Desire Lines (25 page)

“No, you didn’t.”

Laughing, he looks down. “Let me put it this way: I knew you could.”

“I’ll have the story,” she says. She opens the door and looks back at him. Then she steps into the rain.

Chapter 17

B
y the time Kathryn rouses herself from bed the next morning, at eight-thirty, her mother is already gone. She makes her way to the bathroom, pulling her T-shirt over her head as she goes, and turns on the shower, holding her hand under the spray as she adjusts the knobs. She squirts toothpaste on her toothbrush and then pees brushing her teeth. Rinsing her mouth, she looks at herself in the mirror over the sink. Her face is puffy and wan, and she seems to be breaking out on her chin. The red dye is growing out of her hair, and her roots are dark, darker than she remembers them being in the first place. In the strong morning light she sees a silver glint, and she reaches up and finds it, isolating it with searching fingers, and yanks it out. Opening the medicine cabinet, she shakes three aspirin into her hand and downs them with a cupped handful of water. Two of them lodge in her throat and start to dissolve, leaving a bitter, chalky taste that makes her gag.

Stepping into the shower, she turns her face toward the spray and
closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to think, doesn’t want to remember, but because she’s stone-cold sober and all alone, her mind won’t stop churning. Ten years of restless uncertainty were better than this, she thinks. At least then she had a way of thinking about Jennifer that kept her memories neatly contained in a box. How well can you know somebody? You see them every day, perhaps for years, share things with them you’ve shared with no one else. And then one morning you wake up and realize you know nothing about them—that the person who seemed to open up to you was exposing only a shell. Because you were blind, or gullible, or because you didn’t want to know, you missed all the signs and signals that might have pointed the way toward the truth. So now you’re left with a gaping hole in your life, a bottomless mystery, and you don’t have the slightest idea how to solve it, because your basic assumptions were false to begin with.

She’s reminded of how she used to feel when she read Encyclopedia Brown stories in sixth grade. The main character always had to solve a mystery in his neighborhood; commonsense clues were embedded in each story, and he inevitably figured out the answer. Before it was revealed, however, the reader was given a chance to guess. The answer always made sense; it would be a small clue, an offhand remark or casual observation, but half the time she missed it. And always, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t gotten it by herself, hadn’t seen it all along.

After her shower, sitting on her bedroom floor in a towel, Kathryn calls Rosie to schedule an appointment.

“Rosie’s out,” Doris chirps. “Little League,” she explains. “But we have something for Thursday at ten. And oh, look at this! There’s a cancellation for later today, three o’clock. Your choice.”

“I’ll take both of them,” she says.

“Well, all righty,” Doris says with surprise. “I’ll put you down, hon. Glad you’re feeling better.”

When she hangs up the phone, Kathryn takes a deep breath and stretches out on the floor. She looks outside; it’s a beautiful day, sunny
and warm. The big green leaves of the elm in front of the house rustle and turn in the breeze. It’s the perfect day for a run, she thinks. A run might be just what she needs.

Heading out Kenduskeag Avenue toward the airport, across the highway overpass and through a new housing development, Kathryn feels the muscles in her legs constrict in protest. She hasn’t gone running since Charlottesville, and that was months ago, when she still had a job and a routine and some semblance of a marriage. She feels like stopping, but she doesn’t dare. If she stops now, she might never start again; she might give up entirely and spend her days in her bedroom on Taft Street with the shades drawn, waiting for her mother to come home. She wonders if her mother is secretly as afraid as she is that she might not pull through this; that she might just sink into some kind of torpor from which she’ll never emerge. She has a cramp in her side now, and it slows her a little, but she doesn’t stop running until she’s back on Taft Street, half a block from home.

IT IS
CLEAR
to Kathryn, when she finally broaches the subject of Jennifer, that Rosie has been expecting her to bring it up. “Ah, yes,” she says, “the missing piece.”

“There’s so much I want to say to her,” Kathryn says. “There’s so much I want to ask.”

“Like what?”

“Like—like—why she didn’t feel that she could confide in me. Why she kept me in the dark. It’s painful to admit,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. She half laughs, trying to diffuse her own sadness.

“What do you want to say to her?” Rosie pulls a tissue out of the box and hands it over.

Kathryn wipes her nose and shakes her head to clear it. “I guess I want to say I’m sorry. For not being a better friend. I keep wanting to make it right between us.” She thinks for a moment. “I want to tell her
that I may not understand what’s going on with her—I may not have a clue, but it doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I’ll be here when she needs me. I never told her that.”

“Could she have heard you?” Rosie asks gently.

“I don’t know.” She pulls at the wadded-up tissue in her hand, tearing it to shreds.

Eventually Rosie starts to talk, and Kathryn, full of conflicting and unexplainable emotions, is content to listen. “Of course you feel guilty,” Rosie says, leaning forward. “Of course you can’t get past this. The simple fact of anyone vanishing into thin air is horrific enough, but in this case it was compounded by how it happened, and when. Her disappearance was the literal manifestation of the sense of loss you already felt that night. You were leaving high school, soon to be leaving home. The world you knew was disappearing. And ever since, I’d suggest, you’ve existed in this state of limbo between two worlds,” she says, holding her hands out and cupping them as if she’s balancing ostrich eggs, “unable to let go of the past, unwilling to embrace the future”—one hand falls and rises, and then the other—“afraid, always, that letting go would mean giving up.”

“But wouldn’t it?” Kathryn says.

Rosie cocks her head. “She’ll always be a part of you, Kathryn.”

“So how do I—what do I—” she asks helplessly, and Rosie says, “You do exactly what you’re doing. That’s all you can do.”

