“Older, how?” Kathryn asks.
“She had an old soul,” he says. “She had the soul of a seventy-five-year-old woman. Like she had enough distance to look at life objectively.”
Kathryn nods, recognizing this as true. She remembers Jennifer’s mother snapping, “For God’s sake, Jen, lay off! You’re not my moral monitor,” and Jennifer muttering under her breath, “Then don’t act like such a child.” She did seem more mature sometimes, older than the rest of them: her mother, her brother, her friends.
“So how was she younger?” Kathryn asks.
He thinks for a moment, cupping his chin. “There was a petulance,” he says slowly. “She was obstinate and willful sometimes when it wasn’t appropriate. She always wanted her own way.”
His assessment strikes Kathryn as peculiarly personal, somehow-more than she would have expected from a teacher, even one as perceptive as Mr. Hunter. “How well did you know her?” she asks.
“Not well,” he says offhandedly. “How well did I know any of you?”
“You probably knew her better than most,” Kathryn insists. “All that time after school.”
“Right, orienteering,” he concedes. “I knew her from that.”
“Do you think you learned anything about her that might be useful for me to know?”
“Probably not.” He seems deep in thought. Then he says, “She possessed something very rare, an internal compass. No matter where she was, how deep in the woods, she could always find a way out.”
“Not always, apparently,” Kathryn says.
“I suppose not,” he assents.
“What do you think happened to her?”
“My hunch is that she lost her compass.” He raises his shoulders in a shrug. “It might have been the night she disappeared, or it might have been a long time before. But somewhere along the way she got disoriented, and she made a judgment call she couldn’t reverse.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s speculation. You asked me what I thought.” He spreads his arms, and then his fingers, like a flower opening to the sun in time-lapse speed. “She struck me as lost in some way.”
“So where is she?” Kathryn asks in a playful tone, as if the question is hypothetical.
“I think she’s waiting for someone to find her.” He pulls in his arms, and then points a finger at Kathryn. “How’s your sense of direction?”
She gives him a wry smile. “It’s getting better.”
“Then maybe you’re the one to do it,” he says.
AFTER LEAVING THE school, Kathryn takes Interstate 95 where it jogs from the east side to the west side to run an errand for her mother. She passes over the Kenduskeag at the spot where, late one night during the winter of her senior year, two of her classmates, Ryan Vining and Troy LaGrange, missed a curve and smashed through the guardrail in a gold Corvette at a hundred miles an hour. They sheared the tops off a cluster of trees before slamming into an embankment. The car and their bodies were torn to pieces.
Even now, all these years later, whenever Kathryn reaches this turn in the road, she remembers the shock she felt on hearing the news. She and her mother drove to the spot the next morning and parked by the side of the road in a line of cars. Walking slowly through the battered, snow-dusted trees, they saw flashes of gold, a steering wheel, bloody patches and what might have been bits of flesh scattered through the underbrush. Other kids and their parents were there, too, silent or sobbing, their faces stunned and empty.
Kathryn had wanted to go to the spot to make herself believe it, but she found instead that being there only made the whole thing surreal. “Look up,” her mother said softly, and she did, into a clear sky, a warming sun, a flutter of birds rising from the trees. “How can the sky be so blue today? It doesn’t seem possible.”
Kathryn was suddenly impatient with her mother, angry at her for being sentimental. “You think it should be raining?” she snapped. “Like in a TV movie?”
Her mother reached out and held her arm. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Then don’t be so stupid,” she said, knowing as she did that she was going too far. She slowed her breathing, waiting to see what her mother would do.
“This could have been you,” her mother hissed, twisting her fingers into Kathryn’s arm. “So don’t you tell me how I should react. What do you think I’m afraid of those nights I stay up waiting? You kids are so goddamn thoughtless—” She dropped Kathryn’s arm and covered her eyes with her hands. Then she turned abruptly and went up to the car.
Kathryn watched her mother get in, start the engine, and accelerate past the cars that were slowing to get a look at the accident. Then she walked home along the riverbank, alone.
