Linda Pelletier idolized Will; she called him her little man. When she was sick and in bed she’d call weakly for him—“Will? Will?”—her voice trailing down the stairs to where he and Jennifer and Kathryn would be doing homework at the kitchen table.
“You’d better go up there,” Jennifer would say.
“I don’t want to.”
“You have to.”
“I don’t want to,” he’d say fiercely.
“Go to Mommy, little man,” Jennifer said, scornful and jealous.
Will would drag his feet up the stairs to the room where his mother lay. Sitting there in silence with Jennifer, Kathryn almost believed she could hear Linda’s labored breathing, the catch in her breath that meant her lungs were full of fluid.
Will and Jennifer both inherited the condition from their mother, and were in and out of the hospital as infants. By the time they reached middle school, Will seemed to have outgrown it completely, and Jennifer was fine as long as she carried an inhaler (though, loath to use it as a ploy for pity as her mother did, she kept it a secret from most people at school). Still, Kathryn could remember times when Jennifer had been so sick that the fear in the air was palpable. Soon after they became friends, in the fourth grade, Kathryn had come over with a get-well plate of cookies and the twins’ mother let her go up to Jennifer’s room to say hello. As she climbed the stairs, she could hear the hiss of the humidifier and Jennifer’s loud, jagged breathing. Standing at the door of the darkened bedroom, heavy with steam, Kathryn watched Jennifer’s father smear Vicks VapoRub over her narrow, fluttering ribs. When Jennifer turned and caught her eye, she whispered, “Don’t tell anybody.” It was a moment Kathryn would never forget.
KATHRYN AND HER mother make their way up the path, under a huge, splaying elm that shades the side porch and half of the yard. “This tree has gotten so big,” Kathryn murmurs. Looking up into the branches, she sees a scar made by a rope swing she remembers from years ago.
Her mother takes a ring of keys, like an oversized charm bracelet, out of her bag. “I’ll have to get them to trim some branches before we show the place. It cuts out light.”
“I like the shade,” Kathryn says. “It makes the house so private.”
“Light is a major selling point,” her mother says.
“Did you talk to Linda before she left?” Kathryn asks, changing the subject.
“Not much. Just logistics. I’ll be going through Will for any negotiations.”
“Really?” she says, surprised. “Where is he?”
“I thought you’d know that,” her mother says, glancing back at her. “He’s still in Boston, practicing law. Some gay-rights stuff, from what I’ve heard.” Jangling the keys, she tries one after another in the lock in the massive door.
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Not yet. I have his number, though. If you want it.”
“Okay,” Kathryn says, keeping her voice neutral. She’s not sure that she does.
The door opens inward, and they step into the dark hallway. “Here we are,” her mother says. She pulls back the shutters and opens the windows. Light filtering through the trees touches the carpet. “Come on,” she says grandly, like the lady of the house. “I’ll show you around.”
“I think I know the way,” Kathryn says. Leaving her mother behind opening shutters, she wanders through the empty rooms.
All traces of the Pelletiers are gone, save the faint outlines of pictures and mirrors on faded wallpaper. The house seems less grand than Kathryn remembers, though she knows from her mother’s real estate training course that unfurnished rooms always appear smaller. She walks through the living room, with its dark wood floors and bay window, to the olive-green dining room to the blindingly white kitchen. This is the one room that Linda Pelletier designed from top to bottom, and her vision is evident in each gleaming detail: the gold drawer pulls, the shiny linoleum, the starburst crystal light fixture hanging over a phantom table. Kathryn runs her hand along the Formica countertop, remembering how obsessive Linda had been about keeping it clean. She was constantly brushing off crumbs, spraying Fantastik and rubbing it in circles, scolding the twins to put their dishes in the dishwasher. “I think she’d be happy if we didn’t eat here at all,” Will had groused to Kathryn one time as his mother wiped around him.
