She learned then that some relationships ended without fireworks or tears or regret. They ended in silence.
She’d lost too much of herself in parenthood to simply go back to who she’d been before.
Don’t you dare say that to me, not this time. Nobody’s strong enough to be a parent. We just do it, blindly, going forward on faith and love and hope. That’s all it is, Angel. Being afraid, being afraid in the marrow of your bones, and going on.
Love had turned into loss and she’d pushed it away, but somehow, impossibly, a bit of that love had remained. A girl’s love for her father. Immutable. Unbearable but unbreakable.
At his kiss, something opened up inside the scraped, empty interior of her heart, unfurled. For the first time, her romantic novels made sense, she realized that the landscape of a woman’s soul could change as quickly as a world at war.
When he finally found the words to express himself, his grief had shown itself to be bottomless, terrifying.
But how did you do that? How did two people move backward through time and untie a knot that had tangled through every moment of their lives?
She was angry at him – she knew that, felt it – but as he came toward her, that anger dried up and blew away like dust beneath the longing that mattered so much more.
Her teenage daughter was sprouting like a tree, blooming every day into another variation of who she would someday become. Moods twisted her up and left her looking sometimes like a girl who’d just washed up onshore, unable to quite remember who she was and who she wanted to be. Kate.
Nora’s gaze was steady. “No matter how dark a place is, there are always moments of light. That’s what I passed on to you and Caroline, my moments of light.
So that was how they would do it, merge back into the driving lane after a blown tire. They would say ordinary things and pretend none of it had happened. Until the next time.
Have we? Have we lost our light, or have we perhaps just glimpsed it for the first time?
She thought she had grieved for Matthew, cried all the tears she had, but now she saw the desert of grief that lay before her. It could go on and on. The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears.
That was the thing about her dad: he might be moody and sharp-tempered, even a little scary sometimes, but that was just because he felt things like love and loss and disappointment so keenly.
They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.
While they were virtual roller coasters of emotion, you needed to be calm, always.
He had the kind of smile that inhabited every part of his face – his eyes, his cheeks; there was even a dimple.
Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all of the people I have loved and lost. At least that I will be forgiven.
She’d crawled into her grief and cocooned it around her, unable to care about anyone or anything –.
He was trying to make it up to her, asking for forgiveness and seeking redemption all at once, sacrificing himself for her. It was a glimpse of who he’d once been, the poet her maman had fallen in love with. That man, the one before the war, might have known another way, might have found the perfect words to heal their fractured past.