The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  Thank God for email. No matter where Theresa had been posted, or where Laura was on location, they could pick up their email. In fact, last year Laura had been doing a film in one of the remotest places on earth, Tonga, and she sent me a photo attachment of her with the chubby, rattan-skirted Tongan king.

  And even in her cloister outside of Pittsburgh, Theresa had email. Or at least the mother superior did. I presumed she’d pass on the message.

  We were a rootless globetrotting set of sisters—a natural reaction, I supposed, to parents who, like Laura’s Tongan king, were rulers of their small region and uncomfortable anywhere else.

  While I was at it, I called into my office and told Jill that my mother wasn’t well, and that I’d had to come home to help her. I felt guilty about this, even though it was true enough. Jill made the appropriate sympathetic noises and reminded me about the wedding on Saturday and the two services on Sunday. “Terry?” she asked delicately.

  Terry was our youth minister, an energetic young man just out of seminary. He was wonderful with kids, but froze when he was in front of an adult group. “I don’t think he’s ready for primetime yet. I’ll call the presbytery and see who’s on call this weekend to fill in.”

  “Chuck would be glad to do it, I’m sure.”

  Jill had a carefully calibrated voice, a real asset in a church secretary. This time her tone was telling me that calling the presbytery first would offend the Second Church’s former minister, Chuck, and that in turn would offend all the Seconders. And Chuck, though long retired to the golf course, was an experienced and accomplished preacher, and did a good wedding too. My only objection, and it was a selfish one, was that every week he sat in the third row and took notes on my sermons, not the gratifying notes of someone struck by my wisdom and spirituality, you understand, but notes which he’d expand on in an email that I’d receive Monday morning: I paused too long at the conclusion of the reading, and I made the same point about the prodigal son’s older brother twice, and that prop I used, the dragon beanie baby, was really a bit undignified for the later, more traditional service.

  But Chuck got away with that because he knew what he was talking about, and so, reluctantly, I got his number from Jill and called him. Don’t worry, he assured me, he happened to have six new sermons in reserve, just in case, so I shouldn’t hurry back.

  Oh, well, I thought as I hung up. At least the Seconders would be happy for a couple weeks. Sometimes I thought they saw me as a usurper, though I hadn’t replaced Chuck. Between his retirement, just after the church merger, and my hiring, another minister tried to meld the two congregations. He failed utterly, poor man, becoming a victim of the crossfire between the conservative congregation with more money, and the liberal one with the better building. The Seconders made a formal motion to fire him after a sermon on the Eye of the Needle, which seemed to imply rich people were less likely to impress God than the rest of His children. Two interim ministers had also been reassigned when they refused to abide by the session’s demand for prior approval of all sermon topics.

  I got the permanent job because the presbytery assumed that I, with my long experience teaching children in the primary grades, would be good at curbing temper tantrums. And I took the job only with the assurance that no one would be censoring my sermon topics.

  My contract didn’t exclude Chuck and his helpful emails, however.

  I also dashed off a quick e-note to Sarah at her camp, just saying I was straightening out some business out of town, and she could get me by email or on my cell phone. I was trying not to be a smother-mother, an overprotective busybody, so I had confined myself to one call and two emails a week. I also allowed myself ten-minute anxiety intervals every few days, when I gave into all the mommy-worries about the disasters that could occur because I wasn’t there—the drownings and the overdoses and the unprotected encounters with boys . . . I didn’t mention any of that, just told her that my cell phone would be charged and on every minute of the day and night.

  Then I sent another to Tom, telling him not where I was, only that I was safe. I didn’t want him calling me here, using that sweet Irish voice of his the way he always did whenever he remembered how well it worked with me. He could reply to my email if he had anything to say, like who that boy was, and how he came to be.

