So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  But she digressed, as Ms. Ramirez liked to say. Ms. Ramirez was her English teacher, and she, by the way, had the most gorgeous skin Natalie had ever seen: it looked like caramel, and it was so smooth that Natalie imagined she’d never had a zit in her life. Also she had short hair, supershort, cut really close to her head, and you can’t get away with that sort of haircut if you’re not beautiful and if you do not have perfectly symmetrical features.

  The boys in Natalie’s class found this sort of beauty disconcerting: they wanted blond hair, pillowy lips.

  Fourth on the list: the boys in Natalie’s class, Christian Chapman excepted.

  She had turned the sound off on the phone, so when the next text came in she felt the vibration against her leg. She didn’t look: she wouldn’t look.

  She looked.

  WE KNOW SOMETHING ABT UR MOTHER

  Then another one, right on the heels of the first.

  ASK UR MOTHER HOW OLD SHE IS

  Both of these from the same number. Huh? Why was she supposed to ask her mother how old she was? She knew her mother’s age: thirty-three.

  But the third one was from a different number, one that Natalie’s phone recognized. Hannah, the screen’s display told her.

  U DONT KNOW DO U? BUT WE DO

  “Hello, my lady,” said Kathleen later that day. She was soaked, of course she was soaked, after giving away her umbrella, and on a day when she had taken the T to work instead of driving the Camry.

  Lucy didn’t answer, per se, but she did greet Kathleen at the door, stretching, coming to life after a long day’s rest, the tags on her collar hitting against each other.

  “And how was your day, sweetheart?” asked Kathleen. Lucy lifted her ears—they could stand up in triangles, or lie down flat on her head, like a rabbit’s ears, depending on Lucy’s state of mind—and looked at Kathleen. Kathleen said, “Yeah?” encouragingly, and then, “Really?”

  There was a time, years ago, when Kathleen had paid a dog walker to take Lucy for a romp once during the day, but that proved to be expensive. Also, Kathleen didn’t like the dog walker; she felt that the girl didn’t understand Lucy’s particular temperament, that she saw her standoffishness as an annoyance.

  Truth be told, before they got Lucy, Kathleen had wanted a golden retriever, a leaner, a lover, a dog who couldn’t get enough of you. She hadn’t known anything about border collies when they picked Lucy out, but Susannah, some vestiges of the movie Babe lingering in her imagination, had insisted. She did all of the research, she chose the breeder, she called for directions to the farm in Connecticut where Lucy, tiny, still watery-eyed and clumsy, had risen on her stumpy little legs and wobbled toward them.

  “She never plays with the other dogs,” said the dog walker. She had some silly name that was also a color, like Cobalt or Coral. Stupid, Kathleen thought, to have a name like that, and although she understood that the girl had probably not named herself, still Kathleen held the fact of it against her. “She just wants me to throw the tennis ball, over and over. Or a stick, if I don’t have a tennis ball. Or a leaf! A pebble. Anything.”

  Kathleen said, “And?”

  Cobalt (Coral?) said, “And it’s sort of sad for the other dogs, the labs and retrievers, even the standard poodle, actually especially the standard poodle. They want to play with her, and she wants nothing to do with them.”

  Kathleen, who did not particularly care if some dogs she had no responsibility for felt sad, said, “Well, she’s a border collie. That’s her temperament.” Because she had come to understand Lucy, and to admire her for her intelligence, and to respect her space, the way you might respect the space of an artist or a writer, someone doing Very Important Work who needed time alone to think about it.

  After that, Kathleen stopped calling Cobalt/Coral. Instead she got up early and took Lucy for a long walk around Castle Island, and took her out again when she got home from work. On weekends they ventured farther. That seemed to suit both of them just fine.

  “Hello, my lady,” she said again to Lucy now. She pushed her nose into Lucy’s fur and stroked her along the sides of her face. She thought that some people who observed this ritual would think that she was crazy, to love a dog so much. But there was such peace in loving an animal. At night, when Kathleen turned off her light to go to sleep and heard the little snorts coming from Lucy’s bed, the shiftings as she settled herself to sleep, and finally the deep, even breathing, she felt truly blessed and forgot about everything she had lost. This was love, for her, now. This was the love she had.

