Ask Again, Yes (16 page)

Then, when she couldn’t think of any more questions, she said, “I can’t wait until my dad comes home,” and Sara shot her a look that told her not to be so rude.

Francis came home that October, and with him came a battery of therapists, one after another. All day long, Sara and Kate would try to retreat to other parts of the house to give them privacy, but sometimes they would find themselves in the kitchen together, making a snack and listening. “Big one,” they’d hear the one therapist say to their father in an encouraging voice. “Okay, another big one,” and though they knew their father was just taking a big breath, reaching for the ceiling, touching his toes, it would occur to Kate that they should be making fun of the therapist a little, with his tight sweatpants and his butt that looked like two little fists held next to each other. But the new Gleesons were a family that pretended they didn’t find things funny.

Through all of this, Kate thought Peter might call one day. Her sisters never mentioned him, and the fact that they didn’t bring up his name
felt to Kate like she shouldn’t either. She wasn’t sure what would happen if he did call and she wasn’t the one who answered, so she tried to answer the ringing phone as often as she could. Once in a while, when she was lunging for it, she’d catch Sara and Nat glancing at each other. On her birthday, she felt the frisson of expectation when she approached the mailbox, hooked her finger on the latch. But she found only a Caldor flier and something from St. Bart’s.

She missed him all the time. She missed even the expectation of seeing him. She missed looking for him and the thrill she’d feel through her whole body when she’d spot him stepping out onto his porch. She imagined him playing with the zipper of his green hoodie as he walked around Queens, where she imagined he must be because that’s where his father was going to go when he planned on leaving. But Queens was big. She’d looked at a map. He hadn’t mentioned a neighborhood. And maybe, when she really thought of it, maybe he’d said Brooklyn. Maybe the Bronx. Sometimes she felt sure he didn’t go to his uncle’s place at all, and so she imagined him somewhere else. Did he tell her once that he had family in Paterson? She tried to imagine Paterson, where she’d never been, and then Peter against this imagined backdrop to see if it fit. She was certain that if she lit upon the right answer, she’d know it; her body and mind would feel stilled and she’d be able to read a book, finally. But even in those first seconds after waking up in the morning, before even her first conscious thought, she’d find her body oriented toward the window, already listening. Once, before Dana and her family moved in, she thought she heard the scrape of the Stanhopes’ garbage can being pulled to the curb. She leaped from her bed to look but found nothing, and didn’t hear the sound again. Some days, whenever the phone rang and it wasn’t him, she felt sure that he was out there somewhere with his finger poised over the dial pad but wouldn’t press the buttons.

She went out to the rocks sometimes, always bringing a book along in case her mother or sisters looked outside. Once, she thought she saw the corner of an envelope poking up between the third and fourth tallest
of the boulders. She reached as far as she could between them, tearing up her knuckles as she drove her hand again and again into the rough crevice. When she finally got smart and found a stick thin enough to wedge in and push the paper out, she discovered it was not an envelope at all but a folded receipt from May that listed one Coke and one Big League Chew.

One evening—Nat away at school, Sara reading, her father asleep, finally, in his own bed—her mother sat beside Kate on the couch. “You miss your friend,” she said.

The tears pressed forth before she could stop them. It was the week before Thanksgiving. She hadn’t seen Peter in six months. It was so good to have her father home and yet it wasn’t how she imagined it. Sometimes when he entered a room she felt a sudden, jumbled rush to tell him all the things that were on her mind. Then she’d draw up just as suddenly and feel so unaccountably sad. There he was, after all, alive. Making himself a snack. Scratching his shoulder. Reading the paper. It wasn’t his face; she hardly noticed that anymore.

“Is it my fault what happened? Mine and Peter’s?”

“Oh, honey, no.”

“But we snuck out. And she really hated me. Hated that Peter liked me.”

“You snuck out because you were a pair of eighth graders. One day a hundred years from now I’ll tell you what I got up to in eighth grade.” They were both quiet for a long time. Then Lena said, “But she did hate you. I think you should know what she said at the hearing. Your father doesn’t, but I do.”

