Desire Lines (21 page)

“Adult or not, you’re living under my roof.”

Kathryn stands very still, counting to ten under her breath.

“And besides,” her mother adds, “I was curious about how it went. Six hours is a pretty long date.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

“Well, whatever it was. Six hours is a long time for anything.”

Kathryn is tempted to tell her mother to leave her alone, that she’s tired and has a headache and wants to go to bed, but something in her mother’s voice changes her mind. She’s probably been sitting in that chair for hours, Kathryn thinks, keeping an eye on the clock and pretending to read magazines. It reminds her less of high school than of college, when she and her roommates would wait up for each other to report the evening’s events. Unlike some of her friends, she’s never had that kind of relationship with her mother; their exchanges have been more fraught. She has always felt the pressure, real or imagined, of her mother’s agenda: that Kathryn not scare her, not let her down, not marry someone unsuitable and end up divorced, as she did. But now the worst has happened. Her mother’s fears have been realized, and somehow, oddly, it may have taken the pressure off both of them.

Kathryn puts down her bag and sinks onto the couch. “Will Pelletier is HIV-positive.”

“Oh, Kathryn,” her mother says.

Tears well up in Kathryn’s eyes, and her mother comes over and sits beside her on the couch, putting her arms around her. “Baby,” she murmurs, kissing her head, and Kathryn feels herself relax into her mother’s warm embrace.

Chapter 14

R
achel lives in a small cottage in Orono, near the University of Maine campus. The front yard blooms with roses—pink roses spreading up the front walk, white roses climbing a trellis around the gingerbread-hut front door, yellow roses with orange-tipped thorns beside a white fence. The roses will survive for only a few months in the fickle Maine weather. It is so like Rachel, Kathryn thinks as she pulls into the driveway, to lavish time and attention on such fleeting beauty.

Rachel had been different from most of the kids at Bangor High. Her parents were Russian Jews, professors at the university, and they lived in a drafty modern solar-powered house with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and overlapping Indian rugs. In high school it was Rachel’s ambition to be a poet; she read Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson and e. e. cummings, and scrawled her own poems in a large hardbound notebook that her father had picked up for her in England, carrying it everywhere in her Guatemalan bag.

When she was fourteen she asked her parents to send her away to boarding school. No one understood her in Bangor; school was boring, the teachers were bland. Without more stimulation, she insisted, she would wither and die like a raisin in the sun.

Her father said, “So you’re suffering here.”

“Yes, I am,” Rachel said solemnly.

“You don’t belong, you’re an outsider.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, then, this may be the most important time in your life!” her mother exclaimed. “What more could a poet ask, than to be unappreciated and misunderstood?”

Rachel never tried to fit in with most of the other kids, in their ragg sweaters and penny loafers and copycat hairstyles. Her fine, dark hair was cropped short against the delicate bones of her face, and she dressed in velvet dresses from thrift shops with long underwear and hiking boots and dangling jewelry. Kathryn had always envied Rachel’s resolute self-assurance, her daring in dressing outlandishly, the way she’d go to movies or coffee shops and sit serenely by herself without the slightest concern about what anyone else might think. Kathryn was more insecure, always looking around for someone she knew, self-conscious about sitting alone.

The wooden gate is slightly ajar. Kathryn walks up the short stone path to the house and raps the brass knocker. The door opens and Rachel appears, smiling, wearing a floral peach dress and a necklace of seed pearls.

“Oh, Kath!” she says, coming up and hugging her from underneath, her arms going around Kathryn’s shoulders. “It’s wonderful to see you.”

“You, too,” Kathryn murmurs. She pulls back awkwardly. “Look at you—you haven’t changed.” It’s true; Rachel’s dark hair is still in a pixie, and she’s as slender as she was in high school, with pale, dewy skin.

Lightly touching Kathryn’s shoulder, Rachel looks into her eyes. “You have. You look … wiser.”

