Desire Lines

  “I know that their mother was having an affair and planned to leave him.”

  “Did Jennifer ever talk to you about all of that?”

  “Yeah. Mostly about how much she hated her mother for being so selfish—and feeling like she couldn’t ever say anything because her mother was so sick and frail half the time. After her father died, her mother went to bed and wouldn’t get up, and Jennifer was convinced it was an act. She didn’t trust anything her mother did, not after finding that letter from Ralph Cunliff that made it clear there was something going on between them. They were talking about running away together.”

  “So you know, then. That Jennifer found the letter.”

  Kathryn nods. “She read it to me over the phone. She’d been going through her mother’s bag, looking for cigarettes or something, and the letter was in an inside pocket.” She thinks back, trying to remember the moment of that call. Josh had answered the phone. He raised his eyebrows at her as he handed it over. “It’s Jen,” he mouthed. “She sounds wacked.” When Kathryn put the phone to her ear, she could hear Jennifer’s jagged breathing through her clogged nose, the raspy sounds of uncontrolled crying. “Jesus Christ, she’s such a fucking slut,” she sobbed when Kathryn said hello. “She’s just fucking unbelievable. I don’t even know why this surprises me. She never gave a shit about him or anybody else except herself; it’s not like this is out of character or anything. I can’t fucking believe I didn’t see it. Cunt.”

  The word startled Kathryn; she’d never heard Jennifer use it before. But she wasn’t surprised at the story. She understood without being told whom Jennifer was talking about; her mother was the only person who evinced such rage.

  “I hate her, I hate her, I HATE HER!” Jennifer said, her voice rising in a shriek. “She doesn’t give a shit what she does to this family! She doesn’t give a flying fuck!”

  Josh made a face—ooh, I’m scared—across the table at Kathryn, and she threw an orange at him. He caught it and grinned.

  “She’s not getting away with this.” Jennifer was sobbing. “There’s no fucking way.”

  “What are you going to do?” Kathryn asked.

  For a moment all she could hear was Jennifer’s labored breathing. Then she said, “I don’t know. Something.”

  Kathryn heard a note in her voice she didn’t recognize, an intensity that made her afraid. “You want to come over, Jen? You could stay here tonight—or a couple of nights, if you want.”

  “Thanks, but I can’t,” she said abruptly, stifling a sob. “I have to talk to Will.”

  “Does he know about all this?”

  “Who the fuck knows what he knows. It’s unbelievable, the way he sticks up for her.” She blew her nose, and Kathryn held the receiver away from her ear. “This time she’s really done it. Even Will has to see what a piece of work she is.”

  “Does she know you know?”

  “She’s out. I don’t even want to think about where.”

  “Come over,” Kathryn pleaded. “Dallas is on tonight. You’ll feel better.”

  Jennifer wasn’t crying now. Her voice was steady and cold. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said. “Please—obviously—keep this to yourself.”

  “Of course.”

  “I—” She cleared her throat. “Thanks for being here for me.”

  “Oh, Jen,” Kathryn said, wanting desperately to connect somehow, to break through the formality she could feel crystallizing like ice between them, “where else would I be?”

  Now, with Jack, Kathryn turns the salt shaker upside down and watches a tiny white mound grow on the Formica. With her finger she pushes stray granules back into the pile. “As far as I know, she didn’t say anything to her mother,” she tells him. “At least not right away. Will said they should wait, figure out how they were going to handle it before the whole thing blew up in their faces. But then it blew up anyway.”

  “When their dad killed himself.”

  There is a pause. Kathryn bites her lip. Jack pours milk into his tea and stirs it.

  “Jennifer told him, didn’t she?” Kathryn asks.

  “Yep.” He nods.

  “How do you know?”

  He lifts the cup to his mouth with both hands and takes a sip. “Will told me.”

  Kathryn takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.

