Thinking about that, she must have dozed off because when she awoke the bus had passed Exit 56 on the highway and was approaching Exit 57.
Once, not too long ago, maybe last year, Natalie had said to Hannah, “Your house is so much nicer than mine.” She said it in the gentle, teasing manner all the girls used sometimes, when they wanted the other person to disagree: My hair looks awful today. My butt looks so big in these jeans. You said that so the other person could say, No it doesn’t, your hair looks great, or, Are you kidding me? I’d kill to be skinny like you. You wheedled compliments out of people, you made a little game of it. Everyone did it. But Hannah didn’t play that time. She took Natalie’s hand and said simply, “Stay here, then. Any time. What’s mine is yours.”
When was that? A year ago? Maybe less? Sitting in the bus, listening to the man next to her tapping at his keyboard—he had picked up his pace, a staccato rap rap rap, and he was frowning intently at the screen—Natalie could nearly taste the lemonade Hannah’s mother brought out to them at the pool; she could see the glass pitcher sweating on the slate table, the bright stack of beach towels in the basket. Hannah’s mother had once been a flight attendant (“back when it was okay to call us stewardesses”), and she still had a way of looking at you that made you think she could take care of everything, that she could find a spot for your overhead luggage even when you thought all of the compartments were full. Now her sole purpose seemed to be making Hannah and her father happy, and exercising in her lovely, matching Lululemon clothes.
Stay here, then. Any time. What’s mine is yours. The feel of Hannah’s hands on hers, the pillow sham grazing her cheek. (It was a double bed, big enough for two.) She remembered thinking, This must be what it feels like to have a sister.
In the absence of siblings, she and Hannah had created elaborate lives for their American Girl dolls, and intricate, complicated friendships among them. Now Natalie felt a sudden longing for those dolls and their tender, wide-eyed innocence, their gentle compliance with costume changes and tea parties and ornate hairstyles. The glossy catalogs that the company sent out. They had spent hours poring over those. You could get the palomino horse, which came with its own saddle! You could get a canopy bed! Natalie never got the palomino horse or the canopy bed or any of the rest of it. Truth be told, she didn’t have a brand-new doll either. Hers was a castoff from a babysitter (“Are you insane, Natalie? Those dolls cost a hundred dollars!”), but she gamely brushed the doll’s matted hair and tried not to notice the stain on her dress.
The bus pulled into the station. The man next to Natalie looked up and sighed, then glanced at Natalie for confirmation, as though they were complicit in their annoyance with the weather and the traffic. Still stung from his admonishing about the cell phone, she didn’t meet his eyes.
“Finally,” said the woman behind her. “For the love of God, I thought we’d never make it home alive.” She spoke as if to someone, but when Natalie finally turned around to look the seat beside her was empty.
Natalie had planned on walking home, but her house was more than two miles away and the rain was falling so thickly it looked almost like a solid wall. She still had the umbrella from the lady at the Archives, but it didn’t seem up to the task; using it would be like trying to cut a steak with a spoon (this was her father’s saying).
She would have to call her mother.
Susannah had gone away on a rainy night. She didn’t take an umbrella. A rain jacket, but no umbrella.
There had been a lot for the parents to worry about back then, a bunch of teenage suicides in Southie, one after another after another: a cluster, they’d called it in the news, as though they were talking about produce. The parents were on edge, the kids too: Who was next? When? Where?
Three weeks before the awful day, Deidre Jordan’s mother calling her, Do you know what our daughters are doing?
And Kathleen, stupidly, hadn’t known. She’d said, What?
Heroin, said Deidre Jordan’s mother. Drugs.
Kathleen, not believing her, searching Susannah’s room, her backpack, the bathroom cabinets, finding nothing, not a scrap of evidence, no needles, syringes, no plastic bags, nothing. Coffee grinders, she’d heard that was an accessory too. No coffee grinder, nowhere in the house.
Alcohol, she understood. She’d grown up around alcohol, two parents who drank more than they should have and then pretended nothing was wrong. But heroin? A mystery. And because it was a mystery and she didn’t believe it and she didn’t know what to do, she did nothing.
