“She’s a little riled up,” he says. “She’ll get over it. She hates the press; she got burned pretty bad once and vowed she’d never talk to a reporter again.”
“What happened?”
“New England Monthly did a feature story seven or eight years ago. They came up here, interviewed all kinds of people, followed her around for three days, wined and dined her at Pilot’s Grill, got her to show them home movies and Jennifer’s room. And then the article came out, and it basically pointed the finger at my mom and Ralph.”
“Oh, I remember that story.”
“Yeah, it sucked. So you can see why she’s wary. Anyway, how are you?
She has forgotten this about Will: that conversation with him is a torrent; it’s easy to feel swept along in the rush. He can be disarmingly direct, but his frankness is an illusion. You come away knowing little about him but a lot about yourself.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“I heard about the divorce,” he says bluntly. “What a lousy bastard. He didn’t deserve you.”
“Who told you?”
He laughs. “Come on, Kathryn, who doesn’t know?”
“Thanks, Will. That’s comforting.”
“Look, at least you don’t have the black plague. If anybody at the reunion shakes my hand, I’ll be surprised.”
Caught by surprise, she inhales sharply. “Oh—”
“I know you know,” he says. “I asked Jack to tell you. I would’ve done it myself, but I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘Hello, Kath, I haven’t spoken to you in seven years, but I just wanted you to know I’m dying’?”
“You’re not … dying,” she says lamely.
“No. Well, I mean, we’re all dying, right? And any one of us could get hit by a truck tomorrow. Yeah, I did a lot of that kind of justifying at first. And the cocktail I’m on seems to be working for now; I have no symptoms. But I’m not kidding myself. I have a lethal virus in my blood. It’ll probably get me one of these days.”
“I’m so sorry, Will.”
“I know. Thanks. You know who’s really sorry? The guy who gave it to me. Or he would be, if he knew.” He laughs shortly, fending off sympathy. “It’s a wacky world, isn’t it, Kath?”
She bites her lip. Most Likely to Succeed, Will was voted in high school. The only one who got into Princeton. He was the golden boy, the one all the girls had crushes on—and, she realizes now, probably a number of the guys. Like Jennifer, he had blond hair, light eyes, a tall, lithe body. But he had something else, too, that Jennifer didn’t: an encompassing charm, a willingness to play the game. It was probably part of figuring out his sexual identity: He could move easily among any of them, he would not let himself be narrowly defined.
Kathryn remembers the first time she realized she had a crush on him. It was at a high-school dance junior year; the whole group was there, and they were dancing in a ragged circle, pulling in other people, pairing off among themselves. They’d been drinking in the parking lot before the dance—one of Brian’s older brothers had bought them a case of Budweiser—and after two beers Kathryn was drunk. A slow reggae song started playing, and the dance floor cleared. But Kathryn was caught in the low familiar beat, and she swayed to it with her eyes closed. All at once she felt someone’s arm around her waist, and she looked up to see Will, smiling, moving his hips with hers to the music. “I don’t know what life will show me, but I know what I’ve seen,” he crooned in her ear. She felt a thrill go through her—a thrill connected to covert glimpses in the hall between classes, faded notes on lined white paper passed in third period, a stolen kiss in an empty gymnasium. She felt young and shy.
The first time Will kissed her, they were sitting on her front porch in the dark. Jennifer had been out with them that night; they’d gone to Footloose and were singing the title track at the top of their lungs in the car on the way back. But at some point Jennifer grew quiet and asked to be dropped at home. Brian was out of town with his parents, and Rachel and Jack were at a party Kathryn and Will had no interest in, so they ended up on her porch, with its white columns and slatted railings, watching the glow on the side lawn from her mother’s bedroom window.
“This is very fifties,” Will said, leaning against the banister. “Sitting out here on the porch with your mother pacing around upstairs.”
“Almost like a date,” Kathryn said. They both laughed uncomfortably. “I wish she’d just go to sleep.”
