The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  That sounded promising. Mother’s lapses weren’t so very noticeable, I told myself, nothing like the ones profiled in the articles about Alzheimers. She didn’t lose her way walking home from downtown, and she didn’t think it was 1978. She just had a couple missing memories, and a verbal lapse or two—and a sudden interest in giving her money away. It was probably just a medication problem.

  Now all I had to do was somehow get hold of her list of prescriptions.

  Simple.

  Just had to call up her pharmacist and pretend to be Mother, right?

  I couldn’t do that. And I didn’t think I could bring myself check Mother’s medicine cabinet.

  I glanced out the study door towards the staircase. Maybe I’d wait till Laura came, and let her do it. Laura had always been more curious, not to mention more . . . more bad than I. Besides, she once played a real estate agent who snooped through the houses she was listing, looking for blackmail potential. She could just flash back to that role and slip into Mother’s bathroom and get a quick glimpse inside the medicine cabinet.

  I bet Laura never thought I’d be asking her to use her underground talents for my own purposes.

  I copied the list of suspect medications from the Web article to an email form and sent it to myself. And while I was online, I told myself, I might as well do some research into that other conundrum that nagged at my consciousness. Brian. Adam. Tom’s son.

  There were all sorts of adoption registries online. That’s probably how he tracked me down in the first place. I remembered his birthdate, his birthplace. Maybe that would be all I’d need to track down the identity of his true mother . . .

  But I don’t want to find out.

  The little voice in my head interrupted my thoughts. I hushed it—so craven, so cowardly. But I couldn’t hide from it. I didn’t want to investigate.

  I took a steely therapist attitude and asked myself what I did want. I want it to go away, my inner coward said. Failing that, I want Tom to tell me himself.

  It was too pathetic to dwell on.

  The doorbell shrilled, startling me. It was that college president again, smiling.

  He had a surprise! For Mother! A student-recruitment video! Just completed! Soon to be available on the Web! And it mentioned her husband and father-in-law and showed the plaques dedicated to them!

  Mother, excited as a girl on her first date, got her sweater and purse and headed out, calling back over her shoulder, “There’s a housekeeper candidate coming in twenty minutes, dear— please interview her and report back to me.”

  I chose to take this as a sign of confidence in my abilities, but then again, she probably just didn’t want to stand up President Urich.

  As the presidential car—a subdued BMW—sped off down the hill, I had a dread thought. What if—no, he was so much younger. He couldn’t be more than . . . fifty-five? And Mother was sixty-nine. And she hadn’t even considered another man after Daddy died. Not once—as far as I knew.

  I had no time to contemplate this, as the housekeeper candidate was at the door. She spent most of the next ten minutes gazing around her, I assumed, mentally cataloguing Mother’s possessions and totting up the total they’d bring on eBay. I cut the interview short and ushered her out when she admitted she was not bonded.

  It looked like Mother and I would have to clean the house ourselves.

  I looked up at the broad expanse of staircase and remembered having to polish every balustrade after that first time—the only time—I skipped school. There were eighty-two. The little twists in the oak made them all the more challenging.

  The Yellow Pages yielded the name of a maid service, bonded and licensed and insured. Mother would disapprove, of course, as contract maids would lack the personal touch, and wouldn’t do windows or dishes or dinner. But at least they’d keep the place dusted until Mother came to her senses and hired Merilee back.

  The next morning, when the doorbell rang, I hoped it was the service come to say they had a cancellation and could fit us in. But it was Theresa. She was standing there under the noon sun in a heavy brown suit, her face miraculously free of sweat, her hand holding, incongruously, a black nylon Nike sports bag.

  I started towards her, to embrace her, but she’d pulled the Nike bag up to her chest, and I ended up awkwardly putting my arm around her shoulder. The fabric of her jacket was starchy and stiff under my hand. It looked like the sort of suit slightly liberal nuns wore instead of a habit. “How did you get here?” I exclaimed, letting her in.

