All my sisters were dear to me, but Fiona was the dearest, we were the closest out of the whole family, she and I. We had that special bond.
I was thinking of the Midnight Mass at Rathmore and the way the sky would look after, cold and dark and lit up with stars like it is there. The stars weren’t the same in America. It was enough to make me want to cry, and I am not a crier, never have been and never will be. I cried only twice during the whole time I lived in the Turner household: once that Christmas Eve, and once on that terrible night, stumbling outside in the dark.
“What night?” said Natalie. It was hard for her to breathe.
Neil said, “I don’t know.”
“Keep reading!” said Natalie. “Neil, keep reading!”
On a whim Kathleen collected Lucy from home and made her a cozy bed in the backseat of the car. She did that sometimes so that Lucy wouldn’t be alone all day. Working-mother’s guilt, she called it, only somewhat facetiously.
This made her later than she had planned to be for the Stop and Shop, which, true to form on the day before Thanksgiving, was like the middle of a bad dream: the full parking lot, the harried people dashing from car to store in the dwindling light, the drivers pulling in and out of spaces, hardly looking, the ghastly fluorescent lights inside the store illuminating the scowls on the clerks’ faces.
“In and out,” said Kathleen sternly to herself. “Just in and out, beeline it toward the baking section.”
Next: the bright voice behind her. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
She turned. “Melissa. Melissa Henderson.” Again. What were the odds? “You’re back in town.”
Kathleen didn’t want to get snagged in a conversation; she wanted to pay for her pastry flour and get back. The Archives was due to close at four thirty. But Melissa Henderson appeared to be settling in for a conversation.
“I never left, actually. Seemed silly to fly all the way back right before the holidays, and my husband was working anyway, and so here I am!” Melissa Henderson looked a little crazed.
“Where’s—” Kathleen had forgotten the name.
“Mabel,” Melissa supplied. “Home. With my parents. She hasn’t been sleeping great. I don’t even need anything! I just had to get away.” There were puffy mauve pockets under her eyes, and her hair was in a sloppy ponytail.
“And this is where you came to get away? The day before Thanksgiving?”
“Yeah, I know. Crazy. I wasn’t thinking, I sort of forgot about Thanksgiving somehow. But it’s weird, right? That I saw you here twice. Unless you’re here all the time.”
“I’m not,” said Kathleen. “Not all the time.”
“Sort of cosmic.” Melissa Henderson grinned, a wild-eyed grin. Was she a little manic?
“Right,” said Kathleen. She peered at Melissa. “Is everything okay? You look a little—”
“A little nutty?”
“I was going to say tired,” said Kathleen. “A little tired.”
“Oh.” Melissa sighed. “Tired, yeah, I’m tired.” She leaned on her shopping cart, which, Kathleen noticed, was perfectly empty. She said, “This mothering thing is kind of hard, isn’t it, Mrs. Lynch?”
“That,” said Kathleen, “is the understatement of the year.”
“Tell me it gets easier,” said Melissa.
“It gets easier,” said Kathleen. But what she was thinking was, You have no idea how hard it gets.
Melissa smiled, a genuine smile, less crazy; she seemed cheered by Kathleen’s lie. Kathleen decided to allow her that solace, however false. Melissa straightened and gripped the handle of her shopping cart. She said, “Hey, you have a happy Thanksgiving, Mrs. Lynch. Give my best to… well, to whoever.”
Whomever, thought Kathleen.
“Keep reading!” said Natalie again.
So Neil kept reading.
My next mistake came soon after that. The gravy boat, which I was carrying to the sink to wash, slipped from my hands and clattered to the floor, shattering. The conversation in the dining room stopped, and I held my breath, waiting. Then I heard a murmur, and I could make out a few words here and there. Clumsy was one of them. Vase was another. I knew what that was about, I broke a vase in the bedroom the first week I was there. I was dusting. Anna said that it was not important that day, but I could see by the set of her mouth and the way her eyes grew small and squinty that it was. Then somebody—a male—said “fumble-fingered.” Was it Dr. Turner? Arthur? One of the boys, making their voices deeper than it typically was? After that there was a small outburst of laughter.
