Just like that, it was decided for her. She got a call from a lawyer. An aunt she had never heard of had left her property in South Boston. Rather, the aunt was Gregory’s aunt, and she had left the property to Gregory, but of course it was Kathleen’s now. This seemed like something out of a novel: an aunt she had never heard of. An aunt with property! A small house, the first floor of a three-family, with two tiny bedrooms, one bathroom, an outdated kitchen. But it was to belong to Kathleen, all of it, even the little scrap of yard, which had given over completely to weeds.
It wasn’t difficult to leave Marblehead. The apartment was a rental, and anyway so much of the town reminded Kathleen of Gregory: the crooked little houses along the downtown streets, a certain slant of light that hit the rocks along the beach just before sunset.
They drove south. Once they were through the worst of the Boston traffic, Kathleen felt something in her loosening. Susannah was sleeping in the backseat, and Kathleen could see the curve of her lovely toddler cheeks in the rearview mirror. This was a new beginning.
After a couple of months there, the differences between the two towns started to gnaw at her a little bit; she had replaced the narrow little streets of historic homes with grimy, leaning three-families. They were outsiders, doing their best to fit in. Kathleen wondered sometimes what would have happened if they’d simply stayed put in Marblehead. Would Susannah have found someone like Deidre Jordan, or would someone like Deidre Jordan have found her? Was what happened inevitable, preordained? Or simply a consequence of Kathleen’s decisions?
She got the job at the Archives, found a suitable day care for Susannah.
Slowly it returned to her, her ability to notice the world around her. She reveled in it again! The leaves in the autumn, colors so bright they hurt your eyes. The water in the harbor outside the Archives. She loved it in all moods: sparkling with the sun, severe and foreboding during a storm. She grew to love Southie too, after a time. The toughness of the people there was something she could appreciate.
Work became her focus: work, and Susannah’s happiness, both of which she pursued with equal fervor. They got a dog, Lucy’s predecessor, the beloved Murphy, a mutt. She went on dates! Life, love, all of it seemed possible again. Years went by like this, the two of them against the world.
And then it all went wrong.
“Mom,” said Natalie on Saturday morning. “Mom, it’s a beautiful day. You should get up.” She yanked on the shade’s cord to raise it. “The sun’s out,” she said. “It’s not raining.”
Her mother shielded her face with her hand. “Sweetie, just a minute. Let me wake up a little bit.”
Natalie sat carefully on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath. “Mom?”
“Yeah?” Her mother’s eyes were closed.
“How old were you when you married Dad?”
Her mother opened her eyes. “What? Why?”
Natalie thought of Taylor’s breath on her neck, her minty gum, the texts.
U DONT KNOW DO U? BUT WE DO
“I was nineteen, Natalie. You know that. I was young. Twenty when I had you. I’m thirty-three now.” Her mother didn’t meet her eyes when she said that. She was shielding herself again from the sun.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Natalie, what’s this all about? Why are you asking me?”
“Nothing. No reason.”
“Natalie, honey, can you make me a cup of coffee? Lots of milk and sugar?” She let her head fall back against the pillow. “Thanks, sweetie. Then I’ll get up, promise.”
Somehow it didn’t occur to Kathleen that this might be difficult. It didn’t occur to her after they parked in the Common Garage. The hotel parking garage represented “highway robbery,” said Carol, sighing, so they would park here, and Kathleen didn’t mention the Neiman Marcus blouse, though it was hard not to. It didn’t occur to her, as they trooped gamely across the Public Garden, what they were going to, or what that meant.
“A girl-power thing,” said Carol. “You know.”
“Didn’t you say girl empowerment?”
Carol waved a hand. She walked quickly, and Kathleen struggled to keep up. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Carol. “But walk faster. We’re going to be late.”
What they were going to, it turned out, was some sort of celebration of young girls who had done important and amazing things, proceeds going to a corporation that empowered girls, whatever that meant.