She resists the impulse to laugh, or cry. “You mean older.”

“Like you’ve learned something over the years.”

“I wish that were true,” Kathryn says, shaking her head.

Rachel goes into the kitchen to put a kettle on for iced tea—a characteristically elaborate and old-fashioned gesture, Kathryn thinks—and Kathryn settles on a couch in the living room. Opening her bag, she takes out a tape recorder, notebook, and pens. She looks around the room at the Victorian furniture and white cotton curtains and books stacked in piles as high as coffee tables. On the mantelpiece over the fireplace are several photographs of Rachel in exotic places—on the Spanish Steps, on a gondola in Venice, holding up a beer stein in a brightly lit café—with people Kathryn doesn’t recognize. There are a few pictures of Rachel’s cheerful, bespectacled parents, and one of a dark-haired man in a Bangor Rams T-shirt, standing in a clearing. Kathryn looks closer. “Hey, isn’t this Mr. Hunter from the high school?” she asks.

“Oh, yes,” Rachel says, coming into the room. She’s carrying a tray with a teapot, two tall glasses full of ice, a small bowl of lemon wedges, and a plate of English digestive biscuits. “We’ve gone on a few treks together up north. Is Celestial Seasonings okay? I don’t keep caffeine in the house.”

“Sure,” Kathryn says, clearing a space on the coffee table for the tray. “You didn’t do orienteering in high school.”

She laughs. “No. It was Jennifer’s thing, you know? But it’s a great way to get exercise. I’m sorry I didn’t take it up sooner.”

Kathryn nods. “So how’d you hook back up with him?”

Rachel lifts the lid of the teapot and jiggles the bags a few times. Replacing the lid, she pours the tea into two glasses. The ice splinters and cracks. “I didn’t really know him back then. I never took his class. But we happened to both be doing a five-K run for, I don’t know, the United Way or something a few years ago, and we started talking, and he told me about orienteering and, well …” She shrugs. “I’ve only done it a few times, but I love it.”

Kathryn takes a cool glass, wet with condensation, and wraps her hands around it. “What do you love about it?”

Rachel squeezes a lemon wedge into her glass and stirs her tea with a long, tarnished spoon. “Well, you know Jennifer and I both ran cross-country—and there are similarities. Orienteering is a running sport. But unlike cross-country, you run with a map and compass and choose your own way. There’s always the possibility that you’ll get lost—and for me, that adds to the excitement of it.” She takes a sip of tea and places the glass back on the tray. “Actually, technically what I do is called wayfaring: recreational, noncompetitive orienteering. I’m more interested in the running and the art of navigation than in winning a competition, not that there are opportunities around here for adults to compete anyway. Rick—Mr. Hunter—learned about it from friends in Massachusetts who belong to the New England Orienteering Club. Sometimes he goes down there for competitions, but I prefer to do it just for fun.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” Kathryn observes.

“I guess I’ve gotten hooked.”

“So, just out of curiosity, are you and Mr. Hunter …?”

“Rick,” Rachel says, and smiles. “No, no, no.” She shakes her head dismissively. Then she bites into a biscuit, as if to end the discussion. “I was sorry to hear about you and—is it Paul?” she says.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“But I guess it’s better to do it now than later, when kids might be involved.”

“Yeah,” Kathryn agrees.

As they sit in silence, sipping tea, Kathryn thinks back on all the evenings they spent together as part of the group, the secrets they told, the jokes they shared. In a strange way, Rachel knows her as well as anyone does. But they never did the hard work together of forging a separate friendship, and when Jennifer disappeared and then they went to different colleges, the ties that bound them to one another slowly dissolved. She looks at Rachel’s face, her clean profile and dancing eyes.
This is the face of a friend, she thinks, and I don’t have many. “This is nice,” she says suddenly. “I hope we can see each other more.”

Rachel leans back, stretching her arms over her head. “And without a tape recorder next time,” she says.

