Desire Lines (15 page)

So maybe that’s how it should be, Kathryn thinks. Here’s Jennifer’s life, on four sheets of microfiche, and maybe that’s enough. “She’s either dead or she doesn’t want to be found,” Paul used to say when she worried over the details late at night. “Either way, there’s not a hell of a lot you can do about it. Let her go, Kathryn. Give it up. She’s gone.”

“You’re right,” she’d murmur, but she didn’t believe it. Jennifer might be dead, or she might be hiding, but she wasn’t gone to Kathryn. She’d never be gone. The fact that she vanished on a special night in a familiar
place only made the impact of it more intense, seared in Kathryn’s memory from the moment she walked out into the darkness.

Kathryn gets up from the table, slides the film sheets back in the folder, and takes it to Joanne at the front desk. “Could I get copies of these?”

“Sure.” Joanne glances at the clock. “But I won’t have them ready for an hour.”

“I can come back.”

The woman nods. “So you knew this girl, huh?” she says abruptly, looking sideways at Kathryn.

“Yes, she was a friend of mine. And Jack’s. We were all in the same class at Bangor High.” Then, sensing something odd in Joanne’s reaction, she says, “Did you know her?”

Joanne wrinkles her nose. “Not directly. I heard some things.”

“About the disappearance?”

“No.” She looks down, straightening things on her desk. “If I did, I could’ve gotten some reward money. No, she went out with my nephew, Tim Peavey.”

“I remember Tim,” Kathryn says. “He was a football player, right? And baseball?”

“Carnation All-American.”

“When did he go out with Jennifer?” she asks, puzzled, trying to think back.

“It wasn’t long,” Joanne says. “She wasn’t very nice to him.”

It’s coming back to her now. It was the summer before their junior year, and as far as Kathryn knows, Jennifer dated him only once or twice. She used to say that he was dogging her, wouldn’t leave her alone. He was always pushing notes, covered with hearts and great big I
LOVE YOU’S,
through the vent in her locker. “I don’t know if they were exactly
going out,”
Kathryn says, trying to be tactful.

“Listen, honey,” Joanne says, looking Kathryn in the eye. “She went out with him and then she dumped him, and it hurt him pretty bad.
Everybody thought she was a little angel, but she was far from that. Once you got to know her—”

“I did,” Kathryn says abruptly. “I did know her.”

Joanne purses her lips in a little smirk. “Then you know.”

Kathryn starts to respond and then thinks better of it, tacitly giving Joanne the last word. She is suddenly tired, bone tired, as if she’s been losing blood without realizing it. “Well, listen, I’ll be back in a while to pick up that stuff. Thanks for your help.”

“Sure,” Joanne says with a smile. She seems cheerier for having gotten that off her chest.

Outside the air is warmer now, though clouds still mottle the sky. Kathryn gets into the Saturn and it’s as if she’s an astronaut in a spaceship—all she has to do is buckle in and shoot for the skies. She likes the feeling. She turns the key in the ignition and Foreigner blasts from the speakers:
“Hot blooded, check it and see, I got a fever of a hundred and three.
…” She turns onto Main Street and follows it back into town, past the struggling independent bookstores, a preppy clothing outlet showcasing Izod shirts and argyle socks, several ethnic restaurants. Instead of turning left onto Harlow Street toward home, as she’d planned, she continues through the traffic light and up the hill on State Street, past pawnshops and drugstores and the 7-Eleven, until the houses become larger and grander. They’re mostly doctors’ estates; Eastern Maine Medical Center sprawls for half a mile on the right side of the road, a modern monolith on the banks of the Penobscot.

At the end of Main Street, on the border between Bangor and Veazie, Kathryn turns left up a winding hill, passing the mental-health institute and half a dozen car dealerships, the cars on each lot shimmering in the sun like a phalanx of beetles. She can see the sign for the Bangor Mall in the distance.

