So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

Kathleen stood there, clutching the phone.

  Deidre had said… what? “Come on, Susannah,” and off they’d gone? She’d packed the Gap sweatshirt, the jeans, the rain jacket; she’d left the toothbrush.

  Detective Bradford had said, “If a runaway doesn’t want to be found, she usually manages not to be found.” The air was light and sweet when he told her that, the promise of summer not far off. “That doesn’t mean there’s no hope for finding her,” he said. “I just like anyone in your situation to know that, right from the start.”

  Christmas Eve. Natalie and her mother were invited to her mother’s friend’s house. The friend had young children, three of them, all aged five and under, and Natalie could think of nothing worse, nothing sadder and simultaneously more irritating, than watching these children in their sugared-up, pre-Santa state of excitement. No thank you.

  Still, she was happy to see her mother dressed in a red blouse, a black skirt, makeup on, hair brushed and washed. (“It’s only been ten days on the medication,” she whispered to Natalie, whispered as though someone was listening, as though anyone at all ever listened to them, “but I think I can feel a little bit of a difference.”)

  She rapped on Natalie’s door and opened it without waiting for an answer. “Natalie! Is that what you’re wearing?”

  Natalie was lying on her bed, reading The Great Gatsby, which she had checked out of the library, and Kathleen had been right, it was the longest day of the year that Daisy always waited for. Summer solstice. She looked down at her clothes, then up at her mother. “I’m not going.”

  “You’re not? Of course you are. I told Nancy…”

  “I told Dad I’d go with him. He’s picking me up soon.” She was lying, of course; her father was in DC with Julia.

  “He is? He didn’t mention—”

  Natalie shrugged as if to indicate that she didn’t know what had or hadn’t transpired between her parents.

  “Listen,” said her mother. “Are you ready for your phone back? Your computer? I’m going to give them back.” She disappeared momentarily and then reappeared, holding both out to Natalie. “I want you to know I wasn’t punishing you—”

  But Natalie wasn’t listening; she took the phone, took the computer. There was a small clot of fear underneath her collarbones. After her mother left, she fired up her computer—hands shaking, heart hammering. She typed her own name into Google but paused before hitting Enter. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to know. She wouldn’t do it.

  She erased her name and typed in “Vail, Colorado.” She clicked on “images” and saw a gigantic melon of a moon rising in a cobalt sky over a glittering village. She saw beautiful people holding snowboards and consulting trail maps. She saw exquisite Christmas lights in trees along an immaculate Main Street, and a lovely outdoor skating rink surrounded by tan buildings so beautiful and pristine that they looked counterfeit.

  Why was she doing this, pressing the bruise? She didn’t know. Vail was paradise, and she was not there. Others were.

  She held her breath and turned on her phone. The battery was nearly drained; she’d have to find her charger.

  Thirty-seven text messages. Make that thirty-eight: another came in just as she watched.

  She didn’t read them. She found the button, then closed her eyes while she pressed it. Delete, delete, delete.

  Kathleen invited Neil for Christmas dinner. It was just the two of them. Adam, having worked through some of the bureaucratic red tape, had left the day before to secure the adoption of little Henri.

  She had already had it out with him, the thing about telling Natalie about Susannah. He apologized; she forgave—it was difficult to stay angry with Neil, and anyway they’d made the plans for the holiday weeks before and she couldn’t very well uninvite him now.

  Kathleen unearthed some very old red place mats that she hadn’t used in years. She threw them in the dryer on the de-wrinkle setting. At the Stop and Shop she picked out a simple poinsettia wrapped in shiny gold paper to set in the middle of the dining room table. She wore a red sweater with a snowman crocheted into it, and little snowman earrings; dressing in her room before starting dinner, she felt positively festive.

  She had a small tree—real—that she had purchased in the parking lot of a gas station off Route 93; it was being sold by the Boy Scouts, a group of polite young men wearing khaki caps and olive green pants and eager smiles. Kathleen had taken their careful dress, the line of patches on their still-skinny arms, as a sign that the tree was in good health and would last all the way to the New Year. But two days after the tree’s homecoming its needles began to brown and to drop as if it were the star of some piece of autumnal performance art. Even so, she had pulled a box of ornaments from the basement and done her best to bedeck it. She acknowledged that her anger at the smiling Boy Scouts was unreasonable, but no less fierce for that. She thought she should have gone grander, better, with the tree, or not bothered at all.

