So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  “But there wasn’t.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”

  Later, with both of them looking straight ahead at the television, it was easy enough for Neil to say, “Kathleen? What made you tell me all this now? Tonight? I mean I’m glad you did, but I’m just curious about the impetus.”

  “Impetus,” she said. “I like that word.” She didn’t say it, but she knew the answer had something to do with Natalie, with Ashley Jackson, and with Bridget’s story too: girls alone, girls struggling. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something about the new year, I guess.”

  Neil said, “Good enough.”

  Just then the ball began its descent down the pole.

  “Oh God,” Neil said softly. “Did Dick Clark just count wrong? Oh, that’s awful. I can hardly watch.”

  Kathleen, lost in her reverie, hadn’t heard. When the ball reached the bottom, Neil leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  And it was the kiss, ultimately, after all they had talked about that night, that brought the tears, though she tried to hide them from Neil when she said, “You, sir, are a true friend.”

  He smiled. “Don’t go all maudlin on me, boss.”

  “No, I mean it.” She put her hand on his arm, his smooth, gym-toned arm. Baby skin was what it reminded her of. “Really, Neil. Little Henri is so lucky to have you and Adam.”

  “You think so?” He looked so eager and childlike that her heart, which she already thought was well wrung out, twisted once again.

  “I do,” she said softly. “Happy New Year, Neil.”

  “Happy New Year, babe.”

  Kathleen saw the light blinking on her phone at work: a message. She listened to it. “Kathleen? Can I… can I come get the notebook back?” This time she left a number. “That’s my cell,” she said. “I got it back from my mom. I think I want to do the project. Let me know.”

  Kathleen lifted the notebook from her bag. She thought she had finished on New Year’s Eve, but she flipped through it again and saw that after a few blank pages were two more pages of writing.

  My story didn’t end there, when I knocked on Declan Callaghan’s door in the middle of the night. No story ends like that. Mine was a life, like any other—it kept going and going, the way lives do.

  I named the baby James.

  Declan didn’t want to, but I insisted.

  He was nothing like the first James. He was more serious and knowing—wise about the world. It seemed he came out of my womb that way.

  “Imagine when I tell them at home!” I said to Declan, just after he was born. “That I had him in a hospital, with nurses and a doctor and food brought to me after on a tray.”

  The Turners moved away. I heard they moved to Boston, I do not know the details of that. I never saw them again. Probably Charles is dead and gone now; Anna, most likely, too—and the boys, who knows, I bet they are around somewhere, unaware of all the rest of it, that part of their family lives on through me.

  So then what?

  You keep on going, day after day. You learn things. You learn how to quiet your baby in the middle of the night. You have two children, and then three, the last one a beautiful little girl who looks so much like your favorite sister that you name her after that sister: Fiona. Your little Fiona’s face is a map of Ireland, that’s what people tell you, and sometimes you are surprised by how true that seems; looking at her, you can see your mother bent over the hearth, you can feel the heat of the fire, you can hear your sisters’ laughter when they do the bonfire dance, around the house and mind the dresser.

  Every now and then you go back and you reread the letter you were writing to Fiona all that winter and spring and summer, the letter where you told her everything that happened, the letter where you told her not to come to America. You never send the letter, but she never comes anyway. And when you learn of her death you cry harder than you’ve ever cried for anything in your life, harder than you cried for little baby James, so hard you feel as if your body has turned itself inside out. You die a little bit yourself that day.

  There are happy times too. Even a life with its share of tragedy is made up of small happy moments as well: the pleasure of diving under a wave in the ocean, a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, a perfectly folded fitted sheet, teaching your daughter the treble jig, eating ice cream from a cone in August, the first smile of your last child.

  One day, when you are forty-five years old, you go to Nantucket. It is as beautiful as everyone told you it would be. You stand with your bare feet in the sand looking out at the ocean and you remember who you were nearly a quarter of a century ago, and what you did, and what you didn’t do.

