So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  Kathleen said, “What? Where?”

  “Haiti,” said Carmen again.

  “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God! Neil.”

  This time she did get a speeding ticket, $198, just before the turnoff to Route 1, the cop immune to her explanations, not that she tried that hard. She took her punishment like a lady, holding out her knuckles to be rapped, like the good Catholic girl she once was. And then she drove even faster. She was tempting fate, but she had to get home, because she thought Neil would be there waiting for her, on her porch, head in his hands: he had nowhere else to go.

  For how long could they sit there in Kathleen’s living room and watch the wrenching images? Forever, apparently. As evening turned to night (the gloaming came and went without ceremony), they kept watching. Over and over they saw the shots of the buildings tilted crazily, like a child’s diorama carelessly knocked over. (Kathleen kept thinking of a fifth-grade project of Susannah’s, a model town with buildings made out of egg cartons and toilet paper rolls.) The same reporter who had been speaking when Kathleen was in the hospital was speaking now.

  “What is she so fucking calm about?” said Neil through white lips. “Isn’t she there?” He didn’t turn to apologize for the curse, and if Kathleen needed proof that he was in pain there it was. Not that she needed proof.

  They kept showing the bleeding children.

  Neil had his cell phone and every now and then he picked it up and pressed buttons frantically. “Nothing,” he said over and over again. “There’s nothing going through.”

  “Of course there isn’t,” said Kathleen. “There’s probably no point in calling now. I mean the entire infrastructure—”

  “I know,” said Neil. “But I have to do something. What else can I do?” He looked at Kathleen as though he expected an actual answer, and that’s when she remembered the pills, which she hadn’t given back to Carmen, and hadn’t flushed down the toilet.

  “Take one,” she said. “To help you sleep. You need to sleep.”

  “Here?” croaked Neil.

  “Yes, here. That way I can keep an eye on you.” This gave her something to do: she gathered extra sheets from the linen closet, and a pillow from her under-bed storage box. The sofa in the living room was a hide-a-bed, and she worked at the creaky springs until she had the whole thing pulled out and ready to be made up. She would have put him in Susannah’s old room, but she was storing things in there; it needed a good clean-out before receiving a guest.

  “All this trouble,” said Neil. “I can just go home.”

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m not leaving you alone.”

  The buildings were continuing to crumble, the reporter said. There was dark commentary about the building codes—they didn’t exist. The presidential palace had gone down.

  “Oh, God,” whimpered Neil. “Look at that.”

  Kathleen reached for the remote.

  Neil said, “Don’t. What if they show Adam. Or Henri. Don’t.”

  Kathleen said, “Oh, Neil. What are the odds?”

  “But they might,” he said. “It’s possible. They might.”

  Kathleen had thought that the letter to Fiona would explain something, some missing piece from Bridget’s life, but really that was probably just the terrier-like nature of the archivist, unwilling to let any little detail go. Fiona herself was of course long dead and gone. When, and how? Maybe Kathleen would find out someday, maybe she’d send herself over to Ireland to do some real research, the hands-and-knees, wiping-mud-off-a-gravestone sort, down and dirty. You weren’t a real archivist if you’d never done that, were you?

  She sat on her bed and made a mental accounting. Bridget’s notebook: gone. The letter to Fiona: gone. Maybe they’d be found someday, waterlogged, washed up on the banks of the Merrimac, indecipherable. But for now: gone.

  She had thought, this whole time, reading the notebook, trying to find the connections to Natalie, that she was doing something for Natalie, for her project. But that’s not what the notebook was for, in the end; it wasn’t a story all by itself, no beginning and end to it, really. (It made you wonder how many other genealogies had a missing piece to their stories.) Bridget’s notebook was an instrument, a device planted by someone to bring Natalie into Kathleen’s path. (Not God, Kathleen didn’t believe in God, at least not the God of her youth and young adulthood, the incense, the crucifix, the stained glass Stations of the Cross, all that kneeling and asking for forgiveness. But she believed in something.)

