Desire Lines (3 page)

“I hate tuna casserole.”

Patrick smiled down at Kathryn. “Well, then. It’s a good thing old Gus here ain’t moving to Bangor, Maine, now, isn’t it?”

THEY STOP AT
a light, and Kathryn’s mother reaches over and squeezes her knee. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

She tries to pull her thoughts together. “It’s funny being back.”

“But you were just here a year ago.”

“Not like this. Cowed and humiliated.”

“Oh, Kathryn.” Her mother laughs. “You’re so dramatic. You should’ve pursued a career on the stage.”

“I should’ve pursued a career, period.”

Her mother purses her lips and looks at Kathryn sideways, cocking her head like a bird. Then she reaches out and touches her daughter’s hand, where the gold ring shines on her finger. “You’re still wearing this.”

Kathryn retracts her hand.

“Don’t you want to put it away?”

“One of these days.”

“Closure is very important, sweetheart.”

“All right, Mom. I’ll get rid of it when I’m ready.”

Her mother pauses, running her hands around the rim of the steering wheel. “You have to get on with it, Kathryn,” she says finally. “Put that part of your life behind you. I know it’s difficult, but—”

“I hear you,” she says sharply.

The light turns green, and they drive along in silence. Kathryn watches the neighborhoods drift by, clusters of small white houses built in the thirties and forties shaded by leafy green trees, hanging low and full in the summer heat.

“You must be tired,” her mother says in a clipped voice.

“Look, Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.”

Her mother shrugs, a peacemaking gesture. “I was pressuring you.”

“No, it’s me. I’m just not handling this very well.”

“There’s no reason you should be,” her mother says. She smiles. “I am glad you’re home.”

“Me, too,” Kathryn says. She’s not sure she is, but she says it anyway.

KATHRYN’S MOTHER STILL
lives in the house that Kathryn grew up in, a white colonial with black shutters in a section of town called Little City, a residential neighborhood of oaks and maples surrounding a large rectangular island of green, well-kept park. The most impressive houses in Little City are great white confections with elegant slate roofs and full-length windows that line a broad street sloping down toward the river. The Campbell house, several blocks over, is modest in comparison. When Kathryn was growing up, their neighbors were young families and retired couples who puttered together in their flower gardens on summer mornings and sat on clean-swept porches all afternoon, alternately dozing and keeping a lookout for trouble. Not that there was any; the closest Taft Street came to excitement was when two men moved into a house together and built a deck, visible from the street, where they sunbathed in Speedos and massaged each other with tanning oil.

Like most houses in the neighborhood, the Campbells’ was built in the twenties. It has a deep wooden porch, large living and dining room windows, and an original cedar-and-red-brick fireplace. When the Campbells first moved to Bangor from Boston, Kathryn would sit on the wooden porch swing in midafternoon and close her eyes, breathing in the clean pine scent of the hedges separating their property from the next-door neighbors’, listening to the muted hum and swish of cars going by on Center Street, a block away. Sometimes her mother would come out on the porch and sit down on the swing with her, rocking back and forth with her foot. After a while she’d say, “You know, Kath, this is exactly how I grew up. Sitting on a porch swing, waiting for something to happen. Just sitting and waiting. Exactly like this.”

Kathryn has heard all the stories, all the family lore. Her grandfather, John Lefebvre, a French Canadian, migrated to Maine in 1928 because he’d been told that anybody who works hard in America can become a success. As it turned out, in his case the hard work consisted of marrying Kathryn’s grandmother, Alice, the caustic daughter of a wealthy Bangor
banker, and becoming an apprentice to her father, who eventually passed on all of his knowledge and money to his son-in-law. Until his death in 1970, John Lefebvre never missed a day of work. Every day for forty years, he left the house at precisely eight-fifteen in the morning for the bank building on Main Street and returned at exactly five-forty-five in the afternoon, wearing a black fedora and a mustache that faded from black to white but never changed shape.

For fifteen years, from the late thirties to the early fifties, Kathryn’s grandmother wrote a column for the
Bangor Daily News
called “Opinions,” most of which were hers. She wrote about everything from books to fashion to politics, occasionally outraging an upstanding citizen, which amused and excited her. “Oh, look!” she’d say, brandishing a letter. “Delightful! Somebody else has got an opinion, too!” Her acid wit was put to constructive use in her column, but it was often, unfortunately, turned on her daughter Sally, an only child, burning her and making her wary. “Your mother is a nice girl, but she needs to learn to stand up for herself,” Alice confided to Kathryn tartly one time, after she’d compared her daughter’s hairstyle to a certain breed of dog and Sally had left the room in tears.

When Kathryn’s mother was eighteen she left for Boston College, where she met Kathryn’s father, Mike, a scholarship student. He lived in Irish South Boston in a fifth-floor walk-up; his father worked on the docks, unloading fish and dry goods in the grimy darkness of early morning while most of the city slept. Mike aspired to be an accountant, and he took classes during the day and toiled on the docks at night. When he came to pick up Sally for dates, his work clothes would often be in the backseat of the car, smelling of the sea. That smell, and the exhaustion on his face mixed with grim determination, convinced her that he possessed something she needed: a kind of certainty, an uncomplicated desire for what she took for granted. So she dropped out of college six months shy of graduating and married him.

They settled in Boston, Kathryn was born, and when John Lefebvre died—of a heart attack on the way to the office, so the story went, his
black fedora wedged on his head and his white shirt buttoned to the top—Alice, up in Bangor, began making noises about being all alone. It was Mike, finally, who convinced Kathryn’s mother that they should move to Maine. Boston, he said, was full of accountants. In Bangor he could afford the big house he’d always dreamed of: white, with black shutters and a red front door.

