Kathleen said to Neil, “I have to go out for a while.”
He said, “Want company?”
“Thank you. But no.”
She had been storing the notebook and the transcript she’d made from the notebook in her desk drawer, plus an extra copy of the transcript she’d printed out. There was a lock on the door of the drawer, and a little key to go with it, which she used now to unlock the drawer, slipping the key afterward in the change pocket of her wallet. In her purse she put Natalie’s father’s family tree. She put the notebook with a printout of the transcribed pages folded inside in a plastic Stop and Shop bag. She wrote a note to Natalie on a piece of paper and stuck it inside the bag: “Glad to return Bridget’s notebook to you. Your project must be due soon! I think we can take another look at your father’s family tree now.” She tucked one of her business cards in with the note. She wrote on the back of it, as she had that first time, her home phone number. After some thought she added the same words: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. She’d meant it flippantly the first time, sort of, but now she meant it for real. She was thinking of Professor Paterson’s email: These things can escalate very quickly.
All around them, girls were in trouble.
She drove to Newburyport, took the exit, bore right on the now familiar road, all the way down High Street. (Which house had Bridget lived in with the Turners? A question for another day, that, but one she knew she could find the answer to, when she had time to dig.) Left on Lime Street, right on Milk Street. She rang the doorbell at Natalie’s house, but nobody answered. Natalie, of course, would be in school, but where was the not-dead mother? She rang again: nothing. When she listened closely she thought she heard the sound of water running. The not-dead mother must be in the shower.
She waited for a few minutes, but the sound did not abate.
She imagined Bridget O’Connell making her way toward this house in the nighttime, limping toward her future. Maybe not limping. The ankle certainly had healed by then, but the picture was that much more vivid if you included the limping. (Surely she wouldn’t have been barefoot either, but Kathleen added that detail for a touch of color as well.)
She propped the bag against the door.
Around lunchtime Natalie headed back to school. She did not want to miss English.
Also, once her skin had calmed down from the shower, she was eager to get out of the house which, empty, with the light falling across the kitchen linoleum in a certain way, gave her the strange sensation that she was fading from the world.
Only half of the day left: she could do this. “I can do this,” she said, out loud.
When she was coming out of the house she saw, propped next to the doorway, a Stop and Shop bag, and inside it the notebook, with some pages folded inside. With it was a note that said, “Glad to return Bridget’s notebook to you. Your project must be due soon! I think we can take another look at your father’s family tree now.” Also in the bag was a card. Kathleen Lynch’s card, identical to the one Natalie had in her room, with the same writing on the back: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. (Did she write this on all of her cards, hand them out to every visitor to the Archives?) Natalie tucked the card in the front pocket of her backpack, and she put the older papers, the ones she’d found in the black box, in the main part, with the notebook, her gloves, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich she had made to eat on the way.
Too late she realized that she had miscalculated the time it would take her to get to school. She had arrived too early. English was twenty minutes later, and lunch was still in progress. That wouldn’t do, to arrive at this time, making her way in the crowded cafeteria, pulling her sandwich from her backpack, finding somewhere to sit.
So she didn’t walk up to the school. She leaned against the stone wall to eat her sandwich. It seemed weeks and weeks ago that she had stood here with Christian Chapman, though really it had been only a few days. While she ate she studied the sky and considered her next steps.
She had three more days to finish the project. Should she go back to Kathleen Lynch? Was there enough time to do something with her father’s family tree? Maybe, if she got these older papers, the ones from the box under the bed, to Kathleen they’d be able to pull something together. Or should she start completely from scratch? She had no dog, so she could write no animal autobiography à la Emily Middleton. Perhaps a poetry collection after all—something about nature. She wondered if she could be sufficiently moved by nature to impress Ms. Ramirez. She thought, looking at the clouds skidding across the sky, the slant of the midday light against the bare trees in the yards across from the school, that she could. Emily Dickinson had been. “Nature is what we see—The Hill—the Afternoon.” She could do something.
Natalie was thinking about all of this, and trying to remember the next lines of the poem, which she had read for extra credit back in October, when she felt herself shoved roughly from behind, and then, when a familiar voice said, “Sorry!” she turned, feeling the sickening sensation in her gut, in her bowels: the return of the awful. Hannah and Taylor, having somehow scaled the wall (like superheroes! she thought, like evil superheroes!) were instantly on either side of her.
“Oh,” she said. “Hey.” She looked quickly from side to side. The lift tickets hanging from their jackets were tattered and their Colorado suntans were fading; they were, like everyone else, adopting the pastiness of a New England winter. But where this might have made them appear less threatening, in fact it did the opposite, and there was something eerie in their solemn, sullen pallor, and in the way the wind lifted their hair behind them.
Taylor said, “I saw you coming out of Ms. McPherson’s office this morning.”
Natalie offered a tiny “So?”
After that they began speaking in alternating lines, as though they were actors on a stage, with Natalie the hostage audience.
“What did you say to her?” (Taylor.)
“Nothing.” She considered saying, None of your business but thought better of it.
“You must have said something, because she called our parents.” (Hannah.)