  Before that day, not too long before, came this day.

  Here sat Natalie Gallagher: thirteen, tall for her age, young for high school (the cursed early admittance to kindergarten, never a problem before, now came at her with a pitchfork), skin that blushed furiously, betraying—always, everywhere, odiously—what she was thinking. Also: flat chest, flatter than flat, no sign of the burgeoning curves that seemed to be growing overnight in the bodies of girls like Hannah Morgan, Natalie’s erstwhile best friend.

  It was early October, though it could have been spring, so mild had the temperatures been. It was so mild, in fact, that Natalie’s house, an old, crumbling colonial revival in the downtown area, which normally was drafty and chilly, with a creaking old heating system that had been updated in a patchwork way, had been surprisingly bearable.

  Natalie supposed this was all due to global warming, which her Science teacher, Mr. Guzman, a tall, twiggy man with wool sweaters worn thin at the elbows, talked about at length any chance he got. And while she tried to take Mother Earth’s needs into account most of the time, she couldn’t help but revel—a little—in the mercy of the season, and in the fact that her teeth, when she wakened in her tiny slanted room, did not begin immediately to chatter.

  But this was not Science class, this was English, and Ms. Ramirez stood at the front. Natalie sat toward the back, which she did in every class where the students were allowed to choose their own seats. Hannah Morgan and Taylor Grant had chosen seats near the door but toward the front of the room; this gave them the twin advantage of being able to leave quickly when they wished but also to waylay anyone else leaving if they chose to do so. Which, sometimes, they did.

  In Mr. Guzman’s class, seats were assigned, and he had placed Natalie front and center, where she felt as bare and exposed as a telephone pole sticking out of the snow. When, in the first week of school, the boy behind her had tapped her on the shoulder to ask her to sit down a little lower so he could see the board, her humiliation had been so sudden and extreme, and her blushing so furious, that she had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, and had then moved in what seemed like half time across the floor, as though through a viscous liquid.

  No, she much preferred Ms. Ramirez’s class, both for her position in the back of the room and for the subject matter, which stirred her imagination, which made her happy in a way that very few things did these days. So far they had read Sandra Cisneros and Shakespeare; also John Steinbeck and a rash of the Romantic poets. Ms. Ramirez had been going on for some time about an upcoming “independent-study project,” to be worked on from now until January, whose details Natalie was hungrily awaiting. She was (she inched forward) literally on the edge of her seat.

  “And now,” said Ms. Ramirez on this day in early October. “What you’ve all been waiting for. Your independent-study assignment.” The class groaned in unison. Natalie, who hadn’t meant to, felt herself groaning along with them, carried along by their displeasure as though by a rip current.

  Ignoring these signs of discontent, Ms. Ramirez went on with the details: due in mid-January, the assignment could be anything they wanted that taught them something.

  “I want to know three things,” Ms. Ramirez continued. “Why you chose what you chose, how you went about it, and what you learned doing it. That’s it. Not so bad. You can really take the reins here, do something exciting and interesting.”

  Scarcely had Ms. Ramirez finished her
sentence when Taylor Grant’s hand shot up, and Ms. Ramirez, in her terse and (Natalie thought) wonderful way, nodded at her.

  “Um?” said Taylor. “That’s it? That’s the whole assignment?” She glanced at Hannah Morgan, and in return she received from Hannah a look of approval.

  Nine years and some months ago, on her first day of kindergarten, arriving, like the other kids, with an oversized backpack, a lunchbox tenderly filled by her mother the night before, and her heart in her throat, Natalie had first heard Hannah Morgan’s giggle. The giggle had changed not a whit since then, but you could say, truthfully, that everything else had.

  Eight years ago, beginning of first grade: Natalie and Hannah had declared themselves best friends. They were both only children. This was unusual—everyone else in their class had at least one sibling, many of them more—and they started a private club, the Only Child Club, with themselves as the sole members. They made business cards, red construction paper cut into uneven rectangles, and passed them out to their parents.

