So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  “Yes, ma’am,” I whispered, and I obeyed, but I looked first at Dr. Turner. His eyes were now locked on his plate, and he was tending to his food as carefully as I imagined he might tend to his patients. Would he look at me? I remained a few seconds longer than I should have, to see if he would. He didn’t.

  A few minutes later Elsie entered the kitchen. I was washing dishes at the sink. Elsie’s perfume preceded her; I didn’t need to turn around to know she was there.

  “Bridget,” said Elsie. “Listen here. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Slowly I turned. Up close like this I could see the white base of Elsie’s makeup, and the black liner around her eyes. I looked at the edge of Elsie’s eyes, where the makeup was smudged, to avoid looking at her directly. Then I looked down again and wiped at the counter with the rag. I said, “What do you mean? What kind of trouble?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  This time I met Elsie’s gaze directly and didn’t look away when I said, “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  Elsie moved closer—so close that when she narrowed her eyes I could see the charcoal shadow shift. “Play dumb if you want to. But you’re not going to get any help from them with anything.”

  I said nothing.

  “Well. If you change your mind and decide that you are in trouble, you talk to me about it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “There are things I know—people I know, too. You talk to me, do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Elsie,” she said. “Call me Elsie. I’m not your mistress.”

  “Elsie,” I said softly. “All right. Elsie.”

  The day after Christmas, Natalie awoke to something of a miracle: her mother, up before her, showered (showered!), hair styled, making pancakes. Natalie was starving, but she eyed her mother suspiciously over her plate. This woman before her, the near stranger in the kitchen brandishing a spatula, looked like her mother, even sounded like her mother. But she did not seem like Natalie’s mother.

  “What’s going on?” she said warily.

  “Well!” her mother said brightly. “I thought we could spend some time together.”

  “Really?” said Natalie. “Um, okay.” But what she really wanted was Bridget O’Connell’s notebook back, even though she’d told Kathleen that she didn’t. She wanted Ms. Ramirez to turn her beautiful dark eyes toward her and say, Natalie, what a wonderful job you’ve done here. You should be proud. She wanted Christian Chapman to be impressed; she wanted Hannah Morgan to be envious.

  But it went beyond the project, of course. She thought of her mother’s parents, desolate and unhappy on their Kansas farm, tangled in their own anger. She thought about her father’s parents, talking about something regular, like the weather or what to have for dinner that night, coming up on the fog-covered overturned truck on the highway, seeing it too late to do anything about it. This had been part of family lore for so long that she’d never actually taken the time to think it through, how terrifying it must have been, that last glimpse of a prone truck before you slammed into it.

  That’s why she’d been so interested in the notebook, and so excited to have found it: she figured there was some sort of connection there, something tying her to another person. She felt a need, as intense as an itch, to find out what that connection was. She had a father who had (sort of) deserted her; she had a mother who had (definitely) been deserted by her family. So no matter how far in the past this connection to Bridget O’Connell Callaghan was, if it existed at all, it had the potential to be something—to tether her to someone.

  And then she’d messed that up too, by leaving the notebook behind, and by telling Kathleen she didn’t want it. That wasn’t true, of course. (Thing number nineteen that made her sick: lies, other people’s, but hers as well. Also—thing twenty—failing, and failing was exactly what she was going to do when Ms. Ramirez learned that she had nothing for the independent-study project, nothing to show for the weeks and weeks of supposed work.)

  They went to the North Shore Mall. Natalie’s mother bought her two new sweaters and a pair of jeans at Abercrombie. For herself, at the makeup counter, she allowed herself to be talked into three new lipsticks and a concealer stick. (“Your skin is gorgeous, ma’am,” said the bejeweled and perfectly made-up salesgirl, speaking through lips coated with a heavy layer of what she said was Viva Glam II. “But these dark circles—let’s get rid of them!”) Natalie, standing to the side, grimaced; her mother straightened and beamed into the close-up mirror, looking at her distended cheeks, every pore and follicle illuminated.

  “I’ll take it,” said Natalie’s mother. “And the Troublemaker lipstick, too.” (Who was this mother?)