“We got called into the office.”
“We got our cell phones taken away.”
“That’s your fault, Natalie.”
“Thanks a lot, Natalie.”
As they spoke they moved closer and closer to Natalie.
“Hey,” said Taylor. “Maybe we should take her phone. Then we’ll be even.”
Roughly she pried Natalie’s backpack from her and unzipped it. She dug through it, and Natalie remembered the notebook and the papers. Uselessly she said, “Don’t—” but it was too late. Taylor pulled the notebook from the backpack and waved it theatrically at Hannah. When she did that, the thin papers, the older ones Natalie was saving for Kathleen Lynch, spilled out onto the sidewalk and were taken immediately by the wind. Natalie made a move to grab at them, but it was futile. “Oooooooh,” said Taylor, holding the notebook. “What do we have here?”
“That’s mine,” said Natalie. “Give it back.”
“Nope,” said Taylor. “No, I don’t think so.” She tucked it under her arm and continued looking through the backpack. There was a look on Hannah’s face that said she thought they might be going too far, but Taylor Grant didn’t notice that. She was well into it now. She found Natalie’s phone and opened it, expertly tapping away. She said, “Oh, and by the way. Christian Chapman?”
Natalie felt herself go cold.
“Wait until you see the message you sent him.”
“But I didn’t—”
“That’s what you think.”
The world seemed to fall away around Natalie.
“Let’s just say he’s going to be surprised. I bet he thought you were more innocent than this, Natalie Gallagher.”
Hannah said, “Taylor. Come on. That’s too much. Let’s go back in.”
“And not in a good way,” said Taylor. Gleefully. “Wait until he sees!”
Hannah said, more sharply, “Taylor.”
Taylor dropped the backpack and the phone over the wall—the final humiliation was that Natalie had to scramble around to retrieve them—and they were gone.
Natalie still had, in a pocket of her backpack unexplored by Taylor, some of the pills, her mother’s salmon-colored pills. She could hardly open the baggie, her hands were shaking so badly.
How many would make her forget?
One, two? More?
How many?
There was a monkey in the tree that she could see from where she was lying, and he was wearing a red knit sweater, like a stuffed monkey she used to have when she was younger, but this was a real monkey, until he smiled, showing horse teeth, long and yellow.
Then the monkey leaned forward toward Natalie as though he were about to speak, and he became another creature, with a human body and a dog’s head; the dog was not any recognizable breed, he was some sort of mangy mutt, like the kind you saw on news programs where they visited poor areas of third-world countries, dogs roaming the streets, kids eating out of gutters.
Where was her phone? Where was the card with Kathleen’s number?
And then the tree itself seemed to be leaning forward, all the way forward, like it was going to topple right on top of Natalie.
And then…
After she dropped the notebook off at Natalie’s house, after she made her slower progress back up Route 1 in the midst of the midday shoppers, Kathleen suddenly felt as though she could go no farther. She pulled over into the parking lot of the Christmas Tree Shops and sat for a minute.
In the far corner of the parking lot were towers of snow and ice made gray and ugly by car exhaust, like something from an evil fairy tale. Kathleen watched an overweight woman heave herself out of her car and make arduous progress toward the store. The woman turned to her companion, also female—but younger, leaner—and said something that made them both laugh. What did this woman have to smile about, sloshing as she was through dirty puddles on her way to poke through bins of bargains made by tots in faraway factories? Yet she was smiling. What should have cheered Kathleen—the resiliency of the human spirit!—instead depressed her.
All of it depressed her: the cars whizzing past, wearing their winter coats of grime and filth, the NPR voices on the radio, droning about civil war in some African country, even the birds overhead, coming perilously close to the telephone wires. All of it. It was all too much.
Kathleen was tired, but there was so much she wanted to do. She wanted to go back to the Archives and look up the death record for little baby James Turner, just to confirm that he’d actually existed, that he’d actually died. She remembered a line from the notebook, about James, how his head was turned at a strange angle, an angle that couldn’t be right. She shuddered.
There was more to be done, lots to be done.
She wanted to drive to Waltham to look up the records from the 1930 census; she wanted to see the listing for the Callaghan family. If Declan Callaghan was a citizen, they would all be listed, the whole family, Bridget and whatever children had been born by then. She wanted to double-check the rest of Natalie’s father’s work; she wanted to complete the family tree for Natalie. She wanted to put it all down, diagram it: the fact that James Callaghan was really half Turner, which led to a whole different branch of the family tree. She wanted to explore that too.
Later, another time, she wanted to go deeper into Bridget’s family: she wanted to find the married sister in Lynn, her children, who would be Bridget’s children’s cousins.
And then to the village in County Kerry—there was potential there too, all of those siblings left behind.
But she was tired. She was so, so tired. She thought she could lay her head down on the steering wheel and sleep, right there in the parking lot, if she let herself.
She didn’t. She kept driving. This time the sign outside Prince Pizzeria said, MARY ME MARY and whether it was a spelling mistake or the missing R had floated from the sign and out into the traffic was anybody’s guess.