“Oh,” said Kathleen softly, understanding finally when they walked into the hotel lobby, whose occupants seemed to divide neatly into two distinct groups: women over fifty (perfumed, silver-haired, stockinged, bejeweled) and girls in bright orange T-shirts with the name of the charity—Girls Alive!—emblazoned across the chests.
“Hello!” they chirped to Carol, to Kathleen, to everyone entering.
“Welcome!”
“Thank you for coming!”
“This way please!”
An adult must have told them to do that.
“Are you okay?” said Carol, peering at Kathleen. “You look strange suddenly. Like you’re going to cry.”
Kathleen wondered how she looked to everyone there. Regular, like someone to whom nothing had ever happened. As though there were such people.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kathleen gruffly. But she couldn’t bring herself to meet Carol’s gaze, nor could she meet the eyes of the girls in the orange T-shirts. All those brilliant eyes, all those hopeful, uplifted faces.
Kathleen was fine during the lunch—tired, overdressed chicken Caesar salads, Carol had been right—but after, when a couple of women got up to introduce the girls they were honoring that day, all went swiftly and irrevocably downhill. The keynote speaker was a woman with an ultrashort, all-gray hairstyle, the kind Kathleen always admired but knew she could never pull off; she was CEO of such-and-such Boston-based business (Kathleen missed the name). Organizations like this were so important, she said, because society was not always kind to girls. Society did not always let them know how much they could accomplish; society did not always set them free. All around them, this woman said, girls were in danger.
Natalie (poor motherless Natalie, adrift, bereft) looking at her cell phone. Susannah crumpled on the corner of her bed, burrowing into the wall.
Kathleen could no longer hold it together.
All around them, girls were in danger.
Kathleen rose from her seat and signaled to Carol that she was going.
“Bathroom is that way!” sang a girl in the back of the room, a girl with glorious dark skin. (Hispanic? Cuban? Gorgeous.) She was in danger too! Didn’t she know it? They all were.
Some time later, a stranger knocked on the stall door.
“Excuse me. Are you okay in there? Do you need something? Do you need me to call someone?” Beneath the stall door Kathleen could see black pumps, nude stockings. Through the crack where the stall door met the frame, a gray suit was visible. From the ballroom came applause.
“No,” she managed, although of course she was lying.
“Sure?” The gray suit moved a bit; the black pumps shifted.
“No, thank you, I’m fine.”
Lying through the stall door, lying through the crumbs of salad croutons in her teeth.
Long ago Natalie’s father had laid some wide boards out on the basement floor, which otherwise was just dirt—it was a glorified crawl space, really, and it had been years since Natalie could fully stand up in it. In one corner a sump pump tried gamely to keep out any water that crept in, but without the boards it would have been hopeless: everything would have been ruined long ago.
Thing number eight that made Natalie sick: fathers who did jobs like that and then left anyway.
But the boards worked, and this was where the Gallaghers kept their bins with the Christmas ornaments, old paperwork that didn’t have anywhere else to go, outgrown clothing waiting its turn to be donated.
Thing number nine that made Natalie sick: living in a tiny, crumbling house. All around them, during Natalie’s childhood, neighboring homes were purchased and renovated: walls knocked down, kitchens enlarged, spacious family rooms carved out of impossible spaces. In one lot on the next street over, an old home was torn down entirely to make way for a faux-Federalist mansion so big it strained against the property lines like a fat lady in an old suit. While theirs sat, untouched, peeling. Ancient, the same as it had ever been.
“Why don’t we do something to our house?” she ventured once. And her mother said, “Do you think we’re made of money?” This was before Natalie’s father left, and Natalie’s mother must have seen something in her face, some sort of wound, because she continued more softly, “This house has been in Daddy’s family for ages. He doesn’t want to touch it.” It was hard to remember it now, but it had existed once: the tenderness when her mother talked about her father.
