“Or better yet,” Carol said now. “Come home with me for the afternoon. I’ll make you tea. I’ll get off the highway right here…”
“Carol, I’m fine.”
Carol peered at her. “You don’t look fine. You don’t seem fine. You seem strange.”
“I’m fine. I’m perfect. I’ve never been better. I just need to lie down.”
Thing number ten that made Natalie sick: the way half the English class thought the independent-study project from Ms. Ramirez was a joke. No, more than half. Most.
Most of the freshmen class didn’t like Ms. Ramirez because she held them to standards that some students believed to be impossibly high and because she did not, like some of the other teachers, buy into preconceived notions of success and popularity. These notions, for example, said that girls like Britney Thompson and Hannah Morgan and Taylor Grant were always going to do well and that Finnegan Davis, who had greasy hair that emitted a faint odor of poverty and neglect, was never going to.
(On her ring finger Ms. Ramirez wore a small, tasteful diamond; she was said to be engaged to a soldier deployed to Afghanistan, though she never spoke of the soldier or of an impending wedding—indeed, reading aloud from Romeo and Juliet, she seemed almost to straighten her slender shoulders and to read with some coldness the line “O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!”)
After Ms. Ramirez gave the assignment for the independent-study project, after Taylor’s hand shot up and after she said, “Um? That’s it?” and after Ms. Ramirez set her lips carefully together and gave the smallest sigh of impatience, Taylor continued, unbowed, “Can you give us, like, an example or something?” Ms. Ramirez said, “Certainly. You can… let’s see. You can write a collection of poetry. You can go to a museum in Boston—the Museum of Fine Arts, let’s say—and choose a painting that speaks to you, then write me a paper about why. You can write a short story. You can outline a novel. But these are just ideas. I think what I’d value most is if you were to think of something I didn’t just mention, go off in a different direction. Challenge yourselves. Learn something.”
A low rumble of protest rose from the class: a novel! Who did she think they were? Seniors?
“I know that seems vague,” Ms. Ramirez continued. “But the vagueness is purposeful. I want to push you—you’re freshmen, but you’re smart, you can handle this—to learn things for yourselves.”
Later, after the bell rang, Natalie was packing up her things, and heard Hannah Morgan say, “I’m going to write some poetry.” And then, more quietly, “So easy. What a joke.”
Natalie opened her laptop and fired up a fresh Word document. The laptop had been a gift from her father for the school year (“To start you off on the right foot”), though Natalie thought of it more as a good-bye present, a crumb he threw her on his way out the door.
Why you chose what you chose, Ms. Ramirez had said. How you went about it. What you learned. Natalie felt energized by the prospect of answering these questions.
She typed, Family Tree. She typed, Why I chose what I chose. She thought about that for a few minutes, then began her first, halting sentence. I chose what I chose, she typed, because.
She pulled the black box from under her bed, where she’d hidden it, and then her mother knocked on the door. She shoved it back under the bed.
“Come in,” she said. Her mother opened the door a crack.
“I’m going to bed. Came to say good night.” Her voice was rough in the semidarkness of the hallway.
“Okay,” said Natalie, but her mother didn’t leave. Natalie didn’t look up, just continued typing. Because there are too many secrets. That sounded idiotic. She deleted it. Because my father left us. Worse. Delete. Because I want to know where I came from. She let that one stand and considered it, studiously ignoring her mother’s presence in the hallway.
Her mother entered the room and said, “What are you working on?”
Natalie turned her body slightly away. “School project,” she said.
“Oh.” Her mother sat carefully on the edge of the bed. Her hair was lank and unwashed, unstyled. Her beautiful hair. The hair was what Natalie’s father had fallen in love with first, he always said. Her mother’s beautiful hair first, and the rest of her after. My Kansas rose, he called her. Carmen, my Kansas rose.
There was a time—oh, a few years ago, maybe—when all of Natalie’s friends’ mothers were getting short, stylish haircuts, shorter in the back than in the front, swinging around their faces. Natalie wanted her mother to get one too, but her father begged her not to. “You’re younger than those women,” he said. “Prettier. You stay as you are.” So she’d kept it long. For him!
Natalie’s mother looked out the window—Natalie hadn’t drawn the shade—and said, “Can you believe how early it’s getting dark these days?”
Natalie said nothing, stared at her computer screen, and against the unwelcoming wall of silence, her mother pushed: “Nat. I’m doing my best. You know that, right?”
It was the first time in recent memory her mother had used her nickname, the first time she’d sat this close to her, looked at her directly. Natalie’s throat caught.
“Sure,” she said. “Yeah.” Something—pity, maybe—covered her so thoroughly and unexpectedly that she almost couldn’t breathe. She said, “Do you remember when Dad was doing that thing with his family tree?”
Her mother looked at her blankly.
“Let’s see… no I don’t.”
“Oh.”
“Why?”
“No reason. Just wondering. For a school thing.”
“I don’t.” Her mother offered Natalie a wan smile. “But I swear that there are days when I don’t remember my own name.”
Natalie made a deep, unhappy sound.
“I’m kidding.” Her mother put her hand over hers. “Nat, I’m just kidding.”
