Desire Lines (37 page)

“I took a raincheck,” her mother says, getting up. “I had a strange feeling about something, I didn’t know what. Now I guess I do.” She
rinses her mug, puts it in the dishwasher. “Ed Gaffney called about an hour ago.”

“He called you?”

“He’s concerned about you. I am your mother,” she adds, as if it’s news.

Kathryn sighs. She hadn’t wanted her mother to hear about the tapes—of course she’s worried now.

“Don’t be naive, Kathryn,” her mother says sharply. “And don’t play games. You could be in real danger.”

Shrugging this off is not going to work. Kathryn reaches for her mother’s hand. “I’m aware of that.”

“Where were you last night?”

“At Jack’s.”

Raising her eyebrows, her mother leans forward, as if in slow motion. Clearly, this wasn’t the answer she expected. “Well,” she says.

“I didn’t mean to stay out all night. I fell asleep.”

Her mother nods, assessing the situation. “So what is this?” she asks finally. “Is this a relationship?”

Kathryn thinks of Jack’s warm body next to her this morning, his arm curved around her hip, his breath hot on her neck. “Stay,” he whispered as she left. She takes a long sip of coffee. “I don’t know,” she says.

Squinting, her mother scrutinizes her face. “You need to be careful, Kathryn. You need to look out for yourself.”

“I thought you liked Jack, Mom.”

“Not just Jack. All of it.”

Kathryn can detect fear in her mother’s voice, and she feels a sudden protective rush. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” she says. “This is Bangor, for Pete’s sake.”

“Where eighteen-year-old girls vanish into thin air,” her mother says. “I’ve worried enough about you over the years. Don’t give me good reason.”

“I won’t, Mom. I promise,” Kathryn says. But they both know from years of experience that this promise is a formality, an understanding
that Kathryn will do what she must and her mother won’t have to know.
I’ll be back at midnight, I won’t drive with anyone who’s drinking, we’re going to the movies, his parents are home.

AFTER HER MOTHER
leaves to show some houses, Kathryn calls Rosie’s office to leave a message asking for an appointment later in the week. To her surprise, Rosie answers the phone herself. She’s in the office doing some paperwork, and though it’s a Sunday, she offers to see Kathryn at three. Her husband and son are at a baseball game, she tells Kathryn, so she has a little time to kill. “Besides, I like keeping odd hours,” she says. “It makes this feel less like a job.”

When she gets to Rosie’s office, slightly stuffy and sour-smellling in the heat of midafternoon, Kathryn realizes that she doesn’t want to talk about the reunion or sleeping with Jack; she doesn’t want to go into the tapes. What she really wants to talk about is her hair.

You’ve become her,
Hunter had said. And of course, though she hadn’t done it consciously, he’s exactly right. After all, isn’t that what she always wanted? She distinctly remembers wishing she could jump inside Jennifer’s skin and inhabit her body, to see the world through those light-blue eyes. In high school Kathryn memorized the list of products that were lined up in the Pelletiers’ bathroom—Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific, Dove soap, Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, Johnson’s Baby Oil, all-natural kiwi lip gloss, Cutex nail polish—and bought them for herself, as if using the same potions might transform her. Jennifer’s jeans were faded to the perfect light blue; her shirts hung from her shoulders in a smooth silky drape. For a while Kathryn believed that if she bought the same clothes they’d have a similar effect, but she soon discovered that the magic was nontransferrable. On Kathryn those shirts were wrinkled and stained within minutes, and the jeans creased unattractively when she sat down. Even her laundry seemed to undergo a different process; her shirts shrunk and faded, buttons disappeared, her jeans never achieved that soft, sexy blue.

So now, all these years later, Kathryn has gone and dyed her hair blond, Swedish blond, Jennifer blond, just in time for her ten-year high-school reunion, where Jennifer would not be. And maybe part of her is trying to replicate Jennifer and part of her is trying to usurp her. Because even in her absence—especially in her absence—Jennifer’s life has had more of an impact on the people around her than Kathryn’s probably ever will. If this were a Bette Davis movie, Kathryn muses, it would probably turn out that
she
was the villain, the supposed best friend who got rid of her more beautiful and charismatic rival.