Instead of touching it, then, he had just left it: left the two of them there, flailing. Staggering through their days, living inside the house with the crooked doorway (“Original!” her father said cheerily, pulling at it when it got stuck), the sash windows (“Annoying,” said her mother, “I can’t get the one in the living room to close all the way”), the peeling clapboard (“Period,” said her father; “Disgraceful,” said her mother).
You reached the basement not via a regular staircase but by lifting up a strange little door near the kitchen and descending a short set of uneven steps. You had to have a flashlight with you—there was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that was not quite up to the task—and you had to descend slowly, feeling for the next step with one foot while you balanced the other on the higher step.
All of these things Natalie did on Saturday after she brought the coffee to her mother, who had fallen back asleep, one arm flung above her head, her mouth slightly open, emitting a quiet wheezing.
The first box she found was full of her first-grade artwork, and was labeled as such in her father’s neat hand. In her family it was her father who was the organizer, the saver, the bill payer. In other families it was different, Natalie understood that. Hannah Morgan’s mother, for instance, could not pass a Target or a Walmart without running in for some sort of container to hold something: it was an addiction. If you opened up any desk drawer in the office in Hannah’s house you’d find dozens and dozens of file folders, all labeled, all containing exactly what they were supposed to contain, nothing more, nothing less.
Natalie pulled the string next to the bare bulb and miraculously the light struggled to life, though she needed the flashlight as a supplement. She opened the box of artwork and found a picture of a grinning snowman. The smile, which she was certain she had intended to be cheery, was ghoulish. She studied the block letters that made up her name; she could remember writing them, could feel the pencil in her grip, smell the scent of the shavings from the sharpener. In first grade she would have been—what? Well, only five, because of starting kindergarten early. Five! A baby, really, working away on this snowman, laboring over the odd angle of his mouth. It was enough to make her cry. Had she been happy then? She couldn’t remember. But she thought she had.
She sat back on her heels and looked around her. She peeked into most of the boxes—Christmas decorations, baby clothes (absurdly tiny), old toys (plastic rings, a few tattered stuffed animals, a train that, she remembered, used to sing some sort of song about bad luck or hard knocks), tin canisters that at one time lived on the kitchen counter but that had been removed during some massive clean-out. (“All this clutter,” said Natalie’s father. “Making me crazy.”)
In the far corner of the basement was an additional bin, a pale blue Rubbermaid, and this one was labeled in her mother’s writing. Misc. papers, Carmen, old. Natalie had to work to get it out of the corner. It was wedged in there pretty tightly. Inside the box was a picture of a girl. She recognized her mother immediately because of the way her mouth turned automatically up at the corners. She flipped the picture over. Carmen, it said. 1989, Cimarron, Kansas.
She sat for a moment, breathing heavily. Strange. Unless she was doing the math wrong… her mother would have been twelve or thirteen in 1989, but this girl looked no older than nine or ten.
Underneath the photo was a piece of paper that said “Birth Certificate, State of Kansas” with her mother’s maiden name, and her mother’s parents’ names (Natalie’s grandparents, long dead, she’d never met them), and the date and place of birth: June 13, 1976. There was the name of the hospital, St. Catherine Hospital, Dodge City, Kansas, and a gold seal with the word OFFICIAL going around it in a semicircle. Okay, that made sense. The date on the photograph must be wrong, that was all. She wished she had the sheet of paper her father had written his family tree research on; she’d left that at the Archives.
But. Underneath the birth certificate was a plain black photo album, and underneath that was another birth certificate, nearly identical. Except this one had the name of a different hospital—Western Plains Medical Center—and the gold seal was raised instead of flat. Also: the date of birth was different. June 13, 1979.
Natalie’s head was spinning, she thought it might spin right off her neck and roll off the boards into the muck in the corners of the basement.
She stood abruptly and knocked her head against the ceiling. Damn her height! One of the tallest girls in the freshman class, despite being the youngest. Double whammy.
