Natalie put a pill in her mouth, moved it around, then spit it back out. She closed the shade and lay as still as she could in her bed, tired but not sleepy. She listened. From her mother’s bedroom, silence. From the first floor, the bangs and hisses as the old radiators struggled.
She took the black metal box out from underneath her bed, where she’d hidden it (hidden it from whom? nobody was monitoring her movements) and removed first the birth certificates, then the notebook. She opened it. The light here was better than it had been in the basement, and she was able to make out the writing inside the front cover. Bridget O’Connell Callaghan, it said. Newburyport, Massachusetts. 1975.
She read the first few sentences of the first page. This was difficult, because it was all in cursive, and Natalie never had reason to read cursive, and also the letters had faded so that she really had to strain to make them out. Difficult, but not impossible.
I am writing this down because this is my story. I don’t know if anyone will read it. Maybe it’s better if nobody does. But I have a long life behind me, and maybe not so much ahead of me. And I think it’s important for the truth to be out there. So I will start now and maybe by the time it’s my turn to go I will have it all down, the truth, the way it really happened, because if I don’t do this nobody will ever know. There were only ever two other people who knew my secret, and both are gone before me.
It took her a long time to work through even this small section. “Geez,” said Natalie. “What the hell?” she said.
She thought of the Archives, and of the woman who had helped her there (she still had her umbrella). She rummaged in her backpack until she found the card. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, Kathleen Lynch had written, with a phone number on the back.
Was this an emergency?
Maybe, maybe not.
She dialed.
Kathleen switched off the television and turned her attention to the computer. She was going to, as she sometimes did—okay, as she often did—search for Susannah. All of her previous searches had come up empty, but that didn’t stop her from trying again. She said, “Hello, Google, my old friend,” and into the search bar she typed Susannah Lynch. There was a junior high school Susannah Lynch who had placed second in her state cross-country championship a few weeks earlier in Virginia. There was a Susannah Lynch who was born in 1823 in Somerset, England. Also a painting by a Susannah Lynch that was about to be sold at an auction in Wyoming, and Kathleen felt a stab of hope when she saw it. Her Susannah had never been a painter before, but was it possible? Was it? No, it was not: further investigation revealed that Susannah Lynch the painter was sixty-two years old and had gone to art school in Germany. There was a Susannah Lynch, age forty-eight, who was running for local office in Tennessee on a platform of redistributing government money in some way other than how it had been distributed in the past. No dice.
Kathleen cleared the search bar and typed Ashley Jackson. Google returned dozens and dozens of results—the media had seized on this story, and accompanying each version was the same picture.
Kathleen sighed. She thought she’d been through the saddest things in the world—dead husband, vanished daughter—but this was sadder.
“The saddest thing in the world,” she said.
When the phone rang she started.
“Hello, darling,” said Carol. “I’m checking in on you. You didn’t seem quite right today.”
It was hard for Kathleen to hold her voice steady, but she did, looking the whole time at Ashley Jackson’s picture.
Somebody had tucked a gift from the tooth fairy under this girl’s pillow; somebody had held her head when she was sick at night; somebody had watched her perform in a dance recital or sing in a school assembly or score a goal at a soccer game. Somebody had read her letters to Santa, filled her Christmas stocking. And now she was dead.
“I’m fine,” she told Carol. “I promise you, I am perfectly fine.”
She hung up and went back to her computer, but all she could find there was evidence of girls in trouble, so she got up and stretched and called Lucy for a walk. She was hooking on the leash when the phone rang again, and this time she picked up and said, “Carol! I told you I’m fine—”
But it wasn’t Carol. She tilted her head, listening.
“Oh!” she said. “Natalie Gallagher.” She glanced at the clock; it was nearly ten. “Natalie Gallagher. I thought you had disappeared! I thought you had fallen off the face of the earth!”
She nodded vigorously; she put her hand to her throat. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, bring it down. What? As soon as you can. And if you can’t, I’ll come to you.”
It was after eleven when Natalie went downstairs to the kitchen, where, in the dark, the appliances seemed to be leering at her. She turned on a single light and rummaged around in a cabinet until she found the boxes of Ziploc bags, remnants from an earlier life, when her mother used to pack her lunches for her. Now that job was left to Natalie, who forgot half the time. Into the bag she poured a few of the pills she’d taken from her mother’s room. How many would be enough to have on hand but not enough that they would be missed? She shook the pills out. Six, eight, a dozen. How many?
The arrangements for Natalie to see her father were currently haphazard; her parents weren’t divorced, only separated, so they made their own rules. Natalie supposed that when they got an actual divorce the arrangements would lose their suppleness and become more formal, worked out by a fictional character in Natalie’s head called the Judge. The Judge was kindly and benevolent and looked a lot like Detective Lennie Briscoe on the reruns of Law & Order Natalie and her mother occasionally watched.
It came to her, the idea, very late at night, after she’d talked to Kathleen Lynch on the phone, after she’d put the pills in the baggie and put the baggie in her backpack for safekeeping, after she’d turned her phone on again, then off, then on again, and while she was thinking about her visit with her father the following day.
