As the years passed, it became harder and harder to see each other. There could be no closure as long as Jennifer was missing; any conversation they had seemed meaningless unless it was about her, but there was nothing to say. So they stopped talking. When they ran into each other, their behavior was false and perfunctory, like lovers whose affair has ended badly. They had shared too much; they knew each other too well, which made the exchange of pleasantries irrelevant and anything else painful.
They never spoke about the rift. They let it happen, and felt powerless to stop it. They stopped confiding in each other and found different friends. And slowly, over time, they changed, or grew apart: Kathryn stayed in Virginia after college and got married, Will came out of the closet and moved to Boston, Brian settled in Portland, Rachel got caught up in her graduate work at the University of Maine, Jack threw himself into his job at the Bangor Daily News. In the end, letting go of each other was a relief, an escape from the fear and suspicion and increasing hopelessness, a deep dive into anonymity.
Sitting on the porch, Kathryn watches an older woman and her dog making their way down the street, two shadowy figures under the street-lamps. The dog zigzags back and forth, its tail wagging, sniffing the trees on either side. As the woman nears, Kathryn can see it’s a neighbor, someone she vaguely recognizes.
She stops in front of the house. “Is that you, Kathryn?” the neighbor asks.
“Yes.”
“Well, what do you know! It’s Mrs. Adams.”
“Oh, hello,” Kathryn says, getting up. Mrs. Adams was the librarian at Mary Snow, her elementary school. “Home for a visit?”
“Maybe longer. I’m not exactly sure.”
“Really? That’s wonderful. You and your husband thinking of moving up here?”
She hesitates. “No.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Adams’s voice fades, and the dog continues down the street. “You know,” she says after a moment, “my husband died last year.” Kathryn starts to say she’s sorry, but the old woman waves her hand dismissively. “It’s all right. I’m learning to live without him. It’s not easy, but that’s what you do, isn’t it? You just go on.”
“Do you?” Kathryn asks absurdly. She seems so sure.
“Oh, yes. Takes time, is all. You’ll see.”
“I believe you,” Kathryn says, the same thing she used to say when her mother said there were no monsters under the bed. I believe you—wanting the words and her certainty to make it true.
Chapter 3
Despite the pleasant coolness and the quiet, Kathryn sleeps fitfully her first night home. She wakes with a start from a nightmare—falling or being pushed off a ledge into darkness—and looks at the clock: 10:00 A.M.
Her mother, she knows, has been up for hours.
Lying in bed, Kathryn can hear her downstairs on the phone, telling someone about a piece of property on Union Street, a little house just perfect for newlyweds or retirees. Kathryn stretches, wondering what that means. Too small, presumably, for children; too large for one person. But why too large? How could a small house be too large? She must be talking to one half of a couple, Kathryn decides, probably an older couple, about to retire, and she’s flattering them with the reference to newlyweds—new lives, hopeful and in love. Kathryn throws back the covers. She hears her mother hang up the phone.
The late-morning air is threaded through with warmth. At the open window the white cotton curtains slide in and out, a slow dance. Kathryn watches for a while, looking beyond to the broad, flat leaves of the maple, deep midsummer green, whispering and shushing each other. The whole room seems suddenly alive. When she was little, her walls were covered with daisies, four fields of them stretching back, and in the early morning she would imagine that the stalks were in motion, swaying all around her, swaying with the curtains and the maple leaves, while she lay on her meadow of bed, perfectly safe, perfectly still.
After a few minutes Kathryn gets up, throws on some shorts, and starts to go downstairs. In front of Josh’s room, she pauses. The door is slightly ajar. She pushes it with one hand and looks inside. The room is just as it was when Josh left for college seven years ago: the sky-blue walls plastered with a huge poster of Magic Johnson leaping through the air, another of the Fine Young Cannibals, a maroon-and-gold Boston College banner, a hand-lettered pep-rally poster that says GO RAMS! ALL THE WAY TO THE PLAYOFFS! An ancient Macintosh computer with a tiny screen sits on his neatly arranged desk.