She called Deidre Jordan’s mother back. I think you’re mistaken, she told her. I think you have my daughter mixed up with somebody else.
Three weeks later, she was gone. How had this happened? Kathleen had worked this over and over and over again in her mind, and still she couldn’t quite envisage the specifics of the situation.
Deidre Jordan had said… what? Come with me? And Susannah had gone.
It was Detective Bradford who had explained to Kathleen the difference between a missing person and a runaway. He was portly and mustached, and Kathleen pictured him eating food out of a can in a bleak studio kitchen: inhaling it, really, SpaghettiOs through the nose, canned green beans pierced with a fork and inserted into his mouth. But he was kind, and he took time with her, and though the fee he named at first was exorbitant he ended up charging her only half of it. (“Didn’t do much,” he said in the end. “Wasn’t much to do.”)
There was nothing for dinner, and nothing for breakfast the next day either, and it was raining too hard to walk Lucy.
“Sorry, old girl,” Kathleen said. “I’m off to the Stop and Shop, and I’d invite you, but I don’t think you’d be allowed in.” Lucy seemed to understand. It was possible that she nodded.
The Stop and Shop was busy, the parking lot full of weary people pushing sopping wet carts toward even wetter cars. You’d think that there was a snowstorm coming, not just rain and more rain. The bananas had been ravaged, and Kathleen was poking through them, looking for a suitable bunch, when a voice behind her said, “Mrs. Lynch?”
She turned and saw a young woman. Familiar? She squinted at the woman’s curly dark hair. She was pushing a cart with a baby seat perched on top of it in that way that always made Kathleen nervous but apparently was very safe. (In Kathleen’s mothering days, you carried your baby around or pushed it in a baby carriage—none of these complicated and ponderous pieces of equipment.) Yes, the woman was familiar.
“I thought that was you,” the young woman said. She pointed at herself and said, “Melissa. Melissa Henderson. Susannah’s friend.” The girl leaned eagerly toward Kathleen and said, “God! I haven’t seen you in I don’t know how long.”
Kathleen felt her face freeze in an unnatural smile. “Melissa,” she said slowly, remembering. “Of course.” Of course. Melissa Henderson, one of Susannah’s best friends at one point: junior high, and early high school. The more she looked at the young woman under the unforgiving fluorescent supermarket lights (correction: unforgiving to Kathleen, not to Melissa), the easier it was to recall her fifteen years ago. She had an image of this girl and Susannah coming out of the bathroom with makeup on, laughing, all lip gloss and hair and perfume. Beautiful! Both of them. Beautiful hair, beautiful skin, beautiful and optimistic, all of life ahead of them.
“This is Mabel,” this girl, Melissa Henderson, visitor from happier times, said to Kathleen. She turned the shopping cart around so that Kathleen could see inside. “My daughter.” She laughed. “It still seems funny to say that, you know? Daughter. Baby doesn’t feel weird. But daughter does. It seems so permanent, you know?”
Kathleen peered inside the car seat. The baby was very tiny, so new. She was wearing a small pink hat and was sleeping with intense concentration, one fist raised above her head. Kathleen felt a sort of reverence and peace descend briefly on her. “My Lord,” she said. “She’s so beautiful!”
“I know,” said Melissa Henderson. “I mean, I think so too
.”
“It sort of takes my breath away,” Kathleen said to Melissa. Somewhere in the store, one of the fluorescent lights was blinking. Kathleen couldn’t see it, exactly, but she could sense it pulsing in a nearby aisle. This baby’s skin looked like it was made of silk. “Is she your first?”
“The one and only,” said Melissa proudly. “And by the way, after delivering her I can’t imagine going through that again. Ever.”
Kathleen did not pursue this line of conversation. She did not believe in sharing details from labor and delivery. To her, these were private, excruciating moments, to be relived and remembered only in your own mind, if at all.