  She tiptoed out to the living room to check on Neil. He was sleeping deeply, his mouth open, his limbs sprawled across the sofa. He was the second person that day to have fallen asleep under Kathleen’s watch. You didn’t do that, you didn’t fall asleep in someone else’s care, unless you felt safe. That was something.

  She took Lucy out in the little scrap of yard, not wanting to leave Neil for too long. There was a spectacular moon, nearly full, and she stood for a moment looking at it—same sky watching over Natalie and her mother, same sky over Haiti, over Ashley Jackson’s grieving parents, same sky that not so long ago had watched over Bridget O’Connell, then Bridget Callaghan, it was all the same, the sky above them.

  Yes, that’s what she’d do, she’d take some time off from work, Lord knows she had enough vacation time saved up; she’d give herself a trip to Ireland as a present. Not right away, not until she knew what was going to happen with Lucy. She wasn’t going to fail anyone else who needed her, wasn’t going to abandon anyone.

  “A present,” she said aloud.

  She hadn’t saved Susannah, but she had saved Natalie, sort of; she’d saved Neil, in a way.

  A present for what?

  A present for surviving.

  Lucy lifted her head and regarded Kathleen and it seemed that they exchanged an important thought.

  Was it wrong to see something in any of this?

  Was it wrong to believe?

  Natalie’s mother thought she should wait until the following Tuesday to go back to school, that Monday being a school holiday; her father, returned from Punta Cana with the peeling remnants of a sunburn on his face and along the upper reaches of his neck, thought so too. But Natalie didn’t want to wait any longer, she was too anxious, the waiting gave her a feeling of permanent unease in her gut, so off she went on Friday, but not until after lunch. She couldn’t quite imagine walking in in the morning, part of the rest of the school, the waves of bodies, all those stares and whispers.

  Her father showed up to escort her in the Lexus “just to make sure you’re okay,” but she made him drop her across the street, on the corner of Kent, where she waited until he drove away before heading into the building. Though she would have bet real money that he was circling the block and zipping down Merrimac to come up a different street and observe her from another angle.

  Her legs were trembling. She almost turned back; she wanted, very briefly, to run to the safety of her father’s car. But she thought of the notebook, and the story Kathleen had told her, and she thought of Bridget O’Connell walking through the dark streets of Newburyport, the same streets she had just traveled, and she forced herself to go on.

  She got to English as early as she could, earlier even than Ms. Ramirez, and she stood by her desk, waiting for her, listening to all the sound and movement in the hallway. She’d forgotten, already, how loud all of that was. But it was Hannah Morgan, not Ms. Ramirez, who came in first.

  “Hey,” said Hannah, and softly Natalie answered back: “Hey.”

  They studied each other for a fraction of a moment: they could have been two animals waiting to pounce, or two long-lost relatives ready to embrace. It was anybody’s guess, really.

  Hannah said, “Natalie—”

  Natalie surprised herself by how hard her voice sounded when she said, “What?” It sounded like a stranger’s voice.

  “I just…”

  “You just what?” Natalie considered her, and it was like they were nine years old again, facing of
f over a game of Monopoly: Boardwalk for Park Place. “You just what, Hannah?”

  Hannah said, “I just didn’t think you’d be back already.”

  “Well. I wanted to tell her why I didn’t finish my project.”

  Hannah looked down, then back up, and her voice caught. “Natalie, she knows why.”

  “She does?” Natalie fixed her eyes on the back of the classroom, on the view Ms. Ramirez had from where she stood.

  “Everybody knows.”

  Of course Natalie had expected this. You didn’t get driven away from high school in an ambulance in the middle of the day without people knowing about it, it wasn’t exactly a slow news day when that happened, but hearing the words opened the wound anew; Natalie felt a little nauseous.

  Something was missing from Hannah—but what was it? Oh, of course, it was the space around her, the space around her was empty; Hannah was alone.

  Natalie said, “Where’s Taylor?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” said Hannah.