For a while after their father walked out on them, Josh and Kathryn had spent a lot of time together. They stayed close to home, ostensibly reading and watching TV, but really keeping an eye on their mother as she tried to piece together a life for the three of them after the divorce. But eventually the strain of that became too much. “I’m sick of worrying about her,” Josh told Kathryn. “I can’t live this way.” He became methodical and disciplined; he started going to the library to do his homework after school and, though not a natural athlete, threw himself into sports. Kathryn felt the same, but her anxiety manifested itself differently. She spent hours at Jennifer’s house, began smoking pot, went to keg parties down nameless dirt roads when her mother thought she was spending the night with a friend—anything to avoid coming home to that quiet house soaked in their mother’s sadness.
The difference in ages between Kathryn and Josh was like dog years in high school; the three grades that separated them might as well have been decades. When Kathryn left home, the divide only widened. Josh grew more conservative as he got older, joining the Young Republicans in college and eventually becoming president of the club. Meanwhile, Kathryn was living in a group house in Washington, D.C., subsisting on tofu stir-frys and working for one left-wing cause after another. When Josh moved to New York and became a mortgage broker and she returned to Charlottesville for graduate school in English, the distance between them seemed too great to bridge.
It had been years now since one of them picked up the phone to call the other without a birthday or national holiday as an excuse. Kathryn didn’t even tell Josh about her divorce—she knew her mother would do it, and she wasn’t in the mood to explain her personal life to this brother she hardly knew anymore. She was sure that Josh—who dated only model types and lived in a modern high-rise on the Upper East Side and once said he found what he called her “starving artist shtick” utterly incomprehensible—would be less than understanding about what she was going through. But one night about a month ago she came home to a phone message from him that caught her by surprise. “I just heard,” he said. “I’m sorry. I may not be there, but I’m here for you. I mean that.” They played phone tag for a while and that was the end of it, but it was nice to know that he cared enough to call.
Kathryn straightens a picture on the wall—a cheaply framed photo of the Bangor High basketball team, with Josh’s head half obscured by somebody taller—and leaves the room, pulling the door shut behind her. Then she makes her way downstairs to the kitchen, where she pours herself a cup of coffee from the Thermos her mother has filled. Sitting at the round breakfast table, she leafs through the Bangor Daily News. The paper is a microcosm of the town: old-fashioned Yankee conservatism, homegrown rural pragmatism, liberal intellectualism (reflecting the influence of the state university in Orono, ten miles up the road), and a dash of hippie utopianism, which dwindled in the eighties but now seems stronger than ever, under the guise of New Age. Thumbing through the pages, Kathryn notices that the paper has jazzed up its headings, adding computer graphics and color, changing the Women’s Page to a more inclusive Style section.
“Good morning,” her mother says cheerfully. She’s come in from the back wearing thick gardening gloves, a dirty apron, and an acid-green visor.
“You’re out there early.” Kathryn closes the paper.
“It’s not so early anymore,” she says, glancing at the clock. “But I’ve been in the garden off and on since six-thirty. It’s age.” Kathryn grins. “You’re not that old.”
“I thin
k it has something to do with menopause. I get up earlier every year.” Her mother peels off her gloves and takes off the visor, then fluffs her hair. “Whoo. It’s really warming up.” She goes over to the counter and pours herself some coffee. “Been up long?”
“Not really. I had these awful dreams. How’s the garden?” Picking up a pen, Kathryn begins drawing daisy chains around the headlines on the front page.
“Oh, I’ll tell you, Kath, I get the most satisfaction from it.” She sits down and takes little sips of her coffee. “The irises are flourishing, and even the clematis is beginning to bloom. Last month I dug in some horse manure, and it’s made a big difference. You have to come out back and let me give you a tour.”
“Sure,” she says. For some reason her mother’s forced cheeriness, especially in the morning, often has the effect of making her grumpy and monosyllabic.
Her mother sighs with exaggerated contentment. “You know what? Honestly? I don’t know if you’ve come to this realization yet, but being single is really all right. You have so much time to do what you want. Marriage can be so limiting.”
