Where We Fall: A Novel

by Rochelle B. Weinstein

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Coach,” E.J. says.

  “Yes, you do. You both do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  RYAN

  The drive to Cold Creek feels longer than usual. I would have skipped Ellis’s funeral if not for E.J. The boy feigned control, but I knew he was about to break. We decided as a team we would show our support for one of our own. Devon was there, a shade healthier than the days before, and beside him was Ruby, impossibly elegant in her bright purple dress and matching hat. The woman has a heart as big as her floor-length black jacket. No matter how awful Ellis had become, Ruby was there for her children when they needed her.

  I don’t particularly care for cemeteries. They remind me of what I’ve lost, the two parents I’ve buried, and I don’t like the feeling of vulnerability. My daughter stood beside me. She dressed in black, which made her seem older than sixteen, more like a woman whose childhood leaked from her eyes. I saw how she yearned for E.J. to face her. I knew she wants so badly for things to be the way they once were. How easy to revert back to the familiar and unchanged.

  I should have listened to the prayers, but I have never been one to pray openly or believe in God. I think we all have a higher power within us that we hold ourselves up to, and against, in times of need. To me, prayer is positive thought.

  The reverend spoke a few words and the small number of guests and family members tipped their hats to the stricken Whittakers. The sturdy casket was draped with a single bouquet, a token provided by the funeral home. It was a cold November, and the forecasters had predicted an early storm that would frost the stark trees. A cloud from his breath filled the sky when he spoke, forming a misty veil above his head. I was convinced the cold was Ellis’s spirit collecting all the warmth from the air. Just as he stripped those around him of life, he could transform the air into thick, unbreathable swells.

  Looking down at the casket, I imagined how days earlier I was standing across from Ellis while he antagonized me and my daughter. Then in a sliver of night sky, only hours later, he was gone. Poof! Like that. Senseless crimes rock me to the very core, and even though Ellis’s demise was by no means a surprise to anyone in our town, the finality of his death sent ripples throughout the community.

  The sadness snuck inside my jacket and grabbed hold of my throat. It would not let go.

  I pulled at my tie, thinking I could breathe more easily without the confining fabric around my neck. The tie was my favorite, or Abby’s, because what was best for her quickly became best for me. I always attributed that to being a guy who didn’t care about what he wore, though it was probably more than that.

  The ring of the phone is shrill, echoing through the truck’s speaker system. My cell is in the glove compartment. It’s there whenever I drive, so I’m not tempted to peek. ESPN and MaxPreps send me notifications daily. After I had made a few too many risky moves behind the wheel—checking my texts—I learned to tuck it away. Now I hit “send” on the screen next to the wheel and the phone connects. Her voice is so close, her breath is on my cheeks.

  “Ryan, I’m sorry to bother you,” she says.

  If I weren’t driving, I’d shut my eyes and let her soft voice take me somewhere far away. Somewhere I might rest my head and sleep. Somewhere I might imagine what could’ve been, what might’ve been, had she not left. A haven free of criminal parents and a wife who is sick.

  “Ryan?” she says my name again.

  “I’m here.”

  “Can we talk?”

  Something about Lauren has always loosened me, weakened my ability to control myself. I clear my throat, ignoring her request. “Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened?” I ask.

  She is silent, and I imagine her draped across the couch that’s overlooking the mountains. I think about how my words are wearing away at the walls we put up.

  “If you hadn’t left,” I repeat, “do you ever wonder what would’ve happened to us?”

  She whispers, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Come on, Laur, I know you. Every inch of you. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

  I should tell her I love her. That I never stopped loving her. Her face and her eyes followed me around for years, staying with me long after we first said good-bye. It takes all my strength to keep my thoughts to myself.

  “I’ll be driving through Charlotte this week on the way to shoot the last of the falls. Can we grab coffee?”

  “Didn’t we say everything we had to say at the house?”

  “No,” she says, “we didn’t.”