“What Mrs. Stanhope said?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

Lena stroked Kate’s hair, gathered it up in her hands and draped it over her daughter’s shoulder. “You’re such a pretty girl, you know that, right?”

Kate shrugged.

“And smart. And, I don’t know, ‘tough’ is the wrong word. You’re more like your dad than you are like me.”

Again, something inside Kate wobbled for a second. He was tough. And yet there didn’t seem to be any future on the horizon. They were all waiting for this period to end, but maybe this was just the way it was going to be from now on, all of them watching him and reminding him to take his hands out of his pockets when he walked.

Lena pulled Kate close. “She said she’d kill you if you went near her son. She said she shot Dad because if he died, that meant we’d have to move away, and you wouldn’t be near Peter anymore.”

Lena let that sink in. “Before you go feeling guilty I’ll tell you the rest. She also said that she knew the Nagles had painted their house a similar shade of blue to her house just to prove that the shade they chose looked better. She said she was sick of Monsignor Repetto singling her out at Mass. She was also sick of everyone thinking she was responsible for the
Challenger
explosion. She mentioned an estranged sister who tried to sabotage something or other back when they were kids, and a person she worked with who was plotting to have her fired. And so on.”

They were quiet for a few minutes.

“She mentioned so many people and so many grievances that it sort of diluted the mention of you. But she kept coming back to you, harping on you, like you were plotting to steal her son from her. It was so nuts it sort of felt like a joke. The
Challenger
explosion for God’s sake. Until you consider what she did.”

Kate remembered running down Jefferson holding Peter’s hand.

“The point is she’s sick, Kate.”

Kate nodded, though she wasn’t entirely sure why.

“I’m saying that what happened is no one’s fault, really. Not even hers when you think about it. We came to a plea agreement this week. Instead of going to prison we all agreed that she should stay in the hospital for a long time. Dad agreed to that for me. Otherwise it would have gone on
and on and on. I don’t want to see them anymore. I don’t want to talk about them anymore. Your poor father. Can you imagine if . . .”

“Do you know where Peter is?” Kate asked.

“Honey . . .”

“I just want to know. I promise I won’t contact him.”

“I don’t know. That’s the truth. I really don’t.”

“Does anyone?”

“Well, sure. Their lawyers do. His mother’s doctors know, I’d imagine. She probably has a social worker, too. I’m sure they know on the job. Brian is still working, I think.”

Kate looked at her and hoped she wouldn’t make her say it. After a moment Lena just shook her head slowly. “Forget it,” she said, but with tenderness, like she understood that she had to ask.

“But they’re probably still in New York,” Kate said. “Since she is.”

Lena’s face was as blank as stone. “Kate. I’ve known Peter since the day he was born. He’s a good boy. No one thinks he isn’t. But you have to forget about him. He was your friend but now he’s gone. You might not believe this now, but one day you’ll have a friend you love as much as you love Peter. All of this is too much for a little girl to handle. Your whole life is ahead of you.”

Kate was silent.

“For your father, Kate. Don’t you go looking for trouble. Okay?”

The telephone rang. Natalie. The long-distance rates dropped after 9:00 p.m.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

eight

A
ND SHE DIDN’T GO
looking for trouble. Sometimes she felt she deserved more credit for how completely and truly she did not go looking for trouble, or at least the trouble her mother meant.

She made friends easily, without trying, and didn’t understand how there could be people who didn’t. All you had to say was one pretty funny thing and you made a friend. There was a crew of girls from St. Bart’s that stuck together now that they were mixed in with the public school kids, and they all went out for soccer. Kate made JV as a freshman even though there was a freshman team. She wore her uniform to school on game days and sat with a group of seven other girls for lunch and took all honors classes. She raised her hand when she felt like talking and didn’t think that was notable until Mr. Behan told her parents in the parent-teacher conference that he was glad to see a girl raising her hand. Kate’s friends agreed they’d go together to the holiday formal in December, and they all went to Marie Halladay’s house beforehand to get ready. “How fun,” her mother kept saying when she drove her over, her dress folded carefully inside a Macy’s bag. The more details Kate gave her mother the happier her mother seemed to be, so she started making them up:

“We’ll probably trade jewelry,” she said.

