A Prayer for Hanna

Eve Samaha

My older sister, Maggie, had a dog. It was a Bichon Frisé, a shrunken poodle, named Hanna. Her eyes dripped brown tears. Maggie tied bibs around Hanna’s white neck and clipped red bows on her frilly ears. Mom and Dad loved the way Maggie took care of that dog. 

“Show them her decorations,” Mom said, when we had guests. “The little red bows.”

“This dog is a genius,” Dad said, when Hanna gave him her paw. I accidentally walked on Hanna’s foot, and Maggie rushed to her side. 

“Beatrice!” she said, glaring at me. Then she whispered a prayer. “God, let her foot be okay.”

We lived in Michigan in a big red house. Maggie and I were the only children. Our parents bought Maggie pink and blue dresses every year to wear to church. She passed them down to me when they got tight. We numbed our buttocks on the pews every Sunday. Maggie and I knew God wasn’t real. 

“He doesn’t make sense,” I said. “God is a manifestation of people’s fear,” Maggie said. “I’m not really afraid of anything. I don’t need him.” 

When we were in school, I saw her in the bathrooms. She would fling open the stall door and give me a withering look. Her eyes were always puffy. Maggie cried a lot even though she had the dog and a handsome boyfriend called Roger. Her face was smooth and she tied her long red hair back with ribbons and bows. Her fingers were slender, a pianist’s fingers, but she had no musical talent at all. 

I stood outside her bedroom door when she was with Roger. 

“What do you wanna do now?” she was saying. 

I listened to them kiss. 

Since Maggie was the oldest daughter, Mom subscribed to her life like a magazine. At church, Dad talked about her two successes: playing Antigone in the Spring Showcase in her freshman year, and her dog, who knew paw and roll over. She’s my eldest, he said, gazing at her fondly. God blessed me with this one. His church friends admired Maggie and her beautiful red hair. She would look at the ground. 

Maggie had felt the pressure when she was fourteen. She started scratching at her scalp until she had bald spots. Mom gave her a rubber stress ball, and Maggie massaged and poked holes in it with a pencil. When she lost the stress ball, she started biting her nails. Since that was less noticeable than the bald spots, Mom let it slide. 

When Maggie was fifteen, she burst out crying in church. Dad grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the aisle. Mom and I followed. The congregation murmured. At home, Dad shouted at Maggie. 

“Control yourself,” he said. “Or…” Maggie wasn’t crying anymore. 

She scratched her head and said, “Or what?”

Mom took three Advil in the kitchen and I went to my room. Maggie showed up at my door an hour later. 

“Mom and Dad hate me,” she said. 

“No,” I said. “They hate me.” She laughed. 

“Why would they?” she said. “You don’t do anything. Not the way I do.” 

“That’s why they hate me.” 

“You’re so normal,” she said. “No one likes normal people, anyway.” 

I picked up my book and turned away from her. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t even care.” 

My friend, Lily, lived with her parents and her older brother in a white house down the road. Lily cheated off my tests. 

We were sitting on her bedroom rug playing Go Fish. 

“My parents hired a tutor,” she said. “Because I’m dumb.” 

“That’s good,” I said. Something started thudding repeatedly against the wall. 

“That’s my brother,” she said, standing up. “His soccer ball.” I followed her into her brother’s room. She kicked the ball away from him. He put her in a headlock and she screamed. They laughed like hyenas. 

“We don’t fight like that all the time,” she told me afterward. “He does love me.” 

“Yes,” I said. “I know he does.” Her family was perfect. 

That year Mom and Dad had brought the dog home on Christmas. Maggie sat in a pile of wrapping paper and Hanna squirmed onto her lap.

“She can be like my new baby sister,” she said, crying, smoothing the dog’s fur. Hanna had beady black eyes. She licked Maggie’s chin. 

“She’s an emotional support animal,” Dad said from his armchair. “She’s really going to change your life.” 

“Isn’t she supposed to make you stop crying?” I said. I flipped through my new book. Mom had rubbed Maggie’s back and asked me to put the wrapping paper in a trash bag. 

After the dog arrived, Maggie said prayers all the time. 

“God, let her not have any illnesses or injuries,” she said, on her knees. Dad had taken Hanna to the vet. 

“God, let her be safe,” she said. Mom had let the dog out in the backyard at night. 

“I thought you didn’t believe in him,” I said. 

She looked up at me pathetically. “I don’t,” she said. “It’s an expression.”

My family had dinner together every night. Our dining table was large and rectangular, which allowed Dad to sit at the head. 

“Lord, bless this food, and bless us,” he said. His eyes were closed. He looked plump and righteous. 

“Thank you to the farmers who picked these vegetables,” Mom added. She was all about thanking people. Dad gave her a priestly smile.

