They spent some time looking through the massive menus. Kathleen saw that Natalie was looking at the kids’ page. She pointed at the clown sundae. “I used to love these when I was little,” she said. There was a wistfulness in her voice that made Kathleen’s heart crack.
“Get one!”
Natalie hesitated. She rubbed her fingers on the menu. Finally she said, “Nah. They’re for little kids.”
“I don’t think so,” said Kathleen. “I think they’re for anyone who likes clowns. And sundaes. Get one.”
“Nah.”
“I’ll get one too.”
“You will?”
“Sure.” Kathleen signaled to their waitress. She pointed at the menu. “One question,” she said. “These clown sundaes. Do you have to be a kid to get them?”
The waitress tapped her pencil on the ordering pad. “I don’t care what you get,” she said. “Just order quick.” She squinted at the clock on the far wall. “Shift change coming up.”
“All right, then,” said Kathleen. “Two clown sundaes, please.”
When they had their sundaes Natalie inspected hers and Kathleen said, “So. Is it how you remember it?”
“Yeah. Exactly.” Natalie smiled, and Kathleen could see what she must have looked like at age seven or eight, with missing front teeth and scabs on her knees from falling off her bike. She thought that you could do that with most people, if you looked hard enough: find the child in the adult.
“Hey, thanks. For bringing me home.”
Kathleen, trying to play it cool, said, “Not a problem. Really.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes, and then Natalie said, “You must think I’m crazy, the way I keep going down to the Archives at weird times.” She tapped the spoon against the metal bowl and picked out one of the Reese’s Pieces eyes with her long fingers.
“You? Not at all. I’m glad you came. You’re no crazier than anyone else.”
“Really?”
“Really. We’ve all got our own brand of crazy.”
“Tell me one crazy thing about you.”
Kathleen had an image of herself twenty-eight years ago, a young wife, a new mother, not sure how to calm Susannah down from her crying jags. She said, “When my daughter was very young—oh, maybe six weeks or so—she was a terrible sleeper. Colicky. It was awful. There was this one time when my husband had to travel for business, and I wasn’t getting any sleep. I was out of my mind. So once I put her in the car and I drove south. She was sleeping, and I was scared to stop. I didn’t want her to wake up. So I kept driving. I drove all the way to New York City. But I had never driven there, and I got scared, just on the outskirts. So I pulled over at a rest stop, and I fed the baby. Then I got the biggest coffee I’d ever had in my life, and I drove back. Nine hours in the car.” She couldn’t tell if that was crazy enough for Natalie. But it was something.
Natalie squinted at her and said, “Why are you so nice to me, anyway?”
Girls in trouble, thought Kathleen. Girls in danger.
“I don’t know,” said Kathleen, making herself busy with her wallet. To the waitress she said, “Shift change, I know.”
The waitress said, “Appreciate it,” and Kathleen tipped her extra, because she felt inexplicably lucky.
“Bear right,” said Natalie after they pulled out of the parking lot. “Back on the highway, then take the next exit.” She lowered her window and lifted her face to the wind. Kathleen allowed her this, and Lucy nuzzled her way in, pointing her nose out the window.
So far this town was no more beautiful than any other suburban outpost: a redundant collection of gas stations, a Dunkin’ Donuts from which emanated, even at this time of day, the faintly nauseating smell of overly sugared coffee, of doughnuts boiling merrily in fat.
Kathleen tried for some conversation. “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”
Natalie shrugged. No mother home whipping up mashed potatoes, rolling out a piecrust. She said, “Relatives?” and Natalie nodded.
Susannah had gone through a vegetarian phase; Kathleen remembered a questionable meal when she was thirteen or fourteen, a tannish, tasteless log called Tofurky: it had been like chewing on old leather that had been left out in the rain.
“It gets better,” Natalie said, and for a second Kathleen thought she had spoken aloud, she thought Natalie meant the Tofurky, until she specified, “The town.”
