The In-Between Hour

by Barbara Claypole White

What did he think? It was as if he’d reached a solid hold on a rock face, a place where he could pause and compose himself.

Hannah becomes Will's anchor, the most important part of a climb.

Tackle a rock face without a strategy and you could drift onto hazardous rocks. Rush, and you could face calamity that proved fatal.

More Will philosophy. :)

Drums. He slowed his pace. The beat of drums pounded up through the earth, through the flattened grass, through the soles of his Converse and into his calf muscles. The drums tugged at him, calling him to dance. No. He wasn’t being pulled back to a life of poverty and mental illness, a life of being trapped between two worlds and not belonging to either. Not belonging to the tribe because he looked so all-white American. Not belonging at school because he wasn’t a jock: he was a writer. The small kid in kindergarten whose only friend was a girl; the high schooler with the crazy parent.

Again, readers get to the heart of Will's demons.

The drums continued to echo through his skin, through his muscles, through his blood. Calling him to dance.

Will has to start listening to the drums again …

Poppy laughed. Yeah, he had that effect on people when he tried out anger. Like an invisible member of the chorus line, he wasn’t cut out for front-row emotions.

Will has so little self-belief, despite his public success.

The shoulder of her T-shirt had tugged down to expose part of the tattoo. Grow up in the South, and any idiot could recognize wild wisteria. What was more intriguing was that she had chosen to mark her body with the symbol of love lost and the ability to endure. “Beautiful ink,” he said, and looked up into eyes that met his at the exact same level.

Hannah has as many hidden layers as Will …

The line of people behind him all wore traveling faces: trapped in transit, happiness checked along with their luggage. There was a poem in that thought, if words could break through the brume in his brain. Words had become empty vessels no longer infused with affect.

I stole Galen's "traveling faces" from one of my son's poems.

Counterfeit emotions he could do, but gestures involved effort. Hard to send messages of movement to a body weighted down by invisible, wet sandbags.

How depression feels to Galen.

Dad didn’t understand that he couldn’t perk up, he couldn’t aim that high. Galen just wanted one day when he didn’t wake up crying.

This came from one of my research interviews--with a young man, diagnosed with depression, who told me he often woke up crying.

He couldn’t stomach violence, and yet his storytelling mind circled psychopathic behavior like a hummingbird hovering over a red hibiscus flower. Most mothers showed their kids how to fold laundry. His mom schooled him in the darkness of the human psyche.

And back to Will's personal demons!

She owned a dinner service for twelve yet lived a cater-for-one lifestyle.

This is Hannah in one sentence.

When had Galen decided to give up on himself? Did self-loathing just slam into him one day like a piece of space junk falling from the sky, or had it always been there, festering in his DNA, and she’d been too busy to notice?

I understand, only too well, how guilt creeps in when you're a parent terrified for your child.

Sick sounded so much better than recovering from a major depressive episode. “Yes, that’s why he’s home.”

The sad fact of the stigma and shame that is still attached to mental illness.

into the dying light of the gloaming. Life always seemed brighter, more auspicious, at this time of the day. Something to do with the quality of the light, she supposed—so soft, so gentle—and the way it illuminated the treetops with gold. But right now the gloaming spoke of lives suspended, of an endless sense of waiting. But waiting for what—for things to get better or worse?

Many of the scenes are set during the gloaming …

Galen woke up crying. He wanted to feel something—anything—but anxiety. Anxiety wasn’t even a true emotion. It was the space between

My son, who battles OCD, refers to anxiety as the space between emotions.

Galen scraped around a chair and straddled it. He draped himself over the back with the insouciance of an English major who believed genre fiction belonged in the ninth circle of hell.

I enjoyed putting Will and Galen on different sides of the genre versus literary fiction debate.

She can drop everything for a client, even if it’s during Christmas dinner.” Will raised his eyebrows. Ruined Christmas dinners? That was his territory. “She’s a people pleaser with really shitty boundaries,” Galen said.

This says more about Hannah than Will or Galen. (Galen nailed it!)

Good kid, his Willie. Always done what he were told. Knew how to be quiet, too, so as not to upset his mama. And knew when to go to his room. One time, had to lock the boy in for a whole night while he went searchin’ for Angeline. Came home and found Willie curled up asleep in the corner of his room. Felt real bad about that, but couldn’t hire no babysitter. Family secrets, they weren’t for sharin’.

Will grew up in a very dysfunctional home. (In case you're still wondering!)

