“No. I’m telling you it’s not that simple.”
“Well, maybe not. But look at you. You’re happy enough. But she’s not!”
“It might take longer—”
“Some days she doesn’t even get dressed,” said Natalie. This was her ammunition, and she fired it as hard as she could.
Her father put his head in his hands and rubbed at his temples. “Really?”
“Really. Most days.”
Softly her father said, “Jesus Christ.” He looked at the ceiling. Abruptly he straightened, then got to his feet and shook his clothes as though he’d been eating at a picnic and needed to clear the crumbs. “Natalie. Your mother needs help, to get better.”
“Help?”
“Medication, a therapist, maybe both. She promised me she was going to do that, but now I see that she hasn’t.”
“She doesn’t leave the house,” whispered Natalie.
“Well. We’re going to make sure that she does.” Natalie’s father looked around the room, but it was unclear what he was looking for, and eventually his eyes landed once again on Natalie and he opened his arms to her.
She remained where she was. She said, “Who’s the we? You and Julia?”
Her father studied her. Then he lifted his shoulders—it was almost imperceptible, the motion—and said, “Not we. Me. I will do it.” Then he said, with a false brightness in his voice, “We can talk about all of that later. For now, how about some pizza?”
“No,” she said. But she was starving, and her stomach was making little grumbling sounds. She unfolded her legs and rose from the floor.
Her father grasped her elbow awkwardly and led her toward the door. “Honey, I know I already said this. But I mean it. This is all very complicated. When you’re older, you’ll understand it better.”
“Why do you all say that, all grown-ups? Why is that your excuse for everything?” She took a deep breath. “When I’m older, I won’t understand because I won’t even think of you at all.” It was the worst thing she could think to say to him. The worst! And she added to it, twisting the knife. “Not at all,” she repeated.
That felt good. It was the only thing that had felt good to Natalie in a very long time, but it felt really good. It felt amazing.
Natalie didn’t come, she didn’t bring the notebook down, and after a few days of waiting Kathleen let herself stop thinking about it. Just like that, it was almost Thanksgiving, and the stainless-steel sky was so low it looked like you could reach right up and touch it.
Kathleen was having Thanksgiving dinner with Adam and Neil and some of their friends. She had offered to bring a pumpkin pie, and she was going to make the crust from scratch, a recipe she’d seen in Eating Well magazine (Neil would appreciate it, if he took a break from his green smoothies long enough to try it), but looking through her cupboard on the day before Thanksgiving she realized she didn’t have any whole-wheat pastry flour. After work she’d have to go to the grocery store, along with every other last-minute idiot south of Boston, but there was nothing she could do about it now, because she was due at work in half an hour.
“Well, Lucy?” said Kathleen, getting ready for work. “How do I look? Okay?” Lucy’s chin was on the floor, and her eyes followed Kathleen as she moved around the kitchen. “Lucy,” said Kathleen. “You haven’t eaten your dinner.” Typically Lucy ate in the middle of the night, like a person with an eating disorder, someone ashamed to consume in front of others; Kathleen would hear the crunching, oddly comforting, break into her dreams. But today Lucy’s bowl was full. Kathleen would be late if she didn’t get a move on; she didn’t stop to ponder Lucy’s bowl.
On the sidewalk a man ran by her dressed in shorts—shorts!—which seemed to Kathleen too optimistic, but indeed she did feel overdressed in her thick winter coat. She unwound her scarf and stuffed it in her pocket. “Global warming,” she said dismally, to nobody.
At work she was well settled at her desk when Neil walked in.
“Sorry, boss,” he whispered, and she could see that the skin underneath his eyes was pouchy and gray.
She said, “Neil! What happened to you? For heaven’s sake, turn right around and go home. You look terrible. Are you sick?”
He leaned two hands on her desk; he hadn’t shaved (that was unusual) and she thought that it was possible he was wearing the same sweater he’d been wearing the day before. “Not sick,” he said gruffly. “I’m exhausted.”