“I don’t know,” Rosie says. “Let’s consider a different scenario. Maybe by looking like Jennifer, by, in a sense, becoming her, you’re trying to find your way into the mystery. Maybe in order to find her, you have to get as close to her as you can.”

On the way home Kathryn cranks the radio, and Bonnie Tyler’s raspy voice, wailing “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” fills the car. Closing her eyes, Kathryn lets the music soak in, saturating her pores. She is sodden, drunk on it. She hasn’t felt this way since high school, when she would go into her room and sit on her bed in the dark with headphones on, absorbing the music into her bloodstream like a drug. She expected so much from it then. The music showed her a way through a thicket of emotions; it made sense of her confusion. It distilled her heart.

In college, older and more cynical, she made fun of the music she used to love. The lyrics were cloying, the arrangements sappy, the groups passé. Her friends from prep schools had listened to a different kind of music, more self-referential and cutting-edge. She amused them by describing school dances featuring a deejay with a handlebar mustache and a shiny red baseball jacket who played Whitney Houston and Sheena Easton and lots of Madonna. She quoted sappy lyrics from earnest, anthemic pop songs, and they doubled over with laughter. But a part of her, deep down, was loyal to that younger self. She had not forgotten the tremendous relief she’d felt at hearing her own emotions confirmed and explained at a time when they were such a mystery to her.

Now, driving up Broadway, she listens intently to the steadily rising anger in Bonnie Tyler’s voice—
“Every now and then I fall
APART”—and she remembers Jennifer blasting this song as they drove to school on cold winter mornings. Nothing seemed to exist except the music; the moment was reduced to its essence, and that essence was pure feeling. At times like this, Kathryn realizes now, she was as close to Jennifer as she would ever be. Jennifer would select a tape, find the right song, and let the music say what she was unable to admit. Kathryn always felt as if the music was a code, and if she could only figure out what it meant, she’d hold the key to Jennifer’s elusive personality. Sometimes she didn’t try; she just lost herself in it. But usually there were two parts of her, one that existed purely in the moment and one that hovered above, watching, waiting, hoping somehow to find a clue that would yield an answer.

*  *  *

There’s a message in the wild
And I’m sending you the signal tonight
You don’t know how desperate I’ve become
And it looks like I’m losing this fight…

Kathryn is sitting at the kitchen table by herself that evening, listening to the tapes again, when the telephone rings. Absently, she goes over and picks it up. “Hello?”

There’s silence on the other end.

“Hello?” she says again, her senses sharpening.

“Kathryn,” a voice whispers.

“Who is this?”

“Leave it alone.”

“What?”

“Leave it alone.”
The voice is slow and distinct, but unidentifiable. Then there’s a click, and the line is dead. Immediately, almost without thinking, she dials Star 69, as Paul had done. The phone rings and rings, but no one answers.

She replaces the phone on the hook and stands there for a moment, unable to move. When it rings again, seconds later, she lets the machine get it. “Kathryn, it’s Jack. Just calling to say—”

“Hi,” she says, picking up the receiver.

“Screening, huh?”

“I got a weird call,” she says.

He listens silently while she tells him about it. Then he says, “I don’t like this.”

“It’s probably nothing,” she says. “Some high-school kid who read the article and wants to have a little fun.”

“Those tapes weren’t nothing.” He draws in his breath. “I’m starting to get uncomfortable with all this.”

“All what?”

“What this is turning into.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You’re basically live bait.”

“Look,” she says, reasoning with herself as much as with Jack, “this is exactly what we wanted. We’re smoking this guy out.”

“Is this what you thought it would be? That some psycho would come out of the woodwork to harass and threaten you? Because that wasn’t my scenario.”

“What did you think?”

He sighs. “I thought that maybe someone who saw something or heard something would come forward. Or—who knows?—maybe Jennifer would read the piece and decide to show herself.”