  Also in first grade: the first play date at Hannah Morgan’s house. Hannah Morgan lived in a big bright house on the other side of town. The house had a swimming pool and a gigantic kitchen and a massive carpeted basement whose centerpiece was a pool table imported from England. (“Snooker,” Hannah told Natalie when Natalie, following her down the stairs, her mouth agape, could scarcely contain her amazement. “That’s what they call it in England.” This was said in an important, reverent tone that Natalie would soon learn Hannah adopted when talking about many of her family’s possessions. Natalie couldn’t think of anything in her own home that required such a tone, and for this she respected Hannah.)

  Seven years ago: first sleepover. Hannah’s bedroom had its own attached bathroom, with its own white cupboard into which Hannah’s mother had set small white wicker baskets to hold Hannah’s headbands and barrettes. Her bed had a yellow canopy. How Natalie envied Hannah that canopy, and the matching throw pillows, and the big pastel wooden letters spelling Hannah’s name that were strung onto a white ribbon and hung on the wall.

  In the morning Mrs. Morgan, a lovely, doting woman who wore expensive yoga clothes that gave the paradoxical impression of sweatless exertion, made them pancakes; they sat at the massive island and ate themselves silly, and then, holding their bellies, down they went to the basement to choose from Hannah’s complete selection of Disney movies.

  Hannah’s eleventh birthday. Mrs. Morgan—Mr. Morgan being, as ever, unavailable (“working,” both Hannah and her mother said as reverently as Hannah said the word snooker, and while it was never explained to Natalie exactly what he did, she knew that the work involved dealing with other people’s money)—took them on a trip to New York City to see Wicked at the Gershwin. They ate big plates of spaghetti at Carmine’s. They shared a double bed at the Marriott Marquis, where they were hermetically sealed forty-four stories high and bathed in ambient light from the neon signs, the glories of the city spread out before them. In the morning they sat in Duffy Square and polished off bagels as big as their heads, their friendship forever secure.

  Or not.

  It had been dusk when the bus started out from Boston, Natalie’s journey from the Archives to South Station having taken longer than she’d expected, but now it was fully dark, an inky blackness replacing the craggy outlines of the trees along the side of the highway.

  People always say that in Boston you’re better off being on the road in a snowstorm than a rainstorm because at least people know how to drive in the snow, at least they take care. People didn’t take the rain seriously, and then: bam. A string of cars laid out on the highway.

  On the shoulder, there was a car that had skidded off the road and sat at a crazy angle, its hazard lights flashing.

  A woman behind Natalie said, “Jesus Christ, does he know how to drive this thing in the rain?” Natalie couldn’t tell if the driver heard her, but the woman had a North Shore accent and a loud, brash voice that let you know she hoped he did. For some reason, even though Natalie had lived in Newburyport her entire life, she’d always been a little bit afraid of such women: receptionists in the doctor’s office or the school, clerks at the supermarket, women so loud and confident. Unafraid.

  Her mother did not have this way of speaking; she hadn’t grown up here. “Whisked away from the Kansas farmland” is what her father used to say, and it was true that Natalie’s mother had lived most of her life on a farm, with real chickens scratching around in the dust, a horse in the barn, the whole deal. (“Not what you think,” her mother said grimly when Natalie asked about the farm. “No red-and-white-checked aprons, if that’s what you’re imagining.”)

  “My wholesome midwestern beauty,” Natalie’s father called her. “Raised on whole milk straight from the cow. That’s why her skin glows.”

  (“What were you running from?” Natalie asked. “Never mind that,” said her mother.)

  Why had she told the woman at the Archives her mother was dead? She didn’t know, not really, except that there was something satisfying in the lie, some power it gave her over her own story.

  The bus lurched, and a voice from the back of the bus said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Four months ago: on a July morning so bright and hot and humid that even the birds seemed to be mollified, a morning so scorching that the garbage cans began to stink like tenement trash the moment they were set out at the curbs to be collected, Natalie’s father moved out. He didn’t go a great distance, just to Amesbury, just across the river, but as far as Natalie and her mother were concerned he could have been headed for Mars.