  “Hear what?” (And from whom was she supposed to hear it? She’d been holed up like a hermit all week—so bored, in fact, that she’d finally hooked up the Wii.)

  “She might not be coming back. She might be transferring, to this private school down in Manchester.”

  Natalie took a moment to absorb this, then said, carefully, not really sure she wanted to hear the answer, “Because of me?”

  “I don’t know.” Hannah made herself busy with her notebook, then looked up at Natalie, squinting. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, yeah, of course because of you. A lot of shit went down because of what happened. A lot of shit. Taylor’s parents found everything on her phone, and they got the school involved—the principal, everyone. The parents are doing something, there’s all these committees…”

  “What about your phone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you have your phone taken away too? Didn’t someone look at your phone? Your mom or something?” Natalie thought of Mrs. Morgan, all that Christmas baking, the clean, dry socks, the slippers fresh from the package.

  Hannah studied her. “Yeah, she took it away,” she said. “But she never looked. And then she gave it back. Anyway, most of it was on Taylor’s.”

  So, thought Natalie, it would end like this, Hannah getting away with everything, slipping away like a criminal in the dead of the night.

  The bell rang then, and there was a great chaotic push from the hallway into the classroom, a mélange of colors and shapes and sounds. Ms. Ramirez entered with the students. Speaking over it all, Hannah said, “Natalie?”

  “What?”

  Natalie saw that Hannah’s eyes were wet. Her mascara smudged in the corner of one of her eyes when she reached up to wipe at it. By then the classroom was nearly full, although Christian Chapman hadn’t come in yet. He was always late. Natalie didn’t take her seat. Neither did Hannah. And Natalie waited, they all waited, to see what would happen next.

  EPILOGUE

  For two solid weeks Neil stayed with Kathleen, all but abandoning his condo. He didn’t want to go back there, didn’t want to see the crib stained with Australian timber oil, the coffee table corners carefully housed in pieces of foam, the pale green curtains decorated with pictures of small smiling elephants. Why elephants? Why smiling? Kathleen, who went by there daily to pick up the mail, to gather clothes and books that Neil needed, didn’t know. She made up Susannah’s room for Neil, and she liked, late at night, to stand outside the door, hearing Neil’s steady breathing.

  He had his own stash of Ambien, prescribed to him by his primary, and dutifully he took one before bed each night. He slept so heavily that when it was time to get up for work, Kathleen sometimes had to shake him by the shoulders.

  The vet called to schedule Lucy’s procedure. Kathleen didn’t call back. She was nothing if not a researcher, and she had done her research. She knew there was nothing to be done; she knew that sedating a dog Lucy’s age was a risk in itself. She knew that if the news was what she expected it to be—what Dr. Ryan had all but told her it would be—there wasn’t much to be done then either. She left the Archives at lunch every day and drove home to see to Lucy. At night, while she and Neil watched terrible television and drank red wine together, she brushed Lucy, paying special attention to the thick coat over her chest. She walked with Lucy around Castle Island, and when Lucy rasped and stopped to rest, Kathleen stopped to rest too.

  She knew that when Lucy showed discomfort she would march right in to that puppy-faced doctor and ask him for whatever drugs would make the dog feel better.

  “And then,” she told Neil, “I’m going to march right in to my own doctor and ask for the same thing.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Both places.”

  Three times a day, because she’d told Neil she would, she called in to his home voice mail to check the messages. She did it when he wasn’t there because the expectant look on his face, and then the crush of disappointment when there was nothing, was too much for her to handle. He carried his cell phone everywhere he went; he slept with it under his pillow, and when he went to the bathroom (he told Kathleen) he rested it on the edge of the sink.

  Kathleen kept saying, “Neil, honey, anything is possible. You may hear from him yet—”

  “Yeah,” said Neil. “I know.”