I turned on the tap. I thought Anna would be in soon enough to see about what had shattered, and she would add the broken gravy boat to the long list of my transgressions. Poor Bridget, who couldn’t do anything right. I bent to collect the pieces from the floor. But I reached too quickly for one of them, and I cut my hand. Without thinking I wiped my hand on my dress, and this added to my indignity, because now I had blood on my dress, and Anna wouldn’t want me to continue serving at the table unless I changed.
But it wasn’t Anna who came in, it was Dr. Turner. So involved was I in picking up the pieces of the gravy boat, and in trying to regain my composure, that I didn’t hear him enter the kitchen, and I didn’t know he was standing there until I saw his shoes in my line of vision.
I looked up.
“Oh, now,” said Dr. Turner. There was something yielding in his voice that I hadn’t heard before, and something else that was unfamiliar: a tenderness, I think you would call it. Something thumped deep inside me.
He said, “It’s just a dish, Bridget. No need to cry about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“It won’t be the end of us, you know, if we lose a gravy boat.” I had heard this jocular tone before; he used it with Harry and Edward sometimes, and occasionally when he read portions of the Daily News aloud at the breakfast table. But never with me. Nor with Anna.
He said, “What is it, Bridget?” and I pointed at my ankle, whose swelling you could now see through my stocking.
I had never noticed before that there was a light strip of brown in one of his blue eyes. I guess I’d never looked at him directly so close up, nor he me. Once I noticed the brown strip, I couldn’t stop looking at it.
I probably have some of this conversation wrong—this happened fifty years ago—but what I remember, what I imagine I remember, is that he said, “What good is it having a doctor in the house if you don’t make use of him?” And he pointed me toward a kitchen chair, which was higher than the stool.
He unbuckled my shoe gently and slid it from my foot, then rolled down the stocking. I winced when he touched my ankle, and I saw that it had turned a purplish green color. There was a mark across it from where the buckle had been pressing into it. It seemed like such an intimate thing he was doing, holding my ankle like that. He whistled, low and long. “Bridget! This looks painful.”
I nodded. I was trying not to cry, but in fact the trying made me cry harder.
He said, “I’ll wrap it. I have bandages in my bag.”
Then he said, “They won’t notice if you go on upstairs after I wrap it. Not Elsie and Arthur anyway. They won’t notice anything. They’re well into the rum.” From the dining room I could hear loud laughter, both female and male. Dr. Turner rolled his eyes in a way I suppose was meant to signify that there was a joke between us. And I guess maybe there was.
“Holy shit,” breathed Neil. “Scandalous. Is this going where I think it’s going?”
Natalie didn’t know. But before she answered, Kathleen came in and said, “It’s nearly four thirty, you two. We’re about to close.”
Back at the Archives, Kathleen stood for a moment outside the reading room and watched Neil and Natalie, the two Ns, their heads close together, bent over their work. She felt a stab of something, probably jealousy, that was the only emotion that really stabbed you. Also regret. Regret stabbed too. But this was definitely jealousy, even though she
had been the architect of this scene. (Let’s call over Neil! she’d suggested. “He’s a genius at this.”)
All around them girls were in danger. And obviously she was ill-equipped to help: look what had happened the last time she’d tried. She thought of Susannah in the bath, playing with a yellow ducky, Susannah climbing aboard the school bus, turning to wave, all the hope and optimism in the world on her face. It went so quickly from that to the rest of it, it took your breath away.
When Susannah left she took with her a few items of clothing. Two pairs of jeans. A navy blue sweatshirt that said GAP across it in white letters. A rain jacket with a hood. Things she didn’t take: Her toothbrush. The little white polar bear with the black nose she’d slept with since infanthood. A suitcase, nor, as far as Kathleen could tell, anything to carry her belongings in.
