So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  Natalie said, “I guess not.”

  “God, the traffic,” said Kathleen as they neared the station. “Thanksgiving. Planes, trains, automobiles. You know that movie?”

  Natalie shook her head.

  “Before your time.”

  The phone sang again and Kathleen, trying to discern whether there were different entrances for trains and buses—she thought there were—said, “Don’t you want to answer that?”

  “No,” said Natalie, and Kathleen glanced over at her to see that her lips were set in a tight, thin line.

  “Go ahead,” said Kathleen. “It won’t bother me a bit.”

  “That’s okay. It’s nobody I want to talk to.”

  They drove on in silence, finally pulling up alongside South Station. Kathleen looked behind her for a parking garage entrance, or a ten-minute drop-off spot.

  “The gloaming,” said Natalie, looking out the window on her side of the car. “Is that what you said?”

  “Yes,” said Kathleen. “The gloaming. But we’re far past that now. It’s certainly night now—”

  “I know,” said Natalie quickly. “I know that. But I like the way it sounds. It’s sort of… I don’t know. Beautiful and depressing at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” said Kathleen. “Ominous, in a way. But hopeful too, right?”

  “Exactly!” said Natalie.

  It was dark enough in the car that she didn’t think Natalie could see her fully unless they turned to face each other. So Kathleen allowed herself a smile so wide and expansive that it felt like a silly grin, like an exaggerated clown face, the sort of smile that might, if it stayed too long on your face, give you an ache in the jaw.

  She was still smiling like that when she sorted out the parking situation and turned into the garage. Here was her precious cargo, safely delivered.

  “What are you doing?” Natalie, who had been rooting through her bag, stopped and looked out at the parking garage, then back at Kathleen.

  “I’m going in with you.” Kathleen lowered her window to retrieve the ticket from the mouth of the automated dispenser.

  “Why?”

  Kathleen parked, turned the key, silenced the car, felt behind the seat for her purse. “To check the bus schedule. To make sure you’re not waiting here alone.”

  Natalie grimaced. “They come every hour.”

  “But what if you’ve just missed one? It’s—” Here Kathleen pushed up the sleeve of her coat to look at her watch. “It’s five twenty. What if one left at five fifteen?”

  Natalie shrugged. “Then I’ll wait until six fifteen.”

  “No.” Kathleen shook her head. “No, absolutely not. I’m not leaving a thirteen-year-old girl alone in South Station at this time of night. At any time of night, the day before Thanksgiving. It’s going to be nuts in there.”

  “But Lucy—”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  Natalie sighed and made a great show of clambering out of the car. Was this petulance or some sort of grateful acquiescence? Kathleen hoped for the latter, feared the former, and decided reality must fall somewhere between the two. And anyway it didn’t matter, because they were on their way out of the car together, navigating the stairs of the parking garage, heading toward the bus terminal.

  Kathleen was glad she’d insisted on going inside. Because Natalie had just missed the bus up to Newburyport, and the next one did indeed not depart until six fifteen.

  “Don’t bother arguing,” she told Natalie, leading her back in the direction of the parking garage. “It’s my fault you’re here so late, my responsibility, I kept you there working with Neil. I’m driving you home.”

  “No you didn’t,” said Natalie. “I kept myself there.” But Kathleen noticed that she wasn’t arguing.

  They settled themselves back in the car and Kathleen pulled out of the parking garage, first paying the attendant, whose laconic “Have a good night” was shortened to something scarcely recognizable: maybe just the word night. Perhaps a bedtime wish. Night-night, she used to tell Susannah. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Apparently bedbugs were on the rebound, she’d read that somewhere.

  On the way out of the parking garage they talked more about Lucy: her eating habits, where she slept, what she’d been like as a puppy.

  It occurred to Kathleen that what she had beside her in her car was a child, what the airlines would call an unaccompanied minor, and though Kathleen was accompanying her, she wasn’t sure that this, in the eyes of the law, or of her parents (parent, she corrected herself, just one parent), was a reasonable situation. It occurred to her that if she were stopped by anyone, what she was doing might be construed as kidnapping, pure and simple. But she was in it now, on Atlantic Avenue, then off it, heading north, and she couldn’t very well abandon the girl now that she’d brought her this far.

