Desire Lines (28 page)

“Oh, yeah, it just broke,” Jennifer said, taking it away from her and putting it in a drawer. “I’m using Abby’s for the moment.”

“Then how can Abby find you?”

“What?”

“Isn’t she supposed to have a compass, too?”

Jennifer furrowed her brow. “She’s borrowing one from Mr. Hunter. He has a couple. It just happened,” she repeated, irritation in her voice.

“How often did the team meet?” Kathryn asks Abby.

“Usually once a week, sometimes more.”

“I was looking at her diary. Spring of senior year she had the team meeting twice a week.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So did you?”

They stare at each other for a moment, and then Abby stands up. “I think I’ve said all I’m going to.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s all I’m going to say.”

“Come on, Abby,” Kathryn says. “I need your help.”

Abby shrugs. “Sorry.”

Kathryn clicks off the tape recorder. “Well, thanks for being so open.”

“I don’t get your questions, anyway,” she says. “I don’t see what they have to do with finding out where she is.”

Outside, it’s drizzling and the light is fading. When Kathryn gets to her car, there’s a wet ticket under her windshield wiper. She takes it out and examines it, squinting under the weak fluorescent streetlight to see the damage: twenty dollars. She looks up and down the street; the sign that says
NO PARKING ANY TIME
is twisted and half obscured by a
SHIT HAPPENS
bumper sticker, but is nonetheless visible, if she’d been inclined to look.

She fumbles with her keys, opens the car door, and heaves herself into the seat, tossing the ticket in the back. “Fuck,” she says, touching her forehead to the beige plastic steering wheel. “Fuck fuck fuck.” The horn sounds loudly, and she yanks her head up fast.

Chapter 21

K
athryn gets up early Wednesday morning, as the sun is rising. She puts on her running shoes and laces them up in the gloom of the kitchen before going out on the porch to stretch. The morning air is cool, even chilly. The street is quiet. A thick layer of dew, like lint from a dryer, coats the grass. The sky, watery and gray, has been touched by the sun only lightly, a benediction.

Down at the end of the block, Kathryn can see the paperboy on his bike, flinging rolled newspapers onto front porches. She remembers her own days as a paper carrier: the thrill of lofting those papers, lightening the bag as you sailed by each house, sometimes hitting the doormat—the target—square in the center. This was a trick you could get away with only in the summer, she remembers; winters buried the paper in snow, and spring and autumn risked rain.

After her interview with Abby, Kathryn had eaten a quiet dinner with her mother and gone to bed early. But she didn’t get much sleep. She kept thinking about what Abby said about knowing Jennifer better than
she did. Now, as she jogs slowly down the street, she realizes that the reason Abby’s comment rankled so much is that it’s probably true. For years, the only emotions Kathryn has let herself feel have been sorrow and fear about Jennifer’s disappearance. But whatever it was that Kathryn once felt is now complicated and deepened by the ghosts she is stirring up. The fact is, if she can admit it, Jennifer exists for her now as surely as she did ten years ago—not as a tragic eighteen-year-old victim, but as a person with complexities and contradictions. And Kathryn is newly angry at her for keeping parts of her life separate, for trusting others with her secrets. She is angry and hurt and flushed with another emotion, one she can hardly believe and never would have imagined, after all these years: She is jealous. Jennifer is the center of attention again, as always; as they put it in grad-school jargon,
Jennifer determines the discourse.
Part of Kathryn is almost impatient: Come on, she wants to say, the jig is up. You’ve held out long enough; we’re all bored now, ready for the game to end. You win. We care enough, after all this time. Now at least have the decency to tell us where you are.

Of course I didn’t know her, Kathryn thinks, stopping in the middle of the street to catch her breath. I was working with partial information-trying to solve a puzzle with pieces missing, trying to answer a riddle with only half a clue.

“so I
HEAR
you spoke to my mother.” Will’s voice on the phone is gentle, teasing; Kathryn can tell right away he’s not upset about it, as she had feared.

“Will,” she says. “Are you in town? I thought you were coming in tomorrow.”

“I got the day off and figured what the hell. Maybe seeing you guys first will make the reunion less of a nightmare.”

“You don’t have to go,” she says.

“Are you kidding? I’m class president, remember? I planned this shindig.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “Now I remember why I never ran for office.”

“You never ran for office because your ego didn’t require false adulation and praise.”

“No, I never ran for office because I was afraid nobody would vote for me,” she admits. “So is your mom totally pissed?”

“She’s a little riled up,” he says. “She’ll get over it. She hates the press; she got burned pretty bad once and vowed she’d never talk to a reporter again.”

“What happened?”

“New
England Monthly
did a feature story seven or eight years ago. They came up here, interviewed all kinds of people, followed her around for three days, wined and dined her at Pilot’s Grill, got her to show them home movies and Jennifer’s room. And then the article came out, and it basically pointed the finger at my mom and Ralph.”

“Oh, I remember that story.”

“Yeah, it sucked. So you can see why she’s wary. Anyway, how are you?

She has forgotten this about Will: that conversation with him is a torrent; it’s easy to feel swept along in the rush. He can be disarmingly direct, but his frankness is an illusion. You come away knowing little about him but a lot about yourself.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“I heard about the divorce,” he says bluntly. “What a lousy bastard. He didn’t deserve you.”

“Who told you?”

He laughs. “Come on, Kathryn, who doesn’t know?”

“Thanks, Will. That’s comforting.”

“Look, at least you don’t have the black plague. If anybody at the reunion shakes my hand, I’ll be surprised.”

Caught by surprise, she inhales sharply. “Oh—”

“I know you know,” he says. “I asked Jack to tell you. I would’ve done it myself, but I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘Hello, Kath, I haven’t spoken to you in seven years, but I just wanted you to know I’m dying’?”

