you drove too recklessly down Old Forest Road; the deep ruts of a thousand logging trucks were carved into the dirt, which was hard as granite. The forest was long gone by then; it had caught fire and disappeared, along with nearly two thousand acres of forest throughout Ash County.
        Old Forest Road ended abruptly about a mile from the junction, and a less-defined road angled off to the north and south for about a hundred yards each way. To the north the road petered out in the grass of my grandmother’s front lawn; to the south, it ended in the driveway of the Cayhalls’ trailer house.
        The meadow surrounding our homes was littered with the charred, blackened stumps of the forest, like the sullen crags of broken teeth. Until I met Hannah, I entertained myself by crawling, soldier-like, through the graveyard of trees, imagining that I was a snake searching for signs of life. Until I met Hannah, I never found any.
        She was sitting on a large rock that appeared to have been polished by a sooty cloth, with a book open on her knees, which were bare and dirty. I slithered through the field, unaware of her until she spoke.
        "You look like you’re having fun," she said. Hannah’s word’s tumbled out, I noticed absently, in a fog of southern drawl, as though she’d been born and raised in the back hills of Louisiana rather than southern Oregon.
        I stopped, and looked up at this girl who was staring at me from twenty feet away. I was suddenly very embarrassed, and I stood up, self-consciously pushing dirt and brambles and pebbles off of my clothing. The dirt just ground in, though, leaving me in a pale yellow shirt with an obscene brown smear across the front.
        "Looks like poop and pee," Hannah said, and laughed.
        She was very pretty, but I could see the marks of poverty: her face was smudged, as though she hadn’t washed it in days; her hair was tangled and matted, and there was a hapless barrette crammed in just over her forehead, which appeared to do little good. Her dress was old, of a style not worn in a decade, and the hem was thready; a section had fallen away and was dangling like a broken fishing line.
        I smiled at her, feeling the flush in my cheeks go down. "I’m Robert," I said, and Hannah said, "What a silly name," and the heat in my face returned.
        "I mean, why Robert instead of Robbie?" Hannah asked.
        "Nobody ever called me Robbie."
        "Well, I’m gonna. You’re Robbie. From now on."
        I nodded, and that was how Hannah and I met.

I remember the next month of school like I’d written a book about it–which, listening to my editor, you might think that I had. I was accustomed to catching the school bus at the intersection of Route 17 and Old Forest Road, where I would sit in the dirt and search the skies for enemy bombers until the lumbering orange beast arrived and sucked me in.
        The following day I was sitting there and a battered Chevy pickup, trailed by a smoky blue cloud, erupted from the thick shrubbery that surrounded the entrance to Old Forest Road. I saw Hannah inside as it passed; she stared at me through the rear window, then turned her head, and a moment later the pickup jarred to a stop. A single white light flashed on the rear of the truck, and it squealed in reverse and stopped directly in front of me.
        A man with a grizzled, unshaven jaw looked out at me, one arm hooked over the steering wheel, the other bent over the door. "So you’re Hannah’s new friend," the man said slowly.
        I nodded, and Hannah pushed her face up beside the man’s. "Well?" she said. "Get in, silly."
        I went around to the passenger side of the truck and Hannah popped the door to let me in. My backpack went in the bed of the truck; I sat beside Hannah on the cracked vinyl seat.
        "This is my dad," she said, and the man nodded at me over Hannah’s head. "His name is Steven. With a ‘V’. Steven Cayhall."
        "Nice to meet you, Mr. Cayhall," I said.
        The man nodded again, said, "Likewise," slowly, and gunned the pickup. I held on as we bounced and flew to the school, which was a forty-minute ride by bus, and a six-minute ride by Cayhall Express. Hannah and I clambered out of the rustbucket in front of the school, and I snatched my backpack from the truck bed, anxious that Mr. Cayhall would suddenly zip away in the old truck before I could get my bag. Then I heard the soft chants of the other kids: "Robert’s got a girlfriend, Robert’s got a girlfriend."
        And Hannah, who was new to school, took my hand proudly and said, as we passed the other kids, "No, he doesn’t. And his name is Robbie."
        And I mumbled, "Jerks," as we went, and fumbled my sweaty palm out of Hannah’s as soon as we were inside.

