Free Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline

their own reality? Does shutting out fear keep disaster at bay?
To enjoy your life, she thinks, you must ignore so much, discount the possibility of tragedy, deny the evil that shadows hope. That seems impossible to her. But it is sobering to contemplate that this bleak awareness might define her future—that she can’t trust others, so she won’t make herself vulnerable, so she is destined to move through a random series of superficial relationships. There may be less to lose that way, but it is, she knows, a lesser life.
She has forgotten so much. She has willed herself to forget. She has forgotten what it is like to feel, and she isn’t sure she wants to remember. Like water from a well that takes a while to run clear, pain would come first, and she’s not sure she has the faith to wait for something better.
A car honks, and she opens her eyes. Looking around, she realizes that car after car is slowing beside her, trying to determine if she needs help.
KATHRYN DOESN’T WANT to go home, but she doesn’t know what else to do. She passes the Broadway exit and then, instead of continuing north indefinitely, gets off at the Bangor Mall. When she was growing up here, the mall was a shopping oasis in acres of farmland, but now it’s surrounded by complexes and megastores. The farmland is virtually gone.
Heading down the long entrance road to the mall, Kathryn approaches the loop that surrounds it. She’s always been confused by the array of tributaries and side exits that intersect the loop, and at the fork she hesitates. She’s not sure what she’s doing here or what she wants to find, so she doesn’t know which way to go. Like a homing pigeon sheveers left with the traffic, past the back entrance of Sears, and turns into the parking lot at Porteous, the place she always used to park in high school—the only store for a hundred miles where you could find Clinique cosmetics.
The mall was a second home to her then. On gray winter days when there was nothing to do, she and Jennifer would drive to the mall and roam around aimlessly, in and out of the Gap and Spencer Gifts, getting a Blizzard from the Dairy Queen booth, stopping at the pet store to see the hyperactive puppies in their stacked cages. They knew the mall as well as they knew the high school—where the cool kids hung out, where the hidden bathrooms were, which days certain stores got their shipments. They went to the mall to lose themselves, but also they went there to be found. Everyone ended up there eventually; it was the unifying center of a centerless town.
Thinking back now, Kathryn realizes that these were some of the best times she and Jennifer had together—giggling, sharing secret jokes, sitting at the fountain near the entrance and assessing the high school guys who sauntered past grinning at them, affecting nonchalance. She felt closer to Jennifer then than she’d ever been with anyone. “It’s like having another twin, being friends with you,” Jennifer told her. “God forbid,” Kathryn said, but she was secretly thrilled to have a sister, a twin, to no longer feel separate and alone.
Now, walking past the jewelry shops screaming “50% off” and the empty shoe stores, Kathyrn can see that the mall is no longer the center of Bangor’s shopping universe. There are too many new establishments out there on the periphery, too many superstores offering cheaper prices and a better selection. Years ago her parents and their friends lamented the coming of the mall and the slow death of the downtown, but they had no idea how things would evolve—that one day the mall itself would come to seem quaint and old-fashioned, a modest relic of a simpler time.
At Cosmos Pizza Kathryn gets a Diet Coke with lots of ice in a giant paper cup and sips it slowly through a straw as she makes her way downthe promenade, stopping every now and then to look in a store window. She pretends to be checking out the merchandise, but she’s actually watching the