Residential

Chapter 1: Every Single Night

Every single night 
I endure the flight
Of little wings of white-flamed 
Butterflies in my brain
These ideas of mine percolate the mind
Trickle down the spine
Swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze
That's where the pain comes in
Like a second skeleton
Trying to fit beneath the skin
I can't fit the feelings in
Every single night's alight with my brain.

-Fiona Apple, "Every Single Night"

Hannah wasn't interested in her mom's cold french fries. The wind blew hot through the open window and yellow hills rose and fell alongside the highway. Another billboard announcing the importance of water conservation retreated in the passenger-side mirror.

"I said it's fine, Mom."

Her mom kept one hand on the wheel while she held out the ketchup-smeared In-N-Out tray. "It's not fine, you didn't have any breakfast."

"I had that smoothie."

"This?" Her mom abandoned the fries to the center console and rattled the half-empty Odwalla bottle. "You call this breakfast?"

"Yeah, I do actually. A smoothie is a normal--"

"And what about lunch?"

"Well I had the mocha too."

Tires shrieked. Hannah jolted forward against her seatbelt as they wrenched to a stop. The wilted french fries skittered over her lap and onto the floor.

"I don't know if this is partly some hipster bohemian thing--"

"Jesus, Mom."

"--But you can't survive on coffee and cigarettes."

Hannah groaned, even though she knew it made her sound petulant and childish. She was twenty-one, but ever since the ER, everyone from doctors to academic advisors to her mom and stepdad had been treating her like a misbehaving teenager. It hadn't helped that, for the past two weeks, she'd been in a pediatric unit at UCSF.

Most of the In-N-Out tray had landed in her lap and she swatted fries and salt off her leggings. "Well, I definitely won't be eating these now."

Her mom let go of the wheel and cradled her forehead. From the trembling of her shoulders, Hannah thought she might be crying. A horn blared as a pickup veered into the right lane to pass their stationary Prius.

Wind whipped the drought-parched grass and the hills rippled gold. Just one flicked cigarette butt would be enough to set those thirsty hills ablaze.

* * *

"In one hundred feet, the destination will be on your right."

Hannah wasn't sure what she had been expecting. Maybe something more clinical, more isolated.

The Anuket Recovery Collective ("Find your ARC to peace and wellness!") sat near the end of a residential cul-de-sac. To Hannah, the houses looked tacky and pretentious -- stucco McMansions with ionic columns and dusty fountains. A few of the bigger ones even had little towers. Despite the drought, all the lawns remained a vibrant green. Lawns, Hannah thought, didn't deserve to be watered. The many billboards through the South Bay had told her as much.

Hannah had mostly been raised in apartments. Early on there had been the blue house up a steep Portola hill. But after the divorce had come the one-bedroom in the Sunset, hallways that always smelled like ammonia, Hannah and Grant in a bunk bed, her mom on the living room pull-out, and cockroaches in the kitchen. Then came the pretty Victorian flat by the Panhandle, which they'd shared with her mom's hippie dancer friend and her autistic son, where refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup and food coloring (red, specifically) were prohibited. After that, an airy carriage house in Bernal Heights Hannah had loved, morning walks with Grant to the school by Holly Park, and the barista at the cafe who expected them every morning for bagels (cream cheese and black pepper). But after just six months, a rent hike on the carriage house, and the death of her grandma's elderly Russian tenant, they moved to the Richmond apartment with salmon wall-to-wall carpeting, where the only grocery store was a Molly Stones so overpriced the family dreaded every trip, and the bagels were always stale. Hannah was seventeen when Jonathan proposed to her mom and they moved to his dad's old house in Glen Park, still crowded with old cop stuff, where her mom and Jonathan started to cook extravagant dinners every night and Hannah no longer wanted any.