“Umm.” Kathryn adds stems and leaves to some of the larger daisies.
“In fact, I may never get married again. Who knows? When I divorced your father, I was just starting to figure out what I wanted. Like, remember how your dad always wanted vanilla-bean ice cream in those big square containers, never any other flavor, just boring vanilla bean? Well, I didn’t realize until he left that I don’t even like vanilla bean. Quite frankly, I detest it.” She shakes her head. “Can you imagine, all those years of putting up with vanilla bean when I could’ve been eating a flavor I liked?”
Kathryn looks up. A headache is starting to take shape behind her ears. “You didn’t have to eat it, Mom,” she says stubbornly. “You could’ve bought your own ice cream.”
“But that’s just the point,” her mother says, leaning forward. “I didn’t know that I deserved to have what I wanted. And you know why? Because I thought your father was right about everything.” She sits back. “Boy, was I wrong!”
“So what’s your favorite flavor now?”
“I don’t have a favorite flavor,” she says breezily. “I pick and choose. I switch around.”
Kathryn nods, coloring in the daisy petals. Now they’re black-eyed Susans.
“Hey,” her mother says. “I forgot to tell you. Linda Pelletier and her husband, Ralph What’s-his-name, moved to Florida a couple of months ago, and their house is on the market.”
Kathryn puts down the pen. Linda Pelletier is Will and Jennifer’s mother. “What?”
“I think they just got sick of being here. Too much water under the bridge. Anyway, they’re gone now, and I’m showing their house. In fact, I need to go over there in a little while to air the place out. Do you want to come?”
“I can’t believe they just left,” Kathryn mumbles.
“Oh, honey, you can’t blame them. All the memories and everything, it must have been torture. I’m sure we have no idea.”
Kathryn knows the house well—a large, ramshackle Victorian on Lamott Street. Growing up, she spent countless hours at the Pelletiers’; the house was as familiar to her as her own. After her parents divorced, when she was twelve, and her family dissolved into enemy camps, she often sought refuge there. It was so different from her house, where there were strict rules about homework and television and junk food and chores. The twins’ mother never seemed to care what they did, as long as they weren’t too loud and didn’t cause trouble.
For a while, from the outside at least, the Pelletiers had seemed like the perfect all-American family. The twins’ father, Pete, was a Rotarian who played first base in the local men’s softball league; their mother was a former Miss Penobscot County. Even as babies, Will and Jennifer were unusually beautiful and good-natured, winning the Best Baby contest at the Maine State Fair when they were two. But Kathryn had witnessed the fights behind closed doors, the mother’s secretiveness, the father’s drinking. She was spending the night when the news came that Pete had been killed in a car crash. Everything seemed to unravel after that. By the time Jennifer disappeared, the family had already broken apart.
“What do they want for the house?” Kathryn asks her mother now.
“One seventy-five.”
“Isn’t that a lot?”
“Actually, it’s not outrageous for that street. I’ll sell it before the summer’s out.” Her mother stands up and puts her hands on her hips. “I love this job, Kath. I’m damn good at it.”
“It sure sounds like it.” She smiles, amused at her mother’s bravado.
Her mother smiles back. “I’m going to run upstairs and change,” she says. She gives Kathryn a once-over. “You might want to, too.”
TURNING ONTO A wide, well-kept street of enormous old residences set back from the road, Kathryn’s mother slows in front of a white corner house with a turret. The grass is long and the shutters are closed, but flowers in pots along the walkway bloom as if they’ve been recently planted.
“Pete Pelletier put his heart into this place,” Kathryn’s mother says as she pulls into the driveway. “That’s why it’s in such good shape, even after ten years without much care. He rebuilt the foundation and installed a new boiler and fixed the roof.” She puts the car in park and takes the key out of the ignition. “After he died, Linda used the money to put in a new kitchen, but she didn’t do much else. It’s just as well that she’s selling it now, before it falls into serious disrepair.” Opening her door and getting out, she motions for Kathryn to follow.
