Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline

Jennifer?”
“It just didn’t seem right. It seemed like too much.”
Her mother leans forward and tops up her glass.
“And anyway, I’m not sure I feel comfortable with her,” Kathryn says, trying to change the subject again. “It seems really bizarre, everybody going to the same therapist. I don’t see how she can keep everythingseparate. The friendship, the therapy thing, seeing you and Margaret and me—”
“I didn’t know she was seeing Margaret.”
Kathryn looks at her mother, biting the lip of her glass, and suddenly she’s sorry she mentioned Margaret at all. She knew when she said it that her mother might be hurt; after all these years, Margaret’s name still has that kind of power. When Kathryn was in high school and fighting with her mother, the meanest thing she could say was “Margaret never yells at me!” or “Margaret said I could.” Eyes gleaming, flushed neck betraying her anger and pain, her mother would say, “Why don’t you just go live with your father and Margaret, then?”
“Well,” Kathryn says now, “anyway, Doris says hi.” She forces a laugh. “That woman needs to go to secretary school.”
Her mother nods slowly.
For a few minutes they sit together in silence. Then Kathryn says, “Mom …”
“What?”
“I have an idea. I want to take you to dinner. Somewhere fun, somewhere we can sit outside. My treat.”
“Your treat?” she says, bemused. “How do you think Rosie would analyze this?”
“She’d probably say I was trying to get in touch with my inner child by nurturing the Great Mother.”
“Daughters who feed their mothers and the mothers who let them.”
“Hey, pretty good.”
“I’ve been in that office quite a bit,” she says, collecting the wine bottle and glasses and standing up. “I know all the slogans. Now, where are you taking me? I’m starving.”
AFTER A LEISURELY dinner at Mama Baldacci’s, a cozy Italian restaurant with red-checked tablecloths and meatballs the size of tennis balls,they return home and Kathryn’s mother heads upstairs to take a bath. Kathryn sits out on the porch swing, pushing it back and forth with her foot. She thinks about how Rosie said that her life has been torn apart and she has to rebuild it. Frowning in the darkness, she tries to figure out what it is that she doesn’t agree with, what it is that rings false to her. There’s a drama to it she knows she hasn’t lived. There was never a cataclysmic moment in which things might have been, however briefly, etched in relief against memory, against things to come—a moment which, by its sheer magnitude, defined her history and her future. Instead, Kathryn thinks, she has disintegrated slowly over a number of years. By the time of her divorce she was already less than a whole person, shadowing through her life without much in the way of will or ambition. It is true that she doesn’t know what she wants, but it’s more than that: She doesn’t, any longer, possess a want. She feels somehow lighter than she should, lighter in the mind, a solid will slowly turned to sand.
Kathryn thinks about all the stories she could tell Rosie over the next month or two, stories that might intrigue her and provide clues to Kathryn’s depression—if that’s what it is—but would essentially leave her alone. She thinks about what remains unspoken: Jennifer, Will, the last night by the river, the constant turning over, like the worrying of beads, the question of what happened to her best friend the night she disappeared. It is a question as relentless as it is haunting, the only constant in the past decade of her life. Where did she go? Where did she go?— the rhythm of it like the chugging of a train through a deep and far-off valley. It is a question that embraces mystery, with one embalmed response: Nobody knows. Yet there is an echo, fainter but more urgent, that haunts her: Somebody has to know. Somebody, somewhere, knows what happened.
Kathryn can go days without thinking about