Desire Lines (29 page)

“Remember this?” He stops and turns, and she walks into him. “We used to come out here when your mom thought we were at the movies.”

“Back when I thought you were straight.”

“And I didn’t know what the hell I was.”

They sit on the rock and watch the gurgling water, and he tells her stories she already knows, about his mother’s affair and his father’s suicide and Jennifer’s role in all of it, about seeing Jennifer, wan and ghostly, in the hospital bed after she got her stomach pumped, about the next few months of silence and retreat. Jennifer began staying out late, leaving the house early in the morning—anything to avoid being at home. Their mother was distracted; she didn’t notice as much as she should have, or if she did she didn’t do much about it. Jennifer hated her stepfather; it was hard for her to be in the same room with him. It was easier for everybody when she was gone.

Will knew that Jennifer was secretly seeing someone. She spent a long time getting ready; she pounced on the phone on the first ring and took it into her room, locking the door. He could hear her making plans. But she wouldn’t admit to it, wouldn’t even admit that there was someone. “I just want to be by myself, for Christ’s sake. Is there something wrong with that?” she’d snap when he pushed it. One time he followed her. He was several cars behind her on Broadway when she spotted him at a traffic light. She pulled into the Pizza Hut parking lot and sat there, smoking in her dark car, until he left.

“She was different after our dad died,” he says, trailing his fingers in the water, picking up a handful of stones. “I didn’t really recognize her after that. And I guess I pulled back, too. I couldn’t stand that haunted
look in her eyes. It was spooky how well she hid it from other people. At school she acted normal—better than normal; she even seemed happy. But you could see that blankness, if you knew how to look. Remember her senior picture? Her smile looked painted on, like a doll’s.”

“I was just noticing that,” Kathryn says. “I’d never really seen it before.”

“That’s the kind of stuff I became obsessed with after …” His voice falters. He drops the stones in the water, and they make tiny individual splashes.

“What else?” Kathryn says gently. “What didn’t you tell the police? What secrets did you keep?”

“There are so many kinds of secrets, aren’t there?” he says with a faint smile. “How far back do you go? Do you start with the little things, like smelling whiskey on my dad when he dropped me off at school? Or picking up the phone and hearing my mother say ‘I love you’ to some man I’ve never met? What about the lies my parents told each other, the lies they told Jen and me, the lies we all learned to tell?

“I remember this one time when Jen and I were six and the paperboy—Jimmy Butera, I even remember his name; he must’ve been about fifteen—took us with him to catch a snake out in the field behind the Poseys’. That was what we thought anyway. He ended up pinning Jen down and making her take her clothes off.”

“Jesus,” Kathryn says.

“She started having an asthma attack—you know, coughing and choking—and I was trying to pull him off her. Finally the whole thing freaked Jimmy out, and he took off. After Jen calmed down, the two of us went home and told our mom, though he’d threatened to break our arms if we did. It didn’t matter anyway; Mom was most concerned about the fact that Jimmy’s father was president of one of the big banks downtown, the one Dad did business with. She didn’t want to cause trouble over nothing, she said, and besides, boys will be boys and maybe we
learned a lesson.” He laughs sardonically. “We learned a lesson, all right. I think that was the last time Jennifer ever confided in her.”

“God, that’s awful,” Kathryn says. “I never knew.”

“Why would you?” He shrugs. “It wasn’t important, just one more thing to hide. One more thing to be ashamed of.” He laughs again, a hollow sound devoid of feeling.

“How could—why did—”

He looks at her, hard, for a minute. “I don’t have any answers,” he says. “And I’ll tell you something. I’ve learned to live without them. I don’t expect to know the whys of anything anymore.” He smiles, the corners of his mouth trembling. “It’s pretty good training for a defense attorney, actually. Comes in handy when there are things you don’t want to know.”

“But you want to know what happened to Jennifer, don’t you? Wouldn’t you give anything to find out?”

She watches him looking out at the darkness, at the slip of moon, the starless sky, the water flowing past and around them. “I spent a lot of time looking for her,” he says finally. “Now maybe I just need to come to terms with it.”

When they stand up to leave, he laces his fingers through hers and draws her close, kissing her softly on the forehead. Shutting her eyes against the light of the moon, she lets herself sway against him, and he pulls her closer, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. All at once her eyes are swimming and her head is light and she’s crying, dripping hot tears onto his chest, brushing her face against his denim shirt.

LATE THAT NIGHT
, when Kathryn gets home, she finds a note for her on the kitchen counter. “Paul called,” it says in her mother’s neat, grammar-school cursive. “Says he has something he needs to talk to you about. Wants you to hear it from him first. Too tired to wait up. Love, Mom. XXO.”

Kathryn looks at the clock: It’s 1:15 A.M. She picks up the phone and dials Paul’s number. It rings four times before the machine picks up.

“Rena and Paul are otherwise engaged,” a woman says in a girly singsong. “Leave a message and we’ll deconstruct it when we get a chance.” Kathryn pauses for a moment, then hangs up.

She’s turning off lights, heading upstairs, when the phone rings in the kitchen. She runs back to get it. “Hello?” she says cautiously.

“Kat? Oh, it was you,” Paul says. “Go back to sleep, it’s okay,” she hears him murmur to someone in the background. “Sorry,” he tells Kathryn. “Star six-nine. I had to find out who it was. This weird guy in the department is kind of stalking Rena, so we treat all hang-ups like crank calls.”

“So this is your news?” she asks.

“Oh. Um. Yeah.” He laughs, a bit defensively. “I’m sorry to tell you this way, but I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it from someone else.”

“Oh, you did, huh?”

“She transferred into the program a couple months ago. From Brown,” he adds, as if that should somehow matter. The nerve, Kathryn thinks, trying to impress me with his new girlfriend’s résumé.