Kathryn knows all about Will and Jennifer’s father—his tragic, thwarted life and early death. It had been his dream to become an attorney, but when Linda found out she was pregnant the summer after they graduated from Bangor High, and they got married and had twins, it was all he could do to get through college. When he became an insurance agent and started doing pretty well, he brought up law school again, but Linda discouraged him. “You’re making a lot of money now,” she reasoned. “If you go back to school we’ll never see you. Don’t you think you owe it to the kids to be around while they’re growing up?”
So he stopped talking about law school and instead, when he and Linda were twenty-four and the twins were six, bought the dilapidated Victorian on a tree-lined street—a fixer-upper with a lot of potential, the real-estate agent opined as they signed the contract. The house and the family became his project. Evenings and weekends when Kathryn was over he’d be up on the roof, painting the kitchen, wallpapering the hall, fixing screen doors, and adding shelves and closets. He led Will’s Boy Scout troop, took the kids on nature hikes, built a tree house in the backyard. Linda got a closetful of clothes, and they all went to Disneyland on vacation. But there was something about Pete that none of them could reach. He read the paper avidly and was hooked on all the local trials. Sometimes he went down to the courthouse to watch the trial lawyers at work in their sharp blue suits with their snap-front briefcases and eager assistants. Instead of bedtime stories, he told his children about the landmark cases of the century, the Scopes monkey debate, the Rosenberg fiasco, the Nuremberg trials. He knew many of the prosecutorial arguments by heart.
The twins’ mother did as little work around the house as possible. She hadn’t wanted to buy it in the first place; she’d wanted something new. She wasn’t handy, she said, and besides, she had asthma; all that paint and dust filled up her lungs. “Can you hear him in there, banging away?” she’d ask Kathryn, dragging on a cigarette. “That noise is giving me a headache.”
It’s funny, Kathryn thinks now, that Linda didn’t move after Pete was killed, given how she felt about the house. And even stranger that when she remarried, her new husband just moved in. Pete’s death had been ruled an accident, but the rumor around town had been that it was a suicide—a desperate act by a man who had just found out his wife was having an affair and planned to leave him. Ironically, as it turned out, his death merely hastened the pro
cess—Linda Pelletier quietly married her lover just four months later.
Linda Pelletier had always been different from the other mothers-restless, unpredictable, moody. Often when Kathryn came by she’d be sitting on the front porch with a couple of teenage girls from the neighborhood, smoking cigarettes. She was still young herself; she’d been eighteen when she gave birth to the twins prematurely, and she considered herself a teenager well into her twenties. Other mothers in pastel sweatsuits and no-nonsense perms walked sedately by with their kids in strollers, waving at Linda as she sat painting her nails on the porch. Linda would be the first one in the neighborhood out sunbathing after a long, cold winter, the weak sun shining down on her and snow melting on the ground, a bottle of coconut tanning oil at her side.
When Linda was young, her hair had been as white-blond as her childrens’; now she tinted it that shade. She retained her cheerleader’s figure by dancing in the living room with the music turned up full blast. She seemed happiest when she was dancing; she’d put in a cassette of Michael Jackson or John Cougar and get into a Danskin leotard and jerk around frenetically with her eyes closed to the thumping beat of the bass. When they were little, Jennifer and Will had danced with her, but as they grew older they became aware of how little she seemed to notice them while she was dancing, how little she seemed to care. So they pulled back. After a while, it was hard for them even to watch her.
The dancing never lasted long. At some point Linda would collapse on the couch, gasping for breath, and Will or Jennifer would run into the kitchen to rummage for one of the inhalers she kept around the house. All the while that they were growing up, the twins knew their mother wasn’t well. The severe asthma she’d had as a child had left her with badly damaged lungs and a weak constitution, which the cigarettes didn’t help. She took naps most afternoons; some days she didn’t get out of bed at all. Often she didn’t have the energy to make dinner, so as soon as they could reach the stove top standing on a stool, Will and Jennifer began doing it themselves—Hamburger Helper and Chef Boyardee and frozen pot pies. They’d bring trays of food up to their mother’s bedroom, where as often as not she’d turn her face to the wall, motioning for them to take the food away.