  But as if I’d opened a channel in my brain, I heard Tom’s voice, soothing and easy. Maybe I was overreacting. After all, if he was telling the truth about when this happened, we weren’t married—not even going together—when this child was conceived. Was he supposed to recount for me every date he’d had those few months we were apart? Maybe Brian’s existence was as much a surprise to him as to me. Maybe he hadn’t lied to me, hadn’t concealed a material fact, hadn’t concealed himself . . .

  But he had. I knew him well enough to know that while Brian’s appearance was a surprise, Brian’s existence wasn’t. Tom knew some woman somewhere had borne his baby—some woman who knew he’d married me before the baby was born, and thought it clever to name me as the mother. Or maybe it was a decision they made together, a cynical way to keep their identities hidden while still keeping that connection alive.

  He knew. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew . . . so why not admit it? Why hide it? The big secret was out.

  So why not just say her name? Maybe it was true, he didn’t know it. But then how did he learn about the boy? Maybe he was trying to protect her. Maybe he thought her spouse wouldn’t be as accepting as he thought I would be.

  Maybe her interests were still more important to him than mine—or his son’s.

  While I had the laptop open, I clicked on the calendar program and spun it back to 1991. I counted back from April nine months, or rather forty weeks, and got to late July. That was assuming Brian was the product of a full-term pregnancy.

  I closed the laptop and, after glancing out the window to make sure Mother was still gardening hard, I headed up to the attic. I found the box labeled “textbooks” in a corner of the attic, and kneeling on the dusty floor, I ripped the tape off the top. Inside were two stacks of black vinyl calendars—fifteen in all, I counted. I found 1991 right away, but 1990’s gold lettering had worn off the cover, and I had to open it to the first page to identify it. On impulse, I also grabbed up the two previous years, and slipped all the books into my canvas tote. I tried to close the box again, but the tape was old and wouldn’t stick. So I shoved the box back under a rafter and set a gilt picture frame on top of it.

  Mother had gone off to her room, so I took the books out to the screened porch. Out there on the wicker lounge, in the quiet of the afternoon, I started to open the 1990 book, but then I set it aside and took out 1988.

  1988 could be divided into two sections—Before Tom and After Tom. Before I met him, there were notes about class assignment, sorority functions, the occasional date. After I met him, however, almost every day had some jotting about some book we’d discussed or some restaurant we’d tried or some band we’d discovered.

  I backtracked and found that day in September that Tom entranced me by his voice alone.

  It was the first day of 20th Century British Literature class. The professor was explaining the syllabus, and giving us our choice of papers about the poetry of W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, or W.B. Yeats, when he was interrupted.

  “Would you be saying then, professor, that Yeats is a British poet? By what measure?”

  He was sitting behind me in the theatre-style oval of seats rising up above the lecture podium. Ahead of me, a woman student straightened as he spoke, glanced back, and then fluffed her hair. I wasn’t about to turn my head and stare at him as she did, but that seductive Irish accent raised chills on the back of my neck. I didn’t have to look to know that he was beautiful.

  The professor peered sharply up at the rows of seats behind me. He must have known, from the accent of his questioner (more pronounced than usual, I learned later), where this digression was headed. “Yes, a British poet in the sense that Ye
ats came from what was a colony of Britain and wrote in English. And, you might recall, he was Protestant.”

  I couldn’t help it. Without even raising my hand and waiting to be called on, I said brightly, “Oh! Then I guess Robert Frost was a British poet too? After all, he came from what was once a colony of Britain, and wrote in English, and he was Protestant too.”

  As soon as I said it, I felt sandwiched between burning looks, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. The professor was regarding me with blistering disapproval— later he gave me the only non-A I ever received in an English course, not that I’m implying a connection—and on the back of my head, I felt the warm gaze of the Irish student.

  He was waiting for me as I filed out into the crowded hallway.

  “Why Robert Frost?” he inquired.

  I got my breath back just in time to reply, “He just came to mind. He and Yeats corresponded about poetry. And besides, he was the only 20th Century American poet I was absolutely sure was Protestant.”