Instead she said, “What is she, about two months?” Kathleen couldn’t stop looking at the baby. She wanted to pick her up and feel the heavy weight of her head against her neck.
“Three,” said Melissa. “But she was born early. She’s a real peanut.”
The inside of the car seat was pink, and the blanket tucked over the baby was pink too. It was an oasis of pink. When the baby opened her mouth and made a little mewling sound Melissa plucked a tiny pacifier, also pink, from somewhere inside the car seat and put it between Mabel’s lips. Mabel sucked twice and then let it fall out; not once during the entire transaction did she open her eyes.
“I imagine she keeps you plenty busy,” said Kathleen.
“I’ll say.”
“They do, at first.” Kathleen tore her gaze away from the baby and looked more closely at Melissa Henderson. She was still carrying some baby weight, that was clear, and who could blame her, but otherwise she looked only a little bit older than she had when she and Susannah had sat up in Susannah’s room, the door closed tightly, doing God knows what. She added, “Though you look well rested enough to me.”
“Well,” said Melissa, “maybe that’s because I’m visiting my parents. I’ve got some extra sets of hands.” She went on from there: she lived out in Oregon now, on the shores of some lake Kathleen had never heard of, and her husband worked for Nike. They went hiking all the time. Biking. Skiing. “Not so much anymore,” she allowed, casting a loving look inside the car seat. “But of course this is even better.” At the end of her monologue Melissa Henderson sighed blissfully and said, “We love it so much there, we’ll probably never move back here.”
It was then that Kathleen felt the first stirrings of envy for Melissa Henderson, for her lakeside home, her beautiful baby girl, her healthy skin. The mention of her parents and the extra set of hands they were providing to care for the baby. (How Kathleen would love to provide an extra set of hands to help care for a grandchild! She would love it so much, it hurt to think about it.)
Melissa looked expectantly at Kathleen: it must be her turn to speak, but she had no idea what to say.
Slowly, inexorably, the envy that had sprouted began to morph into something more foreboding. Melissa Henderson’s presence here; the lovely, pink accoutrements in the car seat; even the smattering of freckles across Melissa’s adorable little nose: all of this seemed to showcase so blatantly the things that Melissa had become and Susannah had not. Wife, mother, lakeshore resident. How was it that these two girls, at one time walking in tandem on the same path, had diverged so dramatically?
“Hey,” said Melissa suddenly. “Do you remember when you took us to the movies that time? What’d we see? Do you remember?”
Kathleen didn’t recall at first, but after a moment there emerged a cobwebby recollection of Susannah and Melissa behind a container of popcorn, a jug of soda as big as Texas, their heads pressed together, the two of them whispering madly, while Kathleen sat slightly apart, an observer, a glorified wallet. (But glad to be there! She remembered that. Glad to be there.)
Melissa snapped her fingers. “It was Home Alone! I remember now. That freaky little kid, remember?”
“Ah,” said Kathleen. She did remember. Who was that little twit who played the kid?
“Macaulay Culkin,” said Melissa. “God, that was forever ago.” Melissa leaned toward Kathleen in a way that was both conspiratorial and, Kathleen thought, a little too familiar. “Crazy,” Melissa said. Then she continued: “Did he die? Or was that someone else?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“No, he didn’t die. That was one of the Coreys. Feldman, was it? Oh, I don’t know. What’s it matter, right?”
“Right.”
In an effort to disguise her envy, Kathleen cast her eyes about the produce section, at the orderly stacks of oranges and apples and lemons piled atop one another in a way that seemed to be precarious and unstable. The bananas she would give up on—there was not a suitable bunch in the lot of them.
She could have taken her leave, but she didn’t; she waited for the question that was surely coming next.
Melissa Henderson was now so close that Kathleen caught a whiff of a subtle and expensive perfume. Melissa arranged her features in an expression of sympathy and understanding, and her voice seemed to change an octave. And here came the question, as though Melissa had just thought of it, as though the whole conversation had not served as a prelude to this. She tilted her head at Kathleen and asked, as casually as if she was asking about where in the store she might find the quinoa, “How’s Susannah these days?”
