So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  “Maybe you’ll be off school tomorrow, with the snow.”

  “Mom, tomorrow is Saturday.”

  “Oh! That’s right, I forgot.” Carmen laughed, but her laughter had a tinny quality to it, like somebody on a television show pretending to laugh.

  She turned from the window. “Natalie, did you say something to your father?”

  “About what?”

  “About me, about something being wrong with me.”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “I’m just sad, you know.” Her voice caught. “There’s nothing wrong besides that. I’m just really, really sad.”

  “Mom—” Did her mother know about Julia?

  “I’m going to go to the doctor, to get some medicine. I have an appointment next week. Your father made the appointment.”

  “Yeah?” Then, after a beat, “Mom? Why did you marry Dad? So young, why did you marry him so young? Why’d you have to lie about it?”

  Her mother turned back to the window. She said, “Natalie. Don’t judge things you don’t understand.” Then she sighed and said, more softly, “I’m sorry. Like I told you before, your father saved me, Natalie.”

  “But you didn’t say from what.”

  “From home, from an unhappy home, unhappy people. If I didn’t lie about it, well, I wouldn’t have gotten out. And I had to get out. When I met him I was… what? Three years older than you are now. A baby.”

  “And what was he like then?”

  “Oh, Nat. He was so handsome. Charming. I would have followed him anywhere the day I met him, anywhere at all. He was in town for a medical conference—”

  Her voice trailed off, and for a second this seemed like Natalie’s old mother, the mother Natalie’s father had fallen in love with. So what if she was young when she’d married him? She had loved him, he had loved her, and then it didn’t work out. It happened all the time: Look at Christian Chapman’s parents. Maybe there was nothing so odd about their story.

  The next thing she knew, Natalie was telling her mother about it, about Hannah and Taylor and the texts. She almost, almost, showed her the Web page, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it again, so she stopped there. She didn’t look at her mother while she was talking; she looked straight ahead at the wall in front of her, then up at where the wall met the ceiling, a spot where the paint was peeling. It had always been peeling in just that spot; when she was younger she called it dragon’s skin.

  After that it happened fast.

  Her mother said, “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  Carmen held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

  “Give what to you?”

  “The computer.”

  Natalie’s heart beat faster. “What?”

  “And the phone. Give me your computer and your phone.”

  “But I—”

  “Natalie. We didn’t have problems like this when I was a kid. We didn’t have all of this stuff to have problems with. Give me the computer. Give me the phone.”

  Natalie had no strength to articulate anything, and in the background of the whole conversation was the Web page, a hot little ember burning. I don’t even know her. LMAO anyway. She didn’t believe anyone anymore. She said it again, same thing she’d said to her father, the teenager’s answer: “Yeah, okay. Whatever.” She gave her the computer, lifted her phone from the nightstand, handed it over. Obeyed.

  All the next day Kathleen stewed and shifted. She took Lucy for a long walk around the harbor. She waited, though she didn’t know what she was waiting for. She called Neil to see if he wanted to go to a museum—there was an exhibit on Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris at the MFA, and something at the Athenaeum. But Neil didn’t answer. Didn’t she have another friend she could call? No, she did not. No friends.

  Not true. She had Carol. She called Carol; Carol’s house had been chosen to be on some Christmas showcase tour and she was in a mad frenzy of preparation. (“Holiday tour, it’s really called,” Carol said. “But I’m calling it a Christmas tour and anyone who doesn’t like that can just stay home.”)

  She perused the food section from the previous Wednesday’s Globe and cut out four different recipes, then made a shopping list from them. Then she shopped. She bought mushrooms and steak for mushroom, barley, and steak soup. She bought walnuts, pecans, and almonds for a spinach salad with spiced nuts and blue cheese. Glazed pork roast? Why not! Into the cart went a four-pound boneless pork loin and a jar of gourmet spicy mustard. And for dessert: raw almonds, eggs, and flour to make almond biscotti.