Walking up the stairs to the second floor, looking out the long windows at the patchy grass and unruly hedges in the broad expanse of yard, Kathryn thinks about how many times she’s done this—let herself into the house and then made her way unnoticed up to Jennifer’s room. At the door, though, Kathryn always knocked. Jennifer was very private, and anyway she usually locked her door.
Kathryn had always loved hanging out at the Pelletiers’. She and the twins played cards and Monopoly and Scrabble and watched Little House on the Prairie on the small red black-and-white in Jennifer’s room, or sat on the back porch doing the crossword and the anagram and reading the funnies out loud to each other. They made batches of brownies and ate all the batter. It was in the Pelletiers’ attic that Kathryn smoked her first cigarette, and then her first joint.
With Will and Jennifer, Kathryn had often felt like the single friend of a sophisticated married couple who keep her around to amuse them. Part of it was that they were both so striking: white-blond hair as fine as corn silk, light-blue eyes, small regular features. In the summer their skin was smoothly tan, like wet white sand. Kathryn, who was freckled and pale and had hair the color of a murky puddle, somehow felt enhanced by association—which was strange, she realized; usually around such attractive people she felt diminished. But Will and Jennifer seemed to care so little about their appearance. Like old money, their looks were just a given.
The twins were smart and subversive and cool, with a ready wit and a mischievous glint in their eyes. When Kathryn was with them, she felt sharper and stronger, emboldened by their glamorous insouciance. With the two of them she did things she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing alone: sneaking out of the house when she was supposed to be asleep, convincing a gullible bouncer at the Bounty that she’d left her ID at home, skipping a day of school with a transparent excuse and going to Bar Harbor.
In high school the twins had been effortlessly popular. Will was humble and friendly but also sure of himself, and, through some combination of confidence and obliviousness, unconcerned with what people thought. Though less outgoing than her brother, Jennifer could be equally charming. She mocked her imagined awkwardness, cultivating a sense of herself that was so much at odds with who she was that it was impossible to take seriously, but had the effect, intentional or not, of evaporating envy.
Although they looked alike, the twins were in many ways opposites. They seemed to share different halves of the same personality. Will liked to be with people, and Jennifer, shy by comparison and somewhat melancholy, preferred to spend long stretches of time alone. Kathryn guessed it was this character trait that made her closer to Jennifer: They spent long, quiet afternoons together talking; they found comfort in their shared solitude. They told each other intimate secrets—not about the facts of their lives, Kathryn realized later, but about how they felt about them. Kathryn knew, for example, how hurt Jennifer was that her mother seemed to favor Will; Jennifer knew all about Kathryn’s father’s betrayal. Even at the time, these moments together seemed rare and special; the intimacy felt to Kathryn like a gift. It seemed that these secrets they shared with each other were the most important ones they had.
But sometime during senior year, Jennifer began holding back. There was never any discussion about it; Kathryn just felt her withdrawing by degrees. It was so subtle that for a while Kathryn told herself she must be imagining it. Jennifer wasn’t becoming more diffident or remote; Kathryn was just clinging to this friendship out of a fear of the unknown—of graduating from high school, leaving home, going away to college. She didn’t want to admit to herself that Jennifer might be pulling away, so she pretended it wasn’t happening. Later she recogniz
ed this as a self-protective impulse; she’d learned from painful experience during her parents’ divorce that knowing too much could be worse than not knowing anything. So she was willfully ignorant, and this ignorance haunted her when Jennifer disappeared and no one seemed to have the slightest idea why.