Once you got to know her, Joanne said. What does she know? She never even met her. But Kathryn has to admit that there’s an element of truth in what she was saying. Jennifer could be sulky and unpredictable. And she could be thoughtlessly inconsiderate, asking for favors and
giving arbitrarily in return, opening up to people and then just as quickly closing off again.

Kathryn remembers one Christmas, when they were fourteen, that Jennifer received a beautiful pair of ice skates, creamy white leather with shiny silver blades and pink laces. Her mother had ordered them out of a catalogue at White’s Sporting Goods store. Kathryn’s run-of-the-mill pair from Standard Shoes, bought in an end-of-season sale the previous spring, looked tacky in comparison.

The day after Christmas was clear and cold. There had been a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, and though plows had come through the neighborhood twice, the streets were still coated with a layer of packed ice. At eight-thirty that morning, groggy with sleep, Kathryn opened the front door to find Jennifer standing there with her new skates on, clutching the doorframe with one pink-gloved hand. “Hey, Kath,” she said. “I’m on my way over to the park. Will said there’s ice over the whole baseball field. Want to come?”

Kathryn looked down at the skates, and then at Jennifer’s pink socks, white jeans, white jacket, and pink-and-white scarf. Her blond hair was pulled back into a pink ponytail holder. “I just woke up,” Kathryn said.

“I can wait.”

“Don’t you have boots? It’s three blocks over there. Road salt can’t be good for those.”

Picking her feet up one after the other, like a pony, Jennifer said, “Aren’t they beautiful? But I feel like an idiot, like I’m trying to be Dorothy Hamill or something. You’re the one who can skate.”

“You can skate,” Kathryn said, without much conviction.

“No, not really. But you know what my mom says: If you can’t
be
good, at least look good.” She grimaced and stuck out her tongue. “So come on.”

“I’m not feeling so hot today,” Kathryn said. “And my skates are butt-ugly.”

“Yeah, but you’re good. It doesn’t matter what they look like,” Jennifer said, yanking playfully on Kathryn’s arm. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”

And so Kathryn went. She put on her skates and guided Jennifer to the park. When they got there she spent an hour trying to teach Jennifer to skate backward, and then, when Jennifer fell and hurt her knee, she held her steady as they hobbled back home.

Jennifer was always getting people to do things for her—skating lessons, homework, a later curfew, a second chance. But she didn’t expect these favors for free. What she gave back was as undefinable as it was unspoken, and it was only years later, after Jennifer was gone, that Kathryn began to understand why she had so willingly accepted the mercurial nature of Jennifer’s friendship, why all of them gave so much to her and expected so little. It wasn’t that she was funny, or creative, or even particularly empathetic, though at times she could be any of these things. The fact was, each of them had been in love with her in some way, in love with the idea of her, the ideal she represented: her physical beauty, her poise, her audacity. She didn’t seem to feel the need to explain herself, to rush to fill a silence, to justify the choices she made, the way the rest of them did. Ultimately, though, Kathryn thought, this may have been her undoing. Because when Jennifer did express fear or hurt or vulnerability, they may have believed her, but deep down they never really took it seriously. She was saying these things, they thought, to show that she was normal. To be like them.

So the lady at the News is right about Jennifer, and she’s wrong, Kathryn thinks, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how nice Jennifer was, and how many people loved her, and how many she hurt or alienated or fooled. She’s gone; that time is long past.

Glancing at her watch, Kathryn sees that it’s been forty-five minutes, so she heads back to the News to pick up the copies. Joanne isn’t around, but there’s a folder on the front desk of the library with Kathryn’s name scrawled on the front. She slips the folder into her bag and goes out to the newsroom. She can see Jack in his office with his shirtsleeves rolled up, talking on the phone. He’s gesturing animatedly with
one hand and scribbling on a pad with the other. She dawdles, fiddling with her bag, waiting to see if he’ll hang up, but after a moment it becomes clear that he’ll be on for a while, so she slips out without his seeing her.

At the front desk she asks about John Bourne, the reporter whose name is on most of the stories about the disappearance.

