“No,” Kathleen said. She set Bridget’s notebook on the kitchen table next to her computer. “No, really, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to convince me.”
Neil had put in a bookmark, one of the scraps of paper from the reading room, to hold the spot where he and Natalie had left off. And Natalie had left her transcription folded up inside. It was easier to read that than to decipher Bridget’s handwriting, because Natalie’s handwriting was really very neat, which was nice to see; Kathleen was surprised anyone learned to write these days. So Kathleen caught up on Bridget’s story (she could tell where Natalie’s hand had tired and she had stopped), and then she moved ahead, stopping after each paragraph to type what she’d read into the computer.
For a moment every sound around me was magnified: the ticking of the clock, James’s fussing in the dining room, the clatter of Edward’s spinning top against the floor. I didn’t dare look up, so I trained my gaze on the black and white checks on the kitchen floor.
Dr. Turner said, “Bridget. You go on and put James to bed. Then you go and rest. I’ll tell Anna. Can you manage James, with your ankle?”
I said that I could, although truthfully I could manage only barely.
Dr. Turner collected James from the dining room and brought him in to me. His eyes had a thin band of red around them from crying and his hair was sticking up in little tufts. He quieted when I pressed him to my shoulder, and I sat back down in the chair for a moment to rock him and to rest my ankle before starting up the stairs. His head fell heavily against my collarbone.
“Remember to close the gate,” Dr. Turner said, and I said, “Of course.” As simple as that.
I breathed in the scent of James’s hair and his skin. He could have been one of my sisters sleeping there—he felt that familiar. He felt like a part of me, his weight completely giving in to mine. He felt like my own child, and I loved him with a fierceness that I imagined was like a mother’s love, although I did not know at that time what a mother’s love felt like.
I think I sang to him that night, as I often did: “Over in Killarney, many years ago, me mother sang a song to me, in tones so sweet and low.” Anna didn’t like when I sang Irish songs to the children; Anna wanted me to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” nice English songs with English pedigrees.
I sang, “Oft, in dreams I wander, to my home again, I feel her arms around me, as when she held me then.”
By the time I finished the song I missed my mother with a nostalgia so strong it felt like a pain. I thought of the letter from Fiona: not long now and I would be able to read it.
The skin on my hands was cracked and raw from the cold and also from the work. I remember that I was ashamed of this. I remember that Grainne had told me to rub butter on them, to make them softer. I remember that I told Grainne that Anna would never permit me to use butter for my own purposes, and if I did it without her knowledge surely she would catch me. She kept track of such things. In Norah’s house it was different—there were so many servants there that sometimes one or another of them could get away with something without it being noticed, and they all watched over each other, like a family. I always envied Norah that.
By then I had given up all hope of Midnight Mass—even if I had been permitted to leave the house, my ankle would not have allowed me to walk to church.
After I dressed for bed I read the letter from Fiona. Fiona had enclosed a photograph of herself just as I had requested and I looked at it for a long time. It was heartening to me to see her there in the photograph, looking so well. I began a letter back to her. I was so tired that it was impossible for me to write for very long—my head was heavy on my neck, and my body kept pitching forward until I startled myself out of sleep. But there was so much I wanted to tell her. In particular I wanted to describe—before I forgot—Elsie’s powdered face, her plum lips, shaped into a Cupid’s bow so that the effect was of a mouth that was permanently ready to be kissed. Also her eyes, outlined with a smudgy black and dusted with gray and green shadow. Imagine showing up at home on Christmas Eve dressed like this! You would be laughed out of the church, out of the town, you’d be the talk of everyone for weeks. I wanted Fiona to know about that, to know how different it was here.
It was much later when he came to me.
I think I had fallen asleep when there was a knock at my door and I sat immediately upright, my heart racing. I thought it was Anna, come to scold me for leaving the dishes downstairs.
But it was Dr. Turner. Charles.
I opened the door.
“Bridget,” he said. “Bridget, it’s all right, really it is.”
I don’t think I said anything at all; I think I just stared.
