Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman

Author:Alice Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453225776
Publisher: Open Road Media

ELIZABETH Renny’s house is much too crowded. The two boys, Jody’s brothers, will have to sleep in the storage attic. Jody’s mother will sleep on the couch. It is the Columbus Day weekend, and when they arrive they’re exhausted. Laura had forgotten to make a ferry reservation and they waited in line for three hours in Woods Hole. Laura is not herself lately. She and Glenn have now been legally separated for five months, and the separation is not at all what she expected.

As soon as they get into the house, Keith, who is ten, and Mark, thirteen, race up to the attic to search for bats. Laura embraces her mother, then gasps when she sees Jody.

“You’re so grown up!” Laura says in a voice that’s more accusing than she means it to be. She hugs Jody, then stands back to appraise her. “Wow,” Laura says.

Jody has made lasagna for dinner and Laura and the boys can’t believe she can cook.

“She’s been a great help to me,” Elizabeth Renny says.

Jody looks down at the table and smiles. She can’t understand why all this attention pleases her, but it does. Her brothers, who are not yet settled enough to be obnoxious, watch her but do not speak. Their typical behavior when meeting a grownup. After dinner, the boys go upstairs. They set up their Gobots sleeping bags, then scuttle through the attic, checking out all the corners with their flashlights. Jody is in the kitchen, washing dishes. Her mother is watching, astounded that she even knows what liquid Joy is.

“I’m going to faint,” Laura says.

“Will you stop?” Jody laughs. “Go sit down. Don’t bother me.”

Laura goes into the living room where her mother is drinking oolong tea with sugar and lemon.

“I don’t know what you’ve done, Mother,” Laura says to Elizabeth Renny. “She’s a different person.”

“Hardly,” Elizabeth Renny says. “Just a year older.”

Each time Elizabeth Renny returns the cup to its saucer there is the faint clicking sound of china. Her first impulse, when Laura suggested this visit, was to say no. Now she’s nervous. More so, when Laura continues to compliment her.

“You’ve done a great job,” Laura tells her. “If I had been forced to deal with Jody’s acting out while Glenn and I were separating, I wouldn’t have made it.”

Laura has fair skin and the same pouty mouth Jody has. Occasionally, her little-girl’s voice creeps in, so that some of her sentences are marked by a slight whine. “But I don’t really think this is the right place for her. Life here is not what I want for Jody.”

Laura wanted desperately to get off the Vineyard and into the world, in her case, Boston College. Elizabeth Renny vaguely remembers how hurt she was at the time. They had been close and then quite suddenly they were enemies. By the time Elizabeth Renny’s husband died, five years after Laura went off to school, they could not have a conversation without enormous effort. It seems impossible that this woman, who is forty-one years old, was her baby girl.

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