So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  I shook my head; I couldn’t help smiling. I thought of my father playing the fiddle, my sisters dancing to it, all of them in the parish dancing to it. My father was one of the best fiddlers for miles. The phrase came to me suddenly: around the house and mind the dresser.

  Declan stood up. “I must get back to work. I don’t want to get on the wrong side of Dr. Turner. But you know that, living with him.”

  I felt a strange sensation behind my temple: a rhythmic throbbing. “What do you mean?”

  “The temper! The man may as well be Irish, the way he flies off.”

  I said, “Oh, now.”

  Declan nodded. “And I guess I’ll check my wages too, when I get them, to see that I don’t get cheated.”

  “Cheated?”

  “He’s a cheap one, he is. Some lads I know did work for him in the past. But never again is what they told me.”

  “Then why do you?”

  “Because it allows me to see you.”

  It was difficult for me to reconcile this image of Dr. Turner with the Charles that I knew: the soft hands, the gentle voice. “I don’t believe you,” I said to Declan.

  Yet working out anything in my mind proved difficult at that point anyway. My head was too heavy for my neck. Oh, I was so tired.

  Declan rose.

  He said, “Chin up, Bridget O’Connell. You’re too pretty to look like that on a day like this.”

  I thought again of all the work waiting for me inside. I thought I might be sick. I wanted to call Grainne, but I was not permitted to use the telephone.

  “Girl like you,” Declan said. “You could have any man you wanted, you know. You just need to point and choose. Think about it, will you? A lovely little house over on Milk Street, a real roof, a far cry from the thatch you’d have at home.”

  I said nothing. James, waking, pointed at the sky and said, “Birdie!”

  Anyway, why did I need to call Grainne? What was I calling to ask? I already knew the answer.

  Declan said, “Little lads and lasses running about, enough for our very own ceili.”

  Not long after that, Charles told me that in July we were going to Nantucket. As a family.

  “Everyone?” I’d said. Meaning, me too?

  “Everyone. Elsie and Arthur will join us for a week of it too,” he said. “You’ll continue your duties. But you see the place is smaller—you might be in with the children. At night.” I felt something coil in my stomach at that: I remember it like it was yesterday. In with James, that would have been fine, that would have been lovely, but in with Harry and Edward, their stealthy tormenting of me, the thought of that was too much to bear.

  He said, “Anna must never know about this. You understand that.”

  I said, “I know.” Then I said, “Of course I know that.” Because what did he take me for?

  He reached for me after that, but I pulled away. He thought it was because of the conversation about Nantucket, but really it was something else—my body felt different, not like mine, and I didn’t want anyone near me.

  It was too early for the quickening. But looking back I believe that is when I felt something. I knew.

  From the gravy boat smashed on the floor to this moment—the blink of an eye, a world turned upside down, a doctor’s hand reaching out to touch a swollen ankle, and all my fault after that because I was greedy.

  Natalie’s mother was working every day now, and Natalie, who thought she’d been at loose ends before, was now really at loose ends, with school out until after the new year. (Thing number twenty-one: loose ends.)

  On Monday she wandered around downtown, hoping to run into Christian Chapman, but she didn’t: he had probably gone up to Vermont or New Hampshire with his snowboard, with his divorced and guilty father.

  Once she walked by Talbots downtown and stood peering inside, watching her mother folding shirts; her mother was looking down, the little tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner the way it did when she was concentrating hard.

  On Tuesday she went for a walk in Maudslay Park. Everyone she passed, it seemed, had a dog or a friend to walk with, and the openness of the sky above her, the tangle of the tree roots on the ground, the crunch of the frostbitten grass and leaves under her feet, all of these seemed to underscore her solitariness. (Thing number twenty-two: solitariness.)

  On Wednesday she called Kathleen Lynch, but nobody answered. She didn’t leave a message.

  On Thursday her father called her. “We’re taking you out tonight, me and Julia. Remember? New Year’s Eve. We talked about this, right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Natalie, lying. “Yeah, I guess so, maybe.”

  “We’ll wine and dine you,” he said. “Wear something nice.”

  In spite of herself, she smiled. “Dad,” she said. “I’m thirteen. I don’t drink wine.”

  “We’ll stick with the dining, then,” her father said, and his voice took on a jovial quality that she found hard to resist.

  “Okay,” she said. She nodded, as though her father could see her. “Okay, you got it.”

  She pulled a dress out of her closet. It was from the summertime; it would be too short, because she had grown since then, and it was inappropriate for the weather, but she had nothing else: she’d wear her coat.

  After she closed her phone, she opened her computer. She had bookmarked the page with her photograph on it, and even though she told herself she would never look at it again she looked at it all the time. She looked to see who had said what about her, to see what they’d said, to see how bad it was getting. She had bookmarked it! What a loser, she said to herself sometimes, pulling it up, her stomach churning, her guts tied into knots. She was an active participant in her own grim fate.

  This day, though, New Year’s Eve day, she hit the link and got a perplexing page not found message. Refresh. Nothing. Again, refresh. The page was gone.