“Why?”
“We were up all night—talking, fighting, talking. I don’t think I slept more than ten minutes. And then Adam got up and went to work, the bastard.”
This was interesting. Kathleen perked up. “Fighting? About what?”
“Oh, everything. Henri. Plans. Arrangements. Fatherhood. Anything you could think of, we fought about it. Which day care to use.”
“You don’t have that sorted out yet?”
“Not really. Well, it depends on your definition of sorted out. Mine and Adam’s are apparently very different.”
“Neil!”
“I know, I know. We have our names on some lists. We’re on it, really we are. But apparently Adam thinks one of us should leave our job to care for Henri.”
The door opened and in walked a middle-aged man with a hat tipped over one eye, making him look like some shady character in a film noir. But when he took off the hat he became a regular man, balding, paunchy, in search, no doubt, of some piece of genealogical information he had been sent to retrieve by an elderly and unwell relative. Kathleen nodded at the man—the intern was greeting him—and turned her attention back to Neil.
“And this never came up before?”
“Maybe it did. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Neil,” she said. “Don’t quit on me. Don’t you dare.”
“No,” he said vaguely. “Of course not.” But underneath his words she could sense a sort of giving in.
“Neil,” she said.
“I know!” he said. “I don’t want to, believe me. But it’s complicated. It’s all a lot more complicated than I realized. I mean, even just getting him—that’s turning into its own circus. Adam might go over there in a couple of weeks to try to sort things out.”
“And come back with him?”
“Maybe. We don’t know. Or maybe we’d both go back later to get him. Who knows? It’s hard to say.”
Kathleen could see a figure walking up the outside steps. The figure looked familiar, the height, the posture, but from this distance she couldn’t be sure—was it?
“Oh, Neil,” she said. “I’m sorry. It seems awfully difficult.” And she meant it. It did seem difficult. Adopting a child! Complicated. Having your own child: also complicated.
(Susannah turning sullen and angry, her usual sunny demeanor vanished; money missing from Kathleen’s wallet, jewelry from her room. Kathleen absorbed these signs, and she dissected them, trying to ascertain their meaning and what to do about them. She thought she had time to figure out a plan. But she was wrong. She didn’t have any time at all.)
Then the door opened and the figure moved closer.
“Neil!” she stage-whispered. “That’s her, the girl with the notebook. That’s Natalie.”
Neil looked up briefly. “Yeah?” he said.
“Too tired to care?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going to stagger over to my desk and sit down for a minute. And then I’m going to hit the coffee machine, hard.”
Kathleen watched Natalie’s slouching progress across the floor. An expression came to her mind: bent but not broken. She rose to meet Natalie and when she reached her and said hello she saw that the girl’s eyes were rimmed with red. Crying, or cold? But it wasn’t very cold out; she thought again of the man running in shorts. So crying, then. And who wouldn’t be crying, with a dead mother? Natalie looked to Kathleen like some sort of bedraggled animal. She wore the same jacket she’d been wearing a few weeks earlier, but it was dirtier, as if its owner had met wi
th unexpected obstacles. The hair was the same, the brilliant orangey red, but it was pulled back with a rubber band. Absent, today, were the meager attempts at makeup; without these Natalie looked both more innocent and older.
“Well!” said Kathleen, trying to sound carefree and unconcerned, as though she hadn’t been wondering where Natalie had been. “Hello again!”
Natalie blinked at her, and her face wore a vaguely surprised expression, almost as though she had been carried into the Archives building in her sleep and had awoken suddenly to find herself there.
“Have you brought what you found in the basement?”
Natalie nodded. “I brought it. But. I’ve been trying to read it for, like, days, but I can’t read much of it. It’s taking forever. It seems sort of hopeless. Plus I don’t even know what I would do with it if I read it, what kind of project it would be.”