Then he said, “You are so beautiful, Bridget.” The way he said my name sent a strange sensation through my body. He brushed his fingers against my cheek, and he drew them under my chin and turned my face toward his.
That was the beginning of it.
It was difficult, later, the next morning and the next morning after that and all of the other mornings that came, to reconcile this man with the man who sat at the table at breakfast, eating a soft-boiled egg out of an eggcup.
And I came to see that there was a greediness in me that I hadn’t known about. Without that greediness, there would have been none of the rest of it.
It was Mrs. Morgan who answered the door.
“Natalie!” she said. “You look like you’ve been through a war!” She peered around Natalie to the street. “Did your mom drop you off?”
Softly, apologetically, anticipating Mrs. Morgan’s pity before she actually witnessed it, Natalie said, “No. I walked.”
“Walked! That’s got to be four miles! What’d you do that for?” Mrs. Morgan was dressed, as always, in a perfectly matched Lululemon outfit, a lavender sweatshirt and a lavender tank just visible underneath. This costume was proof to Natalie that though she’d been away from this house for a long time some things remained exactly as they had been. That was comforting.
“Well, never mind why, come in,” said Mrs. Morgan. “But take your boots off right inside. And for heaven’s sake, look at your jeans! You’re a mess. Did you walk all the way from your house?”
“From downtown,” said Natalie. “Starbucks.”
“Good Lord, sweetie, no offense but that was kind of nutty of you, was it not?”
It was, Natalie acknowledged this. She nodded. In her defense, though, when considering the distance to Hannah’s house she hadn’t counted on the fact that as the day grew warmer some of the puddles that had frozen overnight would begin to melt into an angry gray slush. Crossing the 95 overpass, where she’d been splattered with that slush, she realized that she hadn’t thought through her route carefully enough, and there was a spot—no sidewalk—where she had to cross over the on-ramp to the highway. That experience had left her numb and trembling and now that she had reached her destination she could have fallen right into Mrs. Morgan’s arms, so relieved was she at having arrived, tattered but basically unharmed. She bent to unfasten her boots.
“Sit down, honey,” said Mrs. Morgan, shepherding her toward the lovely brown woven leather bench that stood near the front door. How many times had she and Hannah come in from school and tossed their backpacks on that very bench? How many times had Natalie’s mother gotten mad at them for getting the bench wet? This will never dry! she’d cried, pointing at the water spots. It’s completely ruined, you two. Oh, to have Mrs. Morgan mad at her again. To be in trouble in this lovely house, among all of these lovely things. And anyway the bench had always dried, was never ruined.
“Socks too, honey,” said Mrs. Morgan. “I’ll get you some slippers from the mudroom—we’ve got extras. If I’d seen how wet you were I would have sent you in that way, but I guess it’s too late for that now.”
“I guess so,” said Natalie. She rolled up her socks and stuffed them inside her boots, but Mrs. Morgan, watching her, made a clucking sound and s
aid, “Give those to me, sweetie. I’ll wash them and Hannah can bring them back to you at school.”
For a minute, consumed with getting off her wet things, and with talking to Mrs. Morgan, and with looking around her to get a sense of what had changed in her absence, Natalie had forgotten her purpose in coming, the reconciliation with Hannah she was about to engender. But at the mention of Hannah’s name, her heart pulsated. She wondered what Mrs. Morgan knew.
“It’s been so long since you were here, Natalie. Just the other day I was asking Hannah about you.” Mrs. Morgan had her hands on her hips and was surveying Natalie kindly, indulgently. So. She didn’t know, then. She didn’t know anything! Natalie felt immensely cheered by this. If Mrs. Morgan didn’t know anything, then perhaps somehow Natalie had made it all up. Perhaps this was normal, dropping by like this—perhaps a return to the real normal was possible.
“The girls are upstairs,” said Mrs. Morgan, and Natalie felt a little catch in her gut at that. Girls? Why the plural? “On the computer or something,” Mrs. Morgan added, and she rolled her eyes in a way that Natalie thought was meant to signify some sort of complicity, the two of them, Natalie and Mrs. Morgan, against the world. “I suppose you came to join them.”
