So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  The first noise was the one that woke me. The crash, the fall that came after. It seemed like the falling went on forever. It takes a long time for a little body to make its way down a flight of stairs.

  Then the screams. Not James’s—he was silenced. It was Anna’s screams I heard, and that’s what sent me running, and sent the boys running too, from their room, and also Charles, and so we all arrived at the same time to see Anna on the floor bending over James, whose head was turned at a strange angle, an angle that couldn’t be right.

  Anna looked first at me, pure venom. “You left the gate unlatched.”

  To Charles, who was pushing past me to get to James, “Do something.” Then, louder, hysterical, “Do something!”

  But of course there was nothing to be done.

  I started to say, “But I didn’t… I wasn’t… I know—”

  “You stupid child,” Anna spat at me. “You don’t know anything.” Then she began to wail. “Take her away!” she said. “Get her out of my sight. Take her away from me forever. Do you hear me? Get her out of my house.”

  Charles didn’t look at me; he too was bent over James. He said, “Bridget. Go.”

  It was the middle of the night, but what could I do? I gathered the few things from my room, and I obeyed. All the way to Milk Street in the dark, stumbling every now and then, crying.

  “Declan,” I said, banging on his door. “Let me in. Let me in, Declan. I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  I hadn’t left the gate unlatched. Charles must have done so, returning to his room.

  New Year’s Eve, seven o’clock, Natalie in the back of her father’s pristine Lexus, feeling very much like the child who had been driven up and down Route 95 making sales calls to doctors’ offices.

  They went to Mistral, which was the fanciest restaurant Natalie had ever been to, and Natalie watched as her father paid thirty dollars for the valet parking alone. While they waited for their table—it was an eight o’clock reservation—her father drank a martini at the bar, and Julia had a seltzer water with a lime in it. Natalie and Julia sat on the barstools while Natalie’s father stood behind, hovering, like a mother hen (a father hen).

  Natalie drank a Shirley Temple, which she thought was horrifically juvenile, but her father ordered it without asking her and in fact she did enjoy it. When she and Hannah were younger they had practiced tying the cherry stems in knots with their tongues. Over and over again they practiced until an entire jar of cherries was gone. Hannah learned to tie the knot and Natalie never did.

  Julia asked Natalie questions: about school, about what she had done over the vacation (nothing, was the honest and mortifying reply), about what she wanted to be when she grew up (Natalie hadn’t thought about this in such a long time that she went with her default answer from fifth grade even though she no longer really believed it: a vet). Natalie felt her dislike of Julia begin to dissolve: she was lively, she was interested, she was, in the yellow glow of the restaurant’s lights, pretty. Sort of.

  When Julia rose to go to the bathroom Natalie’s father said, “So, Nat, how’s your mother doing?”

  She said, “I don’t know. Okay, I guess.” She chewed her lip and looked around the restaurant. When she turned back to her father, the expression on his face was one of such despair and consternation that, in an effort to erase it, she found herself saying, “I think she’s better. Getting better. She’s taking some medicine—”

  “Really?” Her father brightened.

  “Yeah. And her job, that’ll be good.”

  Her father said, “Job?”

  “At Talbots, downtown. Didn’t she tell you?”

  Her father took a long sip of his drink. “No,” he said. “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Oh,” said Natalie. “I thought you told her to do that. I thought you made her.”

  “Made her? Natalie, believe me, it’s beyond my power to make your mother do anything.” Natalie wasn’t sure what that meant. It was bewildering, the grown-up world, everybody hinting around but not really coming out and saying anything.

  Natalie sucked at the remains of her Shirley Temple. She had saved the cherry for last, as she always did, and she ate it now, savoring it, chewing on the stem to get all the juice. She didn’t try to tie the knot.

  She said, “Dad—”

  Suddenly she wanted to tell him everything she’d told her mother, but with the hope of a different reaction: about the texts, the bewildering transformation of Hannah Morgan, the website that had appeared and then disappeared, Bridget’s notebook. She wanted to ask him what he knew about their house and who had lived there; she wanted to talk to him about the family tree, scratched out on the yellow legal pad.

