But he was saying… what?
“There’s something I want to tell you about,” her father said. She watched his Adam’s apple working. She felt suddenly like his voice was coming from very far away. “I suppose I should say someone,” he corrected. “I suppose I should say, there’s someone I want to tell you about.”
There was a lump in her stomach, in her throat.
Hadn’t she known? She watched enough television. She had read plenty of books. It was the plot of nearly every story ever written: someone else. There was someone else, someone besides her mother. There was always someone else.
So he wasn’t her savior after all. She should have known.
The phone dinged again: that’s what it did when you didn’t look at your text, it kept dinging and dinging to let you know it was there.
The new apartment was in a mill building that had been turned into living spaces. “A feeble attempt at cachet,” was how her father described it to her on the way there, turning partway to look at Natalie and then returning his eyes to the road. (Thing number fourteen: stupid adult jokes that are not funny.)
Her father hadn’t loosened his hold on the steering wheel; she could see small white circles on his knuckles. They crossed the chain bridge into Amesbury. From the bridge Natalie could see the river, inhospitable now, despite the emerging sunlight, though in the summer it would fill with boats. They turned left after the bridge and continued on the road along the river, and she was grateful for that because it gave her something to do, looking out at the fancy houses with their fine stone walls, their beautiful gardens. When she was little she had imagined living in one of these homes, spreading herself out in a spacious bedroom. The car sloshed through puddles, sending dirty water in sprays around them and on the windshield.
After they turned away from the river and toward the downtown, Natalie’s father said, “So, look. Natalie. As I was saying. When we get to the apartment, there’s going to be a woman there I want you to meet.” She didn’t turn toward him: she wouldn’t. The sun hitting the pavement made shapes that danced in front of her eyes. She felt dizzy. He went on from there: this had nothing to do with Natalie, or how much he cared about her. His relationship with this woman, this woman named Julia, was separate from all of that.
When he said Julia’s name he faced Natalie and reluctantly she met his gaze before he turned his eyes back toward the road. There was a signal—a light behind his eyes—that made her realize that something very big and important had changed. When she heard the word relationship, a wave of nausea washed over her. She thought she might have to ask him to stop the car to allow her to be sick on the side of the road. If there was a new relationship, if there was a woman named Julia (Natalie couldn’t say the name in her head without adding the italics), there would be no room for Natalie.
Natalie’s father pulled into a large parking lot, into a space with the number 33 painted on it in bright yellow paint. She got out of the car slowly. A phrase traveled through her head: This is madness. She had no idea where she’d heard such a phrase, or why, but the drama of it seemed perfectly fitting to the occasion. Madness.
Her father walked around the car and opened her door. It was a courtly, gentlemanly gesture that she had forgotten him capable of. Suddenly she remembered all of the sales calls when she sat in the car and watched him disappear into a medical office, and the way he’d always look back at her and wave.
The sun had risen quickly and dramatically, and Natalie’s father lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the glare. “Listen,” he said. “I know this might come as a surprise to you, all of this. Hearing about Julia.”
She stared hard at the building in front of them. A real estate agent’s sign stuck into the ground advertised sales and rentals. “It’s nothing,” she said, trying her best to erase the weight of the news with her nonchalance. “No big deal.” That sounded just mean enough without being whiny.
“Hang on,” he said, bending down. “Your phone fell out of your pocket.”
He picked it up. Another text sound. “Here,” he said, smiling broadly. “This thing keeps going off. You must be popular.”
The salespeople and the other customers at Magic Beans must have thought that Kathleen was Neil’s mother. Or maybe an overbearing mother-in-law, insisting on being involved. The store was packed, and everywhere you turned there was a belly in a different size: a cantaloupe, a soccer ball, a beach ball. On top of each belly, a fresh, rounded face, and attached to each fresh, rounded face a husband.
“Do you feel strange being in here?” whispered Kathleen.
“No,” said Neil. “Why, should I? And why are we whispering?”
They didn’t buy a crib; in the end Neil couldn’t decide on one without Adam. After, they went for coffees at the Panera across the street.
“I hate to sound so old,” said Kathleen, “but in my day we didn’t have baby stores like that. The money that goes into having a child these days! It’s staggering.”
“I know,” said Neil. “But it is what it is.”
“Our biggest expense was a bassinet,” she said. “I remember that.”
Susannah had slept in that bassinet her first four months. Kathleen had set it next to her own bed so she could more easily care for the baby in the night, and she remembered how fearful she’d been to fall asleep those first few weeks, scared that she’d miss some warning change in Susannah’s breathing. She’d thought then that that part would be the worst for her and Gregory to get through, that once Susannah had emerged from that stage fat and happy, taking deep, regular breaths, sleeping soundly and regularly and intently, that they were in the clear. Ha!
This seemed like a dangerous path to traverse, so Kathleen cast about for a way to change the subject. “Hey,” said Kathleen. “Remember that girl who was in at the end of last week?”
“The one with the cell phone?”
“That’s the one. She called me! Last night. She found something in her basement, an old notebook.”
“I’ve never found anything in my basement,” said Neil morosely. “And believe me, I’ve looked, plenty of times.”
