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For the girls: Adeline, Violet, and Josephine
It was a Friday when the girl came into the Archives for the first time, the first Friday after they’d changed the clocks. Spring ahead, fall back: Kathleen had once learned some rhyme about that when she was a schoolchild, but she no longer remembered it. It had been some time since she’d been a schoolchild. This was early November, the leaves mostly down, lying wet and slick all over Boston.
Not so long ago, a few days, maybe a week, Kathleen had been out walking the dog in short sleeves, but today the sky—dark, glowering, low—seemed to be readying itself for some sort of inhospitable eruption. The planet appeared to be in a muddle, and she waited (they all waited) for something to happen.
Which it did. Not right away, but eventually.
Once when Kathleen’s daughter, Susannah, was in kindergarten, she had come home with a song she’d learned about her place in the world: Universe, Earth, North America, United States, Massachusetts, Boston, South Boston. That was years ago, of course, before Susannah left, when she was still young, unblemished, unashamed to love her mother, with sturdy little legs and a smile that turned strangers’ heads. There was a tune that went with the song, and some hand gestures. Kathleen thought of that now, imagining a camera zooming in on her, Google-mapping her all the way to her desk, and to the girl slouching in front of her.
This girl must not have heard the weather reports, because her jacket was thin and didn’t look waterproof. The girl had long orangey red hair, and skin that was nearly transparent—Kathleen could see the tiny blue veins snaking along her temples—and even through the jacket Kathleen could see that she was very, very thin. Legs like toothpicks, a chest that was nearly concave, collarbones poking out from the skin. This was an arresting look. In fact she could have stepped right out of the pages of one of the catalogs Kathleen occasionally received in the mail (catalogs that were likely meant for Susannah, because certainly Kathleen, a woman of fifty-seven, a widow, had no need for a $170 dress with ruffled tiers of diaphanous silk).
The hair really stood out, because of the color, and the thinness was almost hard to take; the girl could have been just as easily headed for an eating disorder clinic as for the runway. But here she was at the Massachusetts Archives, which was, you had to admit, a strange place for a girl this age (what age? Kathleen wasn’t sure) to be.
Neil was off somewhere, and the intern was helping somebody in the reading room. Later Kathleen was grateful for that; she was happy that she was the first one to talk to the girl, because what if somebody else had claimed her?
The girl held a cell phone in her hand, a tiny little thing but not so tiny that it didn’t have its own minuscule keyboard, and occasionally she dropped her eyes to look at the screen. Kathleen listened politely as the girl explained what she was there for. A school project, she said. Researching her family tree.
“Ah,” said Kathleen. “And you came to do it the old-fashioned way.” She liked that.
The girl blinked at her. Kathleen could see that she had tried to camouflage the paleness of her eyelashes by using mascara, and that the mascara had clumped in one corner of her eye. She resisted the urge to tell her about that, and later that night, at home, with the television on and Lucy (a border collie, though about as far away from the border as you could get) resting on the rug near the fire, that was a choice she regretted. In the same situation, she would have wanted to know. The girl was also wearing, on slightly chapped and cracked lips, a shade of lipstick that was a little bit off.
“Old-fashioned,” Kathleen repeated. “Instead of online.” After a beat she added “Good for you” in an approving way, and the girl smiled at that, showing front teeth that seemed too big for her mouth.
And then Kathleen saw it! Just like that, the resemblance to Susannah. Not in coloring—Susannah was darker—and while Susannah was tall she wasn’t as skinny, as coltish, as this girl, even when she had been this age. (Fourteen? Younger? Older?) But there was something about the mouth, the eyes, the expression. Something indescribable.
Thus encouraged, Kathleen went on. “Here’s where you sign up for a visitor’s badge.” She pushed the form toward her. Natalie Gallagher, the girl wrote carefully, gripping the pencil harder than she needed to. Kathleen handed her a badge, and the girl—Natalie—put it on. “Now,” said Kathleen, “your backpack isn’t allowed in. You’ll have to put your things in a locker.” She pointed. “Then you can meet me in the reading room.”
The girl slunk off, and returned a moment later, flushing. “It says I need a quarter,” she said. “I don’t have a quarter. So I put my stuff in the locker, but I couldn’t get the key. Will I be able to get my stuff back? Without the key?”
“No quarter?” Kathleen said. She took her purse from the floor near the desk and rummaged through her wallet. “Here,” she said, thrusting one at the girl. “You’d better get the key, just to be safe.”
“Thank you,” said the girl. She had manners.
A few minutes later Natalie appeared in the reading room with a sheet of paper in her hands. She pulled out a chair and sat across from Kathleen and regarded her with a gravity and a seriousness of purpose. They did not get many people this young in the Archives. Mostly it was older people: retirees with time on their hands, or people heading to Ireland who wanted to visit the village where their great-great-grandparents were born. Sometimes they got a Girl Scout or Boy Scout troop working on a badge. But a solitary teen? Unusual. Kathleen knew she was probably reaching, but this girl seemed like she had been sent from somewhere else as a messenger of sorts—a visitor from the Land of Susannah.