  Kathleen kept her eyes open for Melissa Henderson and her little pink baby; she felt betrayed when they did not appear.

  The girl at the checkout, a teenager, fifteen, maybe sixteen, was telling a story to the pimply kid who was bagging the groceries. “So then I was, like, is he going to call, or not? And he didn’t call, so I was, like—”

  Stop! Kathleen wanted to yell. Stop being so vulnerable, stop being so stupid!

  All around her, girls were in trouble.

  She cooked for nearly three hours. She brushed the pork loin with the mustard mixture. She cut the biscotti on an extreme angle, the way the recipe instructed. She cut it perfectly, if she did say so herself, so that none of it crumbled.

  While she worked she tried not to think of Natalie, or of Natalie’s mother. She should be able to do more for Natalie, but could not. She should have stood up to Natalie’s mother, but had not. Would Natalie’s mother tell her that she had been there? Maybe, maybe not. She checked the barley. Was it barely tender, the way it was supposed to be? Yes, it was. She heated the broiler and brushed the steak with olive oil.

  She found herself thinking of Bridget O’Connell, standing in a kitchen so many years ago, preparing a meal, same as Kathleen was doing now.

  The wind picked up and beat against the side of the house; she could hear the wind chimes on the front porch clanging. There was something comforting about being inside the house, quartering crimini mushrooms, measuring out sherry and beef broth to pour into the soup pot. She felt like Laura Ingalls, safe inside her prairie home.

  I can do this, she thought. I can survive. I am a survivor.

  But when she was finished, and had laid all the food out before her, she realized that she had nobody to share it with. (How was it possible that she was only now realizing this?) Rapidly the comfort dissipated. She was alone in the kitchen, with enough food for a complete dinner party, and she was not hungry.

  She studied the pork loin, plucked a pecan from the spinach salad, admired the angle (extreme!) of the biscotti. She sighed. She covered the pork with foil and wedged it on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator and emptied the salad into a Tupperware container. She put the cover on the soup pot and left it on the stove while she walked Lucy again through the remnants of yesterday’s snow. (Lucy did not appear to require this walk, or even to want it, but Kathleen did.)

  When she returned she pulled out the laptop and checked her email. There was nothing from Professor Paterson, nothing from anyone. Natalie had lied to her about her mother. Susannah had gone. Everybody was a liar, everybody was a disappointment.

  She pulled the notebook from her bag and poured herself a glass of wine. “Well, Lucy,” she said. “Looks like it’s just you and me, pup.” She nodded at the notebook, contraband, someone else’s belongings. “And you, Bridget,” she added, as she opened the notebook.

  We had a long winter that year, loads of snow, and suddenly it was over. April passed; May came. Along High Street the gardens came into bloom, and people were outside all the time. James turned one, and then he was fourteen months old. He toddled along, holding my hand, up and down the sidewalk. He said small words—cat, car—and pointed with his chubby little fingers. At night I took extra care putting him in his crib; again and again I checked to be sure the gate Dr. Turner had built was fastened because he could climb up or down anything. “My little Houdini,” I called him, leaning over to kiss him.

/>   Once I bent down and whispered in his ear, “I wish you were mine.” I thought I would have to be careful about that because soon enough he’d be able to repeat to Anna anything I said to him.

  He had all his teeth by then, or nearly all. He bit his brothers and he laughed about that too, and soon we were all laughing, because it was impossible for even the most bad-tempered among us to stay angry at him.

  Because of Charles, I was happier, and I did the work better for being happier.

  Dusting in the parlor, I sang, “On the banks of the roses, my love and I sat down/And I took out my violin to play my love a tune.”

  “What is it?” said Anna sharply. “What are you so happy about?”

  “Oh, nothing, ma’am,” I said. “Just a letter from home, it’s cheered me up.” I swept the front steps with extra care; I scrubbed the pots with vigor. My hands got even more cracked and dry from the scrubbing and I stole a little butter to rub into them; I didn’t want Charles to notice the rough skin.