“Jeannie made a mix tape to listen to while we get ready.”

“Marie is going to do everyone’s makeup.”

“Makeup?” her father asked from the passenger seat. “Are you allowed to wear makeup?” He’d just had another surgery, this time to build out his jaw, and half his face was wrapped in bandages. He took pills to blur the pain but they wore off quickly, it seemed, and the doctors had warned him not to overlap doses. His words were a little muffled but Kate could still tell he was teasing by the tone of his voice. He was as delighted as her mother.

“Kate,” her mother said, “we are so proud of you.”

Afternoons felt long and aimless without Peter, but a routine settled over her days. School, soccer, homework, TV, bed. Sara was the editor of the school paper, and on the weeks an issue was due, Kate walked home alone. The sky seemed bigger, emptier, since high school started, and for the first time she saw Gillam as a small place, set among other small places, and she craved to know what it would be like to walk beyond it, walk beyond the next town over, too, and the one after that, until the craving had been satisfied. She imagined a camera overhead pulling back and back like it did in movies sometimes, and Gillam lost among the twinkling lights of so many other places until it was just a speck, and then New York was just a speck, and then the United States, North America, the entire globe.

Sometimes, she’d try to conjure up the feeling of Peter walking beside her—the shape of him, the smell. Once in a while, usually on a Friday, one of her friends would come home with her after school and they’d chatter the whole walk to Jefferson. Then at her house they’d gobble the cookies and sodas Kate’s mother put out for them and keep chattering up until the moment their mothers came to pick them up and they’d go
bounding across the Gleesons’ lawn crying out that they’d see Kate on Monday. “Did you have fun?” her mother always asked, looking at her closely, and she’d assure her that she had. But as she waved and yelled her goodbyes across the twilit lawn, she always felt relieved, completely exhausted, like these departures could not have come too soon.

When freshman year ended, Kate got a job as a camp counselor. Monday through Friday she woke up already running late, so she’d pull a bra on under whatever T-shirt she’d worn to bed, brush her teeth, and grab an apple or a banana before sprinting the ten blocks to the Central Avenue fields, where camp was held. There were bonus nights when the kids stayed nearly until dark, and Kate volunteered for those shifts, too. “Keeping busy!” her mother commented when she came in after one of these extra-long days, and her father watched her move around the kitchen. Toward the end of the summer, one of Kate’s friends who also worked at the camp, a girl named Amy who was also on Kate’s soccer team and had been over to Kate’s house plenty of times, said in front of the other counselors that Kate was like a sister to her, and looked over at Kate with a bright smile. Kate had been filling water bottles at the water station when she heard her say it, and she felt her stomach drop. She coughed. Her face went red when she realized everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to say something.

“But you have sisters,” Kate said, finally, the only thing she could think of.

“It’s an expression, Kate,” Amy said, rolling her eyes. The others, embarrassed, looked away.

“No, I know it is. I just mean you have two sisters. So do I. This isn’t what it’s like.”

Amy’s face fell and some anger passed there. “What’s with you today?”

Later, Kate had to say that she hadn’t really been listening, hadn’t really known what they were talking about. She’d misunderstood. “You’re one of my closest friends,” she assured Amy. “I only meant that my sisters can be so annoying.” Amy agreed that was certainly true, and
for the whole walk home Kate tried to remember if Amy’s oldest sister was named Kelly or Callie.

In the fall of sophomore year two interesting things happened at once. She made the varsity soccer team and she heard that Eddie Marik liked her. The girls were in a tizzy over it, because Eddie was a senior, and was good-looking, and had two good-looking older brothers that somehow made him even better looking than he would have been if they were just considering him alone. There was no debate about whether or not Kate should like him back. Kate thought at first that he meant Sara, who was his year, and had gotten their names confused. They didn’t look alike, but even people who didn’t know them sometimes told them that they could tell they were sisters by the way they walked. Word came down that he did not mean Sara; he meant Kate. Every day at lunch the girls leaned across the cafeteria table until their heads were almost touching, and reported on the details they’d heard: Eddie had said to Joe Cummings that Kate Gleeson was pretty. He thought she was an awesome soccer player. He was thinking of asking her out.