Desire Lines (30 page)

“Well, you’ve got it all planned out,” Rosie says. She taps her pen against her teeth. “We can’t choose our parents, and obviously they determine a great deal about who we are. But beyond our family, we choose the people in our lives for a reason. Patterns exist and dynamics exist because we haven’t learned enough about who we are to stop them from playing out.”

Kathryn glances at the digital clock radio on the bookshelf; it’s 10:49
A.M
. Is this the parting summation?

“You keep getting involved with a particular kind of person. Why?” Rosie asks. Replacing the cap on her pen, she lays it on the desk. “That’s the question you need to be thinking about. And next time I hope we’ll make a little more progress in that direction.” She tosses her notebook onto the desk, and it slides across the smooth surface. “This is good work to be doing,” she says, walking Kathryn out. “It’s hard but important.”

Of course it’s important to you, Kathryn thinks; you’re getting seventy dollars an hour. But a tiny part of herself has to admit that Rosie is probably right.

THERE’S NO ONE
sitting on the porch of the nursing home when Kathryn arrives, and the parking lot is virtually empty. The afternoon sky is cloudy and bland.

“Where is everybody?” Kathryn asks when she gets to her grandmother’s room. The old woman is sitting in a wheelchair by the bed, doing anagrams out of a book. Kathryn kisses her on her cheek, which is papery and soft and smells of talcum.

“Dead. I’m the only one who made it through the night,” her grandmother says brightly.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Kathryn says. She holds up a paper cone of flowers. “What should I do with these?”

“It’s ‘quiet time.’ They think we’re in nursery school here,” she snorts. “Gives the staff a chance to nap, is what I think.” She flutters her fingers toward the bathroom. “There’s a plastic pitcher in there. They don’t trust us with glass.”

Kathryn goes into the bathroom, finds a blue regulation hospital pitcher, and fills it with water. Coming back into the room, she asks, “So how are you, Grandma?”

“How I am is boring. And bored. So why don’t you tell me something amusing?”

Kathryn smiles, unwrapping the funnel. “Mom is dating a car salesman.”

“Hah.”

“They might be in love.”

“Good Lord,” her grandmother says. “Tell me more.”

Kathryn begins to disentangle the daisies from each other and snap off the ends, standing them in the pitcher one by one. “I don’t know much,” she says. “Mom’s pretty tight-lipped about it. I haven’t even met the guy. But he did loan me a car while I’m home.”

“So you think he’s grand.”

“Basically.”

Her grandmother nods. Then she looks down, studying Kathryn’s feet. “Where in the world did you find those clodhoppers? They’re frightful.”

“They’re clogs, Grandma. And they’re really comfortable.”

“So is my bathrobe, but I don’t wear it out in public.”

Kathryn holds up the pitcher. “What do you think of these?”

“Very nice,” she says primly. “You know, Josh always brings me roses.”

“When’s the last time Josh came to see you?”

“It might have been yesterday, I remember it so well. A huge bouquet of yellow roses,” she says, spreading her arms, as if to encompass them. “There must have been dozens. And baby’s breath.”

“Josh is a mortgage broker,” Kathryn reminds her.

“And you’re just broke.” She laughs gleefully. “Oh, Kathryn, I need you around more often! I’d forgotten how witty I can be.”

Kathryn gives her a patently fake smile. “Glad I can be of service.” She turns and sets the flowers in the window.

Her grandmother claps her hands together. “So. Your mother has told me about the big investigation. Where are we with the story, Nancy Drew?”

“I have an article due tomorrow.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen hundred words.”

“Piece of cake.”

“Easy for you to say.” Kathryn crosses her arms, leans against the wall. “I’ve been talking to people all week, and I don’t know much more than when I started.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

Kathryn laughs, incredulous at the question. “Because,” she says with exaggerated patience, “I have nothing to go on. I have nothing to say, nothing to build a story on.”

“How many people have you interviewed?”

“Umm …” She counts them in her head: John Bourne, Gaffney, Jack, Rachel, Brian, Mrs. Pelletier, Mr. Hunter, Abby Elson, Will. “Nine.”

“And none of them said anything interesting.”

“No, they did. But I just don’t know how I can—”

“What were you expecting, a confession?”

She half shrugs. “Well, it would be nice. It’d be a good lead.”

Her grandmother frowns. “1 didn’t realize you were such a lazy reporter. Is that why you got fired from that paper in Virginia?”

“I didn’t get fired,” Kathryn says, annoyed. “I quit.”

“Um-hmmph,” she says skeptically. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” She turns and looks out the window at the dishwater sky, the pine trees on the horizon rustling in the wind like a faraway army. “I’m thinking of calling Jack and asking for an extension.”

“Pah.” Her grandmother shakes her head in disgust. “In all my years as a reporter I never once missed a deadline.”

“This is a little different, Grandma. I’m not writing about the Junior League.”

Lifting her chin slowly, she looks Kathryn in the eye. “I am not going to dignify that with a response.” The room is silent for a moment. Then she snaps, “That is the most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me. Take it back.”

“I wasn’t fired,” Kathryn says petulantly.

“What?”

“I wasn’t fired.”

“All right, fine, then. You quit,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“Okay. I take it back.”

They stare at each other. Then her grandmother says, “I’m surprised at you, Kathryn. I didn’t know you were such a big baby.”

“Please, Grandma, don’t insult me anymore. I’m starting to sympathize with Mom.”

“And I’m starting to think you’re more like her than I thought.”

There’s another long stretch of silence between them. Somewhere
down the hall, a radio is playing. A telephone goes unanswered; Kathryn counts ten rings, eleven, twelve, before it stops. The room, she notices, smells of canned food and disinfectant.

