Kiss Her Goodbye

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  April? Kathleen frowns. Who’s April?

  “—and I called Dad,” Jen finishes ruefully.

  “I’m glad you did.” Matt pats her arm. “I think it was just a trick of the light, or a low branch hanging down from that tree by the bushes. But I’ll stay here with you until the Gattinskis get home.”

  Oh, April. That’s right. The girl who ran away from the apartment complex down the road late last summer. Kathleen vaguely remembers hearing she turned up in California with her father.

  Or did she?

  Things are different here than they were back in Indiana. There, the neighborhood was so tightly knit that they knew everybody, and everybody knew them. Families, including Matt’s, went back generations.

  Here in Orchard Hollow, you can live a stone’s throw from somebody and still be strangers.

  She opens her mouth to ask whether April did turn up in California, but Jen cuts her off, addressing Matt.

  “You don’t have to stay until the Gattinskis get home, Dad. They should be here in like, fifteen minutes. I’ll be okay with the girls until then.”

  “Fifteen minutes?” Kathleen asks. “I thought they were out for the night.”

  “They were. I called Mrs. Gattinski on her cell phone. I was pretty freaked out, and she said to call in an emergency. I figured it was an emergency if somebody was creeping around the house. I didn’t know what else to do.” Jen looks increasingly embarrassed. “I just kept thinking—”

  “About the girl who ran away? Do you know something I don’t about that, Jen?” Kathleen asks.

  Jen shrugs. “Erin thinks she got murdered.”

  “I thought they found her in California.”

  “Did they?”

  “I don’t know.” Again, Kathleen considers how different the neighborhood is. Here her daughter is babysitting for virtual strangers and scared out of her mind. “You did the right thing calling the Gattinskis and Dad, Jen. What did Mrs. Gattinski say?”

  “We had a bad connection the first time I called and I got cut off, but she called me right back. She was really worried. She said they’ll be home right away. You don’t think they won’t want me to babysit again, do you, Mom? What if they think I’m some wimp?”

  “You’re not a wimp,” Kathleen firmly tells her daughter. She looks at Matt, wishing he were taking this more seriously, wishing she had told him about the soccer field.

  But what did you see, really? Just a bystander watching the game.

  Did April really turn up safe in California?

  Or did something horrible happen to her?

  Darn Kathleen’s imagination for conjuring a sinister stranger preying on young girls. But in this scary world, that’s probably the fate of every mother of a teenaged daughter: feeling as though somebody is going to come along and snatch your precious child away.

  Yes, surely other mothers feel that way.

  Surely, when other mothers kiss their daughters goodbye, they secretly wonder if it might be for the last time.

  But it’s different for me, Kathleen tells herself grimly, looking at her beloved Jen. I’ve been living with that fear for too, too long—and it’s been growing with every day that passes.

  We never should have moved back here. I should have talked Matt out of taking the job. I should’ve . . .

  What?

  Told him the truth?

  She looks from her daughter to her husband. Both are unsuspecting. Both would be shattered if they knew . . .

  No.

  No, they’ll never know. She’s come this far without telling, and she’ll carry her secret to her grave, just as she vowed on the day that began as the most tragic—and wound up the most blessed—day of her life.

  THREE

  Jen has never liked Mondays.

  There’s the whole thing about being extra tired Monday mornings because you slept in on Sunday morning and couldn’t get to sleep Sunday night.

  Plus the cafeteria always serves spaghetti on Mondays. Jen can’t get the sandwich choice because it’s always pre-made with mayonnaise, which is off limits due to her egg allergy. And she likes spaghetti, but the school’s cook makes the sauce too garlicky. She sits next to Garth Monroe in biology lab right after lunch. He’s cute—really cute—and the last thing she wants to do is breathe garlic fumes in his face.

  And then there’s the choir thing.