  As I pass through the stone entryway, the private drive tugs me away from Lauren and hoists me toward my wife. “I’m pulling into Cold Creek,” I say.

  “I need to see you.”

  Hearing Lauren, the person I have quietly loved my entire life, tell me that she needs to see me feels like rain as I stand in a desert. My whole body awakens. But just as swiftly as the raindrops cover me, they evaporate.

  “The café at the bookstore? Say, three o’clock?”

  “I moved on, Lauren. Isn’t that what you wanted me to do?”

  The quiet space between us edges us close and then apart.

  “I’ll be there,” she says. “If you change your mind.”

  She hangs up, and I’m not sure if she said good-bye. The media screen on the dashboard reads, “Call ended.” The finality of it all cuts me every time. Good-byes always confuse me.

  I wrap my coat around my shoulders and head toward Cold Creek’s visitor center. The afternoon is as depressing as my mood: dark and mean. Abby waits for me where she always sits when she knows I’m coming, beside the fireplace, sipping some herbal tea that helps her sleep. She stands up to greet me, and even though we both try to find each other’s lips, we instead greet each other warmly on the cheek. Her hair is pulled back off her face in an orange strip of fabric, and her lips have a pink shine. She looks twenty-one again in her tight jeans and sweater.

  We walk hand in hand outside. This is what we do. Despite being alienated from the monotony of our marriage, we have found a way to make our separation as predictable and comfortable as home. Abby takes me outside to one of the many trails on the grounds, and we walk and talk. The cold bites at our fingers and feet. I ask her if she’s warm enough, and she tells me she is. “I’ve grown used to having another layer around me,” and I know at once she doesn’t mean a jacket. It’s what they’re teaching her in here. I’m getting pretty used to the insights that pop out of Abby’s mouth—she calls them “balance-enhancing phrases” that keep her whole. What the heck do I know? I’m a football coach.

  We set out along the perimeter trail, a walking path that runs parallel to a stream. The water is scarce this time of year, and the trickle helps me relax. I tell her about E.J. and Ellis, and she apologizes for her absence. “Juliana needs me.”

  “She’s a good girl. She knows this is the best thing for all of us.”

  “I miss her,” she says, turning to me.

  I know I should hug her. That is the cue for one of us to make the gesture toward the other. Instead, we stare into each other’s eyes until one of us turns away. Abby is very different from when I last visited. She has lost something, but she has gained something too. I don’t know what it is, but it’s the reason I keep my distance, and probably the reason she keeps hers.

  When neither of us initiates contact, we resume our walk and forgo our usual seat in the garden. Abby talks with her hands. Today they are darting out in front of her. She’s distracted. Something big is on her mind. “Why are we doing this?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “We’re pretending everything is normal when it’s not. It’s freezing frickin’ cold out here, and we walk the same path every time we meet even though it doesn’t take us anywhere.”

  “I thought you liked walking. You said you liked when things are orderly and predictable.”

  She sighs. It’s a big one.
r />   “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  She waves her fingers in the air, and I see that Sybil has painted her nails a new dark color, to match her eyes. “You just don’t get it.” Then she turns from me and heads inside.

  I follow her through the doorway of her room. Sybil and Rose don’t even try to get me to play games with them. Despite how much better my wife looks, the girls are eyeing me, signaling for me to be cautious as they file from the room.

  I throw myself across her twin bed with the frilly yellow comforter and sheets, arms folded behind my head. She’s in the nearby rocker, which she’s dragged to the side of the bed. The room feels too small for us, for all our problems. I begin by saying, “I thought you were doing better. What do the doctors say?”

  The hands come to life again. “They say I’ve made significant progress, though it would be nice if you noticed the change so I didn’t have to point it out.”

  I look at my wife, and I am trapped in a maze of helplessness. I bow my head and she goes into more detail about her therapy and what she calls the “masterful web that had her brain on fire.” It’s unsettling, heavy stuff, and my mind can’t immediately wrap itself around the conclusions she’s drawing, or adjust to the degrees of complexity that, at times, make my wife a stranger.

