So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

Dr. Ryan said, “I’m sorry….” and he made a movement toward Kathleen as if to stop her. But Kathleen was out the door, and Lucy was too.

  “Do you have children?” Kathleen had asked Detective Bradford the last time he came.

  “Yup,” he said. “But they don’t live with me. They live with my wife.” He rubbed his chin. “Nasty stuff, divorces.”

  “But you have children.”

  He nodded.

  “How many?”

  “Two. Boy and a girl.”

  “Then you understand,” she said, “that I’m not giving up. I’ll keep looking for her until the day I die.”

  “I understand,” Detective Bradford said. “But—”

  “That’s all,” answered Kathleen. “I know you’re done. I just wanted to make sure that you understand that I’m not.”

  This time there was a single text, only five words long.

  It came minutes after Christian Chapman left her; she heard the ding, and with shaking fingers she dug her phone from her coat pocket.

  WE WILL TAKE U DOWN

  Delete.

  Natalie kept walking, but she didn’t put the phone back in her pocket; she kept her eyes trained on it, waiting for what was coming next.

  Nothing came. It was recycling day; the blue bins were scattered across the sidewalk like so many dead animals. Natalie had to cross over or pass around them with nearly every step.

  The neighborhood was sheathed in a heavy, gray, midafternoon silence. The high school got out first, so the kindergarten and elementary school parents had not yet begun their vigilant school-bus watching. Natalie felt like she was alone on the street, in the town, maybe even in the universe.

  She checked the phone again, in case the rattling of the recycling bins she had to step over had caused her to miss an incoming text. But there was nothing.

  Now she was scared. Before, she had been troubled, bothered, saddened. Lonely! But now she was scared. The car on the sidewalk, the horn honking so loudly. Just a few more inches and it could have taken her down. We will take u down. Christian Chapman had departed quickly after that. It must be that he sensed some bad luck around her, some invisible but radioactive element on her skin.

  She thought of the school assembly, of Ms. McPherson, the guidance counselor, with her poodle puff of hair, her unfashionably waist-high khakis, the earnest way she spoke. She thought of the photographs of Ashley Jackson, her smile wide and welcoming: innocent.

  Natalie knew what people said about kids like Ashley Jackson. They said: Why would she do something like that? What could be that awful? Someone that young, that normal. People didn’t understand, didn’t know. But Natalie understood. She knew.

  What had Ms. McPherson said? My door is always open.

  Kathleen felt something at her back—what was that? The wings of time? Was that in a poem? She paused to Google it and found that she had it wrong. Sadness flies away on the wings of time was the correct quote. (That’s not true, she said softly to her computer screen. Sadness doesn’t go anywhere.)

  She read the last entry in Bridget’s notebook again:

  Solace can come from unlikely sources.

  Natalie’s mother had the Saturday shift at Talbots, nine to three, and also Sunday, noon to five.

  Natalie said, “Why are you working so much?”

  Her mother, dressed now in a smart black jacket, and underneath that a cream-colored blouse with ruffles down the front, shrugged and said, “The money is decent, Nat, and it keeps my mind off things.”

  Natalie flicked her eyes away, not saying, What things?

  Her mother said, “Are you going to be okay alone here?”

  “Sure,” said Natalie. “Of course. I’ve got homework.”

  But she didn’t have homework, not really.

  She stood in her silent kitchen. She made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and consumed it standing up, looking at the mound of mail on the counter.

  Which was better, the mother who stayed in her room, or the mother who emerged to fold shirts and rearrange the sales rack at Talbots? Truly, she didn’t know.

  On Sunday she dialed her father’s number three times. The first two times he didn’t pick up. The third time he answered. He said, “Hang on, Nat,” and then she heard him say, “What’s that, honey?” to someone else (Julia, of course) before returning to her. When he did he said, “I’ve been meaning to call you all day, sweetie.”

  She said, “You have?”

  “I wanted to let you know that we’re going away for the week.”