  On Mondays, Jen has choir instead of gym. Back in Indiana, the school choir was made up of a select group of students, and they rehearsed while the others were in study hall. Here, choir is mandatory. Which would be fine—if you weren’t one of the students who’s been instructed to just move their lips during the upcoming fall concert. Jen has never been able to carry a tune.

  So basically, Mondays suck.

  Today was better than usual, though. Instead of making them sing during choir class, Mrs. Tylerson had them do worksheets on classical music while they listened to some opera. And Garth was absent, so her garlic breath didn’t matter nearly as much as usual. It’s just too bad she wasted her favorite pair of jeans and form-fitting black sweater on a day when he’s not even here.

  Now, as Jen heads to her locker to get her jacket and her backpack, she glances at the homework assignment her biology teacher just handed out. It’s filled with little four-box grids that need to be filled in. Boring, boring. They’re studying dominant and recessive genes. But that, she supposes, is better than the big reproduction unit that’s looming. How will she ever get through that with Garth sitting only a few inches from her? Talk about embarrassing . . .

  “Hey Jen!”

  She turns to see Erin hurrying toward her, Amber Korth at her side.

  “Hi, guys. What’s up?”

  “Robby said he’ll drop us at the Galleria for a few hours and come back and pick us up at five-thirty,” Erin says, falling into step with Jen, twirling a strand of her long blond hair around her fingertip. “There’s a sale at Abercrombie. Want to come?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Erin asks.

  “Why not?” Amber echoes.

  “I just can’t.”

  “Her mother,” Erin informs Amber, as though Jen hasn’t spoken. “She doesn’t want her hanging around with juvenile delinquents.”

  “That’s so—I mean, God! We’re not juvenile delinquents, Jen.”

  “I know you’re not, Amber. And so does my mother. It’s just . . .”

  “Robby.”

  Erin’s voice is flat, and so is Jen’s when she replies.

  “Right. Robby. My mother would kill me if she found out I’d been riding around with him. And so would your mother, Erin. She’d be so pissed.”

  “My mother so isn’t going to find out, Jen. Is she?”

  There’s something almost . . . ominous in her friend’s tone. Jen looks up to see that Erin’s eyes aren’t as warm as they were a few seconds ago.

  Hurt, she says softly, “You know I wouldn’t tell your mother, Erin.”

  “But are you going to tell your mother? Because guaranteed if you do she’ll tell mine.”

  “Geez.” Amber shakes her head. “Why’d you even want to ask her to come with us, Erin? If my mother finds out—”

  “Nobody’s mother is going to find out anything. Right, Jen?”

  Undigested spaghetti is churning in Jen’s gut. She forces herself to look Erin in the eye. “I’m not saying a word to anybody.”

  “Good.” Erin softens her tone. “I just . . . when I saw you I thought I’d ask because I figured maybe you felt like doing something fun for a change, Jen. I mean, I feel so sorry for you. All you ever do is go to school and play soccer and babysit. You never get to go anywhere or do anything.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Oh, right. You forgot, Erin. Church. She goes to church with her family on Sunday mornings.” Amber giggles.

  “Cut it out, Amber.” Erin flashes a sympathetic look at Jen.

  Grateful they’ve reached her locker, Jen turns her ba
ck and works the combination with her right hand, clutching her books against her pounding heart with her left. Suddenly, she feels like crying.

  “See you tomorrow, Jen,” Erin says, behind her.

  “See you tomorrow,” Amber the trained parrot echoes.

  “See you,” Jen manages.

  She opens her locker, blindly shoving her books into the backpack hanging on a hook. Oblivious to the din around her, she wishes they’d never moved here. Back in Indiana, she had plenty of friends. Friends who had known her—and her family—their whole lives. Friends whose parents were as overprotective as Jen’s.

  No they weren’t, she contradicts herself. Not all of them. Nobody else had to be home by nine o’clock on a weekend night in Indiana, either. And almost everybody got to go to the Dave Matthews concert in Chicago last February. Everybody but Jen.