Mr. Cayhall worked a late shift; he could drive Hannah and me to school every morning–and he did, though he never said a word more to me; just "So you’re Hannah’s new friend" and "Likewise"–but he couldn’t bring us home. Grandmother was sick, and didn’t drive, so we were stuck riding the bus home. It deposited us at the junction a good forty-five minutes after school let out–a constant source of frustration for time-conscious teenagers–and I began my habit of walking with Hannah down the mile-long Old Forest Road, and then to her house, a football field’s length to the south. I’d get a drink of water from their garden hose, then turn around and walk the two hundred yards to Grandmother’s house. Later, I’d do it again if we were going to play–which, for us, meant riding bikes in aimless circles or shooting her air rifle at clouds.
        Grandmother was always in bed. She was nearly seventy at the time, and had knuckles and cheek-bones gnarled as a California redwood. I would bring her medicine to her in the mornings and the afternoons, and once before bed: a glass of water along with three red pills and a yellow one. I didn’t know what they were; all I knew was that Grandmother cried in the grip of pain until she swallowed those pills, and then it was like she was wrapped up in a blanket in front of a fireplace–she would heave a great sigh, flashing her pink gums, and sink into a state of drunken relaxation, then sleep.
        Her home was small–there was a living room with a loveseat that belched dust when you sat on it, and a kitchen of yellow tile with a Formica-topped table and two chairs. Grandmother slept in the loft, where her smelly old bed was; she’d climbed up there years ago and then she’d gotten sick, so she’d never come down. I always imagined the day she’d get so sick that I’d have to try to drive her old ’51 Chevrolet to the hospital. More frightening than that was the prospect that I would somehow have to excavate her from the bed and get her down the nearly vertical stairway.
        For the seven years I had lived with Grandmother, I had slept on the couch, and tolerated a vicious coughing fit every time I stretched out on the dusty old thing. I spent my days playing as much as I could because the rest of my time was spent emptying Grandmother’s bed pan, or scooping the pale mush of a dissolved pill from under her tongue, or washing her papery skin with a damp rag.
        Hannah’s father was a good man, to hear her tell it–he loved her very much, and worked hard to make sure they had food and clothes, though ’69 was a tough year on just about everyone in Ash Corners. He would drive his old truck down to Klamath Falls for work, or to Medford; once he had to commute to Portland every day, and would get home at three in the morning to find Hannah sleeping.
        In the afternoons, after giving Grandmother her pills and waiting for her to crash, I would ride my bike to Hannah’s old mobile home and we would play. I would never go inside, but she would often come to Grandmother’s and we would play checkers on an old cardboard set, substituting pennies or bottle corks for the missing pieces. It did seem odd that we never played at her house, but she once said, "Daddy doesn’t like people much. Oh, he don’t get mad none, but he’ll just stare and stare at ‘em when they’re over, and they get all flustered and just go. He’s kinda weird like that."
        We were playing checkers one day when there was a sudden hard thump from the loft, and Hannah flashed wide eyes at me. I clambered up the staircase and Hannah, behind me, gasped. Grandmother was lying on the floor; she had rolled out of bed and collapsed, half-in and half-out of the old bed. Her bed pan had tumbled out, spilling its contents down her bare, bony legs.
        "Call the doctor," Hannah said urgently, and went to Grandmother’s side. The old woman groaned, and as I thundered down the stairs, I heard Hannah’s soft voice calming her.