  She thought, there in the restaurant, with its buttery walls, its bright-white tablecloths, its bustling waiters, that she could open up to him. She wanted to tell him about Hannah Morgan and Taylor Grant in Vail. He would throw back his head and laugh: they’d laugh together. “God, how pretentious,” he’d say. “Vail? Are you kidding me?”

  She said, “Dad—”

  But he was talking at the same time, talking quickly, and he was saying, “Listen, Natalie, I wanted to tell you this on my own, before Julia gets back, Julia and I…”

  She felt an ominous black ball forming in her belly.

  “We’re going to have a baby!”

  The room was spinning.

  “In the summer we’re going to have a baby, at the end of July.”

  Now he was watching Julia, who was weaving her way back from the bathroom. When she reached them he caught her hand briefly before letting it drop. Natalie had the sense of watching two people on a stage from the back of the audience.

  Her father said to Julia, “I told her our news.”

  Our news. Natalie could have vomited. She shook her glass so that the ice cubes clinked together.

  Julia flushed and turned to Natalie. “Isn’t it exciting? A baby! I never thought I’d have a baby.” Natalie thought of the black bra in the bedroom. “And you’ll have a little brother or sister.”

  Her father said, “Natalie?” but she didn’t look up from her plate.

  She could hardly eat her dinner—prime sirloin with corn whipped potato and golden chanterelles, and for dessert, a warm chocolate torte with vanilla ice cream and crème anglaise. Anytime she looked up, she saw Julia’s head tipped toward her father. When the check came her father reached for it, and Julia said blithely, “It’s my turn to pay,” sliding a card into the thin black check holder. All around them there was the low and steady buzz of a restaurant filling up, the mysterious rhythm of adult laughter. It seemed that in all of this there was no room for Natalie.

  When she got home she left a message for Kathleen at the Archives. She could have called the home number, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, but she didn’t. She said, “Can I come down to get the notebook back?”

  “Oh, my God,” Kathleen said. “Oh, my God.”

  She read the line again: Let me in, Declan, I’ve got nowhere else to go.

  The timer for the pasta sounded. Kathleen strained it too quickly, nearly splashing some of the scalding water on her arm. She checked the Bolognese. It looked delectable. And it seemed to be pleading with her for a better fate than that of the pot roast she’d made the previous month: shoved into an inadequately sized refrigerator, later thrown away. Food couldn’t plead, though. (She was hallucinating. Add it to the list.)

  She wanted to call Natalie to tell her what she’d just read. But Natalie didn’t want to talk to her, and even if she did she didn’t have her phone; her mother had taken it away. Because of what she, Kathleen, had done.

  She turned on the television. In Times Square, thousands and thousands of people stood shoulder to shoulder. How could they stand it? What if you had to go to the bathroom, needed a sip of water? She wouldn’t have been able to stand it. She was positive that, had she been in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, she would have given up long before midnight and would have run
screaming through the crowds.

  The camera focused in on a child wearing a pair of glittery glasses with the number 2010 cut out around the eyeholes. The glasses were too big for the child—a girl—and she had to hold her chin at an impossible angle to keep them on. How old was she? Six, maybe seven: front teeth missing. Was this child expected to stay up until midnight? What kind of parents were these?

  You should talk, Kathleen Lynch, she told herself morosely. You should talk.

  She had a little more wine, and then she called Neil. Surely he was out, but she called anyway.

  Neil was not out. Neil was at home, staining Henri’s outrageously expensive crib with Australian timber oil. “I blew everything else off, to finish this,” he said. “It’s supposed to be sheer. But I’m not sure it’s supposed to be completely invisible. That seems sort of like it defeats the purpose. Why, what’s up?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’ve just… well, I made a bunch of food, and it’s sitting here on the kitchen counter, and I’m not that hungry.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” said Neil. “I just stuffed myself with Upper Crust. Slice of the day. It’s the Fenway: sausage, pepper, onion. I’m completely bursting. I went on a total binge.”

