Untethered Read online

  “I’m sure she has plans to mail you an elaborate card or a poem or something,” Dave said. He moved his hand on the door and, more to himself than to Allie, said, “We really should have had her do that before she left.”

  “Great,” Allie said, “but can we—”

  “I’d really rather you didn’t,” he said. “It will only make it more difficult for Morgan. Good-byes aren’t something she’s good at. I know it’s not what you would like, but I think the best thing for her is to just make a clean break of it. I’m sorry.”

  Allie started to protest, and Dave looked to Char for help.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, she wanted to yell at him. You “forget” about tutoring, about the girl who’s dedicated hours every week to your daughter, you drop this bombshell on her that she’s not going to see Morgan ever again and can’t even say good-bye to her, and you expect me to calm her down? To usher her quietly to the car without another word?

  But yelling at him would accomplish nothing, other than to guarantee he would never again answer a call from her or Allie. If she could only speak with Sarah, she was sure she could get them to see how unfair this was to Allie. To have them agree to one last visit, no matter how brief, so the girls could say a proper good-bye. If she wanted to leave an opening for that, though, she needed to cooperate with him now.

  Char moved her hand from Allie’s arm to the back of her head and ran it down the girl’s hair before nudging her toward the driveway. “We understand,” she said, speaking to both Dave and Allie. “We want to do what’s best for Morgan.”

  Allie made a noise, but Char nudged her again, and before the girl could say more, Dave said, “Thank you, both of you,” and closed the door.

  Allie walked directly to the passenger side. By the time Char was in and buckled, the girl was crying.

  “I’m so sorry.” She put a hand on Allie’s knee. “But I’m sure we can—”

  Allie held up a palm, moved her leg away from Char’s hand, and turned to the window.

  “Okay,” Char said.

  When they got home, Allie ran up to her room and closed the door.

  Char knocked later. “Do you want any dinner?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Later, Char was walking past Allie’s door, carrying a load of clean towels to the linen closet, when she heard a cell phone ring.

  “Oh my God!” Allie yelled. “Effing telemarketer! Stop calling me!”

  Char waited for the sound of a cell phone shattering against the bedroom wall, but it didn’t come.

  Twenty-five

  The following evening, Allie was late getting home from soccer tryouts. Maggie, a friend on the team, lived in the neighborhood and had been driving her each night. Allie usually walked in the door shortly after six.

  At six fifteen, Char texted, Where are you?

  Despite Bradley’s strict “answer every text from an adult” rule, there was no response.

  At six thirty, she texted again: A? I would like an answer + ETA, pls.

  At six forty-five, she was wavering between fury and panic, and wasn’t sure which to choose. She called Maggie’s mother to ask if she knew where the girls were.

  “Maggie’s been home since a little after six,” the woman said. “I assumed she dropped Allie on the way. Let me go ask her.” Moments later, she was back. “Charlotte? Maggie says Allie wasn’t at soccer today.”

  Char chose panic.

  She texted Allie again, her trembling fingers creating a jumble of typos. No sccre? Whre yuo! I’n vry wirred.

  Still no response.

  Out of force of habit, she hit number one on her speed-dial list. “This is Bradley Hawthorn. Sorry I missed your call. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  For the past four months, the sound of his voice had soothed her, but now it only made her more afraid. He would not, in fact, get back to her. Nor would he walk through the front door any minute, put his hands on her shoulders, and tell her there was no need to worry, Allie was just fine. And he wouldn’t be there to ream the girl out when she finally did walk through the door—please God—with a gym bag full of excuses: My phone died. I got a ride with someone else and we stopped for food on the way. We didn’t think we’d be that long.

  Char dialed Colleen, who offered to come over.

  “No,” Char said. “Thanks. But it’s all me now. For the big, scary stuff, too. I can’t have you or my brother holding my hand every time something goes wrong. I have to deal with this on my own.” She walked to the living room window for the fifth time and peered out. “I can’t believe she skipped soccer tryouts today and didn’t tell me. That’s not like her.”

  “Skipped?” Colleen said. “She told Sydney she wasn’t going out for the team at all.”

  “What?” Char thought about last week and Allie’s clean-eating-to-make-varsity excuse for declining Char’s ice cream invitation

  “I assumed you knew,” Colleen said. “In fact, I was planning to ask you about it at lunch on Thursday.” For almost two years, they had had a standing weekly lunch on the CMU campus. Char didn’t have enough of a break between classes to get to one of the cafeterias and back, so Colleen brought lunch and they ate in Char’s broom closet of an office.

  “What the hell is going on with that kid?” Char said. She paced in front of the living room window, looking out every few seconds. It was the first time she had actually wanted to see Wes’s car pull up. “First these burnout kids, then her grades start sliding, and now she quits soccer before tryouts are over?

  “I let her talk me out of putting her in group therapy. You know, for bereaved teens. It was right after school on Tuesdays, so she’d have to miss soccer. She was coping fine, she said, so why make her risk her spot on the team for this waste-of-time therapy? And I went along with it. Meanwhile, she was ditching soccer anyway, and spending Tuesday afternoons doing who knows what with those kids.