Now, stepping into Jennifer’s room, Kathryn looks around at the peeling pink wallpaper with its faint floral pattern, the grungy hot-pink carpeting, the row of skeletal coat hangers in the otherwise empty closet. The last time Kathryn had been in this house was a week before she left for college. She remembers it well: Will pale and tense, with dark hollows under his eyes, his mother chain-smoking on the front porch, clutching cigarette after cigarette with nervous fingers. For over two months Will had been in charge of the volunteers who were trying to find Jennifer, and they’d turned up exactly nothing. Kathryn fumbled through a good-bye, but she didn’t know what to say, and he, distracted, barely noticed. It had gotten so that whenever she tried to talk to him, she felt false, and she hated herself. It wasn’t that she had stopped caring—it was that her caring felt so inadequate. It couldn’t bring Jennifer back, and it couldn’t dull Will’s pain. So after the shock, the disbelief, the heart-clamping two and a half months of waiting to hear, Kathryn went away to a new life, relieved to be leaving. Will stayed behind, organizing search parties, tacking up posters, writing legislators and congresspeople, asking for something, anything, in the way of help.
When she telephoned from college, Will’s voice was tired and defeated. He rarely called her; he said it always seemed as if he was interrupting something. And it got harder and harder for her to call him. She’d sit on her bed in her sterile dorm room, listening to his listless voice as she watched her roommate get ready to go out to a party, the sounds of guys playing hackeysack drifting up from the courtyard below. It felt as if her life had been split in two. After a while she stopped calling and began sending postcards instead, and then, eventually, she stopped writing, too, not knowing what effect it had on him, feeling only the monumental numbness that had crept in like a fog and settled over all of them when Jennifer disappeared.
“I think that’s enough,” Kathryn’s mother calls up the stairs. “There’s a cross-breeze. Where are you?”
“I’m in here,” she says. “Just a moment.” She starts to cry, and then she stops herself. Jennifer is gone. Words can’t express the enormity of the loss. No story can contain it. Her absence is a presence, ghostly and haunting, touching all who knew her. It is impossible that she disappeared, inconceivable that she will never return. She is at once nowhere and everywhere, a constant shadow, elusory and insubstantial, her life an unkept promise, a half-remembered dream.
Chapter 4
Kathryn’s grandmother is seated in a wheelchair in the main living room of the Oak Bluff Retirement Home when Kathryn arrives.
“Grandma Alice?” Kathryn calls across the room, and the old woman looks up, the glare from the overhead light reflecting in her glasses. She is wearing a blue-striped dress, flesh-colored support hose, and dainty powder-blue nylon slippers, her thin legs splayed slightly on the metal footrests. Her wispy gray hair is haloed around her head.
“Kathryn,” she says in a shrill voice, holding up a folded newspaper. “Just in time. What’s a five-letter word for ‘streetwalker’?”
“Streetwalker?” Kathryn says, coming toward her. “Whore, I guess.”
“W-H-O-R-E.” Her grandmother bends over the crossword, carefully filling in the blanks with a pencil. She looks up. “I had ‘hussy.’ This seems to fit better. But it is a rather ghastly word, isn’t it?”
“Who makes up these crosswords, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I should fire off a letter to the paper about it.” She sets the crossword in her lap. “Of course, I write a letter about once a week for some reason or other. I can just imagine the dread in that office every time an envelope with my shaky handwriting comes in.”
“You keep them on their toes, Grandma.”
“And they need it, too. Who else but someone like me has the time to mess with them?” She looks up at Kathryn, squinting into the fluorescent light. “You’re looking a little tired, my dear.”
She sighs. “I know. Mom’s already pointed that out.”
“So I don’t need to mention the hair,” she says. “Red’s not really your color, you know.”
“Well, that makes two things that you and Mom agree on.”
“That’s because it’s not opinion, dear; it’s fact.” Grandma Alice leans forward. “The divorce is final?”
“Yep. I’m a single woman now, Grandma, just like you.”
She sticks out her chin. “Too bad. I always liked Paul. But I suppose what I liked about him was probably what made him a bad husband.”
“Oh, really?” Kathryn moves behind her wheelchair. “Want to go out on the porch?”
“In, out, whatever.” She folds her hands in her lap and Kathryn wheels her outside. “He was quite a flirt, wasn’t he?”
“Did he flirt with you, Grandma?”
