You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

side. In the ensuing pause, as he looked at her more seriously, she heard the rest of what he meant to say: We need to stop fighting, even if it means we need to quit one another. We can’t keep doing this to each other.

She nodded; he was right. Why couldn’t they just come together and sort things out? They were hurting each other too much. It wasn’t working.

“Are you ready?” she asked him. “Do you feel prepared for this adventure?”

It was meant to be a white flag. Surrender.

“They gave me the necessary information, I think,” he said, dropping his eyes to the brown earth. “I’m just supposed to follow, and keep a distance so they don’t know I’m behind them. If anything goes wrong, I’ll catch them up and help out. Simple as that.”

“And not sneak up on them like a bear? Not pretend to be a howling wolf in the distance?”

He smiled a half smile. “No Wolfman Jack.”

And now, more seriously, she added, “You’ll let me know if anything goes wrong? Or even just if Karin starts to feel strange?”

“I’m not supposed to get that close to them,” he said. But added, “Of course.”

“What time do you think you’ll be back here tomorrow?”

“I suspect around this time. We’re supposed to explore the park with the kids tomorrow, and there are some activities planned for the early afternoon, like a scavenger hunt. I’ll call you when we’re leaving base camp.”

A fantasy flashed before Grace’s eyes, a daydream or a vision, of using the time not to drive home, take a bath, and make longed-for phone calls but to make a grander escape, taking the car south and out of the Netherlands and just coasting farther on, through Europe, maybe till she hit Italy. She imagined Cinque Terre, that beautiful cluster of towns on the rugged Italian coast she’d visited once as a girl. But the daydream was as fleeting as a hummingbird, and was stopped in its tracks by the idea of Karin being left behind with Martijn and his sons. Whatever escape she made would always be with Karin.

“I’ll plan to start driving down around two just to be on the safe side,” Grace said.

She thought about how not twenty minutes ago she had stood with her daughter and watched as Karin had turned the blindfold over in her hands before putting it on, as a single tear rolled down her own cheek—unseen, she’d hoped.

“Mom, please?” Karin had whispered, irritated. “You don’t have to be so American about it. I’ll be back in, literally, twenty-four hours. You’ll thank me for this. I mean, think about the time alone, with the house totally to yourself. When do you ever have that?”

The words had been so mature, coming from Karin, that she’d had to laugh, squeezing her daughter tightly to her. Only making matters worse.

Of course she realized it was a bit stupid. Karin had already been away longer on sleepovers at friends’ houses. But Grace was vulnerable right now, in ways she couldn’t articulate. She needed her daughter to be okay because her own personal life felt like a cabin made of popsicle sticks that could topple any moment.

“It’s just…it’s just that you’re getting so big,” Grace had told Karin, making a cliché out of the moment. “You’re growing up so fast.”

All Karin said was “Seriously, Mom” and rolled her eyes. “I won’t be any older tomorrow.”

Grace had given her daughter a tender smile. “You’ll be a day older.” Then she’d kissed her once more on the head and let her go. Karin had turned and joined the group, where she’d been told to put on her mask. She had probably been relieved to finally escape Grace’s maternal gaze.

So the groups had assembled, the parents had completed their tasks, and the kids had been guided into their cars and driven away. It was true that this dropping felt far more poignant than she had expected it to, for so many complicated reasons. She’d need a month of therapy to fully unwind all the threads. She had been relieved, at last, to hear the sound of the car with the kids in it pull out; she could let go of holding her breath.

Chapter 3Drop Point

Karin heard the car slowing down, felt it turn off the road to the right, heard the tires come off the slick asphalt and crunch down onto an unpaved road. She could feel the automobile slip down into some kind of softer earth and then a loud rumble and vibration underneath the car. She knew that sound: they were passing over one of those metal grates that prevented deer from crossing into the Veluwe parking lot.

They had to be near the drop point, Karin was sure now. She felt excited and leaned forward in her seat, and then realized as a kind of weight fell over her that she was tired already. It was probably only like 5:15 now, the time when, at home, she’d be on her bed upstairs with her computer in her lap, trying to finish up her homework before dinner. She wasn’t like her friends at school who loved to stay up late doing their homework together, but really just gossiping on Snapchat. Karin really liked to go to bed early. In fact, she’d put on her supersoft teddy-bear PJs right after helping her mom load the dishwasher. She didn’t always fall asleep right away; usually, she stayed up reading magazines or books.

No one would see her in teddy-bear PJs here, no way. She had brought only sweats and a T-shirt to sleep in. She wanted to show the kids that she was a little bit like her father, the famous war adventurer. But first she would have to muster the energy to get out of this car.

Dirk started singing, “We zijn er bijna! We zijn er bijna!” in Dutch, a song little kids sang when arriving somewhere (“We’re almost there!”), and she could hear Lotte, in the front seat, laugh