Where We Fall: A Novel

by Rochelle B. Weinstein

  Quinci’s luggage didn’t make it to Charlotte, and she is about to sue someone at US Airways. She’s screaming and swearing into her cell phone about the airline ruining her trip while holding up her finger and telling me, “One sec.”

  She hangs up and greets me with a kiss on both cheeks. “Isn’t that how you greet people from Europe?” she asks through a mane of black hair and blue eyes. “Don’t look so surprised, Lauren, I’ll be gone the day after tomorrow.”

  I laugh at her. “Who checks luggage for two days in the mountains?”

  “Who has a vacation home in the middle of Nowheresville?” she shoots back.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, guiding her through the house and to the sofa.

  “You, my friend, need a pep talk. And I need to see what you’ve got for me.” Then she reaches inside her ginormous pocketbook and applies a thick line of red across her lips. “Besides, the way you talk about this place, I thought I’d make a mini-vacation out of it. “It’s pretty,” she says, barely looking up from her compact and missing the view completely. “But where’s the mall?”

  Q can be funny when she’s not so demanding. Her bag isn’t supposed to arrive for twenty-four hours, and she is hard-pressed to be without her cosmetics and hair products for that long. Before she calls her attorney, who—she has reminded me three times—also represents Phillip Margolin, we are Google mapping directions for the fifty-minute journey to Johnson City, to the closest store, which happens to be Target.

  The house is quiet without the clickety-clack of Quinci’s heels. I hope she heeds my advice and picks up a pair of suitable shoes for the terrain.

  Collapsing on the couch with the not-yet-named manuscript in my hand, I reach for the remote and switch through rows of channels. The soft voices on the local news remind me that I’m jet-lagged, and I fall back on the brown leather cushions and close my eyes.

  The waves of emotion strike me hard. It is a lashing I have since forgotten, but being in this house brings it back all over again. It hurts more than I am willing to admit. So many years have passed, and it feels like only days. Maybe less. Could I have been foolish enough to think that hiding among the cracks and crevices of nature would heal me? And did any of it matter when starting anew had only led me back to where it all began?

  The waterfall book rests against my chest. The story began immediately after college when I set off on a post-graduate photography program under renowned photographer Jean-Pierre Guichard. The focus of the six-month journey was to photograph the world’s most majestic cascades: New Zealand, Croatia, Venezuela. I had plunged into the journey headfirst, leaving my present life behind. In some ways, it helped knowing Ryan wasn’t right there, so accessible to me. I had to let go of him in order to fully experience the land without limits. Loving Ryan was never an issue; he was in my heart. He knew I’d be unavailable for stretches of time while I hid behind my camera and the priceless views. And by sharing the pictures with him, I could see things through his eyes that my own could not.

  Then everything fell apart. My trip was cut short.

  Instead of traveling the world to places like Canada, Iceland, and Brazil, I was pushed in another direction, one that landed me in a flat owned by one of Jean-Pierre’s friends in South Kensington, London. There I wrote novels under the pen name Virginia Sutherland, after the New Zealand and Zimbabwe falls that had been on my itinerary. Iceland’s Seljalandsfoss falls were a good choice, but the pronunciation made Quinci’s head spin, so we ruled it out.

  If Ryan were a waterfall, he would be the Detian Falls on the border of China and Vietnam. Constant and contained, beautiful in their simplicity. That was before. After, he would become Canada’s Virginia Falls. Brash and contradictory, tumbling out of control down an unruly abyss.

  Because my eyes have failed me since I was a child, I grew to rely on the precision of the camera’s lens to capture what I couldn’t trust my eyes to see. At times I’d close my eyes and listen. The water spoke to me in a language only I could decipher. A trickling meant peace; a river, the seduction of impermanence. Whether thrashing falls or a docile surge, water has taught me that nothing remains unchanged. We can move beyond self-imposed limits. When sleep eludes me, the stream outside my bedroom window lulls me to sleep. My favorite trails have followed winding paths of weeping water. Water inspires me, and the falls are a pursuit I always need to follow. They were why I first left Ryan all those years ago, and the reason I stayed away for too long.

