There was a profound silence during which Natalie’s audience of three stared at her, and after several seconds of this she attempted an explanation: “It’s nothing. I just didn’t eat much—and then I walked a long way. It was a really long walk.”
“You walked here?” said Hannah.
Mutely, miserably, Natalie nodded. Hannah and Taylor exchanged glances. They didn’t say anything, but they didn’t have to. The implication was clear: freak.
Hannah exhaled and considered Natalie. After a minute she gestured toward Taylor and said, “Taylor’s parents had to go out of town.” Then, narrowing her eyes at Natalie: “She had to spend the night!” Beside her, Taylor nodded her affirmation, studying her fingernails. That, thought Natalie, explained the middle-of-the-night texts. They had been together, the two of them, in this house, concocting new ways to torture her. While she was alone in her narrow bed, with her narcotized mother softly snoring in the next room.
“Oh,” said Natalie, holding the ice pack to her head, which, in truth, was beginning to throb. She pressed harder with the ice. It was easier to focus on the physical pain than to listen to Hannah, who was still talking.
“Plus we had some planning to do.”
“Yeah?” Natalie tried to sound uninterested but really she was dying of curiosity. Not literally. (“Don’t ever use the word ‘literal’ when you don’t mean it,” Ms. Ramirez had said. “You are not literally climbing the walls unless you are at a rock-climbing gym. You are not dying of thirst. This was not literally the straw that broke the camel’s back.”)
Hannah was saying, “I’m going skiing in Vail. With Taylor’s family. Over Christmas.” Natalie’s head began to throb with more vigor and intensity. Was it possible that the ice was making it worse? She lowered the ice pack, but then Mrs. Morgan, who was sitting sentry beside her on the bench, gently and firmly guided it back to her head, saying authoritatively, “The swelling comes right away if it’s coming, you know. Keep it here.” She waggled a finger at Natalie. “I’ve had medical training, remember? From the airlines.”
Natalie had forgotten that Mrs. Morgan had ever been anything other than what she was today: pre- or post-yoga, gentle, concerned, ensconced comfortably in this beautiful home, where she had raised a beautiful daughter who had stealthily transformed herself into Taylor Grant’s partner in crime.
Hannah and Taylor had taken on identical postures, with one foot—the left—slightly in front of the other, as though they were on a stage, about to begin a duet. Natalie thought, Christmas in Vail! Mrs. Morgan leaned closer and adjusted the ice pack on Natalie’s head. Her perfume, so recently a reminder of all that Natalie loved and missed about this house, had become cloying.
How was this possible, for Hannah to go skiing with Taylor Grant and her family? Hannah was, like Natalie, an Only Child, and she couldn’t leave at Christmas, but there was Mrs. Morgan reaching over from the bench to smack Taylor lightly on the leg, saying, “I can’t believe you’re taking my baby from me at Christmas. But Vail! Who could say no to that?”
“That sounds nice,” said Natalie, who did not know how to ski, and was not sure when Hannah had learned. But inside she was roiling. Had the world gone insane? Was everybody against her? Oh, how her head hurt. It seemed that since she had rung the doorbell she had been traveling down, down, into the depths of her misery, and that she had finally reached the bottom.
Natalie studied the fuzzy pink slippers. They were as clean as if they had just come out of the package, and something told her that they had. “After we get you iced up I’ll drive you home,” said Mrs. Morgan. “I think you should rest. I’ll talk to your mother, make sure she keeps an eye on you. She might want to take you in to see the doctor.”
Natalie’s mother wasn’t even out of bed yet, and what would Mrs. Morgan think if she came stumbling down the stairs in her pajamas and opened the door on this scene: an injured daughter, a reluctant caretaker? What if Hannah and Taylor came along for the ride? What if they were watching?
“That’s okay,” said Natalie. “You don’t have to talk to her. Really, I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”
Mrs. Morgan said, “Well—” and stood up, considering Natalie. “It’s just sort of strange, to faint like that. Even if you were hungry. Even if you walked a long way.” Then she said, “Oh my God, you’re hungry! Of course, you just said that. Let me get you something to eat. Better yet, come into the kitchen.”
