So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  She rewound, played it again. I need you… I need you.

  “Right on Rawson, top of the hill,” the woman on the phone had told Kathleen.

  She hadn’t stopped to write that down—no time to stop, no time to do anything but get in the car and go, go, go—so she repeated it the whole way up: right on Rawson, top of the hill, right on Rawson, top of the hill.

  In front of one of the High Street homes a boy, young and somber, four or maybe five, ski jacket zipped over snow pants, worked a shiny scooter up and down the sidewalk; his pace was glacial and uncertain but, even so, he had a bike helmet affixed firmly to his head. Kathleen thought, Parents! Careful, always, but so often about the wrong things. She should know.

  Right on Rawson, top of the hill.

  Ashley Jackson turning the key in the ignition in her parents’ garage, Susannah lying on her bed, her face to the wall: in danger, all over, girls in danger. Right on Rawson, top of the hill.

  It was a small hospital, a community hospital, sitting right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, but the emergency department, a concrete building annexed onto the red brick of the rest of the hospital, looked sturdy and dependable. Two ambulances sat idly in front; had Natalie come here in one of these?

  Looking back on it later Kathleen felt like a character in a movie, the way she burst through the doors and into the ER’s waiting room; she had run from the parking lot, she knew her hair was crazy, she knew her eyes were crazy, and crazy, too, was the way she said, “Where is she? Natalie Gallagher. Where is she?”

  “Did I talk to you? You Kathleen Lynch?” This must be the woman from the phone: North Shore accent, bottle blond, all business. Her nametag said THERESA.

  Kathleen nodded.

  “I told you, on the phone, we can’t tell you anything. If you’re not related.”

  “I’m related,” said Kathleen.

  The woman’s eyes flicked over Kathleen, then to a television suspended in the corner across from a constellation of fluorescent orange chairs. “You’re not related. You already told me that. We’re trying to reach her mother or her father.” Muthah, fathah. “We left messages at home, we just had the one number.” She peered closely at Kathleen. “You don’t have another number for her parents, do you?”

  No. No other number.

  A twenty-something man in scrubs behind the admissions desk pointed a remote control at the television. He paused on one channel, and Kathleen saw the red CNN letters, a scene of rubble in some faraway city, people running.

  “Where’s that?” said Theresa, looking past Kathleen.

  “I don’t know.” The young man had already changed the channel, some sitcom, two married people arguing in a kitchen, why did every sitcom feature two people arguing in a kitchen?

  “Please,” said Kathleen. “Please, can you let me see her? Can you tell me what’s going on?” She was reminded of a long-forgotten feeling from childhood, powerlessness at the hands of an adult, a teacher, her mother, her father, someone who stood, like this woman, in front of the very thing Kathleen wanted most.

  “I really can’t,” she said. “Hospital policy. If I don’t follow it, I could lose my job.” She tapped her nails on the counter and looked down at a clipboard that was resting there.

  Then the door opened again. “That’s the mother,” said Kathleen. “That’s Natalie’s mother.”

  Theresa stepped forward. “You the mother? Natalie Gallagher’s mother?”

  Carmen nodded; she didn’t see Kathleen at all, or, if she saw her, she didn’t acknowledge her. “What the hell is going on?” she said. “I got home from work, had all of these messages—”

  “Your daughter….” said Theresa.

  “Where is she? Where’s Natalie?”

  “I’ll take you to her,” said Theresa. “She’s okay, she’s sleeping, she woke up for a little bit, and now she’s sleeping again. It looks like she might have taken some pills—”

  “Some what?”

  That’s when Carmen saw Kathleen. “What are you doing here?” Then, to Theresa, “What’s she doing here?”

  “I called her,” said Theresa. “We couldn’t reach anyone else, and your daughter had this woman’s number on her.”

  Carmen said, “I don’t understand. How’d this happen? What pills?”

  “There were pills in her backpack,” said Theresa. “In a baggie. We’ve identified them as Ambien. We don’t know how many she took.” From somewhere she produced the baggie and held it out to Carmen.