  Having Quinci here is a welcome distraction. The publishing house has been breathing down her neck, so it makes sense she’s breathing down mine.

  Anyone who knows the workings of the publishing world knows that it is almost impossible for an unknown author to make it through the slush pile. Quinci was an ambitious warrior, which worked to my advantage. It began on a whim. After completing my first novel, I sent a query letter to her newly formed agency in Manhattan, and instead of outright rejecting me or requesting the first fifty pages, Quinci broke all the rules: she picked up the phone and called me in the London flat. She was impressed with my note and asked for the entire manuscript.

  Within seventy-two hours, we were back on the phone. It was the most talking I had done in months.

  “Who hurt you?” she came right out and asked.

  “What makes you think I’ve been hurt?”

  “I’m a trained reader,” she said. “There’s loss buried deep in your words.”

  “I have a keen imagination,” I said, careful to bury the feelings that came along with it. “Besides, London has a lot of stories. There’s a tale everywhere you look.”

  “It reads very personally.”

  “That happens when you write your characters in the first person,” I said.

  “It’s got to be therapeutic to be able to release your demons that way. Your writing possesses such depth. You have the makings of a bestseller.”

  I laughed. The novel was a lark. My life course had shifted. Ryan and I were over. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t look at waterfalls. Visiting theaters and wandering the streets at dusk in London were my salvation. Writing was a cathartic pastime.

  “I feel like I know you,” she said, “the you who’s played by Helene.”

  “Everyone thinks they know the author. We’re not all protagonists.”

  “You’re not the least bit romantic, wandering the globe in search of waterfalls? You refer to them like old lovers.”

  She wasn’t wrong. The fingers of the falls had touched me deeply. Joy and pain trickled down those mountains. It was not easy to give them up.

  “You must have really loved Patrick.”

  I let the memory wash through me.

  “He sounds like one hell of a guy. I’d never let someone like him go.”

  I bit my lip. I hadn’t let Patrick go. He had let go of me.

  At Davidson when I fell for Ryan, I had just returned from a fourth date with Thomas Howard III. He was a likable enough guy who was exactly what you’d expect of a Thomas Howard III. But my thoughts would flit back to the arrogant boy in my psych class, even while Thomas’s lips were pressed against mine. I couldn’t admit it at the time, but I liked how Ryan teased me in front of a dozen pairs of eyes. The attention was thrilling, even though he was the antithesis of the guys I usually dated. I knew he was special when I returned to my dorm and found the bouquet of orange tulips. He later told me they matched my hair and how he would one day bury his face in there. I shivered when he made bold statements like that, and the quivering propelled me to do things I would otherwise never have done.

  Thomas and I spent our fourth date studying at the library before heading over to the Soda Shop for some shakes. Returning to Belk Hall, he expected I would invite him inside, and I did, though what happened next to this day sends an ache down my body.

  Abby was at a movie with some girls from the floor, and Thomas sprawled himself across my bed. An irony of college living is that these tiny spaces are creat
ed with two pieces of furniture: a desk and a twin bed. Though adults encourage kids not to have sex, once you pass over the threshold of your dorm room, you are essentially on a mattress. Thomas was handsome in a Dead Poets Society way—fair haired, blue eyed. His teeth were a little darker than I liked, but he was kind and opened doors and wanted to be a dentist. Go figure.

  Our communal bathroom was down the hall, and while Thomas stretched his long limbs across my deep blue comforter, I walked the few yards to its metal door. Ryan popped out of nowhere and pulled me down the hall. I saw the bathroom retreat behind me, though the heat that emanated from Ryan’s hand doubled my pace.

  Before my feet touched the ground, I was in the side stairwell used for emergencies, and Ryan had lightly pressed me up against the wall. Someone had opened the window in the dimly lit space, and a temperate breeze nipped at my bare shoulders, but I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t Ryan’s looming presence wrapped around me.

