Night Road by Kristin Hannah

Author:Kristin Hannah [Hannah, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312364427
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-03-22T07:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Before the accident, Jude would have said she could handle anything, but grief had overwhelmed her. Intellectually, she knew it had to be dealt with somehow, and yet she couldn’t imagine how to accomplish such a thing. She was like a swimmer in deep water who saw a great white approaching. Her mind screamed swim, but her body just hung there, paralyzed.

To everyone else, the so-called trial had been the end of the story. Justice was served; now go back to your regularly scheduled program. Jude had felt pressure from everywhere to heal now.

Instead, she’d gone gray. It was the only way to describe her life. A depression unlike anything she’d ever known or imagined descended. She could find nothing to look forward to, nothing to do.

One by one, in the past six weeks, people had given up on her. She knew she’d disappointed her friends and family, but she couldn’t care about it. Her feelings were either gone or buried in such a dense fog that they eluded her. Oh, sometimes she was normal—she might go to the store or drop something off at the post office, but she was always at risk of finding herself standing somewhere, in front of a row of plump purple eggplants or holding a letter, with no memory of how she’d gotten there or what she needed. She’d gone to the store twice in her pajamas, and once she’d worn shoes that didn’t match. The simplest tasks loomed like Mount Everest. Making dinner was beyond her.

She cried at the drop of a hat and screamed out for her daughter in her sleep.

Miles had gone back to work, as if it were completely normal to live with a frozen heart. She knew how much he was still hurting, and she ached for him, but he was already growing impatient with her. Zach hardly came out of his room. He’d spent the summer in his new gaming chair, with his headphones on, killing animated enemies.

They were doing their best, Zach and Miles, and they didn’t understand why Jude couldn’t pretend, why she couldn’t go out for lunch with her friends or work in her garden. Something. She saw how Miles looked at her in the evenings, over a dinner he’d brought home in Styrofoam containers. He would say things like, “How are you today, honey?” What he really meant was, “When are you going to get over this and come back to me?”

He thought that was the endgame. For him, the memory of their daughter was already becoming a treasured family heirloom that you put on a high shelf, behind a case of glass, and took down once or twice a year, at birthdays or Christmas. You couldn’t handle it too roughly or too often for fear it would break.

It wasn’t like that for her. She saw blank spaces everywhere—in an unused chair at the dinner table, in teen magazines that came addressed to Mia Farraday, in clothes left in a hamper. Mostly, she saw Mia in Zach, and it was unbearable.

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