  “It would be easy to believe that Jennifer just snapped—after all, she and Will agreed they were going to wait awhile before they did anything,” Jack says. “But she didn’t wait; she called him that day at work, told him everything she knew. Will said it was almost like she was as angry at her father for being oblivious about it as she was at her mother for doing it. She wanted to push it in his face. She thought maybe thinking other people knew about it would finally make him mad enough to do something—make their mother accountable somehow, I don’t know. Anyway, it was a terrible miscalculation. He didn’t even confront their mother, for chrissakes. He just made sure his insurance papers were in order and his desk was neat at work and there weren’t too many loose ends she’d have to deal with. He paid all the bills that afternoon. And then as soon as it got dark he drove his car to Little City park and sat there drinking Dewar’s out of the bottle and getting his nerve up.”

  “Did Will tell you all this?”

  Jack’s mouth twitches into a smile. “No. There were three eyewitnesses, according to the police. A dropout named Jim Oulette was sitting on a swing in the playground smoking a joint and listening to his Walkman. Two little girls on Linden Street were having a sleepover in a pup tent, looking at the stars with a pair of binoculars. They all saw him sitting there in his car, drinking something out of a paper bag, and they all heard him rev the engine at midnight and accelerate across the middle of the park, straight into that giant oak at the far corner.”

  “Jesus.” She shakes her head.

  “I only found out the details later, when I’d been working at the News for a few months and I got access to a reporter’s private file on the story. Of course, they didn’t print any of that. It was officially labeled an accident. So the wife got the insurance money and the kids were taken care of. I’m sure that’s why they didn’t push for an investigation. What was the point? The story was tragic enough.”

  “And Linda got her white Lincoln.”

  “And her new kitchen,” Jack says with an ironic smile. “And her new husband.”

  The waitress comes over and stands by their table, scribbling on a pad. She rips off the sheet of paper and puts it between them, facedown. “More coffee, folks?”

  Kathryn says, “Sure,” and Jack says, “No, thanks,” at the same time. He looks at his watch. “I’m supposed to meet a friend at the gym in fifteen minutes,” he says apologetically. “But I can stay a little longer.”

  Kathryn looks up at the waitress. “I guess that’s all, then.”

  “You can pay at the front,” she says, already turning away. After she leaves, Kathryn starts getting her things together. She can feel Jack’s eyes on her as she gathers her notebook and pens and rummages for her wallet. Then, gently, he says, “Are you surprised she didn’t tell you?”

  She looks down at her paper placemat printed with a goofy grinning cartoon governor and the dessert menu, and folds a scalloped edge with her finger. “No,” she says. “I guess I knew, deep down. I knew there was more to that story. I was afraid to ask.” She feels her chest constrict and she sits back, then suddenly covers her face with her hands.

  “Hey,” Jack says, leaning forward.

  “It’s so sad. All of it,” she murmurs. “For her to tell him like that—and then to have to live with what he did. No wonder she swallowed all those pills. Now that I know, it makes a lot more sense.”

  He nods slowly.

  “Do you think it has anything to do with her disappearance?” she asks.

  “I think it has to, somehow. Don’t you? Maybe only peripherally, but it’s got to be a factor or a clue.”

  “But you don’t thi
nk she ran away.”

  “I just can’t see that,” he says, shaking his head.

  “So what do you think? That she went off and killed herself somewhere no one could ever find her? Or did her mother find out about it and murder her in a fit of rage?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” he says. “I could be wrong, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Why would she kill her daughter over this? If that woman was in love with her husband, she had a funny way of showing it. She’s having an affair with some guy, her husband kills himself over it, and four months later she’s engaged? That’s a pretty short mourning period. I can’t imagine she’s too upset he’s gone.” He squints at the bill and reaches into his back pocket, pulling out a battered wallet. “This is on the paper,” he says as they slide out of the booth. “It’s the least we can do, since we’re paying you jack.”

  “As it were.”

  “As it were.” He grins.

  At the front of the restaurant, she turns to face him. In the bright light of rainy midafternoon she can see fine lines around his eyes. All of a sudden she’s aware of finding him attractive in a way she never did in high school, when he was lanky and awkward and had skin like a baby.

  “So are you going to have this story for me by Thursday?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  He smiles and gently cuffs her shoulder, the way a bear might. “I knew you would.”

  “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

  By 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 s
its 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.