And indeed as they continued on past one shopping center and then another—grocery stores, a nail salon, a dry cleaner, a Market Basket—the predictability began to give way to statuesque old homes, Federalists and Victorians, all, it seemed, meticulously decorated with tasteful fall displays illuminated by perfectly placed spotlights. Did Natalie live in one of these? (Had the author of the notebook?)
“No,” Natalie said. “Keep going.” Then, eventually, “Turn here, left.”
Natalie directed her to turn right next, and then said, “Okay, so. You can pull over.” Kathleen did, though the street wasn’t quite wide enough and a driver passing her honked his displeasure. Natalie said, “I’m just around the corner. I’ll get out here.”
“Here, on the corner? But why?”
Again Natalie shrugged. “Just because. No reason. I can walk up. It’s right there.” She pointed to a narrow street full of old, crooked homes. “I can see it from here. See? With the porch light on. You can turn around right here. It’ll be easier to get back to the highway.” (The porch light on, but no mother waiting, what was sadder than that?)
“I’d rather make sure—”
But Natalie was out of the car already, clutching her backpack, stuffing her phone in her jacket pocket, saying, over her shoulder, “Thanks a lot for the ride. Thanks a lot.”
Kathleen watched Natalie cross the street, then watched her turn the corner and climb the steps to the house she had indicated. MILK STREET, the sign said. Kathleen could see an injured shutter, hanging like a loose tooth, on the house Natalie was entering. Natalie fumbled for a key in her backpack and worked it into the lock (poor motherless girl, a latchkey child). Susannah had been a latchkey child too, what else could you be when your father was dead and your mother was working? For a long time Kathleen had blamed all that had happened on that. But Deidre Jordan had not been a latchkey child, so there you go. No rhyme or reason to it.
Lucy let out a low whine and then turned and settled herself in the backseat. Kathleen thought again of Ashley Jackson, the wide smile, all the hope in the world in her face. She thought of Susannah. All around them girls were in danger, you could lose them in the blink of an eye.
Later, at home, Kathleen was fumbling on the floor of the passenger seat for an errant tennis ball of Lucy’s that had rolled out of view when she’d stopped short in the horrendous pre-Thanksgiving traffic that she followed all the way home. Bumper to bumper was an understatement, a euphemism: this had been more like bumper on bumper. Bumper over bumper, bumper glued to bumper.
When she reached for the ball she felt something else on the floor. A book: the notebook, which must have fallen out of Natalie’s bag during her hasty departure, or when she had fumbled for her phone. She brought it inside and set it on the kitchen counter.
As Kathleen rolled out the crust for the pie, she thought about Natalie, and about what she could do. She could get the notebook back to her. She could help Natalie with those girls at school, those bullies. She wasn’t sure how, but she’d figure it out. She could make a healthy pie to bring to Neil and Adam. She paused to curse the healthy piecrust recipe—a crust with virtually no fat was difficult to roll, impossible to crimp. But the filling, if she could be so immodest, was delectable.
She held out the spoon for Lucy to lick, but Lucy just stared at her, uninterested. “No pressure,” she said, and Lucy settled herself down in the corner, gazing up at Kathleen with a look that could only be described as melancholy. “Cheer up, old girl,” said Kathleen. “We’re going to be all right, you and I.”
See? She could
do this. All was not lost. She had a second chance.
On Thanksgiving Natalie and her mother dined at the Chinese restaurant downtown: cashew chicken and egg rolls among the goldfish and the hovering waitstaff. Besides the two of them, there was a merry table of five adults knocking back the contents of a scorpion bowl; other than that, the place was empty.
The day after Thanksgiving Natalie woke early, just after six, and lay in bed, listening. There was nothing much to hear, just some warbles from a few birds outside her window. She thought the birds would have all flown south by now, but maybe they were confused by the constantly shifting temperatures. She thought about the picture Mr. Guzman had shown them, a polar bear clinging grimly to a piece of ice no bigger than a picnic blanket. Or maybe not all birds flew south. She didn’t really know.
It was overwhelming, to think about the birds and the polar bears. Better to start small, with her own problems, of which there were plenty. Maybe Kathleen Lynch had a point. Maybe if Natalie got Hannah alone, outside of school… well, maybe she could talk to her.
