So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  Kathleen watched the girl’s progress out the door. She made her way down the steps, slipping once and then catching herself with the handrail.

  “Whoa,” said Neil, appearing beside Kathleen, whistling. “Who’s your friend?”

  Kathleen shrugged, suddenly irritated by Neil, irritated by the weather, by Natalie’s disappearance down the steps, by the rain, by everything. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Where’d she come from?”

  “Newburyport.” What had Natalie said? I don’t like to owe people I don’t know. That seemed like an odd thing for a young girl to articulate.

  “Strange,” said Neil.

  “Yes,” said Kathleen. My mother’s dead. So I can’t call her for anything. The poor girl. No wonder she looked so fragile and bewildered. So underfed! Poor thing, no mother. That explained why she was out in a rainstorm on a school day, why she was navigating Boston’s public transportation system on her own. She had nobody to tell her not to.

  Neil asked later why the girl wasn’t in school.

  “Teachers’ in-service,” said Kathleen. They were taking a coffee break in the little room upstairs. It was a coffee break where neither person was drinking coffee. For Kathleen it was water; Neil was sucking at the green beverage he’d brought with him—some sort of concoction that included kale and hemp seed, whipped up earlier that morning in his $500 Vitamix blender. (“For cleansing,” he’d said.) “What did she want?”

  So Kathleen told him about the project. “We didn’t get very far at all,” said Kathleen. “She said she had to get the bus back. Sort of odd, to come all the way here, for what was basically an introductory conversation.” She was still thinking about the resemblance between Natalie and Susannah. It was chewing at her.

  “Yeah, that’s a shocker,” said Neil. “Seems like kids do everything online these days.”

  Neil was somewhere in his thirties. Kathleen didn’t know his age exactly, but it seemed to her he was too young to say “these days.”

  Kathleen nodded. “That’s what I told her!” she said, feeling pleased with this evidence of solidarity between them. “Not just kids,” she added. “Seems like most people do.”

  “Right,” said Neil, and he took another sip of the smoothie. “And that’s fine, in certain cases.”

  “Sure,” said Kathleen. “A good start. But eventually you want the primary source.”

  “Of course you do,” said Neil.

  She liked Neil because he was a good and careful worker and because, though he was young enough to be her son, he shared her appreciation of the old-fashioned nature of their work, her respect for the rolls of microfilm documenting births and deaths and marriages, her taste for ferreting out the details.

  Example: There was a time, a couple of years ago, when she had all but given up on one branch of her family tree; then she discovered that the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters had life insurance policies going way back. Her missing link, a great-great-uncle, who had died in 1879, was listed as a member. And voilà, another branch of the tree opened. Neil was the first person she told, and his excitement was real. (“You smart little fucker,” he said. If there was one thing Kathleen would change about Neil if she could, it would be his language. Salty. But he always apologized after.)

  She liked Neil also because he never asked about Susannah. Neil seemed to accept the hole in her life without feeling the need to stick his finger into it, feeling around for the tender parts, the way most people did.

  “Newburyport is a hike for a girl that age,” said Neil.

  “That’s what I said,” said Kathleen, pleased again. “She said she took the bus.”

  “Sure. The bus from Newburyport goes right into South Station.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I know lots of things.”

  “Then the T, then the shuttle,” said Kathleen. “She said she likes the bus.”

  “I like the bus,” said Neil. “Once I took the bus all the way across the country.”

  “You didn’t!” said Kathleen, impressed. She was always finding out interesting things about Neil, like that he knew how to cook lobster thermidor and that once in New Zealand when he was in his twenties he had jumped off a bridge with a bungee cord attached to his ankles. She thought that maybe that came with being gay, the sense of adventure. Once she said that to him and he had laughed and said, “You don’t know many gay people, do you?”

  Now he said, “So what’d you do? To help the girl.”