“So how long have you two been shacking up?”

“Well,” he says carefully. She knows the phrase
shacking up
irritates him. “Almost a week. Look.” The unctuousness in his voice has evaporated. “It’s late and I don’t want to get into anything with you. But I didn’t need to call. I was just trying to be considerate.”

“I think I’d rather have heard it from someone else,” she says.

Paul sighs.

“Excuse me if I don’t offer congratulations,” she says. “I hope Rena knows what she’s in for.”

“Rena has nothing to worry about,” he says. “Rena is nothing like you.”

She’s silent for a moment. Then she says, “How’s Frieda?”

“She has fleas. I got her a collar. Look, Kathryn,” he says, “I didn’t mean to say that. You provoked me.”

She sighs. “I know.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what else to say.”

When she hangs up the phone, Kathryn sits in the dark kitchen watching the blurry shapes around her morph into objects she recognizes—an Early American wall clock, the pine kitchen table, a ladder-back chair—as her eyes adjust. After a few minutes she makes her way easily up the stairs and into her room without turning on any lights. The terrain is so familiar, she knows it by heart.

Chapter 22

“I
want to hear about Paul. You’ve barely said a word about him.” It’s Thursday morning at 10:05, and Rosie is settled in her overstuffed chair with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. She’s wearing a floral dress so similar to the upholstery that it’s hard to see where the chair ends and she begins.

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, for starters, why did you marry him?”

“Do we have to talk about him? I don’t really want to.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Umm … do you think I should dye my hair again? It’s been almost a month.” Kathryn laughs nervously at her feeble diversion.

Putting down her pen and crossing her arms, Rosie says, “Oh, you want to talk about roots, huh? Okay. Tell me about your father.”

Kathryn makes a face. “Very funny.”

“It’s up to you,” Rosie says briskly. “We can talk about your hair, if
that’s what you want.” She squints at the top of Kathryn’s head. “Yeah, you might want to touch it up. If you’re happy with that shade.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I’m not sure it’s the most flattering color. But what do I know? I’m a therapist, not a beautician.” She shrugs. “As a therapist I’d make a different diagnosis.”

“What do you mean?”

“When did you go red?”

“About four weeks ago, like I said.”

“What’s your normal color?”

“Field-mouse brown.”

“Ever dye it before?”

“Nope.”

Rosie nods slowly. “So you’re starting over,” she says.

“Well, obviously.”

She picks up the pen and writes something in her notebook. “Or you’re trying to hide,” she says, without looking up. Kathryn doesn’t answer. She shifts in her chair. “Which do you think it is?”

“Probably some combination.” Kathryn looks out the one small window in the stuffy little room, at the gray sky and the gray gravel and the gray siding of another prefab building across the parking lot.

Rosie cocks her head. “Maybe you just don’t want to be that mousy brown-haired person anymore. Maybe you’re trying to figure out who you do want to be.”

Kathryn looks at her, suddenly feeling spiteful. Do other therapists tell their patients how to analyze their experience? Her friend Gretchen, in Charlottesville, used to complain that her shrink never said more than three words the entire fifty minutes she was there. Isn’t that standard procedure? And what’s with the dress? Did she choose it on purpose to blend in with the chair?

“But I really think we need to talk about Paul, if you want to get
anything done here,” Rosie continues. “I think he’s a major block to progress.”

Paul. Kathryn grimaces. Is she really going to have to think about him? Whenever something triggers a memory—a word or an object, an expression, a fleeting glimpse of a dark-haired man—she turns her mind away. Her feelings are too sharp, too bright; it’s like looking into the sun. She can’t think clearly about him anyway. It’s like that old joke about the blind man and the elephant; she can’t seem to get a complete picture of what he is or who he is—he’s just a collection of parts that don’t seem to fit together. There was the Paul who brought her daisy chains and breakfast in bed, and the one who went through all her CDs without asking and sold the ones he didn’t like. There was the don’t-give-a-shit, pot-smoking laziness, and then the seismic ambition. She didn’t ever feel as if she understood him, though she wanted to and she tried. For a long time she told herself that this was why she loved him—for his contradictions, for the fact that he was an enigma, always, somehow, a surprise.

“That’s interesting,” Rosie says. “That’s just what you said about Jennifer.”

Kathryn stops short. She hadn’t even realized she was thinking aloud. “What?”

“You said that maybe part of what you liked about Jennifer was that you didn’t understand her. She didn’t quite add up.”

“I said that?”

Rosie nods.

Kathryn considers this. “What more do you want to know about me?” she remembers Paul saying soon after they got married, his arms spread wide in exasperation. “I’ve told you everything!”

“No you haven’t,” she said. “I just want you to be more open. Tell me what you’re feeling. Tell me what’s going on in your head.”

He thrust his hands at her as if pushing her away. “I don’t want you in my head!” he shouted, slamming out of the room. “Stay the fuck out of it!”

When Jennifer disappeared, Kathryn had been angry at herself for not pushing harder. If only she had found the right way to ask, the appropriate tone, the magic question, maybe she would have learned something; maybe she could have helped. So when she met Paul and he was similarly evasive, she tried to pin him down. The very thing that had attracted her to him—the fact that she couldn’t crack his code-eventually made her anxious and frightened, and her probing made him want to escape.

“Your father was emotionally unavailable, too, wasn’t he?” Rosie says.

“Yeah.” Kathryn shrugs, looking up at the white-spackled ceiling. “But so what? Isn’t this just one of the four or five basic human dynamics, and I’m destined to play one position for the rest of my life against some predictable opponent? I’ll always be whining for more, and they’ll always be pushing me away. And our basic incompatibility will make a sustained relationship impossible, and I’ll die unhappy and alone.”