Desire Lines (10 page)

Her mother put her arms around her and squeezed, and all of Kathryn’s muscles tensed. “You’re a bag of bones,” her mother whispered. “Hugging you is like hugging a tired old woman.” She held Kathryn’s face in her hands, and Kathryn looked away. “What have you done? What have you done to yourself?”

Kathryn shrugged, her bony shoulders moving up and down in a sigh.

“You’re a different person,” her mother said.

“Jet lag,” she murmured.

Kathryn slept for three days in the room she’d grown up in, with the shades drawn and the door closed. Every few hours her mother came in to check on her, pull up the sheets, touch her forehead with cool, soft hands. In her dreams she saw the same images over and over, a series of snapshots fading in and out: footprints disappearing into the grass, an open window, an outstretched hand, miles of highway, a shallow grave. These pictures became a kind of visual mantra. She didn’t know why she had seized on them, but in an odd way they comforted her. They helped her face the fear that was gnawing at her inside.

On the evening of the third day, as her mother and brother were sitting down to dinner, Kathryn appeared in the kitchen wearing nothing but a long T-shirt and underwear, and announced that she was hungry.

Her mother leapt up to fix a plate, and Josh leaned over and pushed Kathryn’s long hair away from her face. “About time,” he said. “I was beginning to think you’d gone missing, too.”

Chapter 7

T
he next morning, a warm, sunny day, Kathryn drives out to see Rosie Hall, a friend of her mother’s and her sometime therapist, who practices in a little cluster of beige-colored prefab buildings in an industrial development on the edge of town. Kathryn was doubtful when her mother suggested she call Rosie, and she’s even more doubtful now, looking around the empty waiting room—a cramped space with two folding chairs, a country-style woven rug, and a cheap wooden table holding a lamp, a collection of magazines spread out in a fan, and a dying spider plant.

On the phone the secretary had said, “Lucky you, we can squeeze you in today! Rosie has to pick up her son Jeff from baseball practice at five, so you’d better come a little before four.” Kathryn’s been waiting ten minutes, sitting in one of the metal chairs, leafing through a three-month-old
Personal Quest,
and there’s no sign of Rosie.

“Nice day out there, huh?” the secretary says from behind a short divider.

Kathryn looks up. “Yeah.”

She shakes her head and goes back to typing. “But I guess you can feel lousy in all kinds of weather.”

Kathryn looks up again to see if she’s joking, and the secretary gives her a sympathetic smile. Kathryn glances at her watch.

“She’ll be out in a minute,” the secretary says. “She wants to make sure everybody gets their money’s worth.”

As if on cue, the office door opens and a tall, shy-seeming man with a prominent Adam’s apple, a faded flannel shirt, and heavy work boots emerges. “Thanks, Rosie,” he calls back. “See ya next week.” He nods to the secretary. “Doris.”

“Be seeing ya, Lance. Take care.” Doris waves him out the door and turns to Kathryn. “You can go in now.”

Standing up, Kathryn puts the magazine back in its place in the fan and steps through the door. She finds herself in a large, empty room with no windows, beige carpeting on the floor and walls, and a wide lozenge of humming fluorescent light on the ceiling. Big square pillows and foam-stuffed baseball bats are scattered around the floor. On the wall a hand-printed poster declares, in green block letters,
ROSIE’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO-GOOD, VERY BAD DAY ROOM
, with names signed in different colors around it: Amy, Angie, Dick, Gretchen, Mike, Sue. Another poster, a faded cartoon of a turkey, says
DON’T LET THE TURKEYS GET YOU DOWN.

“This is where we do group.” A short, softly rounded woman with large pink-tinted glasses and curly brown hair appears in the doorway to the next room.

“Why are the walls carpeted?”

