Fly Away by Kristin Hannah Read Free Book Online Page A

sweet and seductive. Dotted along the two-mile curve of beach
     were fires, around which shadowy people danced and stood. The sound of laughter rose
     above the whooshing of the waves.
    “We should have come here when she was alive,” Marah said. She sounded young and sad
     and far away.
    That stung. They’d meant to. How many times had they planned a trip, only to cancel
     for some now-forgotten reason? You think you have all the time in the world until
     you know you don’t. “Maybe she’s watching us.”
    “Yeah. Right.”
    “A lot of people believe in that.”
    “I wish I was one of them.”
    Johnny sighed. “Yeah. Me, too.”
    Marah got up. She looked at him, and the sadness he saw in her eyes was devastating.
     “You were wrong.”
    “About what?”
    “The view doesn’t change anything.”
    “I needed to get away. Can you understand that?”
    “Yeah, well. I needed to stay.”
    On that, she turned and went back into the house. The door slid shut behind her. Johnny
     stood there, feeling shaken by her words. He hadn’t thought of what his kids needed,
     not really. He’d folded their needs into his own and told himself they’d all be better
     off.
    Kate would be disappointed in him. Already. Again. And even worse, he knew his daughter
     was right.
    It wasn’t paradise he wanted to see. It was his wife’s smile, and that was gone forever.
    This view didn’t change a thing.

 
    Four
    Even in paradise—or maybe especially in paradise—Johnny slept poorly, unaccustomed
     as he was to being alone, but each morning he woke to sunshine and blue skies and
     the sound of waves that seemed to be laughing as they rolled onto the sand. He was
     usually the first to waken. He started his day with a cup of coffee on the lanai.
     From there, he watched daylight come to the blue waters of the horseshoe-shaped bay.
     He often talked to Katie out here, saying things he wish he’d said before. In the
     end, as Kate lay dying, the mood in their house had been as somber as gray flannel,
     hushed and soft. He knew that Margie had let Katie talk about what scared her—leaving
     her children, knowing they would be sad, her pain—but Johnny had been unable to listen,
     even on that last day.
    I’m ready, Johnny, she’d said in a voice as quiet as the brush of a feather. I need you to be ready, too .
    I can’t be, he’d said. What he should have said was, I will always love you. He should have held her hand and told her it was okay.
    “I’m sorry, Katie,” he said to her then—too late. He strained for a sign that she’d
     heard. A breeze in his hair, a flower falling in his lap. Something. But there was
     nothing. Just the sound of the waves whooshing coquettishly onto the sand.
    The island had helped the boys, he thought. From dawn to dusk, they were on the go.
     They ran races in the yard, learned to body-surf in the bubbling foam of the breaking
     waves, and buried each other in the sand. Lucas talked about Kate often, mentioning
     her in casual conversations almost every day. He made it sound as if she were at the
     store and would soon come home. At first it had disconcerted the rest of them, but
     in time, like the gentle, ceaseless roll of the waves, Lucas had brought Kate into
     their circle again, kept her present, shown them the way to remember her. Mom would have loved this became a common refrain, and it helped them all.
    Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite right. After a week in Kauai, Johnny still had no
     idea what would help Marah. She had become a pod version of herself—same elegant beauty
     and commitment to personal grooming, but with a flat look in her eyes and an automatronic
     way of moving. While he and the boys played in the surf, she sat on the beach, listening
     to music and tapping her cell phone as if it were a transponder that could get her
     rescued. She did everything that was asked of her, and more that wasn’t, but she was
     a ghost version of herself. There and not there.