  “I told her the cold, hard truth.” Kathleen smiled to show she didn’t think the truth was either hard or cold. To her it was a delight, the purest kind of pleasure.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is if she really wants to do it the right way, she’s going to have to come back here a few times,” said Kathleen. “It can be a long slog. She might hit snags, dead ends.”

  “What’d she say about the long-slog part?”

  “She said she didn’t mind.” There was eagerness in the way the girl had said that. Kathleen told Neil about that too. She had told Natalie to start by talking to her grandparents, if they were living. (“Nope,” said Natalie. “All dead.”) Then Kathleen had to explain that the Archives kept only the records from 1841 to 1920; to research her later generations she’d have to go to the municipal clerk’s office or the Department of Public Health registry in Dorchester.

  “What’d she say about that?”

  “Taken aback, at first.”

  “Who isn’t?” asked Neil. They got a lot of people who came to the Archives expecting to find everything there, expecting to fly through six generations on the first visit. But the system was confusing if you didn’t know it intimately, the way Kathleen and Neil did. Early passenger lists for people arriving in Boston were held at the Archives. But census schedules from 1790 to 1930: microfilm copies of those were in Waltham. It was no easy feat, running all around the eastern part of the state, gathering that information. You had to be committed.

  “But she seemed into it,” Kathleen told Neil. “And then she just… left. I guess that might be the last we’ll see of her.” She didn’t tell Neil about the cell phone, or the text. “But before she left, when she seemed excited about the project, a young person like that, it was enough to give you some hope about the world.”

  “Ah, Kathleen. You’re always looking for a reason to hope,” said Neil.

  Kathleen said, “Well.” She didn’t say, “Can you blame me?” Susannah’s hot little hand inside of hers, her hair in a braid down her back.

  “You don’t need to look so hard, you know.” Neil smiled.

  “Says you,” said Kathleen.

  Kathleen thought about the formal way Natalie had reached out to shake her hand. Natalie’s hand was cold, and despite the length of the fingers, there was something birdlike about it; Kathleen felt that if she squeezed too hard she might break some of the fine bones just underneath the skin. You didn’t always see manners like that these days, the world had become so casual. Different from how it was when Kathleen studied with the nuns.

  On the lunch table somebody had left a copy of the Boston Globe. A headline caught Kathleen’s eye: “Mexico City votes to legalize gay marriage.”

  Kathleen picked up the paper and studied it, studied the photograph of flag-waving activists all the way in Mexico City, the rainbow-colored banner—it looked like a parachute, really—that they held aloft. She had never been to Mexico. She scanned the article. “The Roman Catholics aren’t happy about this,” she told Neil. “Just so you know.”

  “The Roman Catholics are never happy about anything,” said Neil. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would.” For the majority of Susannah’s life Kathleen had forced on her daughter the same rituals that had been forced on her when she was a child: the sacraments, Sunday Mass, Holy Days of Obligation. Inside the top drawer of Kathleen’s dresser was a framed photograph of Susannah in her First Communion dress, looking l
ike a miniature bride in her veil (Susannah had insisted on the veil because her friend Lisa was going to have one).

  She remembered clearly something Susannah told her after the service, as they were driving home. She said that her teacher had told them to expect a feeling of peace and joy to settle over them once they received the Host. “She said it would be wonderful,” said Susannah. “A feeling like I’d never had before.”

  “And?” said Kathleen. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.

  Susannah sighed. “I didn’t feel anything.”

  “Nothing?” said Kathleen.

  “Nothing at all. It tasted like bread, and I didn’t feel anything.”

  “Oh,” said Kathleen. “Well.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  Now on Sundays she woke up early and took Lucy for long walks through the Arnold Arboretum. Walking along the paths, surrounded by fall color or snow-smacked trees resplendent in winter, Lucy’s ears flattened against her head the way they did in times of great exertion and concentration, Kathleen came as close as she ever did to worship. This was now her church.

  Kathleen drank the last of her water.