  He smiled. “Let’s get some coffee. Are you free?”

  I wasn’t—my Scandinavian romanticism seminar was only minutes away—but for the first time in my life, skipping class seemed like the proper thing to do. “Of course,” I said, and that made the second time Tom led me astray. It wouldn’t be the last.

  I didn’t need any more reminders of how quickly and totally I’d fallen for him. So I set that book aside and opened 1990.

  It was a dispiriting year, to judge by my dreary recording of resumes sent out (seventy-two) and interview requests received (one). There was something oddly optimistic in my little notations— Matterskill NY K-3, Lewiston ME reading specialty, Las Vegas International Primary School— French fluency required, Seattle North special needs kindergarten . . . I was so open then, willing to go anywhere, teach anything, if they’d just give me the chance. I just wanted a chance to start my life up.

  The problem was, I’d graduated during the year the baby bust babies were turning six, which meant they were closing grade schools all over the country. There were no openings for K-3 teachers, especially brand new ones who hadn’t yet taught a single child to read. My friends—the smart ones who had sold out early and interviewed with the investment banking firms—were all firmly ensconced in Manhattan offices, and there I was, still unemployed.

  I wasn’t used to that, to say the least. I’d always worked, since my first job in the library when I was eleven. I felt like a useless failure, and Tom’s defection didn’t help.

  Instead of heading off to the big city, I had to slink back home. I wasn’t quite ready to use my family connections to get a job, but home promised free rent and food and that particular twisted oak tree that had a cushion of moss underneath, just right for sitting back and re-reading my favorite children’s books and dreaming of the day I’d read them to a classroom of kids.

  And just right for grieving about Tom.

  It was grieving, what I felt that summer. When we parted in June, he to go on to his spectacular new career and me to my stack of résumé envelopes, I knew something had died—my innocence, my youth, my college romance.

  Now I leafed through June, and started to remember that summer. I’d gotten back to Wakefield too late to get any real kind of job, so there I was; shelving books at the library for minimum wage just as I did when I was eleven. And I was miserable and broken-hearted and full of self-pity, certain my life had ended just when it was supposed to begin.

  My best friends from high school had taken an apartment together in Jasper, so most of the time I was left with only sisterly company. Not Laura—she’d stayed at boarding school for a special theater project. And Theresa wasn’t much company, as she was only twelve that summer and shy as a fawn around me.

  But for the first month of the summer, Cathy was at home while she worked for the climbing school outside town. Alas, she wasn’t the tea and sympathy sort. She believed a dose of nature cured all ills, so I spent much of my supposed leisure time hobbling after her over rock outcroppings and through snow-melt creeks and up the grassy ski slopes. It helped, or at least it got me into the sort of shape that I could imagine using to wow a new man.

  But at that point, a new man was the last thing on my mind. That summer, romance died for me, and I never wanted to hear a man’s voice again.

  Unless, of course, Tom should happen to call and suggest I come and join him.

  Yes, youngsters, even in the 1980’s, that era of high-feminism, we were almost as ready as the 50’s housewife-types to drop everything and go off with some man. In fact, I’d have to say we were even worse. At least most of the 50’s women got a wedding ring. Some of my friends uprooted themselves, quit jobs, gave away their cats, and moved across the country to live with some guy who thought he got this great deal because he was God’s gift to women. The women seldom got the wedding they hoped for, or if they did, it was only after years of begging.

  At least I wasn’t that weak. But maybe I would have been, if Tom hadn’t so precipitously and romantically proposed.

  I found the reference there in the journal—August 3. All it said was, “He said he couldn’t live without me.” And reading that, it washed over me, the memory of the wonder of it, the intensity of his voice, the realization that he must love me as desperately as I loved him . . . and how that memory had sustained me all the years that followed, when his love didn’t seem so epic at all, more matter-of-fact and even—he had said he couldn’t live without me.

