Desire Lines (9 page)

Like most of her friends, Kathryn felt that the adults in her life existed around her, setting limits, asking questions, prying. Kathryn moved through each day as if around an obstacle course, ducking inopportune questions, ignoring unwanted advice, sliding in just under curfew. She couldn’t imagine how she might communicate with these people, even if she wanted to. Her parents talked about responsibility and limits and planning for the future. They wanted her to save time, to be aware of time, to use her time wisely. This concept was meaningless to her. Why worry about time when there was so much of it, when it was as plentiful as air? She wanted to squander time, to use up great gobs of it. As far as she was concerned, everything happened too slowly.

High school always seemed to Kathryn like a way station for real life, a place where nothing meaningful could happen and there was no point in even trying. She took school seriously; she fretted over tests and made decent grades, but she never quite believed that anything she learned in high school would spill over into Real Life—that mythical time in the future, after college, when she would be an adult in the world. Of course, she was as terrified of leaving home as she was at the prospect of being left behind. She procrastinated filling out college applications until the last possible week, scrambling to ask for recommendations, dashing off the personal essay. It seemed to her like a school assignment, an exercise; it was impossible to imagine that it might actually be her ticket out.

Being a teenager was like being a member of a large, disparate tribe
with its own language, a patois invented from the necessity of deceit. The kids hid things from teachers and parents and each other, and sometimes, without even knowing it, from themselves. High school was all about deception. Otherwise, how would any of them have survived it? If Kathryn had told her parents the truth about her life, they would never have let her out of the house. As it was, they were suspicious, setting curfews and quizzing her about her friends, extracting meaningless pledges and promises, checking up when possible. Kathryn quickly learned to recite the catechism they wanted to hear:
I’m the good girl, the conscience of the group, the one with common sense. I would never do drugs
I
have sex in someone’s car
I
sit between two friends, unbelted, in the back of a hatchback that’s passing a truck at ninety miles an hour up a hill on a two-lane road. I would never take the kinds of chances that could get me killed, because I know how precious my life is to you, how shattered you would be to lose me.

She let them believe this, and they let themselves trust her—and as long as nothing terrible happened, they could all convince themselves that Kathryn deserved that trust.

WALKING AROUND THE
mall now, Kathryn’s feet are beginning to drag. The mall always makes her tired; she wonders if there’s something in the air-conditioning that zaps people’s energy and keeps them there longer, like drugged captives. Finally she summons her energy and makes her way to the car, then drives the five hundred yards to the cineplex across the street. Scanning a list of titles and playing times, she finds an action-adventure movie starring Mel Gibson that’s starting in eight minutes. She buys popcorn and another Diet Coke and settles into a seat in the empty theater. When the previews begin, she leans back, soaking up the bright images and sounds in front of her like a sun-worshipper at the beach.

The movie is fast-moving and visceral, and for two hours she thinks of nothing but the drama onscreen. When the lights come up, it takes
her a moment to orient herself, and then she does: she’s in a deserted movie theater at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday. In her hometown, living with her mother. With nine hundred dollars to her name, a student loan to repay, and no job to speak of, driving her mother’s car. On the way out of the theater she slips into another movie that’s just starting, but it’s about a guy who loses his wife and his job and decides to drink himself to death, and she’s pretty sure she’s not in the frame of mind to see it.

Chapter 6

“S
o, my darling,” Kathryn’s mother says several days later when she finds her sitting at the kitchen table in boxer shorts and a Women’s Studies T-shirt, reading the paper. “Do you know what time it is?”

Kathryn glances at the clock. “Eleven forty-five.”

Her mother looks at her.

“What? Did the time change?”

“It’s eleven forty-five,” her mother says. “The morning’s almost gone.”

Kathryn looks at her over the top of the paper.

“You’ve been here almost a week now, Kathryn, and I wasn’t going to say anything, but I just can’t stand by any longer without telling you what I think.”

Kathryn lowers the paper and folds it slowly, avoiding her mother’s eyes. “Fine. Go ahead.”

“Well …” She takes Kathryn’s empty mug off the table. “More coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“I think I’ll have some.” She goes over to the counter, takes down a Maine Black Bears mug, and fills it from the pot. “This is what I have observed,” she says, opening two packets of Equal with her teeth and pouring them in. “You stay up late watching talk shows—”

“Does the noise bother you?”

“That’s not my point. And then you sleep late every morning. You wander down here around eleven or eleven-thirty, and then it’s afternoon before you’re dressed, and half the day is gone.”

“Um-hmm.”

“Don’t you think there’s a problem here? Look.” Her mother comes over and sits in the chair beside her, setting her mug on the table. Kathryn inches her chair away. “It’s no secret that you’re depressed.”

All at once a flock of emotions, seemingly from nowhere, wings its way through Kathryn’s brain.

“And I think you’re hiding.”

“From what?”

“Yourself. Your expectations of yourself.”

“Oh, Mom—” Kathryn starts, but her mother cuts her off.

“Listen, I know what’s going on. When your father left me, the jerk, I—”

“This is hardly the same thing. Paul and I agreed, mutually—”

“Bull-oney. Nobody ever agrees mutually,” she says. “Something happens, one person pulls away, and the other one gets self-protective and pulls back too. And Paul was having an affair, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, but that was just a symptom.”

“Whatever. All I know is that divorce does terrible things to your sense of self. Your esteem.”

Kathryn lets out a short laugh. “Have you been buying those self-help books again, Mom?”