Kathleen had worked at the Archives for twenty-six years, since Susannah was a toddler. Part-time, at first, because she had to arrange for child care, and there was a certain point at which the cost of the child care would be higher than Kathleen’s salary; she had to be careful not to reach that point. These were the things she worried about back then.
In those twenty-six years how many people had come to her looking to research their family trees? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Maybe more. She should have counted them. Why hadn’t she counted? That would have been an interesting statistic to carry around with her, a way to measure the productivity of her life.
She retrieved some scrap paper from the pile and a pencil from the container of pencils and handed them to Natalie. Natalie took them both and tilted the paper at an angle and held the pencil above the paper, looking at Kathleen expectantly, as though this were an exam, and Kathleen the examiner.
“So,” said Kathleen. “What’s the assignment, exactly?”
“Oh.” The girl shifted in her chair. “Well, no assignment, exactly. It’s sort of an independent-study project. For extra credit, like. I’m the only one doing this. Other people are doing other stuff.” She paused. “My father did some of this a couple of years ago, but I don’t know, I guess I thought I could do something with it…” Here she gestured at a crumpled sheet of paper she had put on the table, crudely torn from a yellow legal pad.
“I see,” said Kathleen, tapping the table with the eraser of her own pencil. “And where’d you come from? Where’s your school?”
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“Newburyport,” said the girl.
“Newburyport! That’s a haul, all the way down here from there. Somebody drive you? Your mother drive you?”
The girl looked down. “No,” she said. “I came on my own.”
“On your own? How?”
“Bus to South Station, then Red Line, then I took the shuttle.”
“Oh,” said Kathleen, impressed. “How’d you know to come here?”
The girl shrugged. “I Googled it,” she said.
“I see. Then you must have seen… you probably saw that you can actually do much of this online, at least to get started.”
“Yeah,” said the girl. It was almost a whisper, the way she spoke. “But I wanted to come. I like the bus. And besides, I kind of wanted to get away.”
Kathleen considered this. “Fair enough,” she said. She went on. “If you don’t mind, I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve traced my family back to the early eighteen hundreds.” The girl didn’t react, so Kathleen continued. “How’d I do it? I took my time. Years.”
Natalie said, “Years?”
“Years.” This was one of the nuances of Kathleen’s job: you couldn’t ever be nosy, you couldn’t ever show more interest in a person’s family than he showed himself, but sometimes you had to encourage—even prod—in subtle and delicate ways. “To do research like I’ve done would be a major undertaking. But if you’ve got something to start with, well, in that case we might be able to go back a few generations pretty easily. And the thing about it is this. It’s like pulling a thread that unravels and unravels. One loose thread, and you can unknit an entire sweater. Because everyone is a part of someone else’s life story, once you find the connection.”
Quietly Natalie said, “Geez. I don’t know if I’m going to do all of that. I mean, I don’t think I’m going to go, like, overboard on it.” But Kathleen could see behind her eyes some glimmer of interest. Natalie finished, “I just want to get a good grade on the project.”
Undaunted, Kathleen detailed some of her search, then continued. “When I got stuck, I thought my way out of it. I took other avenues to get the answer. And I’ll show you what I got for it, if you wait here a minute.” She left the room and walked back to her desk, where she kept photocopied sheets of her descendant chart. When she returned to the room she saw that the girl had her cell phone out again. This was strictly not allowed, but Kathleen let the transgression pass because as she drew closer she saw that the girl’s shoulders were shaking; she was crying.
“Natalie?” She touched her gently on the shoulder, and the girl started. There was something like a caged animal in the look she gave Kathleen—she might have been baring her teeth. “Is everything okay?”
Natalie wiped at her eyes and, looking down, said, “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Near the lockers, where you left your bag.”
Abruptly Natalie stood, then set off toward the door of the reading room. Kathleen heard a ting, and when she looked down she saw that in her haste Natalie had knocked her cell phone to the ground. Kathleen picked it up, not meaning to read the message on the screen, well, okay, sort of meaning to read it, it was hard to pick the thing up without reading it, and she saw these words in the phone’s window:
WE KNOW SOMETHING ABT U NATALIE
Out loud Kathleen said, “Huh?” She read it again, and then she put the phone on top of the table, and by the time Natalie made her way back from the bathroom, her eyes dry but the mascara now smeared beneath them, Kathleen had busied herself at one of the cabinets.
Just like that; it was that quick. She was involved.
“Okay?” Kathleen said when Natalie returned from the locker room. “Everything all right?”
Natalie shook her head and wiped fiercely at her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Fine.”
“It doesn’t look like everything is fine. You don’t look fine.” Kathleen spoke softly—Neil called this her Library Voice—and so when Natalie grasped at the phone on the table, knocking into the chair next to her, the sound was surprisingly loud in the quiet room. “I’m fine,” she said. “But they’re stupid.”
“Who?”
“Stupid girls. The girls in my school. Everybody in my school is stupid. I hate them all.” She said this harshly, and the hand that gripped the cell phone was white-knuckled.
