“We should spend more of our lives on staircases.”
– Georges Perec
Hannah is already a little drunk by the time she gets to the Eagle’s Nest, navigating carefully along the sparsely-lit streets as she stumbles from Nina’s parents’ house to the bar. It’s a local dive, neighborhood-friendly, tucked away on the inside of a plaza dominated by a grocery store, a florist, and a terrible Chinese restaurant; Nina likes to go there on hockey nights. Hannah is mostly indifferent to it, tagging along with friends who want to stop in on the weekends, but this is the first time she has ever gone by herself; a fact made worse by the unfortunate truth that it’s the closest – the only – place she can think of going without putting herself behind the wheel of a car. It’s almost three in the morning by the time Hannah reaches it, having tripped somehow on a cracked patch of sidewalk and lost her boot halfway, but there’s still a few people lingering outside: an older couple arguing quietly in the shadow of the plaza awning, a handful of college kids smoking and talking around the wire table in front of the big picture window. She doesn’t recognize any of them.
The Eagle’s Nest is mostly empty when she walks in, the corners dark and occupied by a few old men in ballcaps, worn sweaters, guys close to her dad’s age cradling beers in steady palms while they watch baseball highlights on the TV over the bar. The security guy looks up from his crossword and nods at her as she props herself up on a barstool. Dean is the one behind the bar tonight; he’s washing out glasses, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and he doesn’t notice her at first. Hannah can’t bring herself to look at his face and instead studies the tree tattooed on his forearm, traces out the blue-ink branches with her eyes, follows the leaves on his arm to the trunk on his wrist to the roots down over his knuckles, disappearing into the water.
There’s a pause as the song on the jukebox changes and when Dean finally looks up, the way he smiles when he sees her makes her stomach drop, like missing a step in the stairwell. She hasn’t known him for very long and is the first to admit she doesn’t know him very well, but Hannah can’t help but like him – he’s funny, he’s friendly, he gives her free drinks. He flirts with her sometimes when she comes in with her friends and even though she likes it, there’s a decent enough chance that he already has a girlfriend. The Facebook results were inconclusive.
“Didn’t think you were coming in tonight,” he says, wiping his hands dry with a dishrag. The music is too loud in the almost-empty bar, he nearly has to shout. “It’s been a while, Han. You too busy to come see me?”
Hannah shrugs. “Sort of.”
“Well, you made it in time for last call, sweetheart. Anything you want?”
“Tequila,” she says, “A lot of it.”
Dean obliges and Hannah leans on her forearms against the counter, thinks about laying her head down while she waits. He sets the glass at her wrist and Hannah picks it up without preamble; she swallows it all and the Cuervo rings in her mouth, numbs it and warms it at the same time.
“Bad day?” he asks, and when she doesn’t answer he gives her a look, half-thoughtful, half-worried. The way he’s standing makes it look like the wings on the eagle etched into the mirror are growing out of his back and she almost laughs – Some guardian angel, she thinks, and when he asks, “Wanna talk about it?” Hannah can only shake her head. She breathes deep and it shudders in her chest, her throat. She can’t get her words to work, not yet.
“Wait here,” Dean says, and pours little more in her glass before he disappears off to the side. The lights in the window flick off and the bar gets darker, warmer, as Dean starts shuffling people outside. Security goes out for a smoke as the college kids trickle in slowly to pay their tabs, find their coats, and Hannah stays quiet down at her end of the counter, trying to make herself small and unnoticeable. She stares down at the glass in her hand and feels like some old-lady drunk, like that crazy lady she saw in the deli last week who put lithium tablets in her ice cream like sprinkles, and it sends an electric shiver all the way down her spine because that’s the big fear, isn’t it? That she’ll end up just like that, homeless-woman overcoat and all, that she’s spent all this time climbing, struggling against the incline and pulling herself out of the pit, just to wind up as someone who can’t face it, can’t face anything, that after everything that’s happened she’s still just a girl who can’t, who can’t –
Hannah drowns her thoughts in what’s left in her glass. She had a lot of rum back at Nina’s place and the tequila probably isn’t doing her any favors.
Dean turns the locks on the door once the cash is in the drawer and turns off the TV over the bar. It makes the room smaller, it feels like a cave. The jukebox is still playing on the money someone else put in, some super-happy synth-pop song she doesn’t know, and it’s jarring, almost, the dissonance between the upbeat music in the room and the hard emptiness in the pit of her stomach, her reasons for being there. She’s still staring at her empty glass when Dean turns her chair around, spinning the seat so she’s facing him. He’s so much taller than her, a monstrous shape in the low light. His hands are warm where he rests them on her shoulders and Dean runs them down her arms, his hands huge over hers as he pulls her to her feet. She’s expecting the hug but it still feels strange: being this close to someone she barely knows, held like she matters by someone who has no real reason to care. Dean holds her tight and Hannah turns her head so that the side of her face rests against his chest, breathing in as she closes her eyes.
“What happened?” he asks, and Hannah swallows hard.
She wants to tell him about how she came home from running errands yesterday and broke down almost as soon as she came through the front door, how she couldn’t even make it up the staircase before she’d collapsed, boneless and sobbing, on the fourth step, unable to stop or move or make any sense of it at all. She wants to tell him about how isolated she feels, how she knows her friends and family are all happy she’s come back, that she’s home, but that doesn’t change the fact that the lives of everyone she loves have orbits that don’t revolve around her, now, that she’s freewheeling like comet over vast and vacant sky. She feels useless, empty, like she fell out of her own body somewhere along the line; food doesn’t even taste like food anymore, just something she has to put in her mouth and swallow. Dean smoothes his hand over the back of her head and Hannah wants to tell him about how nearly every day since she’s come back home has felt like an uphill battle, like she’s been climbing and climbing endless flights of stairs and there’s still no sight of the top floor.
“Just a rough day,” she says instead, and she can feel Dean’s mouth pressing against the top of her head. He tells her that he’s sorry and she shifts in his arms, wishing for an exit sign.
Rach (Out Loud) 