Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline Read Free Book Online

they’d turned up exactly nothing. Kathryn fumbled through a good-bye, but she didn’t know what to say, and he, distracted, barely noticed. It had gotten so that whenever she tried to talk to him, she felt false, and she hated herself. It wasn’t that she had stopped caring—it was that her caring felt so inadequate. It couldn’t bring Jenniferback, and it couldn’t dull Will’s pain. So after the shock, the disbelief, the heart-clamping two and a half months of waiting to hear, Kathryn went away to a new life, relieved to be leaving. Will stayed behind, organizing search parties, tacking up posters, writing legislators and congresspeople, asking for something, anything, in the way of help.
When she telephoned from college, Will’s voice was tired and defeated. He rarely called her; he said it always seemed as if he was interrupting something. And it got harder and harder for her to call him. She’d sit on her bed in her sterile dorm room, listening to his listless voice as she watched her roommate get ready to go out to a party, the sounds of guys playing hackeysack drifting up from the courtyard below. It felt as if her life had been split in two. After a while she stopped calling and began sending postcards instead, and then, eventually, she stopped writing, too, not knowing what effect it had on him, feeling only the monumental numbness that had crept in like a fog and settled over all of them when Jennifer disappeared.
“I think that’s enough,” Kathryn’s mother calls up the stairs. “There’s a cross-breeze. Where are you?”
“I’m in here,” she says. “Just a moment.” She starts to cry, and then she stops herself. Jennifer is gone. Words can’t express the enormity of the loss. No story can contain it. Her absence is a presence, ghostly and haunting, touching all who knew her. It is impossible that she disappeared, inconceivable that she will never return. She is at once nowhere and everywhere, a constant shadow, elusory and insubstantial, her life an unkept promise, a half-remembered dream.

Chapter 4
K athryn’s grandmother is seated in a wheelchair in the main living room of the Oak Bluff Retirement Home when Kathryn arrives.
“Grandma Alice?” Kathryn calls across the room, and the old woman looks up, the glare from the overhead light reflecting in her glasses. She is wearing a blue-striped dress, flesh-colored support hose, and dainty powder-blue nylon slippers, her thin legs splayed slightly on the metal footrests. Her wispy gray hair is haloed around her head.
“Kathryn,” she says in a shrill voice, holding up a folded newspaper. “Just in time. What’s a five-letter word for ‘streetwalker’?”
“Streetwalker?” Kathryn says, coming toward her. “Whore, I guess.”
“W-H-O-R-E.” Her grandmother bends over the crossword, carefully filling in the blanks with a pencil. She looks up. “I had ‘hussy.’ This seems to fit better. But it is a rather ghastly word, isn’t it?”
“Who makes up these crosswords, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I should fire off a letter to the paper about it.” She sets the crossword in her lap. “Of course, I write a letter about once a week for some reason or other. I can just imagine the dread in that office every time an envelope with my shaky handwriting comes in.”
“You keep them on their toes, Grandma.”
“And they need it, too. Who else but someone like me has the time to mess with them?” She looks up at Kathryn, squinting into the fluorescent light. “You’re looking a little tired, my dear.”
She sighs. “I know. Mom’s already pointed that out.”
“So I don’t need to mention the hair,” she says. “Red’s not really your color, you know.”
“Well, that makes two things that you and Mom agree on.”
“That’s because it’s not opinion, dear; it’s fact.” Grandma Alice leans forward. “The divorce is final?”
“Yep. I’m a single woman now, Grandma, just like you.”
She sticks out her chin.