“Did you ever talk about it with her afterward?”
“A few days later she called and asked me to meet her at McDonald’s, so of course I went. When I got there she was sitting at a corner table behind this huge fake plant, crying her eyes out. She didn’t even really acknowledge me, she just started going on about how sorry she was and how fucked up she was and how she wanted to explain but couldn’t, and how her life sucked and she’d screwed everything up and now Rachel hated her and I probably hated her and most of all she hated herself. What could I say? I just sat there and tried to make sense of it. I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. So I made some lame-ass move like patting her on the hand, and that was when she bolted. She knocked over her soda and didn’t look back. So I got down on the floor with wads of McDonald’s napkins, and by the time I looked up, her car was gone.”
“Did you hate her?” Kathryn asks.
“I actually felt sorry for her,” he says. “Even that night at the prom, when she was an unbelievable bitch, I knew down deep that it really didn’t have anything to do with me. I thought maybe it had something to do with her father. Nobody really close to me has died, so I don’t know what it’s like, but your dad offing himself in a public park—that has to screw you up pretty bad.”
“Did she ever talk about that with you?”
“No,” he says.
“What about Rachel?”
“What about her?”
“Do you think she was angry at Jennifer?”
“I don’t know. I know she was pissed at me.”
“She thought you were going to ask her,” Kathryn says.
“I guess so. Don’t get me wrong, I thought Rachel was cool. But I never liked her like that. We were just friends—I thought she knew that.”
“Do you think that’s how Jennifer thought of you? As ‘just friends’?”
“Probably. I guess so. But the thing is, I’m usually a pretty good judge of whether someone likes me or not. I don’t tend to set myself up for disappointment. And for a few weeks, at least, Jennifer acted like she did.”
“Did either of you feel guilty about Rachel?”
“We never talked about it,” Brian says. “And I told myself that I had nothing to feel guilty about; I never told Rachel I’d go with her or anything like that. But I know, deep down, that I was a shit. Because to be honest, if Jennifer hadn’t come along, I probably would have asked Rachel. And I would have had a much better time, too.”
“Brian, did you ever figure out why Jennifer asked you?”
“I’ve thought about this a lot, because she could’ve gone with anybody. I decided it was because she wasn’t interested in anyone, and she wanted to go with a friend—which meant me or Jack, since going with Will might have freaked people out. And she never seemed quite at ease around Jack, for some reason. So that left me. I just wish I’d figured that out before I got my hopes up.” He sighs loudly. “God, it’s weird to think about high school after all this time. There’s so much about those years that I’ve forgotten. I don’t know why that is, except that when Jennifer just vanished into thin air it kind of obliterated everything else.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve always had this nagging feeling that if she wanted to be found, she’d come back.”
“So you think she ran away.”
“I know she was unhappy. I know she was hiding things.”
“Like what?”
“Little things, but still …” He pauses for a moment. “Like one time during class when I snuck out behind the school for a cigarette, I ran into her coming back in. From nowhere. She was totally startled and strange. Another time we were walking up the ramp and she dropped her notebook and pages went flying and she freaked. She wouldn’t let me help her pick them up; she kept saying she could do it herself, and that I should go on ahead. When I tried to help her anyway, she grabbed the pages out of my hand and told me to ‘fucking stay out of it.’ Stuff like that.”
“If you had to guess, where would you say she is?”
“Her passport was missing, right? I’d say Australia, or New Zealand. Somewhere far away—somewhere warm.”
“But do you really think she’d do that to Will?”
“Maybe Will knows where she is,” Brian says. “Who knows? Maybe he’s been there.”
“No, he was devastated,” Kathryn says. “He organized the search party.”
“If she did go somewhere, she wouldn’t have let him know for a while. But think about it: Maybe one day at college, maybe his sophomore year, Will gets a phone call out of the blue and it’s her, letting him know she’s alive. It wouldn’t surprise me. Look, I just think she’s out there somewhere. And I think if you keep looking long enough, you’re going to find her. She didn’t walk off the face of the earth. Somebody has to know where she is.”
WHEN THE PHONE call is over, Kathryn goes up to her room to find her high-school yearbook. Sitting on her bed, she slowly turns the pages, looking for clues in Jennifer’s various poses. In her senior portrait Jennifer might be any pretty high school girl, though now to Kathryn her smile seems unnatural, frozen in place. She sits on bended knee wearing a sleeveless maroon uniform, number twelve, in a picture of the cross-country team. In another photo she stands in the back row of a group of serious-looking National Honor Society students. Under the banner headline SUPERLATIVES, she and Jack are grinning and tapping their foreheads under a hand-drawn thought balloon that says “Most Likely to Be Remembered.” In a photo montage of the school play, she’s wearing first a high ponytail and a poodle skirt and then a cascade of curls and a leather jacket, above the caption “You’re the One That I Want!”
Brian is right, Kathryn thinks. None of us really knew her. She fooled us all into thinking this was who she was. Or maybe we saw what we wanted to see. Is it only in retrospect that her smile seems dutiful? Is her life mysterious only because she left a mystery behind?
