By Blood

“Are you certain you can bear to part with... it?”

“Yes - it’s just.. a burden.”

“Ok then - it’s a deal.”

The two women hung up simultaneously. The first walked over and tentatively touched a mobile hanging over a crib with one hand. The second cradled her pregnant belly and burst into tears. 

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23 Years Later

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Every year, Hannah’s mother would give whatever Mother’s Day gift she received the same brooding, disapproving stare before remarking on how difficult Hannah’s birth was and how she deserved something more for her efforts to bring Hannah into the world. Then she’d skulk down the hall to her room, close the door, and turn on her radio and her podcasts to listen to the news and stories of cold murder cases, just like she did every other day of the year.  Hannah would see a ratty, yellowed towel appear to block the crack under the door. It didn’t totally prevent the smell of cigarette smoke from wafting through, but Hannah never mentioned the smell. She was too afraid of Mother’s reaction. 

Hannah and her mother lived in a small town called Fairacres, with no family or friends or really any other connection to the town. Mother had moved there shortly before Hannah’s birth because the town had the right combination of affordable apartments and open jobs, she said. Hannah yearned for a brother or sister or some cousins to play with, but Mother told her many many times that none of that was in the cards for her. “Just us against the world,” Mother said. 

Growing up, Hannah was kept inside and alone most of the time. Mother had homeschooled her, and Hannah was not allowed to go out at all without Mother - not to the park, the library, or even the store. Hannah had once asked if she and Mother could go for a walk down the street, and Mother had lectured her for hours about staying inside and staying safe. Mother worked the graveyard shift cleaning the local ER, and before she would leave for work she’d tuck Hannah into bed and then lock the door from the outside. Hannah would turn toward the wall and pick at the patterned paper. 

As Hannah got older, Mother started venturing out more, especially to church, but Hannah always had to stay home. She could watch TV, and she had a computer so she could get online as long as she never posted photos of herself. But in real life, Hannah resigned herself to staying inside the two-bedroom apartment. 

When Hannah turned eighteen, she was permitted to take a job at a local motel. Mother had gotten to know the owner, Mrs. Preston, at church and felt satisfied that she would keep Hannah safe. Hannah would arrive after check-out time for the guests and would clean the rooms before check-in time for the next round of visitors. 

She still didn’t get to talk to almost anyone, but she found a wonderful array of things left behind by motel patrons. Exotic coins, books of all kinds, postcards, magazines, pictures, toys, and even some jewelry. She was diligent about putting everything she found into the Lost and Found bin in the main office, and just as diligent about coming back to claim the now ownerless things after the thirty-day waiting period expired. She loved these glimpses into the lives of others, and imagined a version of her life where she went to stay in motels and owned such interesting things. 

Several years passed that way, with the lost things Hannah found providing the only change from day to day. 

Then, the most amazing thing happened. 

She had walked into Room 103, which was her least favorite to clean because it had less space between the bed and the wall than other rooms. People inevitably dropped the grossest stuff down there, evidently thinking that it was some kind of black hole that no one had to clean. But this particular day the most tremendous prize had come out of the bedside abyss - a genealogy kit from DNAdventure. 

The kit was brand new, still in its plastic shrink wrap. She carefully read every word on the outside of the box, getting more and more excited. Mother and I can find some family! We won’t be so alone. Maybe then Mother will feel less scared all the time, she thought. She was tempted to take it right then, but her fear of getting in trouble and losing her job was too great. As much as she wanted the kit, she wanted her job and the meager freedoms it afforded her even more. 

Thirty days later, the former occupant of Room 103 hadn’t called to ask if the kit had been found, so Hannah retrieved it from the Lost and Found bin with a huge smile. She took the kit into the bathroom and carefully wrapped it inside her sweatshirt, then tucked it into the bottom of her backpack. She had walked home smiling at the sun. 