 "...very, very sick," the doctor was saying. Hannah was nodding, but I was barely listening, staring at my grandmother’s swollen face–her eyes were tucked beneath fat purple lids, and there was a bitter red gully carved into her temple where she had struck her head.
        "...and this big bed will have to go," Dr. Hanlon continued. "She’s probably going to lose muscle control more and more in the coming months, and this will likely happen again if she’s not able to stop it. And you see what it did to her this time. Another couple times falling out of the bed could probably kill her."
        "So what do we–" I started, then stopped, staring at my grandmother, whose lips were cracked and beginning to bleed as she unconsciously squeezed her lower lip in and out of her pink jaws.
        The doctor produced a handkerchief and dabbed the sleeping woman’s mouth. "Get her a futon," he said.
        "A what?"
        "It’s like a soft bed without a frame," Hannah said to me, then looked at the doctor. "Right?"
        "Pretty much," Hanlon said. He was a stout man with feathered, graying hair. An ex-college linebacker, if I’d heard right. "She may still roll out of it, but it won’t hurt her. Probably get a king-size one."
        "But I don’t have any money," I said sheepishly. "I’m only in school."
        Hanlon cupped his chin in one large hand, and tapped his fingers on the side of his jaw. "Hmm," he mused. "Let me think that over a bit. I’ll figure something out for you."
        And he did. Two weeks later, Uncle Jesse came to live in Grandmother’s house. He brought along his silver Pontiac and a couple of suitcases and a big black guitar case, and a thick futon mattress, which he and I folded and dragged up into the loft. He shoved Grandmother’s bed aside with her still in it, and we stretched the futon mattress on the floor and I watched Jesse carry Grandmother in his arms. She looked dead, or like the husk of a locust’s shed shell. He put her on the futon, pulled her nightgown to her knees, and lay the bed sheets over her.
        Then he looked at the bare mattress of Grandmother’s old bed, which he planned on sleeping in, and studied the ugly stains of bodily waste on the mattress. "That’s gross," he said bluntly.
        We invited Hannah over and she stood in the yard as Jesse attacked the mattress in the loft, ripping it into thick, foamy chunks. He tossed the chunks through the window, and Hannah kicked them into a pile, and we sat back and had a bonfire as the sun went down.

 Jesse was a drinker. I remember my parents saying so, before they died. Dad would look at Mom in the car, after we had left some family get-together, and he would say, "Your brother’s a disgusting drunk." And Mom would sit there with tears in her eyes and nod, and I’d think about her brother stumbling around, starting one disturbance after another–sweeping dishes off of a table with one flat arm; putting his fist through his daughter’s bedroom wall; spilling wine down Dad’s new shirt.
        "My son doesn’t need to see that garbage," Dad would say.
        And Mom would just nod, and the tears that had collected in the sagging lids of her eyes would spill out.
        But now they were gone, and I was fifteen, and even though I knew what garbage Jesse was, I found myself caught up in his fascinating stories of the Second World War and chasing girls back home in Atlanta.
        Hannah and I sat next to each other on the old loveseat in the living room, and Jesse sat in a plastic chair by the window. It was dark, and the fire outside had smoldered down to a pile of orange embers; we had gathered old wood from the meadow and piled it on the fire as it the mattress chunks were caught by the evening wind.
        "...well," he said, holding a tumbler in one hand and making curvy gestures with the other, "this girl was absolutely somethin’ else. Most beautiful girl any of the guys in my company had ever seen. I mean, wow."
        Hannah looked at me and laughed. "Right," she said.
        Jesse leaned forward, and ice clinked in his glass. "Seriously," he said in a low voice. "This woman was like Rita Hayworth to us. I mean, sure, her teeth were a little bucky, but hey, when you’re in the Army, you don’t care. You’d even go for something like that"–he gestured with his glass at the loft, indicating the sleeping skeleton in the futon.
        "Nuh-uh," I said, disgusted. "Would you?"
        "If you were stuck in a tent with twenty other guys for six years you would." He took a drink from the clear liquid in the glass. "Anyway, she was great. And then one day, I asked her to go for a ride in my Jeep with me. She took a step back, looked me up and down, and said ‘No thanks, soldier.’ So my buddy, he says, ‘What about me?’ And she steps back, looks at him, and says, ‘Well, okay.’ I just about sh–crapped," he said, casting an apologetic look at Hannah, who shrugged.
        "So they go driving away, and I stand there watching ‘em go, feeling all hang-dog and sorry for myself. And I turned around to go back to the mess hall, and bam! If they didn’t run right over a land mine and end up in big pieces falling all over our camp."
        "Gross," Hannah said.
        "Wait, I don’t get it," I said. "They hit what?"
        "A land mine," Jesse said, then took another sip. "Bam!" Jesse said. "You step on it and as soon as you get off, it goes off. You gotta stay there forever."
        "Wow," I said.
        "Yep. So you kids come ‘round tomorrow and we’ll make hamburgers and I’ll tell you more." Then he went upstairs and fell asleep on the box spring and snored loudly.