Natalie rose from the bench and followed Mrs. Morgan toward the lovely smells, the site of so many pancake breakfasts, pizza dinners, after-school snacks. She was hungry. She was ravenous. The hot chocolate at Starbucks seemed like a very long time ago, and before that was—what? When had her last meal been? She couldn’t remember. The Thanksgiving dumplings, she supposed.
The island, which was long and curved the whole length of the kitchen, looked the same as it always had, clear and gleaming, more stools than necessary lined up like obedient children waiting to be inspected before church. For all the kids I never had, Mrs. Morgan used to say ruefully about the stools. She had said that often for a few years and then abruptly she stopped saying it.
Hannah and Taylor hadn’t followed them. Natalie heard their feet pounding on the way upstairs. Mrs. Morgan, peering into the oven, was saying, “Of course I’ve had to give up the carbs and the sugar completely, but not you girls, you’re all just twigs—”
Next to the oven, on the wide expanse of luminous countertops, were several trays of cookies: sugar cookies shaped like Christmas trees and snowmen and angels, peppermint bark, and some sort of green and black balls—chocolate mint, it turned out, when Mrs. Morgan loaded up a small square plate and set it in front of Natalie.
This was a lot of cookies for a family of three, especially this early in the season. Suddenly this seemed very sad to Natalie, all of these cookies, nobody to eat them. Probably Mrs. Morgan would keep baking them, even while Hannah was off in Vail.
Thing number fifteen that made Natalie sick: rich people’s ski vacations.
Without asking, Mrs. Morgan filled a glass with milk and passed that to her too. “Eat!” she commanded. “My God, Natalie, you need some meat on your bones. You’ll waste away. I wish I had that problem. I can pack some up for you to take home with you.”
“I’m eating,” said Natalie, and she was. She was entirely enjoying being fed and comforted, coddled. She was even enjoying the slippers. But combined with the sense of being cared for was the understanding that this part would end and immediately after that the rest of her life would commence. She was thinking about this when Mrs. Morgan leaned over the island, fixed her gaze on Natalie, and said, “You’re not in any trouble, are you?”
The relief that flooded Natalie was nearly palpable, and she looked into Mrs. Morgan’s eyes. It seemed somehow that they too had become lavender, like her exercise clothes. Here was someone who knew. Here was someone who cared. And here was someone with the power to do something about it. In trouble! Yes, she was in trouble. She was in serious trouble, and it was trouble of Hannah’s doing, and she needed a way out. She was forming the words in her head when Mrs. Morgan continued, “You’re not… I mean, there isn’t any possibility that you’re pregnant, is there, Natalie?”
Natalie couldn’t keep the shock, the mortification, out of her voice. “What? No!”
Mrs. Morgan held her hands up like she was stopping a bus. “Hey, okay,” she said, smiling, “I just had to ask. You know, you hear these stories about young girls sometimes, too young, and the fainting—well, I just had to ask. You understand.”
“Okay,” said Natalie, wondering how she could recapture the look of benevolent concern Mrs. Morgan had recently bestowed on her, and how she could tell her about the real source of the trouble.
At the same time another thought struck her. If Mrs. Morgan thought it possible that Natalie could be pregnant, did that mean—could that mean?—that Hannah was having sex, had had sex?
No. It was impossible. Nat
alie was thirteen years old. Hannah and Taylor were fourteen, but they were freshmen.
None of this would do. There was no way, especially after this, that she could sit in the car next to Mrs. Morgan while Hannah and Taylor stayed behind, plotting Natalie’s further social demise. Because of course they would turn what had just happened into grenades.
“I’m all done with the ice,” she said to Mrs. Morgan, holding out the pack.
“Okay, then. I’ll just pop this back in the freezer, and then we’ll get your things together.”
Mrs. Morgan stepped out of the kitchen and called up the wide and gleaming stairway, “Hannah, why don’t you grab a pair of your socks for Natalie? Hers are soaked.”
“Okay,” came back Hannah’s sweet reply. Though Natalie tried not to listen, she tried with all her might not to listen, she was sure she heard first the girls’ voices and then the dissolution into laughter.
“I’m just going to pee real quick,” said Mrs. Morgan, and it was then that Natalie remembered the easy way she had with talking about bodily functions, and how that had alternately delighted and embarrassed Natalie when she was younger.