  Anna had gray pouches around her eyes, and the skin looked like it was stretched too thin over her cheekbones.

  Once I almost called him Charles instead of Dr. Turner in front of one of the boys. I stopped in time, but I could feel myself blushing furiously and I had to step outside under the pretense of beating the doormat against the side of the house. When I think about that winter and the spring that followed, I think of being very still, waiting, in my little room, waiting for Charles. He didn’t come every night. And anyway I think my memory has played tricks with me there. Really I was hardly ever still. I think I was moving all the time. And I was tired all the time too, because my work didn’t cease. I was careful not to complain about it, not wanting Anna to suspect. I did as I was told, always as I was told. In a way I think I was apologizing to her, for what I was doing.

  It was that winter that Declan Callaghan came to do some work for the Turners, when Charles’s practice had become busy. He did odd jobs around the house—a “jack-of-all-trades.” I don’t know what the jobs were, I never paid attention, but when I imagine the man he was back then—a boy, really, not so much older than I was—I picture him with a hammer, going about the house, whistling. Smiling. His hands broad and freckled, like my father’s hands—not like Charles’s hands, a doctor’s hands, long-fingered and graceful.

  “He’s stuck on you,” Norah used to say, because she had taken to using American expressions whenever she could. (She said, “All wet.” She said, “Cat’s meow.” She called money “dough.” She went, when she could, to the speakeasy down on Liberty Street. She cut her hair.)

  “Him?” I said. “A Cork boy? Norah!”

  “What? You don’t think he’s dashing?” (That was another one: dashing.)

  “I don’t,” I said.

  I didn’t.

  And then. Washing the Turners’ sheets again, I saw the blood. I knew what this meant. I turned my face to the wall over the laundry and bit my fist to push down the urge to scream.

  On the same day I noticed that Anna was pale and tired—she stayed away from me, and away from the boys, and she shut herself up in her sitting room with her letters, not coming out for meals, not coming out for anything. I didn’t mind taking James from her. I almost cried for her, looking at the slouch of her shoulders, looking at the veins protruding from her pale hand on the stair rail.

  But I hated her too.

  And for a few days I hated Charles.

  I had been a fool to think he had given her up for me when really he had us both.

  For three nights I refused him and on the fourth night I did not.

  He said, “Bridget, Bridget, it’s you that I love. You know that.” And then it didn’t matter about Anna or not Anna. It didn’t matter who else was in the world when we were separate; it mattered only that when we were alone, it was just us. Why was that enough?

  I think I willed it to happen, if such a thing is possible. I think it was that night that it happened.

  As I set out in the beginning of this writing, I don’t expect anybody will ever read this account. I am writing it for myself. Otherwise I would perhaps be concerned about what people would think or whether anybody would believe that it was real, the love between Charles and me. But it was real. I was there, and it was real.

  I didn’t think about the future. When you are young you think either that nothing is permanent or that everything that is important to you will continue like that forever. Both ways of thinking are dangerous.

  “I’ll say,” said Kathleen. “You’ve got that right.”

  Lucy, lying on the floor, coughed.

  “Hey, Nat,” said Taylor on Monday after English. “You haven’t answered any of our texts. What’s wrong? Not friends with us anymore?” She indicated Hannah, standing at her side like a lieutenant, as the other part of the us.

  “Hey,” said Natalie mournfully.

  “Didn’t you get our texts?”

  “No,” said Natalie. “I don’t have my phone.”

  “Oh, poor Nat! What happened? Did you lose it?”

  She thought about her mother taking them away. “Yeah,” she said. “I lost it.”

  Taylor studied her and then said, “Bummer.” She followed that with “How’s your mother?”

  “Fine.”

  “She get her driver’s license yet? Can she vote yet?”