  She had a glass of wine while she set the table, while she dressed the chicken and peeled the potatoes and prepared the cranberry sauce—made from scratch, with pecans and currants and raisins added. It was the same cranberry sauce that her mother, and her mother’s mother before her, had prepared on both Thanksgiving and Christmas. She worked from a stained index card propped up against the counter; the card was yellowed with age, and it made her think of Bridget’s notebook.

  She tried not to think of Susannah—the wine made it difficult; the more she drank, it seemed, the more porous her thoughts became—and where she may or may not be this Christmas Day. But her mind, despite her efforts, seemed intent on creating and playing a montage from Christmases past. Susannah, front teeth missing, hair messed, ripping into a box that contained… what? Kathleen could not remember. Susannah, a near-teenager, slender and long-legged, proffering to Kathleen a gift she’d made at school, a small wooden jewelry box, which sat now inside Kathleen’s top dresser drawer, and which held the tiny gold cross Kathleen had given Susannah as a First Communion gift. Susannah, age sixteen, sitting beside Kathleen at Christmas Eve Mass, her hair dyed jet black, as dark as night, darker even, her face pale beneath the hair, which only partially covered up the line of earrings marching up the length of her ear.

  She thought of Natalie Gallagher and wondered how she would pass the day. With her mother? With her father? With nobody, alone in her bedroom, with just her cell phone for company? With relatives, an extended family that Natalie had never mentioned but that Kathleen imagined might swoop in at such a time, taking the poor, semi-orphaned girl under their collective wing, offering her solace?

  Before she could continue this line of thinking all the way to its end, the doorbell rang and there was Neil, holding a bottle of Malbec in one hand and a bouquet of daisies in the other.

  “Well!” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

  He held out the flowers. “You told me once they’re your favorite flower, and I couldn’t resist when I saw them.”

  “Oh, Neil. Daisies! In December—”

  “I know,” he said. “Terribly un-environmental of me. How many gallons of fuel did it take to get these from wherever to here? Forgive me, Mother Earth.” He bowed. “And Merry Christmas.”

  “Well,” she said again. “Thank you.”

  “I like your sweater. It’s very—”

  “Very what?” She crossed her arms protectively over the snowman.

  “Very, oh, I don’t know. Midwestern.”

  “Neil!”

  “In a charming way. Don’t worry, you can pull it off. You’ve got the class for it.”

  (“I bet you used to be a knockout,” Neil said once to Kathleen. And Kathleen had thought, Used to? He hadn’t meant anything by it, had only meant to compliment her, but the words hurt.)

  Neil perched at the counter while Kathleen put the chicken in the oven. He had brought an iPod, and an iPod speaker, which he plugged in at one of the kitchen outlets, and soon enough the kitchen was filled with Diana Krall
singing “White Christmas.”

  “And tell me again why you didn’t go with Adam?” said Kathleen, opening the Malbec. She knew from her wine class that she was supposed to decant the wine to let it breathe, but she felt a childish, petulant delight in pouring it straight out from the bottle. She fussed with the daisies for a minute, finding a vase under the kitchen sink, and eventually she replaced the poinsettia with them, relegating the poinsettia to the bathroom.

  “Oh, because it could take weeks,” Neil said. “I had to let him have this. As much as he complains about it, he loves sorting through bureaucracy. I’d be useless at this point, and grouchy to boot.” He pulled his face into something approximating a grimace. “And anyway, my boss is sort of a stickler when it comes to vacation time. I doubt I’d get the time off.”

  “Oh, stop,” said Kathleen. “Smart aleck.”

  “And when things are sorted out, and Henri is ready to come home, I’ll fly down to meet them. And we’ll all come home together.”