  On the way home, they stopped at Trader Joe’s, where Carmen stocked up on dark chocolate caramel wedges, organic strawberries flown in from Mexico, three tins of queso fresco.

  But Natalie didn’t want three tins of queso fresco; she wanted Bridget’s notebook back. Maybe she should call Kathleen. Maybe she could get back down there and retrieve the notebook, visit the Archives again. She’d liked it in the Archives. She’d liked the formidable stone of the building’s façade, the flag whipping ferociously in the winter wind, the water in the harbor choppy and defiant, the way, Natalie imagined, the water had looked in the ancient seafarers’ tales they had studied with Ms. Ramirez at the beginning of the semester. (Boring, pronounced Hannah Morgan, and Taylor Grant echoed her: Yawn.)

  After Trader Joe’s, Natalie’s mother pulled into the parking lot of Qdoba. Qdoba! When had Natalie’s mother last eaten a full meal? But here she was ordering the Ancho Chile BBQ Burrito, a Diet Coke to go with it. Was her mother doing all of this for her, because of what Kathleen had told her about Hannah and Taylor? Or was it the medicine?

  When they were seated at the white table, still slick and pristine from the washrag Natalie had seen an employee rub energetically against it, her mother, not quite looking at her, said, “So. I wanted to tell you.”

  Natalie thought, Here we go.

  Her mother said, “I got a job.”

  Natalie studied the tortilla chip in front of her. With every effort to make her voice sound casual, even devil-may-care, she said, “Oh yeah?”

  “Right before Christmas, at Talbots. I went in there, and it turned out someone had just quit—it was luck, really. And I can walk there. The lady said”—here she beamed—“that I had a good eye.”

  Natalie said, “Oh,” and used a little plastic fork to remove a black bean that was lodged in her teeth.

  “Isn’t that good? Nat?”

  But Natalie was intent on the bean in her tooth; the plastic fork was not up to the task, its tines too thick and unyielding, so she gave up and inserted a fingernail.

  “Earth to Natalie!” Her mother reached over and knocked softly on Natalie’s skull with her knuckles. It was an old joke from Natalie’s childhood, but today Natalie found this abhorrent instead of amusing. She pulled away.

  This hurt her mother: she saw that instantly. But she let the wordless insult lie because what she could have said instead was far worse. She wanted to say this: Too little, Mom, and too late. Because wasn’t it true that her mother’s lie about her age was the first thing Taylor Grant and Hannah Morgan had chosen to exploit, opening a fissure in Natalie into which they could insert whatever weapon they chose, to probe, and then to maim her further? Wasn’t all this, at the core, her mother’s fault? It had to be somebody’s fault.

  Her mother said, “Aren’t you happy for me? Sweetie—”

  Natalie said, “I guess.” Artfully, she shrugged.

  Natalie felt something dark and ugly gnawing a hole inside her. It was bullshit. All of it: bullshit. Her parents, both of them. Kathleen Lynch, who wasn’t even helping when she said she would. Hannah Morgan, who could do something about Taylor Grant but refused to. Mrs. Morgan, too blind to see what was going on. Ms. Ramirez, praising an idiot like Emily Middleton, who was writi
ng her dog’s autobiography. All of them full of the same bullshit. Pretending to help, but doing nothing. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

  Natalie stared hard out the window at the traffic going by on 114, streaming from the mall parking lot, from the Target, from everywhere. The traffic was backing up. One driver, impatient, honked loudly, setting up a chain reaction of honking horns. Natalie stared at the half-eaten burrito in front of her, its insides spilling out like guts.

  She didn’t say it, Too little, too late. But she thought it.

  You could find anything these days with Google, really, it was amazing. Hannah Morgan, Natalie’s erstwhile best friend. There was more than one Morgan in Newburyport—no surprise there, very common name. But Natalie had described Hannah’s house, its basic place in the town (she had indicated this the day Kathleen drove her home), its size. So, the day after Christmas, through a combination of the online white pages (thank you, People Search!), an online real estate database that was new to her (thank you, Zillow!), and a satellite service called Google Earth (you too, Google Earth, thanks very much), Kathleen was able to pinpoint the house. One click, and she had at her disposal a set of directions, which she painstakingly copied onto a piece of scrap paper—no printer. Luddite was right.

