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Part of it is that I recognize in her that thing that happens when you lose your mother. My mother left by choice, Bailey’s by tragedy, but it leaves a similar imprint on you either way. It leaves you in the same strange place, trying to figure out how to navigate the world without the most important person watching.
This quotation comes from “Greene Street Before It Was Greene Street,” as Hannah reflects on her relationship with Bailey. At this point in the story, Hannah knows Owen has asked her to protect Bailey, but she does not know why and has yet to share the information with Bailey. Here, Hannah acknowledges how she and Bailey share the distinction of being motherless daughters and how that status complicates the relationship for both of them. Though Hannah’s childhood trauma differs from Bailey’s (abandonment versus death), these differences are less important than what they share. As she expresses what it feels like to lose one’s mother by referring to “place,” Hannah implies that this is a journey the two can share together, if they let themselves. Because Hannah has experienced this loss herself, she desperately wants to be the one who guides Bailey through the world and this sense of maternal loss.
It would be the first time I was a part of an actual family. I felt completely unsure of how to do it properly, how to count on Owen, how to show Bailey she could count on me.
Hannah thinks this in the flashback chapter “Eighteen Months Ago,” recalling when she moved to California to be with Owen. Hannah wants reassurance she is making the right choice but does not articulate to Owen her own insecurities about being part of a family. Despite Hannah’s love for her grandfather, she does not consider her upbringing the same as experiencing a nuclear family. She fears her lack of experience will doom her efforts with Owen and Bailey. Ironically, Hannah’s assumption that her time with her grandfather somehow does not count as “an actual family” hampers her far more in her efforts to build a family dynamic. Throughout the book, Hannah relies on her grandfather’s wisdom to guide her interactions with people. Her memories repeatedly demonstrate a man who understood how to be a loving, safe parent for a confused, hurt child. Hannah’s relationship with Bailey improves as she finally recognizes that modeling her grandfather’s behavior will work with her stepdaughter. Hannah’s journey as a character includes breaking down the restrictive assumption that she does not understand how to be part of a family and recognizing she had a wonderful family role model all along in her grandfather.
We’ll have Bailey in common. We’ll be the two people doing whatever is needed for her.
In “You Have to Do Some Things on Your Own,” Hannah has this realization after she and Nicholas have successfully made peace. Neither Nicholas nor Hannah fully gets what they want, but they put aside their differences for Bailey’s sake. This passage further expresses how blood ties do not define family. Here, only Nicholas and Bailey share biological kinship. Nicholas and Hannah nevertheless agree to construct a nontraditional family through their shared interest in and love for Bailey. Ironically, even though Nicholas and Hannah distrust and even dislike each other, hardly the foundation of a healthy family dynamic, they still recognize the other’s love for Bailey and band together to protect her. Possibly as a concession to the unusual dynamics that cause her to ally with Nicholas, Hannah also does not reference Owen as one of the people doing whatever Bailey needed here even though she reiterates Owen’s profound love for Bailey elsewhere in the book. Her arrangement with Nicholas excludes Owen, just as her internal monologue does.
