Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [3]
Jennifer gave the back of Stephen’s head one more sad, reproachful glance and went into the house with Mark.
Hannah
Hannah stared at her face in the mirror and wondered whether it was okay to wear mascara. She couldn’t wear it to school, but she could at the weekends and on holidays. To church? There’d never been a rule that she’d known of. Maybe if she wore it she wouldn’t cry, because she’d know that then it would run. Maybe wearing it would help her not do it.
“No one was with her when she died.” That was a line from Charlotte’s Web. It had been one of her favorite books when she was young. And that was one of its best bits, the line when Charlotte the spider had finished her web-making, egg-laying mission, and gently slipped away into oblivion. “No one was with her when she died.” It was so deliciously sad. You could revel in it, in the small dry ache it caused in the back of your throat and the little sting in your ribs. When she was younger, Hannah liked to feel sad, so long as it was “artificial” sad; that was what she called it when the sadness was about something that wasn’t real. Like when Leonardo di Caprio slips beneath the icy waves at the end of Titanic, Kate Winslet hoarsely whispering her promise to never forget him. Or when Charlotte died. Well, this was different. This sad was real. The ache wasn’t fun. Trying not to cry was a huge effort, an effort that she made all the time, all day, until she got into bed at night and didn’t have to try anymore. Especially today. They’d all promised that they wouldn’t. They’d promised Mum, although Hannah didn’t think it was fair of her to ask for that. Still, none of it was fair, was it? She tried not to think about Charlotte anymore. Unhelpful bloody spider. There’d been loads of people around when Mum died, anyway. She’d died in a crowd scene. All of them there, around that horrible high hospital bed they’d brought in, so incongruous in the pretty room. Her sisters, Jen and Lisa. Dad. And the vicar, and the doctor—both more by accident than by design, she thought. It made her think of a Philip Larkin poem she’d read at school—something about the priest and the doctor running across the fields in their long coats trying to figure out all the answers to all the questions. The doctor came every other day, checking up on Mum. The vicar came because Mum had asked for him, which was slightly odd, since Hannah only really ever remembered seeing him before this year on Christmas morning, once every three hundred and sixty-five days, belting out “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” the tip of his nose perpetually bright red and dripping with a winter cold. Mum told Dad she was hedging her bets. Not in front of the vicar, of course. And even more people downstairs, Mum’s friends, in and out on rotation, making tea that no one wanted to drink and sandwiches that no one wanted to eat and taking phone calls that no one else wanted to answer.
She decided against the mascara and picked up the hairbrush, running it through her long auburn hair. Mum’s hair. Dad’s hair was silvery above the ears and still pretty dark on the top. That would have been okay, too—the dark, not the silver. But she had Mum’s.
When she’d finished, she sat on the end of her bed, with her hands folded in her lap, squeezed tight together. And waited.
JENNIFER DIDN’T WANT COFFEE, BUT SHE TOOK A MUG FOR SOMETHING to do with her hands and wandered across the large living room.
The house was immaculate. It was a great house for the summer. Mark had built it. Not with his own hands—he was an architect, and he’d designed it for him and Mum, the year they had married, just before Hannah was born. They’d bought a hideous bungalow with peeling, custard yellow paint, on a lovely three-acre plot, and immediately knocked it down, even as the neighbors watched, openmouthed, muttering to each other about how the elderly couple who had sold