“She can’t go to sleep. She’s programmed with that mother gene that keeps her awake until you’re safely in bed.”
Kathryn played with the chain of the porch swing she was sitting on, idly moving the swing back and forth with her foot. “What in the world does she think is going to happen to me? I’m with you, for God’s sake.”
He tilted his head, his disheveled blond hair falling over one eye, feigned annoyance on his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Kathryn laughed. “She knows you’re a nice guy.”
He shook his head. “I’m sick of that shit. Just once I’d like someone to think I’m dangerous.”
She smiled. “Well, you might have to do something dangerous, then.”
He looked at her keenly. Then, all at once, he leaned forward and kissed her. Startled, she pulled away. “How dangerous is that?” he said. He pushed her long brown hair off her face and pulled her closer, kissing her again.
“So this piece you’re writing for the Bangor Daily News,” he says now. “Have you found out anything new?”
“I don’t know yet,” she says. “I still have to talk to some people. Like you.”
“We can talk. I have to tell you, though, I don’t have much faith in this process. I’m inclined to agree with my mother—to dig all this up again is painful, and probably a waste of time. We did so much … I don’t know. I don’t know, Kath,” he says quietly, and she can tell that he’s trying to keep his emotions in check. The whole time they were searching for Jennifer she saw him break down only once, and that was the day, several weeks after it happened, when divers found a body at the Bucksport dam. It turned out to be a vagrant from Old Town, but they didn’t know that for several hours. Will’s face, when they told him, was a terrible mixture of relief and fear, and when the police left, he tripped over a chair and then kicked it, savagely, across the room, splintering a back leg. He retreated to an upstairs room, but his loud sobbing reverberated through the house.
“You’re probably right. There’s not much point in doing this. But maybe it’ll stir up something; maybe something got overlooked. It’s worth a try, don’t you think? Otherwise we’re just giving up. Are you really ready to do that?” she asks.
“Listen,” he says sharply. “I busted my ass longer than anybody. It’s wrecked my fucking life. Don’t tell me I’m—”
“I’m sorry, Will. I was out of line.”
“Jesus, Kath.” He sighs. “I know you’re trying to help. Five years ago—three years ago, even—I would have welcomed this. But coming now, it just seems so disruptive, so late. We could have her declared legally dead now, did you know that? We won’t, but we could.” He’s silent for a moment. “You know, when Jennifer was little, she used to get lost all the time. She’d go off into corners and closets, or behind boxes in the attic. Mom was always looking for her, calling after her, trying to get me to track her down. ‘You know how her mind works,’ she said. ‘You’ll find her faster than I can.’ I did usually find her, but it was more because I knew the hiding places and the limited possibilities for escape than that I knew Jennifer so well.” He pauses again, and Kathryn can hear him breathing. Then he says, almost inaudibly, “She is dead, I think.”
THEY MEET THAT night down by the river. His hair has darkened over the years; his face is narrower, more chiseled. His eyes are tired. They sit on the bank in the darkness and listen to the water lapping the shore. Then, taking her hand, he leads her across the large slabs of rock that form a stepping-stone path.
“Remember this?” He sto
ps and turns, and she walks into him. “We used to come out here when your mom thought we were at the movies.”
“Back when I thought you were straight.”
“And I didn’t know what the hell I was.”
They sit on the rock and watch the gurgling water, and he tells her stories she already knows, about his mother’s affair and his father’s suicide and Jennifer’s role in all of it, about seeing Jennifer, wan and ghostly, in the hospital bed after she got her stomach pumped, about the next few months of silence and retreat. Jennifer began staying out late, leaving the house early in the morning—anything to avoid being at home. Their mother was distracted; she didn’t notice as much as she should have, or if she did she didn’t do much about it. Jennifer hated her stepfather; it was hard for her to be in the same room with him. It was easier for everybody when she was gone.