 Things went about like that for two months. Hannah would come over for dinner and enjoy herself; Jesse would rip out the meat and grill up burgers or steaks, or take us over to Ashland to the Dairy Queen.
        Then, after walking Hannah home after school one day, I came into the house and climbed the stairs to the loft. I started to open my mouth to tell Jesse I was home, but I heard a faint shuffling noise from upstairs, and something kept me quiet.
        I went up the stairs softly and over the loft railing I saw Jesse kneeling by Grandmother’s bed. The old woman was out–he’d just given her the medicine, I guess–and so she didn’t see him tap two red pills out of her bottle into his hand. But I did, and I watched him swallow them with a sip of that same clear liquid–vodka, Hannah later told me. He knelt there with his back to me, and I stared, outraged, for several minutes, waiting for him to turn around and see me.
        But he didn’t. Jesse kind of went slack and collapsed against the wall next to the futon, and closed his eyes with a dazed smile on his face.
        And that was when things started getting bad, and I remembered Dad talking about the garbage of Jesse’s drunken behavior. Jesse started making me walk to the corner store down at the intersection of Route 17 and the farm road, giving me a few bucks to buy him a bottle of vodka. The owner wouldn’t ever sell it to me, no matter how many sob stories I tried–I was just old enough for him to think I wanted it for myself–and I’d walk the four miles back, dreading Jesse’s punishment with each step. Sometimes it was the back of his hand across my face; other times it was his foot flat against my spine. He’d get high on Grandmother’s pills so often that she would cry all day, unable to get relief from the pain, and he’d warn me to never tell Dr. Hanlon or he’d throw me out the window like he did with that mattress.
        So Hannah and I stopped going back to Grandmother’s house after school; I would leave my bike in the grass by her trailer when Mr. Cayhall would drive us to school, and when we got off the bus, we’d go to her house and climb on our bikes and take off. We looked for somewhere new to entertain ourselves, and Hannah’s trailer was never an option–"Daddy might come home, and he’s always tired," she would say, apologizing.
        And we would ride, and eventually we came across the place.

Route 17 seemed endless to us. We would quickly ride past the intersection of it and the farm road, and then ride a little further each day. The forest along either side of 17 hadn’t been touched by the fire years back–there had been a wind blowing to the east, keeping the fire away from the heart of Ash Corners–and it furrowed along in great ripples of rich greens and reds.
        Nearly ten miles west of the town we came across a bridge that vaulted over a dry creek bed. The sign on the bridge read ‘Tennebaum Creek.’ Below it was another sign that read ‘Tennebaum Bridge.’ We skidded to a stop on our bikes in the center of the bridge and looked down at the dusty bottom of the creek.
        "Ech," Hannah said. "Kinda plain."
        "Yeah," I said.
        It was indeed a boring sight. The creekbed was cracked and dry; the surrounding grass was sun-yellow and bleached.
        Then she said, "I think I hear water. Do you?"
        I listened, shook my head. "Ain’t no water here."
        But she nodded. "Yes, I hear it. Come on."
        We pedaled a bit further: Hannah riding slowly, standing up on the pedals, looking around; me hanging back, suddenly impatient. I could see a steep hill ahead, and I was already anticipating the rush of speed that would follow the slow climb.
        "There!" Hannah cried, stopping abruptly. I banged into her, but she didn’t say anything; just pointed.
        I looked, and there I saw what she saw: there was a small glimmer through the trees, the glimmer of sunlight on water. "That’s–"
        "It’s a creek," she said excitedly. "Come on, let’s go check it out."
        We barreled down the steep slope off of the road, and almost tumbled over our bicycles. The earth was clogged with crowd grass, as Jesse had called it when he made his one aborted attempt to mow Grandmother’s yard; it was a thick carpet of grass that stood nearly knee-high.
        Hannah dropped her bike in the grass, and it all but disappeared. I did the same, and chased after her, and we crashed through the brush and into the shadowy assembly of redwoods, and then we came across it.
        "It’s perfect," Hannah breathed.
        It was. Above us a gap in the evergreen needles opened up, and lit up a patch in the forest with a ghostly haze. Dust filtered through the light like insects. The ground was covered with a soft green moss; the same moss grew up the north side of the trees and swallowed stray rocks whole. A vast oak stood in the center of this space, its trunk a deep hollow. Most beautiful, though, was the achingly clear stream that drifted lazily by. Eventually, it was there, sitting on the soft rocks or wading in that overlooked stream–which, as far as I know, remains nameless–that I first experienced the pinnacle of love and the depths of grief for the first time.