Twenty to seven. The birds had ceased their warbling. Perhaps they were having breakfast, or off to Starbucks. She opened her bedroom door and listened. Nothing. Not even the sound of the television from her mother’s room, which meant her mother had gotten up to turn it off before she fell asleep for the night. That was a good sign. She moved down the hallway and opened her mother’s door a crack. The room was dark, tomblike, the shades completely drawn. She could make out her mother’s shape in the bed, under the quilt.
“Mom?” Her voice sounded strange, otherworldly, in the quiet and dark room. The shape in the bed didn’t move. Once Natalie’s eyes got used to the lack of light in the room she could see the pill bottle on the nightstand. She felt her heartbeat step up its pace. My mother’s dead, she had told Kathleen the first day, and then she had stuck to the lie. What if…
She opened one of the shades, inviting the watery morning sunlight in.
Then her mother rolled over, opened her eyes, used her hand to shield her face. “Honey?” she said. Her voice sounded thick, like she had swallowed cotton, or like Natalie’s voice sounded when she had strep throat.
“Mom? How many of these did you take?” Her mother pulled the clock toward her. “Six forty-five,” she said. “Natalie, what the hell?”
“How many, Mom?”
Her mother pushed herself up on an elbow. “What? Take of what? Oh, those. Just one, one before bedtime. That’s all I ever take. God, Natalie, it’s early.”
“Sorry,” said Natalie. “Sorry, Mom. I didn’t realize it was so early. Go back to sleep.” Her heart was still hammering away inside her rib cage. She let the shade down.
She used the bathroom, brushed her teeth, got dressed. She grabbed her backpack from her room. By the front door she collected her ski jacket, boots, hat, gloves—she could see frost on the grass in her neighbor’s yard. Maybe that’s what the birds were warbling about, maybe they were saying, What the hell?
It was only a couple of blocks to the edges of the downtown, and another couple to Starbucks, where Natalie ordered a hot chocolate with the money her mother gave her every so often these days, without explanation or instruction—hush money, as Natalie thought of it, because she had heard that term somewhere, in a movie, although she didn’t know why she would need to be hushed. Really it was Hannah Morgan and the rest of them who needed to be hushed. She should give them hush money.
She took one of the good upholstered seats, one of the coveted seats, but she didn’t let herself feel apologetic about that.
She turned on her phone.
Well, there it was, like a bowling ball to her gut, like a scalpel slicing into her heart. This one came from Taylor, whose number she now recognized, whose name she had even entered into her phone alongside the number. DID U HAVE A GOOD THANKSGIVING? EGG ROLLS? WITH UR TEENAGE MOTHER? Someone had seen her—someone had walked by and seen her eating Thanksgiving dinner with her mother in the Chinese restaurant. There was another one after that: U R SUCH A LOSER!
The texts had come in the middle of the night, while she was sleeping. Like her mother, sleeping, dead to the world. She thought of her mother’s salmon-colored pills. She deleted the messages.
Next to Natalie a man in a business suit was unwrapping a breakfast sandwich, and because of where she was sitting the scent traveled directly to her. She didn’t realize until that moment how hungry she was. But there seemed to her to be a sort of dignity to her hunger as she sat and contemplated what to do about Hannah Morgan. To give in to the hunger, to stand up and pull the dollar bills out of her pocket, to count them, to order herself a breakfast sandwich: all these actions seemed like the dishonorable path. She had bigger battles to fight.
Maybe Kathleen Lynch was right. The only way to do it—the only way to survive this, and to move forward from it—was to appeal to Hannah, to get Hannah to get Taylor to stop. She studied the walls, where an exhibit from a local photographer hung: framed prints, for sale. One in particular caught her eye. It was a close-up of a tree branch in the rain, the droplets made enormous, bubblelike, by the lens. Hannah couldn’t really hate Natalie—that was impossible. It was not so long ago that they had been best friends. If Natalie could just get her alone, if they could talk the way they used to talk, maybe things could go back to the way they had been.