Will knew that Jennifer was secretly seeing someone. She spent a long time getting ready; she pounced on the phone on the first ring and took it into her room, locking the door. He could hear her making plans. But she wouldn’t admit to it, wouldn’t even admit that there was someone. “I just want to be by myself, for Christ’s sake. Is there something wrong with that?” she’d snap when he pushed it. One time he followed her. He was several cars behind her on Broadway when she spotted him at a traffic light. She pulled into the Pizza Hut parking lot and sat there, smoking in her dark car, until he left.
“She was different after our dad died,” he says, trailing his fingers in the water, picking up a handful of stones. “I didn’t really recognize her after that. And I guess I pulled back, too. I couldn’t stand that haunted look in her eyes. It was spooky how well she hid it from other people. At school she acted normal—better than normal; she even seemed happy. But you could see that blankness, if you knew how to look. Remember her senior picture? Her smile looked painted on, like a doll’s.”
“I was just noticing that,” Kathryn says. “I’d never really seen it before.”
“That’s the kind of stuff I became obsessed with after …” His voice falters. He drops the stones in the water, and they make tiny individual splashes.
“What else?” Kathryn says gently. “What didn’t you tell the police? What secrets did you keep?”
“There are so many kinds of secrets, aren’t there?” he says with a faint smile. “How far back do you go? Do you start with the little things, like smelling whiskey on my dad when he dropped me off at school? Or picking up the phone and hearing my mother say ‘I love you’ to some man I’ve never met? What about the lies my parents told each other, the lies they told Jen and me, the lies we all learned to tell?
“I remember this one time when Jen and I were six and the paperboy—Jimmy Butera, I even remember his name; he must’ve been about fifteen—took us with him to catch a snake out in the field behind the Poseys’. That was what we thought anyway. He ended up pinning Jen down and making her take her clothes off.”
“Jesus,” Kathryn says.
“She started having an asthma attack—you know, coughing and choking—and I was trying to pull him off her. Finally the whole thing freaked Jimmy out, and he took off. After Jen calmed down, the two of us went home and told our mom, though he’d threatened to break our arms if we did. It didn’t matter anyway; Mom was most concerned about the fact that Jimmy’s father was president of one of the big banks downtown, the one Dad did business with. She didn’t want to cause trouble over nothing, she said, and besides, boys will be boys and maybe we learned a lesson.” He laughs sardonically. “We learned a lesson, all right. I think that was the last time Jennifer ever confided in her.”
“God, that’s awful,” Kathryn says. “I never knew.”
“Why would you?” He shrugs. “It wasn’t important, just one more thing to hide. One more thing to be ashamed of.” He laughs again, a hollow sound devoid of feeling.
“How could—why did—”
He looks at her, hard, for a minute. “I don’t have any answers,” he says. “And I’ll tell you something. I’ve learned to live without them. I don’t expect to know the whys of anything anymore.” He smiles, the corners of his mouth trembling. “It’s pretty good training for a defense attorney, actually. Comes in handy when there are things you don’t want to know.”
“But you want to know what happened to Jennifer, don’t you? Wouldn’t you give anything to find out?”
She watches him looking out at the darkness, at the slip of moon, the starless sky, the water flowing past and around them. “I spent a lot of time looking for her,” he says finally. “Now maybe I just need to come to terms with it.”
When they stand up to leave, he laces his fingers through hers and draws her close, kissing her softly on the forehead. Shutting her eyes against the light of the moon, she lets herself sway against him, and he pulls her closer, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. All at once her eyes are swimming and her head is light and she’s crying, dripping hot tears onto his chest, brushing her face against his denim shirt.
LATE THAT NIGHT, when Kathryn gets home, she finds a note for her on the kitchen counter. “Paul called,” it says in her mother’s neat, grammar-school cursive. “Says he has something he needs to talk to you about. Wants you to hear it from him first. Too tired to wait up. Love, Mom. XXO.”
Kathryn looks at the clock: It’s 1:15 A.M. She picks up the phone and dials Paul’s number. It rings four times before the machine picks up.