We would go to the place often–dip our bare toes into the cool water and splash around and fall down in the stream. One afternoon Hannah sat down in the creek and smiled. "Feels so good," she said.
        I joined her, and it did. The day was warm, and we relaxed.
        Later she stood up, and her white skirt clung to her legs, filmy and nearly transparent. Above the tan line just over her knee I saw a dark shadow, and asked what it was. Hannah bent her head and wouldn’t look at me.
        I squatted, the seat of my jeans skimming the slow water, and peeled her skirt up her legs. There was a bruise there, on her thigh, the color of a rotten plum, vibrant in its shades of purple and black; fringed with a sickly tint of yellow.
        "Did your dad hit you?" I asked, furious. "If he did, I’ll–"
        "It wasn’t Daddy," Hannah said quietly.
        "Then wh–"
        "I can’t tell you who done it," she said, and after that, Hannah never let me talk to her about the bruises I would see her arms, her shins, her neck. "Can’t tell you," she would say again, and that would be that. Except it never was.

Grandmother got worse.
        Jesse stopped giving her the pills altogether–he would spend hours in that intoxicated daze, and then erupt when he came down–but she never noticed. By that point she was so far gone that he could have sat beside her all day with his finger up her nose and she wouldn’t have flinched.
        One day Hannah didn’t go to school; Mr. Cayhall gave me a ride and still said nothing. After being dropped off by the bus I ran to their trailer and found his truck in the driveway. I went up to the door and knocked, and Mr. Cayhall opened the door.
        I was stunned–he looked different: the week of growth on his face was gone; his greasy hands and nails were freshly cleaned. Instead of his customary flannel shirt, he wore an old but clean white shirt with a checkered tie. He looked a dozen years younger.
        "Robert." That was the third thing he said to me.
        "Hannah home?" I asked.
        "Nope," he answered. "She took off on her bike. Said you should meet her at ‘the place,’ wherever that is."
        I was a little surprised–we’d never ridden out there alone. "Oh," I said. "Oh. Okay."
        I went back to my bike, and as I climbed on, he said, "You’re good to Hannah?"
        He was serious, his face still. I said, "Yes, Mr. Cayhall. She’s my best friend."
        "Good," he said, and then he closed the screen door.
        I rode down 17, and around me the weather began to turn sour, the already gray sky deepening into a sullen black. It began to rain, and the wind picked up hard, roaring down the corridor created by the wall of trees on either side of the road. More than once it stuttered my bike off the road and into the grass or the gully. I kept riding only because I knew Hannah was at the place, waiting, and I couldn’t leave her there, in this weather, alone.
        "Hannah," I called into the wind as I stumbled down the hill with my bike. Her bike was lying in the grass, and I dropped mine beside it; shouted her name again. This time, through the whistle of the wind, I heard her faintly calling my name.
        She was in the nameless stream when I got there, jumping up and down and kicking through the water, barefoot. "Daddy’s got a date tonight," she said. "Did you see him?"
        "Yeah," I answered.
        "Did he shave? I told him to shave."
        "Yeah, he was all dolled up," I said. "Like a pretty little girl."
        "Smarty," she said. "Come with me and I’ll show you pretty."
        She came out of the water and took my hand, which she hadn’t done since that day at school a few months back. Her fingers laced with mine and she pulled me to the hollow oak. It was cool and dry inside, and the first thing I noticed was the thick blanket spread on the ground. The second thing was the candles arranged on knobby shelves in the wood; Hannah lit them with a cigarette lighter, and smoke curled up from the wicks and disappeared where the hollow trunk tapered into solid wood.
        The wind screamed around the tree, and we stared out at a flutter of leaves and loose needles caught in the gust. It swept down over the stream and skipped along the water, sending up small sprays that blew back into the hollow and dotted our faces.
        "Scary," she said quietly, looking out at the forest, which was deepening in shadow.
        "You’re safe now," I said, maturely, and then Hannah surprised me: she leaned forward on her bare knees and kissed my lips quickly; then she pulled back with a worried look in her eyes. She stared at me, and I stared at her, and then we kissed again, and in the soft glow of the hollow oak we fumbled around and learned all the things that boys and girls must learn about each other.