“I have straight A’s,” I said. First-semester grades had just come in. Mom and Dad hummed their approval. I waited for them to tell me I had a bright future. Maggie ate a stalk of asparagus from the top to bottom in little bites. 

“You’re very smart,” Mom said. I nodded emphatically. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. “I wasn’t that smart when I was in ninth grade.” 

“Was I that smart?” Maggie said. She forked another piece of asparagus. Everyone ate a bite of asparagus or chicken. 

“I feel lucky to have two smart daughters,” Dad said. “There aren’t enough of those.” Maggie and I looked at Mom, and then we all looked at Dad. His beard quivered with asparagus drippings. 

“Hey,” Mom said. “Hanna wants chicken.” The three of them turned and fussed over the dog, who was begging at the corner of the table. 

I felt sorry that Dad had to live with three women, since he was a sexist. He was fifty-four and bald. He stalked around our backyard slapping the bushes with a rolled up newspaper, looking for invasive Japanese beetles. He spent hours with the Reader’s Digest crosswords. He read aloud from the Bible every Christmas Eve, licking his finger before he turned each page. 

“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign,” he would say. 

“Oh, George,” Mom would say. “They’re tired.” 

They had met in high school when she was a blonde varsity cheerleading flyer. They went to the same church group. In their marriage photos, they stood side by side, Dad looking ugly next to Mom. She married him because she got pregnant with Maggie. I still thought that she should have married someone else and pretended the baby didn’t belong to Dad. Maybe the years of flipping in mid-air had confused her. 

Dad lost the dog on a Saturday in winter. 

“The backyard fence has a hole in it,” he said, leaning on the kitchen counter. I put down my book and sat up on the couch. 

“George,” Mom said. “What will Maggie say?” She looked at the medicine cabinet, probably contemplating Advil. Maggie was at Roger’s house for the afternoon. Mom opened the cabinet and closed it. Dad called the police. 

I felt crazy with anger. I pictured Dad praying to God to bring the dog back instead of running after her. I pictured Hanna dead in the snow. We would never find the body because of her white fur, camouflaged. I leaned toward the coffee table and tore up the crossword he had been working on. With the pieces in my hands, I walked into the kitchen and showed him. He was still on the phone. 

“I ripped this up,” I said. He nodded, got out his notepad and started writing. I looked at the notepad to see if he was writing a message for me. “Animal Control,” it said, and the number. I threw out the crossword scraps. He put down the phone. 

“Let’s think about this rationally,” he said. “If you were a dog, where would you go?” Mom sat down at the dining table and put her head in her hands. I sat next to her. The woods stretched for miles behind our house.

“If I were a dog,” I said. “I would get eaten by a coyote.” Dad’s eyes widened, satisfying me. He handed Mom the notepad. 

“I have written down the number for animal control,” he said. “Please call it.”

“Can’t you do that?” she said. She picked at her scalp with her index finger. “I’m going to pray,” he said. Mom stood up quickly. 

“That’s what you always do,” she said. “You just pray.” 

“What do you mean by that?” he said slowly. He was a big man. 

“I’ll do the praying,” I said to Dad. He picked up the phone and dialed Animal Control. Mom sat back down. 

“Poor Hanna,” she said. “Imagine her out there with her little red bows. She doesn’t deserve this.” 

“We’ve failed her,” I said. I hoped she knew I was talking about Maggie. 

“Your father is very stubborn,” Mom whispered. She glanced behind her. “He won’t admit that this is his mistake.” 

“Whose mistake does he think it was?” I said. She didn’t answer. 

“A little white dog,” Dad said into the receiver. “Red bows.” 

“Please, God,” I said, putting my hands together. “Let her be safe.” 

We sat around the dining table after he hung up. 

“Maggie’s a very sensitive girl,” Dad said. “She’s not going to take this well.” 

“She’s more than sensitive,” I said. “She’s deranged.” 

“What!” Mom said, slapping her hand on the table.

“She’s worried that you hate her,” I said to them. That made them both splutter. “Hanna is the glue holding this family together,” I said. “Was.”

“I’d like to think that role belonged to me,” Dad said. He sat up straight in his chair. 

“Oh, yes,” Mom said. “Absolutely.” She had wrinkles around her eyes like whirlpools. They made an unfortunate pair, I realized. No one would take the blame. We sat on a seesaw, perfectly balanced. One tip in the wrong direction and someone would go down. 

We were still sitting at the table when Maggie came in through the back door. Hanna ran in at her feet. 

“Why was she out in the backyard?” Maggie demanded. “Who let her out?”

“Me,” I said. 

“God,” Maggie said. “Of course it was you.”