The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  At least she has Mother, I thought as we arrived home and the two of them headed up to bed. And at least Mother has her.

  The next morning, my cell phone beeped before I’d even opened my eyes. I scrambled out of bed and grabbed the phone. “Sarah?”

  “How’d you know it was me?” my daughter said. “I’m using Taylor’s phone.”

  “Because I didn’t tell anyone else to call the cell phone.” I was just glad it wasn’t Tom— then I started wondering if she’d talked to Tom. Not that he would confide in her about our marital trouble, but . . . but eventually one or the other of us would have to tell her—about the past, about her half-brother. Her half-brother. That would be difficult.

  To mask my nervousness, I infused a bit of maternal cheer into my voice. “What’s up, honey?”

  Sarah just wanted reassurance. She’d been at camp two weeks, and she hadn’t quite settled into her new job as counselor. “I’m not used to, you know, being the boss instead of one of the campers.” She heaved a big sigh. “It’s such a responsibility. I have to make sure they get everywhere on time, and they don’t drown, and they don’t sneak over to the boys’ camp like we always used to . . . ” She stopped suddenly. “I mean, like we did that one time. Last year.”

  I decided to let that ancient a transgression go unpunished, especially since she was obviously now learning why it was a transgression. I was just grateful she was the typical teenaged narcissist, obsessed with her own situation and incurious about why she could only call me on the cell phone and what Dad might be doing. Pretty soon she was reminiscing about her room at home, the one she didn’t have to share with another counselor, and her CD collection and the great donuts we always brought home after church on Sundays . . . I heard the threat of tears in her voice. For a child who had experienced three continents and four languages before she was ten, Sarah didn’t do change well. It made me dread the surprise coming up in her life.

  But that could wait. “Sounds like you need a care package, honey. I’ll put one together today. And I’ll email you some jokes, okay?”

  More cheerful now, she rang off, and I rose and, eschewing breakfast, walked into town to keep my daughter supplied with the necessities. It had rained the night before, and the hill was slick, but by the time I got downtown the sun was shining and the puddles were evaporating.

  Main Street looked clean and new, or as new as a downtown without a single chain store or neon sign could look. This was a real town, not one of those quaint little villages like the ones that had grown up around the university town where I now lived. The motley storefronts showed the town’s growth over two centuries. As I walked south down Main Street, I passed the tall brick Federal-style building that used to house the coal company headquarters, then a much shorter shingled hardware store with windows that hadn’t been washed since they first started stocking weed whackers. City Hall took up most of a block on the courthouse square, with the police headquarters just across the street. Three men in overall were taking the scaffolding down from an addition—it must be the new city lockup that Jackson mentioned.

  On the corner, haughty like a grand matron, was the granite Greek Revival bank my father had managed until he died. I stopped and squinted through the big bowed window, seeing in the dim within the tellers and their new computers behind the old iron grates. I always wondered if it was that was what killed Daddy, if the tedium and stress of managing a whole town’s money ate away at his heart. He died so young and so suddenly, sitting at his desk with his hand turning the page of a posted transaction report.

  We were lucky, his daughters. We all ended up doing what we wanted, not what was expected of us. Not one of us got an MBA and came back here to run the bank. We just cashed our dividend checks—the extended family still owned 30% of the bank stock—and went our own way. Perhaps Mother allowed that, against her own inclinations, because of what happened to Daddy—that wildlife artist trapped behind a banker’s desk.

  At the world’s last surviving five-and-dime I stocked up on penny candy (well, nickel candy), a 64-count crayon box, and an Incredibles coloring book. I crossed the street to the bookstore and got her a couple of the tamer romance novels and the latest Buffy novelization, and even sprang fifteen dollars for a Matchbox 20 CD. All of this I crammed into a priority mail box at the post office, except for a box of peanut brittle, which I planned to eat in memory of those summer camp packages Merilee used to send me.

  It was so much easier fulfilling my maternal duty when my daughter was in another state.

  I was just emerging from the post office when I saw Tom’s jeep pass by. He saw me too, and did a quick U-turn. I found myself wishing that Chief Jackson what’s-his-name had seen it, but no patrolman emerged from the police station to issue a citation. Once again, Tom had gotten away with it.

  He even got a parking place right in front of me.

  I waited, indecisive, as he got out of the car. I didn’t like to cause a scene, not here on Main Street, not in my hometown where a public fight would have everyone gossiping that not even one of the Wakefield daughters could hold onto a man.

  He stood there by the parking meter, casual and composed, his dark curly hair lit in flickers by the morning sun. If he’d looked at all anxious, at all contrite, I might have stopped. But he looked so easy, so calm, as if he were arriving for a perfectly normal visit with my family, only a couple days late because he’d had to finish some work.

  I started towards home. He kept pace, so as far as anyone knew, we were just another placid couple out for a morning stroll. He even reached over to take the plastic shopping bag, but I switched it to my left hand, away from him. “How did you find out I was here?”

  “Called your office. Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything. Jill just said you weren’t to worry about the wedding, that Chuck was handling it.”

  He made it sound like just another normal marital exchange of phone messages—Lisa called; the faculty committee meeting has been postponed; did you get a parking ticket in DC last year, because some collection agency says we now owe $1200. I wasn’t going to let him get away with it. “Did you talk to Brian? Your son?”

  He must have been ready for that, because he didn’t flinch. “He said he’d get in touch if he wanted to. He didn’t.”

  “I can’t believe you aren’t more curious about this. About him. About who he is and where he’s been and if he’s been raised okay.”

  He didn’t respond. He just kept walking with me, easy and calm. I knew he couldn’t be truly calm, but a passerby would never have imagined that we were confronting an issue that could destroy the marriage. Goaded, I said, “But then, apparently it’s much more important for you to protect yourself and the boy’s mother.”