Even the prospect of Neil, with his bright chatter about little Henri, did not appeal to Kathleen. So, pulling over again, this time in the parking lot of Kelly’s Roast Beef, with its bright green sign (Our sandwich platters are awesome! was written in neon orange), she dug in her bag for her cell phone. It was an ancient thing, kept only for emergencies, incapable, as far as she knew, of texts or any of the rest of it. It was a phone that Natalie, if she were to see it, would laugh at. Kathleen left a message for her supervisor. Sick, she said in the message. Came on suddenly. Felt feverish: could be contagious. “That time of the year, you know.” Out the rest of the day. Do her best to be in tomorrow.
So it was home she went, home to Lucy, who didn’t rise to meet Kathleen. This was unusual, Lucy was like an English butler, always at the door but never in your face about it. Kathleen’s heart was heavy with trepidation as she walked to her bedroom. But Lucy’s chest was rising and falling, and her tongue was partly revealed between her lips in her familiar position of deep sleep. Kathleen felt around Lucy’s chest, under the thick hair. She didn’t feel any mass. Maybe the vet was mistaken. She’d take her in again next week, when Dr. Quinn was back from his ski vacation.
Kathleen was so tired from the events and the effort of the past several days that she lay right by the dog bed with Lucy and fell asleep. She dreamed about Bridget, and also about Susannah, and about Natalie too. In the dream, everything she touched was marred by the specter of girls in trouble, girls in danger. Ashley Jackson’s mother setting out hats and noisemakers for a birthday party; Bridget O’Connell’s parents saying good-bye to her when she left her little village for America, the adventure of a lifetime. She herself, tying Susannah’s first pair of sneakers, pulling the tongue tight, the little rhyme she used to say:
Bunny ear, bunny ear, side by side
Round the tree and jump inside
Through the hole and pull it tight
If you made bunny ears, you did it right.
Then Susannah, younger, much younger, the age of Melissa Henderson’s baby, her tiny satin lips pressed together in sleep, the soft down on her head, her floppy little body nestled into Kathleen’s for nursing, and then for sleep. Oh, to hold that baby again, to have another chance at all of it. She was sleeping still, but she felt the memory like an ache deep in her body, in her bones.
The three girls were bound together so closely in her dream, intertwined, really, one becoming the next becoming the next, that when the ringing of the phone roused her she scarcely knew the decade, or who she was.
The voice on the other end was brisk, brooking no questions. Calling from Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport, the woman said. Kathleen’s name was on a card brought in with a patient earlier that day, a patient whose parents they were unable to reach. Did she know how to reach the parents?
Kathleen felt a little dizzy. She thought briefly of Gregory, of his poor broken heart, broken in the real sense. Had he felt this way, at the end?
Of course Kathleen knew the answer, but she whispered: “Who?”
A Natalie Gallagher. Her name was written on a label inside her backpack.
Kathleen had to sit down in the chair by the phone. (“Sit down!” people said when they had bad news for you. She used to think that was out of politeness, before Gregory died, but she knew after that it was out of necessity because really your legs could give way. She had fallen in a heap when she learned about Gregory, a little puddle of shock and bewilderment.)
She said, “What happened?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” came the voice. “But we can’t tell you anything, because you’re not related to the patient. We’re calling only because this card was in the backpack, and because it’s after school hours now and we can’t get any information from the school. We’ve called the only number we could find, the home number that we found in her cell phone, but nobody answered. The cell had a couple other numbers too, but nobody answered those. Nothing else in the backpack, just part of a sa
ndwich and a card with this number.”
The woman had a North Shore accent: numbah.
Kathleen stood and began gathering her things, putting her shoes back on, rooting for her car keys in the pocket of the jacket she’d thrown on the bed. Lucy lifted her head only inches from the bed and then settled it back down, immune to the urgency. “You have to tell me,” said Kathleen. “You have to tell me what happened, and if she’s okay.”
The voice relented slightly. “I can’t give you details. But she’s okay. I really shouldn’t have told you that, I could lose my job.”
Kathleen didn’t care a nickel about this woman’s job.
The woman continued: “What I’m asking is, do you have any way to get in touch with her parents? Guardian? Whoever?”
“No,” said Kathleen. “But I’m coming up there.”
“We can’t release her to you, it’s really got to be her parents or a legal guardian.”
“I’m coming up,” said Kathleen. “Just tell me how to get there. I know how to get to Newburyport. Just tell me how to get to the hospital.”
The woman sighed. “Okay. One-thirteen to Rawson, right at Rawson, top of the hill. But really, we can’t—”
“I’m on my way,” said Kathleen.
“I don’t know where you’re coming from, but since you’re not related—”
“I’m leaving now.”
She was gathering a leash and a water bottle for Lucy when she noticed the light blinking on her answering machine. She pressed the button. The call had come earlier that day, but she hadn’t noticed the light when she’d come home. She’d been too worried about Lucy. Natalie’s voice: “Kathleen… Kathleen, I did something. I took a pill, two pills. I feel really weird. Kathleen, can you come get me? I need you.”
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