  “I took the bus from Pittsburgh. It let me off at the bottom of the hill.” Theresa had a low voice, gentle in tone. But she didn’t look at me as she spoke. “It didn’t take long.”

  “The bus?” I could just imagine what it would be like taking the mountain roads in a Greyhound. But I guess nuns didn’t rent cars, and that vow of poverty probably precluded an airline ticket. “You must be exhausted.”

  “No.” She set the Nike bag on the floor and looked around the entry hall, her gaze pensive. It must have been a couple years since she’d been home. “Everything looks the same. Now what is this about Mother?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, glancing up the stairs to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “Maybe you should see for yourself, and form your own judgment. With your nursing training, maybe you’ll know more. Did you have trouble getting away?”

  “No. I was given permission.”

  It was a laconic statement of fact, one that hinted at real conflict. “I appreciate your coming when you didn’t really have to.”

  “Of course I had to come. She’s my mother too.”

  Now that sounded like a rebuke. And she might be right—maybe I was guilty of thinking Theresa of a little bit different than Laura and me, a little less responsible, not because she was adopted, but because she was adopted so late—she was six when she came to live with us. So — well, yes, our mother was her mother, but she had another mother somewhere who had nurtured her long before she became one of us.

  I didn’t want to think about adoption or mothers giving up babies. “See what you think, then, if she—”

  She was coming down the stairs, in fact. “Theresa!” Mother was smiling—not that social smile I was so accustomed to, the one that had so many uses, but a real smile. She was happy. Happy to see Theresa. I felt a little poignant twist in my chest, to see her genuine pleasure. And then my sister, so distant with me, opened her arms for our mother’s embrace.

  Maybe I’d done the right thing after all, asking Theresa to come home.

  “Isn’t this a nice surprise, Mother?” I said, in a rush to get this out before she got suspicious. “I told Theresa and Laura about what you’re wanting to talk to us all about, your will, and they both agreed to visit.”

  Some of the pleasure left Mother’s eyes, replaced by wariness. “Laura too? My word. How long has it been since she favored us with a homecoming? But it is nice of all of you, to help me with this estate-planning.”

  I held my breath, willing Theresa not to contradict me. It was a half-truth at worst—that is, entirely true, just not the entire truth—but Theresa tended to be more of an absolutist than I was. But she didn’t say anything about the other reason she had come home, and anyway, Mother was bustling her up the stairs, chastising her for not calling for a ride, asking, “When must you get back to the convent?”

  I barely heard Theresa’s reply as they rounded the landing. “I don’t have to be back any particular time.”

  That sounded . . . suspicious. She’d been at the cloister for a year, after six years in a nursing order. And in that year, she’d never left the monastery outside of Pittsburgh.

  But she’d also never taken her vows.

  It was hard to believe the mother superior hadn’t given her a return date.

  My suspicions increased when she came into the kitchen a half hour later, not in the pseudo-habit, but a gray cotton dress of Mother’s that was too big and too long for her. The stockings were too
large too, drooping at her narrow, unshaven ankles. On her feet were the clunky black shoes she’d arrived in. Her light brown hair was cropped short, no style, just straight across the back.

  “I think I need some other clothes,” she said, yanking the cloth belt tighter around her narrow waist.

  I wanted to ask if this meant she were leaving the convent, if this was the end, but I just didn’t feel comfortable being so direct with Theresa. It would be like asking—well, if I were planning on leaving my husband. Too personal. Too provocative.

  I was, I knew, too sensitive to nuance, too delicate in my awareness of other people’s boundaries. My counseling professor used to warn me that too much respect for privacy meant that I’d never learn enough to help those I was counseling.

  But Theresa wasn’t coming to me for advice. And anyway, we’d never had the sort of relationship where we confided in each other. Cathy and I did, and since Cathy’s death, Laura and I had shared a secret or two. Theresa— she did not welcome that sort of camaraderie. She seemed to cherish her solitude and self-sufficiency, and I respected that even now, when I worried that she was on the brink of changing her life.

  Join the party, I told myself.