  “Plus, her grades! Bradley would’ve grounded her until she got herself back to the top of the Dean’s List, but I bought her my-dad-just-died-what-do-you-want-from-me line and let her keep going out at night. I didn’t even ask if her homework was done—I didn’t want to give her that pressure. She told me these kids were helping her get over the grief, and I wanted her to have that help.

  “What about my grief? I lost my husband! I haven’t once asked her to help me get over that. And I’d never ask that. I’m the adult here, and she’s the child. I get it. But is it too much to expect that she would at least spare me from having to deal with this kind of anxiety when I already have enough on my plate? Now I’ve also got to spend an evening texting her and begging her to answer, calling all her teammates to see if they know where she is, pacing in my living room, wondering where she is and whether she’s okay?

  “I’ve heard things about that Justin. So help me God, if he has laid a finger on that child . . .” Char shook her head, refusing to imagine the possibilities. Her chest felt like it might explode and she put a hand on it. She held the phone away and took several deep breaths. I’m having trouble breathing would bring Colleen over in a second.

  Maybe she should stop venting. Maybe she was doing herself more harm than good by saying all of this out loud. But she had already initiated a crack in the dam. For months, she had been holding back her frustration, using all her strength to keep words like this from spilling over. Now that she had let some escape, there didn’t seem to be a way to keep it all from spewing out. She pressed her hand into her chest and massaged as she lifted the phone back to her mouth.

  “And I let her go out with him anyway,” she continued. “I thought about confronting her about it. I talked to Will for a long time about whether I should, and I decided not to. I didn’t want to jump in and make all these rules for her in her own home, you know? Her dad had just died, and she’s never really done anythi
ng wrong, and it didn’t seem like the right time to come down hard. Plus, she gave me this line about how Kate and Wes and Justin were such good friends to her. So much more helpful than . . .” She stopped, not wanting to implicate Sydney. “How they were so helpful to her grieving process. And I bought it. I took her word for it, and I went easy on her. And what do I get in return?

  “Consideration? Affection? Oh, no! She’s got all these reasons why she can’t spend even half an hour chatting with me before dinner, or going for ice cream. ‘I’ve got homework.’ ‘I’m watching my sugar intake because of tryouts.’ But she can spend hours upon hours with these kids, and she can go get ice cream with them and pizza.

  “Maybe I want company! Did she ever think of that? Maybe I’m lonely! Maybe my brother and all my friends—except you—are a thousand miles away! Maybe there’s nothing for me here, if she’s going to just run past me on her way to her room and on her way out the door.

  “Maybe it’d be better for me to be in D.C., or in South Carolina, where people want to spend time with me, help me with my grieving process. Maybe that would be better for me than hanging around here for the sake of a kid who does her best to avoid me and, when she can’t, looks me right in the eye and lies to me!”

  Char stopped her pacing, crossed to the couch, and flopped down. She was debating whether she should wait for Colleen to speak, or launch into another round of venting, when the front door opened and Allie called, “I’m home!”

  Twenty-six

  Colleen spoke, but her voice grew faint and tinny as the phone slid out of Char’s hand, bounced on the couch, and fell to the floor. She flew to the front hall, leaping down the three steps from the living room without slowing.

  Allie stood inside the door, her shoulders halfway to her ears with tension, arms bent rigidly at her sides as though she was ready for a fight. It was the first time she had done something so wrong on Char’s watch. I dare you to make something of it, her body language goaded. But her face said something very different. Her cheeks were a patchwork of red, and her eyes, shining with liquid, flitted from the floor to the hall table to the mirror to the ceiling and everything in between—except for Char’s face.

  Brace yourself, kid, while I tell you exactly what I’m going to make of it, Char thought. But the thought was fleeting, and she left it at the bottom of the stairs as she hurled herself toward Allie and wrapped her arms around her.

  All of the things she had said to Colleen were true. Her frustration and anger had been real. It still was. But relief filled her now, and it pushed aside the other emotions. Not forever, but for now.

  For now, the girl was home, and that was all that mattered.

  “Thank God you’re okay!”

  Allie teetered back with the force of Char’s embrace and they both let out a laugh, which, for Allie, turned immediately into a sob.

  “It’s okay,” Char said, holding her tighter and kissing her temple. “It’s okay. Oh my God.” She laughed again, with relief. “You’re okay! I was so worried.” She kissed the crying teenager again.

  “I’m so sorry,” Allie said, her voice in the high note of someone talking and crying at the same time. “I decided to go out with Kate and the guys after school and they promised we’d be back before six so I didn’t think it would matter, really, whether I was with them or at the soccer field, but then they had another stop to make, and then another, and I thought I had lost my phone, and when I finally found it, I saw you had called and texted and I saw how late it was, and I’m so sorry I didn’t call or text you back and let you know but I was safe the whole time and I’m so sorry you were worried. . . .

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about not trying out for soccer but I can’t deal with it, Char, I can’t deal right now with the . . . obligation . . . it just feels like too much, first Dad’s gone and now Morgan, and I have no idea when—or if—I’ll ever be moving to my mom’s, and I’ve been so stressed about that and wondering if she even wants me to move out there since her plans keep changing and my room keeps not getting decorated and there’s always some new excuse why ‘now isn’t the right time.’ . . .

