Desire Lines Read online

Kathryn makes a face. “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “There’s just so … much. I don’t know what good it’ll do to go digging around. And it feels self-indulgent to babble on about my stupid problems when really I’m fine, and things are fine, and it’s not like my home was destroyed by a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake or anything—”

  “Actually, that’s a pretty good analogy. In many ways your life has been torn apart—and now, slowly, you have to figure out how to put the pieces back together.” She scribbles a note on her pad and looks up. “So how about next Tuesday? And then we can take it from there.”

  “Tuesday? I’m not sure. I might be doing something, I can’t remember.”

  Rosie smiles and hands Kathryn her card. “Here. You call me in the next day or two and let me know. I’ll have Doris pencil you in in the meantime. So call us either way.”

  Slipping the card in her bag, Kathryn stands to leave. On the way out, Rosie says, “I just want to say one thing. Your mother and I are friends. I’m not going to pretend we’re not. But what goes on in here has nothing to do with my relationships outside this office.”

  The phone rings behind them, and the receptionist picks it up. “Rosie?” she says, covering the mouthpiece with her hand, “it’s Margaret Campbell. Should I have her call you back?”

  Kathryn gapes at Doris. “Margaret?”

  “Phone calls are confidential, Doris, remember?” Rosie scolds, giving her an exasperated look. “Take a message.” Turning to Kathryn, she says, “Doris seems to think we’re running a beauty salon in here. Look, I’m not going to lie to you. Both Margaret and your mother come to me.”

  “Oh, God,” Kathryn says, putting her hands up.

  Rosie stops and puts her hand on Kathryn’s arm. “You know what a small town this is. But I’ve lived here for forty-three years, my whole life. I don’t have any problem keeping things separate.”

  “I don’t see how that can be true.”

  Smiling, Rosie says, “Somebody once defined genius as the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. I’m not saying I’m a genius, but I do believe I’m capable of that.” She pats Kathryn’s shoulder. “Anyway, it’s up to you. I can understand if you feel uncomfortable.”

  Walking down the steps into the sunlight, still bright in the late-afternoon sky, Kathryn has to stop to catch her breath. It all feels too familiar; things are closing in. And yet somehow, on the surface, she feels strangely, almost clinically, detached. Even the sad little details of the past year she recounted to Rosie seem curiously unconnected to any real emotion she might have. What am I feeling? she wonders, getting into her mother’s car and reaching under the seat for the keys. It’s been so long since she’s asked herself that question that she doesn’t have the slightest idea how to answer.

  AT A STOPLIGHT Kathryn pulls up beside a minivan driven by a harried-looking young mother. In the back, a row of car seats and several tow-headed children are shaded by a screen attached to the window with suction cups. Toys and bottles and boxes of crackers orbit around them.

  The chaos of it, the drudgery, the endless mess; the idea of becoming a mother is as foreign to Kathryn as the idea of becoming, say, a mortician—and about as appealing. She knows babies are hard work; she did enough baby-sitting in high school to temper any romantic illusions she might have had. And it’s hard to imagine feeling ready to nurture someone else when she can barely manage her own life.

  And yet. As she looks over at the children, their faces upturned and eager, their chubby starfish hands, she has to admit she feels a twinge of melancholy. The end of her marriage signified many things: a rending of vows, a crumbling of intention, an admission of defeat. But it also represented the death of hope, of potential. It ended her dreams about the kind of person she was and the kind of life she and Paul would lead together. Somewhere deep down she is unutterably sad about the babies they will never have, the ghost children they imagined late at night as they lay in bed in the dark together: one boy and one girl, three boys, two girls, all with Paul’s dark eyes and her fair skin. Sometimes, still, she thinks of these children, as silent and otherworldly as angels, hovering just out of reach.

  As the light turns green, Kathryn pulls ahead, watching in her rearview mirror as the woman in the minivan shouts over her shoulder and tosses a stuffed animal into the backseat, trying to keep from swerving into oncoming traffic.