PART THREE
REUNION
Chapter 20
It’s early evening when Kathryn arrives at Abby Elson’s dilapidated apartment building on Union Street. The driveway is jammed with old cars, so Kathryn parks on the road in front and gets out carefully as traffic whizzes by. Scanning the crudely lettered names beside the buzzers at the front door and not finding Abby’s name, she makes her way to the back, past an open Dumpster and a rusty motorcycle, and climbs an external flight of stairs to a second-floor landing.
Through the screen door, Kathryn can hear the whine of a radio. She presses her nose to the screen, trying to see into the gloom.
“Hey.”
The voice startles her. “Hello?” She sees a glowing red dot in the darkness, and then Abby Elson is standing in front of her, scrawny and pale in faded jeans and a tight red shirt, trailing a cigarette in one hand.
“C’mon in,” she says, holding the screen open. “Don’t mind the shit everywhere.”
Kathryn makes her way inside, stumbling over a gas can by the door and a shovel propped against the wall. “Sorry,” she mutters, bending down to get the shovel as it clatters to the floor.
“Forget it, leave it. I been telling him to get that goddamn thing out of here for a week,” Abby says, opening the refrigerator. “What can I get you? Want a beer? Oh, there’s a Sprite in here, too.”
“No, thanks, I’m fine,” Kathryn says, but Abby has already tossed her the soda.
Sinking into a chair at the Formica kitchen table, Abby gestures across from her. “Have a seat.”
In high school Abby had been a beauty, with long dark hair, doe eyes, and a tiny waist. She looked like a Disney heroine. She was always dating someone, usually the star athlete of whatever major sport was in season, especially if he, too, was a little unconventional. Her boyfriends tended to wear leather jackets and drive fast, souped-up cars.
Abby’s mother had taken off when she was little, and Abby and her father and another sister who worked at Sizzler lived in a trailer park near the mall. Kathryn went there once, with Jennifer, and she was amazed at the economy of scale within those narrow walls. Everything fit: the queen-size bed, the full bath, the cheerful kitchen and comfy den, Abby’s berthlike sleeping area set off by a screen. Compared to the drafty, rambling old houses Kathryn and Jennifer lived in, trailer life seemed liberating. Abby appeared to have no chores; she sat out front in a folding chair under the flimsy, flapping awning, painting her nails with frosted polish and waiting for her boyfriends to call.
Abby was Jennifer’s friend. None of the rest of them knew her very well. “I just don’t get it. What do you see in that girl?” Will would ask every now and then, an amused smile on his face.
“You’re a snob,” Jennifer would answer. “She happens to be very bright.”
“She’s had half the football team. She’s not great for your reputation.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about my reputation,” she’d retort. “And if you’re so shallow that you care that much what other people think, I truly feel sorry for you.”
Kathryn hadn’t cared so much about Abby’s reputation, though it was a convenient excuse when she needed a reason to complain about her. As Jennifer began spending
more time with Abby, senior year, Kathryn felt increasingly left out. It wasn’t that Jennifer was spending less time with Kathryn; it was that she began to seem distracted and distant. The two of them would be walking to class together and Abby would appear, dropping a folded note into Jennifer’s shirt pocket and winking as they passed. Or Kathryn would be over at Jennifer’s and the phone would ring and Jennifer would disappear with it into the next room, talking in an excited whisper.
“Who was it?” Kathryn would ask when she emerged.
“Oh, just Abby.”
“How is she?”
“She’s fine,” Jennifer would say, and that would be it. She never told Kathryn what they were talking about, and she never shared the notes. Kathryn began to feel like a wife who suspects her husband is having an affair but can’t prove it. She looked everywhere for clues of Jennifer’s betrayal. “Best friends?” Jennifer would coyly ask, winding her arm around Kathryn’s back, sensing her mistrust.
“So you’re writing an article,” Abby says now. She takes a long drag on the cigarette.
