Read Online The Firstborn by Conlan Brown - Free Book Online Page B

displace the tangled strand that hung in her face.
    She took in a long breath of air, held it, then let it out slowly, as if to feel the substance of her own body with her lungs. Instead she felt hollow.
    Her eyes focused on the picture in front of her. It was of her, a little girl in a blue dress on the Fourth of July, sparkler in hand, twirling for her parents.
    She missed her parents, even though she knew she shouldn’t.
    Her father had been a truck driver and was gone too much. Her mother was a lonely woman who passed her time with too many male friends while her husband was away. When Hannah was five, her father came home a day early and found her mother with one of her “uncles.” Her father left and never came back, and Hannah’s mother went shopping. She found men and ran off with them, leaving Hannah with her grandfather for long stretches of time, only to come back and sweep her away at a moment’s notice to go live with the man of the week.
    When Hannah was fourteen, her grandfather had put his foot down, refusing to let his daughter drag Hannah all over the world to live with unseemly men. That was the last she would see her mother for two years, and only sporadically after that.
    Hannah sighed. Last she knew her mother was living in Black Hawk with a man named Robert, but that was all she really knew. She looked at a picture of her grandfather and his late bride and smiled. They were her real parents.
    Something in her lungs ached and she felt it again—
    Bullets punching through a car’s windshield, a holy man’s body being punctured with lead—
    “Hannah?”
    She snapped back to the moment and looked at her grandfather standing at the end of the hall.
    “Hannah?” he said again. “Dinner’s ready.”
    She nodded, glanced at the picture one last time, then followed him into the next room.

    Henry Rice sat at the dinner table, shaking salt onto his potatoes, eyes fixed on Hannah. She sat, shoulders stooped, hair in her face, staring at her plate.
    “How are you feeling?” he asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.
    She didn’t reply.
    “You need to eat,” he said with a concerned smile. “Do you think you could eat?”
    After a moment she nodded, reached down, and picked up a knife and fork. She took a bite of food and chewed silently.
    “Maybe we should do something tomorrow,” he said, trying to be helpful. “Would you like that?”
    She shrugged dispassionately.
    “You know,” he said, groping for the right words, “when your grandmother passed away, I didn’t leave the house for a month. I was miserable.”
    Hannah dabbed at her plate.
    “Then, one day my granddaughter showed up,” he said with a smile, “and she took me out of the house and we went for a drive through the mountains.”
    She stopped.
    “Do you remember that?” he asked.
    She nodded. “It was fall.”
    “Yes, it was,” he said warmly. “You got me out of the house and you helped me see the world again.”
    “I’m just not ready,” she said in a small voice.
    “You will be,” he said, confidently, “and when you are, I’ll be right there to take you to see the world again.”
    She smiled weakly and went back to her plate.
    They finished their meal in silence.

    Hannah sat in her room in an old rocking chair, a stuffed bear in her arms. Back and forth she rocked, staring at her bed, pajamas laid out neatly on the soft, tight sheets.
    Outside the world was dark. It was time for bed. She was tired, but she couldn’t bring herself to crawl into bed. All she could think about was the way they had grabbed her as she left her home in the morning, throwing her roughly into a van.
    Hannah felt scared, unwilling to go to bed. She’d slept with the light on every night for two weeks now, fighting sleep. She knew better than to be afraid of the dark, but she felt it anyway. The thought of going to bed scared her, not with blind terror but a kind of unsettling knot that twisted and clawed at the inside of her