  “WE GOT A postcard from Josh in the mail today,” Kathryn’s mother says when she gets home. She holds the glossy card up with two fingers. “He’s in Nepal. Says he’s sorry he can’t make it to Maine while you’re here, but this is all the time he can get off work.”

  Kathryn takes the card, a National Geographic-style shot of the snowcapped Himalayas. She turns it over and scans it. “Wish you could see this place … incredible hiking trails … unbelievable views,” she says aloud. She looks at her mother. “You hoped he’d be coming home, didn’t you?”

  She shrugs dismissively, but Kathryn can tell she’s hurt. “He’s a grown man,” she says. “I can’t expect him to use up what little vacation time he has on me. But I did think he might, knowing you were here.”

  “Mom,” Kathryn says gently, “Josh and I haven’t been close in years.”

  “I keep hoping that’ll change,” her mother says, smiling sadly. For a moment she seems lost in thought. Then she clasps her hands together. “So how’d it go?” she asks. “I’m about to pour myself a glass of wine. Care to join me?”

  “Sure,” Kathryn says. “It was interesting.”

  Her mother opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle. “White okay?”

  Kathryn nods. Her mother takes down two stemmed glasses and gets a tray of ice out of the freezer. “No ice in mine,” Kathryn says.

  “I shouldn’t either—I know it’s not too classy. But it’s jug wine. Why stop there?” She half-fills the glasses and motions toward the sliding glass door. “Let’s go out in the garden. I feel like celebrating. I may have sold a house today.”

  “May have?”

  “They’re still deciding, but I think I’ve got them.” With her glass in one hand and the bottle in the other, she leads the way out the door and down the steps to the white wicker chairs sitting under a tree in the back. She sets the bottle on a little wicker table. “So what do you mean, ‘interesting’?” she says, taking a long sip of wine.

  Kathryn shrugs. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She can feel herself closing up, like a drawbridge.

  “Did you talk about Jennifer at all?”

  “No.” She takes a deep breath. “Margaret called while I was there,” she says, subterfuging.

  “Oh, really?” Her mother’s expression stays the same, but her eyebrows lift. She has another gulp of wine. “Why didn’t you talk about Jennifer?”

  “It just didn’t seem right. It seemed like too much.”

  Her mother leans forward and tops up her glass.

  “And anyway, I’m not sure I feel comfortable with her,” Kathryn says, trying to change the subject again. “It seems really bizarre, everybody going to the same therapist. I don’t see how she can keep everything separate. The friendship, the therapy thing, seeing you and Margaret and me—”

  “I didn’t know she was seeing Margaret.”

  Kathryn looks at her mother, biting the lip of her glass, and suddenly she’s sorry she mentioned Margaret at all. She knew when she said it that her mother might be hurt; after all these years, Margaret’s name still has that kind of power. When Kathryn was in high school and fighting with her mother, the meanest thing she could say was “Margaret never yells at me!” or “Margaret said I could.” Eyes gleaming, flushed neck betraying her anger and pain, her mother would say, “Why don’t you just go live with your father and Margaret, then?”

  “Well,” Kathryn says now, “anyway, Doris says hi.” She forces a laugh. “That woman needs to go to secretary school.”

/>   Her mother nods slowly.

  For a few minutes they sit together in silence. Then Kathryn says, “Mom …”

  “What?”

  “I have an idea. I want to take you to dinner. Somewhere fun, somewhere we can sit outside. My treat.”

  “Your treat?” she says, bemused. “How do you think Rosie would analyze this?”

  “She’d probably say I was trying to get in touch with my inner child by nurturing the Great Mother.”

  “Daughters who feed their mothers and the mothers who let them.”

  “Hey, pretty good.”

  “I’ve been in that office quite a bit,” she says, collecting the wine bottle and glasses and standing up. “I know all the slogans. Now, where are you taking me? I’m starving.”

