Laura’s father, Philip, had secured a job in a nearby town. He’d given up on his dream of a life in theater stage design and was now working as an accountant, a fact that prompted Janine to roll her eyes whenever it was mentioned. “An accountant,” she would hiss, drawing hard on her cigarette, plucking at the sleeves of her peasant top. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“Life can’t just be about fun all the time, Janine. Sometimes one just has to be an adult.”
“And God forbid adults should have any fun, right, Philip?”
Her parents hadn’t always been like this, it seemed to Laura. She vaguely remembered her mother being happier. She remembered a time when her mother had not sat at the dinner table with her arms folded across her chest, barely picking at her food, replying in sullen tones to her father’s every question. There was a time when her mother had laughed all the time. When she had sung!
“We could go back to London,” Laura would suggest, and her mother would smile for a moment and smooth her hair, and then look wistfully into the middle distance. But her father would reply—too brightly, with a little too much vim—“We can’t go back, chicken, I’ve got a job here now. And we’ve got such a nice house here, haven’t we?”
At night, Laura heard them arguing.
“You’ve got a job,” her mother hissed in a horrible voice, “in financial advice! Christ’s sake, Philip, is that really what you want to do with your life? Count other people’s money all day?”
And
“Is that really the life we’re going to live? An ordinary one? In the countryside? In Sussex? Because, you know, that’s not what I signed up for.”
And
“Signed up for? This is a marriage, Janine, not a drama course.”
Laura, a hopeful child, pretended not to hear the arguments, convinced that if she worked very hard and behaved very well then whatever it was that was making her mother unhappy would blow over. Laura tried hard to please her; she was quick to pass on compliments from teachers or to show her any drawings she’d done at school.
At home in the afternoons, Laura stayed by her mother’s side; she helped out if there was cleaning to do, or sat at her side while she read, or followed her quietly from room to room as she moved restlessly around the house. She tried to read her facial expressions, tried to imagine what it was that she was thinking about, that made her sigh like that, or blow the fringe out of her eyes in that way, tried to figure out what she could do to earn a smile, which sometimes she succeeded in doing, although sometimes her mother would yell, “Christ’s sake, Laura, give me a minute, would you? Just one minute to myself?”
In the autumn, Janine started taking art classes. And by the time the Christmas holidays came around, something had changed. A freezing wind blew in from the east, bringing with it achingly beautiful blue skies, a bitter chill, and as if from nowhere, a familial thaw. A truce seemed to have been declared. Laura had no idea why, but something had shifted, because the arguments stopped. Her father no longer looked hangdog, harassed. Her mum smiled while she did the washing up, she cuddled up close to her while they watched television in the evenings, instead of sitting apart, in the armchair, reading her book. They’d even been on outings to London, once to Hamleys and once to the zoo.
The new year started in a glow of optimism, her mother waving her off to school in the morning with a smile on her lips. There was even a promise of a family sledding trip on the weekend, if it snowed.
It did snow, but they didn’t go sledding.
That Friday, two and a half inches of snow fell in less than an hour, enough to cancel football practice. It was only just after three o’clock when Laura freewheeled down the hill toward home, riding out in the middle of the road, where the snow had melted clean away due to the weight of traffic, but it was already getting dark, and she neither saw nor heard the car that swung out into the road. It seemed to come from nowhere.
She was thrown twelve feet, landing on her back on the road, the crack of her helmet on the tarmac audible to her mother, who was standing in the driveway in front of the house. Her skull was fractured, her leg and pelvis badly broken. The driver of the car that had hit her did not stop.
Then came the trouble, and the pain. Six operations, months and months in hospital, hours upon hours of agonizing, exhausting physical therapy, speech therapy, trauma counseling. Everything healed, eventually. More or less. A bad seed had been sown, and although everything got better, Laura was left worse. She was slower, angrier, less lovable. Inside her a bitter darkness bloomed as she watched, with helpless desperation, her once-limitless horizons narrow.