Things I Want My Daughters to Know (44 page)

“Nathan,” she protested, her palms against his insistent chest. “I’m late. We can’t . . .”

He stood back, hands raised in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay.”

Opened her door and gave a flourish. “Your chariot, madam. . . .”

Hannah climbed in, leaning her head gratefully against the back of the seat and closing her eyes in the vain hope that it might make the ride slow down so that she could get off.

Mark

“So where were you?” Mark fed Lisa the question, hoping Hannah would interrupt the answer.

“I met a friend in town. I ended up going back to her place. Actually, she hadn’t heard about me and Andy, so I poured out the whole sorry story and had a good cry and had fish and chips and watched DVDs. A rocking single girl’s Saturday night.”

Lisa looked at Mark for a response, but he wasn’t really listening. It was nearly two o’clock now. He’d tried her mobile, twice. But it was switched off. Anger had long since given way to fear.

When the phone rang, Lisa exhaled. At last. Bloody Hannah. Mark picked up on the second ring.

“Hannah?”

Lisa watched his face.

“Yes. I’m Mark Forbes. Hannah, yes. That’s my daughter.”

His face drained of color instantaneously.

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“My God.”

“What?”

He put his hand over the receiver.

“There’s been an accident.” Went back to the call.

“Yes.” A long pause. “Right. Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can.

Thank you.” He hung up and leaned his head against the wall.

“Mark? Talk to me. What’s happened?”

“Hannah’s been in a car accident. She’s in casualty.”

“Jesus. Is she okay?”

“She’s okay.”

“Thank God.”

“I’m going down there.”

“I’m coming with you.”

She already had her jacket on. Mark grabbed his car keys from the hook by the door, and they almost ran to the car.

Hannah

Casualty departments at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning told a very sorry story about society. Mark couldn’t believe he was walking into the nar-rative. He gave his name and Hannah’s at the desk. The harassed recep-tionist didn’t look up at him as she told him to take a seat, that someone would be through to talk to him in a moment.

Lisa took his hand and squeezed. “It’s good that we have to wait. The longer the wait, the more trivial the injury. It’s being whisked straight through you don’t want.”

She’d been here with Cee Cee last summer. For three hours. Cee Cee had pushed an orange tic tac into her left ear. She wanted to see if it would come out the other side. Some boy at school had said it would, if she tipped her head over. It hadn’t. It had been a really hot day in May, the kind that surprised and overexcited people and resulted in a casualty waiting area full of sunstroke and barbecue-burn victims.

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put her hand on his knee, to stop him. He looked at her and smiled weakly.

The young casualty doctor who approached them from behind the ominous swinging doors was, according to the hospital badge pinned to her white coat, called Quincy York. A slender blonde, with piercing blue-green eyes behind flattering round glasses and a soft American accent, she smiled encouragingly at them as Mark jumped to his feet at the mention of Hannah’s name. “Don’t worry. Your daughter is okay.”

Relief flooded through him, and for a moment Mark felt weak on his feet.

“Sit down here,” she said, not unkindly, steering him toward a quieter bench at the side. “I’ll take you through to see her in a moment.”

Mark sat down next to her, his face white and pinched. Lisa was still holding his hand. The doctor looked at her questioningly. “I’m her sister,” she offered. Dr. York nodded.

She looked down at her notes. “Hannah is fine. The good news is that she was wearing a seat belt, which protected her a great deal from the impact. She’ll have some nasty bruises from where it restrained her, and she’s got a few small lacerations on her face, from the windshield, but nothing that will need stitching. We’ve steristripped a couple of the larger ones, but they should all heal without scarring.”

“Thank God.”

“She was lucky.”

“What about the driver?”

“His injuries were more serious, but not life-threatening. His parents are here with him. . . .”

“His injuries?”

Dr. York was confused by the question and looked down again. “Yes.

Nathan Spring. The driver of the car.”

“She said she was out with her girlfriends. . . .” His voice trailed off.

Nathan Spring. The boy from the party.

“I see.” She clearly did. She paused before speaking again. “Look. I
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don’t know what happened earlier in the evening. But Hannah has had a drink or two, Mr. Forbes. I don’t suppose there’s anything particularly unusual about that, although she is below the legal drinking age, as you know. She wouldn’t be the first teenager we’ve seen here on a Saturday night who’s been drinking when she shouldn’t have been. She isn’t

‘drunk.’ We were all teenagers once. The problem was that she got into a car with someone who’d also been drinking. The driver had a substan-tially higher blood alcohol level. It would have been pretty obvious that he shouldn’t have been driving.”

“Oh my God.” Mark couldn’t believe it. He rubbed his jaw. Hannah?

“Stupid girl.”