  Now I closed my eyes, hearing those words again in this new context. His great outpouring of Ellen-love followed so closely on whatever passion he had felt for Brian’s anonymous mother that it must have been a reaction. I couldn’t trust it. I couldn’t believe it. And yet, I’d built my life around it. All those years I’d told myself that he really did love me that much, that marriage just meant a calming of that powerful love—not a lessening, just a calming. As long as I knew there was that true love at the foundation—

  But there wasn’t.

  I didn’t doubt Tom loved me. He’d be a fool not to, frankly, especially after Tehran. I’d taken good care of him and our daughter, built homes in unlikely places, kept the faith when he was gone, helped him find his way back again.

  And, I told myself, it wasn’t meant to be a grand passion. It was a marriage. We were good parents together. We had fun together. We shared the same interests. We—it sounded so . . . common. It wasn’t shared interests that sustained me through the year he was held hostage in Tehran. It wasn’t shared interests that powered me in the difficult years that followed, when his recovery coincided with our daughter’s adolescence. No, what gave all of that meaning, I thought, was that proposal, full of the power of love and force and passion, enough so though I never heard it again, I still felt its effects.

  And it wasn’t true. Not really. He couldn’t have felt that truly about me so soon after whatever had happened that summer. I didn’t for one moment believe that Brian’s conception came from some casual one-night stand.

  I knew I was probably over-reacting, probably being unfair. It was nearly twenty years ago, after all. And Tom hadn’t cheated on me, not technically. But still—I felt cheated. The marriage I thought I’d lived was built on a deception, and so was our little family. I thought our daughter was our first child, our only child, and I was the only woman he’d loved. And it was all a lie.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next morning, while I was washing the dishes, Laura called from her summer home in the Hamptons. She was just my sister most of the time, but every now and again something like this would happen and I’d realize that she was famous. She never bragged about it, and in fact would tell me quite sincerely that she wasn’t famous at all, just another character actor who was lucky to get steady work in television. “Less famous than Tom,” she would say, “because at least he gets to say his name when he does reports on CNN. Everyone just knows me as ‘the adulterous nurse in that TV show with Dennis Franz’.”

 
Maybe that was true. But still, she called me from her summer home in the Hamptons, around the corner from the Spielbergs’, and I couldn’t help but be impressed as I propped the receiver on my shoulder and dried my plebian hands on a towel.

  In the background, behind her voice, there was a flurry of banging. “I’ve got renovations going on. A new kitchen, a sun porch —”

  “So,” I said, an edge in my voice, “you’re saying you can’t get away because you have to supervise the work?”

  “Good grief, no. I’m glad for the excuse to leave. The plumber started banging pipes at 6 am, can you believe it? Anyway, the architect is working as the general contractor too, and— well, he’s pretty trustworthy.”

  Pretty cute too, I surmised from the slight lilt in her voice. “Do you need me to pick you up at the airport?”

  “I’m driving. So I’ll be in sometime tomorrow. If I can remember the way.”

  As I hung up, I tried to remember when Laura had last been home. Cathy’s funeral? Could it have been that long? Maybe, I told myself, she’d be able to corroborate my memory of the cameo.

  Once the breakfast dishes were all dried and put away, I got back to my internet research on—well, I wasn’t going to give it a name yet. Geriatrics. Old age. At least now with Laura coming home, I would have some reinforcement if I had to confront Mother. Laura used to be good at confronting Mother, in a sneaky sort of way, so maybe she’d even take over that duty.

  Glancing guiltily over my shoulder to make sure Mother wasn’t around, I typed “memory loss elderly” into the search engine, and produced a list of thousands of articles. I scanned a couple and found one that gave me hope. Some elderly people, the friendly physician wrote, went to different doctors for different ailments, and if each doctor prescribed even one drug, the medications could counteract each other. Some might even cause memory loss and what looked like dementia, but could be corrected with medication-management.