  Kathleen didn’t know if children even learned cursive these days. She remembered Susannah bent over the kitchen table, the tangle of her ponytail, one leg bent beneath her in a triangle, working at the penmanship sheets that came home with her every Tuesday. What grade was that? Second? Third? Did it matter? No, it did not.

  She remembered her own cursive instruction at the hands of the nuns. Even now her penmanship was perfect, it had been drilled into her, rulers firmly applied to the backs of her prepubescent knuckles.

  All that week, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Kathleen read the notebook. When she wasn’t working, she read; when she was supposed to be working—she read then too. It was slow going because she was transcribing as she read, continuing the notes Natalie had made.

  Carol called a couple of times: post-Christmas blues, she said, the grandkids had left, and my God they were annoying when they were here but when they were gone there was sort of a hole.

  “Carol,” said Kathleen. “I can’t.”

  “You can’t what? You can’t do anything? Drink? After-Christmas sales at the Atrium?”

  “The Atrium?” said Kathleen. “I don’t think they put anything on sale at the Atrium. No. Thank you, but no. I’m buried with work.”

  Neil stopped by her desk at odd times of the day, just as he usually did. He hadn’t heard from Adam, then he had heard from Adam, but something seemed off. Then everything seemed great with Adam, but Neil was panicking that he’d never get Henri’s room done in time. He hadn’t hung the curtains. Would Kathleen like to come over and hang curtains with him? He would make fondue—

  “Neil,” she said firmly. “I can’t.”

  He peered over her shoulder. “Wait,” he said. “Isn’t that…”

  She felt like a child taking a spelling test, covering her paper with the crook of her elbow. “Maybe,” she said. “Now shoo.”

  “Didn’t you—”

  “Neil!” she said. “I’m busy. I love you to death, you know that, but I’m busy.”

  She brought the notebook to and from work with her. The light in the l
iving room wasn’t terrific, so more often she sat at the kitchen table, Lucy sleeping beside her.

  I began having more strange dreams—dreams about my family back in Ireland, dreams about little James, much bigger than he was, ten or eleven years old, talking to me in another language, a language I didn’t speak.

  Elsie and Arthur came around more, it seems they were always around. Lots of whispered conversations between Charles and Arthur, doors closed while they were talking.

  “You know how it is,” said Elsie, laughing. “Men and their business dealings.” She said this in the same way she once said, “Men and their cars!”

  I don’t know where Anna was during all this time. She was lying down, she was writing letters, she was sitting in the straight-backed chair in the living room looking out the window for long periods of time while the boys ran in and out. But anyway she was absent enough for Elsie to be able to observe me, and for her to be able to come up behind me in the kitchen when I was working at the sink.

  She said, “You don’t have to tell him, you know.”

  Carefully, looking at the water, at the silverware from breakfast I was washing, I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I turned. Then she laughed, right in my face, her mouth open so wide I could see the strings of spittle at the back of her throat, so close to me that I could smell her breath, her perfume, see the way her makeup caked in the fine lines around her eyes, I could see the outline she put around her lips to change their shape.

  “Oh, don’t you?” she said. “I think you do.”

  “You don’t know me at all,” I said. “You don’t know anything.”

  “Bridget,” she said. “Don’t get your fiery Irish temper up with me, I’m on your side. Probably the only one who is.”

  I paused at that. She was right.

  “Arthur is buying a new car,” she said. “A Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. He’s just ordered it from the plant in Springfield. We’ll have it by the summer.”

  Was I supposed to react to this? I knew nothing of cars, didn’t know one from another. Back at home we used horses to draw the hay home for winter feed. We used horses for everything.

  But she pressed on: “Do you know how much that costs?”

  I didn’t, of course. I shook my head.

  “Fifteen thousand dollars.”

  Still I had nothing to say. I couldn’t even begin to understand that kind of money.

  She leaned even closer, if this was possible, and said, “Do you know what I’m saying to you, Bridget? I’m saying that I have”—here she cleared her throat, which she did often, because she had one of those smoky cigarette voices, she smoked all the time (drank, too, she showed me once that she kept a flask in her garter)—“that I have money. Lots of it. I’m not afraid to spend it. And if you need help, well, then I’ll use my money to help you. Charles has no money to help you.”

  This was an added blow, and she saw it on my face because she said with some pity, “You didn’t know that, did you?” She sighed. “You don’t know much, my darling girl.”

  I said, “I know that he loves me.”

  She laughed long and hard at that, so long and hard that Anna called from the other room to see what was the matter, so Elsie lowered her voice when she said, “Oh, Bridget, silly Bridget, if you believe that, then you are not as clever as I assumed you to be, not by half.”

  Kathleen closed the notebook, marking her place carefully with a scrap of paper. Reading the cramped writing was making her head hurt, and her eyes felt like they were straining in their sockets. She remembered her mother, in the months before her death, her litany of ailments always at the ready: can’t see like I used to, can’t hear like I used to, can’t taste like I used to. “Lucy,” she said. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

  The walk was short, and though it was nighttime she thought she saw from the glow of the streetlamps that Lucy was limping. “Can’t walk like you used to, eh, old girl?” she said. Add it to the list. Neither of them was getting any younger.