Them. More than one girl up there: not just Hannah, slouching around in her bedroom, bored out of her mind. Now Natalie slowed her motions, taking her time with the slippers Mrs. Morgan held out to her, spending several seconds tucking the laces carefully inside of the boots. How to escape from this situation? With Mrs. Morgan there watching her, how could she put her boots back on, ask for the coat Mrs. Morgan had already whisked away, resume her sodden trek? And at the same time, how could she walk all that way in reverse?
Well. There was simply no way. She couldn’t leave. That was all. She was here. The realization arrived abruptly, like a punch to the stomach. This was a mistake, but she was in it now.
She stood, finally, and Mrs. Morgan, who was still watching her, said, “Well, goodness, Natalie, I believe you’ve gotten even taller!”
“Thank you,” said Natalie, though she wasn’t sure it was a compliment. Indeed she felt, next to the petite Mrs. Morgan, as though she’d grown three solid feet since she’d last been here. Or perhaps, like Alice in Wonderland, she had grown out of proportion to her surroundings. Taller! Taller! Taller!
There was a lovely smell wafting out of the kitchen—cookies? some sort of cake?—and Natalie tried to focus on that, and on the Christmas decorations in the foyer, the lovely silver bells hanging from the newel post, the artificial tree that stood where it had always stood in the corner of the foyer, because the real one, the fantastically tall one, would be in its spot in front of the living room window, with the tasteful white lights that would come on automatically when dusk arrived. Mrs. Morgan was a great believer in beating the Christmas rush. The tree went up on Thanksgiving night, when the presents were probably already purchased, wrapped, stored.
Natalie tried to think about all of this—Christmas! festivity! joy, etc.—instead of concentrating on the feeling of the blood moving too quickly through her body. But she couldn’t stop it, and it didn’t take long for Mrs. Morgan’s form in front of her, her lovely lavender sweatshirt, to begin to wave and tremble. Mrs. Morgan’s face, suddenly, seemed to be not her own face but geometric pieces of it, like a Picasso. Natalie was thinking how strange that was, and how like the painting of Guernica they’d studied in Spanish class, when everything went black.
So much for a quiet day at home with Bridget’s notebook: the phone rang again. Kathleen let the machine pick it up: she thought it would be Carol again. But it wasn’t Carol, it was Neil. “Kathleen, my dear, the Archives is no fun without you. And you left your pie plate at our house last night. I left it on the porch, in a Trader Joe’s bag, but if you don’t come for it, no biggie, I’ll bring it Monday.”
The phone’s ringing had brought her momentarily out of Bridget’s world. That was okay with her, she felt like she needed a break, a chance to process what she’d read.
Pie plate, she thought. I’ll go get that pie plate. She gathered Lucy and her leash and coaxed the Camry to life. She parked a few blocks away from Neil and Adam’s brownstone, wanting to give Lucy the walk. Some of the buildings, the shops especially, had already made their first tentative motions toward holiday decorating. It all made her feel festive; perhaps she shouldn’t have turned Carol down.
Outside the brownstone, next to the Trader Joe’s bag, there was a large cardboard delivery box. She checked the return label. Pottery Barn Kids. This must be a gift; she took Neil and Adam for people who would order from some obscure, independent shop she’d never heard of. She peeked inside the front windows, where the monochromatic curtains had been drawn back, revealing the pristine living room. She couldn’t see the gunmetal kitchen. She felt like a Peeping Tom; she grabbed her bag and walked Lucy back to the car, but Lucy was walking more slowly than usual, her ears folded back against her head. She stopped once and sat down and then, after a moment, rose and regained her pace.
The phone was ringing as she unlocked the door to her house. (Must get that caller ID after all. Suddenly she was getting popular.)
Natalie was crying, which made it difficult to understand her, but she repeated her words again until finally Kathleen understood. “You were wrong,” she said. “The advice you gave me, it was wrong.”
It wasn’t long before she came to—Mrs. Morgan told her she was out for only half a minute—but it was long enough for Hannah and Taylor to hear the sound of Natalie falling and come running down the stairs to see what the commotion was. So when Natalie opened her eyes, she had three sets of eyes looking down at her: one caring, one suspicious, one vacant.
