Cards (and how we play them) - Hartbig

Prologue

I was 6 years old when my life changed.

Uprooted and practically abandoned. I was 6 years old when I lost everything in the world that held any meaning to me. I was 6 years old when I felt love for the first time.

Can you fall in love when you’re 6?

Probably not. It doesn’t sound fundamental, there’s probably some scientific research that lends to the fact that you can barely understand the concept of counting when you are that young, it’s not credible that you can grasp the world’s greatest and worst emotion, the most complex idea known to human or animal.

Then again, don’t we understand the basics when we’re little? Children are prone to honesty, they only know what they are thinking, they can only say what is on their minds, the bare truth. It’s entirely plausible for a child to fall in love and know it when they are 6. Granted, I didn’t know until I was 12. But the first time I knew love, I was 6.

——-

My parents weren’t the greatest. They cared for me and did what they could, but it was just that – what they could, what they thought they needed to do.

It’s the typical trailer park story you hear every day: my dad was in jail and part of some sort of secret gang or society or something, my mom was an addict. Pills, mostly. Even so, we lived in a relatively nice apartment, low-end as it was, and though my parents had their demons, I was never privy to them. They kept that part hidden from me.

My father was murdered in prison, based on the secrets he held, and my mother succumbed to her greatest weaknesses. I was sad of course, the only people, the only foundation I had was gone, ripped from underneath me. But being only 6, I didn’t fully understand what went on. I still don’t, to this day.

So Child Protective Services picked me up, and as it turns out, my dad had a sister I knew nothing about that lived in San Francisco (isn’t that always the case?). Fast forward a few days and suddenly I’m being dropped off in front of a looming house with an extended yard that just seems too bare to be a home.

Rosaleen Maude can only be described as normal, even to this day. She lives on a quiet street, on the outskirts of a loud town, wears normal cloths at a normal job with a normal life.

A welcome change to what I knew.

“Come on Hannah.” The young Services agent had beckoned me out of the car with a routine smile, grasping at my hand as we walked up the curb to the front door. I remember looking at her hand in mine, admiring her fingers, so much longer than mine how they clasped protectively around my short stubby ones. My parents never held hands with each other, or with me, so the concept itself was foreign. It didn’t seem like such a dreadful thing; it was almost safe, warm. Kind.

Watching my aunt step out of the door and onto the porch, she looked then the way she does now: simple. Jeans and a cardigan, white shirt. No make-up, brunette hair up in a bun, no traces of accessories barring a band around her left wrist. At only 35 years she was aged even then, stress lines across her forehead and wrinkles around her eyes. Despite her appearance, her smile was kind, her light blues eyes, so like mine, shined bright with the innocence of youth.

She stepped down the three steps of her porch, crossing to meet us halfway down the walk.

“Rosaleen?”

She nodded, “Please, call me Roz.”

The agent had nodded politely, presumably in relief that this encounter ran smoother than so many others that didn’t, “Roz, this is Hannah Hart.” She announced as if presenting a princess at her ball, looking down at me and squeezing my hand tight.