  “Isn’t there someone you should call? To let them know you’re safe, that you’re on your way home?”

  “Not really,” said Natalie.

  “Your father?”

  Natalie made a sound (a snort?). “He’s at work.”

  “Someone else, then? A neighbor? Does anyone look after you when your father isn’t home?”

  Natalie sat up straighter. “I look after myself.”

  Kathleen said, “Of course you do.”

  Tick me up, Susannah used to say when she had trouble pronouncing her Ps. Mommy, mommy, tick me up.

  Kathleen was thinking about how wonderful it was to have a child beside her in the car again. (Was this girl a child? Of this Kathleen wasn’t sure, for in her memory thirteen was the witching age, when girls could head either way.) She was thinking all of this when Natalie, having heard some sound that Kathleen didn’t hear, rummaged in her backpack, pulled from it the cell phone, looked at it, and made a strangled, anguished noise.

  “Natalie? Is something wrong?”

  Natalie shook her head mutely and turned to look out the window.

  “Natalie?” said Kathleen. “What is it?”

  She expected huffiness or reticence; she expected to be shot down, to be told, in no uncertain terms, to mind her own business. But the tears came instantly, and Natalie, her voice shaking, reaching up every now and again to stroke Lucy’s chest (Lucy having moved closer so both paws were now resting on the console, but remaining grave, almost presidential), began to talk.

  There was plenty of time for the story—more than enough, buckets of extra time—because every person who had ever lived in or near Boston and who had ever had a family to visit for Thanksgiving was now on the highway with them. But besides her kitchen, making the healthy version of pumpkin pie, where else did Kathleen have to be? Nowhere. So she listened.

  “Well,” began Natalie in a trembling voice. “There’s these girls in my school… they’ve been doing mean things.”

  Kathleen held her breath and then let it slowly out. The moment felt large and important. “What sorts of mean things?”

  “Sending texts and stuff. Really horrible texts. Making fun of me, calling me ugly, that sort of thing. Stupid stuff.”

  “Ugly! But you’re gorgeous.”

  Natalie stared straight ahead.

  Once a friend had told Kathleen that if you had anything to talk about with your teenage daughter you may as well do it in the car, “when they’re looking straight ahead, when you’re both looking straight ahead, nowhere to run, and you don’t have to face each other.” Kathleen had tried that with Susannah. It hadn’t worked. But maybe now it would. Kathleen said, “Who are they? Do you know them?”

  “Yeah,” said Natalie. “Well, one of them. One of them used to be my best friend.”

  “Your best friend?”

  Natalie was pulling at a strand of hair. “Yeah. But then she got to be friends with this other girl, and she’s really popular, and… well, it all started after that.”

  “Natalie, that’s terrible.” Kathleen said. She thought of Ashley Jackson, the school photograph, the brigh
t fake trees. “What about the school? Can’t they do something to help?”

  In answer to that Natalie emitted an abrupt laugh, almost a guffaw, and then set her lips more firmly. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, right.”

  “Have you told anyone?”

  Natalie looked horrified. “No! Who would I tell?”

  “Your… father?” Kathleen eased her car ahead slowly toward a minivan with a rooftop car carrier. Stuffed to the gills, that car must be.

  Natalie slumped down in the seat. Kathleen wanted to tell her to sit up straight, that the seat belt wouldn’t protect her that way, but she didn’t. The phrase choose your battles marched through her mind. Someone had given her that advice with Susannah. That hadn’t worked either.

  “No,” said Natalie. “That would be worse. That would be awful. If they thought I tattled on them.”

  Kathleen moved her car ahead a quarter of an inch. At this rate they wouldn’t get to Newburyport until Christmas.

  “Well, what kinds of things do they say? In these texts?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Stuff. The ugly thing, or that maybe I forgot to take a shower because they thought they smelled something when they walked by, or that I shouldn’t talk to this guy named Christian. Stuff about my m—” She broke off.

