Page 89 of High Season
“What?” she says. “You love Nic.”
“He’s been seeing Josie Jackson,” Hannah says. “Did you hear?”
Marie sets the wineglass down.
“Well,” she says. “I’m sure he’s not planning on bringing her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“’Nother one, Mémé?” pipes up Isla.
“Don’t you think it seems weird?” Hannah says, as her mother accepts the place mat offering.
“I trust Nic’s judgment,” Marie says, as if that ends the matter.
“You’ve changed your tune.”
“He’s my only nephew, Hannah. I’m not going to stop inviting him over because of some fling. Besides, you know what Nic’s like. He’ll be on to the next one before you know it.”
“’Nother one?”
“Maybe I will have that glass of wine.”
“Top mine up while you’re in there, would you?”
It is one of those perfect summer evenings. Warm. A slight breeze. Everyone together. The kind of night that always makes Hannah wonder aloud to Eric if they should consider moving out here, an idea that melts away as soon as the wine buzz wears off.
But tonight, with the news of Josie Jackson being back, the heat and the alcohol only remind Hannah of that summer. Blake. Tamara, a blaze of fury and bad ideas, tearing through what none of them knew would be the last few weeks of her life.
And Josie. Always Josie, always intertwined with Hannah’s memories. It seemed, sometimes, like their teenage years merged together in places, until Hannah couldn’t make out which memories were hers and which were Josie’s. Who got a detention for running a black-market bubblegum-selling operation on the playground, who had their first kiss at a year-eight disco with a boy with cystic acne, who won the year-seven sports day, and who cracked their head open falling over in the egg and spoon race. It was always Josie and Hannah, bearing witness to each other’s lives, telling each other’s stories until they tangled into one.
That is, until Evelyn Drayton’s birthday party. The day that their paths were spliced into two, sent spiraling into wildly different directions.
Hannah goes outside, to the small patch of garden that Mark and Marie dreamed of their entire working lives. There are borders crammed with tomato plants, pots of basil, an explosion of strawberries. A wind chime Marie made at a ceramics class that she’s taken up on a Tuesday afternoon. A stone wall that Noah kicks a football up against over and over again. Mosquito candles, the smell of citronella almost overpowering the garden’s natural herbal scent, because Marie has become obsessed with the possibility of her grandchildren getting bitten, even though Hannah spent most of her childhood wandering about with tender scarlet swellings patterning her arms and legs.
Mark and Eric sit at the table, a second bottle of wine between them. Stretched out on a wooden deckchair, Mason’s thumbs fly againstthe buttons of his Nintendo Switch. He’s fourteen now, a teenager. The thought sends a cold feeling all the way through Hannah. She knows all mothers dread the thought of their children growing up, but this feels different. She understands what teenage boys are like. She remembers.
Hannah had postnatal depression when Mason was first born. Baby blues, they used to call it, something that sounded so impossibly twee to describe the vast, awful feeling that threatened to consume her, that kept her awake at night and made her feel like the worst person in the world when she looked at her child and the feeling of overwhelming love that people had promised her failed to materialize.
It was understandable, everyone said, especially when she’d had him so young. It was hard not to feel like she was missing out, when all of her friends moved on with their lives, leaving her behind.
Hannah couldn’t find the words to describe how it was something far worse than that, something much more terrible, more frightening.
Eric was the only person she had told, on a long, dark night, when Hannah had gone to bed with her hair still smelling of milky vomit, unable to remember the last time that she’d slept properly or showered.
“Think of the worst person you’ve ever known,” she said. “The person who’s done the most terrible thing to you.”
“That barber who gave me that shit haircut before the wedding,” Eric said.
“You’re not taking this seriously.”
“OK, OK, fine,” he said. “I’m thinking of someone.”
“OK,” said Hannah. “So what if Mason turns out like that? What if he turns outworsethan that? What if we’ve created something that’s evil at its core, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it?”
Eric didn’t speak for a moment. When he did, his voice was so certain that Hannah couldn’t imagine how different their experience of becoming a parent must be.
“I don’t think anyone’s evil at their core,” he said. “I think evil is created. A result of circumstance, and your upbringing, and all sorts of things. And I reckon we’re pretty good people, right? So I think Mason’s going to turn out alright.”
She hadn’t answered at first.