  Her mother wasn’t swayed by the fact that Dana Markowitz’s parents were driving them into the city and staying for the concert.

  Erin’s words echo in her head. I feel so sorry for you.

  Suddenly, Jen feels sorry for herself, too.

  You never get to go anywhere or do anything.

  Anger seeps in. Anger at her mother, and at herself, for allowing her mother to shelter her to the point where people are making fun of her.

  Jen grabs her backpack and her barn coat, then slams the locker shut and looks around. Erin and Amber have stopped at Erin’s locker at the end of the corridor.

  Jen’s sneakers carry her in that direction even as her mind wrestles with temptation. When she arrives at Erin’s locker, she steps out of character long enough to say, “Is it too late to change my mind and tag along?” before wondering what the hell she’s getting herself into.

  Carrying a stack of still-warm-from-the-dryer jeans, Kathleen opens the bottom drawer of her dresser, then pauses in dismay.

  The thing about getting caught up on laundry is that there’s not enough storage space for clean clothes, towels, and sheets. What this house really needs, Kathleen decides, trying to jam the jeans into the already crowded drawer, is a large walk-up attic like the one in their old house. She used to be able to store off-season clothes up there in cedar-lined wardrobes. In this house, there’s an attic, but it’s more of a crawl-space, really, accessible only by a pull-down ladder through the ceiling in Jen’s closet.

  Kathleen forces the bureau drawer closed, then opens a top drawer to make room for her clean socks. It, too, is full already.

  You could always clean out the clutter, she reminds herself as she rummages past several single socks whose partners vanished into clothes dryer oblivion.

  Like these dressy black trouser socks—when does she ever wear them? And some of her gym socks are wearing thin at the toes. She removes several pairs from the drawer, then catches a glimpse of pink fuzz tucked into the back corner.

  Kathleen’s heart beats a little faster as she pulls out the familiar bundle: a hand-knit pale rose-colored blanket and a single matching baby bootee with lacy white trim. Swallowing hard over a sudden lump in her throat, she clutches the soft yarn against her cheek, remembering . . .

  Until the faint, muffled sound of a ringing telephone startles her out of her reverie. She reaches for the bedside extension, only to find that the cordless receiver isn’t in its cradle.

  Damn it. Jen must have taken it into her room again last night to have a private conversation with one of her friends.

  Frustrated, Kathleen hurries back down into the kitchen, but by the time she reaches the phone there, it’s fallen silent.

  Four rings, and it goes into voice mail—that’s the new system. In Indiana, they had a good old-fashioned answering machine, but that broke and Matt didn’t see the sense in replacing it when they moved. Not when voice mail is so economical and convenient.

  Or so he says.

  Frustrated at having missed the call, Kathleen dials the voice mail access number. As she punches in her pin number, she glances at the clock. It’s almost three. Curran and Riley will be getting off the bus in about five minutes, followed by Jen fifteen minutes after that.

  “You have no . . . new . . . messages,” a recorded voice says in staccato cadence.

  Either that . . . or she dialed too soon.

  Still holding the phone, Kathleen walks over to the counter, where she was mixing together a steak marinade between loads of laundry. As she throws a pinch of salt into the oil and vinegar combination in the bowl, she weighs the likelihood that the caller was her father’s nursing home, calling to tell her he’s run away again.

  It’s happened a few times lately. Somehow, her father manages to dress himself and slip out the front door. He never gets far. He’s usually found by the Erasmus staff wandering in the same block, trying to find his way back to his old neighborhood and the house that was sold long ago.

  “I just want to go back home, Kathleen,” he says whenever she rushes over after one of those incidents. “Why can’t I go home?”

  The nurses have promised her—several times, now—that it won’t happen again. But maybe it has.

  Or maybe Drew Gallager himself was calling again?

  Kathleen spoke to him less than an hour ago, and promised to visit first thing tomorrow morning—bringing the new socks and underwear he requested. That means a trip to Target on the way, unless she leaves the younger boys with Jen and runs out to the store this afternoon instead.