“DID YOU TELL
your father you were coming home?” her mother asks Kathryn at dinner, several hours after the flight. They are seated at their usual places at the walnut table in the kitchen, Kathryn in the middle and her mother at one end. A mat set at her brother Josh’s customary place holds a sweating bottle of white wine and the dinner her mother has prepared in advance, a curried chicken salad and cold artichokes.

“Yes,” Kathryn says. She had called him several months ago to let him know about her breakup with Paul and that she’d be in Maine this summer, though she didn’t tell him exactly when. Her father had never taken to Paul; the first time he met him, a month before their wedding, he told Kathryn he thought Paul was pretentious. “That boy didn’t deserve you,” he said bluntly when she told him she was filing for divorce. “Now you can get on with your life.”

Kathryn has never been close to her father, even before he left her mother for his secretary and moved to a neighboring town. He wasn’t around much when she was growing up. Her mother always said it was his work—he was trying to build a business, she said, putting in long hours to support the family—but months before he announced he was leaving, Kathryn suspected something. When he finally told them about Margaret, Kathryn mainly felt relief. At least now they knew for sure.

“Don’t you need to let him know you’re here?” her mother says.

“I’ll give him a ring tomorrow. How’s Grandma Alice?” she asks.

“Oh, pretty good, considering,” her mother says. She squeezes a lemon wedge over her artichoke. “They’re friendly to her over there, which drives her crazy, but other than that she seems fairly content.”

“Does she know I’m in town?”

“Sure she knows.”

“Maybe I’ll drop by and see her tomorrow morning.”

“Whenever you feel like it,” she says. “There’s no rush. She’s not going anywhere.”

“But I
want
to see her.”

Her mother shrugs. “Okay, then see her.”

Kathryn feels the air between them cool, and all at once an irritation toward her mother rises in her. She can’t remember a time when her mother and Grandma Alice weren’t engaged in some kind of petty squabble. When Kathryn was in high school she used to get involved, mediating between them, ferrying messages back and forth across the gulf of misunderstandings and wounded feelings, but after a while she realized it made little difference. She has always liked Grandma Alice; she finds her funny and clever and dry. Her mother’s small grudges annoy her.

“What’s going on with you two now?” Kathryn says.

“Oh, nothing really. I won’t bore you with it. Although I do think she gets crabbier as she gets older.” She flashes Kathryn a glance. “Now that I think about it, I guess it’s a good idea for you to stop by. It might take some of the pressure off me.”

“I’ll just show you up, for being a bad daughter,” Kathryn says.

“Ah,” her mother says with a wry smile, “but I still win. For being a good mother, and raising you.”

LATER THAT EVENING
, after they’ve finished the dishes and her mother has gone upstairs to read, Kathryn sits on the front porch by herself with the lights off, listening to the rustling of the thick-leafed maples that line the sidewalk. She wonders, as she does every time she comes home, what has become of her remaining friends from high school: Will, Brian, Rachel, and Jack. In high school she would never have imagined they’d go years without speaking. But Jennifer’s disappearance changed
everything. It was like a chemical explosion: a sudden flash, a terrible trauma, and then the insidious, debilitating poison of fallout.

At first, in the weeks after it happened, the group had been closer than ever, up early every morning to join search teams and copy flyers and cover the phones. But as summer passed without any word, only Jennifer’s brother, Will, was able to maintain the intensity. And the guilt and shame the rest of them felt for not sticking around, for going on with their lives, for not finding her, made it impossible to look each other in the eye. At some point, Kathryn thinks now, though they wouldn’t admit it out loud, each of them had given up on her, and in doing so they broke their implied promise of loyalty and constancy; they betrayed the group.

And then something else began to happen: They started to wonder, quietly, behind each other’s backs, whether one of them knew something he or she wasn’t saying about the disappearance. They looked into each other’s eyes for clues and quickly looked away, each aware of what the others were doing. At the very least, one of them might be keeping a secret. Who was it? What did that one know?

As the years passed, it became harder and harder to see each other. There could be no closure as long as Jennifer was missing; any conversation they had seemed meaningless unless it was about her, but there was nothing to say. So they stopped talking. When they ran into each other, their behavior was false and perfunctory, like lovers whose affair has ended badly. They had shared too much; they knew each other too well, which made the exchange of pleasantries irrelevant and anything else painful.

They never spoke about the rift. They let it happen, and felt powerless to stop it. They stopped confiding in each other and found different friends. And slowly, over time, they changed, or grew apart: Kathryn stayed in Virginia after college and got married, Will came out of the closet and moved to Boston, Brian settled in Portland, Rachel got caught up in her graduate work at the University of Maine, Jack threw himself into his job at the
Bangor Daily News.
In the end, letting go of each
other was a relief, an escape from the fear and suspicion and increasing hopelessness, a deep dive into anonymity.

Sitting on the porch, Kathryn watches an older woman and her dog making their way down the street, two shadowy figures under the street-lamps. The dog zigzags back and forth, its tail wagging, sniffing the trees on either side. As the woman nears, Kathryn can see it’s a neighbor, someone she vaguely recognizes.

She stops in front of the house. “Is that you, Kathryn?” the neighbor asks.

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you know! It’s Mrs. Adams.”

“Oh, hello,” Kathryn says, getting up. Mrs. Adams was the librarian at Mary Snow, her elementary school. “Home for a visit?”

“Maybe longer. I’m not exactly sure.”

“Really? That’s wonderful. You and your husband thinking of moving up here?”

She hesitates. “No.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Adams’s voice fades, and the dog continues down the street. “You know,” she says after a moment, “my husband died last year.” Kathryn starts to say she’s sorry, but the old woman waves her hand dismissively. “It’s all right. I’m learning to live without him. It’s not easy, but that’s what you do, isn’t it? You just go on.”