“That kind of cynicism is just what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Face it. You’re listless.” Her mother slowly wags her head. “Being in denial is not going to help.”

“Look, Mom, I appreciate your concern, but I wish you’d just leave me alone, okay?”

“No,” she says, leaning closer, “I will not leave you alone.”

“Why are you treating me like a child?”

“Because you’re acting like one.”

Kathryn covers her face with her hands. “Do me a favor. Please get off my back. Just for a little while. Please.”

“All I want is for you to be—”

“I know, I know—”

“Don’t you interrupt me!” Her mother’s voice is fierce.

Kathryn takes a deep breath.

“I am sorry about what you’ve been through,” her mother says angrily. “I’d have given anything for the last few years to have worked out differently for you. I know it hasn’t been easy. But this is just no good. You’ve got to work through it. You are twenty-eight years old, Kathryn. I run into girls from your class all the time, and they’re having babies and teaching school and buying houses and planning for retirement and generally acting like adults. But you don’t seem to want to make any hard decisions.”

“You don’t call getting divorced a hard decision?”

“I call it inevitable. That marriage was doomed from the start. You weren’t in love with him, you just kind of fell into the relationship because it seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, so far, it seems to me, inertia has been the driving force of your adult life. You fell into a job in Washington that you kind of liked, then you went to graduate school, which you didn’t finish; you got yourself married and settled in Charlottesville, which you kind of liked, got a job that you kind of liked … and then, when things didn’t work out, you abandoned it all and came back to where you started—with no clear idea of what you want, no plans, no goals for the future.”

Kathryn looks at her mother steadily, and her mother looks back.

“I think this goes way back, Kathryn,” she says finally. “I think this has to do with Jennifer. And I think it’s time for you to start working it out.”

INERTIA, KATHRYN THINKS
, lying on her bed that afternoon, staring up at the ceiling. What a strange word. Who’d have thought her mother would come up with it? She likes the sound of it—
inertia—
a far-off echo, a secret, a lulling whisper in her head. She hasn’t tried to name this disconnection she’s been feeling; she hasn’t dared to pin it down. Having a word, and such a word, to describe it is somehow comforting. She likes that it characterizes actions, not feelings; it covers her without defining her. It’s safe.

For the first time in a long time, she thinks back to that night by the Kenduskeag. After Jennifer left, she and Will had made their way down to the river, just the two of them, leaving everyone else behind. “Will you remember this?” he said. “Will you remember me?”

She wonders sometimes what would have become of them if nothing had happened, if they’d all simply gone off to college as they expected to after that last summer in Maine. Maybe she and Will would have continued to see each other whenever they could for a while, and then the phone calls and the visits would have dwindled, and finally she’d have found out from a friend at Princeton that he was gay—or maybe he’d have told her himself. Jennifer would have gone to Colby, as she’d planned, and Kathryn to Virginia, and the two of them would’ve stayed friends, coming back together in the summers between school years, sleeping on the floor of each other’s dorm room on occasional weekends. But then they’d have gotten caught up in their separate lives and separate friends and forget to call, and eventually they’d have been standing on the shores of each other’s lives, squinting hard into the distance to see to the other side.

Instead, things fell apart. Jennifer’s sudden absence destroyed the fabric that had held everyone together. The police were secretive, then
hesitant, and finally admitted there’d been no leads. Kathryn moved through college in a kind of daze, forming friendships cautiously when at all, making respectable grades, avoiding loud parties, keeping herself organized and managing her time efficiently. Everybody who knew about Jennifer’s disappearance remarked on how well Kathryn was doing, how quickly she had “bounced back”—as if what she did and how she appeared had any relation to how she felt.

For a long time the guilt was enormous. She felt guilty when she laughed, when she made a new friend, when she momentarily forgot. She’d be walking down the street in the middle of the day and the sun would be shining and a child would laugh and she’d be wondering what to make for dinner, where she might find some thin-stalked asparagus, whether she had a lemon in the fridge, when something would trigger a memory—a glimpse of blond hair, a low, throaty laugh, a dim recollection of Jennifer at fourteen encountering asparagus for the first time, leaving behind a small mound of fringed tips. At times like this Kathryn would stop short, her thoughts dissolving like an Etch-a-Sketch, her stomach caving in on itself like a hill of sand.

During her sophomore year she spent a semester in London. She read eighteenth-century British poetry and took to wearing black from Marks & Spencer. In the late afternoon, around teatime, she would leave her cramped, ugly flat and walk through the damp streets, smelling the rain that was never far away, looking at the grim, pale faces of Londoners too long on the dole. Yet she felt perfectly at home. She began losing weight, first because the food at the college was so bad and then because she learned to savor the feeling. She was shrinking, disappearing.

She began smoking cigarettes to stave off hunger, and wore black eyeliner and layers of clothes because being thin made her cold. Her London friends noticed the change, but thought it was cool; they joked about how fresh-faced Kathryn Campbell had been transformed. Her unhealthy glow was like a lighthouse beacon, drawing castaways. But she wasn’t capable of offering shelter; she had a hard enough time giving
solace to herself. Instead she willed men toward her and then, before daylight, left them. It helped, she knew, to be so light. Somehow it was easier to leave and feel no remorse when your mind was dizzy with hunger and the weight of your body left no imprint on the bed.

When she returned to the States at the end of May, her mother and brother barely recognized her. She slipped off the plane, dressed in tatters and pale as the moon. Her mother stepped back in horror; her brother stepped forward, impressed. “Wow, Kath,” Josh said appreciatively as she came toward them, “you look like a freak.”