Natalie had nearly finished her hot chocolate, but always there was that puddle of chocolate in the bottom of the cup. She removed the plastic top and studied the remains of her drink, then attempted to scrape the chocolate up with a coffee stirrer. This didn’t work. She tipped the cup to her lips and swallowed as much of the chocolate as she could access, then replaced the top. She could do this.
They had been so close once, Hannah and Natalie. Surely Hannah needed only a reminder of that closeness, and Natalie would be welcomed back into Hannah’s house, into her beautiful bedroom, her lovely attic. She would be hugged again by Mrs. Morgan, she would smell her perfume in the night as she bent to tuck the girls in. All of this was so appealing to Natalie that she could hardly wait to get outside and begin making things right.
And why not walk to Hannah’s house today? Natalie had nothing better to do. She liked to walk—walking suited her body, her long stride, her temperament. Moving, in her opinion, was always preferable to staying still. She had her iPod in her bag; she would listen to music, and it would make the time go by faster. Hannah was probably, like Natalie, at loose ends on this day off from school, this orphan day between Thanksgiving and the weekend. With nothing to focus on, with no siblings to keep her entertained, perhaps she was feeling as lonely, as unmoored, as Natalie herself was. The Only Child Club, victorious, once again.
Natalie crumpled her cup and wedged it into the garbage can outside Starbucks. It was now nearly eight thirty, and State Street was coming alive: a woman unlocking the door of the shoe store, a golden retriever dragging its owner along the sidewalk. Across the street, in Market Square, the Christmas tree, the lights strung but not yet lit, stood tall against the slate gray of the sky, and a small girl, a toddler, dressed from head to toe in purple snow clothes, stood with her mother, looking up at it, pointing. On Sunday the town would gather by the waterfront to watch Santa come in on the boat; the high school bands would creak out a few holiday tunes for the parade; the tree would be lit for the first time. Natalie remembered shivering there with the rest of them, in happier times, each of her mittened hands in one of her parents’.
Watching the mother and child, Natalie felt something pass through her, a tremor of anticipation or relief. So uplifted was she by the beauty of the day, by the love she felt so suddenly and intensely for her town, for her fragile, sleeping mother, and for Hannah Morgan and their upcoming reconciliation, that she felt as though it had already happened, as though she’d passed straight through the awfulness and arrived, unscathed, improved, better for the journey, on the other side.
“Come shopping with me,” said Carol, and Ka
thleen wished she hadn’t answered the phone.
“Oh, Carol. I don’t think so.”
“What’d you take the day off for, then? If you’re just going to sit around?”
“I’m not sitting. I’m getting ready to walk Lucy.”
“The sales are out of this world. They are giving stuff away at the Arsenal Mall.”
“You’re at the Arsenal Mall? Isn’t that a little low-end for you?” A mass of contradictions, Carol was. “And I thought you had to get up at dawn for those sales.”
“Don’t make fun,” said Carol. “I’m an equal-opportunity sales shopper. And you do have to get up at dawn, to get the good stuff. I did, I’m up, I’m still out.”
“You what?”
“I already bought a flat-screen for my son and his wife. I almost got in a fight, real fisticuffs.”
“I don’t think so…”
“It’ll be fun! We’ll get coffee. Coffee with Baileys. Or whatever you want. My treat.”
“Oh, Carol. Thank you, but I really don’t want to.”
The truth was she had nobody to shop for. Lucy was easy: a bag of tennis balls, two rawhides, and done. Neil never wanted anything much; Adam made enough money that they could buy what they wished. She and Carol went out for a nice lunch instead of buying each other gifts.
Kathleen remembered Susannah painstakingly writing a letter to Santa the year she was seven, her last year of truly believing. She had been studying for her First Reconciliation at the same time and so her letter was a mix of request and confession: Dear Santa, I apologize for all of the bad things I have done over the past year but except for the bad things I have been a really good girl and I was wondering if you could get me a little bit of presents. Somewhere in her bedroom closet, in an old shoebox, Kathleen still had that letter.
“So there’s nothing I can do?” Carol said. “To convince you?”
Kathleen should have held on to that innocent time in Susannah’s life a little bit longer.
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 15