  “Two,” whispered Kathleen, but nobody was listening to her.

  Carmen’s face went pale. “Those are mine. Those are my sleeping pills.” She made no move to take them out of Theresa’s hands, and so Kathleen did—she’d take them into the bathroom and flush them down the toilet, put an end to all of this.

  “She was awake for a while,” said Theresa, “which means it’s likely she took only one or two. She couldn’t remember.”

  “Two,” said Kathleen, louder this time, and both Carmen and Theresa stopped and stared at her.

  “What do you mean?” asked Carmen. “How do you know?”

  “She called me. She left me a message.”

  “She called you?” said Carmen. “What do you mean? She called you, and not me?”

  “Whoever she called,” said Theresa. “Doesn’t matter.” (Mattah.) “She couldn’t remember. But don’t panic when you see her, she’s got an NG tube in.”

  Carmen said, “A what?”

  “A nasogastric tube. Standard procedure in a case like this.”

  Again Carmen said, “A what?”

  “A tube in her nose,” said Theresa. “It looks worse than it is, don’t worry.”

  “Wait,” Carmen said to Kathleen. “Wait out here.”

  The channel-surfing man settled on CNN again. (Did this man not have a speck of work to do?) “Earthquake,” he said.

  The screen was showing a lot of children: children everywhere, children covered in fine white dust, children wearing Catholic school uniforms with socks pulled up to their knees. “Where?” said Kathleen. She was mostly just making conversation; the tragedy at hand seemed, at the moment, bigger and more important than whatever was happening on the television screen. Closer to home, as it were.

  Just then Carmen came back out, nodded at Kathleen. “She’s awake now,” she said. “She’s asking for you.” She looked to the ceiling and back down again, right at Kathleen, and Kathleen could see that her eyes were wet. “Not me,” she said. “She wants you.”

  So it was that Kathleen didn’t hear the young man’s answer, didn’t hear the sound track to it all—the constant wail of sirens, and the British-inflected voice of the CNN reporter, didn’t hear any of it.

  Kathleen followed Carmen back down a fluorescent-lit hallway and into a curtained cubicle.

  Natalie, lying in the hospital bed, looked even frailer and paler and thinner than she usually looked; also, her height was obscured by her position on the bed, so she looked younger too.

  “Hey,” said Kathleen softly. She reached out and stroked Natalie’s hair.

  “I dreamed you were coming, you were like this big angel…” Natalie’s eyes closed and she drifted off.

  Theresa peeked her head around the curtain. “Everything okay?” she said. Kathleen was beginning to soften toward her. Despite the Massachusetts accent, despite the hospital setting, there was something of the old-fashioned diner waitress in her, gruff but sincere: she’d get your egg order right, no matter what. Theresa crooked her finger at Carmen. “This way, please, I’ve got forms for you—”

  Kathleen said, “Go ahead. I’ll sit with her.”

  Carmen said, “Well—”

  And Kathleen, firmly: “Go ahead. She’s in good hands, I promise.” For the first time since Natalie had walked into the Archives, she actually believed that.

  When Carmen had gone, Kathleen pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. Natalie’s eyes fluttered again and she said, “I ju
st wanted to forget for a few minutes. I just wanted to go to sleep. I just… I thought it would be easier to sleep.”

  “I know,” said Kathleen.

  “I didn’t expect—”

  “I know,” said Kathleen. “I understand. Shhh, you don’t have to explain.”

  “My project is due Friday. And I haven’t done any of it. I haven’t done anything!”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Kathleen. “Natalie, don’t worry about that.”

  “I never did any of it,” Natalie repeated. “I thought I was going to do this really great thing, and I never even finished the notebook. I don’t even know the whole story. And the letter! I found the letter you called about.”

  “You did?”

  “But they took it, Hannah and Taylor. It’s gone, ruined.”

  This was a blow, but Kathleen tried not to let it show.