WE KNOW SOMETHING ABT UR MOTHER, said the text. But how did they know this? She hadn’t even known. We know something about your mother. So they knew—what? That Natalie’s mother was younger than she professed to be, that she had two birth certificates, one showing her real age and one her fake age? And why did that matter, to anyone else but Natalie and her mother? Why did they care?
She put the photograph back in the box, and the photo album with it. The birth certificates she folded up and put in the pocket of her jeans, both of them. If her mother had been born in 1979, as one birth certificate said, then she was only sixteen when she married Natalie’s father—not nineteen, the way Natalie had always thought. And that meant—what? That it was illegal, what her parents did? And if so, so what? That still didn’t answer the question of why anybody cared.
Sixteen. That was only three years older than Natalie was now. When she was eight her favorite babysitter had been sixteen, a junior in high school—Natalie remembered the babysitter, Francine, she went by Francie, as a gum-chewing, busty girl in short shorts who braided Natalie’s hair and, when she got her license, drove her out to Plum Island to sit on the beach. It was from Francine that the American Girl doll had come. She thought of the juniors in her school now. Sure they seemed older than Natalie, older than Hannah and Taylor too, but old enough to be married? To become mothers? No way.
Natalie’s head was beginning to hurt.
She cast her flashlight once again across the basement. In one corner (she had missed this before) a pair of skis leaned against each other. Who skied? She didn’t, never had. A few plastic beach buckets—purple, red—now aged and cracked. She remembered digging with them on the beach at Plum Island, making sandcastles with her father, her mother stretched out on a beach chair (her mother’s skin always tanning, never burning, never freckling, God, how jealous Natalie was of that!).
And then. And then! In the darkest corner, the one farthest from the naked bulb, a cardboard box, bent with age, the brown faded nearly to white, one corner rippled like corduroy where it must have gotten wet and then dried again because it wasn’t on the boards, officially, but sort of tucked away behind them.
She felt a strange humming in her ears. The box wasn’t labeled, and when she bent to lift it, it almost collapsed in on itself, so she ended up bumping it up onto the boards and then dragging it toward her.
And inside the box was another box, metal, black, with a faded flower design on it, and an ancient piece of masking tape with something scrawled across it, she coul
dn’t read what. She opened the box, half expecting to find another box inside of that, like those Russian dolls, what were they called? The nesting dolls. Hannah had a set on her dresser, red circle cheeks, little bow mouths, brought back by her father from one of his many business trips.
There was no additional box, though, just a black spiral notebook, nothing written on the front of it, and inside pages and pages of writing. When Natalie opened the notebook, a sheet of paper fell from it—no, more than one sheet, a bunch of sheets, but this paper was so thin it was hard to tell how many, and these papers looked much older than the notebook itself. She shone the flashlight on the box, but there was nothing else in there, so she put the papers back in, then she removed the birth certificates from her pocket and put those inside too, closed the box, and carried the whole thing upstairs.
She felt like she’d been on a long journey and she half expected to emerge, like Alice in Wonderland, in an entirely different world from the one from which she had departed. But everything was just as she’d left it. The kitchen table with stacks of mail on it, the dingy towel hanging crookedly on the handle of the stove, the elderly tap dripping its syncopated rhythm. And from the rest of the house: silence. No mother tapping around upstairs, no music playing, no television. Just silence, plus the thudding of her heart inside her rib cage.
“I’m coming in with you,” said Carol, piloting the BMW toward Southie after the event. “To make sure you’re okay.” Carol eased the car onto the highway, not looking, not really, to see if other cars were coming.
“I’m fine,” said Kathleen. She could feel the Caesar salad churning around in her belly.
On the last day of their Beginner’s Knitting class, when they were supposed to be finishing their scarves, Carol had pulled out all of her work—hers had been a terrible scarf, bumpy, uneven, really a disgrace to scarves, and to knitting in general—and had said to Kathleen, “Screw this. Let’s go for a drink.” And so they had: Irish coffees at The Black Rose. (“With every tourist in Boston,” said Carol. “But who cares! The coffees are the best.”)
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