  He moved first into a small, white studio apartment that belonged to a friend of a friend. When that friend reclaimed it, he moved again, into another apartment, which Natalie had yet to see, because she had been, for the past three weeks, studiously ignoring her father’s phone calls and messages and requests for visits, having found, as her mother slipped deeper into the fog and haze that they may as well begin calling depression, that it was easier to be angry than sad.

  When Natalie thought about that day, which she tried not to do often, the memory rose to her mind, unbidden: her father’s grim determination packing his bags into his car, her mother’s bedroom door tightly closed, its occupant ensconced in a state of desperate melancholy from which she would not emerge until later that evening, when they ordered take-out from Pizza Factory and sat together in the kitchen. Natalie’s mother ate none of it, and Natalie, ravenous, bereft, confused, consumed four pieces, crust and all.

  And from there: downhill, all of it.

  After he left—two days after, because she spent the first day sitting on a bench near Cashman Park, looking out at the boats on the river—Natalie tried to call Hannah. But Hannah had become suddenly, astonishingly unavailable, even invisible. She was a regular missing person, and, when calls to Hannah’s cell phone went unanswered, Natalie took to calling her home number directly and speaking to Mrs. Morgan. Hannah was swimming at the Ipswich Country Club with a friend (which friend, Mrs. Morgan did not say, leaving Natalie to exercises in tortured, anguished guesswork). The closest Natalie had ever been to a country club was the pool at the Y, which, of course, didn’t count at all.

  Then, suddenly, Hannah was gone for two weeks at a sleepaway camp in Waterford, Maine. (Where was Waterford, Maine, and why had Natalie never heard of the camp plan?) A bit of Internet research, conducted clandestinely in her room, although her mother, to be sure, was not checking in on her, revealed that the camp offered horseback riding and waterskiing; that there was an amphitheater-style campfire (what did that even mean?); that the dining room was large and rustic; and many other facts that, taken together, caused Natalie’s throat to constrict and a low rumble to begin in her ears. Hannah was away! Hannah had gone to this special place and had said not a word to Natalie about it. Not a word. Witness the glories of the place, the toothy grins of the campers featured on the website, happiness incarnate.

  And it was that fast. N
ot quite overnight, but fast enough that Natalie felt dizzy from it all, unmoored, unanchored, the way she felt the first time she did a somersault underwater, when she didn’t know which way was up.

  Now Natalie closed her eyes and leaned against the window. She was suddenly very, very tired. Truly, she wasn’t worried about the bus ride. She had always felt safe in cars driven by other people. That probably came from all the times her dad used to drive her around when she was little. He was in pharmaceutical sales and he used to take her on calls. His territory covered a great distance—up into New Hampshire, down through Boston and a little bit south—and she’d fall asleep in the car, waking to find herself in the parking lot of a medical office building, or in a strip mall where a doctor’s office was squeezed in next to a burrito joint or a hair salon. “Wait here,” her dad would say, and she knew enough not to try to unbuckle her seat belt, not to open the door that he’d locked. Sometimes he left her with a book to look at, or a toy to play with, but sometimes he left her with nothing at all. She didn’t mind that. She had always had a vivid imagination; she and Christian Chapman had worked together on writing a book when they were in kindergarten (“my early readers, my little Einsteins,” the teacher had called them).

  Natalie remembered Christian in first grade, crying because another boy had taken his kickball at recess. He had been small then, and easily teased, with a little-boy buzz cut and a slender, almost girlish body. In fifth grade he moved away. She couldn’t remember where. Was it Oregon? Montana? Somewhere wide open and exotic. He had recently returned. It all had something to do with his dad’s job. During his absence Christian had grown, broadened, strengthened; he had taken up the skateboard and the snowboard, and the little-boy buzz cut had become fashionably floppy.

  She sat behind Christian in English class now, and every so often, if she bent forward, she caught a whiff of something that could have been cologne or could have been merely the fresh clean smell of the outdoors but either way made her think of the snow-covered mountains or ranches from which he had just moved (it was Montana, definitely Montana).