When the session is over, Kathryn feels like a wet sheet on a clothesline, limp, wrung out, nearly transparent. Leaving Rosie’s, she drives down to a small park by the Penobscot and sits on the bank watching the boats and the picnicking families. No one says a word to her; it’s almost as if she is invisible, or the action in front of her is on a screen. She stretches out on the grass and closes her eyes, feeling the late-afternoon sun on her eyelids, drifting in her own separate space and time.

Chapter 18

“I
‘m sorry, Kath,” Linda Pelletier says briskly when she hears her request. Kathryn has tracked her down by phone at her new condo in Florida. “I’ve said everything there is to say to the police and the press already.”

“But it’s been years since anyone’s written about this,” Kathryn says. She twirls the phone cord between her fingers. “There might be a new way of looking at it, or a detail that never came to light.”

Mrs. Pelletier sighs with undisguised irritation. “Really, I don’t think so. People forget things after this much time. If anybody has anything new to say, they probably made it up.”

“But don’t you think it’s worth a try?” Kathryn ventures, knowing as she does that she’s stepping precipitously close to a line. “As long as she’s still missing, shouldn’t we do what we can to find her?”

Kathryn hears Mrs. Pelletier suck in her breath. “You have no idea what this has been like for me. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

“You’re right,” Kathryn says quickly. “I’m sorry. I know this has been a terrible ordeal.” She leafs through the papers on the table in front of her. “But I have the interviews you gave right here, and there are a few questions the police didn’t ask that I’ve been wondering about.”

“Like what.” It’s a challenge, not a question.

“It would be helpful to know more about your husband’s death and Jennifer’s suicide attempt.”

Mrs. Pelletier laughs dryly. “I’ve already said all I have to say about Pete’s accident and Jennifer’s reaction to it. There’s no link, as far as I can tell, to any of this.

“Look.” She sighs. “I understand why you’re doing this. But we’ve been dealing with it day in and day out for ten years, and you’re just coming in now—like somehow you’re going to ask the magic question and somebody’ll say, ‘Gosh, that’s right, I forgot! I saw her down at the bus station that night, buying a ticket to L.A.!’ There’s nothing more to find, Kath. And I’ve just had to accept that we might never find out what happened, unless she decides to wander home. Or unless somebody stumbles across—God forbid …” She stops, her voice choked with emotion.

“Do you think she ran away?”

“Frankly, I don’t know anymore,” she says after a moment. “I didn’t use to think so. But who knows who’s going to do what? She was my daughter, but I don’t think I knew her. I thought I did, but …” Her voice trails off. “That’s my regret,” she says softly. “I do regret that. Maybe … but there’s no way of knowing. Anyway, we’re moving on with our lives. We need to put the pain of this behind us.”

“‘We’—you mean you and Will?”

“No, I mean me and Ralph,” she says, a quiver of tension in her voice. “This has been hell on Will. And then—his lifestyle choices and the consequences of that … I just think the strain of this has made him a different person. I wish I could help him, I really do. But he’s got to help himself.”

When the conversation is over, Kathryn opens the back door of the
house and walks out into her mother’s garden. Sitting down under the apple tree, she gazes up at the gnarled branches and the small, unripe fruit. She thinks of Mrs. Pelletier in the days after Jennifer vanished, her face drawn and scared. Without benefit of makeup, her eyes were rabbity, her lips chapped and white. She seemed not to know what to do; she stood on her porch wrapped in Jennifer’s letter sweater, her eyes darting anxiously up and down the street as if she expected her daughter to come sauntering up any minute. In interviews on TV she was always pleading and sobbing, her mute, hulking husband at her side. Five weeks to the day after graduation she was hospitalized for exhaustion. When she was released from the hospital, she told the newspaper that her doctor had forbidden her to go back to search-party headquarters. Will had to keep it going on his own.

Kathryn’s own mother had been disapproving. “You’d think she could pull herself together and try to be useful,” she said, clucking her tongue at the television, where Linda Pelletier was huddled behind her son as he patiently answered questions on the local news. “If I were her, I’d be up day and night looking for my daughter.” Kathryn didn’t doubt it; she knew how tenacious her mother was. But sometimes, in a particularly indulgent moment, she let herself wonder how long it would last-how long before her mother would decide there was nothing more she could do and it was time to let it go, let her go. Her mother could be fickle; she threw herself into hobbies and projects and friendships and then, without warning, it seemed to Kathryn, abruptly gave up and moved on. It was a bleak thing to think about, how your mother would handle it if something happened to you, and it always put Kathryn in a bad mood. But it was just one of the many questions that Jennifer’s disappearance had stirred up in her. It was part of the wound that wouldn’t heal, and she picked at it like a scab.

Chapter 19

T
he school secretary confirms that though Miss Hallowell quit teaching several years ago to sell beauty products and Mr. Richardson recently retired from teaching drama, Mr. Hunter is still at the high school, still teaching social studies. Kathryn leaves a message for him at the school, and later that day he returns her call. His voice on the phone is guarded; he seems not to remember who she is.

“Jennifer Pelletier’s friend,” Kathryn reminds him. “We were in your class together senior year.”

“Oh, right. Miss Campbell. Brown hair,” he says finally. “You went to Penn, right?”

“Virginia.”

“That’s right.” He laughs; she’s not sure why. She remembers this now, that he was always laughing at his students, always finding some private humor at their expense. It made Kathryn uncomfortable, but it also gave her a small, edgy thrill. The lure was that you might someday
be in on the joke—that you might earn his trust enough for him to confide in you. “I know who you are. It’s all coming back,” he says. “Jennifer’s shadow.”

Kathryn knows he’s needling her, but it stings nonetheless. “Oh. That’s a pleasant way to be remembered.”

He laughs again. “Well, I’m sure you’ve carved your own path since then.”

“I haven’t had much choice,” she says dryly.

“No, I guess not,” he says. “So what can I help you with?”