  She said, in a hollow voice, “Away?”

  He said, “To Punta Cana. We got a last-minute deal, we couldn’t turn it down…”

  She saw now that she had it all wrong. The Julia in the restaurant, with the kind questions, the carefully tilted head, that woman was an imposter. She didn’t care a whit about Natalie.

  Her father said, “With the baby coming…”

  Julia, like everyone in the world, wanted to secure her own spot.

  Natalie didn’t say, What about your job?

  She didn’t say, Where the hell is Punta Cana?

  She didn’t say, What about me?

  She said, “Okay, then. Have a great time.” And then she hung up.

  She thought, I’ve got to do something.

  Twilight came, and then dusk. She opened the front door and stepped out, into the gloaming, then stepped back in. She thought about Lucy, and the way her ears pointed straight up when you asked her a question, then lay back down when you stroked her head. She thought that if she had a dog like Lucy—any dog at all, really—she might not feel this yawning emptiness.

  Kathleen left another voice mail for Natalie about the letter. Could she just look for it? Could she please? This was in her archivist’s nature—if there was another piece of the puzzle, she wanted to have it. And could she call Kathleen back, let her know that she was okay? Kathleen was worried about her…

  Her message was cut off there, the female voice friendly but firm: if Kathleen wanted to rerecord the message, she could press the number two.

  Natalie took a deep breath and pressed the code to hear her voice mail. She had deleted the last one, but this one she wanted to hear—maybe it was her father, calling from Punta Cana. Maybe Julia had drowned in the aquamarine water. (How could you drown in that, though, Natalie didn’t know. She had visited the website for the resort whose name her father had mentioned, you could see clear down to the ocean floor, you could see to the ocean floor even from the open-air hotel rooms. Only an idiot could drown in that situation.)

  But of course her father hadn’t gone to Punta Cana yet. He’d only just told her about the trip. It was Kathleen Lynch. Natalie chewed on her hangnail and listened to the message. A letter, she was supposed to look for a letter that Bridget might have left with the notebook. She was supposed to look for the letter, and then she was supposed to call Kathleen Lynch so they could talk about it. Natalie had mentioned something about that to Kathleen in the beginning; there had been another piece of paper, two or three of them actually, and they were tucked inside the box that was under her bed, alongside her mother’s birth certificates, the fake one and the real one. She slid the box out from under her bed and took out the pieces of paper. This handwriting was much harder to decipher than the writing in the notebook (and that was hard enough); the paper was old, and as thin as tissue paper. It seemed like it might dissolve in her hands. She held it up to the light. She couldn’t make out any of it, not a single word. She wondered if Neil could, if he was such a whiz at that stuff.

  But Neil had deserted her too. Thing number twenty-three that made her sick: deserters.

  A text came in while she was thinking about this. She didn’t want to look.

  But she looked.

  Technical difficulties with your Web page, it said. But don’t worry, we will get it back up.

  Delete.

  Finally, Monday night, a reply from Professor Paterson. He apologized for the delay
. He had been out of town and hadn’t had access to his email. He hoped he could still offer assistance. (That was heartily ironic, thought Kathleen, an online expert who did not check his email.)

  Kathleen read on. As she read she felt her hands grow warm, then clammy; she felt the heat rise to her face. Her heart beat faster.

  These situations are always to be taken with the utmost seriousness, wrote Professor Paterson.

  Do not advise your daughter to ignore the bullying, wrote Professor Paterson. That is a common mistake parents make.

  It is not the correct response, wrote Professor Paterson.

  These things can escalate very quickly, wrote Professor Paterson.

  Your daughter needs to know that she has an ally in you, wrote Professor Paterson.

  Schools do not always know how to respond to these situations, wrote Professor Paterson. Often there are missteps, errors in communication.

  Kathleen switched from email to Safari to pull up the Web page with the pictures and comments about Natalie.

  It wasn’t there.

  “Gone?” she said out loud.