That night, she had pretended to sleep until 2am, excitedly waiting for Mother to go to bed. Mother would come in and check on her over and over again before she went to bed, and Hannah didn’t want to risk being caught. But once she was certain Mother was asleep, Hannah took the DNAdventure kit out, working as quietly as possible. 

She carefully read all the instructions, then spent ten minutes spitting silently into the sample collection tube. She packaged everything up and tucked it all back into her backpack. The next day, she’d managed to leave work fifteen minutes early, giving herself enough time to run to the post office and mail the kit without Mother noticing that she was late coming home. That night she lay in bed, picking at her wallpaper and dreaming about what it would be like to go to a family reunion. 

The day the results were due in Hannah’s inbox, she spent the day nervously shifting her weight back and forth between her feet while she cleaned, trying to burn off her excitement. She just knew that the results would open up a whole new world for them, and she couldn’t wait to go home and open the email that was the key to her new expanded family. 

Later that night, after Mother was snoring, Hannah pulled her laptop under the blankets with her and logged into her email. “Your DNAdventure is About to Begin!” the email subject line declared. Hannah clicked the link, configured her login, and then closed her eyes. 

“Please let them have found some family,” she whispered, and clicked the Relatives icon, holding her breath while the page loaded. She was stunned - she had tons of family! And not just fourth cousins and long-dead ancestors - her eyes darted between aunts, uncles, cousins, and, to her true shock and amazement, her father. Mother had used a sperm bank when she decided to have a child, so Hannah had never had any hope of knowing anything about her father. And here was the donor’s name! Sadly, the site listed a death date for him, so there was no hope of meeting the man who had made her possible, but it still felt good to have his name. 

The site offered her the ability to reach out and contact her new family members, but she held off. Her fear of Mother and her ingrained wariness of other people stopped her. She just stared at all the names of people she hoped would love her. Although she was too nervous to reach out, she did decide to take the risk of snapping a selfie with her phone and posting it on her profile. She wasn’t supposed to put images of herself anywhere, let alone online, but Hannah’s fear of Mother’s rules was outweighed by her hopes of someone pointing out that they looked exactly alike. After posting her photo and logging off, she closed her computer and picked at the wallpaper until she fell asleep. 

The next morning, Mother noticed Hannah’s jubilant mood. 

“Why are you grinning at your cereal? It’s not like the world got less dangerous overnight,” she growled into her coffee mug. Hannah simply agreed with her and rushed back to her room to get ready for work. She planned to spend her shift mentally composing messages to the family tree. 

After work, Hannah sat with Mother and had dinner. As Hannah cleared the table, Mother left to go to the store. Hannah stood on tiptoe so she could see out the high windows of their basement apartment. When she saw Mother drive away, Hannah ran back to her room and fired up her computer. She logged into DNAdventure and saw a red four on her inbox. Someone had written to her! Opening her message page, she saw that all four messages were from the same woman, Nancy, who was listed as being her maternal aunt, which was strange since Mother had never mentioned a sister. The subject lines were not exactly what she was expecting, however. 

“Is this some kind of sick joke? How dare you.”

“This isn’t possible.”

“I’m going to sue you and this fucking website.”

“You are cruel and sick!”

Hannah was baffled and upset. Why was her brand new aunt attacking her like this? She clicked the first message. The body of the message was more of the vitriol from the subject line. She clicked through the other messages and saw more of the same. 

Hannah sat back, confused. She had no idea why this woman would be so angry, considering they’d never met before. Maybe there had been some kind of falling out between Nancy and Mother that Hannah was unaware of. She decided to answer civilly but directly. She wrote back, introducing herself and asking why Nancy was so upset. She wondered if she should write a note to introduce herself to her father’s brother. Maybe that side of the family was nicer. 

Within moments, she got a reply from Nancy: “Can I call you?” 

Hannah decided to risk it. If Nancy decided to keep yelling at her, she could always hang up. She replied with her cell phone number, even though Mother was supposed to be the only one with the number. Seconds later, her phone started to ring. 

“Hello, this is Hannah.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. 