  It was not lost on her that her last trip to Newburyport, with a similar goal, had ended badly, but she was fired up. All around them girls were in trouble, and here was one she could help. Not could: had to help, because nobody else was going to do it. She was a solitary crusader, shield and surcoat at the ready, trekking toward the Holy Land.

  She practiced:

  “Your daughter is hurting someone.”

  “Your daughter is hurting someone I care about.”

  To get to Hannah Morgan’s house, you took a left off the highway exit, not a right, away from the downtown, and you wound through newer neighborhoods—nothing historical here, no secrets locked in basements or attics. Nothing, really, to see at all, save the houses themselves, and the ghostly outlines of massive play sets in the weak light coming from the quarter-moon above. No cars visible, no mess. People in houses like these kept their cars in garages, their mowers in sheds or faux barns, not like in Southie, everything out on the street for the world to see, all fair game.

  No hesitating this time, no standing at the door recalling the sensation of dunking under the water. Just the doorbell, which chimed musically somewhere deep inside the house, not just one chime but several, part of some classical piece, must be.

  Somehow Kathleen had expected Hannah herself to answer but, no, this must be the mother; she was dressed in some sort of black yoga outfit, hair pulled back from her face with a matching headband, and holding a sweating glass of white wine (the word “Muscat” came into Kathleen’s head, a remnant from the wine-tasting class, but she couldn’t remember what that was; Carol would remember, she remembered everything).

  The woman looked at Kathleen, warily expectant, or expectantly wary, Kathleen wasn’t sure which.

  Kathleen cleared her throat. “Mrs. Morgan?”

  “Yes…”

  “My name is Kathleen Lynch. I’ve come on behalf of one of your daughter’s friends, or one of her ex-friends, I should say.”

  Mrs. Morgan said, “Huh?”

  Kathleen wavered for a minute. She looked down. She recognized the intricately tiled foyer from the photo of Natalie on the website, and she found in this recognition a modicum of strength. She said, “Your daughter, and her friend Taylor, they’re hurting someone named Natalie.”

  “Natalie Gallagher?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman sipped from her wineglass. “What do you mean, hurting?”

  “I mean bullying. They’re bullying her.”

  “I think you must be mistaken.” She slurred a little bit on mistaken; it was Kathleen’s guess that this was not her first glass of wine, perhaps not her second either. “Nobody’s doing any bullying. Natalie was just here the other day.”

  Kathleen remembered, suddenly, a feeling from her youth, of being called on in class and being either ill-prepared to answer or downright wrong when she did—this made worse, of course, by the visage of the nun who had asked the question, Sister Mary This-or-That, a wrinkled white face under the wimple, a dash of peach fuzz above the lip. She cleared her throat. “Where is she? I’ll talk to her myself.”

  “She’s not here. She’s on a ski trip.”

  This was a blow.

  Mrs. Morgan added needlessly, “In Vail.”

  Mrs. Morgan had not asked Kathleen inside the house, so Kathleen continued to stand awkwardly between the storm door and the porch.

  Surely the Crusaders faltered sometimes, right? Surely it did not all go smoothly for them all the way. There were stumbles, and they forged ahead.

  “If I were you, I’d look it up, there’s a website. ‘We hate Natalie Gallagher,’ it’s called.”

  “Who are you again? Where’s Carmen?”

  “I’m Kathleen Lynch,” she said. “And I’m worried about your daughter’s behavior.”

  Around the edges of the headband, Kathleen could see gray roots that were at odds with the blond hair. Mrs. Morgan narrowed her eyes, took another sip of wine. “I think you must be confused. Maybe you have my daughter mixed up with someone else.”

  She had said almost those exact words to Deidre Jordan’s mother. “Look it up,” said Kathleen as the door closed in front of her. She stood at the door for several seconds. The doorknob was some sort of antique copper affair, very posh. She spoke to the doorknob, hoping her voice carried through. “Look it up,” she called. “Look up the website, and do something about it.”