  She bought Dad new socks and underwear right before Labor Day, when she was doing back to school shopping for the kids. She could swear she bought him some for his birthday in July, too. But when she asked him, he claimed somebody has been stealing them from his bureau.

  For all she knows, he isn’t just paranoid. The private Catholic nursing home isn’t exactly a haven, but it’s affordable.

  Dad is proud of the fact that he worked hard all his life and saved enough to take care of himself in his old age.

  “You know, Katie, I never asked anyone for a penny,” he likes to say, in his more lucid moments.

  No, he never did. And she never asked him for a penny, either.

  Sometimes, Kathleen is tempted to ask Matt if they can have Dad move in here.

  Then she remembers what it was like to live under the same roof with him; remembers all the lonely, deprived years of her childhood.

  She remembers Get Out.

  Those were her father’s final words to her on that awful March day; they rang bitterly in her ears as she closed the front door behind her, locked it, and pocketed the key. Not that she’d be needing it again. Drew Gallagher had made it more than clear that she—and her baby, when it was born—would not be welcome in his house.

  Standing in her suburban kitchen, Katie is swept back to that day, remembering every detail, reliving it as she has so many times through the years.

  She remembers the sting of the wind on her cheeks and the stink of sulfur from a nearby factory. Remembers how she raised the hood on her down parka, picked up her hastily packed suitcase, and descended the sagging front steps. How, when she reached the packed layer of recently plowed snow that marked the sidewalk, she paused.

  Right or left?

  Which way should she go?

  Where the hell was she supposed to turn?

  Aunt Maggie would have taken her in, without a doubt. But her aunt had warned her only months earlier, during Katie’s annual Christmas visit to Chicago, that she was going to find herself in serious trouble if she didn’t straighten out.

  No, she couldn’t go running to Aunt Maggie, Queen of I Told You So.

  Who else was there?

  Maeve O’Shea?

  Her best friend lived only a few blocks from her father’s house. However, Katie had all but ignored Maeve in the two years since they’d graduated from Saint Brigid’s. The last she heard, Maeve was working at the Clinique counter at the mall and still dating her high school sweetheart, Gregory, who was in dental school—a far cry from the mess Katie had made of her own life.

&n
bsp; She swallows hard over a lump that rises in her throat even now. The warm suburban kitchen has fallen away and she’s once again standing on the street in the frigid dusk, feeling hot tears beginning to slide down her cheeks, stinging where the brisk March wind hits them.

  There was nobody to turn to.

  Nobody.

  She was entirely alone in the world.

  No. Not alone.

  She remembers. She remembers what she promised the baby growing in her womb.

  I’ll keep you safe. I’ll never let anything happen to you. To us. I’m going to be the best mommy in the world.

  But how? And where? She needed help.

  She remembers looking up at the sky, searching for answers there. She did that a lot when she was growing up, as though she expected to see her mother, the angel, looking down on her. But she never did. That night, she saw nothing but overcast twilight, heavy black clouds closing in over Lake Erie a few miles away. Katie instantly recognized what that meant. More lake-effect snow, rolling in quickly from the west.

  She knew she couldn’t stand out there on the street all night. She had to find someplace warm before the storm hit.

  The answer came to her then, an answer so comforting, so right, that she almost dared to believe that it was actually sent from Mommy in heaven.

  Wiping away her tears, Katie held her head high and turned toward the left, where the familiar steeple of Saint Brigid’s rose high above the snow-covered roof tops.

  Saint Brigid’s is gone now.

  So many things are gone.

  So many things are different.

  Katie has a family of her own. She’s not dependent on Drew Gallagher for anything—and he’s not dependent on her.

  That’s how it should stay, she tells herself firmly, dialing the voice mail access number again. She already has her hands full trying to keep up with the kids and the household. The last thing she needs is to move her elderly father in here.