“Well,” her grandmother says finally. She clasps her hands in her lap. “I don’t know if you are interested in my advice.”

“I don’t know, either,” Kathryn says warily.

“For what it’s worth, based on what you’ve told me, and my own—
admittedly limited—
experience, I believe you have more than enough material for a story.” She pauses, waiting.

“Go on.”

“To build a story is to master the art of illusion,” her grandmother says. “There doesn’t need to be a solid center; you just have to create the illusion of one. You have to trust your instincts.”

“That’s the problem,” Kathryn says, sitting down on the bed. “I don’t.”

“You set the scene, divert the eye,” her grandmother says. “Thoughts, feelings, everyday objects, offhand remarks: you take what you’ve got and craft around it.” She makes an arc in the air with her hands, then lets them fall to her lap. “What do we want to know about this girl? We want to know what happened to her. What are the possibilities? That she was picked up by a stranger, or she wasn’t.” She begins counting the options on her fingers. “If she wasn’t, maybe she fell into the river by accident. Or on purpose. Or she was picked up by someone she knew. Or she ran off. Every possibility invites a different set of questions: Why would someone pick her up? Why would she run off? Was she running toward something, or running away?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Kathryn frets.

“But it’s all right not to know. Don’t you see?” She reaches over and takes Kathryn’s hand in her own cold, bony one and squeezes it tightly. “That’s the story.” She looks into Kathryn’s eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I don’t know,” Kathryn mumbles, shaking her head.

“Of course you do,” her grandmother says. She sits up straight in her
wheelchair and smooths the blanket on her lap. “You just have to find a way in. When you have that, the story will reveal itself. It will tell you what you know. And what you know, my dear, may surprise you.”

LATE INTO THE
evening, sitting at the kitchen table, Kathryn listens to the tapes. The voices are more hesitant, more solemn, than she remembers. She hears things she doesn’t recall having been said; she thinks of questions she should have asked. In the quiet, the disembodied voices tell one story, the silences another. Kathryn listens to the Morse code of pauses and unfinished thoughts and interruptions, and a pattern slowly begins to emerge. After all this time the pain seems fresh: what Jennifer did, what she didn’t do, the trivial betrayals. They each seem to think that Jennifer somehow duped them into believing that they knew her, that they understood her, when, as it later became clear, they didn’t know her at all. Jennifer’s surface was a mirror, reflecting back to people the image they wanted to see; behind the glass, she did what she wanted.

But what Kathryn begins to understand, as she listens to the tapes, is that she and her friends are wrong to feel betrayed. Jennifer did allow them to know her, each in a different way. Some saw glimpses of her renegade spirit, others of her heavy heart. And maybe it wasn’t that she was purposely deceiving them; maybe it was that she wanted so badly to be like everyone else, to be normal, that she felt she had to hide part of who she was to keep their friendship. Kathryn thinks about what Rachel told her Jennifer had said: Trust
isn’t a word I know. It isn’t in my vocabulary.
In the end, Kathryn thinks, Jennifer had too much to hide; she became too skilled at telling lies and keeping secrets. She was too adept at covering her tracks. It was inevitable that eventually she would become impossible to follow.

Opening the folder from the police station, Kathryn rereads the missing-persons reports, the all-points bulletin, the write-ups of interviews
with family and friends. In the dry, official language of the police report what stands out most is how little evidence they had, how baffling and unexplainable the disappearance was. The small clues they had collapsed like a pile of ashes whenever anyone tried to build a case out of them.

Was she unhappy? Did she say or do anything unusual in the preceding six months? Had anything happened in the past year that might have had a profoundly negative effect on her? Was she secretive? Was she deceitful? Did anyone have reason to be angry at her?

The answer is yes, yes to everything—and yet somehow it still doesn’t make sense, even after all the depositions and searches through the underbrush, even after analyzing her father’s death and the suicide attempt and interviewing the mother she betrayed and the brother she lied to and the friends she treated so cavalierly. Something is missing-some vital piece. And until it is found, the story will never make sense; the pieces will add up to nothing, their accumulation as meaningless as a dead language. Without a key there can be no translation, just pages of unintelligible text.

In all my years on the force,
Gaffney said,
I’ve never seen a stranger-to-stranger abduction.
It could have happened; anything’s possible. But it probably didn’t. Which meant that either she ran away or someone who knew her did her harm. How well do you know your neighbor? How well do you know yourself? In towns all over America, the lament when something terrible happens is the same: He would never do that, he’s not the type. Nothing like this ever happens here. He seemed like such a nice guy, kept to himself, didn’t bother anyone. And then, inevitably, people begin to see signs of deviance in the ordinary man’s behavior. Well, he was a little strange. Killed squirrels with a BB gun, didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, never had a girlfriend, couldn’t hold down a job. But it always struck Kathryn that the details that surface after the fact could probably be culled from any life. We all have things to hide, things we’re hiding from, habits and quirks and insecurities.
The facts of our lives can be so easily corralled into a story of good or evil, brilliance or insanity, conformity or aberrance. How can you know what anyone is capable of? How can you know it of yourself?

The same is true, of course, of the one to whom something happens. The first reaction is panic: She could be any of our children; she might be my daughter, my sister, my friend. The beautiful blond-haired girl in the yearbook photograph, with her shining eyes and soft striped blouse, her pop-song quote and wholesome activities, represented everything a parent could want, everything a teenage girl might long to be. But as time went on and details began to emerge, it was easy to particularize and distance what had happened to her. She was different. She took chances, kept secrets, had a life tainted by tragedy. She was out alone after midnight on a rural road. Her family life was sordid; her mother had affairs, her father committed suicide, her mother remarried under a cloud.