(“Avoid clichés whenever you write,” said Ms. Ramirez. “If someone’s said something the way you’re about to say it, think of a different way.”) But Natalie couldn’t banish the cliché; she saw the lightbulb suspended somewhere above her head. Her father! He was the answer. He had moved not only out of their house but to a whole different town. With a whole different high school, where she could begin a whole different life, away from Taylor Grant, away from Hannah Morgan, away from all of them. She felt a momentary pang about Christian Chapman, but that dissolved quickly.
A memory kicked in, her father holding his arms out to her as she jumped into some pool (whose pool, or where, she didn’t know). Her father on Christmas morning in a Santa hat, passing out presents.
She walked to the mirror over her dresser. Who was she, really, to criticize her mother for not keeping herself together? She hadn’t washed her hair in a couple of days, and her lame attempts at makeup were ruined by her foraging in the basement, all the dust that had stirred up: there were black streaks of mascara running down her face, there was lipstick smudged in the corner of her mouth.
She opened the notebook again.
My name is Bridget O’Connell Callaghan. I was born Bridget O’Connell in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1905. In 1925, at the age of twenty, I came over to America to work in service for the Turner family of High Street, Newburyport, Massachusetts. My sister Grainne sent money for my passage, as she had come over herself to work in service two years earlier. She married and left service just before I came over.
Sometimes I am grateful to Grainne for doing that for me. Sometimes I wish she had never done it. Sometimes I wish I had stayed in Ireland. I always wanted more, when I was there. I was greedy, greedy, greedy, and what was there was not enough for me.
But I remember it! I remember dancing with my sisters at the parish festivals. I remember the days when the master dance teacher would come to our village on his bicycle, and teach us new steps, around the house and mind the dresser, we used to say, you could say that t
o any Irish immigrant of my vintage today and they’d know exactly what you meant. I remember learning the Saint Patrick’s Day dance and dancing with my sister Fiona. She was a great one for dancing, Fiona was, and caught onto the steps so much quicker than I did. I always envied her that, and how happy she looked when she was dancing, her hair flying out behind her, her cheeks pink.
Sometimes I wish I never wanted more than what I had back in Ireland. But that wasn’t enough for me, and I wanted.
My parents are dead, God bless them, and so too is Fiona, as well as my dear husband. It is one of the greatest sorrows of my life that I never saw Fiona again after leaving Ireland, and that is the greatest sorrow in a life that has seen no shortage of sorrow.
But also no shortage of joys.
Grainne is two years older than I am and lives in the city of Lynn, not far from me. My sister Siobhan married a boy from our village and lives there still. My sister Claire never married, but she cared for our parents until they died.
Declan would not like to know that I am writing all of this down—he was of the school of thought that says keep the past in the past. I think that is fine for the most part.
Except.
I had a scare with my health recently and I thought I might die. I didn’t die. It turned out to be a simple situation, a problem with my appendix, which was then removed, but the idea that I might pass on from this world to the next without ever telling this story worried me, I couldn’t stand the thought of it, of going to my grave with everything a secret.
That expression had always sounded strange to me, “going to my grave,” as though you pack a suitcase and board a train to get there.
Even if nobody ever reads this, even if I hide this in a box and hide the box somewhere in the house and nobody finds it, it will be enough for me to know that the story has been told.
You could say there were lots of things that led to what happened.
But it all started on Christmas Eve, 1925, so I will begin my story there.
Natalie’s eyes were heavy; she couldn’t keep them open. She let the notebook fall to the floor. It was all she could do to reach over to the nightstand and switch off the light.
“You know,” said Kathleen to Lucy, “I’ve never found anything worthwhile in my basement. And believe me, I’ve looked plenty of times.”
Lucy stared impassively back at her.
Kathleen washed her breakfast dishes and rooted around in the closet for her boots—she wanted to take Lucy to Castle Island. But just as she was getting ready to go, Neil called; he wanted her to go to Magic Beans with him and look for a crib.
“I’d love to,” she said. “But isn’t that Adam’s department?”
“God no,” said Neil. “I’m not letting him come on any more shopping trips. He put me on an allowance, Kathleen. Can you believe it? He thinks I’m going overboard.”
“Are you?”
“Definitely. Also he’s in a volleyball league, Sunday games.”
“Volleyball!” said Kathleen.
Her mother was still sleeping, dreaming her Ambien dreams, her eyes twitching behind her eyelids (Natalie had checked), but Natalie, who had been up with the birds, was dressed and ready to go, ready to talk to her father, ready to begin this new chapter of her life. She didn’t know how it was that she’d never thought of this solution before, but now that she’d thought of it she could scarcely think of anything else.
An outing, her father had christened it on the phone, when he called to finalize the arrangements, as though he were a camp counselor, and she a camper.
Natalie stood outside for a few minutes, waiting, but she wasn’t dressed warmly enough. The storms of two days before had left behind a new world, refreshed, scrubbed clean, but colder too.