  Taylor made a crazy sign with her hand and looked over at Hannah for affirmation. Natalie could feel her cheeks start to warm; she wanted to lift her hand to her face, to cool it down, but didn’t want to call attention to it. And yet. She remembered her father’s long-ago admonitions to stand up for herself. This, like the importance of sitting up straight at the dinner table, of writing thank-you notes, of using Mr. and Mrs., had been drilled into her from an early age by her father.

  Nobody likes a weakling, he told her one time, driving home from a sales call, gripping the steering wheel, the wormlike vein above his temple popping out. People can smell fear, like a dog they can smell it. You’ve got to get ahead of it, every time.

  Gathering every morsel of bravado available to her (admittedly, a very small amount, and not easily accessed) and looking first Hannah and then Taylor directly in the eyes, Natalie said, “Listen. Why don’t you leave me alone. I didn’t do anything to you.” But, horror of all horrors, she could not hold her voice steady, and the last word came out in a gruesome combination of whine and almost-cry. Taylor snickered, and looked at Hannah.

  Natalie pushed past the girls, making unwitting physical contact; unwitting, too, was the proximity to their perfume, a scent—unfamiliar, expensive—that could have come from either one of them but likely came from both, since Hannah and Taylor apparently now shared everything.

  She walked away, and after a few steps she turned around. They were both bent over a phone. Already.

  She thought again of the warthog and the lion, the relief the warthog might have felt after the final bite, the pain so close to being over.

  On Tuesday, at nine o’clock sharp, the phone at Kathleen’s desk rang.

  “Kathleen Lynch,” she said, as cheerily as she could manage.

  “It’s Natalie Gallagher.”

  “Natalie! I’m so glad you called.” All was not lost, then. Here was her second chance. (Third, fourth? Did it matter?)

  “Do you have my notebook?”

  “I do! I have it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want it. I’m all done with that stupid project. I’m not doing it. That’s not why I called.”

  “But—”

  “You went to my house?”

  “I did. To drop off the notebook. But then I forgot to leave it, I’m so sorry—”

  “You talked to my mother. You told her everything I told you.”

  Kathleen felt a drop in her stomach.

  “Thanks a lot,” said Natalie.

  “You’re welcome,” said Kathleen, in a small voice.

  “I wasn’t being serious,” said Natalie. “
I’m not really thanking you.”

  Kathleen had figured that.

  Natalie continued, “What I told you in the car was private. If I wanted to tell my mother about it, I would have told her myself.”

  Kathleen had the sensation of a ship listing, veering off course. Fix it, she told herself. Straighten it out. She said, “But I thought your mother should know. Actually I thought your father should know, because you told me your mother was dead…”

  “You thought! What do you know?”

  “I thought—”

  “She took away my phone. My computer. I’m calling from my home phone.”

  So: not in school then. Better not to bring that up.

  “All of it. She took away everything. Now I don’t know what they’re doing to me, they could be doing anything.”

  Kathleen was silent: she had no words.

  “What if she tells my father?”

  Kathleen didn’t know. So there was a father in the picture. H. Gallagher from the mail pile, the jaunty me! in the scrap of genealogy Natalie had brought in the first day. Carefully she said, “Well, what if? Maybe—”

  “And what if he goes marching into the school and says something? They’ll know I’m a rat. They’ll crucify me.”

  Kathleen hadn’t thought about that. “Natalie.”

  “I thought you were my friend. I trusted you. I told you all that stuff—”

  Kathleen knew even as she spoke that she should not engage in battle. “I was trying to help.”

  “Yeah, like you helped your own daughter.”

  This was like a punch. Natalie was crying now: Kathleen could hear the great gasping breaths. But she steeled herself. “You don’t know anything about my daughter.”

  “I know a little bit. Neil told me some of it. I know she ran away from you.”

  “She ran away. Not from me. It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Natalie was still crying.

  “Natalie. I was trying to help.”

  “Well, everything you do to help, you mess it up. It’s the same with all grown-ups. It’s the same with everything.” And she hung up.