  Every day Kathleen made breakfast for them both, practically spooning oatmeal into Neil’s mouth the way she would for a child—the way she had when Susannah was eighteen months old and on a self-imposed hunger strike. Even so, he lost weight. His pants hung off him. He tightened his belt to its smallest hole. He wore the same gray T-shirt and boxer shorts to bed each night; Kathleen snuck them away every few days to wash them. She suggested he take some time, a week, more if he needed it, without going to the Archives.

  “No,” he said. “What am I going to do alone all day here? I’ll go crazy.”

  So they drove in together, listening to NPR—there was other news going on, there was the swine flu and the Australian Open and the Taliban. When stories about relief efforts in Haiti came up, Kathleen reached for the dial to turn it off and Neil always stopped her.

  When the news came through about the American Baptist missionaries from Idaho, they both sat up straighter.

  One day Kathleen searched through death indexes (a gloomy name, that!) for 1926 until she found James Turner. Town: Newburyport, Mass. Age: eighteen months. Cause of death: fall down stairs. Here it was. It was real, then. A real person. At the Department of Public Health in Dorchester, there would be a real death certificate. And only three of them alive today—Kathleen, Natalie, Neil—who knew the story behind it. She would call Natalie, they would go together to the Department of Public Health. She’d made Natalie promise that they’d keep working on this together. Any weekend day she could make it down, and when she couldn’t, Kathleen would go to her. No more fake early releases, though, Kathleen had made her swear to that.

  She couldn’t find a listing for Bridget Callaghan in the death indexes. The only explanation she could think of for that, of course, was that Bridget hadn’t died in this country, that she had, somehow, made it back to Ireland, that she’d died there.

  She went to find Neil to tell him that. He was sitting at his desk, white-lipped, gripping his phone. He leapt up when he saw her.

  “Oh, Neil,” she said, misreading his expression for grief. “Oh, Neil, sweetie.” She moved toward him. “Come here,” she said, although by then she had reached him, and when he started to cry, she said, “Oh, honey, it’s okay.”

  “That was Adam,” he said. “That was Adam. He just called.”

  “What?”

  “He just called. He called from the embassy…” His words tripped over themselves. “There are kids everywhere, kids lined up in hallways… the staff is overwhelmed, it could take weeks more to get out, Adam lost his passport in the quake, it took forever to get his identity verified at the embassy, he was separated from Henri, bu
t then he found him—”

  Neil was talking so quickly it was difficult for Kathleen to make out each word.

  “All the paperwork is gone, everything is gone, I have to make copies from what we have at home, thank God he’s so anal…”

  Kathleen said, “Oh, Neil.” She tried to maintain composure, but a tear leaked out.

  Finally he took a breath and they regarded each other. “You saved me, Kathleen Lynch. These last two weeks, you saved me. You kept me alive, I mean it.”

  She said, “Oh, come on. Stop it.” But she felt some latent emotion, something she had thought long dead, rebloom inside her.

  “I’ve got to go home!” Neil said. Home to the pale green room, the cushioned corners, the clothes folded inside the dresser. Now he could prepare for homecoming.

  And Kathleen could prepare for… what? First to help Lucy through what was to come, and then she’d book the trip to Ireland. She would take a month to do it. No, she would take six weeks. A compromise: five weeks. She had that much vacation; she had acres of vacation. She had plenty of money saved. She hardly spent anything on herself.

  The more she thought about it, the more it seemed odd to go all the way there and research someone else’s family, so she would pull out her own research and prepare that too. She’d visit both places. She’d go to Galway, where her family was from, after County Kerry and do some of her own digging.

  “Won’t you be lonely?” said Neil when she told him on the phone. It was going to be at least a week—maybe longer—before Adam and Henri came home. Neil was refolding the clothes and putting them back in the dresser drawers. He told Kathleen he was walking around the house in circles, making sure everything was perfect. Lucy was sleeping in the middle of Kathleen’s kitchen.

  “No,” she said. But would she be? She didn’t know.

  In fact she didn’t want to go to Ireland alone. She wanted to go with Natalie.

  That was crazy, right? That idea was insane. You couldn’t take someone else’s child to Ireland.