“I know,” said Natalie, but she wasn’t sure if that was true. Everything about this moment made her feel like crying: the circle of light from the lamp on her nightstand, the shadow it threw on the rest of the room, the black box hidden under her bed. Even her mother’s face, the gray pouches that had recently formed under her eyes, marring the beauty of her skin. All of this made her want to burrow under the covers and weep like a little girl.
Her mother straightened and pushed her hair back from her face. First the hair, her father had said, and then the rest of her, that’s how I fell in love. How Natalie envied her mother’s coloring, the way that, with the right makeup, she looked Spanish or South American or something unidentifiable but equally exotic, not farm Kansas. “You can ask Daddy yourself.”
“Maybe.”
“You should call him.”
“I’ll ask him tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Remember? I’m seeing him tomorrow.” Thing number eleven that made Natalie sick: mothers who couldn’t remember anything. Natalie took a deep breath. She said, “I found something in the basement.”
Her mother, who had been examining her fingers, looked up, startled. “What do you mean?”
“I found something, in a box, with your name on it.”
“What kind of box?”
“A box with papers inside. Papers. Birth certificates. Mom. There were two birth certificates, with two different years for you.” Watching her mother, she felt as though the two of them were trudging together up a long dirt path.
Her mother stared back down at her hands. “But, Nat, I don’t understand. What made you go looking for that?”
“Someone said something to me. At school.”
“At school? How did they know, at school?” It was true, then.
“I don’t know.” Natalie kicked the metal box under the bed, sending it skidding closer to the wall. “But you have to be eighteen, to get married in Massachusetts. I looked it up. You always told me you were nineteen when you got married. But you weren’t, you were sixteen. It was illegal, what you did.”
“But how’d they know at school? How’d anyone know?”
Natalie looked squarely at her mother. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
Then came a sound from Natalie’s cell phone, which was on her nightstand—they both started at that. “Just a text,” said Natalie, but she could feel her voice shaking when she said it. Here we go, she thought. Here we go again. She wanted to pick up her phone and look at the text, but also she didn’t. Really what she wanted to do was throw up, or run away.
Her mother tapped her forehead with her fist. “Oh, God. I think I know what happened.”
“What?”
“Once, a long time ago, I told Hannah’s mother.”
Natalie felt her stomach drop to the floor. “You what?”
“I told Hannah’s mother. This was forever ago, years ago, one of those endless play dates, you know how those used to go on when you were young? Afternoon into the evening, your dad was traveling for work, so was Hannah’s dad—”
Carmen paused and looked at the ceiling, and into the silence Natalie said, in a voice she hardly recognized, “And then what?”
“And then her mother got out the wine, and we ordered pizza for you girls, and we sat there forever while you two played. I think we even put a movie on for you… God, I forgot all about this.”
“Mom. I don’t care about the movie. What happened?”
“Well, then we got to talking. She’s pretty charming, you know, Angela is, and I guess I just told her…” Carmen reached out and touched Natalie’s hair, and Natalie pulled away. “Sweetie, just because I was young when I married your father doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. My God! I loved him more than anything.”
“Yeah but.”
“Yeah but nothing. Your father saved me. He saved me, Natalie! I needed saving. I was so ready to leave home, and he came along—”
“He saved you from what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter.”
“Why?”
“It matters to me.”
Carmen sighed and twisted a piece of her hair around her finger. “From an unhappy home, unhappy people. My father drank, Natalie, and it wasn’t an easy house to grow up in.” She drew in her breath, then let it out slowly. “There was a lot of… there was a lot of anger.”
Natalie considered this; somehow, they had never talked about it. She should have worried more about her mother as a little girl, but instead she thought of the long-ago play date, the secret that had been released. After a beat she said, “What did your parents do? When you left?”
“They stopped speaking to me. It was a huge scandal. Keep in mind, Nat, the town I grew up in had about two thousand people. That’s like three of your high schools, the whole town. Tiny. When somebody runs off with an older man—a pharmaceutical salesman!—it causes a ripple.”
Natalie was silent, waiting for her to go on. Then she said, “So that was it? You never talked to them again?”
“I tried to contact them. After you were born, that’s when it became really important to me, for you to have a family, some roots.”
Natalie thought of her father’s family tree, hastily begun and then forgotten. She thought of the rows and rows of cabinets in the reading room at the Archives, and the records they contained, all those people, all those families, intertwined. She thought of the notebook she’d found and not yet read: could her roots be there? She said, “So then what?”
“They didn’t want to hear from me. I felt terrible about that. Here you were, this beautiful little baby, so tiny and pure…” Carmen’s voice broke off there. “I felt so sad for you, no relatives, your father’s brother, your uncle, moved to Australia so long ago. He started a whole different life.”
Natalie knew about this, her Australian cousins, whom she’d never met; they were older, with beautiful exotic names: Barita, Kolora, Larra. “And Daddy’s parents were already dead when you were born.”
Natalie knew about this, the car accident, her grandparents riding together down 95, in an early summer fog, the truck, overturned in front of them, that they couldn’t see in time. “And that’s why we’ve never gone back there.”