The hammering in her head picked up tempo. Mrs. Morgan called, “Grab yourself some cookies for the road! I’ll just be a minute!” (She hadn’t closed the door to the bathroom, and Natalie remembered that because Mr. Morgan was never around, Mrs. Morgan and Hannah acted like sisters.) Natalie slipped down from her stool and stood uncertainly in the center of the kitchen.
Finally she managed a strangled no thank you and then she was on her way to the foyer, removing the slippers, stuffing her sockless feet into her boots. Luckily her coat had not been, as she thought, whisked away to the expansive mudroom (labeled baskets, copious hooks); Mrs. Morgan had hung it on the handle of the front door, so she was able to grab it and put it on.
She had her hand on the doorknob—a lovely copper affair, “hand-hammered,” Mrs. Morgan had once told her, although Natalie didn’t know what that meant—when she heard Hannah say, “Natalie!” Her heart lifted briefly and she turned to see Hannah making her way quickly down the stairs, without Taylor. Here was her chance. She searched her mind for the right way to say it, but Hannah spoke first, casting furtive glances over her shoulder.
“Natalie,” she said. “Watch out. She has a picture of you.” Natalie stared at her, not comprehending. “She took a picture of you. With her phone. While you were passed out.”
Slowly Natalie began to understand. “Hannah. You can’t—you have to stop her. You have to make her stop.”
Hannah made an expansive gesture to indicate the stairway, perhaps her room, who knew what else. “I can’t.”
In her face Natalie saw her former best friend—just for a second, but clearly enough that she knew she hadn’t imagined it.
“Natalie, I can’t stop her. She’s going to do what she’s going to do. I just wanted you to know—”
“But why me, Hannah? Why me, out of everyone? I mean, the thing about my mother, but—?” Natalie was desperate, desperate. She would do whatever it took to turn this thing around.
Hannah glanced up the stairs. “Nat,” she said. “If it wasn’t you, it would just be somebody else.”
“Yeah, but. But can’t you do something to make it not me? Can’t you?”
Hannah shrugged. “I can’t, Nat, I can’t do anything. It is what it is.”
“But I was your best friend. We were best friends! Why are you doing this to me? Why are you letting Taylor do it? Why are you bringing my mother into it? Why does she care about my mother?”
Hannah gazed at her, impassive. “She doesn’t care about your mother.” Hannah’s voice was as even and emotionless as that of the lady who gave the weather forecast on the morning news: a blond, bland voice with nothing behind it.
And there was the answer Natalie had been searching for that day in the basement, when she found the birth certificate, when she found Bridget’s notebook. Even as she asked she knew: the answer was that there was no answer. There didn’t have to be an answer, or a reason. People did what they wanted to do, and you couldn’t stop them. “Then why—?”
“It’s just a weakness she found, that’s all. Just something to focus on. I can’t help that.”
Then Taylor’s voice: “Hannah? What are you doing down there?” The top of the stairs and the wide-open second floor overlooked the foyer; Taylor stood there for several seconds, regarding them. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, thought Natalie. Let down your hair so I can climb up and scratch your eyes out.
“Nothing!” said Hannah. “I’m coming right back up.” Taylor disappeared, and Hannah lowered her voice an octave and said to Natalie, “Listen. You have to pull yourself together. Start washing your hair, pay attention to what you wear.”
Natalie was taken aback by this. Feebly she said, “I wash my hair.”
Hannah appraised her. “How often? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. You know what I’m saying.”
“But. Will you do something, about Taylor? Can you erase the picture, get it away from her?”
“I can’t, really,” said Hannah, without real feeling, the way you might answer if someone asked you whether you liked Glee. “It’s not up to me. It’s not my phone. She could have made ten copies by now anyway. It doesn’t matter if I erase one of them.”
Natalie had nothing to say to this.
“Just… pull yourself together. It’ll be better for you that way. Don’t make yourself pathetic.”
Then Mrs. Morgan’s voice: “Natalie! Sorry I’m taking so long. I forgot I still had a pan in the oven. I’ll be right there to take you home.”
Hannah turned and retreated up the stairs, her progress so rapid and silent that it was as though she hadn’t been there at all.