“Oh, nothing is hopeless,” said Kathleen. She didn’t really believe this (lots of things were hopeless), but it seemed like the right thing to say. She looked closely at Natalie. “And why aren’t you in school?”
“Early release.”
“How early? It’s only eleven thirty now. And you came all the way from Newburyport…”
“I don’t know. Early.”
Kathleen let that one pass. She’d been lied to before by a teenage girl; no reason she wouldn’t be again.
Natalie looked suddenly stricken. “Why? Do I need an appointment?”
Something in her eyes made Kathleen relent. (She was a girl without a mother, for the love of God! Go easy on her.) “No, of course not,” she said. “I just meant that if you’ve been trying for days and days with no luck, you could have come in sooner, we would have helped you. But that’s okay, we’ll get to work now.” She gestured toward the empty reading room. “So why don’t we have a seat and take a look.”
They settled themselves at their usual table and Natalie pulled from her backpack a black spiral-bound notebook. She had bypassed the locker ritual this time, an infraction Kathleen did not point out, so transfixed was she by the notebook.
“I wrapped it in tissue paper,” Natalie explained.
“Good idea,” said Kathleen, touched by that little detail, the responsibility and maturity it displayed. This poor dead mother, whoever she had been, however she had died, had taught her daughter well.
Kathleen began to read. She stopped and looked at Natalie. “How far did you get?”
“I don’t know, like, two pages.”
Kathleen bent closer to the book. Natalie sighed, and there was something so adolescent about the sigh, so reminiscent of Susannah’s own sighs at that age, her frustration at life’s little cruelties or indignities, that Kathleen thought she might cry. But she organized herself enough to say, “What is it?”
Natalie chewed at her fingernail. Her nails were ravaged, some of them bitten all the way down to the quick, and Kathleen had to stop herself from suggesting that Natalie leave them alone. “Nothing. I just thought this would be easier.” Her posture really was terrible. It was a shame to think she might grow up slinking around like this, embarrassed by her gorgeous height.
“You thought what would be easier?”
“This. All of this.” Natalie gestured to indicate the reading room, then the main lobby; her gesture even seemed to include the wide expanse of Massachusetts Bay that lay beyond the windows. “I thought I could do some sort of amazing project, really impress my teacher.”
“And why can’t you?”
“I don’t know,” said Natalie. “All I have is this book, and some stupid research my father never even finished—”
“Okay,” said Kathleen. She closed the notebook and rested her hands on top of it. “So what is it exactly that you want to do?”
“I don’t know. It’s independent study. I guess I can do anything. I thought I could do something really cool, like research my whole family tree, go back and back and back, but it took me so long to get here even this one time…” She blinked her eyes rapidly and looked at the ceiling.
“But you have to produce… something, right?”
“Yeah. But other people are just writing a poetry collection, dumb stuff like that. I should just do that. I’m not sure why I’m here.”
In a voice as gentle as she could muster, Kathleen said, “And sit up straight, will you?”
Natalie looked wounded—wounded like a little bird, like the birds in the nest Kathleen used to compare herself and Susannah to after Gregory’s death.
“I’m sorry,” said Kathleen. “It’s just that tall girls tend to slouch, and it’s a terrible habit to begin so young. My daughter was tall. Was. Is. Is tall. She got it from her father.” She gestured toward her own body. She was of exactly average height on a good day. “Obviously.”
Natalie did straighten, pulling her shoulders back to reveal the lines of her collarbones. This too seemed birdlike, somehow, though birds did not, to Kathleen’s knowledge, have collarbones. Natalie looked interested. “And does she hate it? Being tall?”
“Sometimes when she was young, I think,” said Kathleen. “But she grew into it. You mostly end up growing into your own body, whatever body you get.”
“What about now?”
“What do you mean?” Kathleen busied herself with looking down at the notebook, because she was trying to delay the question that surely, inevitably, Natalie, like Melissa Henderson before her, would present next. To distract herself she thought about how strange it was that something like this notebook had once been new—purchased in a store, taken home, with fresh, blank pages.