Things she did not leave: A note, an explanation, an apology. A good-bye.
Now the regret was stabbing too.
Better, after all, to leave Natalie to Neil, to unsullied, about-to-become-a-father Neil. Maybe he wouldn’t wreck it.
She tried to keep her voice steady when she said, “It’s nearly four thirty, you two. We’re about to close.”
Neil stood and stretched and placed a hand on Natalie’s back in an avuncular way. “Great work,” he said.
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“Well then, great work by me. And now I must check in with my better half. Although today that’s questionable. You’re coming back, right? Another time? So we can keep going? This is gold, what you’ve got here. Kathleen, you won’t believe what’s in here.”
But Natalie was looking up at the clock on the wall. “Oh crap,” she said. “I’m going to miss my bus.”
Kathleen cleared her throat. “Where’s your bus leave from? South Station? I’ll give you a ride.”
“Yeah,” said Natalie. “But you don’t have to—”
“Oh, nonsense,” said Kathleen, motioning toward the window. “I drove in today. It’s completely dark out. It won’t take me more than ten minutes. And you’re… how old?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen! Your—” Kathleen had to stop herself because she had been about to say, Your mother wouldn’t like for you to be traveling like this in the dark. But after all, the girl had no mother, the mother was dead and gone, this girl was practically an orphan. (Surely there was a father, though, right? Somewhere, there must be a father.) So she amended her sentence to make it, “You’re tall for your age,” at which Natalie winced, and then Kathleen wished she had kept her mouth closed entirely. If you can’t say anything nice, her own mother used to tell her, don’t say anything at all. To soften the blow of the “tall” comment, she said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get you to your bus.”
And then a surprising and amazing thing happened. Natalie shrugged and said, “Okay. Thanks.” But she met Kathleen’s eyes levelly, and it seemed that some understanding passed between them, some recognition of what Kathleen might do for Natalie, or even what one day they might do for each other. The look departed quickly, Natalie’s eyes becoming once again hooded and shadowy, the eyes of a newly minted teenager, but it was enough for Kathleen that it had been there at all.
Kathleen thought, She just needs someone to take care of her. Then she thought, Don’t we all?
Susannah in a Girl Scout uniform, Susannah locking herself in the bathroom, Susannah in a car, on a whale watch in Boston Harbor. Susannah in her toddler bed, waking in the night from a bad dream, her arms around Kathleen’s back, her lips on her neck, chubby cheeks in a little creamy face.
It was so quick, from that to this, the blink of an eye.
It was fully dark when they left, and the campus adjacent to the Archives was mostly deserted, the University of Massachusetts students off for the holiday. There was no moon and the harbor was a hulking shadow, nearly invisible. Kathleen, leading the way to her car, suddenly remembering, said, “By the way. How are you with dogs? I have my dog, Lucy, with me.”
“You have a dog?” Natalie stopped on the Archives steps. “I love dogs. I really love dogs. I would love to get a dog. But I’m not allowed.”
(Of course not, thought Kathleen. The dead mother, the fractured family. Who would want to add a dog to that scenario?)
“Well,” said Kathleen. “I guess that’s understandable.”
“Do you keep her in your car all day?”
“No, no, just since I went to the store. She’s had this rasp. I didn’t want to leave her all day…. Oh, never mind, I’m sure it’s nothing, but anyway, she’s in the car.”
Kathleen unlocked the door for Natalie, who slid in and turned immediately around to greet Lucy. “A border collie!” she said. “I love these. These are sheepdogs, right?” Then, sagely, soberly, as though she herself, perhaps in a past life, had been responsible for the care and feeding of a border collie, “These dogs need a lot of exercise. If you don’t give them a job to do, they’ll find one themselves, and it might not be one you like.”
Kathleen turned the key in the ignition and said, “How do you know so much about border collies? And fasten your seat belt.”