“Rena and Paul are otherwise engaged,” a woman says in a girly singsong. “Leave a message and we’ll deconstruct it when we get a chance.” Kathryn pauses for a moment, then hangs up.
She’s turning off lights, heading upstairs, when the phone rings in the kitchen. She runs back to get it. “Hello?” she says cautiously.
“Kat? Oh, it was you,” Paul says. “Go back to sleep, it’s okay,” she hears him murmur to someone in the background. “Sorry,” he tells Kathryn. “Star six-nine. I had to find out who it was. This weird guy in the department is kind of stalking Rena, so we treat all hang-ups like crank calls.”
“So this is your news?” she asks.
“Oh. Um. Yeah.” He laughs, a bit defensively. “I’m sorry to tell you this way, but I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it from someone else.”
“Oh, you did, huh?”
“She transferred into the program a couple months ago. From Brown,” he adds, as if that should somehow matter. The nerve, Kathryn thinks, trying to impress me with his new girlfriend’s résumé.
“So how long have you two been shacking up?”
“Well,” he says carefully. She knows the phrase shacking up irritates him. “Almost a week. Look.” The unctuousness in his voice has evaporated. “It’s late and I don’t want to get into anything with you. But I didn’t need to call. I was just trying to be considerate.”
“I think I’d rather have heard it from someone else,” she says.
Paul sighs.
“Excuse me if I don’t offer congratulations,” she says. “I hope Rena knows what she’s in for.”
“Rena has nothing to worry about,” he says. “Rena is nothing like you.”
She’s silent for a moment. Then she says, “How’s Frieda?”
“She has fleas. I got her a collar. Look, Kathryn,” he says, “I didn’t mean to say that. You provoked me.”
She sighs. “I know.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what else to say.”
When she hangs up the phone, Kathryn sits in the dark kitchen watching the blurry shapes around her morph into objects she recognizes—an Early American wall clock, the pine kitchen table, a ladder-back chair—as her eyes adjust. After a few minutes she makes her way easily up the stairs and into her room without turning on any lights. The terrain is so familiar, she knows it by heart.
Chapter 22
“I want to hear about Paul. You’ve barely said a word about him.” It’s Thursday morning at 10:05, and Rosie is settled in her overstuffed chair
with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. She’s wearing a floral dress so similar to the upholstery that it’s hard to see where the chair ends and she begins.
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, for starters, why did you marry him?”
“Do we have to talk about him? I don’t really want to.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Umm … do you think I should dye my hair again? It’s been almost a month.” Kathryn laughs nervously at her feeble diversion.
Putting down her pen and crossing her arms, Rosie says, “Oh, you want to talk about roots, huh? Okay. Tell me about your father.”
Kathryn makes a face. “Very funny.”
“It’s up to you,” Rosie says briskly. “We can talk about your hair, if that’s what you want.” She squints at the top of Kathryn’s head. “Yeah, you might want to touch it up. If you’re happy with that shade.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I’m not sure it’s the most flattering color. But what do I know? I’m a therapist, not a beautician.” She shrugs. “As a therapist I’d make a different diagnosis.”
“What do you mean?”
“When did you go red?”
“About four weeks ago, like I said.”
“What’s your normal color?”
“Field-mouse brown.”
“Ever dye it before?”
“Nope.”
Rosie nods slowly. “So you’re starting over,” she says.
“Well, obviously.”
She picks up the pen and writes something in her notebook. “Or you’re trying to hide,” she says, without looking up. Kathryn doesn’t answer. She shifts in her chair. “Which do you think it is?”
“Probably some combination.” Kathryn looks out the one small window in the stuffy little room, at the gray sky and the gray gravel and the gray siding of another prefab building across the parking lot.
Rosie cocks her head. “Maybe you just don’t want to be that mousy brown-haired person anymore. Maybe you’re trying to figure out who you do want to be.”