  “I could probably use a few tops myself.” I tried to sound casual as I dried the last coffee cup and put it away in the cupboard. “I can drive you to a store.”

  But Mother, coming up behind her, said, “No, I’ll take her to the mall in Buckhannon. There’s no variety here in town, really. And I’ll pick up a couple blouses for you, Ellen. Just something casual, a light knit. I know what you like.”

  I didn’t object. It had been a year since Mother had seen Theresa except through the filter of a rice-paper screen. I didn’t blame her for wanting a little time alone with her now. So I just said casually, “Can you get me a pair of khaki shorts too?”

  “I’m sure they’ll have some at Lukens.” She opened the refrigerator and brought out a carton of milk—Theresa had always been a big milk drinker. “While we’re gone, dear, you might think about replenishing our larder. President Urich wants to take us all out tonight—so kind of him—but if Laura is arriving, we’ll need to begin planning meals for the rest of the week.”

  I didn’t actually mind this duty, or the self-assigned task of tidying up the house after Mother took Theresa off in the car. There was some serenity, or at least mind-fog, that came from the familiar rhythms of housework. By noon, I was at Odom’s Market, trying to remember my mother’s brand of soap and my sisters’ favorite foods.

  In the narrow, box-lined aisles, I ran into several old classmates and exchanged the usual homecoming pleasantries—no, I wasn’t staying long; no, my husband wasn’t along; yes, I’d pass on my best wishes to my mother. It was back at the butcher’s freezer that I saw one person I’d never expected to see again here in town. Jackson—

  Jackson something—I’d forgotten his surname, but I remembered him. When I worked summers in the library, he used to come in, a most unlikely patron of literature. He’d looked like a hood with his tangle of dark blonde hair and torn t-shirt, but he was unfailingly polite whenever he asked to see the motorcycle magazines we kept behind the circulation desk. Once he asked me to direct him to a book on criminal law, and from the tense, conscientious way he took notes, I gathered it wasn’t because he was planning to go to law school.

  Naturally, this was the boy my little sister Laura chose for her secret rebellious high school passion. I only knew because she called me at college and swore me to secrecy—“I have to tell someone,” she whispered. “And he’s nothing like you’d think—he’s a really evolved person inside.”

  And now I guessed, looking at him in the crisp blue uniform there in Odom’s Market, that maybe Laura had seen some otherwise unrecognized potential in him, because apparently, sometime after his entire family was escorted to the state line, he’d evolved right over to the right side of the law.

  He looked . . . very masculine.

  Maybe it was the uniform. Maybe it was the aura of simultaneous safety and danger that seemed to surround cops, even in small towns like Wakefield. Maybe it was the gun on his hip, though I was, of course, a pacifist who didn’t believe in violence. I don’t know. But rather suddenly I realized how attractive he was—not with that abstract appreciation of male appeal that was all I used to allow myself, but with . . . well, real appreciation. His hair was shorter and darker now, but still a little tangled, and the smile he gave me wasn’t so shy, and he called me Ellen, not ma’am—he looked all too good to me.

  I reminded myself that he was younger—four years younger, just like Laura. Not that at our age that was much of a difference. But he was Laura’s old boyfriend, which put him off-limits for life. And, oh, yeah, I was married.

  So I didn’t proposition him right there in the meat department.

  All I did was pick up the chicken breasts that were right next to the steak he was getting, so that our hands were in close proximity if not quite touching. There was no ring on his hand . . . and there was one on mine. It was truly sad, I thought, how little it took to make me feel illicit.

  To divert myself from my own weakness, I said, “Oh, did you know Laura is coming back to town? She’s driving down from New York. She should be here tomorrow.”

  His hand stilled, just for a moment, then he set the steak package down in his cart. “I thought she lived out west. In LA.”

  “She summers on Long Island. Anyway, she’s coming for a visit.” Well, that was close enough to the truth. I wasn’t going to tell him that she was coming to help me assess whether our mother was going batty.

  As if he could read my mind, he said, “Your mother doing well?”