Dr. York put her hand on Mark’s forearm. “Listen: I understand your reaction. But they’ve both had a lucky escape. It could have been a lot worse. I’ve spoken to Hannah. She seems like a sweet kid. She was obviously scared stiff. I think she realizes fully what has happened. My guess is she’s given herself enough of a fright to make sure she never does anything like that again.” She smiled at him kindly. “Take her home. Let her rest. Talk to her.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She stood up and spread her arm toward the ward. “Let’s go and find her.”

Hannah was sitting up on the high hospital bed, behind the green curtain. Dr. York excused herself, saying she’d be back with Hannah’s discharge sheet in a moment or two, and pulled the curtain closed so that the three of them were alone. Hannah was pale and disheveled. She’d obviously been crying. She had cuts and grazes on her cheeks, some held together with small white strips, and an angry blue-black bruise on her collarbone, exposed by the neckline of her shirt. The big high bed made her look like a small, frightened child. She didn’t say anything, but her wide eyes looked imploringly at her father.

“You stupid girl.” He sounded loud to himself in the hushed ward.

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“You stupid, stupid girl.” Hannah shrank back against the pillows as though each word was a physical blow. Her face contorted with fresh tears.

“Mark.” Lisa put her hand on Mark’s arm. “Take it easy.” Mark’s shoulders dropped, like the rage had blown, tornado-like, through him and left him deflated and broken.

“Doesn’t she realize? Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it, Hannah?”

Hannah was sobbing now.

“I can’t lose you. I can’t lose you, too. I can’t.”

Lisa’s heart broke for him. Her relief at seeing for herself that Hannah was okay was instantly displaced.

“I’m so sorry, Dad. I’m so so sorry.”

“What the hell were you thinking? You know better than that.”

“Not now, Mark.”

Lisa realized she needed to take charge. Mark was in no state, hysteri-cal with relief. “This isn’t the place. Let’s just take Hannah home. Okay?”

Mark nodded and turned toward the curtain. Stopped. Turned back, and, moving back to the bed, pulled Hannah into his arms.

She put one arm around him, grateful for the embrace and the forgiveness it implied, but the pressure of his hug hurt the bruise.

“Ouch.”

Now his voice was gentle and soft. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Does it hurt?”

Ten days later, the cuts had all scabbed over, and the bruise had turned from aubergine to black to purple and was now a livid, almost acid yellow. The rest of Hannah was pale golden. Turns out they both knew how to apply SPF 30 after all.

At first, Mark had been afraid of the holiday—the one Amanda had bullied him into booking earlier in the year. He’d been dreading it for weeks before the accident, actually. Without the closeness he and HanT h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 329

nah seemed to have lost, and without the distraction of life’s minutiae and routine, he feared long silences and reproachful faces. In the after-math of that Saturday night, he was even more anxious.

Thank God Lisa had been there that night. She’d taken over. It was Lisa who’d tucked Hannah into bed, held her while she cried, listened to the ridiculous desperate story of how a sixteen-year-old with more sense than she’d shown would make the decision to get into a car with a boy she knew was drunk, just because she thought she loved him, and just to avoid getting into trouble with her dad. Mark had glowered and paced downstairs, drinking neat whiskey.

He hadn’t cried until much later, when he’d gone up to bed. There was almost no point. It was after five in the morning, and he thought he was too wired to sleep. But eventually exhaustion broke over him like a wave, and he climbed the stairs. Hannah’s door was wide open, and since it was almost daylight outside, he could clearly see the cuts and scrapes on her beautiful, precious young face.

This had been too close, too lucky.

Hannah had more or less come straight out of the hospital into her exams. The mocks, thank God. She hadn’t said much about how they’d gone. They wouldn’t get the results until they got home.

It wasn’t until their third night in Antigua that they’d really talked.

That first night they’d both been exhausted by the flight. At dinner on the second—with their noses turned red by the hot sun—they’d made small talk. On the third, after they’d eaten, they’d sunk into the white lounge furniture on the terrace, with tall glasses of coffee, and Hannah had talked to him, properly. She told him, with the grave, nervous tone of the confessional, about Nathan, and the lies and the events leading up to the accident. He knew most of it—Lisa had told him, that Sunday morning, while Hannah slept soundly—but he listened without interrupting, and without judging. There were a lot of tears. Hannah’s shame touched him. Poor kid.

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And then he talked. He told her he was sorry. Sorry for how he’d been. That he could see now that he’d leaned on her too much. She shook her head, wanting to refute it, but he’d smiled gently and told her it was true.

“I thought you were okay. I let myself believe it was easier for you than for me. That you’d recovered more quickly.”

“Maybe just differently?”

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
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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.