  Kathleen took a deep breath. “Oh,” she said.

  Neil said, “Damn it.” Then, “Sorry, Kath, I think I just messed up. Good thing the goddamn stain is invisible.”

  Nobody called her Kath. That was even less common than Katie. She liked it. She took a deep breath, exhaled. “Also,” she said. “I’m… well, I guess I’m a bit low.” Another breath. “I guess I could use a friend.” This was hard to say, and after she said it she waited.

  “Kathleen? Don’t say another word. I’m on my way.”

  Kathleen pictured a cartoon character leaving tracks behind him.

  She was agitated, waiting for Neil. She was shaken by what she’d read, but she didn’t want to talk about that with Neil. She wanted to put the notebook away, and talk about it another time with Natalie. She went into her bedroom and took out Susannah’s First Communion picture. She brought it back to the kitchen and placed it on the counter. It looked incongruous next to the pot of Bolognese sauce, with a bunch of aging bananas bordering it on the other side, but she didn’t care. She spent some time admiring Susannah’s wide eyes, the hopeful quality to her smile. Heartbreaking. She felt the memory of Susannah at that age—second grade, it would have been, spring of second grade—tumble into the great, yawning hole inside of her.

  She picked up the notebook and read the end again, just to be sure she had it right. (She did.) She put it away, underneath the pillow in her bedroom.

  Neil arrived without ceremony, without even knocking, and for that she was grateful, because she wanted to get right to it. She had a glass of wine waiting for him. She served them both giant bowls of the pasta and the sauce. “Stop grimacing,” she told him. “You don’t have to finish it. I just want to serve it.”

  “Give it to Lucy,” he said. “She’s looking sort of svelte, don’t you think?”

  She ran her hands along Lucy’s sides. “She is, actually. We’ve been walking a lot. Haven’t we, Luce?”

  “She looks like she’s actually going to answer you,” said Neil. “God, I swear that dog is part human.”

  “Not part,” said Kathleen. “All.” Lucy retreated to the living room and Kathleen motioned for Neil to sit at one end of the table while she sat at the other end. She brought the First Communion picture over as well and placed it in the center of the table.

  “Do you know what the detective told me when Susannah disappeared?”

  Neil shook his head.

  “He told me that there’s nothing scarier than a teenage girl, nothing more dangerous.”

  Kathleen fixed her eyes on Susannah, looking at the gap between her too-big teeth, the glimpse of the lace along the neck of the dress—borrowed, Kathleen remembered, from a neighbor with a daughter two years older. It had been hard to find a dress to fit Susannah because she was tall for her age, as Kathleen had told Natalie.

  And even though the neighbor’s girl had been tall too (what was her name? Kathleen couldn’t remember), Susannah was taller; the dress was supposed to fall to midcalf but instead hit just at the knee. Kathleen remembered the shoes, too: white patent leather with a buckle at the ankle. Brand-new, and worn only that one time.

  It bothered her that she couldn’t remember the name of the neighbor’s girl.

  Her hands were shaking. She pressed them to the table to steady them, but the shaking seemed to be traveling through her whole body. Her bowl of pasta sat untouched, as did Neil’s. She took a tiny bite. It was delicious (another culinary triumph), but she had no appetite.

  Erin! That was the girl who had lent them the First Communion dress. Of course. Erin. In those days, in their neighborhood, you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting at least one person named Erin. This Erin had become a nurse, married a cop, moved to Quincy. She probably had a gaggle of children by now, spots on her chest from too much sun on the Cape in the summer.

  Kathleen leaned toward Neil. She thought that, had they been closer in age, to somebody passing by outside they might look like two parents discussing a troublesome toddler, or two lovers having a conversation about something intimate and complicated.