  “I’ve learned a lot—I know this is gibberish to you—a lot of self-reflection and how to let go of blame and anger. To accept others, and myself.” She is hardly talking to me. Her eyes are focused on something on the wall, and she’s brushing her fingers through her hair. “Some stuff’s been easier to look at than the other.”

  Then I remember, and before I can rope the words in, they charge from my mouth.

  “She was here, wasn’t she?”

  “How did you know?” she asks, the accusation lining her face.

  “I had a feeling this would happen.”

  “You knew? You knew she was back in town?”

  I should sit up, but I am pretending this information doesn’t unnerve me. I’m not sure why I have failed to mention that I saw her and that her voice was in my ears only moments ago. Her presence is all around us, beginning with the picture Abby found in my drawer, proof that it was impossible for the three of us to fully separate. The stop and go of my heart is almost as distracting. Lauren is the puppeteer, masterfully pulling on our strings.

  Abby blinks. Her hands fall to the sides of the chair. “I can’t believe this.” And I wait for her attack, but it doesn’t come. “Look at us, look at us keeping things from each other . . . It can’t work like this. Seeing her was hard, but she was right . . . I failed her, and you, and I can live with that, but not with the goddamn secrets.”

  I don’t know what to say. Talking about Lauren hurts. I sit up and try to rid myself of the feelings. “I think we failed her together.”

  “No,” she starts, and then stops herself. I watch her finger the arms of the rocking chair. The chair tips close to the bed and then slowly away. She looks serious and scared.

  Abby continues: “This is when I’m supposed to tell you how she destroyed you when she abandoned you. How she didn’t bother calling or showing up. She didn’t care about either one of us, but mostly she didn’t care about you. Always you. That’s what you want to hear, right?”

  I’m confused, though I say what I believe she wants me to say: “It doesn’t matter, Abs. It was a long time ago. We were young. Things happened the way they were supposed to happen.”

  “If I say those things, you’ll feel better about that night. You’ll feel less guilty, right? It’ll help for a few minutes, until the next time. We’ve been so good at relieving ourselves of our guilt because it’s been so easy to blame Lauren.” I’m not sure where she’s going with this, and I feel her bracing herself for something big. She is watching my reactions like a hawk. I feel naked under her stare. She breaks the silence: “How much do you love me, Ryan?”

  I feel like this is a trick question. My body tenses and I finger the band around my left ring finger. “You know how I feel about you, Abby.”

  “That’s not really an answer,” she says, and I notice a cloudiness to her eyes. They are about to cry. “Did you ever love me the way you once loved her?”

  I search the comforter for the answer, anything to avoid looking at those tears. Of course I love Abby, but it’s different from my love for Lauren. How could I compare the level of love I’ve felt for any two people? Feelings are too complicated. She leans forward and takes my hand in one of hers while the other grabs hold of my chin. She does this so I can’t turn away. She looks frightened and determined all at once.

  The seriousness of her face matches the gravity of her words. She speaks slowly, deliberately: “If I told you that Lauren had shown up, that she hadn’t abandoned you, that she was there for you, would we be together today?”

  “What does it matter?” I say, shaking my head, pushing the possibility away. “She wasn’t there.”

  She settles back in the chair, grabbing the handles. Her hair falls against her shoulders, and the words fall off her tongue as though she had practiced them for years: “She was there, Ryan. I saw her. She saw me.”

  It takes me a minute to put together what she’s saying. The force of the blow knocks the air out of me, and I feel myself moving away from her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Lauren. She came for you.”

  I am sure she is joking or testing me or playing some twisted hoax. I even let out a laugh. “Lauren wasn’t there. I would’ve known. She would’ve let me know.”