“I know everything about dogs,” said Natalie. “All kinds of dogs. In grade school, when we used to go to the library and pick out a book every Friday, I always picked a dog book. I know everything about most breeds.” She said this with a certain amount of bravado, almost an arrogance, but it was endearing.
“Have you ever had a dog?”
“No,” said Natalie, shaking her head. “Our house is too small. And my mom is allergic.” Kathleen glanced at her. “Was allergic. Also, no yard. But I know I’d be a really good owner. I just know it. I’m meant to have a dog. Someday I will.”
“Someday,” said Kathleen, “someday you’ll be an adult, making your own decisions. And you can do whatever you want.”
Natalie said, “Yeah.” Morosely.
“Off we go,” said Kathleen. “Into the gloaming.”
To which Natalie said, “Huh?”
“The gloaming. Dusk. It’s supposed to be a magical time. Have you never heard that expression? It’s the name of a movie. Also a short story or a novel, I can never remember which.”
No response; Natalie had twisted in her seat and was rubbing the white stripe between Lucy’s eyes. Lucy was pressing her head into Natalie’s hand, and the dog’s expression was one of supreme contentment.
“Well, I suppose we are far past the gloaming now anyway, aren’t we, and into actual night.” (Chatty, Kathleen, aren’t we today?) “What are we, a month from the solstice? Less? Three weeks? Sometimes I feel like Daisy Buchanan, waiting for the shortest day of the year and then missing it. Although she’s waiting for the longest day of the year, not the shortest.”
Kathleen stole a glance at Natalie, who was staring blankly at her; the car’s interior lights had come on when they opened the doors but had not yet gone off.
Natalie said, “Who’s Daisy Buchanan?”
Kathleen said, “Haven’t you read The Great Gatsby?” And then, because Natalie’s long legs seemed to be cramped in the front seat, she said, “You can move back, you know. There’s a lever on your right, just above the floor.”
Natalie obliged and said, “No, I haven’t read The Great Gatsby. We don’t read that freshman year.”
“That’s something to look forward to.” Kathleen looked behind her—no need, really, for the parking lot was empty except for her car—and said, “But I suppose it’s all about Harry Potter for kids these days, is it not?”
Natalie shrugged. “Not really. That’s for little kids.” Kathleen remembered Susannah, newly out of diapers, standing on a footstool in the bathroom to wash her hands. I’m a big kid, she’d say. And later, trolling slowly down the sidewalk on a bike with training wheels. See? I’m a big kid. The irony, of course, was that once children stopped making such pronouncements was when they actually were big.
Kathleen took a mental walk through the book secti
on of the Globe, the posters she saw on her rare visits to the mall. “Or vampires, right? Is that what you and all of your friends are into?”
“I guess,” said Natalie. “I don’t know.” She chewed at her fingernail, and Kathleen had the urge to reach out and pull her hand away from her mouth. She resisted.
Then Natalie’s phone let out a series of musical sounds, suggesting a song that was vaguely familiar to Kathleen. “See?” said Natalie. “That’s a phone call. Different sound.” But she ignored that, too.
They were on the Expressway now and Kathleen, who hadn’t had reason to drive to South Station for some time, leaned forward, peering out at the signs. “I think I want Exit Twenty,” she said. “But would it hurt them to make it a little clearer, where I’m supposed to go?”
Natalie didn’t answer.
Kathleen exited and followed Lincoln Street. There, at last, was the sign she was looking for. She turned left from Kneeland onto Atlantic, without giving anyone quite enough warning, in front of a shiny Mercedes, and the driver’s face appeared in the window, pale and irate. She glanced quickly at Natalie, but she seemed not to have noticed. A woman hurried by, carrying a paper grocery bag with a baguette sticking out of it.
“Looks like a movie set,” said Kathleen. “You never see anyone actually walking around with a baguette sticking out of their bag, do you?”
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