Desire Lines (22 page)

“Vaguely,” Kathryn says, remembering. “Something to do with Brian, right?”

“Mostly. But … I wasn’t going to talk about this.”

“Just tell me a little about the argument.”

“Well, it wasn’t really an argument. We didn’t raise our voices or anything. It was more like a discussion, where two people get together to tell their sides of a story.”

“So what was it about?”

Rachel is silent for a moment, biting her bottom lip. Then she says, “Again, I’m not sure this is relevant. But basically, it was about Brian, on the surface, at least. I knew she wasn’t interested in him as a boyfriend, and I knew she knew I was. So it was weird to me that she went
to the prom with him. I mean, he asked her, and of course she can do what she wants. But I guess I thought that out of respect for my feelings she would have said no. Given that she had no interest in him,” she adds.

“Are you sure about that? That she had no interest?”

“Yes. She made it absolutely clear. I mean, I can understand her wanting to go and needing a date, since obviously she couldn’t go with the person she wanted to go with. But she could have had anyone—it didn’t have to be Brian. Not that he would have asked me if she had said no, but even if he hadn’t, at least I wouldn’t have had to deal with the embarrassment of both of them knowing how I felt and feeling sorry for me.”

“So why did she go with him?”

“I don’t think she really thought about it. Or maybe she did—and decided that her need to have a good time outweighed my possible discomfort. Who knows? She was peculiar that way. That’s what I mean about feeling like I never really knew her. I could rarely tell what she was thinking, or even what she was feeling. It was as if she had a loose wire somewhere. Something about her was …” She pauses, searching for the word. “Disconnected.”

“How did things end up between you?”

“Well, in our discussion that night she said she was sorry, that if she had realized how much it would upset me for her to go with Brian, she would have reconsidered. I said it didn’t upset me—it unsettled me. More about my relationship with her than my relationship with Brian. I said it was about trust. And then she said something that struck me as bizarre. ‘Trust isn’t a word I know,’ she said. ‘It isn’t in my vocabulary. I don’t believe in it.’ I just stared at her. I didn’t know what to say.”

Kathryn makes a note on her pad. “I want to go back to something for a second,” she says, tapping her pen against her teeth. “What did you mean when you said she couldn’t go with the person she wanted to go with?”

Rachel looks at her doubtfully.

“Do you really want this on tape?”

“Do you want me to turn it off?”

“It’s up to you. I did promise, after all. You must have, too.”

“I’m not sure …” Kathryn says, confused.

“Not to tell. I mean, obviously. You and I have never discussed it, and if anyone did, it would be the two of us.”

Kathryn shakes her head. The objects in the room seems suddenly to have come into sharp focus, and the air is still. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How could …?” Rachel’s voice trails off. She stares at Kathryn in silence for a long moment. Finally she says, “Hmm. I think we’d better turn that thing off.”

They both reach for the button, and Rachel pushes it first.

“Tell me,” Kathryn demands.

“I’m sorry, Kath. I need to think about this.”

“Think about what?”

Rachel stands up and crosses her arms in front of her chest. She goes to the window and adjusts the flimsy curtains, looking outside. “I just need to think.”

“What is this all about?”

“I thought you knew,” she murmurs. “I thought we both did.”

Kathryn shakes her head impatiently.

Absently pushing her hair off her face, Rachel turns back around. “This is very … awkward.”

“I don’t understand.”

She smiles weakly. “Really, Kath, this is irrelevant.”

“Then why can’t you tell me?”

Rachel holds her hand out at arm’s length and waves it back and forth. “I’m sorry. I’ve said too much already.”

“Listen, Rachel,” Kathryn says, trying to be reasonable. “Jennifer’s gone. If you know anything—”

“I don’t,” she says quickly. “I don’t.”

Kathryn glances outside; the color has drained from the sky, and the rosebushes are swaying to one side in the wind, petals falling on the grass like confetti.

Looking down at her watch, Rachel says, “You know what? I actually need to do some stuff. I’m teaching summer school, and I have a seminar tomorrow morning I haven’t even started grading papers for.”

“Sure. Okay.” Kathryn sighs. She gets up. Opening her bag, she gathers the tape recorder and cassettes and notebook and dumps them in. At the door she hesitates. “Call me when you change your mind,” she says.

Chapter 15

“K
ath Campbell!” Brian says. “How the hell are you?” It sounds like he’s talking to her through a tin can.

“Just a sec,” she tells him as she clicks through channels on her mother’s cordless phone, trying to improve the reception. “I’m fine,” she says when the echo is gone. “Is this an okay time to talk?”

“Yeah, it’s good.”

“How is Portland?”

“I love it. Thinking of moving north?”

“Yeah, well, I’m in Bangor right now, actually,” she says. She leans back in the rocker, putting her foot up on a Moroccan hassock her mother brought back from a cruise several years ago. “Staying with my mom for a few weeks.”

“Up for the reunion.”

“Yeah, kind of. Reunion, divorce.”

“Ouch. Sorry to hear that.”

God, she thinks, I wish I could make a general announcement.
“That’s okay, it’s for the best,” she says quickly. “How about you? Any drama in your life these days?”

“Not much. Still working for Geary’s Ale, running their distribution now. And I’m engaged.”

“Congratulations! That’s drama.”

“Yeah, she’s great. A Biddeford girl. You’ll meet her at the reunion. Maybe we can get together beforehand, try some new Geary’s flavors.”

“I don’t know about this fruit concept, Brian,” she says. “Blueberry beer is a little wacky for me.”

“Oh, that’s last year’s news. The new thing is fish. We’re introducing a wild trout that’ll knock your socks off.”