  “One big happy family.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well,” said Kathleen. “Happy families. I’ll drink to that.” She raised her glass to Neil’s, and she tried not to sound wistful, or envious, although she felt, along with the muddled holiday cheer, a little bit of both.

  Later, dinner cleaned up, leftover chicken offered to and declined by Lucy, Neil departed, she checked her email for a response from Professor Jacob Paterson. Nothing. She accessed his university Web page—she had bookmarked it, and even the creaky Mac was able to bring it to the fore quickly—and studied his photograph again: the glasses, the pale, flat face. It seemed he had something to tell her. But what? He likely had his own family with whom to celebrate the holidays: his own wife cooking him his own roast chicken, perhaps in her own holiday sweater, his own children tearing about, playing with their new toys, breaking them, probably, the way all children did on Christmas Day. Crying about it after, as they all did too.

  She had more wine. What had Natalie said? You don’t talk to your own daughter.

  She typed into Google the name “Natalie.” Of course this returned hundreds of thousands of results. Natalie Portman seemed to be the most popular of those, and Kathleen spent some time looking at her, admiring the elegant lines of her face, her wide, open smile: true beauty. Then she entered “Natalie Gallagher”; there seemed to be plenty of Natalie Gallaghers in the world. Then, to narrow it further, “Natalie Gallagher Newburyport.”

  And then.

  Here was Natalie Gallagher, the girl Kathleen now thought of as her Natalie. There was a photograph, a close-up of Natalie’s face, as unflattering as you could get, taken from above. Her eyes were closed and her face was slack. Was she lying down? Asleep?

  The photo wasn’t the worst of it. It was the comments that appeared below. Kathleen felt sick looking at all of this. Had Natalie seen it? If she had, how could she stand it? But what if she hadn’t? She should tell her, make sure she was aware of what she was up against. Or she should tell someone. Someone at the school, an administrator who could help. She even went so far as to rise from her chair and walk toward the phone. But it was Christmas night! No school administrators would be around, not tonight, and most likely not for the next week; they were all home, like their students, like Kathleen herself.

  Lucy came into the kitchen, her nails tapping against the hardwood, and stood, gently whining, by Kathleen’s side.

  It was dark on the street save for the Christmas lights on at many of the houses. Neil had observed once that it seemed that the less money people had, the more they spent on holiday decorations. Kathleen thought that was an obnoxious thing to say, and she told Neil so, but really wasn’t it true? Witness, two blocks over from her house, the multifamily, in front of which she now stood. It was similar to Kathleen’s building, but decorated with such flamboyance, such an extravagance of lights—bright white reindeer prancing across the roof, a trio of angels gamely blowing trumpets in the front yard, a giant wreath covered in red lights—that the house itself seemed to give off a noise.

  Kathleen wobbled a little on the sidewalk, caught at the leash. Perhaps (probably) it was the wine, but the longer she stood there on the sidewalk, the more Kathleen felt herself overcome by a searing sort of clarity.

  “Somebody should do something,” she said. An idea was forming in her mind, and she now saw herself as the young girl’s savior, as a knight of sorts, maybe not a knight in shining armor but an older, female knight, in black dress pants and a midwestern-style Christmas sweater: a knightess. “Somebody’s got to do something for that girl,” she said, and Lucy, sitting respectfully beside her, cocked an ear in a way that signified both interest and support.

  Christmas night she typed, “Dear Professor Paterson: I’m sorry to bother you again, but I am worried that my last email might not have reached you.” She stopped. She wrote, “I am pasting it into this email, just in case.” Then she wrote, “I have tried to help my friend, but I’m afraid I wasn’t able to.” Then she deleted the word friend and replaced it with the word daughter. She traveled into the bowels of her Sent folder to retrieve the original email, and dutifully pasted the text. She pressed Send and heard the whoosh: the carrier pigeons doing their work. Where was he now? Finished with his supper, perhaps settling down to relax in his living room (beige, it would be beige) with his wife, surrounded by pictures of his kids doing the usual kid things: selecting pumpkins at Halloween, jumping into an aquamarine pool at somebody’s birthday party, bundled up by the front door in snowsuits. Weather in the Midwest could be unpredictable.