She picks up a foam bat and swings it, hard, at the wall. It bounces off. “So nobody gets hurt.” She smiles. “You must be Kathryn. Come on in.” Kathryn follows her into a dim little office containing three old, overstuffed chairs, a cluttered desk and straight chair, and a bookcase filled with books, most of which, it seems to her at a glance, are self-help. “Sit wherever you like,” Rosie says.

Kathryn looks around. One chair, large and lumpy and low to the ground, has broad arms and a floral print; another is a rocker, with a stuffed leather seat; and the third, covered in red chintz, is a wingback. She feels like Goldilocks. “Is this a test?”

“I don’t know. Could be, I guess!”

Kathryn narrows her eyes at her. Reaching out tentatively, she squeezes the arm of the wingback. “I’ll take this one.” She sits down and sinks low in the loose stuffing, struggling to sit upright. Finally she wrenches herself up.

“Not quite right?” asks Rosie.

Kathryn motions toward the lumpy floral.

“That’s people’s favorite,” she says. “I guess it’s kinda womblike or something. Why don’t you take your shoes off and make yourself comfortable?”

Kathryn slips off her shoes and sits in the low chair, tucking her legs under for ballast. Rosie takes a pad and pen from her desk and pulls the straight chair up close. Kathryn shrinks back into the cushions.

“So,” Rosie says, chuckling, “you chose the floral. What do you think that means?”

“Hmm,” Kathryn says. “I think it means that Baby Bear is going to come home and find me in his bed.”

Rosie shakes her head and writes something down on the pad.

“What are you writing?”

She looks up. “I wrote humor-slash-evasion.”

“Oh, come on,” Kathryn says, “did you really expect me to take that question seriously? Okay, I’ll take it seriously. I chose the floral because rocking chairs make me nervous and the wingback has no springs. And I notice, by the way, that you’re in the straight chair.”

“Why do rocking chairs make you nervous?”

Kathryn looks at her watch.

“Are you feeling that this is a waste of time?”

She stands up and begins backing away. “Look. I—I think maybe
this was a bad idea. I’m obviously not in the right frame of mind, so maybe we should just—”

Rosie puts the pad on her lap and sits forward. “Kathryn,” she says calmly, “your mom’s paying for the hour. Why don’t you just sit back down—for goodness’ sake, you can sit on the floor if you want to—and relax, and we’ll see how it goes.”

She shakes her head skeptically. “I don’t know.”

“Here’s what we’ll do,” Rosie says. “We’ll start over. We’ll start now. You’ve just come in the door, you’re choosing the chair you want, and we have a whole hour ahead of us to talk about what’s going on in your mind.”

“Don’t you have to pick your son up at baseball practice?”

“Oh, it won’t kill him to sit on his fanny for a few minutes,” she says. “Now. What are you doing back in Bangor?”

“so.”
ROSIE LEANS
forward, propping one arm on the other, her hand on her chin. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Your marriage is finished, but you’re not sure you ever got it off the ground to begin with. You don’t know what you want to do with your life and feel incapable of finding out. You’re living with your mother at a time when everyone your age seems to be getting on with their lives. And your ten-year high-school reunion is coming up in a couple of weeks.”

“Pretty grim, huh?” Kathryn says.

Rosie taps her fingers on her chin. “It’s a lot to deal with, that’s for sure.” She pulls a day calendar off her desk. “How is Tuesdays, four o’clock?”

“What do you mean? You mean permanently?”

She laughs. “Lord, no. I’m not one of those analyst types who think it has to take years to see results. I was thinking more like a month or two.”

“I don’t know,” Kathryn says. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. I
might just stay a couple of weeks. I don’t know how long my mother and I can stand living together.”

“Have you considered getting an apartment?”

“No. I don’t want to … settle.”

“You mean compromise, or settle down?”

She thinks about this for a moment. “Both, I guess.”

“Well, it’s pretty clear that you need to deal with this stuff. You can do it with me, or you can do it with someone else, but you need to do it.”