Kathryn pops open the Sprite and it explodes, spraying the table and her tape recorder. Leaning her chair back on two legs, Abby reaches over to the counter and grabs a dirty rag. “Here,” she says, tossing it over. Kathryn mops up the mess, wiping soda from between the cracks of the recorder.
“I just have a few questions,” she says, setting the machine back on the table and pressing Start.
“Okeydokey.”
As Abby talks, Kathryn looks around the small, dark apartment. There’s a gray-and-red uniform from T.J. Maxx hanging over a floral chair in the living room and a pair of hiking boots on the floor. An ashtray on the large-screen TV is full of butts; a motorcycle helmet sits on the couch like a severed cartoon head. “Jennifer was in my gym class second semester junior year, that’s how we met,” Abby is saying. “At first I thought she was an uptight blond bitch, but she turned out to be pretty cool. Pretty funny. Really knew which way was up. We didn’t really get tight, though, until senior year, when I joined orienteering and we started spending a lot of time together. We were partners. You had to have a partner so there’d be someone who knew what time you left and what time you were supposed to be back. Your partner had your coordinates.”
In the living room a cuckoo clock in the shape of Mickey Mouse is ticking loudly. It’s exactly 6:30 P.M., and Minnie pops out of Mickey’s mouth with a squeak. Kathryn jumps. “That thing drives me crazy,” Abby says, rolling her eyes, “but Lane thinks it’s funny. He ordered it on QVC one night when I was asleep.”
“So what do you think she liked about it?” Kathryn asks.
“About what?”
“Orienteering.”
“In what sense?”
“I don’t know,” Kathryn says. “What sense is there?”
“People did it for a lot of different reasons.” Abby leans away from Kathryn, hooking her arm over the back of the chair. Her face is guarded. “To get away from their boring shit lives. To learn how to survive by their wits.” She shrugs. “Because they grooved on nature.”
“Why did you do it?”
She holds her cigarette out at arm’s length, seeming to study it. “It started out as a way to avoid two weeks of detention for smoking, but then I got into it. I just needed some space, I guess. I didn’t have much of that.”
Kathryn remembers seeing Abby’s family lined up in the bleachers at graduation, a whole row of them, holding up a sign that said WAY TO GO, ABBY! and pumping their fists in the air when she picked up her diploma. She was the youngest of six children, most of whom were married or divorced, with children of their own, by the time she started high school.
“Why do you think Jennifer did it?” Kathryn presses her.
Abby puts her head down, and then she looks up at Kathryn and grins. “Why do you think?”
Kathryn starts to parrot what Jennifer had told her—that she loved knowing she could find her own way in the wild, that being so alone was almost spiritual—but something in Abby’s voice makes her pause. “You might have a better idea,” she says.
“But you two were ‘best friends,’” Abby says mockingly. She taps ash from her cigarette into a chipped teacup on the table.
Kathryn looks at her. “I thought so.” She swallows hard. “But you probably knew her better than I did.”
Abby smiles. “You’re probably right.”
Kathryn flushes, a knot in her stomach.
Abby stubs out her cigarette, squishing it into the cup. “I’ll be honest,” she says. “I love knowing something you don’t. It’s hard to give that up.”
“How do you know I don’t know?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you did.”
Kathryn tries to piece together what she knows: Jennifer’s L. L. Bean boots drying out in the hall; practice once, then twice a week; pizza parties at Mr. Hunter’s cabin on Pushaw Lake; night sessions to test their skills in the dark. “Hey, Jen,” Kathryn had said one afternoon, sitting on Jennifer’s bed, idly playing with her compass, “this thing is broken.”
“Oh, yeah, it just broke,” Jennifer said, taking it away from her and putting it in a drawer. “I’m using Abby’s for the moment.”
“Then how can Abby find you?”
“What?”
“Isn’t she supposed to have a compass, too?”
Jennifer furrowed her brow. “She’s borrowing one from Mr. Hunter. He has a couple. It just happened,” she repeated, irritation in her voice.
“How often did the team meet?” Kathryn asks Abby.