  AFTER A LEISURELY dinner at Mama Baldacci’s, a cozy Italian restaurant with red-checked tablecloths and meatballs the size of tennis balls, they return home and Kathryn’s mother heads upstairs to take a bath. Kathryn sits out on the porch swing, pushing it back and forth with her foot. She thinks about how Rosie said that her life has been torn apart and she has to rebuild it. Frowning in the darkness, she tries to figure out what it is that she doesn’t agree with, what it is that rings false to her. There’s a drama to it she knows she hasn’t lived. There was never a cataclysmic moment in which things might have been, however briefly, etched in relief against memory, against things to come—a moment which, by its sheer magnitude, defined her history and her future. Instead, Kathryn thinks, she has disintegrated slowly over a number of years. By the time of her divorce she was already less than a whole person, shadowing through her life without much in the way of will or ambition. It is true that she doesn’t know what she wants, but it’s more than that: She doesn’t, any longer, possess a want. She feels somehow lighter than she should, lighter in the mind, a solid will slowly turned to sand.

  Kathryn thinks about all the stories she could tell Rosie over the next month or two, stories that might intrigue her and provide clues to Kathryn’s depression—if that’s what it is—but would essentially leave her alone. She thinks about what remains unspoken: Jennifer, Will, the last night by the river, the constant turning over, like the worrying of beads, the question of what happened to her best friend the night she disappeared. It is a question as relentless as it is haunting, the only constant in the past decade of her life. Where did she go? Where did she go?— the rhythm of it like the chugging of a train through a deep and far-off valley. It is a question that embraces mystery, with one embalmed response: Nobody knows. Yet there is an echo, fainter but more urgent, that haunts her: Somebody has to know. Somebody, somewhere, knows what happened.

  Kathryn can go days without thinking about it—weeks, even. She finds she has an amazing capacity to forget. Sometimes she feels as if she is skating along the surface of her life, her past the dark, roiling water underneath. When the ice cracks—and it does, it has—she moves a little faster, cutting deeper with the blade, working back to safer ground.

  Turning off the porch light, Kathryn heads upstairs to her room. On an impulse she goes into her closet and takes down a box marked “College Papers”—she seems to remember having written about this once, long ago. It was her first year at UVA, as she recalls, in a composition course. The grad student teaching the class wanted the students to express themselves; he didn’t care much about form. He was always giving them assignments like “Describe a meal you love” and “Help a blind person visualize the color blue.”

  Kathryn finds the course folder and leafs through it until she gets to the paper. Then she sits on her bed and reads it:

  Kathryn Campbell

  Composition I/Instructor: J. Trainer

  October 14, 1986

  The University of Virginia

  Assignment: Write about something you’ve lost

  Ever since Jennifer disappeared, I feel as if I’ve been wandering in a foreign country without a map. When I try, I can recall a blur of details about what happened after she left us that night by the river—Will’s strained voice on the phone the next morning, telling me that Jennifer hadn’t slept in her bed; the stiff formality of the thick-belted policeman in the driveway, with Mrs. Pelletier behind him on the porch, wrapped in Jennifer’s letter sweater; searching with Jack and Brian and the other volunteers through the spongy underbrush near the Kenduskeag—but mostly I don’t try. Remembering the details doesn’t seem to help.

  When Jennifer disappeared some kind of time was permanently suspended. We don’t know if she’s dead, so we can’t bury her —no casket, no wreath of flowers, no eulogy, no funeral, no mourning. When I read about the relatives of soldiers in Vietnam still missing after fifteen years, people who believe that there might be a chance the person is alive, who cling to each fragile lead as if it might yield the answer, I think I understand. I loved Jennifer like I love my own family: imperfectly, carelessly, with an irrational certainty that while I might grow up, go away, move on, she will always be just where I need her, just the same.

  A year before she disappeared, Jennifer got a passport. She always dreamed of traveling to foreign lands. I imagine that the telephone call will come in the middle of the night: Someone has seen her. She’s in London, selling jewelry on the street. In Paris, with some brooding French poet. Or a postcard arrives: She just wants to let us know she’s fine and living on a fishing boat in New Zealand. Climbing the Swiss Alps. Lying on a beach in St. Croix.