“Oh, he’s been gone for some time now,” the birdlike receptionist says. “It’s probably been five years.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“I think he went to some paper in Detroit.” She calls over her shoulder: “Helen! Do you know where Johnny Bourne ended up?”

“Hmm,” says a woman with large red glasses, sitting in a cubicle.
“Detroit Morning News,
I believe. Let me check.” She turns the knob on her Rolodex and starts flipping through cards. “Yep, here it is,” she says. “Or was. This is three years old.”

“Fine,” Kathryn says, “whatever you’ve got.”

The woman gives her the number, and Kathryn scrawls it on her notebook. She feels satisfied with herself all at once, the way you might after a strenuous workout or an exam you’ve actually studied for. She has accomplished something for a change, and however small, however preliminary, it’s a start.

On the way home Kathryn stops at Shaw’s to pick up some mussels, lettuce, and fresh bread for dinner. It’s only four-thirty; her mother won’t be home until seven. Maybe she’ll even make a cobbler—peach, her mother’s favorite—as a surprise. She hasn’t shopped like this, with another person in mind, since she was married. Weighing the peaches in her hand, inspecting them for ripeness and bruises, she feels strangely content. There are mussels in her basket, white wine is chilling in the fridge, she has a task to occupy her for the next few hours, and something to talk about when her mother comes home. Maybe it really is this simple, she thinks; maybe all I’ve needed is a worthwhile task and someone to cook for.

As she’s standing in line with her cart, the woman beside her says, “Kathryn, right?”

“Ye-es,” Kathryn says, looking at the woman’s unruly brown hair and soft laugh lines, trying to place her.

“Jan Starley. Used to be Forrest. We were in the same English class,” the woman says. She points to the toddler standing at the front of her cart like the captain of a ship. “And this little guy is Taylor. Say hi to the nice lady, Taylor.”

“Don’t say hi,” Taylor says, turning his face away.

“Sorry.” Jan rolls her eyes. “He’s at that age.”

“He’s really cute,” Kathryn says. He looks over at her from under a shock of shiny black hair, and when he sees her noticing, he grins and crouches down.

“He knows it, too. Careful, don’t step on the Froot Loops,” Jan warns him. She brushes the curly hair out of her eyes and leans her forearms on the cart. “So how’ve you been?”

“Fine,” Kathryn says, “how about you?”

“Oh, gettin’ by.” She squints at Kathryn as if she’s trying to remember something. “Gosh, I haven’t seen you since—well, it must have been sometime that summer. After school ended. Everything was so …” she says, and pauses.

“I know,” Kathryn says.

Jan tousles Taylor’s hair. “I can’t believe nothing ever came of that. She just… disappeared, didn’t she?”

“It looks that way.” It’s strange, but somehow it’s easy to talk about Jennifer like this, as if she were nothing more to Kathryn than a mutual acquaintance or an item in the paper.

“Well, maybe she’ll turn up. It happens, doesn’t it? She’s probably on a beach somewhere in California.”

“I wanna pretzel,” Taylor demands, and Jan pulls open a bag and gives him one. “Broken,” he says, making a face. She hands him the whole bag.

“Probably just wanted to make a clean break,” she continues. “Hey,
who knows, maybe she’ll show up at the reunion. That’d make a good story, wouldn’t it?”

“It would,” Kathryn says. “It’d make a great story.”

She pays for the food and makes her way to the parking lot, where the shiny yellow Saturn stands out like a traffic light:
Caution, slow down, proceed at your own risk.

Chapter 10

D
ays pass. Despite her good intentions, Kathryn can’t seem to get going. She reads the paper front to back every morning, even the business section and the sports pages. She’s beginning to recognize the names of local industry leaders and high-school sports stars; she knows that Dan Rivlin is expected to quarterback for Bangor High in the fall, though he broke his ankle last March in a snowboarding accident and they’re worried it might slow him down. There’s at least one story every day or two about boats lost at sea and lovers’ quarrels that end in violence, and the paper covers them faithfully, in sordid detail, until the boat is found or the case comes to trial. Kathryn knows the trivial facts of each one.