“TALK TO ME
like a stranger,” Kathryn says. They’ve finished their tea and put the tray on the floor, and Kathryn is filling out a label. She peels the narrow strip off its backing and affixes it to a cassette. “Some of the questions I ask may be annoying or intrusive, and some you’ll think I know the answer to already—and I might. But don’t assume anything.”

Rachel nods.

Kathryn inserts the cassette into the player and pushes the record button. Rachel moves forward in her chair, and they both watch the black tape thread onto the empty spool.

“This is an interview with Rachel Feynman at her home in Orono, Maine, on July nineteenth, 1996. I’m going to jump right in,” Kathryn tells her. “How well do you feel you knew Jennifer Pelletier?”

Rachel takes a deep breath and looks out the window at the rosebushes, the blue sky beyond. “It’s weird,” she says. “I consider—I considered—I still have trouble talking about her in the past tense, you know? Even after all this time.” She returns her gaze to Kathryn. “I keep thinking she’s going to show up with some kind of rational explanation for why she’s been gone. Anyway, I considered her one of my closest friends, but after she disappeared and people started asking questions about her, I realized that I actually didn’t know her very well at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. She was quiet, not reclusive or anything, but there was a level of reserve; you knew not to push things past a certain point. Will always seemed more open, though now I wonder. I mean, who knew he was gay? Sometimes I think I must’ve had my head in the sand
all through high school—or maybe we were just lying to each other the whole time.”

“Do you think we were?”

She pauses. “I think we all had secrets. Some of us knew things about others in the group not everyone knew. That’s only natural, I guess. You and Jennifer were closer to each other than you were to me, so I’m sure you know a lot more about her than I do.”

“Well, I’ve found I can’t assume anything,” Kathryn says. “I’m not sure I know any more than you.”

Sitting back, Rachel says, “Well, you and Jennifer were so close—I have to admit I felt a little left out. But then again, I was closer to Jack, and maybe that bothered you. I always wondered if you might have had a little crush on him. Because when he asked me to the prom, even though we were just friends, I remember I felt this weird vibe from you. I don’t know, maybe I was imagining it, but I wondered if you were hoping he’d ask you. Then when you went with Will, I thought I was wrong, and maybe you two had a thing going. Little did I know he was gay.” She laughs.

“Me either,” Kathryn says. Then, prompting, “And Jennifer went with Brian.”

“Right.”

“That was kind of surprising to me. I thought he was going to ask you.”

“I—hmm,” Rachel says. “Do we have to get all this on tape? I don’t really see how it’s relevant.”

“Just background.”

“It just seems trivial—who had a crush on whom, and all that.”

You brought it up, Kathryn thinks, but she keeps it to herself. “What do you think I should be asking?”

“I would think you’d be asking more about Jennifer’s state of mind on the night she disappeared, if she seemed upset or whatever. If I noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

“All right,” Kathryn agrees. “So what did you notice?”

“Well, I’ve thought about this a lot. I’m sure we all have. She seemed strange to me that night—kind of removed and distant.”

“More than usual?”

“Yes.
I think so. Though the fact that she just disappeared makes everything seem strange in retrospect. Even the color of the sky, and the way it was so empty. No stars. And there was a full moon, wasn’t there?”

“It was a crescent moon, I think,” Kathryn says.

“Really? I could have sworn it was full.” She gives her a wry smile. “It’s funny that we both remember the moon, but remember it differently. I’m sure you’ll find that with these interviews. We all have different perspectives.”

Kathryn settles back against the pillows on the couch. “So how did Jennifer seem strange to you?”

“When we drove up—I was with Jack and Brian and Will—the two of you were on the hood of that old red car you used to have. You sat up right away and came over, but Jennifer just stayed there. At first I thought she was asleep or passed out, but she wasn’t. She was just lying there, staring up at the sky. Then I got paranoid and thought maybe she was avoiding me or something. We’d kind of had it out the night before. But you know about that.”