“Hello? Is this Nancy? Hello?”

Suddenly a stifled sob came through from the other end, followed by a couple of shaky breaths. Hannah was listening so intently her brow furrowed. “You sound like her.”

“Hello? Nancy? I sound like who?”

“My sister. You sound like my sister.”

Hannah ran a quick eye over the family tree on her screen. “What sister?”

“Rachel. My sister Rachel.”

“Why does that make you upset?”

“She’s been dead for twenty-three years. It’s, well, very jarring. Who are you?”

“Well, like I said, my name is Hannah, and I live in Fairacres. I work at a motel, cleaning rooms.” Hannah faltered, realizing she didn’t have much else to say about herself. “I’m pretty excited to meet some family - it’s just been Mother and me my whole life. She’s very… protective, so I’m hoping family connections will help her feel, um, more secure?”

“Fairacres. That’s just a hundred miles away from... That photo you posted on your profile - is that you?”

“Yes, of course. Why would I use someone else’s photo?”

“Take another photo of yourself right now. Hold up three fingers on your right hand so I know it’s a picture you just took, and send it to me.”

“Um, no offense, but why?”

“I just…. It’s… can you? Please?” 

Hannah shrugged. “Sure, one sec.” She opened her camera app and took a quick selfie, making certain three fingers on her right hand were visible. She texted it to her aunt. The text alert beeped on the other end of the line.

“My God… I thought you were using a picture of my sister. I thought you were one of those true crime groupies trying to…. Well. You look so much like her.” 

“Oh, well, if I’m related to you, I must be related to her!” 

“No, you don’t understand. Your face, your voice, you live in Fairacres… What about your father?”

“Well, I never knew him - Mother used a sperm bank. I actually just learned his name yesterday from DNAdventure.”

“Was his name Chris Barrington?”

Hannah blinked twice. “How did you know that? That was a pretty amazing guess!”

“Chris was my sister’s husband.”

“Wait, what?”

“I want you to Google my sister, Rachel Barrington. Just… look into it. I’ll call you tomorrow. Rachel Barrington.” The line went dead. 

Hannah laid back on her bed. That was not at all the conversation she had been expecting. She rolled over toward the wall and picked at the wallpaper. This had become her new habit when she lay in bed thinking. The wallpaper was as old as she was, and many of the seams were starting to split open. She had asked Mother several times if she could pull it all down and paint, but Mother would scream about the fumes and forbid it every time. 

After about fifteen minutes of mulling and picking, Hannah sat up and opened Google. She typed Rachel Barrington into the search bar and decided she’d hit the I Feel Lucky button. 

“Gruesome Murder Scene Offers Few Clues” read the headline on the article. Beneath the byline, there was a grainy photo of several police officers looking out over a field in Roseville, a small town 140 miles north of Fairacres. The field was dotted with small white sheets and evidence markers. 

“What the hell,” Hannah muttered. 

The article described a horrifyingly bloody scene in the field - a woman’s body had been dismembered and spread out over a square mile near a pig farm. The pigs had been penned up for the night, but someone had let them loose. A great deal of evidence had been destroyed, but the detective quoted in the paper expressed hope that they would find the killer and bring two charges of aggravated murder. 

The victim, Rachel Barrington, had been pregnant. 

The photo of Rachel they had included in the article could have been Hannah. Same wavy brown hair, same round brown eyes, and same upturned nose. The murder happened twenty-three years ago. On Hannah’s birthday. 

Hannah slammed her computer shut, breathing hard and feeling disconnected from reality. What was this? Some kind of prank? Maybe this was some kind of scheme to get her personal information. Mother was always talking about how being online was dangerous. Maybe this was what she meant. 

Hannah got up and started pacing around her room. The room had been hers since she was a baby and hadn’t ever been updated. In addition to the peeling wallpaper, the carpet was getting ratty and old. There was a large dark spot that spread from the middle of the room to the wall next to Hannah’s bed. She vaguely worried about tearing a hole in the old fabric as her pacing got faster and faster to match the speed of her thoughts. 