“Thank God!” said Mrs. Morgan. “Nat, sweetie, I was about to dial nine-one-one. In fact I still might.” Her face had fallen into creases of concern, and up close like this Natalie could see the furrows over her nose, and the lines radiating out from her eyes. Tiny threadlike lines, even, above her lips, that Natalie had never noticed.
“No,” said Natalie, pushing herself up on one elbow and surveying with some confusion the scene before her. “No, don’t. I’m fine. I just—” But she didn’t know what to say. She just what? She didn’t know what had happened.
Mrs. Morgan was kneeling on the ground, cradling Natalie’s head. Natalie could smell her perfume, that sweet, familiar scent. Mrs. Morgan felt around gently in Natalie’s hair and said, “Oh, honey. You’ve got a bump on the back of your head. No, don’t get up. Not yet. Let me get a pillow for you while you pull yourself together.”
While you pull yourself together. Humiliation.
Mrs. Morgan continued: “Actually, Hannah—run and get one of the couch pillows, will you? I’m going to get some ice. Natalie, you stay right here. Don’t move.”
Hannah, who had been crouching next to her mother, had so far said nothing. She stood and looked down at Natalie; from Natalie’s vantage point Hannah appeared to be as tall as a redwood tree, and as powerful and foreboding. “Sure,” she said to her mother, but she was looking all the time at Natalie. “Sure I will.” She stood for another several seconds, considering Natalie with an expression that was part sneer and part bewilderment, and then she was gone.
Thus Natalie was left alone with Taylor Grant. It occurred to her that both Taylor’s first name and her last name were the names of presidents. Suddenly this seemed terrifically ironic to Natalie, Taylor not being the brightest bulb, but she didn’t realize she was smiling, laughing, even, until Taylor said, in a harsh and ugly voice, “What’s so funny, Natalie?”
Natalie had no answer to this question. It was all too much to bear: the fainting, the laughing, her inadvertent insulting of Taylor. This too she would have to pay for—she would have to pay for all of it, and the price would be high. The long walk she had undertaken and must now undertake in reverse. The reconciliation with Hannah that clearly was not going to take place. She closed her eyes.
Wh
en she opened them Hannah had returned with the pillow from the living room. It was one of the lovely orange pillows with which the two of them used to build complicated forts. Hannah was holding it in such a way that Natalie couldn’t tell if she was going to put it under Natalie’s head or suffocate her with it.
Under her head, it turned out, though more roughly than Mrs. Morgan would have done, and before Hannah straightened she leaned close to Natalie’s face. “What,” she said, “are you doing here?”
Natalie was no longer sure, so muddled was she from the fall and the general confusion and disappointment. For not only did Hannah have plenty of friends at school who were not Natalie, she had a friend right here in the house, usurping Natalie’s place, eating Mrs. Morgan’s cookies (they really did smell divine), sleeping next to Hannah in the canopy bed, receiving Mrs. Morgan’s gentle forehead kisses in the night, if indeed Mrs. Morgan still delivered them. Hannah had plenty of everything. She did not need Natalie.
But Hannah’s question hung in the air; Natalie could almost see it there, cold and unyielding. She cast about for an answer. There must be some reasonable explanation, some way out of complete and utter mortification. It was evident that there was to be no saving her friendship with Hannah Morgan, but surely there was some way to save herself.
Before she found one, Mrs. Morgan was back with the ice, and Hannah smiled sweetly, angelically, when Mrs. Morgan said, “Oh, good, you got the pillow, thanks, honey.” Then, “Yes, that’s a good one, that’s nice and soft,” inspecting it. She helped Natalie first to a sitting position on the floor and then to the brown braided bench, where she rubbed small circles on Natalie’s back. She pressed the ice pack to Natalie’s hand and guided her hand gently toward her head. “Keep this there,” she advised. “That’s quite a lump you’ll get if you don’t. Now, why don’t you tell me what could be going on with you, for you to faint like that.”
So Far Away (9780316202466) Page 16