  And then your husband will take your hand, and press it to his cheek, and you will stand like that for several minutes, and you will think that this is happiness, that maybe you didn’t miss out on it after all. Five years later, when he dies from a cancerous growth on his liver that nobody knew about, you will remember this moment. You will remember thinking it: This is happiness.

  You drop a gravy boat; a doctor touches your swollen ankle; your world changes forever, the blink of an eye, a lost girl, found.

  You learn things. You learn that solace can come from unlikely sources.

  It’s a life, like any other. You’re not finished living it.

  Bridget O’Connell Callaghan, Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1975

  Kathleen called the number Natalie had left. Voice mail. “Absolutely you can have your notebook back,” she said. “Of course you can. And I have a question for you—the notebook mentions a letter, a letter from Bridget to her sister Fiona. Is there any chance you have that letter? Was that letter with the notebook when you found it? I know that’s a long shot. But call me back, and we’ll figure out how to get this to you. I don’t want to mail it, too much risk of its getting lost. So call me back.”

  Next she looked up the number for Dr. Quinn, Lucy’s vet. Nobody answered the phone there either. Voice mail! Was the entire planet going to voice mail? Was nobody answering phones anymore? She left a message there too. “I’m calling about my dog,” she said. “Lucy Lynch.” It always felt strange to give a dog a last name, but there you were, the world was basically a proper place where certain formalities were expected. “She’s been coughing,” she said. “I’m not sure if I should be worrying. But. I am. Lucy Lynch, a border collie. Please call me back.”

  January, and with it the chill and low gray skies: a New England winter. Natalie, trudging to school on the first day back after Christmas vacation (they were supposed to call it winter break, but nobody did), longed for the sunshine. She thought, Global warming, where are you now? But the best the earth could do was to spit rain instead of snow, and it did so vengefully, so that inside the school as well as outside all felt damp and sodden, with wet footprints marking the hallway and coats stuffed inside lockers never quite drying before it was time to put them on again.

  Hannah Morgan and Taylor Grant came back with suntanned faces and lift tickets hanging from the zippers of their coats.

  Natalie thought about what Kathleen had said about waiting for the longest day of the year and then missing it. That made her think about something else Kathleen had said on that same car ride: into the gloaming. Here we go, she’d said. Into the gloaming.

  The countdown to the independent-study projects: eleven days. “I’m expecting really great things out of you,” Ms. Ramirez said. She was looking at Natalie. Natalie looked away.

  Then, suddenly: this. The principal announced, over the loudspeaker, an assembly for the entire school. The nature of the assembly was not disclosed, and Natalie, who had just come from a futile game of volleyball (“Use your height!” the gym teacher cried. “Natalie, your arms are a mile long. Reach for that one!”), sat flushed, still breathing heavily, in a chair in the darkened auditorium as first one school administrator, then another, stood at the podium and talked about the following:

  It had come to their attention that—r />
  There had been some stories in the national news recently saying—

  Some students in this school appeared to be engaged in—

  The recent suicide of a girl in Des Moines, a girl named Ashley Jackson, was significant because—

  The administration was issuing new rules having to do with—

  Natalie felt everything inside of her body constrict.

  Ms. McPherson, the guidance counselor, got up and said a few words. She was available; her door was always open; anyone who wanted to discuss the issues could come and talk to her. It was time, according to Ms. McPherson, to take the bull by the horns when it came to bullying (here she held her hands up as though she were indeed wrestling with a recalcitrant bull).

  Bull, bullying, Natalie figured that it was supposed to be a pun.

  Blown up large on a screen on the stage was a photograph of this girl, this Ashley Jackson, who had killed herself, asphyxiated herself in her parents’ garage. Natalie had never heard of her. Des Moines was so far away, another world, and yet Natalie couldn’t stop staring at the girl, trying to read her history.