Eventually, she sat down and went back to Google. This time, she methodically read her way through every one of the first thirty search results. The murder had been the crime of the century in Fairacres and the neighboring town of Roseville, so there was plenty to read. 

Rachel Barrington had been killed and butchered somewhere and her body parts had been transported to the Roseville field and spread around. She had been thirty-eight weeks pregnant at the time of her death. The police had not been able to find the baby’s body, and they could not rule out that the pigs may have eaten it. More recent articles revealed that the case had gone cold. Rachel’s husband Chris had died by suicide five years after the murder.  And they had never finished recovering all of Rachel’s remains. The police speculated that if the pigs hadn’t eaten the baby it was possible the murderer had taken her, and periodically they would put out a call to the public for information about a girl Hannah’s age who likely had brown hair, brown eyes, and an upturned nose. 

Hannah turned toward the wall and started picking furiously at the wallpaper. What could this mean? Why did all of this have a ring of truth to it? It was crazy. Mother couldn’t be a killer. Hannah thought about how Mother had said she couldn’t go to school, or the park, or anywhere. She thought about how her birth certificate didn’t have an official seal. She thought about how she had never been able to pick out any resemblances between herself and Mother. 

In her frantic thinking, Hannah picked the wallpaper one time too many, and a giant piece from under the window fell loose. On the wall was a brown handprint, with several brown smears below it, and a giant red and brown stain near the floor. 

Hannah ran to her trash can and threw up. 

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23 Years Earlier

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“This is so nice of you to offer up your baby things. I’m so sorry for your loss.” Rachel tried to make a sympathetically sad face, but she could feel it turn into a grimace at the effort of balancing herself. She was due in just two weeks, and it was getting harder and harder to go down a simple flight of stairs without flailing her arms for balance. But because of the other woman’s loss, she felt like she needed to do whatever she could to not draw attention to her unmissable condition. 

“Thank you. Living without a child is the greatest pain imaginable.” The woman in front of Rachel seemed to pause for a moment, and Rachel again felt self-conscious. 

She was a nice-looking woman with soft black hair framing her narrow face. Her skin was so pale it was possible she’d never been out in the sun, and her eyes were sad and distant. Rachel imagined how hard it must be for this grieving woman to give up the baby items they had discussed after Rachel had responded to the woman’s ad. The crib, clothes, diapers – so many expensive things. Rachel wasn’t sure how she was going to afford any of that, so the ad had been a godsend. 

At the bottom of the stairs, the woman turned left and pulled out a set of keys. Unlocking the front door to the apartment, she turned to beckon Rachel inside. “Right down here, in the nursery,” the woman said, gesturing down the hall. Rachel stepped inside the apartment and shuffled so the woman could close the door behind her. The woman was careful to lock the handle and throw the bolt, which struck Rachel as strange, but she was unfamiliar with this part of town. Maybe I shouldn’t have left my purse in the car, she thought. 

Rachel started down the hall, allowing her arms to fall into their familiar spots around her belly. The apartment seemed to be arranged around one long hallway, which started at the front door and continued straight back with several rooms off to the left along the way. There were no pictures on the walls, and the apartment was silent. Rachel couldn’t even hear the rain outside. They passed the kitchen, a small bathroom, and a bedroom. The hallway ended at a door with a cross and a little sign that said Nursery. 

“Go right in,” said the woman, from behind Rachel. 

Rachel reached out, turned the handle, and pushed the door open. The room was dark, and there was something on the floor that rustled when Rachel walked. She ran her left hand over the wall just inside the door, trying to find a light switch. As she searched, her feet got tangled in whatever was on the floor, and she pitched forward into the darkness.

“Careful,” the woman whispered from the doorway. “You don’t want to hurt the baby.”

