Reminders of Him

“He’s good looking in a way that a girl who is trying to get custody of her daughter should want to stay away from. He’s got eyes that have seen a thing or two, and hands that have probably hit a man or two.”

Although the novel celebrates the energy of love, the relationship between Kenna and Ledger is sexual, and both discover in their relationship the power of sexual healing. Kenna warns herself not to be distracted by the attractive bartender, a warning she knows she will ignore.

“I don’t understand attraction. What is it that draws people to each other? How can dozens of women walk through the doors to this bar every week and I don’t feel the urge to give any of them a second glance? But this girl waltzes in, and I can’t take my fucking eyes off her.”

It would be better for both Ledger and Kenna not to get involved. Ledger struggles to understand attraction, but the certainty of it triggers the romance between him and Kenna. Before either knows the complete history of the other, there is an undeniable pull.

“But I couldn’t speak because your best friend had his searing hot tongue in my mouth and it felt like he was branding me with the word ‘CHEATER.’”

Kenna struggles to understand what she owes to her dead lover. As she feels the pull of her attraction for Ledger, Kenna wrestles with whether she is cheating. That obligation makes her love for Scotty a burden she does not put down until after her meeting with Grace.

“They’re dragon eggs…I’m going to plant them in my yard and grow dragons.”

In a novel otherwise freighted with sadness and tragedy, Diem is a gift, a winsome sprite full of imagination and curiosity. She brings together the free spirit of her father and the once happy and imaginative Kenna. In this quote, four-year-old Diem discusses T-ball with her coach, Ledger; she imagines that the T-balls are dragon eggs.

“I know they hate me, and they have every right to hate me, but part of me has been living with them for the past four years in Diem. My hope is that they’ve found a sliver of forgiveness for me through my daughter.”

The emotional drama at the heart of the novel is the movement toward forgiveness between Scotty’s parents and Kenna. Kenna understands the wrong she committed against Scotty’s parents, but she expresses the hope that getting to know Kenna’s daughter might help Kenna reconcile with Scotty’s parents. She discovers that does not work.

“Imagine being told she left him there.”

In five difficult and lonely years of incarceration, Kenna has beaten herself up emotionally, reliving every moment of the night of the accident. Here she suffers through her litany of “imagine that” in which she traces what Scotty’s parents must have endured after losing their only son because of the carelessness of a girlfriend they barely knew.

“They don’t want you in her life, Kenna.”

Until Ledger reads Kenna’s letter about the night of the accident, he straddles two emotional commitments: his growing fascination for Kenna against his relationship with the Landrys, particularly Diem. Here he offers an honest and direct assessment to Kenna. The reality is, he tells her, the Landrys are fine without her complicating their life.

“Are you gonna live in your sadness or are you gonna die in it?”

The compassionate and kindly Ivy, whom a grieving Kenna meets in prison and who becomes her surrogate mother, offers this advice when Kenna is living with postpartum depression. Ivy reminds Kenna that suffering does not need to define her. Ivy reminds her that when her sentence is served, Kenna will be given the opportunity for a second chance.

“You gave me a chance when everyone else gave up on me. You have no idea how much I look up to you for that. But it’s really hard to look up to you right now. You’re acting like a fucking asshole.”

Roman, a person recovering from a substance use disorder who owes his recovery to Ledger, delivers what Ledger needs to hear. Ledger has only begun to second-guess assumptions he made long ago about Kenna, how she left Scotty to die and went home to bed. Roman reminds Ledger of the difficult challenge of giving Kenna the same consideration Ledger once gave him.

“Why?”

It is the novel’s most heartbreaking moment. In a novel that celebrates the power of a mother’s love, when Kenna’s own estranged mother visits her in prison, she refuses outright Kenna’s plea to help her distraught daughter secure some visitation rights to her newborn. In this single question, Kenna’s mother reveals the depth of her selfishness.

“I want so badly for them to heal, but the loss of a child is a wound that never heals. It makes me wonder whether Kenna cries like Patrick and Grace do. Did she feel the kind of loss when they took Diem from her?”

For the first time, Ledger parallels the pain Kenna suffers by being denied access to her daughter with the pain the Landrys feel over the loss of Scotty. In this line of reasoning, Ledger begins to humanize Kenna by acknowledging the depth of her suffering.