  But what? Who? How? Not Natalie; she had never breathed a word to anyone at school. Not her mother. Kathleen Lynch? It could have been, must have been. Was it?

  The texts came during the assembly. This was strictly not allowed, using cell phones during an assembly, so they must have been subtle about sending them, as Natalie was subtle about reading them.

  U WOULDNT DARE, said the text.

  Another one: BUT U DID

  U R A RAT

  U WILL PAY 4 THIS

  Delete, went Natalie’s fingers on her phone’s keypad. Delete, delete, delete.

  She noticed that there was a voice mail, and inadvertently she deleted that at the same time. Delete delete.

  At home that night Natalie put her cell phone in her nightstand drawer. Then she took it out again, removed the battery, put the phone in a shoebox under her bed and the battery in a seldom-used drawer of her dresser, which held tights, long outgrown, and a gold necklace with a tiny cross that had belonged to her father’s mother, long dead. Everything was outgrown, everybody was dead.

  There was a word she had learned recently from a vocabulary list in Ms. Ramirez’s class, and it had stuck with her because it sounded foreign, exotic, and at the same time completely apt. The word: nadir. Surely this was the nadir.

  She took the phone back out of the drawer, replaced the battery, put it in her backpack.

  Natalie, walking home from school, tried to remember the old rhyme they used to say, something about a crack. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. What a terrible thing to say. And yet she stepped right on the next crack she came to—easily, almost gleefully.

  Then, from behind, a voice, her name: Christian Chapman, hair flopping, unzipped jacket flapping, sneakers slapping the sidewalk. “Hey! Hey, Nat.” Nat. Nobody called her Nat. Well, sometimes her mother, occasionally her father, but aside from them, nobody. She turned.

  “Oh,” she said, trying to garner every drop of self-confidence at her disposal, watching his bungling progress (to be so beautifully and unself-consciously clumsy— she envied him that; he must save the grace and athleticism for the snowboard).

  “Hey, Christian.”

  He caught up to her finally and stood facing her, chest heaving, cheeks slightly pinked from the cold and the exertion. She said, “What’s up?”

  “Where you headed?”

  She told him: home.

  “Where’s home, again? I forget.”

  She told him: Milk Street. “Oh,” he said. “That’s kinda far. You walk?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I used to take the bus, but I hate the bus.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I hate the bus. I’ll walk with you.”

  “You will?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Part of the way, anyway. Why not?”

  She trained her eyes on the sidewalk; she thought that if she looked up he would see her furious blushing. They were walking together down High Street—she, Natalie Gallagher, was walking with Christian Chapman down High Street.

  Christian was close enough to Natalie that she could see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. The day, having started off cold and gray, had warmed up considerably; underneath Christian’s jacket he wore a thin gray T-shirt that looked regular but that Natalie guessed was made out of some fantastically expensive technical material.

  “So… did you study for the Science test yet?”

  She had forgotten about the Science test: shit.

  She said, “No, not really, I’ll probably do it today.”

  “Yeah? I have to start a few days early or I’ll never get it all. But not you—you’re one of the smart kids!”

  Insult or compliment? She couldn’t tell. A thirteen-year-old freshman was what she was, flat-chested, awkward, too young, too damn tall. She said, “Uh—”

  Christian said, “Hey, Natalie. Follow me.” He backed up against the stone wall that ran parallel to the street and pushed himself up until he was sitting on it. “I like to sit up here,” he said, shrugging. He looked adorable when he shrugged, like a little kid who didn’t know what he wanted at the ice cream store.

  “Come over here,” he said. He patted the stone beside him, and she clambered up too, though the wall was not all that accommodating, because the stones were set more for aesthetics than for comfort, and she could feel an oddly angled one attacking her through her jeans. “See?” Christian said. “That was no problem for you. That’s because you’re tall.”

  Was Christian Chapman leaning toward her? Was he going to kiss her? It didn’t seem possible. But the way he was looking at her—God, she would have no idea what to do if Christian Chapman kissed her, no clue about how to respond. But was he?

