The trick, of course, was for the items to be hidden well enough that Georgia or anyone popping in to do the turn-down before dinner would not notice them either, but not well enough to elude a careful search by the police.
Would it work? It should work. She could not see any reason it would not work.
Nor could she think of any more fitting punishment for the pair of them, Jackson and Georgia Crane.
One of the saddest things about losing her parents so young was how few genuine memories Jess had of all three of them together. How much she would have given for just one more photograph of her and both her parents together, smiling. How she longed for just one more memory of them both holding one of her hands each and swinging her – one, two, three, wheee! – all the way down the high street. Of her mother gently plaiting her hair before school. Of her father hugging her, of the scrape of his stubble against her cheek as he kissed her goodnight. How she dreamed of just one adult conversation with them.
How much she would have given not to have been looking, not to have been awake, at the moment of impact that night, not to have seen that big car just a split second before her father did, that big sort of black jeep, coming at them out of the darkness, not to have seen the way her father’s body jerked around in its seatbelt, the way his head snapped back, the way their car crumpled around him, the way his face smashed into the steering wheel not once, not twice, but three times as they span in circles.
A ‘HIT AND RUN HORROR CRASH’ the local paper had called it. The other vehicle’s fault entirely – the other vehicle, which, given the damage, must have emerged without stopping from a side road at well over the speed limit and which, with no attempt whatsoever to slow down before it hit them, had crushed their car like a Coke can with Jess and her mother and her father inside it. Five and a half hours it had taken emergency services to extricate her mother’s broken body from what remained of their little Peugeot. The other vehicle? As far as Jess could remember （or anyone had been able to determine since）， it had driven away – she could recall the crunch of glass as it reversed then sped off – with barely a dent in its bumper.
Perhaps in some ways, Jess had often thought to herself, guiltily, it would have been better if her mum had been killed that night too. Killed outright, as her father had been. Then at least she would have been spared those weeks, those months, those years of waiting for her mother to wake up, to come out of the coma, to open her eyes and say something, to open her eyes and smile. Then at least she would have been spared all those weeks, all those months, all those years of false hope. Of her mother being simultaneously the funny, vibrant, enthusiastic woman that still lived in Jess’s head, and the waxy, shrunken, intubated, tucked-up husk that she was now. Every day she used to go – with her aunt, after school – and sit with her mum, and talk to her, and tell her everything that had gone on that day, and hold her hand, and squeeze it. And she and her aunt would brush her mum’s hair, or play her music, or do her nails, and her aunt would tell Jess what her mum had been like when she was little, and how proud she would be of her daughter, doing so well at school, being such a good girl. And every day they would have to gently prise Jess’s fingers from her mother’s at the end of visiting time, and promise her they could come back tomorrow, and every day she would plead for just five more minutes, because those might be the five minutes when she was there to spot her mother’s eyelids significantly flutter, when her lips would meaningfully twitch.
Keep talking. I can hear you. I can’t respond but I am listening. Keep talking. I am here and I can hear you and I love you.
That was what she tried to make herself believe her mother was thinking, as she lay there. And every day Jess wrote in her diary everything that had happened at school, everything that had happened in the world, so that she could give it to her mum when her mum eventually woke up, so that even if she had not really been listening, even if she could not remember anything Jess had told her, she would be able to read it all, to catch up on everything she had missed. Occasionally, very occasionally, Jess’s mum would let down a tear, and it was never clear if it meant anything or it was just her eyes leaking. Occasionally her hand would clench around Jess’s, and Jess would tell herself it meant something. And there could never be any question, for her, while her mum was alive – or whatever this was – of moving away. There could never be any question of living more than an hour or so from the hospital.