“That’s what I said,” said Kathleen. “Earlier today, I said the exact same thing to Lucy.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Lucy?”
“Wiseacre. No. The girl.”
“Natalie. I told her to bring it down. I told her we’d have a look at it with her, you and I.”
“Good,” said Neil. “And we will.”
“I told her you are the king of reading supposedly indecipherable writing.”
Neil stirred his coffee. “You did? You told her that?”
“I did.”
“Kathleen Lynch, I’m flattered.”
“Well, it’s true.”
Natalie’s father explained that they would have taken the elevator to his apartment but that the elevator, like other parts of the building, was still under construction. All around them were piles of sawdust and toolboxes and other evidence of renovation: a bucket of white paint in the hallway, dots of primer on the wall, a ladder. Natalie tried to make herself think, I wouldn’t want to live here anyway.
“This is how I get my exercise now,” her father said as they walked, but he seemed not to be up to the task, because they stopped and rested between the third and fourth floors.
The apartment was on the fifth floor. Her father fumbled in his pocket for the key, but before he could insert it, the door opened and there she was. Julia.
“Come in!” she said merrily, and Natalie’s father leaned forward as if to kiss her but then must have thought better of it because instead he gave her an awkward clap on the shoulder and ushered Natalie in front of him.
Julia had a small flat face and an upturned nose that, when she turned to the side, made her look like a little girl. But in fact she looked nearly a decade older than Natalie’s mother. Didn’t you always hear about men leaving their wives for younger women? But this was the oppos
ite situation. WE KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT U.
Julia was not beautiful, but she was pretty in an ordinary way, like a person you would see in a magazine advertisement for yogurt or a practical car that could hold the whole family. She was dressed almost entirely in beige: beige pants, a soft beige sweater, beige boots featuring a big gold buckle. Her honey-colored hair was cut to her chin in a swingy style, and she gave off the pleasant smell of recently applied perfume.
“Natalie!” she said, smiling. She had a gap between her two front teeth, the kind that, nowadays, they would sort out immediately with braces. “I’m so happy to meet you, finally.” When she said finally, she turned a wry smile in the direction of Natalie’s father; her face, when she smiled, reminded Natalie of a dance teacher she’d had long ago, when she’d done such things as take dance classes, before they’d all realized she was a klutz. Reach up to the sky, girls, like you’re trying to touch the clouds! Julia held out a hand to shake Natalie’s, and her grasp was firm and confident. She held on a little longer than Natalie was expecting, and when she released Natalie she clapped her hands together like a child expecting a birthday present.
She seemed not to notice Natalie’s silence, nor that of her father; she just talked right through it, eliminating it altogether. “I thought we could go out for pizza,” she said—again, the cheery tenor to her voice, the display of childlike enthusiasm. “Natalie, do you like pizza?”
“She loves pizza,” said her father, before Natalie had the chance to answer. Natalie nodded slowly—she did love pizza, though she was loath to admit it here—and looked around the living room. The furniture was beige, too, as though it had been dressed to match Julia, and it had a boxy look to it, with identical light wooden arms on the sofa and chairs. It looked like furniture you would find in a doctor’s office or a hotel lobby, plain and inoffensive and slightly uncomfortable. On the squat table lay two glossy gardening magazines and a picture book about downtown Newburyport; it was these, more than anything else, that led Natalie to believe that somebody else had furnished this apartment. Glossy magazines were not her father’s style.
“There’s a great pizza place not far from here,” Julia said. “Flatbread? But you probably know that. You don’t live far.” After a beat she added, “We can walk there. If it’s not raining. It’s not raining, is it? They say it’s supposed to rain again later—”
Natalie didn’t answer the question about the weather, but her father did (“Sunny as a beach day in July!”). Natalie had been to Flatbread. She had been once with her parents, long ago, and once with the now-odious Hannah Morgan and her mother on a school night when Hannah Morgan’s father was away on business. “I have to go to the bathroom,” said Natalie. It was hard to get the words out, because the urge to cry was so strong.
Julia pointed down a slim bright hallway with a door on either side.
“The bathroom’s on the left,” she said.
Once out of view of the living room, Natalie opened the door on the right and was astonished to see a mattress on the floor, heaps of clothes piled here and there. This was in such stark contrast to the living room, with its tidy matching furniture. There was a card table that held a mound of change and, incongruously, a couple of packets of ketchup, the kind you got with take-out food, and also a pair of glasses that must have been Julia’s. They had bright red frames and were open, as though someone had put them down for just a minute and planned to be right back.
Natalie crossed the hallway to the bathroom, which was small, barely big enough for the sink, the toilet, and the shower. But the ceilings were high, as they were everywhere in the apartment, and on one side of the toilet was nailed a handsome white cabinet with big silver knobs shaped like stars. Natalie, who did not actually have to go to the bathroom, opened the cabinet and saw a razor next to a red-, white-, and blue-striped can of Barbasol; an unwrapped bar of soap; and, on the top shelf, which she had to stand on her tiptoes to access, a collection of moisturizers in matching white containers.