How’s Susannah!
How’s Susannah.
These days.
The temptation, of course, was to fill in a whole life for Susannah, a string of successes both personal and professional. Living in San Francisco, Kathleen could have said. Or Chicago. Working in banking or accounting. Busy, busy. Married? No, not yet. But dating someone serious. She could invent a dog for her, perhaps, a designer breed like a Labradoodle or a Woodle (it was true, Kathleen had recently heard that there was such a thing as a Woodle).
In no hurry for all of this, she could have said, gesturing to indicate Melissa’s baby, her cart full of groceries. Diminish it, that’s what she could have done with the gesture, indicating that Susannah was bound for things larger and better.
But she didn’t. She kept it enigmatic. She averted her eyes and looked down at her own shopping cart, and said, “She’s fine. Thank you.”
Melissa’s eager expression became serious and thoughtful. In a whisper as soft as corn silk, she said, “You don’t know, do you? You’re not in touch?”
“No,” admitted Kathleen. “No, we’re not. I don’t know.”
Melissa said, “I didn’t think so.” She reached down and adjusted the baby’s blanket—no need, really, it was perfectly arranged—and said, fiercely, “I blame it on the other girl.” She stroked the baby’s cheek and then continued, “I know she’s okay, though. I feel it.”
Kathleen said, “You feel it?”
“I do,” said Melissa staunchly. “I do.”
“Thank you,” said Kathleen, wanting to believe her.
“I know it must be so hard for you,” continued Melissa.
“Thank you,” said Kathleen again. But what she thought was: You don’t know. You can’t know. Kathleen had to keep her eyes averted. The faraway fluorescent light kept up its ferocious blinking, all the worse for being impossible to locate. Kathleen’s head was beginning to hurt.
She looked again at the baby, who had stirred and resettled herself as much as the confines of her bulletproof car seat would allow. The baby lips were like a little puff set in the center of her face, like a little dessert. Kathleen had to stop herself from bending down and breathing in the baby’s scent. In the folds of her neck she could see where a little milk was caught—breast milk, judging from the size of Melissa’s breasts.
And just as suddenly as the envy had emerged, it began to disappear. It wasn’t easy, being a new mother, and despite Melissa’s breezy exterior she was of course going through the most major transition of her life. It wasn’t Melissa’s fault if Kathleen and Susannah had lost each other. Kathleen could be kinder.
Softly, still looking at the baby, at beautiful little Mabel, she said, “It’s almost enough to mak
e you believe in the world again, a baby like that.” That was the best she could do, but it seemed like it was enough, because Melissa Henderson gave her a sincere and open smile.
After they parted, Kathleen turned and watched Melissa’s progress down the cereal aisle. She watched her bend lovingly over the car seat, and she was overcome by such feelings of despair that she thought she might have to sit down.
But of course there was nowhere to sit in a grocery store, and nothing for Kathleen to do except continue on her way, pushing the cart ahead of her, trying to ignore the squeezing in her heart.
Natalie stepped inside the station. The man behind the counter who handled the parking for the commuter lot peered at her. On a table next to him sat a coffeepot sizzling on its metal stand, a stack of Styrofoam cups, sugar packets. The man said, “You just come off that bus?”
She nodded and picked at a hangnail.
“You have a way home?”
Natalie nodded again. “I’m going to call my mother.”
She sat on one of the orange chairs and turned carefully away from the man. Slowly, cautiously, she turned on the phone. No texts. She dialed her home number. The phone rang once, twice, three times. No answer. She put the phone on her lap, thinking.
Then a text came in. This one said: DONT U WANT TO KNOW WHAT WE KNOW?
The man cleared his throat. “She’s not there?”
“She’s there,” Natalie said. “Probably just in the bathroom. I’ll call back.” She couldn’t stop looking at the text.
“Coffee over there if you want it,” said the man.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m not allowed to drink coffee.” How old did he think she was? Why did she have to be so tall? (Thing number five that made her sick: her height.) Where was her mother?
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 4