Back inside she studied the cracks in the living room wall. She could bid these good-bye, and also the slanted floor in the kitchen: on to bigger and better things. Well, not bigger, necessarily. But newer—surely her father’s apartment was newer than this house. On to newer and better things.
If she moved in with her father, if she switched schools, she wouldn’t have to complete the project. She wouldn’t have to do all of the hard work Kathleen Lynch had described. She would be free of all of it. She would miss Ms. Ramirez, but there would be other teachers to take her place, other projects.
Her father would be her savior, his Lexus a chariot to carry her away from here.
The Lexus pulled up. Not in the driveway, where you would park at your own house, but along the curb, the way a visitor would park. Natalie could see him at the mailbox, scrutinizing the post for signs of disrepair, and then he squinted up at the house. He squatted and inspected something on the surface of the driveway. From her vantage point Natalie could see the place on the top of his head where the hair was thinning. You couldn’t really tell that by looking at him from the front, so she felt she was privy to an important and telling detail: her father was aging.
“Hey!” said her father when she appeared. “There she is!” He never said things like that to Natalie; he never addressed her in the third person: he was nervous. But he looked the same as ever, though he wore a cautious, hopeful expression she recognized from the days of the sales calls. This expression he always replaced, upon approaching the door of a medical office, with one of unruffled composure.
His winter coat was different from the one she remembered he had the previous year—newer, darker, woollier—but his aftershave smelled the same as ever, and when he bent to kiss her on the cheek she experienced a brief spasm of recognition, or maybe even love.
He had a package for her: a Wii console and two games to go along with it.
“What for?” she asked. “It’s not Christmas yet.”
“No reason,” he said, shrugging.
The games were Family Tennis and something called Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout. (Really? Did he think she needed to lose weight?) She didn’t like video games. She didn’t care about the Wii. The fact that her father didn’t know that, that he didn’t seem to know her at all, exerted a pressure on her head. But she had her eyes on the prize.
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s great.”
“Really?” Her father breathed in deeply, then exhaled.
“Sure. Really.”
So unfitting was this gift that it was as though he had bought it for someone else but had happened along Natalie in the interim and changed his plan. And where was she to play these games, if she were to play them at all? In their tiny antique living room? In her bedroom, where there was no television? In her mother’s bedroom, in the midst of the unmade bed, the collection of pill bottles, the heap of unwashed clothes? She brought the boxes inside and put them in the kitchen, and when she returned her father was tapping his keys against the leg of his pants, looking up at the house. She had a second to study him unnoticed, and he wore an air of distraction, but as soon as he saw her he rearranged his features into a jovial expression. Watching the sudden transformation, Natalie couldn’t help but think of Hannah Morgan near the lockers.
“Ready?” he said. “Natty Nat Nat. You ready?”
She bristled at this and put on her own jolly mask: two could play this game. “Ready, Freddy,” she said. And then, borrowing a phrase he used to say, “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
The river to their right was silent and cold and gray in the emerging morning. In the sky, a violet streak, the singular remnant of the sunrise, hung in the sky. Natalie fixed her gaze on that.
“Dad?” said Natalie. “Do you remember when you did some of that family tree stuff a couple of years ago?”
“Huh?” He wasn’t really listening to her. (Thing number thirteen: grown-ups who didn’t really listen.)
“Your family tree. Didn’t you do something with your family tree?”
“Oh, yeah, that. I got on a kick about that awhile back. Early midlife crisis. I started thinking about my parents being gone, feeling rootless, my brother so far away. I wanted to figure some stuff o
ut. I don’t think I got very far. I remember a lot of question marks.”
“Do you remember someone named Bridget?”
“Bridget? I’m not sure. I don’t know. Why are you asking?”
“School project. Do you know who lived in our house, before we did? I mean like a long time before we did?”
“Natalie, I don’t know, I’m sorry. My mother inherited it, I know that, and we moved in when I was eight or nine, but beyond that…”
His voice was sharp; the hand not on the steering wheel was tapping on the console. All of these things Natalie recognized, from the sales calls, as signs of nerves.
She had been about to ask him about her mother, about the birth certificates, when she heard the sound of a text on her cell phone. Her father glanced over. “Want to get that? One of your friends calling?”
She snorted. “Nooooo. Just a text.” Same as the night before: she wanted to look, but she didn’t want to know.
She had also been about to ask him about moving in with him, but that could wait too, for just the right time.
“Listen,” her father said, too loudly. “Listen, before we get back to my place.” (Our place, she thought.) His voice had softened, and he was looking at her kindly, and she could see, somewhere behind his eyes, the gentle and patient person who had taught her to ice-skate at the Bartlet Mall, who held the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbled along on her bike that first, exhilarating time without training wheels, around the tennis courts at Cashman Park.
She said, “Yes?” Probably he needed someone to take care of him, a feminine touch around the apartment. She could cook, a little. She could make omelets. She’d want to get registered in the new school before classes began in January.
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 8