The moisturizers were labeled in elaborate black script. The brand was unfamiliar to Natalie, but she sensed that the whole collection was expensive. She reached up for one tiny bottle. It was devoted entirely to the delicate skin under and around the eyes. All of this must belong to Julia. Not only that, but the whole collection had been purposefully hidden from Natalie, who, after all, was taller than Julia and still had to stretch to reach it.
So. Julia was not here merely to greet Natalie, and to take her to Flatbread for pizza. Julia was a representative from her father’s new life, the one he’d built since leaving them. Or perhaps—though this was a thought she allowed herself to entertain for only a fraction of a second—even before. Julia was living here, with Natalie’s father. They were living together. There was no room for Natalie.
On the back of the toilet Natalie saw a light green bottle of perfume with an unpronounceable name in gold block letters. This, they had forgotten to hide. She pulled off the knobby gold top and recognized the scent that Julia wore. Then she sprayed a little in the air in front of her, the way her mother had showed her to do once, and walked through it.
A knock on the door. “Nat? You okay in there?” It was her father. His use of her nickname infuriated her, even more than the Natty Nat Nat back at her house had. She yanked open the door.
“What?” she said furiously.
Her father was taken aback by her tone, she could see that she’d hurt him. Good. He stepped back, then stepped toward her again.
“Natalie,” he said gently. “Honey.” He opened his arms to her beseechingly. “Nat. Come in here. Sit down.” He reached around her to turn off the bathroom light.
He led her into the bedroom. There was nowhere to sit except for the mattress, so she sat cross-legged on the floor, and he did too. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
Natalie stared at the floor and said, “She’s living here. Julia. She’s living here, right?” The moisturizers lined up in the cabinet, the perfume bottle on the toilet tank, the easy confidence she had in the living room. Even the way she matched the furniture! These were clues, all of them.
Her father didn’t answer.
There was a pause, and Natalie, looking around the room again, saw a neat pile of women’s clothes folded in the corner. On the top of the pile was a black lacy bra. She stared hard at the bra and tried not to cry. She hadn’t known that women as old as Julia wore lacy underthings. It seemed pitiable and gross. How old was she? Forty? Older? Pathetic.
“Nat,” said her father. “One thing you have to understand is that things between your mother and me haven’t been good for a long time.” He opened his palms and lifted his hands to the ceiling.
“But you left her,” Natalie spat. “You left us.”
“Natalie, honey, it’s more complicated than that.”
“How? How is it more complicated? You. Left. Us.”
“Well.” He sighed and drew his hands through his thinning hair. “She left me a long time ago.”
“What? No, she didn’t. She’s right where she always was.”
“In her mind, is what I mean. She stopped being the person she was.”
The unfairness of this struck Natalie like a blow. She felt dizzy from the imagined impact. “I don’t even know what that means,” she said.
Her father sighed again and looked around the room, as if for an escape. “It’s complicated.”
“You already said that.” She stared at her hands. She had a feeling that if she didn’t look up, her father might stop talking and they could carry on as they had been. They could continue the charade that everything was okay.
“Someday you’ll understand. When you’re older.”
Natalie kicked at a pile of clothes on the floor, sending sport shirts tumbling. Her father ignored that and focused instead on her face with an open, sympathetic look that made Natalie want to scream. “I hate when grown-ups say that.”
“Natalie.”
“Why do grown
-ups always say that? It’s stupid. It’s a stupid, shitty thing to say.”
He let the cursing slide. “Natalie. Just because I’m the one who actually left, the one who walked out the door, well, that doesn’t mean that I’m the only one at fault.”
Cautiously she said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, for one thing, I wanted to have more children, a bigger family. So did your mother, at one time.”
Natalie felt a gentle vibration begin somewhere in her stomach, almost like there was a subway moving under the apartment building. But there was no subway, just her father’s voice in the quiet room.
She said, “So. Why didn’t you?” Her voice sounded unfamiliar to her, low and dull.
“Well,” her father said, “your mother… your mother didn’t want to. She found it very overwhelming, being a mother.” He glanced at Natalie. “Not because of you. But babies are difficult, for some people. Mothers can go through a depression. She wasn’t well for a while after you were born. She hasn’t been well, I mean completely well, for a really long time.”
Natalie said nothing, absorbing all of this, and her father said, “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.”
Natalie thought of Hannah Morgan, of their Only Child Club. Once they had made buttons and worn them to school. This was a long time ago, of course. Even if they were still friends now, which obviously they were not, they were too old for such foolishness. But how proudly Natalie had worn the button, and what solidarity she’d felt with Hannah Morgan, because they both understood that deep down this was not how they wanted things to be.
Her father continued. “But I need you to understand that your mother and me, together, we were unhappy. For a long time.” Natalie felt her mouth twist into something ugly. Her father must have seen this because he said, “Oh, not with you, honey. But with each other. And that’s not how I wanted to live out my life, unhappily. Neither does she.”
“So, what? You just leave her? Find something better?” She gestured toward the living room. What was Julia doing out there, anyway? Browsing through one of the glossy magazines? Straightening the tan pillows? Sitting perfectly still, trying to listen?
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 9