Spiritual was the word people attached to Mom, but therapy had taught him to be honest and repressed was more accurate. Thinking in adjectives—empirical proof of how low he had sunk.

Galen and Will both think as writers.

He used to admire the way she allowed people to be themselves, but her inability to question his flaws was a burden he no longer wanted. Trust was a dangerous disease.

Galen is in a dark place when he comes on the page.

Gradually he was acquiring objects down here, hoarding worse than a blue jay.

Will has never had a home; he's never felt he belongs. Anywhere.

On Saponi Mountain, an owl hooted twice. “My writer friends will be stunned when you pop up on my wall.” “Use it to add to the mystique of your breakdown. Pretend I seduced you to the dark side.” And then Galen did something totally unexpected. He laughed.

I loved excavated the relationship between these two broken writers.

She was in uncharted territory with her eldest, stumbling through a desert and searching for a large neon signpost that flashed This Way to Being a Good Mother.

I know how this feels …

The lack of greeting provided an instant cure. Anger was not an emotion she wanted to own, but yes, she was ever so slightly pissed. Pissed that she had developed a ridiculous crush; more pissed that her crush hadn’t said hello.

Back to the slow dance between Hannah and Will. They shuffle forward and leap back.

“I don’t trust,” Will said. “It’s what keeps me alive as a rock climber.” “Since you’re not dangling off a rock, now might be a good time to start trusting. No one knows that forest better than I do.”

Will doesn't trust, and Hannah has the opposite problem.

They passed a huge root ball from Hurricane Fran and trudged onto the old trading path. The undergrowth rustled, and Hannah raised her face into a rain of falling leaves.

Our property is still covered in root balls from Hurricane Fran.

“The creek’s dry, of course, but there are ferns and wildflowers everywhere on the other side. And each spring a wave of daffodils marks out a long-forgotten homestead.

When one of our neighbors took me on the private trails through the woods, we stumbled on a derelict homestead surrounded by daffodils.

“How did you know, about the graves?” “Periwinkle.” He pointed. “Planted on graves to suppress weeds. My dad taught me to read the land. He also encouraged me to play wherever I saw vinca growing, since it doesn’t provide enough cover for snakes. Come to think of it, I spent most of my childhood playing on graves. Which makes it totally impressive that I didn’t end up as a serial killer.”

I learned this fact during one of the historical walks I took on the land behind our house.

You didn’t just walk away from parenthood because your son was dead—or because he wanted to be.

Amen.

“This was the site of an old grist mill,” she said. “That’s the headrace, and on the other side is where the wheel would have been. The dam was destroyed in the yellow fever epidemic.” “To kill off mosquitoes?” “Exactly. There are so many memories on this piece of land, piled up top of one another. So many lives.” She exhaled. “So many deaths.”

In the original manuscript, a family had been murdered on the land and the father survived only to be chased down the mountain and butchered near the site of the cottage. When Will moved in with his bottled-up grief, he triggered the emotions of the fleeing father. Emotions stored on the land. Pretty weird, huh?

“This is a beautiful spot.” Suddenly chilled, he rubbed his arms. “Peaceful, but the air feels heavy.” “You feel it, too, the sadness?” Her voice rose. “I wouldn’t go that far.” “Do you believe in ghosts?” she said. “Not really.” He was not going to talk about the dead, the spirit world, any of it.... “I do.” She smiled. “My mother taught me to believe in them.” “Yeah, well, lucky you. Mine taught me to believe in human monsters.” He glanced back at the headrace. Again, the feeling of being watched. “Your mother liked a good ghost story?” “She was psychic.” “No shit.” “Your mother liked a good horror story?” “She was insane.” “No shit,” Hannah said.

One of my favorite exchanges between Will and Hannah, this echoes the novel's beginnings as a ghost story.

I’m not someone who peddles regret. I’m someone who believes the present exists because of the past. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Pure Hannah!

No one knew what happened once a family retreated inside a house, pulled the curtains and locked the front door, and life rarely made sense. But standing among the hardwood trees, surrounded by squirrels that were noisier than a bunch of preschoolers in Central Park, Will understood.

I know so many families struggling with mental illness who fake it in public.

“He has a gift. First published at eight, and in high school he won a national competition that’s been going since the twenties. Sylvia Plath was a previous winner. How’s that for irony?” “The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards? Did he win a senior writing portfolio?” “Yes. How did you know?” “Past recipient. Why are you smiling?” His dad was really, really right about that smile.