  I was wearing a sheer, coral sleeveless dress that fell right above the knees. Ryan was in jeans and a gray flannel button-down. Ryan moved his body closer to mine, so close I could feel his heart through his shirt. His hands found my cheeks. He wouldn’t let me look away.

  “Thomas is in my room.”

  “I know.”

  I looked to the floor, ashamed, and Ryan forced my eyes to find his again.

  “What do you want, Lauren?”

  None of it made sense, and everything fell into place—Ryan putting his lips on mine; Ryan holding me like he couldn’t let me go; Ryan breathing me in like air, filling me up with sky. I whispered, silently, the answer to his lips, his neck, his hair: you.

  I’ll admit. I didn’t think about Thomas Howard III at all.

  “He’s going to wonder where I am.”

  “Tell him you’re with me.”

  “I am with you,” I confessed.

  “Do you know how long I’ve wanted this?” he asked.

  I kissed him hard. His arms fell around me, and I melted into the grooves of his shoulders and chest. I had become one of those horrible girls who strings a boy along only to drop him for someone else. Not necessarily someone better, but someone who had drowned out the noises of the world and made it so I was spoiled for anyone else, a boy whose voice filled every part of my body, whose eyes I trusted to see things for me when mine could not.

  When he backed away, I felt a mild panic inside. I didn’t want to return to the other world. I didn’t want to deal with Thomas on my bed, and have to explain what I didn’t understand myself.

  His fingers found my chin, and they lifted it up to meet his face. “Tell me you haven’t thought about kissing me?”

  “I think about you a lot,” I said.

  “Why are you dating Thomas?”

  “He asked me.”

  Ryan took my hands in his, lacing his fingers through each one, and held them close to his heart. “I’m asking you.”

  My face burned from his words.

  “You’re so beautiful, Lauren Sheppard.”

  Ryan Holden.

  His name is stuffed in a memory carriage I grew to avoid, and now it is resounding from somewhere else, somewhere real I cannot wake up from. I hear it again—and Ryan Holden addressed the media today—I open my eyes to Ryan staring at me on the screen. I jolt upright and reach for my glasses.

  It is him. Ryan. And my entire body comes alive. Years strip away. My heart slips away from me.

  Time can change a person, but it hasn’t changed Ryan. Everything good about him is better, except the noticeable frustration that lines his face. I wrap the blanket around me even tighter to protect myself from the feelings that are piling up. He is talking about his team and the struggles his players are facing this season. Under the footage, the ticker reads “Pine Ridge Poised to Win Championship Again?”

  Mom and Dad don’t have a DVR, so when I try to rewind and listen to what he was saying, the message is gone. I hear his voice, the deep inflection of how he cares about this team. The same whisper that would wake me in the morning and kiss my cheeks at night. His eyes are honest and pained, but a beautiful swirl of deep green and brown, and the scar above his eyebrow has hardly faded. It is hard to look and not feel cheated of the years I missed. He was mine, and I was his. Forever. We had agreed on that. Now I am looking at a stranger, though I swear he feels me staring back at him. And he is telling me how he misses me, and I am blushing because it feels so good.

  As I sit here, on the couch where Ryan and I wrapped ourselves around each other too many times to count, I wonder if my choosing the land first, before Ryan, sealed our fate. His mouth tosses words into the air, and his eyes tell me he is the same gracious man I fell in love with when we were young. It strikes me with little warning, like a gushing fall slapping the pool of water below—the seal of the cracks has been only temporary. I may have forgotten how his lips taste against my tongue, but I have not forgotten what being around him does to my heart. A stirring within is erasing what I had seen and what caused me to run. Ryan betrayed me, but hadn’t I betrayed him first? Somewhere in the blurred perspective there is truth.

  This longing begins in my belly and moves through my chest and lungs. It is physical, like sex, and nostalgia laces with unforgotten memory. I can feel him pressing deep into my skin. My protective layer crumbles just at the sound of his voice.