  It was gone.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said (a lapsed Catholic, she was, lapsing further). “What the hell is going on around here?”

  It took Natalie a full day to gather her nerve. The day after that, Tuesday, early, before the first bell rang, she stood outside Ms. McPherson’s office. There was a light on—from a lamp, not from the overhead—and she could see Ms. McPherson’s curly poodle head at the desk, bent forward, writing something. Finally she knocked tentatively, and Ms. McPherson rose and walked to the door. Natalie could see her searching her face for some sort of clue to her name.

  “Natalie Gallagher,” she said. “I’m a freshman.”

  “Of course!” said Ms. McPherson. “Natalie, of course. You’re here early. You’re lucky you caught me. Usually I have first period free and I’m not even here now, but I came in to catch up on some things.” She motioned toward the piles of papers on her desk. “Mount Miscellaneous, that’s what I call all of this here.” She smiled. “I’m forever trying to whittle it down, and making no progress whatsoever. Now, what can I do for you?”

  “Well,” said Natalie. She sat carefully on the corner of the slender orange chair toward which Ms. McPherson motioned her. Her hands were shaking and if she didn’t hold her quads steady she thought her knees might knock audibly together. She stared hard at the wall, where there was a series of inspirational posters with words in fancy white script written across different nature photos: a waterfall, a field of wildflowers, an ocean at sunset. If you can dream it, you can become it. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift—that’s why they call it the present.

  Load of crap, thought Natalie so spontaneously that she almost said it out loud. But the photograph of the ocean sunset was, after all, very beautiful, and perhaps it was that that calmed her, or perhaps it was Ms. McPherson, and the way she seemed to be leaning forward. The expression hanging on every word came to Natalie. Whatever the cause, she felt a loosening from somewhere deep inside her. She felt it all beginning to come out. She began talking, and she told. She told all of it. She told everything, and while she was talking Ms. McPherson sat very still, her elbows resting on the desk, scarcely blinking.

  And then, when she was finished, Natalie answered a series of questions put forth by Ms. McPherson, whose face, it seemed to Natalie, had undergone a transformation from sympathetic to earnest to carefully guarded.

  No, she didn’t have records of any of it.

  She had deleted the texts.

  “And there was a Web page,” she said. “It was awful.”

  Ms. McPherson tilted her body toward the computer. “Ah,” she said. “Well, why don’t we have a look at that, together, and see what we come up with.”

  Natalie cleared her throat. “Actually,” she said, “the Web page is gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone. But—”

  More questions.

  No, there had been no physical harm.

  No, she hadn’t seen the occupants of the car. But she was sure—

  “I’m sure you’re sure,” said Ms. McPherson. “But did you see?”

  No. She hadn’t seen, not for sure. She had been with another student, with Christian Chapman…

  No, he hadn’t seen either.

  Finally Ms. McPherson sat back and lifted her fingers to her mouth. When she lowered them, she said, “It’s a delicate situation, you see, Natalie. Because without proof—without real and solid proof, and even sometimes with it—well, these things happen off of the school property, they’re very hard to punish. Hard for us to punish, I should say. They’re out of our jurisdiction.”

  “But you said…” For a moment, Natalie could not go on. “At the assembly, I thought you said—”

  “Yes, well.” Ms. McPherson straightened in her chair and made a great show of looking through the papers on her desk; for what, Natalie had no idea. “Of course we take it seriously. Anything that concerns our students concerns us.”

  Natalie thought, Bullshit.

  “I mean, to a point. And when things like the Ashley Jackson case occur, when tragedies like the Ashley Jackson case occur, I should say, there is certainly a flurry of attention all over the country, mandates come down from on high, from the superintendent, that sort of thing. Mandates to address the problem, I mean. But the lines are blurry when it comes to how much responsibility we have in situations like these.” When she said the word we she pointed to her chest, and Natalie noticed for the first time a stain in the shape of a cloud on her beige shirt. Coffee, maybe, or dried milk. She kept her eyes fixed on the stain because she thought if she looked up she might start to cry.

