The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  For five miles, it felt good. I drove out of town, just so I wouldn’t have to stop and decide where I was going. A hotel. That would work. Anything would be better than going home and confronting Tom in his name-rank-and-serial-number-only mode.

  I spared a thought for that boy Brian. Where was he staying tonight? What was he thinking now? The mother he thought he had found turned out to be a mirage. The father had no attention for him. My sympathy was stirred—but no. It was too easy to stir my sympathy. I should be more like Tom and focus on protecting myself from this assault.

  I should go home. Home to Wakefield. Get away from here for a few days. Deal with Mother. She’d be all alone in that old house over the river, without Merilee to tend her. Mother was 69. I always thought of her as formidable in the extreme, but I’d seen several parishioners fade mentally at that age. That’s when the richer ones started attracting all sorts of attention, even from the most respectable sorts of fundraisers. I’d had to rein back the church’s stewardship chair a couple times when he heard that some elderly church member was getting a bit confused and willing to pay this year’s pledge twice or even three times.

  And I could go up in the attic and look for that box of journals.

  And maybe I’d figure out how the husband I thought I knew so well could keep such a secret from me for so long.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I didn’t do things like this—run off, no luggage, and no plan. I didn’t do unexpected things, like suddenly produce an adult son.

  I pulled into the mall parking lot, and in the twenty minutes before it closed, bought a few changes of clothes and everything else I needed for a quick trip home. I bought only enough for two or three days. I didn’t want to get trapped there with my mother, and an inadequate wardrobe would impress her where the need to get back to my job would not.

  And then I headed west, into the darkness of the mountains. But I’d forgotten how hard it was to navigate that two-lane road that twisted across the three mountain ranges between the Virginia line and Wakefield. This area was so poor that even the little hamlets along the way didn’t have streetlamps, so there was nothing but my headlights and some weak moonlight to illuminate the dark road—and nothing could light up the sheer cliffs that would suddenly loom around a bend.

  So about eleven I pulled over in a scenic overlook and curled up as best I could in the front seat. There was no use looking for a motel of any sort. No one out here could afford to invest in a business. Sometimes, seeing my home state with the eyes of an expatriate, I marveled at how very poor it was. I’d gotten used to Virginia, not the wealthiest of states, of course, but one where new construction sites dotted each highway interchange, and almost everyone had indoor plumbing and electricity. West Virginia had played out coal mines and laid off chemical workers.

  I didn’t sleep very well, huddled there behind the steering wheel, and by dawn was ready to finish the drive. With the sun rising in my rear-view mirror I crossed the last ridge and headed down into the valley, past the ski resort where my sisters and I and everyone else in Wakefield had worked during high school, and along the winding Croak River to town.

  The highway opened up to four lanes and the strip began, a sudden shock of tacky color and neon after the soft green of the countryside. It wasn’t much of a strip, really, just a McDonalds and a couple gas stations and a Super-8 motel. What I would have given at sixteen for a McDonalds here in town. Back then, we’d pile a half-dozen of us into a car and drive all the way to Jasper, so a Big Mac took on the mystique of ambrosia from the heavens.

  Back then, the forbidden was so simple.

  The last time I’d been here was Christmas, when a foot of snow had buried the streets. Now the road was filled with morning light, and my mother’s garden club must have been working hard, because the median strip on Main Street was red and gold with zinnias the size of goblets.

  If I were a stranger, I’d have thought this was the healthiest town in a blighted state. Maybe I would even stay to lunch at one of the tea rooms on the courthouse square, and wander through the campus of the college that allowed us to claim to be an oasis of knowledge in the desert of ignorance.

  But I grew up here, and coming back evoked guilt—guilt that I left, guilt that I wasn’t building the community, guilt that I felt so trapped in the town that was supposed to be my legacy.