Kathryn laughs. She had forgotten how strange and quirky Brian is, how obliviously good-natured. In high school he didn’t seem to notice when people couldn’t get his obscure jokes or pop-culture references; he was happy just to amuse himself. His mind was like flypaper, collecting bits of trivia and arcane facts, and you were lucky if you clued into half of what he was saying.

Brian is nothing like the rest of his family. His father, Cubby White, has been the head coach of the Bangor High football team for twenty years. His two older brothers were star players, but Brian never showed any interest in football. He was smaller and slighter than they were, and wore John Lennon glasses. He also seemed to lack any kind of competitive drive. While his brothers were fighting over everything from Risk to girls, Brian was quietly building model airplanes in his bedroom, working his way through Sherlock Holmes, and writing and illustrating his own comic books.

For years, Brian and his father didn’t get along—Brian was always aware of being an embarrassment to him, of having let him down. But eventually they reached a kind of truce. Brian would go to pep rallies and football games as a show of family unity and school spirit, but he wouldn’t be expected to cheer. Cubby would give up on trying to make Brian into something he wasn’t. This didn’t always work—Brian managed to find a way to disappear in the fourth quarter when the score
was tied and his father had more important things to think about, and Cubby couldn’t help himself, sometimes he just had to say what was on his mind—but it worked often enough. Brian made it through high school that way.

“So I got your message last night,” he tells Kathryn. “This is a good thing you’re doing.”

“I don’t know,” she says, “It’s probably futile. It’s been so long, I can’t imagine I’ll turn up anything new.”

“It’s worthwhile, no matter what. It fucked us all up for long enough, the least we can do is face it head on.”

“It fucked you up?” she says with surprise.

“Nah, I take that back,” he says. “It fucked you guys up. Didn’t affect me at all.”

She considers this for a moment. “Rachel seems okay. Jack seems fine.”

“Oh, come on. Jack is a workaholic, Rachel hasn’t had a female friend since high school. And that’s just on the surface.”

“What about you?”

“Well, college was a blur.” He laughs, an edge in his voice. “I still wake up in a cold sweat, I just don’t self-medicate as much as I used to. But I lost a few years. Like keys. I don’t remember where I put them. I keep meaning to have replacements made.”

“Do you think Jennifer’s disappearance is the cause of that?”

“Yeah, I do,” he says. “It rocked my world pretty bad.” He sighs. “Have you talked to Will?”

“Not yet.”

“I guess he’s doing pretty well, considering.”

“That’s what Jack says.”

“When did you find out?”

“Just a couple of days ago.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t know sooner. It’s been a year.”

A finger of shame runs down her back. “I’ve been so out of it, Brian,” she murmurs.

“Well, now you’re right in the middle of it,” he says. “So let’s go. I’m afraid I won’t be much help, but I’ll do what I can.”

“Okay.” She thinks for a moment. “Have you talked to Will lately?”

“Sure. He’ll be up for the reunion. And really, he seems to be doing fine.”

“All right,” she says, taking a deep breath. “All right, here we go.” She picks up her notebook and flips it open.

“I
CAN’T REMEMBER
much about Jennifer, to tell you the truth,” Brian says. “When I think of her, what comes to mind first is her yearbook photograph—she’s wearing a striped shirt and hoop earrings—and her nutty quote.”

“Do you remember what it was?”

“Yeah. It stuck in my brain, because it’s from this cheesy song by John Waite called ‘Missing You,’ and I always wondered why she didn’t just go the Kahlil Gibran route like everybody else. I think the exact quote is, ‘There’s a message in the wild / And I’m sending you the signal tonight’”

“Oh, yeah,” Kathryn says, thinking back. “Missing You” was a popular song when they were in high school, and for a while it had been Jennifer’s favorite. She called it her anthem. Kathryn remembers driving Jennifer to school in her old Toyota, singing along with the radio at the top of their lungs: “I
ain’t missing you at all since you’ve been gone—away / I ain’t missing you, no matter what my friends say …”

There had been a strident note in Jennifer’s voice when she sang along that made Kathryn uneasy. Jennifer would shut her eyes and ball her fists and bite down on certain words—
“at ALL, no matter
WHAT MY
FRIENDS
SAY“-with evident emotion. But when Kathryn tried to get her to explain what she was feeling, she shrugged it off. “It’s just a song, Kath,” she’d say, “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It’s tempting to find some meaning in it, but go figure—I have no
idea what it means, or if it means anything at all,” Brian is saying. “But it kind of sums up for me how little I knew her. I guess I just didn’t ‘get’ her.”

“What didn’t you get?” Kathryn asks.

“A lot. I was pretty clueless. Like that whole prom thing. Somehow I had this crazy idea that she was interested in me. I mean, she’d been flirting with me for weeks before I asked her. Well, maybe not flirting—but she was suddenly friendly in a way she’d never been, and I guess I misinterpreted. So I rent the tux and the limo, get a wrist corsage the size of a cabbage, take her out to the Greenhouse for dinner—the whole shebang. And she’s like a different person. Totally cold. Man, that night sucked. And it wasn’t so much the money, though it took a month of working my ass off at Broadway Video to pay for it. It was more that I couldn’t believe what an idiot I’d been to think she might actually like me.”

“Did you ever talk about it with her afterward?”

“A few days later she called and asked me to meet her at McDonald’s, so of course I went. When I got there she was sitting at a corner table behind this huge fake plant, crying her eyes out. She didn’t even really acknowledge me, she just started going on about how sorry she was and how fucked up she was and how she wanted to explain but couldn’t, and how her life sucked and she’d screwed everything up and now Rachel hated her and I probably hated her and most of all she hated herself. What could I say? I just sat there and tried to make sense of it. I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. So I made some lame-ass move like patting her on the hand, and that was when she bolted. She knocked over her soda and didn’t look back. So I got down on the floor with wads of McDonald’s napkins, and by the time I looked up, her car was gone.”