  She Googled Ashley Jackson again. She found more details. There had been hateful texts; there had been Web pages, pictures, nasty comments posted anonymously. And there had been Ashley Jackson, alone in her parents’ garage, turning the key in the ignition. Sitting back, waiting, unable to go on.

  “The cruelty of kids at this age should not be underestimated,” said an expert quoted in the article (the expert was not Professor Paterson). “They don’t always understand that their actions have consequences.”

  She wished she hadn’t sent the email to Professor Paterson yet; there was something she wanted to add.

  She wanted to add, I am afraid something bad is going to happen.

  She picked up the notebook again.

  Elsie and Arthur returned from abroad. They had a new car, a Duesenberg roadster in gleaming black.

  “What happened to the old one?” asked Dr. Turner.

  “Crashed it,” said Arthur.

  “Drunk,” said Elsie. She shrugged. Arthur smiled.

  “Well,” said Anna. “Where’d you go? On your travels?”

  Elsie laughed and said, “Where didn’t we go?” and Anna said sharply, “Just answer the question, Elsie.”

  Arthur said to Dr. Turner, “Whoah. What’s eating her?”

  I, clattering around in the kitchen, knew what was eating Anna.

  A few minutes later I heard Elsie say, “What happened to your girl—what was her name?”

  “Bridget,” said Dr. Turner, and it was a secret thrill to me, to hear him say my name in general company. “She’s still with us.” Still with us: that was a thrill too.

  Even with that comment, and the little lift it provided, I felt a certain heaviness in my limbs. Balled up, as Norah would say. Not quite right. I knew where this came from: the lack of sleep, the nights with Charles, my inability, sometimes, to fall to sleep after he’d gone. Then there was the extra work I did in the mornings, the care I took with the beds and the sweeping, so that Anna could accuse me of no wrongdoing.

  “There you are!” Elsie said when I entered with the soup. “You haven’t gotten any uglier, have you?”

  Arthur said, “Elsie!” and Elsie said, “What? She hasn’t.” Then, to me, “You’d better watch yourself around the young men, you know. They’re likely to take advantage of you.” She cast a sidelong glance toward Arthur. “Believe me, I know how the male mind works.”

&
nbsp; “Now, Elsie,” said Dr. Turner. “I’m sure Bridget is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”

  My hands were shaking. I put a soup bowl down a little too hard in front of Dr. Turner, and a bit of it sloshed over the edge. I could feel Anna glaring at me, but I didn’t meet her eyes, and Dr. Turner wiped at the spill with his napkin without saying a word.

  “You can’t imagine what we saw there, in Europe,” said Elsie after they’d eaten. She was smoking a cigarette at the dining room table. Harry and Edward watched her, transfixed, quiet, for once, as if in the presence of royalty. “You really should go, Anna. You and Charles should go to Monte Carlo.”

  Anna snorted. “Me! In Monte Carlo. How am I going to manage going to Monte Carlo?” I thought I saw something in her expression: a wistfulness.

  “Arthur lost all of our money, of course,” Elsie went on. “He’s a wretched gambler.”

  “Did not,” said Arthur, unbothered.

  “You did!”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Enough.”

  “Plenty more where that came from.”

  A silence fell after that, and James banged a spoon on his high chair and said, “Up.”

  “We saw the Fitzgeralds,” said Arthur. “On the Riviera.”

  At this Anna perked up. “The Fitzgeralds! What was that like? Was she very beautiful?”

  Again James said, “Up,” and I lifted him from his chair.

  “Into the kitchen,” I said. “You’ve got food all over your face.”

  Elsie said, “They were both beautiful. Straight out of a movie. Out of a dream, really. But crazy, I guess. She is.”

  Everything swam in front of me for a moment: it seemed like the entire living room was made up of tiny vacillating dots. I heard someone say my name, but the sound seemed to be coming from very far away. Then it grew closer and closer and the room came back into focus. They were all looking at me—the whole table.

  “Bridget!” said Anna. “You look quite strange. Go into the kitchen and sit down for a minute. Put the baby down.”