  A name flicked through her mind: Kathleen Lynch. Then another: Bridget O’Connell Callaghan. Then: Ms. Ramirez. She remembered, strangely, the sensation of being tucked in at night by her father, her insistence on having the sheets pulled so tightly around her body that she could scarcely breathe. All of these thoughts were hitting her so quickly and with such intensity that she would have been unable, if asked, to articulate them, and yet each seemed to stand individually, in alignment, like soldiers in her head.

  The mind was a strange instrument, somehow she had time to reflect upon that, but only just enough time, because a car swerved over from the center of the street toward them, not hitting them, but bumping briefly up on the curb and onto the sidewalk. Certainly it came close enough to cause them to react, and then it was gone, but not before its driver pressed the horn so loudly that the sound seemed to reverberate visibly.

  “What the hell was that?” said Christian.

  Natalie, mystified, bewildered, a little frightened, her heart battering her rib cage, said, “I don’t know.” But of course later, after the rest of it happened, she realized that she should have known, she should have known all along. And maybe she did. They weren’t old enough to drive; they’d brought others into it.

  Christian Chapman, who had disembarked from the wall and had walked a few steps away, turned and said, “Natalie? What are you doing up there still? Come on down. Follow me.”

  Follow me! Follow him. She would follow Christian Chapman anywhere. She was shaking, she was weak, but she would follow him to the moon, if only he’d ask.

  Dr. Quinn, the vet, was away, it turned out. Skiing. “Vail,” said the receptionist. “Lucky duck. But we have someone else in, Dr. Ryan.”

  “Okay,” said Kathleen. She led Lucy into the exam room. When Dr. Ryan entered and extended his hand in greeting, she said, “Geez. You’re just a puppy yourself.”

  He flushed at that. “Not really,” he said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Old enough,” he said. “Twenty-eight.”

  The age Susannah would have been. Was, was. Not would have been.

  He crouched next to Lucy. “What’s been going on?”
r />   Dr. Ryan felt all along Lucy’s back, along her sides; he placed his palms against her chest. He lifted her onto the examination table and looked into her eyes, her ears. “This cough,” he said. “Harsh and dry, or moist and productive?”

  “Harsh and dry,” said Kathleen. She felt a little dizzy. She sat down in the chair.

  “I do feel something,” he said. “Close to the chest wall, some sort of a mass.” He paused. “I think we need to aspirate this.”

  “You need to what?”

  “Aspirate,” he said. “We pass a needle through the chest wall, remove microscopic cells for evaluation.” Lucy was looking seriously at him.

  “Evaluate them for what?”

  “Cell abnormality.”

  “You mean cancer?”

  He took a deep breath, nodded. She had the urge to hug him—to comfort him. Wasn’t that strange? He was so young; he looked a little bit lost.

  “Today?”

  “No, we’ll need to sedate her for that. We’ll need another appointment.”

  “Do you think that’s what it is?”

  He tented his fingers. “A dog of her age, urban environment, it’s not out of the question.” He paused. “I mean”—he looked down at the chart—“Mrs. Lynch, we can’t confirm for certain without aspirating, but if I had to hazard a guess now I’d say, yes, it is likely to be cancerous.”

  Mrs. Lynch. Dr. Quinn always called her Kathleen.

  “And if it is… what do we do about that?”

  Dr. Ryan inhaled again. “That depends. If. There are options, but none is extremely promising, and for an older dog—”

  Kathleen couldn’t breathe; she felt like she was the one with the mass close to the chest wall. She said, “Is that all, for now?”

  Dr. Ryan didn’t answer; he was writing on Lucy’s chart. He had lifted Lucy down from the table, and Kathleen picked up her leash from the floor.

  “Ma’am,” said Dr. Ryan. “Don’t forget to stop at the desk, make an appointment…”

  Kathleen didn’t stop.