  In my nightmares, I conjure other scenarios: They’ve found her body in the tall grass by the edge of Green Lake. They’ve found her in a shallow grave in the Maine woods. In the town dump. In a basement apple room.

  In the four months since she left us, I think I’ve thought of everything.

  Jennifer is my best friend, and now she will always be my best friend, because she exists for me now only as she was. There is a part of me that will probably never age, that will stay suspended, poised, eighteen years old and holding my breath, until we find out what happened.

  At the bottom of the page, the instructor has written, “Kathryn—Fiction? Nonfiction? Who is Jennifer, and why should we care? We could use more details: The narrator talks about how s/he feels after his/her best friend disappears, but what does s/he miss about her specifically? Why was she such a significant person to him/her? Also, the narrator seems pretty detached. Have you researched this? Is it a typical response? (See Kübler-Ross’s study about the stages of grief if you plan to expand this into a short story.)

  The imagery and analysis are good, though the ‘details’ the narrator doesn’t want to remember are ultimately what will make the story interesting. ✓.—J. Trainer”

  Kathryn smiles at the grade. It was unusual for her not to get a check-plus—she usually managed to get the tone just right. How fitting, she thinks, that in this one instance she wasn’t able to pull it off.

  Chapter 8

  “Well, look at this,” Kathryn’s mother says at breakfast. Kathryn has gotten up early to make banana-walnut pancakes, an old before-school favorite, in an attempt to extend the goodwill between them a little further. Her mother is sipping coffee and leafing through the paper. Her voice is chirpy; breakfast, Kathryn knows, is her favorite meal of the day. Kathryn flips three lopsided pancakes on the griddle and puts them in the toaster oven to stay warm. “Jack Ledbetter has been promoted to assistant news editor of the paper.”

  “Really?” Kathryn sticks a glass jar of maple syrup in a pan of water and puts it on the stove to warm.

  “I see his byline all the time,” her mother says. “Here it is now. Let’s see: It’s a profile of a lobsterman. ‘Harley Gerow eats lobster for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but he can’t stand clams.’ That’s the first line. Catchy, isn’t it?”

  Kathryn looks over at her. “You want to stir up some juice?”

  She folds the paper and goes to the freezer. “I just thought you might be interested.” She takes out a small, orange, frost-covered cylinder and kneads it with her fingers t
o soften it. “Didn’t you two use to be friends?”

  “Sure, in high school. We lost touch after that.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. We just lost touch. You can’t stay friends with everybody you ever met in your life.”

  “Wasn’t he down at the river with you all that night?”

  Kathryn looks at the bubbling pancakes and weighs them with the spatula to see if they’re done.

  “What do you mean, missing?” Jack had said when she called the next morning.

  “She didn’t sleep in her bed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She didn’t sleep in her bed,” she said again, impatient, repeating to him what Will had said to her, as if somehow the words might be enough to contain their meaning.

  Kathryn’s mother looks at her intently. “You haven’t stayed in touch with any of them, have you?”

  She turns away. “No.”

  “Which one of us is going to be famous?” Brian said as they sat around the campfire. “Who’s going to be the alcoholic? Which one of you girls will ditch your husband for me when we come back for our ten-year reunion? Who’s dying young?”

  The pancakes are overcooked. Kathryn flips them, three rigid brown disks, and tosses them into the trash. Her mother squeezes the solid chunk of concentrate into a pitcher. She pours water into the juice can to measure it, and then into the pitcher, stirring the mixture with a whisk. “Well, anyway,” she says, “I was thinking: Why don’t you give Jack a call and see if there’s an article you might be able to work on?”

  “You mean for the paper?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Oh, Mom.” Kathryn takes two plates from the cabinet above the sink and balances them above her hip as she rummages through the silverware drawer. “I don’t think I want to write anything just now.”

  “But Kathryn, you’re so good at it.” She carries the pitcher of juice and two glasses to the table. “You want ice?”

  “No, thanks. And I’m not that good. I’m adequate. And anyway—”