“That’s why.”
Natalie chewed at a cuticle. “I always thought it was just because your parents died.”
“Well, yes, but that happened when you were older. When you were a baby, they were still alive.”
Natalie thought about this: a set of grandparents all the way out in Kansas, alive and well when she was born, grandparents she had never known because they were so consumed by anger. She felt it suddenly and acutely, the absence of these strangers.
“Did Dad know? How old you were?”
“Of course he did.”
Natalie wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. “But sixteen is so young…”
“I know,” said Natalie’s mother. “It seems that way now. But I was an old sixteen. An old soul.” She smiled. Natalie did not smile back. “Maybe I was young, honey, but I knew what I was doing. I loved your father so much.”
Natalie snorted. “Lot of good that did you.” Her mother gasped at that, and Natalie didn’t apologize. (Thing twelve: people who expected an apology when they were the ones doing something wrong.) She said, “How come you never told me?”
“Well, it was a complicated situation. It seemed better not to go into it.”
Natalie stared hard at the wall.
“I didn’t mean for this to hurt you, Natalie. I certainly didn’t mean for anyone to find out. Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would care.”
“I know you didn’t.” What else could she say? And yet. Her mother had given Taylor and Hannah ammunition, and for that she couldn’t forgive her.
Carmen kissed her on the forehead; Natalie accepted the kiss but did not return it.
“Don’t stay up late,” her mother said, and under her breath Natalie said, “What do you care?”
But it wasn’t exactly under her breath after all, because her mother turned back, and there was a different sort of edge to her voice when she said, “Don’t judge things you don’t understand, Natalie.”
Natalie didn’t answer. As soon as her mother left she dove for the phone on the nightstand.
WHAT R U DOING 2NITE, LOSER?
She wanted to run after her mother and give her the phone, have her take it away until the morning, or forever. There were kids whose parents didn’t allow them to have their phones at night. There were kids whose parents monitored everything. Hannah and Taylor clearly did not have those sorts of parents; neither did Natalie. She croaked out one word: Mom? But her mother had gone, had disappeared into her room, didn’t hear.
Later, in the dusk—the gloaming, wasn’t it?—Kathleen rose from her bed, where she had fallen asleep for nearly an hour. She hated sleeping at that time of the day because waking in the near darkness made her feel discombobulated, almost depressed; she’d always been that way, even as a child, and Susannah had too, inconsolable upon waking after she had napped too long.
Kathleen removed her computer from its berth on her nightstand and carried it out to the living room. It was an aging Mac laptop, a hand-me-down from Neil, who was constantly, at Adam’s insistence and with his financial backing, upgrading various technologies in their home. But it served her purposes just fine; any emails she needed to send were generally of a business nature, and she sent them from work. She didn’t use the Mac very often, though she had, at Neil’s suggestion, swung for the high-speed Internet access that was offered along with her phone service.
While she waited for the computer to start up (this process was lengthy and clamorous), she turned on the television. Not because she liked television particularly, but because she wanted to hear some voices. It was the local news (grim), followed by the weather (grimmer), followed by a random smattering of national news (a bus carrying marching-band members in Arkansas had crashed, national unemployment numbers were at a new high, swine flu had reached a remote Alaska
n Eskimo village). “Jesus,” said Kathleen. “How is that even possible?”
And then, grimmest. Kathleen sat up straighter. The suicide of a fourteen-year-old girl in Des Moines who had asphyxiated herself in her parents’ garage after being tortured by her classmates online. Ashley Jackson, the girl’s name was, and the photo that accompanied the story was a school photo, that was clear because of the background of too-bright leaves.
“Unthinkable,” Kathleen said aloud, and Lucy, lying at Kathleen’s feet, lifted her ears. The banner under the photo read, Cyberbullying. Kathleen imagined this girl, Ashley Jackson, getting ready for school in the morning, choosing her outfit, combing her dirty-blond hair in the mirror of the school bathroom. Ashley Jackson was not a freak. No acne, no extra weight. Normal! If you looked at her a certain way you might even call her pretty. Smiling, in this photo, a wide, toothy smile. And now dead.
Later, much later, Natalie padded down the hallway to her mother’s room, where the light from the television cast a glow on the bed, illuminating her mother’s supine form. Carmen’s mouth was open, her head was tilted back, and her breathing was deep and even. Amid the nightstand clutter—an old Us Weekly, a water glass, two different kinds of moisturizer, an empty Kleenex box, a string of gold beads—Natalie saw a pill bottle, which she plucked from the detritus and carried back to her room, pausing on her way to turn off the television.
In her bedroom she undid the cap to the pill bottle and poured a couple of the pills out into her hand. The pills were salmon-colored with an A in the center and a little squiggly line next to the A that reminded her of the tilde that went over the n in Spanish words. She read the writing on the bottle: the pills had been prescribed to Carmen by her doctor, a creaky primary care physician with offices in the Towle Building on Merrimac Street. The directions said: Take one before bedtime. Natalie couldn’t say for sure, but judging from her mother’s deep breathing, her nearly catatonic state, her difficulty waking in the morning, her mother had taken more than one, often took more than one.
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 7