  Seventeen years is a long time. I had thought I left those long-ago feelings and sensations behind, though being here thrusts Ryan into my head, like the thrashing of the falls.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ABBY

  I awake refreshed and eager to begin the day’s dig. Rose is gone, quietly slipping out to her morning yoga on the deck. Tamar has left her imprint in my body. Last night, she explained how the energy of any electronic devices interferes with the work she does, so she asked me to refrain from turning them on. Though I thought she was nutty, I couldn’t refute the state of calm my body had seemed to casually enter. It was hardly a sacrifice. I had relinquished my cell phone and Internet access when I arrived. Being cut off from the device has been good for me.

  I have much to consider. The doctors and my personal peace corps have laid out the groundwork, and it is up to me to decide my fate. Struggling with mental illness is a lifelong, full-time job. It invades every crevice of the mind and body, and when it is dormant, it will later resurface when you are most vulnerable. I remember watching an infomercial that promised to cure anxiety. I was suffering from agoraphobia at the time, and it seemed logical to order the $399 manual, complete with ten CDs for relaxation, meditation, and self-talk that would be delivered to our front door. The thing that really hooked me—besides not having to leave the house—was when the pretty lady on the screen bellowed, “How far down do you have to go before deciding to make a change? How long are you willing to suffer?”

  When I found that picture in Ryan’s drawer, lava poured through my veins. Jeannie had said, “It’s not the emotion, but rather the level of intensity.” My eruption had been volcanic.

  A knock at the door resounds, and I rise to let Ryan in. Before kissing me hello, he walks over to the TV, the only electronic device allowed, and with the flick of a switch, I learn of the ongoing allegations facing one of his players. Because the player in question is a minor, they don’t use his name, though I can tell by Ryan’s eyes that the drama is centered on my daughter’s boyfriend.

  My on-screen husband looks tired and beaten. He is trying to keep in step with the reporters’ questions, but I can see through his steely reserve. They are provoking him with bristling theories. His eyes are glossy red. He clasps his hands together and waits for the frenzy to pass, in an attempt to regain some composure, though it doesn’t work. They poke and badger, and Ryan is irate.

  “Just awful,” he says, gesturing at the television.

  “What happened?” I ask, taking a seat at the edge of the bed. “How come nobody told me?”

  “There’s nothing you could’ve done. E.J.�
�s being stupid, and now they’re charging him with a crime he didn’t commit.”

  I ask about our daughter.

  “Not good,” he says, coming closer to the bed. “She’s in with Jeannie now.” Part of treatment means family members have to meet with a counselor. “It was a fight, but I got her through the door. More important, how you doin’?” he asks, changing the subject completely. This is one of my husband’s many gifts. He can turn the table so that everything has to do with me, and for years I lapped it up, taking a seat at the head. When you’re stuck in your mind the majority of the day, it is easy to forget that other people have problems. But today feels oddly different. Which is why I begin to cry. At first quiet whimpers escape, which turn into loud heaving noises. Snot drips down my face, and Ryan cleans it with his finger before finding a tissue beside by the bed. That’s what he does. That’s how deeply he loves me.

  “Baby, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I think those pills are unlocking my sadness. I cry a lot in here.” Or maybe Tamar’s palms are unleashing something else.

  He takes one of my hands in his and when the tears slow down, I tell him two words: “I’m sorry.”

  It’s not the first time I’ve uttered those words. For years I have apologized for my weaknesses, my sickness, things beyond my control, though today’s apology is for what Ryan is blind to, things he could never know. Things I never told him and the carefully constructed story I will have to unwind. Not today. Today I must be sure that he’s okay.

  “Tell me about E.J.,” I say.

  “The police got a tip that the Whittaker boys had something to do with a burglary. Buford showed up at the field like a bull and called E.J. out in front of the team. He didn’t steal the jewelry, but he may as well have, the guilty way he ran away from Buford’s questions. He took it from his brother and hid it at Ruby’s. Knucklehead thought he could fix it.” His voice trails off because he had known the likelihood of something like this happening.