My son was also a national winner--silver medal for poetry. :)

Maybe being at the cottage was like reaching a solid hold on a difficult route and pausing to rest. Maybe he needed to be here while he gained strength to move forward with his life. A life without Freddie.

Will is beginning to see a way forward, and goes back to a climbing analogy.

This whole conversation was about as fun as squatting in a tick nest.

I still love this line. I hate ticks!

Poetry was the medium through which he translated the world. Without it, he was blind, deaf and dumb. Zombie Galen.

Pure Galen.

When Galen was sixteen, he wrote a poem about her called, “Inside I Weep.” Mom had assumed it was his reaction to the divorce, and Galen hadn’t disillusioned her. So many times he’d heard her crying when she thought she was alone—crying either for her marriage or for his grandparents.

Galen shows us a different side of Hannah.

A false memory flashed. She was meeting Will when she was his age, before the lines, before the stomach sag. Before.

The sad reality of being an older woman!

He was right, of course, but hearing him bite down on the words mental illness slapped her across the face. All those years she had kept him safe, and yet she had failed to protect him from the greatest threat of all: himself.

Similar thoughts circle constantly when you feel as if you're losing your child to an invisible disability. Nothing prepares you, as a parent, for the realization that your child has to battle demons and while you can be sympathetic and loving, you can't stop them. Or even share the battles.

Started with scramblings and bouldering on Occoneechee Mountain. Nothing extreme. I didn’t go on my first roped climb until I was fifteen. My parents couldn’t afford lessons, but climbing’s a family talent.

Why Will is a rock climber.

“Why would you climb if you don’t like heights?” “It’s not about heights. When the slightest shift in the position of one finger can make a difference, it’s about skill—balance, agility and precision.” “You’re an adrenaline junkie?” “Total opposite.” Will flicked back his hair. “Climbing takes me to some stripped-down spiritual place. Stress, worry—both disappear. When I’m climbing, my mind empties of everything but the purity of the moment. The world shrinks to what’s directly in front of me.

Climbing is Will's spirituality. When he's above the world, he feels as if he's talking to God.

Nothing matters beyond my movements on the rock. Nothing exists beyond what I can reach. I concentrate on my breath and the placement of my feet. It’s almost like choreography. I guess you could say climbing’s a controlled dance.”

Back to dancing …

Then she woke at 3:00 a.m., the hour of hauntings, with her heart pounding like a jackhammer. Pure evil had sauntered out of her subconscious to hover in her bedroom doorway, watching, waiting, barring her escape. For a moment, she had thought Galen was screaming—a distorted scream like a manufactured Hollywood sound shot through a wind tunnel. But when she’d tiptoed upstairs to check on him, he was lost in peaceful slumber.

I used to have this dream about 'pure evil.' No idea why.

However, when Liam was four and flooded the inside of her truck with the garden hose, she had fantasized about packing him off to kindergarten boarding school.

When he was little, one of my nephews did this to his father's car. (Stuck the hose through the moon roof!)

“First, we got to find us some willow branches, to make the loops. I have leather and beads in one of them boxes in the corner, but we also need feathers from the all-seein’ night owl.” “That shouldn’t be a problem if you like scavenger hunts. There’s an owl living on the edge of the forest. I’ve even seen him during the day.”

And there he is again--the all seeing owl!

No moon, no stars, just a blanket of darkness. Ahead, a fortress of trees rose like a battalion of undead guards. Two coyotes howled; Saponi Mountain was alive with the kill.

Given Will's relationship to the forest, he sees only danger.

As they crossed the gravel, a thrush—nature’s flautist—announced the gloaming. Another thirty minutes and darkness would fall, but right now the house and the cottage were suspended between day and night, caught in that moment when nothing was defined and everything seemed possible. Galen had written several poems about the gloaming, and she often found herself out in the woods with her camera at this time. The French called it the blue hour; photographers called it the golden hour; Hannah called it the in-between hour. It spoke of endings and beginnings. And today, it spoke of promise for a better tomorrow.

Another small, but important, moment set during the gloaming.

I never had friends over. Couldn’t risk it, not when the house throbbed with her moods. Hiding our lives became a time-consuming lie.

This is Will's heart-breaking truth: much of his life has been lived behind a lie.

Family life is never about the picket fence and the home-baked dinner rolls. It’s about surviving crises. You get through one, there’s always another one waiting in the wings.”

I agree with Hannah's statement one hundred percent.