  “They took the notebook too, it’s all gone. They took everything. They did something with my phone… oh, God, I think they sent something to Christian…” Natalie tried to push herself up on one elbow and gently Kathleen guided her back to a prone position.

  “It’s okay,” said Kathleen. “It’s all going to be okay.”

  “No,” said Natalie. “No, it’s not. How am I ever going to go back to school… after all this… I can never—” Her shoulders began to shake, and she started to cry in the silent way that Kathleen learned to cry after Gregory died, because she did it so often it became second nature. Sometimes she did it in public: she had to learn to be quiet about it because she never knew when the crying would come, or if she’d be able to control it.

  There was movement and sound outside in the hallway, someone ran by, someone called out, and Kathleen was reminded that there were other emergencies in the world, even in this town, that were not hers or Natalie’s.

  “Natalie,” said Kathleen. “Listen to me. It’s going to be okay.”

  Natalie said, “How? How is it going to be okay?”

  And all at once it fit together. The metaphor Kathleen reached for first was the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but, no, that was too easy, this was something more grinding and laborious, like the plates of the earth sliding together.

  And if that seemed too grandiose a comparison, who could blame Kathleen Lynch for that, because she understood, sitting in this hospital room, by this bed, beside this fragile girl, that it had all led to this. All the false starts, the bad advice, the times she’d tried to help Natalie and couldn’t. That was never her role. Natalie was not a replacement for Susannah, not a do-over. Kathleen’s role was to bridge the past and the present; that’s who she’d been for twenty-six years, that’s what she did every day of her working life, and she was being called upon to do it now. So she would.

  She took a deep breath and she said, “Natalie, it’s not lost, even if the notebook itself is lost. I’ve been reading it, all this time. I typed the whole thing out for you. I have a copy for you, back in my desk.”

  “You did?” Natalie didn’t try to sit up again; she was looking directly at the ceiling. “You do?”

  “I do. I know it wasn’t mine to do that with, I know it wasn’t my business—”

  “No, no,” said Natalie. “I’m glad you did.”

  Kathleen said, “How about I tell you? I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “Now?” asked Natalie.

  “Well, I meant a little later, when you’re more yourself,” said Kathleen. “Another day, maybe. There’s no hurry.”

  “No. Now.” Here was something Kathleen had forgotten: in some situations, and this was one of them, there was simply no arguing with a teenage girl.

  So Kathleen began to talk. She started at the beginning, and she told the whole story, everything she could possibly recount from reading the notebook, all of Bridget’s story. She tried to recall it in as much detail as possible: Elsie’s shoes, the way little baby James smelled, the trip to Boston for the abortion that never happened. She pulled Natalie’s father’s paper from her purse. She kept looking toward the doorway, waiting for Carmen to come and take it from her, or to come and take Natalie herself from her, but nobody came, so she kept talking.

  “Here’s the connection,” she said, pointing at the paper. Natalie pushed herself up again, and Kathleen reached behind her to arrange the pillow to allow her to sit. She continued. “Your father got a good start, but he stopped with James. And even if he’d kept going, he never would have known James’s story, never would have known that Dr. Turner was your great-great-grandfather, never would have known about the other baby James. We never would have known that without the notebook that you found.” She knew Natalie was tired, but she kept going. “You see, here? Your father went just two generations back, and then he stopped. He didn’t get as far as Bridget, didn’t know that Bridget was your”—she paused, ticking off the generations on the paper, just to be sure—“great-great-grandmother.”

  “Yeah? She was?”

  “She was. You have all kinds of roots now—two different families, two different directions to go in.”

  “Yeah,” said Natalie softly. “But the project… school—” She looked stricken.

  Kathleen thought of Bridget, walking in the darkness from the Turners’ house to Declan’s house, away from one life and toward another. “Listen, Natalie,” she said. “Look at Bridget’s story. She thought everything was over that one awful night, she thought there was no hope left, nothing to live for, and then look what happened. There was a whole other life for her, a new beginning, children, life, love, all of it, waiting for her. She only had to reach out and take it.”

  She watched Natalie absorbing this.