  She remembered standing in her kitchen talking to Deidre Jordan’s mother on the phone.

  Do you know what our daughters are doing?

  And Kathleen had told her she must be mistaken. Not her daughter: not her Susannah, never.

  Taylor sent a text, with a photo attached from Vail, the view from the chairlift, little dots of skiers below. WOULD SAY WE WISHED U WERE HERE BUT WE R GLAD U R NOT

  Delete.

  What did a Crusader do when a Crusade failed? Did the Crusaders fail? Kathleen’s knowledge of that period of history was fuzzy at best. But if they did, probably the Crusaders did what all people did when faced with failure: they regrouped, pushed forward, called upon some inner reserve of toughness. Human nature being what it was, and probably mostly unchanged from then to now.

  Back at home, she opened her computer. Shouldn’t she know more about medieval history? All the history she knew happened in the past two hundred years.

  One website called the Crusades “an unmitigated disaster.” She read on. God! She hadn’t known about the Children’s Crusades, mini-Crusaders starving to death or being sold into slavery. What a mess. Bodies laid out on roadsides, Crusaders cooked like roast chickens inside their heavy armor.

  So they didn’t regroup. They were dead dead dead, as dead as doornails, dead like Ashley Jackson.

  She took the notebook from the place she’d given it on the bookshelf. “You and me, Bridget, my dear,” she said. “You and me. We’ve got each other, and that’s about it.”

  She found the page that she’d marked, and she set the notebook beside the computer so she could continue to transcribe as she read.

  Declan Callaghan was on a ladder tipped against the side of the house when I returned from my walk. I had James in his carriage, and he had fallen asleep, tired from running up and down the grass at the park. Anna was unwell and had gone back to bed while Harry and Edward were in school.

  “You look like you could use the rest,” I told Anna, and Anna’s face opened briefly in such gratitude and relief that I felt an unexpected tenderness toward her; I nearly cried.

  I nearly cried at a lot of things then.

  The day was warm, and the sky was the sort of blue that was so clear it almost hurt to look at it. Summer was not far away, and with summer would come the trip to Nantucket.

&n
bsp; I sat for a moment with James, still asleep, on the front steps. There was a staggering amount of work awaiting me inside: the week’s ironing, plus the sheets hanging on the line that needed to be brought in and put back on the beds, plus some mending of Harry’s pants, and then the dinner food to prepare. The thought of completing even one of those tasks wearied me beyond belief, and I rested my elbows on my thighs and my head in my hands.

  When I did that, my arms pressed against my breasts, which were so sore that I gasped from the pressure.

  “Bridget!” said Declan Callaghan, climbing down from the ladder. He was sweating; his face, like mine, reddened easily, and was red now. When he was nearly down, he dropped his hammer on the ground and said, “Jesus!” Only he pronounced it “Jaysus,” and I felt a longing for my father, and for Ireland, and for anyone else who might say “Jaysus” in just that way.

  Declan sat down next to me. “He looks peaceful enough,” he said, looking at James.

  I shrugged. “Sure he is.”

  “What do you hear from home?”

  “Oh, the same,” I said. I was dressed too warmly for the day; all I wanted to do was lay my head down on the bricks and fall asleep. Still, Declan was being kind, and I wanted to try. I would try. “Marriages, babies, farming, the dances, all the rest of it. You know.”

  He waited a beat, and I said nothing, and into the silence he said, “Ah, marriages.”

  I looked at him and then down. I could see the sweat coming through his shirt. His work boots had a semicircle of mud on each tip.

  “I’m a citizen now,” he said. “I’ll never go back. This is home, now.”

  “Is it?”

  “ ’Tis.”

  I thrilled to that too, I missed my father.

  “I’m buying a house, I’ve already bought it.”

  “You, Declan Callaghan? You’ve bought a house?”

  “I have. A lovely house, a lovely white house with a gambrel roof. I just need a wife to complete it.” He winked. “Do you know of any good little Irish lasses looking to live over on Milk Street?”