Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [119]
Two phone conversations had brought them to this point.
Amanda had called Ed and told him what had happened.
“I’m coming home.” Was it home already? She’d already packed. She was great at packing.
“No, you’re not.” Ed was quiet for a moment.
“What do you mean?” She’d expected him to tell her to catch the next train. That he’d be her refuge.
“You need to sort this out, before we go away.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.” Ed took a deep breath. “Listen, Amanda. I love you.” It wasn’t how she had imagined he’d say it and she’d hear it, although she had known for a while that he did. “I really love you.” It was the first time he’d said it. She wished she could see his face. “And I want to go ‘traveling’ with you. I don’t want to ‘run away’ with you.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do. If you’re honest with yourself. You run away. When it gets tough. It’s your thing. In some ways, I think you’ve been running away all your life. Maybe this is what from. Stop doing it. Change the habit. Face it, deal with it, and then we’ll go wherever you want.” Then, again, “I love you.”
Wow.
Lisa had called Jennifer.
“You told Mark about Amanda’s letter!”
“How do you know?”
“I know because—for some unknown bloody reason Mark blurted it out to Amanda—she’s home, by the way.”
“Oh God. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. I suppose he wanted her to talk to him about it. But I ended up getting it in the neck. Thanks a bloody lot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re an idiot. Why would you tell him?”
“I know I’m an idiot. I didn’t mean to. It just…it just came out.”
“Yes. Well. I’m not going to be the only villain of the peace. I’m going to bring Amanda ’round and the three of us are going to talk it out.”
“Okay.”
“And, Jen? Don’t you dare start on your Heywoods theory. Do you hear me?”
After she’d hung up, Jennifer sat by the phone chewing her thumbnail. It was obvious that Lisa didn’t know about the row, just about the revelation. Mark had kept the shameful secret of her behavior to himself, at least. She still felt awful about it. She wanted to cry every time she thought about it. But then she wanted to cry a great deal these days. She hated the distance between them. Several times she had picked up the phone to talk to him. To try again and apologize for what she’d said. But it seemed so huge to her, and it got bigger each time she thought about it. She didn’t even know where it had come from, but it was obvious, even to her, that in vino veritas she had some real issues. She didn’t remember everything, but she knew she’d said vile, unkind things. She read Mark’s silence as disgust, and she was afraid she might have severed things between them permanently, but she was too frightened to find out.
And now she had to face Amanda….
“I’ll start,” Amanda began, once Jennifer had played hostess with the tea. “I suppose this seems like an OTT reaction to you two. It probably is. I guess it doesn’t really matter who knows. I would have liked to be the person who made those decisions, about who knew, and I felt like you—Lisa—betrayed my trust, and like you—Jennifer—were just interfering. But you’re right, Lisa. It’s not that much of a big deal.
“I think the reason I’m so mad is that I can’t do anything with this information. I have nowhere to take it. Mum’s dead. Dad’s dead. Mark didn’t know anything about it. I’ve got all these questions I can’t answer. That festers, you know.”
They nodded.
“It played on something that’s always bugged me a bit. I always felt like I fell in the gap between two families. The one you two had with Mum and Dad. And the new one she had with Mark and Hannah. Like I had middle-child syndrome, with a twist.” She smiled faintly. “It probably sounds like bollocks to you two.”
“No, it doesn