Rachel rolled over onto her back, cradling her stomach. She had landed on her hands, and she could feel white hot pain from one of her wrists, which was bent back much farther than it should be. Still, she forced her hands onto her stomach, trying to tell if she’d hurt the baby in the fall. The woman flipped on the light, blinding Rachel. She blinked furiously, trying to get her eyes to adjust, and heard the woman close the door. 

“If you’ve hurt my baby, I’m going to be very very cross. Nothing is more important than my baby’s safety.” The woman crouched down and picked up a large, sharp hunting knife from the floor. 

Rachel’s heart went cold with terror. She reached down to pull herself up and felt smooth plastic sheeting covering  the floor. 

“What are you doing? What’s going on? Open the door.” Rachel backed away from the woman. 

The woman just smiled at her. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. 

“You should be excited,” the woman said. “It’s my baby’s birthday. I’m going to give her the very best life, and keep her safe, for always.” The woman looked pointedly at Rachel’s stomach. 

Rachel’s eyes darted around the room, looking for a weapon, as the woman walked toward her with the knife. “You are not getting my baby!” Rachel yelled.

“Of course I am. And I’m going to take better care of her than you would. I would never go into a stranger’s home with my precious child. That’s why it’s so unfair that my first baby died - I’m going to be an excellent mother.”

The woman’s eyes drifted over to a crib in the corner, wrapped in plastic. 

Rachel got up as quickly as she could and rushed the woman. She managed to knock her into the wall and get past her, but as the woman was falling, she swung her arm around and stabbed Rachel in the leg. Rachel screamed, pain and terror coursing through her. She lunged for the door on her good leg. She could feel warm blood gushing down her pants from the wound on the back of her thigh. 

Rachel fumbled with the doorknob, and finally sprung it open. She took one step into the hallway, but suddenly felt a sharp pain between her shoulder blades. She arched back and let out a scream that left her throat ragged and raw. 

The woman wrapped her free arm around Rachel’s head, covering her mouth with the meat of her bicep. Rachel screamed against the woman’s gray shirt, pulling at the arm that was silencing her with both hands. She felt the knife being pulled out of her back with a sucking pull and the sound of metal scraping bone. Rachel was dragged back into the room. She tried to get some traction against the woman, but the plastic was slick with her blood. Her foot finally caught on something, but soon gave way as she tore a large hole in the plastic sheeting, exposing the carpet beneath. 

She could feel the baby moving frantically. Rachel balled up her fists and shoved both elbows backward as hard as she could into the woman. She landed at least one good blow because the woman fell backward, momentarily losing her grip on Rachel. Rachel again ran for the door, but the woman cut her off. 

Seeing the window on the opposite side of the room, Rachel changed directions. She was mere steps from the window when she felt a hand on the back of her head. The woman closed her fist on Rachel’s hair and brought her up short. She felt the cold hunting knife slide across the front of her throat. It was so sharp that there wasn’t much pain, but the nauseating lightheadedness told her she was losing a lot of blood. 

Rachel fell to her knees, clutching at her throat with both hands. Her eyes were starting to get blurry, and she couldn’t feel her legs. She could see her blood spreading out over the carpet, soaking into the fibers in a large circle around her. All she could think about was her daughter, tiny and defenseless, depending on her for survival. She crawled toward the window. It was high up on the wall near the ceiling, so she had no hope of reaching it. 

She dragged herself toward it anyway. 

She reached upward with a bloody hand and tried to yell for help, but her voice wouldn’t work. She was feeling very weak, and her arm slid back down the wall, leaving a bloody handprint behind. The baby was kicking and moving inside her, but everything else was going very still. 

“Good, you’re settling down. It’s time for the birth of my child. I’m so happy the baby will be born here at home,” the woman said. She pulled Rachel away from the wall by one foot, flipped her onto her back, and sliced into her belly.

The last sound Rachel Barrington heard was her baby’s cry. 

“There, there, my little Hannah,” the woman cooed at the baby. “Don’t worry. Mother’s got you now. And I’ll always, always keep you safe.”