  Growing up a Wakefield in Wakefield, my parents always reminded me, conferred some obligations. Our great-great grandfather had founded the town, or at least founded the bank that funded the town, and ever since, for most of the town’s infrastructure—the city council, the library board and the schools foundation and the Rotary and the Philomathean society and the garden club and the philharmonic— you’d always find a Wakefield in charge . . . until my generation. Mother was still on half the boards in town, and a cousin ran the family bank. But my sisters and I scattered as soon as we got old enough to catch the early bus out.

  I wondered, as I drove down the street winding along the river, if Mother blamed herself for that.

  Not likely. I was the sort of mother who blamed myself. Margaret MacDonald Wakefield, however, was made of sterner stuff. She would tell me, if I asked, that I had to take responsibility for my own actions, and if I regretted leaving Wakefield, perhaps that was a sign that I’d made a mistake.

  I didn’t want to hear that.

  From the time I was thirteen or so, all I wanted was to get away—away from the narrow-minded little town, away from my mother’s velvet domination, away from the desperation that huddled back there in the hills, held back from overwhelming the town only by the combined authority of my family and other genteel types.

  I always wanted to be a teacher, but I didn’t want to struggle against the poverty and the illness and the suspicion in Loudon County. Many children in the hills didn’t even get immunizations because their parents suspected the government doctors, and they didn’t trust the public schools either. When I did a student-teaching internship in the local grade school, one child came to me, sullen, anxious, with a social-studies textbook he’d brought back from home. His father had ripped out every page that dealt with the rise of manufacturing in the 19th Century. Why? The boy couldn’t explain. Perhaps machines were against Pa’s religion. There were some very odd religions back in the hills—snake handlers and dowsers and Sethians. Maybe there was an anti-technology one too.

  I found it much harder to teach those kids than the ones I later taught in the inner city of Washington. At least the parents in the slums weren’t actively against education. But the hill people . . . some of them went to jail rather than send their kids to school, where they might learn about other religions or read stories about wizards or participate in mixed sports. I couldn’t teach them.

  But even if none of her daughters stayed to help, Mother had never given up her mission to maintain Wakefield as an outpost of culture and civility here in the unforgiving mountains.

  Her house—our house—sat there at the top of the road, a great brown toad of a house, shingled and sprawling in a dour Victorian way. I pulled in to the circular drive and taking a deep breath, grabbed my shopping bag luggage and walked up the stone steps. I didn’t bother to knock—no one locked the door in Wakefield—but as I entered the foyer I called out, “Mother?”

  My voice echoed in the stairwell. It was dark there, under the stairs, but I could smell the furniture polish and figured Merilee’s ethics hadn’t allowed her to leave a job with dust on the banister.

  I dropped the shopping bag on the lowest step and went through the hallway to the kitchen, set back over the garden. In the sink was the first sign of life after Merilee—an unwashed cereal bowl and spoon. And then, through the wide back window, I saw my mother, still as straight-backed as the days when she showed horses, there on the flower-pot bordered terrace with a middle-aged man in a tan suit. His neat little beard typed him as “college” better than leather elbow patches would. Between them was a white wrought-iron tab
le with two coffee cups on a silver tray.

  The young boyfriend, I presumed. I was relieved he turned out to be far beyond student-age. And they weren’t holding hands.

  They both looked up as I emerged. Mother looked surprised. The college man looked intrigued, probably because he’d never seen Mother look surprised before. But it didn’t last. She rose and then, hastily, so did he.

  “Ellen, this is Dr. Urich, the new president at the college. My daughter Ellen. Her daughter Sarah is considering Loudon.”

  President Urich stepped forward, his face alight, his hand out. “How wonderful! Another generation of Wakefields at Loudon—that would be a great honor.”

  I took his hand. “Sarah is an O’Connor, actually.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mother amended. “Her father is Thomas O’Connor, the special correspondent on CNN.”

  It was, perhaps, the first time I’d heard my mother boast about Tom. It would have pleased me a week ago, but now I just wanted to change the subject. “It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Urich. I’m sorry to intrude.”