  It was casual enough, the sort of thing an ambitious young police chief might say about the town matriarch, whose favor was politically important. But he’d spoken it as a question, and as I assured him Mother was just fine, thank you, I felt my anxiety index rise. Surely Mother hadn’t called him and tried to report that Merilee had committed a theft. “Have you, uh, spoken to my mother recently?”

  He started to answer, but just then the butcher in his blood-stained apron looked up from his cutting and said, “Hey, Chief! Hear you’re going to be a TV star.”

  Jackson turned to grin at him. “Yep, me and Katie Couric. Or the local equivalent.” He glanced over at me. “Not very impressive, comparatively. Your husband is on CNN, isn’t he?”

  I didn’t want to talk about Tom, so I answered shortly, “Special correspondent. But he’s mostly teaching now. So what show are you going to be on? And when?”

  “Tomorrow. The evening news on Channel 8. All about the new city lockup, and how to protect your kids against predators, you know, that sort of thing. Not CNN, so don’t expect too much.”

  “I’ll watch for it,” I promised. And maybe Laura would be watching with me. Of course, maybe she wouldn’t want him now that he was on this side of the law.

  Laura arrived as scheduled the next afternoon—with a heavy duffel trunk, but without a car. “Lady Porsche,” she said, unpacking the trunk in her old room, the long narrow space off the back staircase, “couldn’t take the mountain air. She gave out up on the Gorge. You know where I mean—where Daddy used to paint.” She pulled out a crop top of the sort my teenage daughter might wear, regarded it regretfully, and laid it back in the suitcase. Not in the Wakefield wardrobe, I agreed.

  We settled almost without volition into our usual camaraderie. Laura and I shared little but our looks and a common set of parents and the dubious honor of growing up Wakefields of Wakefield, but we’d always been friends as well as sisters. It was sometimes a bit dim, growing up in the shadow cast by our charismatic older sister, but there was safety there too, and a special access to the parent we both preferred (me secretly, Laura openly) in those years before his death Cathy got most of Mother’s attention, and they often went off to riding competitions, a mother-and-daughter team of equestriennes. So for weeks, and once an entire summer, we
were left with Daddy, the most gentle of guardians.

  Now it was a relief, after the tense and artificial encounters with my mother and Theresa, just to be with Laura, who understood when I was joking and knew how to tease me into laughing too.

  And we wore more or less the same size. When I confessed I had nothing to wear to dinner with the college president, Laura insisted I borrow one of her Versace sundresses. I felt like Nicole Kidman as soon as it slipped over my head. I was calculating aloud how much of my monthly salary this would cost—all of it—as we descended the old staircase to the front hall, and I caught sight of Theresa, sitting on the deacon bench with her hands knotted in her lap. The glance she gave us was so closed, so unrevealing, that I knew she must be contrasting my ease with Laura with my distance from her.

  But it was only natural that I’d feel more comfortable with Laura. We were closer in age, after all—only four years apart. Theresa was ten years younger—practically a generation, or at least it felt that way. I’d left for college soon after she was adopted, and except for the occasional Christmas visit, we had little contact when she was growing up.

  Even as adults Laura and I had spent much more time together, especially these last five years, when Theresa was sequestered away, first in distant Romania, and then in the cloister. And I owed Laura. She’d been a true support for me those long months Tom was hostage in Tehran, organizing petition drives, staying with Sarah when I flew to the Middle East to try and negotiate his release, recruiting her famous friends to lobby for him, even sending Tom newly released videos through the Red Cross—one of them, in fact, was instrumental in his escape.

  So of course I was closer to Laura, for all sorts of good reasons.

  It wasn’t because Laura and I were blood sisters, and Theresa only adopted.

  But the whole time we were at dinner with President Urich, I felt it—that distance between us. I couldn’t call it estrangement, because Theresa and I were never close enough to become estranged. I tried to make an effort to include her in the conversation, to ask about her life. But it was no use. We had little to talk about and hardly any history together to draw on. It wasn’t either of our faults, just an inescapable family fact.