The Air We Breathe by Christa Parrish Page A

seeking—she, too, seeming vaguely familiar. “What did she say to you?”
    “She asked about my necklace,” Claire said, not intending to lie, not really. But the little girl didn’t seem to want her mother to know her words, and Claire felt the same. What had been exchanged between them went inexplicably deeper than a handful of short sentences about some ugly cross Caden saved for to buy with his own money, one she wore every day because it came from him. She’d told him she wore it under her shirt so it could stay against her heart, and he liked that answer.
    In all honestly she hadn’t wanted anyone seeing the tacky pink crystals, recognizing it from the late-night infomercial declaring it somehow special—holy, even—because one could peer into the secret center window and read the Lord’s Prayer.
    Again, she felt pressed down upon from . . . above? The situation before her had a weight she didn’t understand.
    “Who are you? Why are you near her?” the woman demanded, her earlier fear now anger.
    “I was just sitting here,” Claire said. She took a step away, the back of her knee bumping the bench. “I asked if your daughter wanted a push. She said yes. That’s all.”
    The woman dug through her green leather bag, flipped out her cell phone. “Don’t move.” Claire thought she might call the police, but after dialing, she said, “Dr. Flinchbaugh,” and waited, pulling at her eyebrows and blowing the tiny hairs from her fingers. A tinny mumble came through the phone, and the woman said, “She talked.”
    More distant words Claire couldn’t make out.
    “I don’t know. She didn’t say it to me,” the woman said, then, after listening a moment, held the phone out. “Here.”
    Claire looked at it. “I don’t—”
    “Take it.”
    She did, wiping her hand over the keys and screen to clear away the smeary makeup residue, the sweat. “Hello?”
    “I’m Diane Flinchbaugh. Hanna’s therapist. And you are?”
    “Uh, I’m Claire. Claire Rodriguez.”
    “Mrs. Suller said Hanna spoke to you.”
    “She didn’t say much.”
    “Not much is everything. Hanna hasn’t said a word in four months.”
    And then Claire remembered why the little girl looked so familiar. Her photo had been on the front page of the newspaper, along with the story of how she’d seen her father gunned down in that bank robbery downtown and then was taken and held for two weeks. The mother had been on television, pleading for her daughter’s return, her hair blond and perfectly smooth, her clothes chic, her hips thin. And Clairehad passed judgment, unable to understand how someone in such torment could look so good.
    She had hacked three inches of dead ends from her hair last week after years without attention, and most of her “skinny” clothes had long since been donated to the community center, though she held on to some of them—the ones with meaning—in the off chance that someday she’d pull herself together long enough to diet back down into them.
    Most women wanted back into their pre-children sizes; she’d have given anything to be able to fit into the pants she’d worn when Caden first rode a two-wheeler, or the sweatshirt she had tied around her waist when Amelia said her first sentence. She looked nothing like she did when her identity wound around the words mother and wife .
    And Claire could now see this woman up close, hiding behind her flowing silk, wide-necked blouse, her canary yellow peep-toe skimmers, her manicured fingernails and toenails. She had the look Claire recognized, of someone whose world had imploded and there were no pieces large enough left to pick up and try to fit back together. Only dust.
    “Ms. Rodriguez?”
    “I’m here.”
    “I need to know what Hanna said to you. Her exact words, the best you can recall them.”
    Claire hesitated again. The little girl sat unmoving on the swing, startlingly so. Not a muscle tremored; her chest seemed neither to rise nor fall. She fixed