  “No intrusion!” he exclaimed, picking up his file folder from the table. “I’m always glad to meet a prospective student’s parent. I hope you can bring your daughter for a campus visit soon.” He made a graceful exit, not through the house but out the garden gate to the side drive— he’d been here before.

  Mother watched him go, a smile lingering on her face, and then bent to pick up the coffee cups. “Hold the door, will you, dear? I wasn’t expecting you today.”

  “I—” I don’t like to lie. I never did, and since I was ordained, it had only gotten harder to justify. So to explain my appearance, I gave her a fraction of the truth—but that fraction was all mostly true. “I had a couple days off, and thought I’d run over and we’d have that talk you mentioned. I want to go through some of the books and papers I stored in the attic, and this seemed like a good time for that.”

  “I hope you’ll stay long enough to come to church with me Sunday.”

  And that was it. She accepted my presence and my muddle of motives without question.

  When we got into the kitchen, she set the cups in the sink next to the used cereal bowl. I ran water for washing, but as I reached out for the coffee cups, she stilled me with a hand on my wrist. “There’s a chip on the lip of that cup. I’m going to throw it away before someone gets cut.”

  I shrugged and washed the cereal bowl and the spoon, while Mother found a bread bag in a drawer—like so many children of the war period, she saved bags and aluminum foil and margarine cups—and carefully bagged up the cup. She was always so thorough about such things.

  Finally I brought up the other reason for my visit. “About Merilee, Mother, would you like me to talk to her?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said, with that eternal cool of hers. “If she would have just admitted what she’d done, I might feel differently. But stealing and lying about it . . . ”

  “But the cameo was buried with Cathy,” I insisted.

  It did no good. “You’ve never had a reliable memory, dear. Now don’t you worry. I put an ad in the paper for a new housekeeper, and I have a couple applicants coming this morning.”

  For just a moment, I wished we’d abided by that morbid 19th Century custom and taken a photo of Cathy in her coffin. That would prove me right. But there was no use arguing. “I’ll sit in on the interviews with you, and give you my impressions,” I said firmly.

  She shook her head, smiling. “Whatever you say, Ellen, but I don’t know that I need help. You are, after all, trained to look for the best in people, which is praiseworthy, but not a great aid in looking for household help.”

  I was almost forty, deep into my second profession, and she persisted in thinking I was unworldly. It had never annoyed me as much as today, when I was sleep-deprived and preoccupied. After all, I’d lived all over the world, and she’d lived only in one town in West Virginia. I snapped, “I’ve looked for household help in six countries so far, including three where the national sport is ripping off your employers. I’m not in the least naïve about human nature.”

  With a level look, she said, “But Merilee, you trust. That doesn’t indicate much discernment, unfortunately.”

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Mother wasn’t just being her usual patronizing self, that there was something wrong. So I said only, “I’ll tell you what I think of the candidates.”

  After that confrontation, the actual meetings in the front parlor with the two housekeeper wannabes were something of an anticlimax. They were both clearly unsuitable—in fact, that’s what my mother called each afterwards. “Clearly unsuitable.” The first was too old and arthritic to manage dusting, much less vacuuming. Probably none of her previous employer had paid social security taxes for her, so here she was, older than my mother and twice as infirm, wanting to clean her house. I wanted to go after her and give her a list of social services—but I was a daughter here, not a minister.

  The second was a middle-aged woman whose dark eyes were rimmed with red. She used to work in the mines, she whispered in a tubercularly hoarse voice. “But I’m good at cleaning,” she promised, before she was seized by a fit of coughing.

  Mother rose, the grand and compassionate lady. “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Price. I’ll call if I decide I need another interview with you.”

  The woman glanced up at the name, but then only said her thanks in a subdued voice and departed.

  As the door closed behind her, I said, “You called her Mrs. Price.”