  “Sometimes,” said Ms. McPherson, “sometimes we don’t understand why kids can be so hurtful to one another.”

  Fuck you, Natalie wanted to say. It’s your job to figure that out.

  Ms. McPherson said, “Have you talked to your parents?”

  Natalie shook her head gently, so that the tears wouldn’t spill out of her eyes. She took a deep breath, and Ms. McPherson continued. “That might be the wisest first step, to talk to your parents. And then together you can figure out what to do about this, uh, this situation.”

  “Problem,” corrected Natalie.

  “Problem, situation, whatever you want to call it.”

  Problem, thought Natalie.

  “And if things get really out of hand—”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, then in some cases it’s the authorities who need to be contacted.”

  “The authorities?”

  Ms. McPherson cleared her throat. “The police.”

  “The police?” Really and truly Natalie was dumbfounded: Was she supposed to call the police? On Hannah Morgan and Taylor Grant? The police! And they would—what? Arrest them? Take them away from the school in handcuffs? That was sure to make her a lot of friends, something like that. The drumming in her ears began anew.

  Ms. McPherson must have seen something in Natalie’s face because she softened and relented. “Listen, Natalie. I know this is difficult.”

  In a hard, mean voice, harder and meaner than she meant it to be, Natalie said, “What?”

  “All of this.” Ms. McPherson made a balletic gesture—absurd, really, with her plump arms—to indicate the inspirational posters, the main office outside her tiny corner, and beyond that the hallway of the school. “Growing up. I’ve been there, believe me. I know.”

  Natalie thought, You don’t know. You don’t remember.

  “Typically,” Ms. McPherson continued, absorbing the tips of her forefingers between her lips, “typically, you know, bullies choose someone they feel threatened by in some way. It’s a defense mechanism, really: strike or be struck.”

  Natalie nodded mutely; what she was thinking was, That d
oesn’t help.

  “And I am here for you, I really am. Talk to your parents. If you’d like, have them come in. We’ll set up a meeting. We’ll talk about it. We’ll see where we can go from here. But without any record, without anything official, there’s nothing we can punish. There’s nothing specific we can do.”

  Natalie said, “But I thought—”

  Ms. McPherson leaned toward her. “Yes? You thought?”

  Natalie couldn’t say it, that she thought the assembly had been called because of her. She thought that someone had come to her rescue. Really it was just a sorry coincidence, having everything to do with Ashley Jackson and nothing to do with her.

  Natalie whispered, “Nothing.” She gathered her backpack and her coat, both of which she had shed when she first entered, and kept her head steadily down while she looped her arms through the straps. Needlessly (she thought later) she said, “Thanks.” And Ms. McPherson’s cheery reply: “You’re welcome! Anytime, really.”

  At this point Natalie could hold her tears back no longer. She glanced around furtively and headed toward the girls’ room just outside the office. A safe haven, she thought—the first bell hadn’t yet rung—but after all it turned out not to be a safe choice but a treacherous one. She was approaching the entrance when her path was suddenly blocked by the figure of Taylor Grant, who seemed, through the blur of Natalie’s tears, to have grown taller but who was actually the same perfect height as ever. She was smirking, and poised like a rattlesnake, coming in for the kill.

  Natalie fled: out the door, down the hill, past the wall where she’d sat with Christian Chapman—this was a stinging reminder of the worst of it—then down High Street, toward home. The wind was ferocious and she was running against it. At home she undressed and stood in the shower, making the water as hot as she could stand it, almost scalding her skin. But she wouldn’t let herself turn the temperature down. It seemed like this was a test, what she was doing to herself, and she wanted to know what she was made of.

  All around them were girls in trouble. The flip side of that was girls in charge, and really it was hard to know sometimes which was which. Susannah had been one, and Deidre Jordan had been the other. Girls in trouble, girls in charge, and the delicate balance between the two.