Natalie tried to keep the trembling out of her voice when she called back to Mrs. Morgan, “I’m just going to walk! Thanks for everything!” She opened the door and let herself out, walking down the porch steps and around the mail truck.
She thought she heard someone calling her name when she was three houses away, and she imagined Mrs. Morgan’s face at the door, the wrinkle in her brow all the more pronounced because of her bafflement, but she persevered, walking faster, the whole trek ahead of her: the cars, crossing the on-ramp to the highway, all of it. She would press on. She couldn’t show a crack in her shell. She wouldn’t. She would build herself a suit of armor, she would become impenetrable, as hard and unyielding as a rock. Like the mighty cockroach, she would survive, after the rest of them had gone.
Bad stuff, bad stuff, this was bad stuff.
She walked faster. Her feet were cold. Hannah had never brought down the clean socks. She knew she would never get her own back. Mrs. Morgan would wash them and dry them, perhaps as lovingly as she washed and dried Hannah’s things, perhaps not, but Hannah would never deliver them.
Of all the things that had gone badly about the day thus far, clothes were the least important. But it was the thought of her orphaned socks, held hostage in that beautiful house, rolled together on top of the state-of-the-art washing machine, that finally unleashed her tears.
She stopped outside Hannah’s neighborhood and rummaged in her backpack for Kathleen Lynch’s card. She flipped it over: on the back, Kathleen had written her home number and the words IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.
With trembling fingers, she dialed. This was an emergency.
No answer.
She tried again, and again, stopping a few times on her walk, and finally Kathleen answered, on the fifth or sixth ring, and she sounded breathless, as though she’d run for the phone.
Natalie had told herself she’d hold it together (“Pull yourself together” was Hannah’s cold admonition, and Mrs. Morgan had said the same thing, though more kindly). She wasn’t even sure what she was asking for, by calling. “You were wrong,” she said. “The advice you gave me, it was wrong.”
And then she hung up.
Natalie hung up before Kathleen ha
d the chance to say anything—she didn’t get to tell her she’d left the notebook in her car, didn’t get to ask her what had happened. She cursed her lack of caller ID. (“You’re not quite a Luddite,” Neil had said to her once. “But you’re close.”) Natalie had written a number on the sign-in sheet at work, as all visitors did, but Kathleen didn’t have access to that now.
She’d have to wait for her to call back. It was all she could do.
It was too early to pour herself a glass of wine. But Kathleen felt shaky.
She opened her computer. Her search for Susannah Lynch returned the same results as her last search had: nothing new under the sun, people who want to stay hidden stay hidden, Detective Bradford had been right about that.
No sun here, though: it was just early afternoon, but already the dusk was coming, the gloaming. What had Natalie said? Beautiful and depressing at the same time.
“You can say that again,” Kathleen said to Lucy, who was lying on her side on the kitchen floor. Sometimes Kathleen felt bad for Lucy; sometimes she thought she was doing wrong by her. Here was a dog bred to roam the moors of Scotland, over hill and dale, fully engaged and employed, and because of Kathleen she was lying on an urban floor, no closer to a flock of sheep than Kathleen was to the gates of heaven, if such gates existed. Which probably they didn’t. Lucy coughed then, and Kathleen said, “Excuse you, ma’am.”
Not that Kathleen had taken Lucy straight out of Scotland. She’d come from a breeder in Connecticut, and anyway Kathleen believed that nobody in the world, Scottish or otherwise, farmer or not, would love Lucy as much as she did. She said, “Right, old girl?” and Lucy rolled her eyes toward Kathleen.
The next thing she couldn’t help. She typed in “Ashley Jackson” and pulled up news stories she hadn’t seen last time. She studied again the original school photograph and found a few additional photographs: Ashley Jackson as a toddler (heartbreaking), as a kindergartner, her two front teeth missing (also heartbreaking), wearing a Santa hat: saddest of all. She read more about it: there had been a boy, and that’s why her classmates were tormenting her (of course there was a boy, there was always a boy). There was talk of the parents suing the school; there was talk of forming a “task force” to study the problems that had led to the bullying going on for so long; there was talk of antibullying laws being passed. But for Ashley Jackson’s parents, what? Just an empty bed, maybe a toothbrush still in its holder. Heartbreaking.
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