“I mean, what about now. Does she hate being tall now?”
“I don’t know,” said Kathleen.
Natalie persisted. “Well, ask her.”
“I can’t ask her. I lost touch with her.”
“You lost touch with her?” Natalie pulled her eyebrows together, but her eyebrows, like her eyelashes, were so light—without the makeup they were almost invisible—that the look did not carry the force that Kathleen imagined that Natalie believed it carried.
Can of worms, thought Kathleen dismally. Can of worms.
“You don’t talk to your own daughter?”
“Well,” said Kathleen. She shifted in her seat. “It’s more complicated than that. It’s really… complicated.” She turned her attention back to the notebook.
“Yeah, but that’s really sad,” said Natalie. “Right?”
The cell phone was not in evidence, but a buzzing sound emanating from Natalie’s backpack took her attention—briefly, but thankfully—away from Kathleen.
“Shit, sorry,” said Natalie. “I meant to turn that off.”
“Get it, if you must,” said Kathleen. She looked around at the empty room. “There’s nobody here.” She lowered her voice. “But you were supposed to leave the backpack in the lockers, like last time.”
“Sorry, I forgot,” said Natalie.
The noise came again. Kathleen pictured the phone acting like a phone in a cartoon, jumping inside the backpack, little lines radiating from it.
“Go ahead and answer,” said Kathleen. “Really. It won’t bother me a bit.”
“No,” said Natalie.
“What if it’s someone important calling?”
“It’s not.” Natalie set her lips firmly and shook her head.
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s a text, not a call.”
“Oh,” said Kathleen. “How do you know that?”
Natalie sighed gently, indulgently, the way you might sigh at an old lady in bed at a nursing home as you bent to lift the water glass to her lips—Just one more sip, Aunt Mary, or you’ll be up all night in the bathroom— and said, “I have it set to make different sounds.”
“Oh,” said Kathleen. “I guess I’m showing my age and my ignorance. One or the other. Maybe both!” She’d meant it to be a little joke, but it was clear Natalie was not going to fill in the silence with a laugh so Kathleen provided one her
self, engaging in an awkward, wheezing sound that immediately after she wished she’d kept to herself.
“I’ll turn it off,” said Natalie. “It’s hard to concentrate.” But she didn’t turn it off, and the buzzing continued. Kathleen took this opportunity to change the subject. “You know who we need?”
“Who?”
“Neil, that’s who. He’s a genius at this. I told you that, right? I’ll be right back.”
She returned with Neil, his grouchiness improved slightly by two cups of coffee from the Keurig machine in the lunchroom (this was a far cry from the Nespresso machine he and Adam had at home, but in extreme circumstances he used it anyway).
“This,” she said to Natalie, who was studying her phone, “is Neil. Neil, Natalie.”
Neil gave a theatrical bow. It was enough to make Natalie smile. Kathleen thought he was going to kiss Natalie’s hand, as though he were a commoner visiting her court, and she the queen, but instead he pulled out the chair next to her, brandished his magnifying glass, and said, “So you’re the one with the treasure. May I?”
Natalie smiled and pushed the notebook toward him. From the other room, phones were ringing, and two people had appeared out of nowhere, waiting to sign in.
“I’ll just go and see what’s going on out there,” said Kathleen, backing away. Neither Neil nor Natalie looked up. “Okay, then,” said Kathleen. “I’ll just be out here, if you need me.”
She looked through the glass after she exited the room: Neil and Natalie, heads together, looking down. Something about this picture seemed right.
For a long time they sat there. Neil came up with a plan. “If you want,” he said, “I’ll read it out loud, and you can write it in your own handwriting, so you have a copy.”
“Yeah? Okay. You can read it just like that, no problem?”
“I don’t have many talents,” said Neil. “But this is one of them.”
Neil started from the beginning, and it didn’t take long for him to get to the part where Natalie had left off:
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 10
