Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [145]
He had raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Differently.”
“I thought I was okay,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. “But I was so angry with her, Dad. I was so angry with her for leaving me. The journal goes on and on about how she wasn’t ready—but what about me? I felt like she gave up and let it happen. And I felt so jealous of the others because they were grown-up already, and they’d had her for all of their childhood, and I wasn’t going to get that. And I felt all of that, almost all of the time. I didn’t know where to put any of it. How to get rid of any of it. I kept waiting for it to go away on its own. But I was so worried about you that I could never tell you.”
Mark was crying now, too. “I wish you had.”
“Me, too.” They held hands across the wicker chairs. “And Nathan—Nathan was…”
“Shh. I know.”
Hannah got up and moved to sit beside her dad. He put an arm around her shoulder, and she laid her head against him. He stroked her hair and said words he’d never used, words he’d heard Barbara use a hundred times. “I’ve got you.” And they stayed that way for a long time.
They’d agreed, made a pact. To talk to each other. And to listen.
And Mark didn’t suppose that was an end to it. There were still difficult years ahead. Hannah wasn’t going to be grown-up overnight. She would make more bad decisions and wrong choices. And he would lose his temper again. Treat her too much like a child. Or too much like an adult. He hoped there would never again be anything so potentially catastrophic. His stomach still knotted with the knowledge of how easily he might have lost her that night. But, for now, there was an understanding, and there was peace.
THEY SWAM AND SNORKELED AND RODE THE BANANA BOAT THAT the young black guys pulled around the bay on the back of a speedboat. They went parasailing, Hannah screaming with delight as they were pulled along on twelve hundred feet of rope above the resort. The sea was an extraordinary color, and the white sugar beach stretched for miles. He read Ian McEwan and Nelson de Mille, she read Red and Hello!, ignoring the fat copy of Middlemarch she’d brought to study. They both slept like corpses. It felt like a convalescence for both of them.
They didn’t talk about Nathan. He didn’t know what Hannah intended, and he didn’t want to push her. He hoped she would never see him again, but he stopped short of forbidding it. Mark knew he’d stayed for almost a week in the hospital, being treated for a badly broken arm and a couple of broken ribs. He’d had a surreal conversation with his dad, a couple of days after the accident. He’d felt he had to ring, though he didn’t know what to say, and Hannah had given him the number, anxious for news. Nathan’s father hadn’t known any more about Hannah than Mark had known about Nathan. He sounded mortified and upset and kept saying he couldn’t believe how stupid Nathan had been, how sure he’d been that Nathan knew better than that…a horribly familiar note sounding in Mark’s brain. Gordon Spring sounded just like him. He probably ought to be angrier with Nathan than he was. The night it had happened, he could have wrung his neck with his bare hands. Might have, if he’d seen him. But what was the point now? The kid had probably been punished enough.
May
Lisa
It was the kind of evening when she and Andy might ordinarily have met up after work, gone for a drink that turned into a few drinks and supper. Somewhere outside. With friends or on their own. The kind of evening she’d loved. It was warm—the temperature had reached the mid-60s and stayed there—and the sun was still shining as Lisa came out of her office building, even though it was 5:45.
It was not the kind of evening for flat hunting. Lisa had two appointments, but she was tempted to cancel them both. She’d seen a couple of places earlier in the week, and they’d depressed the hell out of her. It wasn’t that they were horrid. Okay, one was horrid. She should have known that somewhere that cheap would have been dodgy. It actually had one of the last avocado