  “About your…?”

  “Nothing, never mind. It’s all stupid stuff.”

  “Stupid stuff, yes. But it hurts.”

  Natalie nodded rapidly and pressed her fingers to her eyes.

  “And one of these girls was your best friend? For how long?”

  Natalie drew in a shuddering breath. “Forever. Since we were little, kindergarten. I don’t know what happened, I really don’t. I mean, I do know, sort of. She wants to be friends with these other people, and I’m not good enough for that—”

  “You mean they think you’re not good enough,” said Kathleen. She passed the minivan on the right and stole a glance inside: a grimacing father at the wheel, the mother turning around to pass a sippy cup to the backseat. God, the holidays!

  “Yeah. Whatever. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.” Kathleen couldn’t argue with that logic. Natalie continued. “The thing is, Hannah, that’s the one I was friends with, I don’t think she really wants to be that mean, I think she just gets caught up in it when Taylor, that’s the other girl, is around. But she’s always around.”

  “You know, that can be tricky, those female friendships at that age. I mean, my daughter—”

  “Yeah?” said Natalie eagerly. But Kathleen couldn’t do it, couldn’t talk about Susannah.

  The difference between a missing person and a runaway, Detective Bradford told Kathleen, was that a missing person wants you to look for them. And a runaway doesn’t. (Only she remembered that he said, A runaway don’t.)

  “The missing person, the police are gonna pursue. The runaways, they don’t. There’s just too many.” He shrugged his beefy shoulders, and she wanted to cry against him, wanted to press her cheek against his plaid shirt. “That’s why you hired me, to do the stuff the police don’t have time to do.”

  He took out a pad of paper and a bleak little pencil covered with bite marks and said, “Pertinent details, please.”

  Kathleen, looking to the ceiling, breathing very rapidly, couldn’t speak at first. She croaked out three useless, incomplete sentences: “She just walked out. She took her Gap sweatshirt, her rain jacket, two pairs of jeans, and she followed her friend Deidre Jordan out the door. That’s all I know.”

  Deidre Jordan’s family stopped talking to Kathleen soon after, Kathleen told him.

  “Couldn’t take the memories,” said Detective Bradford, nodding soberly. “Very common.”

  “Where do you think she is?”

  “She could be anywhere.”

  She had thought he was a fortune-teller, an angel sent from heaven. But really he was a doughy man in a plaid shirt, a man who had to sit with his legs apart to accommodate his belly.

  What did Kathleen wish she’d done differently with Susannah? Aside from everything. She wished she’d believed Deidre Jordan’s mother when she called. She wished, when she discovered it was all true, she hadn’t waited so long to formulate a plan. She wished she hadn’t been alone in it: she wished Gregory had been there to help her. She wished she hadn’t gone to the corner store.

  Sometimes she wished she’d killed Deidre Jordan, to protect Susannah from her.

  Not really, of course.

  But sort of.

  She wished she’d done something.

  There was a sudden break in the traffic, and Kathleen drove on for several minutes. She lost sight of the minivan. “Well,” she said carefully, “maybe if you get her—what’s her name? Hannah?—alone, maybe you can talk to her.”

  Natalie shifted. “Yeah. Maybe. You think so?”

  “Sure! Sure, I mean, if she used to be your best friend, I’m sure she still likes you. Maybe she just doesn’t understand how hurtful all of this is to you.”

  Kathleen reached into the backseat, past Lucy, for her purse and handed it to Natalie. “I have tissues in there, if you don’t mind wading through to find them.”

  Natalie found the package, extracted one, and blew loudly. “You think that would work?”

  “I do,” said Kathleen. “I think it’s worth a try.”

  Finally they reached the exit for Newburyport.

  “I’ve never been here,” Kathleen said, turning off the highway where Natalie gestured. “Isn’t that funny? It’s not so far away from where I live after all. And people say it’s a beautiful town. Is it beautiful?”