For four years of high school she and Jennifer had seen each other every day; they spent more time together than with their own families. For a long time it seemed that they told each other everything. It was thrilling to know each other so intimately, to build a library together of secrets and memories. Kathryn knew that Jennifer had four cavities and a brown mole on her chest, and that she wore St. Eve cotton high-cut bikinis and Warner’s stretch-knit front-clasp bras. She could remember all of Jennifer’s haircuts, from the fifth-grade wedge to the short-lived bob to the layered disaster the summer after ninth grade, and she suffered with her through the overbleached highlights that resulted from an experiment with peroxide and a bottle of Realemon. But after a while this familiarity became wearing. They knew too much to excite or impress each other. They began noticing patterns in each other’s behavior and commenting on them: But you always do this. That is so like you. That kind of guy always breaks your heart.
Every now and then Kathryn would discover that Jennifer had kept something from her, and her confidence in the friendship would be shaken. When confronted, Jennifer always apologized, citing absent-mindedness, blaming it on her crazy week or PMS. But Kathryn knew it was more than that. At some point, Jennifer had started holding back. At first it was just small things—a new pair of shoes that appeared without discussion, an unremarked-upon encounter with the guy from chemistry class who they both thought was cute. Over time, though, larger, more important details slipped by. Kathryn didn’t know that Jennifer was going to the prom with Brian until Rachel called her, furious. She never knew that Jennifer was interested in, or possibly seeing, someone else. What other things didn’t she know? How serious were Jennifer’s lies and omissions?
There were always reasons for Jennifer’s evasiveness, reasons that made sense. Her home life was awful—far worse than Kathryn’s, where even though she had to endure her parents’ bitter divorce, she still knew each of them loved her and cared about her. Jennifer’s mother was grasping and needy and, at the
same time, disengaged; her father worked long hours at the office and drank too much when he came home. So Kathryn didn’t press her to be more open. She thought she understood. After a while she came to accept the fact that there was something unknowable about Jennifer; it was as if her core was wrapped in a thin layer of ice. In a strange way Jennifer’s inscrutability was almost alluring to Kathryn; it gave her access to a different level of emotion, an intoxicating unhappiness, fathomless in its depth and complexity. So Kathryn, who laid herself bare with every expression, who could no more hide what she was feeling than she could shed her skin, wanted both to become more like Jennifer and to shatter the glassy surface that kept them apart.
Now, looking at the pictures in the yearbook, she wishes she had asked more questions, demanded more answers. She should have forced Jennifer to talk. But Jennifer didn’t want to talk. And how would Kathryn have forced her to, anyway—tied her down and tortured her? There was probably a way Kathryn could have been more receptive, more tuned in to what her friend wanted or needed, but she didn’t know what that was. After all these years, she thinks, I still don’t.
Chapter 16
Later that afternoon, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Kathryn drives to Governor’s, a diner on a commercial strip littered with fast-food restaurants and car-lube shops. She dashes inside and is ushered to a red vinyl booth; within seconds, an enormous laminated menu and a glass of water materialize before her. Overhead, an electric toy train chugs around on a track. Pictures of all of Maine’s governors, with the current one in the middle, line the back wall. Waitresses laden with food rush around as if they’re in a relay.
The sky outside is separated into milky curds. Rain falls in sheets, drumming the asphalt and the cars and the road signs, making everything shiny. Though it’s only four o’clock, the cars on the road have their lights on. Kathryn loves this feeling of being warm and dry in a cheerful, busy place when it’s miserable outside. She takes out her tape recorder and cassettes and notebook and piles them on the table, and then opens the menu, examining the dizzying array of options.
By the time Jack arrives, late as usual, the waitress is already coming toward them with a burger and fries. “Sorry,” Kathryn tells him, “I was starving.”
The waitress sets the food in front of Kathryn and shakes out her hands. “Whew, heavy. Enjoy it. What about you?” she says to Jack. “Just some tea, thanks. Earl Grey.”
“We got Lipton.”
“Fine, whatever.”
When the waitress leaves, Jack leans forward and says, “Isn’t it great to be home? Where else in the world would the heaviness of the food be considered a bonus?”
Kathryn smiles, a little nervously. She knows he’s trying to break the ice. This is their formal “meeting,” as opposed to the informal one at the Sea Dog two days ago, and Kathryn has been feeling jumpy and insecure all day about the work she’s done on the story since he threatened to take her off it.
She spent the morning transcribing the tapes of her conversations with Rachel and Brian, and they seem frustratingly incomplete. She wishes she’d asked different questions, or at least more of them. So many of the things they discussed seem trivial: who liked whom, who was jealous of whom. And she could kick herself for not having pushed Rachel further, gotten her to tell what she knew. Kathryn knows that in backing off she broke the first rule of reporting, that you don’t want to give your source too much time to think. If you have to go back for more information, they’re almost always less willing to give it.
The waitress returns with Jack’s tea, the red paper tag hanging over the side of the cup. He bobs it up and down several times before taking the bag out, placing it in the bowl of a spoon and wrapping the string around it to wring it out into his cup. “It’s gotta be strong,” he explains when he notices Kathryn watching this process. “On days like this all I want to do is stay in bed.”
