Leaving the World

About the Book

On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents – she would never get married and she would never have children.

But life, as Jane discovers, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then she falls pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise – but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.

Just when Jane has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision – stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.

Like Kennedy’s previous highly-acclaimed novels,
Leaving the World
speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path.

About the Author

Douglas Kennedy’s eight previous novels include the critically acclaimed bestsellers
The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship, State of the Union
and
The Woman in the Fifth
. He is also the author of three highly praised travel books. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2006 he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Paris and Maine.

The Woman in the Fifth

Temptation

State of the Union

A Special Relationship

The Pursuit of Happiness

The Job

The Big Picture

The Dead Heart

Chasing Mammon

In God’s Country

Beyond the Pyramids

Contents

for my daughter Amelia

‘The question of authority is always with us. Who is responsible for the triggers pulled, buttons pressed, the gas, the fire?’

– Leonard Michaels

‘Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.’

– Elizabeth Bowen

O
N THE NIGHT
of my thirteenth birthday, I made an announcement.

‘I am never getting married and I am never having children.’

I can remember exactly the time and the place where this proclamation was delivered. It was around six p.m. in a restaurant on West 63rd Street and Broadway. The day in question was January 1st 1987, and I blurted out this statement shortly after my parents had started fighting with each other. Fuelled by alcohol and an impressive array of deeply held resentments, it was a dispute which ended with my mother shouting out loud that my dad was a shit and storming off in tears to what she always called ‘the little girls’ room’. Though the other patrons in the restaurant gawked at this loud scene of marital discontent, their fight came as no great shock to me. My parents were always fighting – and they had this habit of really combusting at those junctures in the calendar (Christmas, Thanksgiving, the anniversary of their only child’s arrival in the world) when family values allegedly ruled supreme and we were supposed to feel ‘all warm and cuddly’ towards each other.

But my parents never did warm and cuddly. They needed shared belligerence the way a certain kind of drunk needs his daily eye-opening shot of whiskey. Without it they felt destabilized, isolated, even a little lost. Once they started baiting and taunting each other, they were in a place they called home. Unhappiness isn’t simply a state of mind; it is also a habit . . . and one which my parents could never shake.

But I digress. New Year’s Day, 1987. We’d driven in from our home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut for my birthday. We’d gone to see the New York City Ballet perform the famous Balanchine production of
The Nutcracker
. After the matinee, we adjourned to a restaurant called O’Neill’s opposite Lincoln Center. My dad had ordered a vodka Martini, then downed a second, then raised his hand for a third. Mom started berating him for drinking too much. Dad, being Dad, informed Mom that she wasn’t his mother and if he wanted a goddamn third Martini, he’d drink a goddamn third Martini. Mom hissed at him to lower his voice. Dad said he was not going to be infantilized. Mom retorted, telling him he deserved to be infantilized because he was nothing more than a little baby who, when reprimanded, threw all his toys out of the crib. Dad, going in for the kill, called her a failed nobody who—

At which point she screamed – in her most actressy voice – ‘You pathetic shit!’ and made a dash for ‘the little girls’ room’, leaving me staring down into my Shirley Temple. Dad motioned to the waiter for his third vodka Martini. There was a long awkward silence between us. Dad broke it with a non-sequitur.

‘So how’s school?’

I answered just as obliquely.

‘I am never getting married and I am never having children.’

My father’s response to this was to light up one of the thirty Chesterfields he smoked every day and laugh one of his deep bronchial laughs.

‘Like hell you won’t,’ he said. ‘You think you’re gonna dodge all this, you’ve got another think coming.’

One thing I’ve got to say about my dad: he never spared me the truth. Nor did he think much about cosseting me from life’s manifold disappointments. Like my mom he also operated according to the principle: after a vituperative exchange, act as if nothing has happened – for a moment or two anyway. So when Mom returned from ‘the little girls’ room’ with a fixed smile on her face, Dad returned it.

‘Jane here was just telling me about her future,’ Dad said, swizzling the swizzle stick in his vodka Martini.

‘Jane’s going to have a great future,’ she said. ‘What did you tell Dad, dear?’

Dad answered for me.

‘Our daughter informed me that she is never going to get married and never have children.’

Dad looked right at Mom as he said this, enjoying her discomfort.

‘Surely you don’t mean that, dear,’ she said to me.

‘I do,’ I said.

‘But a lot of people we know are very happily married . . .’ she answered. Dad cackled and threw back vodka Martini number three. Mom blanched, realizing that she had spoken without thinking. (‘My mouth always reacts before my brain,’ she once admitted to me after blurting out that she hadn’t had sex with my father for four years.)

An awkward silence followed, which I broke.

‘No one’s actually happy,’ I said.

‘Jane,
really
 . . .’ Mom said, ‘you’re far too young for such negativity.’

‘No, she’s not,’ said Dad. ‘In fact, if Jane’s figured that little salient detail out already, she’s a lot smarter than the two of us. And you’re right, kid – you want to live a happy life, don’t get married and don’t have kids. But you will . . .’

‘Don,
really
 . . .’

‘
Really
what?’ he said, half shouting in that way he did when he was drunk. ‘You expect me to
lie
to her . . . even though she’s already articulated the fucking
truth
?’

Several people at adjoining tables glared again at us. Dad smiled that little-boy smile which always crossed his lips whenever he misbehaved. He ordered a fourth Martini. Mom strangled a napkin in her hands and said nothing except: ‘I’ll drive tonight.’

‘Fine by me,’ Dad said. Martini number four arrived. He toasted me with it.

‘Happy birthday, sweetheart. And here’s to you never living a lie . . .’

I glanced over at my mother. She was in tears. I glanced back at my father. His smile had grown even wider.

We finished dinner. We drove home in silence. Later that night, my mom came into my room as I was reading in bed. She kneeled down by me and took my hand and told me I was to ignore everything my father had said.

‘You will be happy, dear,’ she told me. ‘I just know it.’

I said nothing. I simply shut my eyes and surrendered to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, my father had gone.

I discovered this when I came downstairs around eleven. School wasn’t starting for another three days – and, as a newfangled teenager, I had already started to embrace twelve-hour zone-outs as a way of coping with that prevalent adolescent belief:
life sucks
. As I walked into the kitchen I discovered my mother seated at the breakfast bar, her head lowered, her make-up streaked, her eyes red. There was a lit cigarette in an ashtray in front of her. There was another one between her fingers. And in her other hand was a letter.