  “I guess,” said Natalie. “Beautiful enough.” She had grown quiet. In the passing glow cast by the streetlights she appeared drawn, the hand in her lap still clutching the offending cell phone.

  All around them, girls in trouble.

  “Hey, are you hungry? Yes? Me too. I’m starving. What do you say we get something to eat?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Is there somewhere to go to get ice cream? Do you like ice cream?” Susannah had loved ice cream. Maybe still did.

  “Yeah. I love ice cream.” It was enough to make you break your heart, the way Natalie’s face brightened at that. Simple pleasures.

  “So we’ll do that. And then I’ll take you home.”

  “Okay.” Natalie was looking straight ahead. Kathleen observed the curve of her cheek, still childlike, plump, even in one so thin. She thought of Susannah in the backseat as they drove away from Marblehead for the last time.

  “You name the place, and we’ll go.”

  “Well,” said Natalie. “Most of the good places here are seasonal. They’d be closed. But there’s a Friendly’s in Amesbury, really close.”

  Not long after Deidre Jordan’s mother called, there came signs Kathleen couldn’t ignore. There was money missing from Kathleen’s wallet, and from a shoebox on the top shelf of her closet where she kept an emergency stockpile of cash. Susannah had a runny nose with no other signs of a cold. There were strange bouts of unexplained euphoria, then the opposite, when Kathleen could hardly rouse her for school. She was a senior, due to graduate in May. She was so close.

  Kathleen took a day off from the Archives. She waited for Susannah to come home from school, and she cornered her near the door.

  “Let me see your arms.” Susannah was right-handed; it was the left arm that would have marks. It was unseasonably warm for April, but Susannah was wearing long sleeves. Kathleen reached out to her and Susannah pulled away.

  “No. Mom, no. Jesus.” Susannah lifted her arm like she was about to strike Kathleen. Kathleen reeled a little bit from this but recovered, came at her again. “Let me see your arms.”

  “Get away from me. God, Mom, what is this? What the hell?”

  Kathleen didn’t know, at the time, that it was the last time she would hear Susannah call her Mom. Kathleen reached for Susannah again. She tried to speak softly. She said, “Susannah, if there’s something wrong,
let me help you. I can help you.”

  “I don’t want your help,” said Susannah. “I don’t want anything from you.” She went into her room, slammed the door, locked it.

  To stop herself from beating down the door, from saying unspeakable things, Kathleen left the house. She had to figure out what to do: next steps. She walked to the corner store. Moving down the sidewalk, she felt like she’d lost her equilibrium. It was a struggle to stand up straight. The rain didn’t help, and though she had an umbrella the wind kept knocking it out of her hands.

  Kathleen didn’t need anything at the corner store. She would buy milk, even though she didn’t trust milk from the corner store, and toilet paper, even though it was fantastically overpriced.

  Deidre Jordan’s mother had been right. Kathleen was so angry she was shaking. She had survived a dead husband only to be felled by this, by Deidre Jordan and the pestilence of Southie, a place she’d thought would be a haven for her and Susannah. Deidre and Susannah were due to graduate the next month—they were so close!

  On the way back she tried to catalog sweet little things she remembered about Susannah, the better to help her. She tried to think about the little chirping birds in the nest. She tried to think about the first time Susannah wrote her name, the wobbling, painstaking letters a mile high. She thought about the first lost tooth, the first time on a bike without training wheels, the first time she’d read a chapter book, driven a car, made her bed, made an omelet, said a sentence in Spanish with a perfect accent.

  But Kathleen was so angry. And she didn’t know what to do.

  When she came back, Susannah was gone. It was that fast. Kathleen went out for milk and toilet paper and it was a fifteen-minute errand but it was long enough to lose her daughter.

  Kathleen and Natalie were ensconced in a sticky red booth. It was early, and they had the place pretty much to themselves. The waitress had a fabulously outdated bouffant hairdo, and her ample breasts strained against the polyester of the uniform. In a cigarette-addled voice, she asked, “Ice cream, or a meal?”

  “Ice cream,” said Kathleen. “Just ice cream.”