She cranes her neck to look up at Kathryn, and grins. “Outrageously.” Kathryn wheels her over to a spot in the shade near several old women sitting in wicker chairs, fanning themselves.
One of them nods. “Hello, Alice.”
“Hello, Mary, Joan,” she says. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”
“A little hot for my taste,” Joan says, making a face.
“Is this your granddaughter here?” Mary asks.
“Yes, it is. Say hello, Kathryn.”
This is an old joke between them. “Hello, Kathryn,” Kathryn says.
Grandma Alice looks up and smiles, and then pinches her arm, hard, on the inside. “We just came over to say hello. We’re going over here.” She points to an empty corner of the porch.
When they’re safely out of earshot, Kathryn says, “I can’t believe you pinched me, Grandma.”
“Did I ask to be set over there? Gawd. Those two will talk your ear off.”
Kathryn sits down in a white chair opposite her. “So, do you have any friends here, or are you rude to everyone?”
She narrows her eyes. “I’m not rude. It’s just my personality.” Sitting up straight, she primly smooths her blouse. “And yes, I do have friends. Selectively.”
“So you’re not lonely, then.”
“Of course I’m lonely sometimes,” she says. “Everyone who’s alone gets lonely—it’s inevitable. But I’d rather be lonely than have to chitchat with frivolous old ladies.” She gives Kathryn a shrewd look. “Of course, it’s much harder when you’re accustomed to companionship. You’re pretty lonely these days, I’d wager.”
“I don’t know,” Kathryn says. “I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m just kind of numb.”
“Well, that’s all right.”
“No it isn’t.” She leans back and closes her eyes, the heels of her hands against her temples. “It’s humiliating. Paul has a life.”
“And so do you.”
“No I don’t. I’m alive. I’m breathing. That’s the most you can say for me.”
“Here we go, Kathryn feeling sorry for herself….”
“Grandma, I’m just facing reality. I came home because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“And what’s wrong with that? You’ve been through a mess. You need some time to relax.”
“I don’t want to relax. I want to get on with my life.”
“For God’s sake, girl, take the pressure off,” she says crisply. “Life is long. There’s nothing you have to get done in such a hurry.”
“I feel as if I’m drifting.”
“So drift.” She lifts her thin, knobby hands from her lap and waves them back and forth in the air. “You’ve been moving in one direction, and now you need to go in another. You’ve got to take some time to figure out which way to go.”
“Oh, Grandma,” Kathryn says.
“Besides, I need you around for a while. Put some distance be
tween me and your mother.”
Kathryn reaches over and squeezes her hand. “She tries.”
“She tries, I know. She tries. All that trying makes me tired. Promise me one thing: Promise me that when it gets to the point where you have to try so hard, you’ll just leave me alone. Okay?”
She starts to protest. “But she means—”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” Kathryn says.
After leaving her grandmother with her crossword puzzle, Kathryn sits in the car in the parking lot, twisting the ring on her finger. There’s nothing you have to get done in such a hurry. She imagines Paul tonight, playing bass guitar with his band at a small club in Charlottesville as he does most Saturdays, a little cluster of groupies swaying together up front. Her life with him seems suddenly hazy and far away.
KATHRYN HAD MET Paul at the University of Virginia, where both of them were enrolled in the English master’s program. She was twenty-five, he was twenty-seven. She’d been writing a newsletter for a women’s health organization in Washington, D.C., a low-paying and tedious job, and had come to the conclusion that maybe she should consider teaching instead. He’d spent the previous two years living in Africa, learning Swahili and contracting intestinal diseases. The first time she saw him, with his curious Indian elf shoes, dark hair, and piercing brown eyes, she thought he must be foreign, but when he opened his mouth she heard the elocution of a New England prep-school graduate.
“Of course,” he’d replied thoughtfully to a small, reedy professor’s assertion that E. M. Forster’s work expressed a dialectic uncertainty about identity versus nature. “But shouldn’t we be interrogating these on a grid of social analysis rather than wallowing in solipsistic interpretations of the text?”