She sits back in her chair and looks out the window into the darkness. The trees look soft and spongy in the light from the house. “Maybe it’s time to give up that fantasy.”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” he says. “And maybe it’s time to face the fact that this is turning into something you can’t control.”

Slowly, she winds the long phone cord around her hand.

“Gaffney has the tapes. He’s on top of it,” Jack says. “I think we should tell the police about Hunter and let them take over from here.”

“And I should just drop it?”

“Yes.”

She relaxes her hand, turning it slightly, and the phone cord slips off, resuming its coiled shape. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, if that’s what you think.”

He pauses. She can tell he’s debating whether or not to believe her. Then he sighs again. “This wasn’t even why I called. I wanted to ask you to dinner this week.”

“Jack,” she says, “I don’t expect—”

“Listen, Kathryn. I don’t think you expect anything. But I do. Call me old-fashioned.”

“Okay, then,” she says, “I accept.”

“Good. How about Wednesday?”

“Fine.”

“So what are you doing now?”

“Listening to those tapes again. Trying to see if there’s anything there.”

“Have you eaten yet?”

“No. What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“Hmm. I guess I forgot.”

“Well, I just ordered a pizza, and I have to pick it up. I could pick you up at the same time.”

She laughs. “Would this cancel out dinner on Wednesday?”

“Think of this as an appetizer,” Jack says.

WHEN THE RAIN
begins, in the middle of the night, Kathryn gets up to close the window. Lightning rips through the sky like a cartoon bolt; thunder cracks so loudly that Jack, who’s been sleeping soundly, sits up in a daze and looks around.

“It’s just a storm,” she says softly, as if to a child. “Go back to sleep.”

He shakes his head, rubs the back of his neck. “I used to love these when I was a kid.”

“Me, too.”

Leaning back against the headboard, he reaches for her hand and pulls her toward him. His arms around her shoulders, she watches the rain falling in heavy sheets against the tall window. It’s like being at a Laundromat, she thinks, or a car wash. She remembers going through the car wash at the Texaco station on Hammond Street with her father when she was a little girl—how frightened she was at first, and then how thrilled when she realized she was safe, the raging storm couldn’t reach her. And soon they’d be back out in the sunshine, clean and dry. Lulled by the rain, Kathryn drifts to sleep in Jack’s arms. She doesn’t stir until the first faint light of morning tints the sky.

Chapter 27

I
t’s still raining later that morning when Kathryn drives up to the school. Formless clouds, heavy and gray, hang low in the sky. Holding a newspaper over her head like a pup tent, she dashes from the visitors’ parking lot to the double front doors, which open with a vacuum-sealed whoosh and close slowly behind her.

Inside, the air is cold. Kathryn rubs her arms, suddenly covered with goose bumps, as she passes the glassed-in administrative offices. The school secretary, typing away at a computer, appears to be the only one there. Kathryn goes down a long hall to the main part of the building, and then up the wide ramp to Hunter’s classroom.

The door is open and the light is on, but Hunter isn’t there. Tentatively, Kathryn steps into the room. Despite the light, it’s dim and shadowed. Fine rain sifts against the windows, blurring the view. The large black-and-white wall clock ticks quietly, its second hand a thin red needle inching around the face. Somewhere in the distance, a truck horn blares. Kathryn looks around at the posters of Martin Luther King and
John F. Kennedy, the Far Side cartoons taped to the board, the dusty apple-shaped candle on Hunter’s desk—a gift from some grade-grubbing student, Kathyrn thinks, and a name pops into her head: Helen Duvall, a girl in her class who, over the course of the school year, brought Hunter apple magnets, apple pins, a tie with apples on it, and, finally, an apple pie he shared with the class. He made it clear that he was amused and slightly horrified by the attention: “Oh, no!” he’d say, covering his eyes when she approached his desk with yet another gift-wrapped trinket, but Helen just smiled blandly. It was hard to tell whether she was in on the joke.