“Usually once a week, sometimes more.”
“I was looking at her diary. Spring of senior year she had the team meeting twice a week.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So did you?”
They stare at each other for a moment, and then Abby stands up. “I think I’ve said all I’m going to.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s all I’m going to say.”
“Come on, Abby,” Kathryn says. “I need your help.”
Abby shrugs. “Sorry.”
Kathryn clicks off the tape recorder. “Well, thanks for being so open.”
“I don’t get your questions, anyway,” she says. “I don’t see what they have to do with finding out where she is.”
Outside, it’s drizzling and the light is fading. When Kathryn gets to her car, there’s a wet ticket under her windshield wiper. She takes it out and examines it, squinting under the weak fluorescent streetlight to see the damage: twenty dollars. She looks up and down the street; the sign that says NO PARKING ANY TIME is twisted and half obscured by a SHIT HAPPENS bumper sticker, but is nonetheless visible, if she’d been inclined to look.
She fumbles with her keys, opens the car door, and heaves herself into the seat, tossing the ticket in the back. “Fuck,” she says, touching her forehead to the beige plastic steering wheel. “Fuck fuck fuck.” The horn sounds loudly, and she yanks her head up fast.
Chapter 21
Kathryn gets up early Wednesday morning, as the sun is rising. She puts on her running shoes and laces them up in the gloom of the kitchen before going out on the porch to stretch. The morning air is cool, even chilly. The street is quiet. A thick layer of dew, like lint from a dryer, coats the grass. The sky, watery and gray, has been touched by the sun only lightly, a benediction.
Down at the end of the block, Kathryn can see the paperboy on his bike, flinging rolled newspapers onto front porches. She remembers her own days as a paper carrier: the thrill of lofting those papers, lightening the bag as you sailed by each house, sometimes hitting the doormat—the target—square in the center. This was a trick you could get away with only in the summer, she remembers; winters buried the paper in snow, and spring and autumn risked rain.
After her interview with Abby, Kathryn had eaten a quiet dinner with her mother and gone to bed early. But she didn’t get much sleep. She kept thinking about what Abby said about knowing Jennifer bet
ter than she did. Now, as she jogs slowly down the street, she realizes that the reason Abby’s comment rankled so much is that it’s probably true. For years, the only emotions Kathryn has let herself feel have been sorrow and fear about Jennifer’s disappearance. But whatever it was that Kathryn once felt is now complicated and deepened by the ghosts she is stirring up. The fact is, if she can admit it, Jennifer exists for her now as surely as she did ten years ago—not as a tragic eighteen-year-old victim, but as a person with complexities and contradictions. And Kathryn is newly angry at her for keeping parts of her life separate, for trusting others with her secrets. She is angry and hurt and flushed with another emotion, one she can hardly believe and never would have imagined, after all these years: She is jealous. Jennifer is the center of attention again, as always; as they put it in grad-school jargon, Jennifer determines the discourse. Part of Kathryn is almost impatient: Come on, she wants to say, the jig is up. You’ve held out long enough; we’re all bored now, ready for the game to end. You win. We care enough, after all this time. Now at least have the decency to tell us where you are.
Of course I didn’t know her, Kathryn thinks, stopping in the middle of the street to catch her breath. I was working with partial information-trying to solve a puzzle with pieces missing, trying to answer a riddle with only half a clue.
“so I HEAR you spoke to my mother.” Will’s voice on the phone is gentle, teasing; Kathryn can tell right away he’s not upset about it, as she had feared.
“Will,” she says. “Are you in town? I thought you were coming in tomorrow.”
“I got the day off and figured what the hell. Maybe seeing you guys first will make the reunion less of a nightmare.”
“You don’t have to go,” she says.
“Are you kidding? I’m class president, remember? I planned this shindig.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “Now I remember why I never ran for office.”
“You never ran for office because your ego didn’t require false adulation and praise.”
“No, I never ran for office because I was afraid nobody would vote for me,” she admits. “So is your mom totally pissed?”