Book Review: Night Road

Spoilers!

Grief is love by another name, a more painful version of it, to be sure, but love all the same. Which is why the concept of “getting over it” or “moving on” from grief makes no more sense than it would to suggest one stop loving the one who died. Kristin Hannah is an author who knows how to break your heart — creating a swelling, dreadful anxiety in your chest — and to her credit, she’s also adept at putting the pieces back together again. Nothing will, or can, be the same as it was, but in a way, it is, just by another name. In her 2011 book, Night Road, Hannah navigates love and loss in such a touching, albeit raw, way, that it will linger with me the way love and loss tend to do.

I’m a twin, so, Hannah’s book about twins Mia and Zach resonated with me on that level. How close they were. How bound up in each others’ lives they were, and how one’s friends were the other’s friends. Zach is the most popular kid at school, and Mia is shy, reserved, and known essentially through Zach. I was the Mia of my twin relationship. But Zach was a good twin, always there for Mia. Jude, their mother, is the classic “helicopter mother,” who dotes on them with as much love and advice as they can handle, as well as providing materially for them and with her presence at school functions and providing the “cool house” of the neighborhood for all the kids. This mirrors Hannah herself, who readily admits in the Dedication that she was like that to her son. She said of his senior year of high school that it was one of the “most stressful years of my life, as well as one of the most rewarding.” She imbues that stress into Jude, who worried about college admissions and hoping her children didn’t veer off too far into the party and drinking culture.

Lexi was a girl who bounced around from foster home to foster home due to a negligent mother with a drug addiction. She even witnessed her mother’s overdose death. Then, at 14, Lexi’s Aunt took her in, which meant Lexi now lived on the same affluent island not far from Seattle, Washington that Jude and the twins. Although, she lived in the trailer park section compared to Jude’s sprawling house on the beach (Miles, her husband, is a surgeon). On the first day of high school, Lexi, scared and feeling like an outsider, approached Mia who was alone by a tree. They became fast best friends. The book sped up at that point to the aforementioned senior year. It’s in that year that Zach and Lexi also became an item, which scared Mia at first, fearful Lexi was like a previous BFF who was only befriending her to get close to her brother. Instead, the trio became stronger than ever. With the pressure of high school graduation, college, and the rest of their lives on the horizon, the three of them do veer into the party and drinking culture that is rampant on the island. This despite Jude even being the parent who was in charge of the parent committee formed to mitigate such an issue. I thought Jude was smart by having a policy where if the twins were at a party drunk and obviously couldn’t drive, they could call her with no questions asked. Instead, when that happened, she punished them, which only pushed them further into said culture — and they also learned to be more secretive about it.

As I mentioned, I thought the beginning portion of the book moved fast. First, Lexi has no mother figure in her life, then this Aunt steps in, but their relationship largely exists off the page in those early days. Then Lexi and Mia become friends the first year of high school, but Hannah fast forwards to senior year, so we don’t fully get to relish in their blossoming friendship. And finally, Lexi and Zach is a “love at first sight” situation. They’re simply madly in love from the get-go. So much so that Zach is ready to throw away his admission to an expensive California college and instead go to a Washington state school and live in an apartment with Lexi, who couldn’t afford a school like the former. After what happened in the book, I understand, though, why Hannah sped up the story beats. They weren’t the main story beats at all.

Still, with Hannah’s set-up of Mia, Zach, and Lexi, along with Jude’s stressing and attempts at being a good mom and a second mom to Lexi, no less, I knew something was coming. I was dreading the proverbial “shit hitting the fan” moment. There was no way Hannah was writing a feel-good story. Keep in mind, I didn’t read the synopsis; I prefer going into a book blind. It was utterly heartbreaking when the shit hitting the fan moment happened. Like the first time, the twins and Lexi are drunk at a party. Instead of calling their mother this time, Zach, who was supposed to be the designated driver, decided to drive home. Come to find out later that Lexi, being the less inebriated of the two, drove instead. They were only a mile from home along the namesake of the book, Night Road, when Lexi crashed into a tree. Mia, in her drunken state, was in the backseat without a seatbelt on. She crashed through the windshield. Mia died. She died! One of the twins died! I was shattered. Again, as a twin myself, but also having come to love this trio of Mia, Zach, and Lexi, knowing what it would do to those two, and to Jude, who had tried so hard to protect them. Zach and Lexi only had relatively minor, short-term injuries. I will note, as someone who is in this profession now, Hannah talks about how Mia went on to donate her organs and tissues to save lives. That part is great and lovely! Not so great was the offhand remark, while Jude is grieving and distressed, that it was time for “the harvest.” We do not go around saying that word. That’s the no-no word. Nonetheless, Zach blames himself since he was supposed to be the DD and Lexi blames herself since she was driving.