  Elsie arranged the whole thing. For a Thursday, my day off. But of course she couldn’t pick me up at the house; she said she would meet me down at the corner of Titcomb Street, which was far enough away to make it unlikely for anyone I knew to see us. And we planned to meet early enough that most people weren’t out anyway. There was something about the light that reminded me of home, of the morning grass on my bare feet, the sounds the horses made when my father hitched them to the plow.

  Elsie was late; I stood there for a good long time, watching the light grow brighter and brighter, the long, thin strands of pink and orange in the direction of the river. I started to think that I’d made the whole thing up, that she wasn’t coming, that she had no need to come.

  But she came, and I sat in the car, and we drove for miles and miles and miles, all along Route 1, and then into the city, to Commonwealth Avenue, a grand street lined with grand homes. She pulled up in front of one of these and pointed to a little door just visible through an alleyway.

  I thought she would bring me in, but she didn’t. I was shaking and shivering; my heart was clattering away. Elsie waited while I got out. She pressed bills into my hand and said, “Don’t bother counting it, it’s right, I’ve already checked.” She said, “They’re expecting you.” She said, “I’ll come for you in a while.”

  When I got back in the car later she said, “Is it done?”

  “It’s done.”

  She looked at me appraisingly. “You’re looking well enough,” she said. “Better than I did, coming out of it, anyway.”

  I was too tired to answer her, too tired to register what she’d said, too tired for anything except resting my head back on the seat and feeling them both inside me, the lie and the baby, the baby and the lie, the lie and the baby…

  I hid the money inside my shoe. It was more than I had been expecting. I thought of it as a start for myself, a little bit of salvation.

  On New Year’s Eve, Kathleen went to the grocery store after work. She wanted to make a Bolognese sauce. She looked in vain for Melissa Henderson and took her failure to appear as a sign of betrayal: Where are you when I need you, Melissa? Where is Natalie? Where is anyone?

  With the sauce bubbling on the stove she realized the futility of another meal for four or six laid out before a party of one. She was definitely going crazy. That was the problem. “And herein lies the problem,” she said aloud, to nobody. Talking to herself: was that an official sign of insanity, or was that just what sane people thought about going insane? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t someone looking over your shoulder, somebody had told her once. That sort of thinking twisted her mind in knots.

  “I’m heading for the loony bin, Lucy,” she said. “Want to go to the loony bin with me?” Then she said, “Sorry,” because she realized that she had confused Lucy, who thought they really were going somewhere together. “Sorry, sweetheart,” she said, and she bent to rub the wide white stripe on the bridge of Lucy’s pointy nose. “I didn’t mean to tease.”

  She sat there for a moment on the floor with Lucy and took stock of all the different ways she might be losing her mind.

  a. Professor Paterson had never answered her email. She was out of her league; she didn’t know what to do about the bullying, and yet she couldn’t pull herself away. Professor Paterson didn’t like her; Natalie didn’t like her; nobody liked her.

  b. She had wasted fifty-three dollars and twenty-four cents on her last culinary effort, and now she was in the process of making another meal nobody would eat. Waste! She was a waster. If the planet went to hell it would be mostly her fault.

  c. She had become careless at work. She had a stack of letters on her desk, letters from real people seeking real answers to their questions, and she had not answered them. She had fallen behind because all she wanted to do was concentrate on Bridget’s notebook. The Archives was the only place in the world where she shone, where she had ever shone, and even there
she wasn’t shining. She might never shine again.

  d. She had driven all the way to Newburyport to deliver Bridget’s notebook to Natalie and she had neglected to leave it behind. While there, while trying to help, she had gotten the girl in more trouble. She hadn’t helped. She had done the opposite; she had un-helped.

  e. Susannah. Was she ready to think about it? No, she wasn’t. She needed more wine.

  f. Was she becoming an alcoholic?

  g. She had also failed dismally with Hannah Morgan’s mother. She had failed as a mother, and she had failed with the mothers. Failures, failures, all around her.

  h. Her only true friends were Lucy, Neil, and Carol. Neil was about to become a father, and he would no longer be able to be her friend; little Henri would gobble up all of his time, and Adam’s too—and there, in a blink, would go the architects of the only social life she had. Lucy was a dog. Carol was wonderful, really lovely, but she was so far above the world’s disappointments that you felt obnoxious dragging her down into the sewage of your own blunders.

  i. More wine (f!).

  j. She had never imagined, when it all happened, that she would lose her daughter forever.

  k. Was it forever yet?

  l. No. But it was close.

  The gourmet pasta she’d bought ($9 a pound, astonishing, and she had bought it anyway) took a full fourteen minutes to cook—the more you paid, the longer you waited, apparently, so Kathleen turned back to the notebook. She was almost at the end.

  This night is the hardest thing for me to write about. I’ve hardly let myself think about this night—through most of my life I’ve kept it tamped down, tied up, stored in a little box in my mind that I never let myself open.

  I am opening the little box now, and after I write this I will close it again; perhaps I will keep it closed forever and ever.

  I was in my room when it happened. I was sleeping, the sleep of a poor girl, lonely and exhausted, the sleep of the dead, the sleep of the guilty.