“You’re not … dying,” she says lamely.

“No. Well, I mean, we’re all dying, right? And any one of us could get hit by a truck tomorrow. Yeah, I did a lot of that kind of justifying at first. And the cocktail I’m on seems to be working for now; I have no symptoms. But I’m not kidding myself. I have a lethal virus in my blood. It’ll probably get me one of these days.”

“I’m so sorry, Will.”

“I know. Thanks. You know who’s really sorry? The guy who gave it to me. Or he would be, if he knew.” He laughs shortly, fending off sympathy. “It’s a wacky world, isn’t it, Kath?”

She bites her lip. Most Likely to Succeed, Will was voted in high school. The only one who got into Princeton. He was the golden boy, the one all the girls had crushes on—and, she realizes now, probably a number of the guys. Like Jennifer, he had blond hair, light eyes, a tall, lithe body. But he had something else, too, that Jennifer didn’t: an encompassing charm, a willingness to play the game. It was probably part of figuring out his sexual identity: He could move easily among any of them, he would not let himself be narrowly defined.

Kathryn remembers the first time she realized she had a crush on him. It was at a high-school dance junior year; the whole group was there, and they were dancing in a ragged circle, pulling in other people, pairing off among themselves. They’d been drinking in the parking lot before the dance—one of Brian’s older brothers had bought them a case of Budweiser—and after two beers Kathryn was drunk. A slow reggae song started playing, and the dance floor cleared. But Kathryn was caught in the low familiar beat, and she swayed to it with her eyes closed. All at once she felt someone’s arm around her waist, and she looked up to see Will, smiling, moving his hips with hers to the music. “I
don’t know what life will show me, but I know what I’ve seen,”
he crooned in her ear. She felt a thrill go through her—a thrill connected to covert glimpses in the hall between classes, faded notes on lined white paper passed in third period, a stolen kiss in an empty gymnasium. She felt young and shy.

The first time Will kissed her, they were sitting on her front porch in the dark. Jennifer had been out with them that night; they’d gone to
Footloose
and were singing the title track at the top of their lungs in the car on the way back. But at some point Jennifer grew quiet and asked to be dropped at home. Brian was out of town with his parents, and Rachel and Jack were at a party Kathryn and Will had no interest in, so they ended up on her porch, with its white columns and slatted railings, watching the glow on the side lawn from her mother’s bedroom window.

“This is very fifties,” Will said, leaning against the banister. “Sitting out here on the porch with your mother pacing around upstairs.”

“Almost like a date,” Kathryn said. They both laughed uncomfortably. “I wish she’d just go to sleep.”

“She can’t go to sleep. She’s programmed with that mother gene that keeps her awake until you’re safely in bed.”

Kathryn played with the chain of the porch swing she was sitting on, idly moving the swing back and forth with her foot. “What in the world does she think is going to happen to me? I’m with you, for God’s sake.”

He tilted his head, his disheveled blond hair falling over one eye, feigned annoyance on his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kathryn laughed. “She knows you’re a nice guy.”

He shook his head. “I’m sick of that shit. Just once I’d like someone to think I’m dangerous.”

She smiled. “Well, you might have to do something dangerous, then.”

He looked at her keenly. Then, all at once, he leaned forward and kissed her. Startled, she pulled away. “How dangerous is that?” he said. He pushed her long brown hair off her face and pulled her closer, kissing her again.

“So this piece you’re writing for the
Bangor Daily News,”
he says now. “Have you found out anything new?”

“I don’t know yet,” she says. “I still have to talk to some people. Like you.”

“We can talk. I have to tell you, though, I don’t have much faith in this process. I’m inclined to agree with my mother—to dig all this up again is painful, and probably a waste of time. We did so much … I don’t know. I don’t know, Kath,” he says quietly, and she can tell that he’s trying to keep his emotions in check. The whole time they were searching for Jennifer she saw him break down only once, and that was the day, several weeks after it happened, when divers found a body at the Bucksport dam. It turned out to be a vagrant from Old Town, but they didn’t know that for several hours. Will’s face, when they told him, was a terrible mixture of relief and fear, and when the police left, he tripped over a chair and then kicked it, savagely, across the room, splintering a back leg. He retreated to an upstairs room, but his loud sobbing reverberated through the house.

“You’re probably right. There’s not much point in doing this. But maybe it’ll stir up something; maybe something got overlooked. It’s worth a try, don’t you think? Otherwise we’re just giving up. Are you really ready to do that?” she asks.

“Listen,” he says sharply. “I busted my ass longer than anybody. It’s wrecked my fucking life. Don’t tell me I’m—”

“I’m sorry, Will. I was out of line.”

“Jesus, Kath.” He sighs. “I know you’re trying to help. Five years ago—three years ago, even—I would have welcomed this. But coming now, it just seems so disruptive, so late. We could have her declared legally dead now, did you know that? We won’t, but we could.” He’s silent for a moment. “You know, when Jennifer was little, she used to get lost all the time. She’d go off into corners and closets, or behind boxes in the attic. Mom was always looking for her, calling after her, trying to get me to track her down. ‘You know how her mind works,’ she said. ‘You’ll find her faster than I can.’ I did usually find her, but it was more because I knew the hiding places and the limited possibilities for escape than that I knew Jennifer so well.” He pauses again, and Kathryn can hear him breathing. Then he says, almost inaudibly, “She is dead, I think.”

THEY MEET THAT
night down by the river. His hair has darkened over the years; his face is narrower, more chiseled. His eyes are tired. They sit on the bank in the darkness and listen to the water lapping the shore. Then, taking her hand, he leads her across the large slabs of rock that form a stepping-stone path.