  “What’s the news on Henri?” she asked. Neil finished his smoothie and put the cap back on the bottle. Neil and Adam were in the process of adopting a baby from somewhere. Guatemala, was it? No, that couldn’t be it. The Dominican Republic? She could never remember. But she did know that the process was constantly being stymied by one bureaucratic detail or another. It seemed to Kathleen that by the time they actually got the baby he would be old enough for a driver’s license.

  Neil’s partner, Adam, was a tall man with broad shoulders and thick black hair, the kind of man who would have been referred to as a catch by Kathleen and her friends when they were young. And look who’d caught him! Neil. Neil and Adam had Kathleen over to dinner occasionally, and she looked forward to those times perhaps more than she would admit to anyone. They lived in a brownstone in the South End, and if she didn’t feel like getting her old clunky car out she could take the T in and walk to their building, past the trendy restaurants, the fancy boutiques.

  Adam had some sort of job in finance and made pots of money. Because of this he and Neil could afford the sort of modern and expensive décor that to Kathleen’s eye made the inside of their home look like a laboratory or an industrial kitchen. But never mind that: Neil was an excellent cook. In the summer he grew herbs in little clay pots on his deck so the salads and fish always had a wonderful flavor.

  “Oh, that,” said Neil, sighing, as he rose from the table. “Nightmare. You don’t even want to know. It’s a mess over there, in Haiti.”

  Haiti! Of course.

  “But I do,” said Kathleen. She supposed that once Neil and Adam procured their baby and began toting it around in a backpack, that would be the end of the dinner invitations, the end of the long evenings sipping wine inside the industrial kitchen. The end for Neil and Adam, too, of some of their habits. The end of the Sunday-morning jogs, the leisurely brunches after. Probably they hadn’t realized that yet, how much a child changed your life.

  “Actually, it’s Adam handling the phone calls and all of that,” said Neil. “He’s better at it. I get completely stressed out. You can’t imagine the red tape we’re wading through. And all the time the baby is getting older and older! And we’re missing out.”

  Kathleen nodded. She thought Haiti should just give the baby to Neil and Adam. But she didn’t say that. Instead she said, “You’ll want to do something about some of that furniture in your apartment, won’t you?” She was thinking in particular about a glass coffee table with lethal corners. Imagine a baby toddling into that.

  Neil squinted at her. “I guess so,” he said. “Yeah, we need to do some babyproofing. But we’ve got some time. We’re waiting for the call, and then Adam will fly down and handle the details. While he’s gone I can make whatever adjustments we need to make for Henri. Then, boom: parenthood.”

  They went for a walk, as they often did. The wind was whipping the water in the harbor into a frenzy.

  “This might turn into something,” said Neil, peering at the sky. “What do you think?”

  “I think it already has,” said Kathleen, remembering the umbrella she’d given up.

  They climbed the steps and Kathleen paused, as she always did, to admire the squat, fortresslike building, the letters carved into the stone: MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES. There was something about the beauty and permanence of those words that thrilled and awed her every time she looked at them. All the histories tucked away inside the building, all the individual lives recorded. Sometimes, when things were slow, she took a roll of microfilm, loaded it in the machine, and just looked. Death records from Boston in a certain year, for example. A man, age thirty-two, tuberculosis. A woman, twenty-three, in childbirth. Regular old cardiac arrest at age seventy, same as you might expect today. A fall down stairs, a fire, an automobile accident. Sometimes she lingered on the death records of children, reading the parents’ names, the street address, the country of origin if they were immigrants.

  She didn’t do this every day. She didn’t even do it once a week. Maybe once a month, maybe more. But she believed that sometimes it was necessary, even important, to remind yourself of the smallness of your life, your place in the world, the insignificance of it all.

  Kathleen returned to her desk and pulled out her chair. The red light on her phone was blinking, and she thought, Susannah, but the message was from a woman in Bedford who was following up on a visit from the month before. She took down the information.