“And we never will [get to live out our dreams], because life is a cruel, cruel thing, the way it picks and chooses who to bully.”

Kenna’s road to her redemption and securing her second chance is hardly smooth. This is one of her darker moments when she tries to accept that she and Scotty will never get to experience the future they dreamed of together; the happiness and security of their once-budding relationship never had a chance to come to fruition.

“People need people.”

Ledger sees how alone Kenna is. He is poised here between helping Kenna publicly in her quest to meet her daughter and his residual doubts over allowing her to be part of Diem’s life. In the end, his epiphany will guide the novel’s uplifting close.

“I feel like Kenna’s monster and Diem’s protector.”

This comment encapsulates Ledger’s dilemma. In helping Kenna to meet her daughter, he worries that he is endangering Diem. If he protects Diem from Kenna, he is everything Kenna fears. At this point, in the grocery store parking lot after the disastrous near-meeting of Grace and Kenna, Ledger struggles with his role.

“Every song is a reminder of something bad in my life, so I’d rather hear no songs at all.”

Kenna’s changing relationship to music is key to tracking her emotional growth. She rejects music because it only reminds her of the pain of her loss. She will come to realize that music was a joyful part of her relationship with Scotty and that reclaiming her love of music is important in making peace with her past. 

“I don’t know how to defend Kenna in these kinds of situations. I don’t even know if I should. But it feels wrong allowing everyone to continue to think the worst of her.”

Ledger has begun to see his role with Kenna in a new, more complicated light. For five years, Ledger, along with most of the town, demonized Kenna as an irresponsible and callous young girl. As a party of women from the town accosts him during a T-ball game, Ledger realizes that with his growing attraction for Kenna, she has become less of a villain and more of a victim.

“There have been so many choices and consequences and feelings packed into the space we’ve kept between us since we met, but Ledger pushes through all of it and presses his lips to mine.”

The story of Kenna’s redemption and her second chance with her child is told against her second chance at love with Ledger. Since her return to town, she tries to keep her secrets safe and her identity a mystery, but love and the presence of Ledger violates that protective insulation she tries to use.

“I’ve always wanted to be a locksmith…Because no one can get mad at a locksmith.”

Kenna’s confession reveals the depth of her emotional trauma. She is desperate for people to forgive her and treat her with kindness, so she fantasizes about being in a profession that helps people. She believes that no one would wish ill will upon her if she were in this profession.

“It is what it is. A fucked-up situation, with no evil people to blame. We’re all just a bunch of sad people doing what we have to do to make it until tomorrow. Some of us sadder than others.”

In his own way, Ledger summarizes the tragedy of the accident. Both Kenna and Scotty made poor judgments that night. Kenna drove too fast and mistakenly thought Scotty was dead when he was unconscious. Grace and Patrick weaponized their granddaughter to punish Kenna, who they thought received a light sentence. The accident and the aftermath are both more complicated than they seem.

“I began to shrink with every second that passed, until I felt invisible. And that’s the last thing I remember.”

By the time Kenna shares what happened the night of the accident, the reader is suspended between the events of that night and an interpretation of those events that puts Kenna in a sympathetic light. This is Kenna’s memory after leaving the accident. She is sure that Scotty is dead. She is overwhelmed by that realization, so she feels as if she no longer exists.

“I think there’s room in a tragedy this size for everyone to be both right and wrong.”

Ledger perceives Kenna’s dilemma. There are no heroes or villains when it comes to the accident and its aftermath. That illumination convinces Ledger to share Kenna’s letter with Grace and Patrick, certain the letter will humanize the person they have demonized.

“There are people who find peace in forgiveness, and then there are others who look at forgiveness as a betrayal.”

Kenna has just heroically freed Ledger from any obligation to help her by accepting his offer of money to leave town. This insight provides the logic of the Landrys’ animosity. Kenna understands that for them to forgive her would betray their own son. It is Grace who will rise above this logic.

“I’m responsible for keeping you from your daughter for five years, and there’s no excuse for that.”

This is the moment of forgiveness for which Kenna has fought. Grace’s words reveal she cannot forget her son and must struggle against her inclination to blame Kenna. Kenna’s letter convinces her that she has judged Kenna too harshly. She reveals her own error in judgment and offers the promise of Kenna’s second chance.