Kathleen didn’t know what to say to this. Some latent instinct arose in her; she had a mother’s urge to draw Natalie to her, to cradle her head and kiss her hair. But of course she couldn’t do that. Natalie would think she was crazy. She was now backing away from Kathleen, gathering her things, putting her phone into her jacket pocket. Kathleen said, “By the way. Why are you here instead of school?”
Natalie didn’t miss a beat; she looked directly into Kathleen’s eyes. “No school today,” she said. “Day off. Teachers’ in-service or something.”
“Ah,” said Kathleen. “I see.”
Natalie fiddled with one of her backpack straps and pushed her hair out of her face. “Anyway. Thank you for helping me.”
Kathleen could see now that Natalie had little gold hoops in her ears. Why was that sad? Earrings weren’t sad. And yet the sight of them was sad to Kathleen: the innocence of them, this girl’s small attempt to be beautiful.
“You’re certainly welcome,” said Kathleen. “That’s my job. But I don’t feel like I helped you much yet. We haven’t really gotten started. Are you leaving?”
“Yeah. I have to catch my bus back.”
“Well, do you think you’ll continue?”
Natalie blinked at her. “Of course I’ll continue,” she said. “Like you just said, I barely got started. I didn’t do anything yet. I’m not going to stop.”
Kathleen fought the urge to put her hand on Natalie’s jacket, to keep her there while she talked. “You know, you can probably get started from home. The indexes for a lot of facilities, ours included, are online. You have to go to the physical site for the primary source, of course, for the actual records. But I could walk you through some of it on the phone—”
Something in Natalie’s face changed; there was a hardening. “Okay,” she said.
“I didn’t mean you can’t come back.”
Natalie sniffled and wiped at her nose with the sleeve of her jacket. Silently Kathleen pushed the tissue box toward her, and kept talking. Natalie ignored the tissue box. “Of course you’re welcome to come back anytime. The whole public is welcome. I just meant that it’s a long way, that’s all that I was thinking. From Newburyport. If you don’t have rides. Or maybe you’d have rides sometimes?”
“No,” said Natalie shortly, unapologetically, lifting her chin an inch. “I don’t have rides.”
“In that case, I’ll give you my card.” Kathleen crossed the room to retrieve one of her cards from a little stack she kept near the pencils and the scrap paper. “That way you can get in touch if you want to. Email, call, however you want to do it.”
Susannah’s freckles were lighter, and disappeared altogether before she became a teenager. But again, there it was. Something behind Natalie’s eyes that tugged at Kathleen’s memories: Susannah as a toddler reaching out her arms to be picked up, Susannah as an eight-year-old on a bike with a white wicker basket, her braids flying out behind her.
“Here,” Kathleen said. “I’ll write my home number on the back.” She did, and then under the number she wrote IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.
Natalie took the card from Kathleen and studied it. Then she said, “Oh, and… here.” She held out a coin to Kathleen. “I didn’t know I would get the quarter back. From that locker. So here you go.”
“Thank you,” said Kathleen. “But I wasn’t worried about it, really.” She smiled. “It’s just a quarter.”
“Well.” Natalie scrunched up her face. “I don’t like to owe people I don’t know.”
Kathleen was taken aback by something in the girl’s tone, but she was impressed, too—it showed some resolve, the way Natalie straightened her sh
oulders and met Kathleen’s gaze levelly. Kathleen took the coin. It was warm and moist.
She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “But wait. What time is your bus?”
Natalie shrugged. “They come every hour.”
“Do you need to call someone, to let them know where you are? Your mother?”
Natalie looked down at her scuffed sneakers; her shoulders inched forward again. “My mother’s dead. So I can’t call her for anything.”
“Oh, dear.” Kathleen fixed her gaze on a spot on the side of Natalie’s neck—there was a cluster of freckles there, lone and defiant, like a constellation in an otherwise empty sky. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she whispered.
“Yeah, well, so’m I,” said Natalie. She retrieved her phone from her pocket and glanced at it. Kathleen thought she saw her shudder. “I have to go,” she said suddenly.
Kathleen said, “You know, it’s going to rain, it might be raining already. Do you have an umbrella?”
“No.” Natalie looked surprised at the question, as though Kathleen had asked her if she had an extra hand she might want to lend out.
“It’s supposed to pour, Natalie. You’ll get soaked.”
Natalie adjusted the straps of the backpack and zipped her jacket to the top of her neck. She shrugged. “I’ll be okay.”
“No,” said Kathleen. She thought of Susannah in a little yellow bumblebee-themed slicker, Susannah under a pink ballerina umbrella. “Take mine. I have a spare. Wait here.” She didn’t have a spare.
She went back to her desk to retrieve her umbrella. She half expected Natalie to be gone when she got back to the reading room, but Natalie was there, staring out into the middle distance, her cell phone tucked away somewhere. She took the umbrella from Kathleen. “Thanks,” she said, and, in a gesture that was unexpected and surprisingly formal, she reached out her hand to shake. “See you.”
“I hope so,” said Kathleen, and meant it. “Come back, and we’ll work on this together.”
Natalie nodded.
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 1
