Read The Road Between Us for Free Online

seems to help remind her father who she is, or rather who she isn’t.
    She finds him on the far side of the hospital garden, partially veiled by the sprawling fronds of a yucca plant. He is sitting in a wheelchair, staring at an empty bird table from behind sunglasses. Across his knees is a blue hospital-issue blanket. By his side is a small portable oxygen tank.
    After a month in intensive care and a fortnight in a private room, his doctors had recommended he be moved to a clinic for a further month’s rehabilitation. But Edward had insisted that he was now fit enough to return home, threatening to walk there by himself if he had to. Realizing he was being serious, the doctors had agreed reluctantly. But when they told him arrangements were being made for an ambulance to take him there, he became angry again. He wanted to drive himself home, he said, in his own car, like a normal human being, ‘not some freak’. A compromise was reached. Hannah would drive him and Niall would follow them in his car. So as not to alert any reporters who might be waiting for them at the front of the hospital, they would be allowed to park in the ambulance bay around the back.
    As she studies her father, Hannah rubs her arms and regrets wearing a sleeveless top. He might see the Sanskrit tattoo that runs from the base of her neck to her shoulder, the one she has been trying to conceal from him on her visits to the hospital. She worries at the strands of silk and leather about her wrist, tugging them around in full circles before moving to the chunky ring on her thumb and turning that instead. When she looks up, her father is staring at her.
    ‘Hi,’ she says with a small self-conscious wave from waist height when she is a few feet away from him. ‘You all set?’
    Edward smiles unconvincingly when he recognizes her, a stretching of his lips that does not expose his teeth.
    ‘Got any bags?’
    He shakes his head.
    ‘No. I guess you wouldn’t have. Stupid of me.’ Hannah gives a single clap and rubs her hands. ‘They’ve let me park in the ambulance bay, so we’d better not hang about. Do you want me to push you?’
    ‘You can drive?’
    ‘Passed first time,’ Hannah says. ‘You OK for me to push you?’
    ‘Thank you. I can walk OK but they like you to use these things.’ He taps the armrests of the wheelchair. ‘In case you fall on the premises, I suppose. Liability.’
    Spits of rain are falling on the dusty paving stones. As Hannah pushes her father along a path and around the corner of the building, she hums to herself, out of nervousness rather than contentment. When she realizes she is doing it, she stops. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Now close your eyes.’ She brings the chair to a halt in front of his old Volvo estate. ‘OK, you can open them … It’s been sitting in the garage. Mum hardly ever used it.’
    Edward nods. ‘She kept it all these years … Maybe I should go in the back. It’ll be easier with the oxygen tank. I don’t really need it but …’
    Hannah thinks she would prefer it if he was in the back too, that way they can talk without facing each other. There is anawkwardness to their conversations which she does not know how to avoid. Though she has rarely left her father’s side since his return, they are still strangers. Their discomfort with each other lies between them like a wall of glass.
    A few minutes later, as she waits for a Royal Mail van to let her out on to the Cromwell Road, Hannah drums her fingers on the steering wheel. The Saturday afternoon traffic is thickening, she thinks. Conscious that the Volvo smells of rust and damp carpet, she says: ‘I guess she still smells the same.’
    ‘My sense of smell hasn’t returned yet.’
    Hannah angles her rear-view mirror. Her father is staring straight ahead, motionless, as if he’s clicked out the light.
    Chelsea are playing at home, she now realizes, so the traffic will be worse the nearer they get to Parsons Green, a couple of miles away.