  Mother glanced down at the application she was holding. “I did not. I called her Mrs. Peterson.”

  I was going to have to start taping our conversations. “It’s an understandable mistake. She obviously had a touch of black lung, like Mr. Price. And she’s a housekeeper like Mrs. Price.”

  “I called her Mrs. Peterson. I would never call her Mrs. Price.”

  And Mother crumpled the application into a ball, dropped it into the grate, and stalked out.

  Gathering my courage, I followed her into the kitchen. “Perhaps just a quick checkup would be in order, Mother. Dr. Weaver could—”

  “Dr. Weaver?” She shoved the faucet on with a harsh motion and watched as the sink started to fill. “He was probably the one who put Merilee up to her theft. I wouldn’t doubt it. She’s gone over to work for him now.”

  I swallowed a sigh. I wasn’t uncertain any longer. Something was wrong when both our long-time housekeeper and our family doctor were suddenly objects of suspicion. And the Mrs. Price mistake—“There are other doctors in town. Just a checkup.”

  “I had a checkup last November. I was fine. And I’m fine now.”

  She jammed off the faucet and turned to face me. Just like that the anger flowed out of her face, and she said, “Now what did you think of President Urich? A well-spoken man, don’t you think? I don’t know if you remember him from his earlier teaching appointment here, but we were lucky that he came back to be president. And he’s so appreciative of the house. And the garden! He was head of the botany department at a college in Maryland, you know, and he gave me several organic solutions to the slug problem.”

  She chatted, in her steely brook-no-interruption way, about slugs and aphids and other pests, and then announced she had weeding to do.

  I gave up, but only for the moment. Retreating to the dark study—there was no phone line in my 70’s-era bedroom—I hooked up my laptop. How bad was it, I asked myself as I plugged in the modem cord. Just a slip of the tongue.

  But it was this particular slip that worried me.

  Mrs. Price had been our housekeeper before Merilee, indeed, for much of my childhood, until around the time my father died. And . . . well, she was Theresa’s mother. Birthmother, that is. When she and her husband moved out of town—he had black lung disease, we were told, and couldn’t breathe here in the mountains—they left Theresa with us, and Mother adopted her. It had always been the most awkward of subjects aro
und the house, because Theresa had been, for the first six years of her life, the housekeeper’s daughter, and only after that our sister. We were all careful not to remind her of that earlier status or suggest that she hadn’t always been one of us. At least I was. I didn’t know about Laura, my younger sister, who always seemed to resent Theresa’s arrival.

  No, in ordinary circumstances, Mother wouldn’t mention Mrs. Price. All the more reason to believe something was wrong. And it was my duty to try and help her, even if she didn’t want help.

  I dreaded this. It was hard enough helping my mother when she asked for help.

  I’d never quite gotten used to being the eldest. Second children, the psychologists say, mold their identities around what the older sibling isn’t, and I was certainly evidence of that. Cathy, almost four years older, was the leader. I was the one who followed, making meek little suggestions whenever I could. I was quiet where Cathy was outgoing, conscientious where she was adventurous. And while I was definitely “the responsible one,” all through our childhood I deferred to her when it was time to make a decision. She was positive and decisive and always knew what to do, and so even if it wasn’t the decision I would have made, I usually went along.

  Now I was the eldest, and I had to be decisive. I had to think like Cathy.

  But a few minutes of thinking like Cathy made me very nervous. I couldn’t stride into Mother’s room and insist that she listen to me and obey me. Cathy could do that, but I was, alas, still myself, certain that direct confrontation led to direct destruction.

  And I decided that I wasn’t going to make this decision or take this action without my remaining sisters sharing the heat.

  So I wrote a long email about Mother’s condition and her refusal to go to the doctor, stressing the seriousness of it all, and, in an aside, mentioning the college president and his apparent interest in the estate we’d had every expectation of inheriting, and cc’ed the whole tome to Laura and Theresa.