“You and Rachel both do the tea thing,” she observes. “Most people I know drink coffee.”
“Yeah, but she’s a purist,” he says. “I need the caffeine.” He looks over at her burger. “Hey, that looks pretty good. I’m hungrier than I thought.”
After he flags down the waitress again, he sits back against the red vinyl. “So let’s get started,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about Jennifer all day, trying to figure out what I might know or what I might have seen in her that might shed any light on this at all. At the time it seemed so impossible that anything like this could happen, I think I was in shock. And I have to admit, I kept some things to myself. I told myself that if somebody just asked me the right question, I’d tell everything I knew, but nobody ever did.”
“But you’re a reporter, Jack,” Kathryn says. She turns on the tape recorder and pushes it toward him. “Wouldn’t you have wanted to make sure they had the whole story?”
“I wasn’t a reporter then, just a freaked-out potential suspect,” he says. “And anyway I didn’t want my own feelings about Jennifer to get in the way.”
“What do you mean?”
He lifts the cup of tea to his lips and blows on it, then takes a sip. Setting the cup down, he says, “Here’s the thing about Jennifer and me. I’m going to be completely honest, Kathryn, so I’m sorry if this sounds harsh. But I don’t think we liked each other very much. We hung out together in the group, of course, and we were always polite to each other. But I didn’t trust her. I thought she was unbelievably self-absorbed. I thought I could see through her, and I know she sensed that. So we kind of avoided each other, at the same time that we saw each other every day.”
“Was that awkward?”
“Not really. It’s amazing what you can get used to.”
“When did this start? Did something happen?”
The waitress arrives with Jack’s burger and sets it in front of him, and he takes a moment to put ketchup on the fries and mustard on the bun. Then he takes a bite. “This is huge,” he mutters. “It’s like eating an entire cow.” He wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Yeah, there was one thing. But it wasn’t what she did, so much, that bothered me. I could understand that. It was how she did it, and why.”
“You mean the thing with Brian?”
“No.”
She smiles uncertainly. “Then I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“You probably don’t.”
“Okay.” She puts her forehead in her hands and then bends her head, running her fingers through her hair.
“Listen, Kathryn,” he says gently. “There were things she didn’t want to think about, much less talk about—even with her best friend. Maybe she thought if she didn’t think about them, then they weren’t real.”
Kathryn shifts in her seat. “I’m surprised you feel you have such a strong grasp of who she was.”
He sighs. “I’m just trying to face some things I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—at the time. I think we were all that way. We didn’t want to spoil the picture of that beautiful lost girl on the front page of the paper. Star of the school play, National Honor Society, all that bullshit. Volunteer work at the nursing home. The photo they ran made her look like a blond angel. Disappearing like that only heightened the sense people had of her as vulnerable. And she was, I guess. I mean, obviously—where the hell is she? But something about her didn’t add up. I don’t think she was such an angel. Yes, she’d been through a lot, but I don’t think that’s any excuse for what she did to Brian that night at the prom—and how she treated Rachel.” He shakes his head. “I have the feeling that something else was going on. That she had this”—he hesitates, groping for words—“other life. Does that make any sense to you?
“I don’t know,” Kathryn says. “When I talked to Rachel, it seemed like …” Her voice trails off. “She knew something. She wouldn’t tell me much.” A memory, shadowy and sharklike, moves through her brain.
“What do you want to know? I tell you everything,” Jennifer had said one afternoon as they were lying in her scrubby backyard on cheap
reclining lawn chairs, trying to get a tan before the prom.
“You’ve gotten mighty secretive lately,” Kathryn said, trying to keep her voice light, “and I’ve had just about enough.”
“There’s nothing,” Jennifer insisted. “My life is an open book.”
“Don’t be coy with me, missy. That might work with some people.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“Everything.”
“Ev-ery-thing,” Jennifer said slowly, wrinkling her nose. She closed her eyes and tilted her chin toward the sun. “That’s a pretty tall order. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Kathryn sat up and looked at her. “Cut the bullshit. What are you keeping from me?”
Jennifer laughed. “Oh, Kath,” she said, “you’re taking things way too seriously. I’m just teasing you.”
“I don’t think so.”
Sighing exaggeratedly, Jennifer sat up and adjusted her bikini top to keep it in place. “Okay, you really want to know? I’m sleeping with Dr. Smalley. I scooch down to the principal’s office between classes and we fuck on his desk.”
“Ugh, Jen. Don’t even joke.”
“I knew you couldn’t handle it,” she said with a shrug.
“I’ve always felt guilty that I didn’t tell anyone about this,” Jack is saying. “I probably should have brought it up with the police during the investigation. But it seemed irrelevant—only hurtful to Will and the rest of the family, and maybe to Jennifer, too, wherever she was. I didn’t see how telling it would shed light on anything.” He takes a bite of his burger and puts it down. “But I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I think I was wrong. So I’m going to tell you now.” There is a brief silence. “It’s about what happened to her father. How much do you know?”
“Well, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t an accident.”
“Yeah,” he says. “The insurance adjusters are probably the only ones who believed it was.”