  Then she said, “I want to tell you something, Natalie. I want to tell you about the night Susannah left.”

  It reminded her a little of confession, except in place of the priest and the rosary was a girl with an NG tube. No forgiveness, not here, but not really there either. It didn’t really exist, forgiveness, did it?

  Kathleen told Natalie the whole story and then she paused. Natalie was listening, rapt. Kathleen said, “My daughter fell, Natalie, and I didn’t catch her. If I hadn’t left that night, if I hadn’t gone to the store…” Then she said, “Everyone has a moment they would go back to if they could, to make things different. That’s mine. Maybe you had yours today, but that doesn’t mean things are over.”

  Kathleen had been standing at the kitchen phone when she learned about Gregory. This was in the days when phones were tethered securely to the wall. Kathleen thought if she went back to that apartment in Marblehead she’d find the same phone on the same wall—or, if it had been removed, at least its ghostly outline, the telltale rectangle. They wouldn’t say anything specific over the phone, only that she had to come to the hospital immediately. But she knew it from the way the person on the other end spoke, a woman, maybe a woman just like Theresa. “As quickly as you can,” said the woman. So Kathleen had gathered Susannah, and she’d gone. This was before car-seat laws were the way they are now. Susannah and a jumble of blankets in the backseat, Kathleen driving as fast as she could. She dared the cops to stop her, and none did.

  She didn’t see Gregory die, didn’t see Susannah leaving: she’d missed everything.

  She looked again at Natalie, studied the freckles on her cheeks. She said, “You think this is where you are forever, all of this high school stuff, all this stuff with your friends or not friends, but really you’re just at the beginning of the rest of your life, all the good things that are coming. All of this will be just a blip for you one day. I know it. Do you believe that, Natalie Gallagher?”

  Natalie didn’t meet Kathleen’s eyes, and her voice was so low that if Kathleen hadn’t been listening very carefully she might not have heard Natalie’s whispered affirmation. But Kathleen was listening, maybe as carefully as she’d ever listened to anything, and so she did hear it.

  Natalie’s eyes were closing, closing… closed. Kathleen watched her. Her face, in repose
, looking so young and innocent that Kathleen could imagine what she looked like as a child, maybe even an infant, rocked to sleep in the same house where Bridget O’Connell Callaghan had rocked her own babies to sleep, little James, and the rest of them, the ones that came after. Kathleen stopped talking and she sat very still and watched Natalie breathing, watched her chest move up and down, watched her eyes twitching underneath her eyelids. She watched her the way you watch an infant, when every breath is precious and new.

  All around her, girls were in trouble, but here was a girl who was safe, and Kathleen would watch over her, while she slept, and then some.

  Kathleen returned to the waiting room in time to hear Theresa say to Carmen, “We’re going to have to admit her overnight, you know, for observation, a room with a cardiac monitor.”

  Carmen said, “Overnight? Really?”

  “A precaution,” said Theresa.

  There were a lot of things Kathleen wanted to say to Carmen, none of them particularly nice.

  But she looked at Carmen, and she saw herself. Struggling. Doing her best on her own. The two were more alike than not.

  Theresa said, “I mean. I got two kids myself. It’s not my business, technically, once she leaves here. But. If this was my kid, I would look into what’s going on, at school and whatever.” Theresa squinted. “You got that? If it was more pills, if it was a bunch, we’d have to admit her to a psych ward, inpatient, any psych ward that had a bed available. You know that, right?”

  Carmen nodded, and Kathleen nodded. They hadn’t known, neither of them had known that.

  A phone on the desk rang. “For you, Terry,” said the guy in the scrubs, and Theresa turned to take it, her attention shifting away.

  Kathleen thought again of the women in the Christmas Tree Shops parking lot—battered, maybe, but not beaten down. Resilient. She looked again at the television.

  “What a mess,” said Carmen, sighing, looking past Kathleen. At first Kathleen thought she was talking about them, about Natalie, but then she realized that her attention was fixed on the television screen. “Did you see that? Haiti?”