  “And then with the whole Morgan thing, I feel like it just pushed me over the edge, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with anything extra so I told the coach I didn’t want to try out, and I should have told you first and I’m so so so sorry.”

  Allie let her forehead fall to Char’s shoulder, as though the effort of her apology had exhausted her.

  “You’re right,” Char said. “You should have told me where you were. We’re going to need to talk about that. But we don’t have to do it this second, when we’re both emotional.” She kissed the girl again. “It can wait. For now, let’s go eat.”

  In the kitchen, she moved a pot of soup from the middle of the stove back to a burner. “I heated this before, and then took it off. I think it’ll be fine if I warm it up, but I’m not sure. It’s Colleen’s chicken noodle.”

  “I’m sorry,” Allie said from her seat at the counter.

  “I wasn’t trying to make a point,” Char said, looking over her shoulder. “I was only thinking that the noodles might fall apart. Sometimes reheating does that. But we can dump it and find something else.”

  “There are a few other options in there,” Allie said, nodding toward the freezer, newly restocked by Colleen.

  Char slanted her eyes to the ceiling. “That woman.” She turned back to the soup and stirred it. “She tells me Sydney knew you were quitting.”

  “She tried to talk me out of it.”

  “Mmm,” Char said.

  “Are you going to try to talk me out of it, too?”

  Char laughed and struck a decidedly uncoordinated pose. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m not what you’d call ‘athletic.’ I think it’s amazing you’ve done field hockey and soccer all these years. And by amazing, I mean a little crazy. So, no, I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. Do the things you want to do and don’t worry about the rest.

  “I know there’s the whole extracurricular list to think about for college applications. But you did two sports freshman year, and you did that prom-planning committee thing last spring, too. Field hockey and tutoring this year. I think you’re in good shape, don’t you? Remember what Mr. Slavin said when we met with him in the fall: colleges don’t need to see three pages of activities. They need to see you doing things that truly interest you. Don’t go through the motions in soccer if your heart’s not in it.”

  Allie wrote something on the counter with an index finger. “My mom won’t be happy about soccer, especially since I might have made varsity. On the other hand, she’ll be thrilled that I’m not tutoring anymore.” She moved her finger to her phone and touched each of the buttons. “I’m not looking forward to telling her about the team.”

  Char tasted the soup. “Another minute or two, and I think we’ll be good,” she said. “Look, I think you can avoid some stress about the soccer thing. The last few times your mom has called me to check in, she hasn’t even asked about it. I think she might have forgotten it’s a spring sport in high school. So, you might have a get-out-of-jail-free card on this one.”

  Setting down her spoon, she turned around to face Allie, expecting to find a relieved smile on the girl’s face. She found two wet eyes instead. Char wanted to smack herself on the head with the soup ladle. Of course Allie didn’t see “Your mother likely forgot you’re even in soccer right now” as a good thing.

  “I’m an idiot,” Char said. “I’m sorry. I meant that as a consolation, but obviously, it’s not one.” Moving quickly, she turned off the burner, reached into the cupboard for two bowls, and ladled the soup, all while keeping up a light prattle designed to distract Allie’s attention from the clueless remark. “I tell you what. It’s been a tough night for both of us. Let’s take dinner into the family room and eat with the TV on. Okay?”r />
  But Allie was on her feet now, halfway to the stairs.

  “Allie?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Allie whispered.

  “Oh, sweetie. I didn’t mean to upset you. I only meant to relieve some pressure, to let you know you might not have to face that conversation right now.”

  “I . . .” Allie’s voice broke. She spun around and ran up the stairs, and Char could hear her crying as she went.

  Twenty-seven

  So,” Colleen asked at lunch in Char’s office on Thursday. She reached into the cloth tote bag she had set on the desk and pulled out a container of salad, two plastic bowls, and two forks.

  Char frowned. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your bringing lunch . . .”

  “Oh, this is just for show,” Colleen said. “I haven’t gotten to the good stuff yet.” When she brought her hand out again, she held a Ziploc with two chunks of thick sourdough bread, a plastic-wrapped triangle of Brie, a cheese knife, and two gigantic chocolate chip cookies. “Oh, and these,” she said, pulling out two cans of Sanpellegrino Limonata.

  “That’s my girl,” Char said.

  “Catch me up on what’s been going on since Tuesday,” Colleen said, cutting wedges of Brie. “Did you finally confront Allie about Justin, and soccer, and all the rest of it?”

  “No. When I saw her standing in the front hall, safe, alive, I was so overcome with relief that I couldn’t bring myself to confront her. And then at dinner, I said something wrong and she stormed off in tears. So.” She lifted her shoulders.

  “Another time.”

  “Exactly,” Char said. “And actually, I was thinking this morning that maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get to talk to her about it that night anyway. Because I think there’s something else I need to tell her first, before I launch into a big lecture about who’s in charge and who needs to obey. And I didn’t realize it until this morning.”