Lexi, being a stupid 18-year-old, although Hannah couches it as Lexi being a good, moral person, she decided against the advice of her lawyer to plead guilty to killing Mia (I forget the exact charges, but they were at the felony level). Miles was against pressing charges, but Jude, in her grief, blamed Lexi and wanted “justice.” She wanted, like the community wanted, to send a message to other teens about the dangers of drunk driving. Lexi is sentenced to nearly 5.5 years in prison. I don’t think sentencing would have followed, or should have followed, right after Lexi surprised the courtroom with her guilty plea. Even so, Lexi would end up spending more time than that in jail because of bad behavior (fighting and some drug use). I was frustrated with Lexi for drinking in the first place. After all, she initially abstained because her mother was an alcoholic, but with nudging from Zach (which I didn’t like him nudging her!), she drank, too. And look what happened. Only a mile from home! Yes, all three were 18, but they were still stupid, not forward-thinking kids. Then to do drugs in prison … Fortunately, she kicked that habit, too, for a reason I’m about to explain.

The next 50 percent of the book or so featured Jude avoiding confronting her grief — she’s frustrated with Miles for trying to be strong and “move on,” and she can’t even look at Zach, as he’s a reminder of Mia — and another way of saying that is burying the memory of Mia. They all stopped talking about her. They all stopped memory-sharing. Avoidance as a coping mechanism is understandable, but more painful in the long run. Then, Lexi, shortly after her time in prison, revealed she was pregnant. That’s the other thing that stood out to me in the book. Jude gave Mia the sex talk, but not Zach, who she knew was bopping from one girlfriend to the next! Anyhow, Lexi, again, put her needs to the side, and decided to give full custody of their daughter, Grace, to Zach. She thought Grace wouldn’t want an ex-con for a mother. In that way, Grace became her mother, or at least acted like her. She should know a child needs her mother!

But for her part, Jude also became like her mother, who prior to Mia’s death had a stilted and awkward relationship with stemming from when Jude’s dad died when she was seven. Instead of Jude’s mother properly dealing with her grief, she poured herself into her gallery job and avoided Jude as a result, a reminder of her dead husband. Sound familiar? Jude started doing the same thing, and did for the first six or so years after Mia’s death. So much so that she wasn’t the kind of grandmother to Grace, as she had been the loving, doting mother to Mia and Zach. She was cold and distant. And kids glean that, even if they don’t have the proper words for it or the way to process the emotions of it. Grace was lonely and sad. She was acting out her inability to process her emotions (lying and hitting other kids).

When Lexi was released from prison, she couldn’t resist seeing Grace, and she noticed from a distance how lonely and unhappy Grace seemed. So, she decided to fight for her and get shared custody with Zach. Of course, Jude, still in her headspace of hating Lexi, decided to fight it. I understand the emotions both were feeling, but it was around this initial custody battle that I didn’t quite like either Jude or Lexi. I particularly thought it was a low-blow for Lexi to evoke Mia in her argument with Jude, that Mia would have been on Lexi’s side in the custody argument. Granted, that’s the line that triggered Jude to awaken from her grief, as it were. Lexi, still poor and even in a worse positioning as a felon unable to land a job or housing, was in no position to pay for the court’s social worker to supervise her visits with Grace. Instead, she would need Jude to do it. Jude actually agreed to do so — as she had begun to make real progress on confronting her grief, which meant allowing herself to experience the full spectrum of her feelings — but Lexi made a faux-pas by alluding to taking Grace away from Zach. That scared Grace. Between that and her lack of financial stability, Lexi, again echoing her mother, decided she’ll go live with her Aunt, who moved to Florida, and once she’s ready, she’ll return for Grace.

Thankfully, Jude, now fully realizing how much she was becoming her own mother and had stopped being the “best mother” she was before Mia’s death, which meant in a way, abandoning Zach, too, encouraged Zach to go after Lexi. He did, and they realized they still loved each other. She moved in with Zach, and Grace was happy as a peach to have a daddy and a mommy. The snippets of chapters from Grace’s perspective were so sad throughout, how lonely and confused she was. I’m not a parent, but Grace could have benefitted from being told the truth about a great many things, even if she wouldn’t be able to fully understand them. Alas.

Jude made the next step in her grief journey by attending a Compassionate Friends support group, realizing there are other women broken by grief like her. That was lovely. Not long after, she also visited Mia’s grave for the first time in years. She realized how important it was to keep Mia alive by remembering her, embracing her name and the memories. Embracing Zach, who looks like her. Embracing Lexi, who was Mia’s best friend and encouraged Mia out of her shell, and was like a second daughter to Jude.

Losing a child is a form of grief hard to fathom. Losing one of your twins seems like a compounding of grief anyone would wither under — it’s not about being a “strong” person; grief is the ultimate opportunist erosion mechanism — and in that way, I do not begrudge Jude any of her feelings. Or for that matter, Lexi, given what she was going through, too, both in grieving her best friend and her role in her death, and the push-and-pull of motherhood (along with the trauma she experienced from her own mother). There is no right way to navigate grief. You can only learn to live with it and navigate it in your own time.

Grief is its own kind of night road. Hannah’s treatment of grief (and love) did not make for an easy read. Again, she shattered me, but I also love and appreciate an author and a book capable of doing so.