66 pages • 2 hours read
Mary Downing HahnWait Till Helen Comes
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Twelve-year-old Molly and her 10-year-old brother, Michael, are dismayed when their mom announces that they are leaving Baltimore and moving into a renovated church in rural Holwell, Maryland. Mom is excited because the move will give her a studio for her painting and space for her new husband, Dave, to do his pottery. Molly and Michael are upset because their summer plans—a creative writing workshop and science club, respectively—are now canceled. They try to avoid Heather, Dave’s pale-eyed, seven-year-old daughter, who delights in fomenting trouble.
Molly and Michael wish their mom had never married Dave. They understand that Heather lost her mother in a fire when she was three, but they think she should move past that loss or go to therapy—something Dave disapproves of. Heather makes Molly uneasy. Molly tries to act like a big sister, but Heather rebuffs her attempts, even gleefully ripping the heads off the paper dolls Molly made for her. Heather also lies about Michael and Molly to Dave, who believes Heather unequivocally. Mom usually takes Heather’s side as well. Molly feels lonely and unappreciated.
Chapter 2 Summary
The family caravans to Holwell, Dave driving the U-Haul with Heather while Molly, Michael, and Mom ride in the family van. Mom talks excitedly about their new home. Molly admits the white church with its separate living quarters and carriage house is pretty and peaceful, but she and Michael feel betrayed to learn that town is miles away and that there are no nearby neighbors. They believed they were moving to Holwell proper and now realize they will have trouble finding new friends.
Molly must watch Heather while the others unload. Heather crabbily follows Molly down a pleasant, wooded path. Molly wades in the shallow stream beside Heather until the girls must turn back. On a different path, they discover a graveyard. Molly is terrified, but Heather dances around the tombstones, taunting Molly, who runs home in a panic. Molly tearfully tells Mom about the graveyard. Mom, unconcerned, knew about it all along. Dave jokes that the dead people will be quiet neighbors. Upset, Molly leaves to unpack her pretty room, which she would love if she did not have to share it with Heather.
Chapter 3 Summary
After dinner, Molly reluctantly follows the rest of the family to visit the graveyard. When Molly takes Mom’s hand, Heather tauntingly tells Dave that Molly is frightened. Mom reassures Molly that the cemetery is peaceful. Michael finds the tombstones of an extended family and begins reading their epitaphs. Mom finds this sad, but Michael is curious about each person’s history. When Mom and Dave embrace, Molly observes a “look of hatred” on Heather’s face (25).
Heather does not want to share a room with Molly. Declaring that Molly, Michael, and Mom are all mean to her, she says she hates them, does not want to live with them, and wants her own mom back. Dave takes her to bed. Mom urges Molly to be more understanding of Heather, but Molly is upset that Mom takes Heather’s side. Michael and Molly think Heather is trying to break up Dave and Mom. In tears, Mom admits she is discouraged and does not know how to gain Heather’s love. Molly vows to try harder with Heather but thinks that Heather enjoys making them all unhappy.
Chapter 4 Summary
Molly asks Michael how he feels about the graveyard. Michael’s room is filled with scientific equipment, specimens, and nature books. Michael wants to study the graves: Molly’s unease surprises him. Molly is embarrassed by her fears but still has trouble sleeping that night. Heather has a bad dream, calling out for her mother.
The next morning, Molly finds Heather and Michael in the graveyard with the elderly caretaker, Mr. Simmons, who is mowing and weeding. Mr. Simmons’s parents and baby sister are buried there. He explains that in the past many children died from diseases. Heather adds that many kids died in fires. Michael explains Heather’s background.
Heather finds an isolated grave under a tree. Molly gets an ominous feeling. Mr. Simmons confirms it is a grave he has never noticed: that of a seven-year-old girl with the initials “H.E.H.” who died in 1886. Heather observes that the initials are the same as hers. Mr. Simmons finds it odd there are no other family members buried nearby. He tells Heather not to play there because there could be snakes and poison ivy. Heather rudely declares that she will do what she wants.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In these opening chapters, we meet 12-year-old Molly and experience the tension within her newly blended family through her eyes. We also meet the person Molly sees as the primary cause of the family discord: her unpleasant new stepsister, Heather. Each family member copes with the growing disconnect between them in different ways. Hahn also begins exploring issues of death and guilt, building suspense through the remote setting and allusions to the supernatural.
Unlike her scientifically minded, rational younger brother, Molly is impressionable, dramatic, and imaginative. Where Michael enjoys collecting and displaying butterflies, Molly appreciates their living beauty. Nevertheless, both Molly and Michael are sensitive to the changes in family dynamics their mother’s marriage and the combining of the two families have brought about. Not only do they no longer have Mom to themselves, but they find that Mom is not always on their side. Molly is especially sensitive to this new distance, even changing her cheerful poetry writing assignment to one she feels is more in tune with how she now feels about life: “Something depressing dealing with loneliness and unhappiness” (9).
Since Molly is the novel’s first-person narrator, readers only get Molly’s account of Heather, which is unflattering. Normally such a biased interpretation would point to an unreliable narrator, but Heather’s actions support Molly’s critical characterization. Heather is manipulative, lying to get Michael and Molly in trouble and rejecting all efforts by Michael, Molly, and Mom to include her. Heather herself states that she “hates” the three of them and wants her old mother back. Michael and Molly believe, correctly, that Heather is working to split up Dave and Mom so she will once again have Dave all to herself.
Heather’s unwillingness to embrace her new role in the family also impacts Mom. While Mom believes that love will win Heather over, she risks alienating Michael and Molly when she admonishes them to “try harder” with Heather and be more tolerant and supportive. By over-supporting Dave and Heather, Mom under-supports Michael and Molly. The fact that Mom misleads Michael and Molly about the reality of their remote new home and the existence of a graveyard worsens this tension by making Molly feel betrayed. Hahn shows that the adults are as much at a loss as Molly and Michael when it comes to integrating the defiant Heather into a new family unit.
Heather’s difficulties stem from her mother’s violent death four years ago, and Hahn uses Heather’s character to explore the issue of grief. Mom and Dave urge Molly and Michael to empathize with Heather because of her loss, but Molly and Michael believe that Heather should be significantly healed by now. Molly notes that Heather acts younger than her seven years, suggesting that the trauma she experienced at age three might have affected her emotional development or that she deliberately acts young and helpless to better manipulate Dave’s emotions. Molly and Michael believe that Heather would benefit from therapy, but Dave distrusts “shrinks.”
The remote setting and graveyard exacerbate the divisions within the family. Because Michael and Molly are largely cut off from society, they are thrust into closer proximity with Heather. The graveyard and Molly’s increasing fears about it will also increasingly separate her from Mom, Dave, and even Michael, who dismiss her distress.
The graveyard genuinely frightens Molly. She says it is “the spookiest place [she has] ever seen” and describes it with horror-film-worthy visuals that emphasize its creepy appearance (16), including eerie old tombstones and an ominous flock of crows. The idea of dead people on their property disturbs her, and she superstitiously avoids stepping on a grave and getting bad luck. While Michael adopts a scientific and historical approach to the cemetery, Molly instead imagines bony hands and monsters and wonders how she would feel if her initials were on the lonely grave instead of Heather’s. Molly is also familiar with “horror movies and scary stories” to the extent that she compares Heather to the sociopathic little girl in the 1956 classic horror film The Bad Seed (33). Molly’s imagination and her somewhat macabre reading and viewing habits potentially contribute to her fears and her attitude towards death.
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