Kathryn makes a face. “I’m not sure I want to.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“There’s just so … much. I don’t know what good it’ll do to go digging around. And it feels self-indulgent to babble on about my stupid problems when really I’m fine, and things are fine, and it’s not like my home was destroyed by a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake or anything—”

“Actually, that’s a pretty good analogy. In many ways your life has been torn apart—and now, slowly, you have to figure out how to put the pieces back together.” She scribbles a note on her pad and looks up. “So how about next Tuesday? And then we can take it from there.”

“Tuesday? I’m not sure. I might be doing something, I can’t remember.”

Rosie smiles and hands Kathryn her card. “Here. You call me in the next day or two and let me know. I’ll have Doris pencil you in in the meantime. So call us either way.”

Slipping the card in her bag, Kathryn stands to leave. On the way out, Rosie says, “I just want to say one thing. Your mother and I are friends. I’m not going to pretend we’re not. But what goes on in here has nothing to do with my relationships outside this office.”

The phone rings behind them, and the receptionist picks it up. “Rosie?” she says, covering the mouthpiece with her hand, “it’s Margaret Campbell. Should I have her call you back?”

Kathryn gapes at Doris.
“Margaret?”

“Phone calls are confidential, Doris, remember?” Rosie scolds, giving her an exasperated look. “Take a message.” Turning to Kathryn, she says, “Doris seems to think we’re running a beauty salon in here. Look, I’m not going to lie to you. Both Margaret and your mother come to me.”

“Oh, God,” Kathryn says, putting her hands up.

Rosie stops and puts her hand on Kathryn’s arm. “You know what a small town this is. But I’ve lived here for forty-three years, my whole life. I don’t have any problem keeping things separate.”

“I don’t see how that can be true.”

Smiling, Rosie says, “Somebody once defined genius as the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. I’m not saying I’m a genius, but I do believe I’m capable of that.” She pats Kathryn’s shoulder. “Anyway, it’s up to you. I can understand if you feel uncomfortable.”

Walking down the steps into the sunlight, still bright in the late-afternoon sky, Kathryn has to stop to catch her breath. It all feels too familiar; things are closing in. And yet somehow, on the surface, she feels strangely, almost clinically, detached. Even the sad little details of the past year she recounted to Rosie seem curiously unconnected to any real emotion she might have. What
am
I feeling? she wonders, getting into her mother’s car and reaching under the seat for the keys. It’s been so long since she’s asked herself that question that she doesn’t have the slightest idea how to answer.

AT A STOPLIGHT
Kathryn pulls up beside a minivan driven by a harried-looking young mother. In the back, a row of car seats and several tow-headed children are shaded by a screen attached to the window with suction cups. Toys and bottles and boxes of crackers orbit around them.

The chaos of it, the drudgery, the endless mess; the idea of becoming a mother is as foreign to Kathryn as the idea of becoming, say, a mortician—and about as appealing. She knows babies are hard work; she
did enough baby-sitting in high school to temper any romantic illusions she might have had. And it’s hard to imagine feeling ready to nurture someone else when she can barely manage her own life.

And yet. As she looks over at the children, their faces upturned and eager, their chubby starfish hands, she has to admit she feels a twinge of melancholy. The end of her marriage signified many things: a rending of vows, a crumbling of intention, an admission of defeat. But it also represented the death of hope, of potential. It ended her dreams about the kind of person she was and the kind of life she and Paul would lead together. Somewhere deep down she is unutterably sad about the babies they will never have, the ghost children they imagined late at night as they lay in bed in the dark together: one boy and one girl, three boys, two girls, all with Paul’s dark eyes and her fair skin. Sometimes, still, she thinks of these children, as silent and otherworldly as angels, hovering just out of reach.

As the light turns green, Kathryn pulls ahead, watching in her rearview mirror as the woman in the minivan shouts over her shoulder and tosses a stuffed animal into the backseat, trying to keep from swerving into oncoming traffic.