When we left the tree, it was black out, and the wind had calmed, and we rode down 17 in the darkness, steering our bikes with one hand, and holding hands with the other.
        The Old Forest Road was nearly impossible to navigate in the darkness, but after a time, the cloud cover broke and a pale Oregon moon illuminated the ruts in the road, and we directed our bikes around them.
        At the end of the road, we stopped: off to the left we could see lights burning in Grandmother’s house–Jesse, still up, probably still drunk; but to the right, there was utter darkness. At the very least, Mr. Cayhall would have left the porch light on for Hannah.
        "I think it burned out," she said. "Or the wind knocked the lines down again."
        But that wasn’t it at all. As we rode down the lane to her trailer, we saw that the wind had rocked the mobile home so fiercely that it was lying on its side. The cement porch steps had been swallowed by the old white building, and Mr. Cayhall’s Chevy, still running, was bent and twisted, trapped by the trailer which had fallen on it.
        "Mr. Cayhall!" I shouted, running up to the pickup and banging on the door. I cut my hand on a sliver of glass from the window, which had shattered. Hannah said, "Robbie," quietly, and when I looked, she said, "He’s gone, I think."
        She was right–Mr. Cayhall’s face was slack, and in the moonlight the blood that covered his skin was black.
        That was how Hannah Jane Cayhall came to live with Grandmother, and how things ended up getting worse for her.

The place became our only hideaway, because Hannah wouldn’t stay in Grandmother’s house any more than she had to, and she never would explain why. I thought that I knew, though–I had seen Jesse looking at her when he was drunk; saw him pull at her wrist when she walked by; heard him growl her name in his low, rumbling baritone. Pretty soon I understood where the bruises were coming from, because they would show up in greater number, with greater intensity, and I wondered how long it had been happening.
        "Stop asking me about that," she said one day when I confronted her.
        "I’m going to kill him," I said to her, and as I started to walk toward the staircase–Jesse was in the loft, high again–she grabbed my wrist firmly.
        "You can’t," she said. "He said if I told, he’d–"
        "He’ll what? If I kill him now, it won’t ever happen again!"
        And I felt like I could do it, and I would have, but Hannah wouldn’t let go of my wrist, and she talked to me in the same voice she had used when Grandmother tumbled out of bed. She calmed me, and I let it go, and things seemed to get better for awhile. There were no bruises for many weeks. Both of us let it go, and I nearly forgot about it.
        Until I came home from a liquor run one day to find Hannah’s bicycle gone. Jesse was in the loft, and I shouted, "Where’s Hannah?" He mumbled something, and then I saw spatters of blood on the staircase, and I ran out and jumped on my bike.
        How Hannah managed to get to the place I don’t know–but she was there when I got there, lying in the creek, stretched out, her skirt floating, and about her legs an inky, billowing red cloud. In the most pitiful voice, Hannah looked at me, bewildered, and said, "He hurt me."
        I stared at the red in the water, dissipating to pink, and I saw red everywhere. Hannah saw it in me, and though she was fading–which I didn’t notice, and which I hate myself for every day–she said, "Robbie, don’t go." But I jumped on my bike and pedaled angrily down 17 and over the Old Forest Road to Grandmother’s house. I threw my bike down in the yard. Inside, I went to the bathroom and pulled the shower rod down, and charged upstairs.
        Jesse was there, kneeling over Grandmother’s futon, studying a prescription bottle, and he absently said, "Robert, I need you to go back to the store. I need som–" and then I hit him with the shower rod, again and again, until he was as purple and black and red as Hannah, and he said, "Robert, Robert," the whole time, and then, after a time, he said nothing; he lay there as silently as Grandmother, who slept peacefully, specks of blood on her dry skin.

Hannah was dead by the time I called Dr. Hanlon and we arrived at the place. The loss of blood, coupled with the cold water–shock and hypothermia, he said later. First degree murder, the courts said next, and an attorney came from Ashland and talked them down to manslaughter, and I spent the next four years in a juvenile detention center in Portland.

These days I see her everywhere; I hear her repeat, chidingly, "Robbie’s got a girlfriend." I remember the way she kissed me that first time, and how we rode our bicycles fast and furious, as though they were magic carpets.
        I see her on a bicycle on the road beside my apartment, sometimes. Other times she is dancing in the surf by the boardwalk. I pencil her into my manuscripts–the same person, over and over, with a different face, or maybe a different hair color.
        She is happy, I think, and I remember how I was never able to make her life better–and I hope that I somehow made her life more bearable. And I think that, now, all is good, because she is free.
        It has been thirty-one years, and I have never been back to the place. I like to imagine that it has remained as young and alive as Hannah has remained to me; that the moss is as green and the water as clear; that the old oak is still standing, a testament to young love.
        That’s how I want to remember.