  “I think he was right. Let me tell you how scary girls can be, Neil, girls that age. You have no idea. The hold they have over each other: God, it’s terrifying. Really, truly, there’s nothing scarier than a teenage girl.”

  Neil, sitting there, made Kathleen think of a schoolboy taking in a lesson.

  “Kathleen, you don’t have to tell me all of this—”

  She held up a hand. “I was seeing this therapist, you know, to help me through it. I had nobody else. Every week I climbed the stairs to her office—she was on the third floor, an old three-family on Broad Street, it was turned into a medical building, peeling brown wallpaper on the stairs, some sort of flowery design. Every week I sat there, as dutiful as a puppy, on this blue couch with cushions that were too big to sit back against. You know the kind I mean?” She paused and waited; it seemed important that Neil understand about the cushions.

  He nodded. “Too puffy,” he said. “I hate that.”

  “Me too.” She nodded vigorously. “This therapist, I’ve forgotten her name now, I guess I blocked it out, told me that it was her job to make sure I was taking care of myself. She told me I had to get Susannah out of my mind, that I had to release myself from responsibility for her. She told me my survival was at stake.”

  “And?”

  “Of course I couldn’t follow her advice.” Kathleen looked around the house. “How could I? Susannah was all I had, she was my one and only. I mean, this therapist’s job wasn’t to take care of Susannah, but mine was. I changed Susannah’s diapers, Neil. I remember a happy, skipping three-year-old with this laugh that strangers would turn around to smile at. I remember the way her hair smelled—the way her hand felt holding mine when we crossed the street, her hot little hand. I remember her at this age” (she pointed at the photograph) “and as a preteen, and then as a teenager. Learning to drive, learning to cook, braiding her hair, all of it. I remember all of it. I was the one who got up with her in the middle of the night when she was sick or scared, the only one who got up with her, the only one here, all the time.” This seemed to bear repeating. “The. Only. One. And I’m the one who let her go.”

  “You didn’t let her go. She just went. It wasn’t your fault.” Lucy returned from the living room, padding into the kitchen and standing in the center of the room. “She looks like she has an announcement to make,” said Neil, watching her. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she cleared her throat.”

  Kathleen could see that he was trying to lighten the mood, but she didn’t want it lightened. “She never said good-bye. She just… left. She just left.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You don’t know,” Kathleen answered. “I mea
n that with all due respect. But you don’t know. You can’t know.”

  Neil shifted, took a sip of wine. “How did you get over it?”

  “I didn’t. I’m not over it. I’ll never be over it. I went to support groups, I went to more therapy, different therapists.”

  “Better cushions,” said Neil sagely.

  “Exactly. You name it and I went to it.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Sometimes. Yes. No. I don’t go anymore. I probably should. I was in this support group for a while, and this woman who was the leader of it, she had this thing she used to say. Another moment, just like this.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “That’s how you get through the days. One moment, then another moment, then another one after that—”

  “I see,” said Neil.

  “Technically, I shouldn’t be talking to you about this. They told us, in one of the groups I belonged to, not to talk about this kind of stuff with people who haven’t been through it themselves. You know, not to talk to normal people about it.”

  “Civilians,” said Neil.

  “Right. That’s why I don’t talk about Susannah at the Archives. People who have been there for a long time, they know I used to have a daughter and now I don’t, but they don’t know any more than that.”

  “But you still have a daughter.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t. I can’t think of it that way. But every so often I wake up in the middle of the night, and this phrase goes through my mind: I lost my daughter.”

  “Kathleen.”

  “Can you imagine what that feels like? I lost her.”

  Neil shook his head slowly. “No. But it sounds to me like it’s the other way around, like she lost herself.”

  “Well.” Kathleen poked at the bowl of pasta. Lucy lay down in the middle of the floor and let out a low whine. “I know, yes, that’s true. But there had to have been something I could have done, something I didn’t do, something I could have protected her from.”