  For a lark, she opened Internet Explorer and typed this into the Google box: Newburyport. Public School Calendar. Up it came. What grade was this Natalie in? She didn’t know. Probably junior high school, maybe high school. Both schools had the same calendar. There was no holiday listed for today, no teachers’ in-service. Natalie was lying.

  Kathleen, the child of two dour Irish Catholics, had gone to a school where the nuns would rap you on the knuckles with a ruler if you were caught in a lie, and you took it, biting your lips to keep the tears back: then you ended up with sore knuckles and bleeding lips both.

  She left her desk and went through the door to the reading room. There had been someone else there in her absence, and the trays with the scrap paper and pencils were out of order, but that person was gone now so she went about the business of straightening up. On the floor, close to where Natalie’s cell phone had been, she saw a crumpled sheet of paper. She sat down at the table and flattened it as much as she could. This, she saw now, was the piece of paper Natalie had brought in with her.

  Kathleen brought the paper back to her desk and spread it out next to her, pressing down hard to try to erase some of the wrinkles. Natalie’s father had already done quite a bit of work on this. Natalie was born in 1996; that made her thirteen. And this me with the jaunty exclamation point, that must be Natalie’s father.

  Kathleen stared at the paper for a while, and then she tried to find her way back into the work she’d been doing before Natalie came in. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, she’d written on the back of the card she’d given her. She wasn’t sure why she did that, but later, after the rest of it happened, she was glad she had.

  First on Natalie’s list of things that made her sick: adults who always had to let you know what the rules were. Example: the man who sat next to her on the bus. The man had gray hair and wore a business suit; he reminded Natalie of her father. He was probably around her father’s age, although it was seriously hard to tell with adults sometimes. He had on a fancy raincoat, and he was carrying one of those umbrellas that fold up into the size of a safety pin but open up into a giant golf umbrella. Natalie looked at him and immediately thought: banker.

  He was typing away rapidly on a laptop. When Natalie turned on her cell phone he shot a disapproving glance in her direction and said, “No cell phones.” He pointed to the sign at the front of the bus, which showed a cell phone with a big red X ove
r it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” he said, unsmiling. “I don’t make the rules.” He went back to his typing.

  The bus’s progress up 95 was slow and arduous, packed with commuters. The rain had slowed everything down. Natalie looked steadily out the window. She could see the brake lights of dozens and dozens of cars. The bus driver leaned forward toward the windshield. When the passengers boarded at South Station he had been jolly and accommodating, offering bottles of water from the cooler up toward the front, making jokes about the weather. But as the bus wound its way through the terminals at Logan, he clammed up, and so did the passengers, everyone intent on getting home, and now she could almost feel the tension emanating from the driver’s seat.

  She turned on her phone, surreptitiously this time, tucking it between her body and the window. Just to see the text one more time. WE KNOW SOMETHING ABT U NATALIE. From an unfamiliar number, no name identified with it.

  She felt this like you would feel a punch in the gut: she felt hollowed out, almost gasping for breath. She had gotten almost the same text the day before, but she had chalked it up to a mistake; someone texting to the wrong number. This time, though, the text included her name.

  The man hadn’t noticed that she’d turned on her phone. (Second on her list: grown-ups who pretended to care but didn’t really. The list was in no particular order.) She moved the phone a little bit closer to the man; she’d be happy to be called out again for the infraction, happier still to throw the thing out the window and allow it to be crushed on the highway. But he didn’t notice this time.

  Who knew something about her? Knew what?

  It was warm on the bus, and Natalie felt her skin heat from the inside out.

  Third on the list: her skin.

  Whenever she complained about her freckles, her mother said, “Look at Julianne Moore! She’s considered very beautiful. She’s famous for her freckles.” When Natalie asked her to come up with someone else, she never could; Natalie surmised from this that there was basically one person in the whole world who was considered beautiful with freckles, and it was Julianne Moore. It was not her, Natalie Gallagher.