  “I was on top of you, Ryan. Do I need to remind you? She was there.” The rest of it comes out from a distant place inside of her I don’t even recognize. Her face is emotionless. “I can’t say why she didn’t call out, but I saw her standing there in the doorway.”

  I drop my head in my hands and turn away from her. She is talking to me, and I hear bits of what’s coming from her mouth, but it’s muffled by the sounds of my denials. My shoulders hunch forward. I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear how Abby has manipulated the truth.

  “Before I could say anything, she was gone.”

  “It’s not possible,” I hear myself say. My fingers run through my hair in disbelief. No. It can’t be! If she were there, everything would be different. What happened that day was wrong, but it had made sense because Lauren wasn’t there. It was her absence that had let us act without reason.

  “It’s possible,” she whispers.

  Her words seep inside me, where they mix with an assortment of misgivings weighing me down. Years of my life have been stolen. Possibilities have been burned to the ground. They fight with one another to come out. I am disciplined enough to keep them from the surface. “You saw her?”

  “I did.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  She rocks back and forth in the wooden chair. I want to grab hold of the chair’s arms and shake it, shake her, toss them both across the room. The brown of her eyes is filled with tears. I can’t even begin to process this information. There is no way to know how.

  Lauren. She was there.

  Lauren walked in on me having sex with her best friend.

  It has been too long, but I know the number of years by heart. The betrayal shouldn’t hit me as hard as it does. It feels like yesterday—the sting, raw and bubbly. Her eyes invade my memory. Her long legs, the orange wisps of hair. I built a future based on lies, on facts my wife chose to rearrange and misplace—it has crushed my lungs and the ability to breathe. I can’t hear these confessions and bury them with my long-ago feelings. I can’t do that. I feel cheated and pissed.

  “How much do you love me now?” she asks again.

  I stand up and force myself to sit back down. “How could you keep this from me?”

  “You know why. Don’t make me say it.”

  “For all these years!” I shout to her face. “Didn’t I deserve the truth?”

  “I had no idea she was going to leave, like, really
leave! I thought she would confront me later. Confront you.” She reaches for me, but I back up. It is a reflex I can’t control. Her lower lip trembles when she says, “I just wanted that moment with you. I knew we would never be together. I knew you could never love me the way you loved her. I just wanted that night.” She collapses into something small and cowardly. I feel achingly sorry for her.

  “Days went by and I waited for her to show up. Every time the phone rang, I jumped. Every time you called me, I was on edge. Then I found out I was pregnant . . .

  “By then I was convinced you cared. It was a lot easier to tell myself that she did this to us, that we didn’t do this to her. She was selfish. She left. And she never called! How long were we expected to wait for her to show up?”

  My wife crumbles into an unrecognizable mess. Whatever beauty had earlier lit up her face is now replaced with ugly shame. Her dark hair makes her scary. Her lips seem to wince.

  “I know you’re angry. I know you’re disappointed in me. I’ve lived with this for far too long. It has eaten me alive. Knowing I was your second choice, knowing I lied to you for years—it has crippled me. If I lose you now, that’s the price I pay. But being in here has forced me to face what I’ve never wanted to and to finally make things right.”

  I am furious. My words are stiff and calculated like her: “What the hell do you want me to say?”

  “Say you forgive me.”

  “Jesus, Abby, you just dropped a bomb on me!”

  “Ryan.” My name falls from her tortured lips. Her eyes, rimmed in red, are pleading, “Please don’t hate me. Please. I’m doing the best I can. This was no easy confession. I’m saying I’m sorry. What I did was wrong.”

  I have watched my wife struggle since I’ve known her. I have felt her whole body shiver in the heat of summer. I have heard her sobs when she thought no one was listening. I know firsthand how she’s surrendered herself. I’ve been the one to pick her up off the floor, the one to intercept the phone calls from her parents and Juliana’s school, the one to study the lines on her face, looking for the script of how I am supposed to act. Cold Creek was a huge step for her, for all of us. Did this effort matter when something this huge now pins us apart?