  The sidewalk sloped here to go under the railroad trestle, and my last words came resonant and echoing against the metal roof. This, at least, got a reaction from Tom. “It’s not a matter of protection.”

  “So why not tell me?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  This was going nowhere. I guess he thought if he said it frequently enough, and blandly enough, I’d just believe him. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to.

  The big old Carnegie library stood on the corner ahead. A refuge. Before he could react, I quickened my pace and turned up the steps and into the limestone building. I paused there in the foyer, letting the glass door swing closed behind me, breathing in the cool musty air. I felt more at home here than in my mother’s house—I’d worked so many years here, shelving books and stamping cards under the sternly benevolent eye of Mrs. Lofgren. She was long dead, but her presence lingered like the smell of book dust.

  Tom didn’t respect my sanctuary. He opened the door and came in, stopping beside me. In a low voice, he said, “Come on home, Ellen. This isn’t about us.”

  Years of shushing patrons kept me from shouting at him. Instead, I said quietly, “If you really believed that, you’d tell me the truth. And if you don’t, you might as
well go home, because I’m not going to stop asking.”

  He said, “I’m not going home without you.” When I didn’t respond to the caveman routine, he added, “Look, I’ll check into that motel out on the bypass. Call me.”

  I didn’t answer. I just walked away from him, past the circulation desk, into the stacks of encyclopedias, my sneakers making no sound on the marble floor. I didn’t look back, but eventually I heard the door open and then close again, and knew he was gone.

  I meant to do it—meant to research that long-ago summer, meant to seek out the truth about Tom and the boy’s mother. Back home that afternoon, I even got out the journals again and read them over for clues. But my heart wasn’t in the task. I didn’t want to know.

  Or rather, I didn’t want to have to find out for myself. I wanted Tom to tell me. It would mean—it would mean I mattered more than anything else, that what I wanted was more important to him than whatever he was concealing.

  But his refusal meant the opposite.

  I sat in my childhood room, on the window seat over the garden, my fingers resting on the journal, and thought, just like the girl I’d been when I still lived here, I’ve never been anyone’s favorite. It was silly, childish, but true in some primal sense. I’d grown up in middle-child purgatory. Dainty clever Laura was Daddy’s little girl, and proud fierce Cathy was Mother’s. Even after Cathy left home, I didn’t move into the coveted maternally favored slot—Theresa, the new daughter, did.

  And now I realized I probably wasn’t even my husband’s favorite. In my sudden self-pity, I could just imagine nursing him in his final hours, and bending close to hear his last whisper . . . another woman’s name.

  It was pathetic. I was a grown woman. I’d long since gotten over my childhood sense of invisibility. I knew that I mattered, that I’d made a difference in at least a few lives. But . . .

  But from all my years of teaching and now of pastoral counseling, I’d learned that you never quite stop being a child. Adult relationships were always only one precarious step removed from replicating some childhood dynamic. I remember mothers coming to parent-teacher conferences and whispering, “She won’t let me have boyfriends. She’s run off three men already,” just as if their first-grader were their own puritanical mother. And I’d counseled husbands and wives who competed as fiercely as siblings, always sure the other was getting more attention or happiness or good fortune.

  And here I was, falling into the same trap, thinking of Tom as the love-withholder, and me as the helpless child.

  But I wasn’t helpless. I wasn’t. I deserved to be first in someone’s life. I didn’t deserve a man who kept hidden and cherished what must have been a secret passion for someone else. I could . . . leave him to it; leave him to his memories and illusions. I could just . . . leave.

  I let myself feel that for just a minute, pushing back all the objections my practical mind raised—my daughter, my job, my house, my life. I could let go of the struggle to find meaning in this marriage, and accept the reality that it was built on a lie. I could—

  But it wasn’t just this secret of his that made me consider the clarity and control of aloneness. It was that old longing to escape the curse of a long marriage—the grievances and obligations and patterns that build up, the half-truths and misunderstandings that take root, the tangle life becomes.

  I’d cared too much for too long, and even when it was right, even when he seemed the only one in the world who knew me truly, I felt a sense of lostness. I’d lost myself in him too long ago to remember, and every now and again, I tried to seize me back.

  This time, maybe I would succeed.

  It was ten minutes after six before I remembered that Jackson was going to be on the evening news. I can’t imagine why I cared, why I grabbed Laura by the arm as she passed through towards the kitchen and insisted she come sit with me and watch. It wasn’t as if love had much merit for me these days, or matchmaking held much charm. I was probably just trying to distract myself from my own problems—or maybe distance myself from that illicit thrill I felt when I saw the man who had been the boy in the library so long ago.

  Laura, protesting, only perched on the edge of the chair. “This better be good,” she said. “I’ve got a pizza in the oven.”

  We had to sit through a few minutes of weather before the local anchorwoman introduced the segment. I glanced over at my sister as Jackson came on the screen. She didn’t react in an obvious way, but she did quit squirming and glancing towards the kitchen as the interviewer asked him brightly about the next day’s dedication of the new high-tech prisoner lockup at police headquarters. Focus then shifted to the heralded topic: how parents could protect their children from the dangers of modern society.

  I wondered if Laura saw the flicker of irony in his eyes as he mentioned the various crimes teenagers could get up to—shoplifting and joyriding and gang fights. I didn’t know which one of those sent him to reform school back before he reformed, but I bet Laura did. For all I knew, she’d been with him at the scene of the crime.

  The interviewer seemed most interested, however, in a hazard that didn’t exist when young Jackson McCain was corrupting my sister and tearing up the streets of Wakefield. “What about sexual predators on the Internet?”

  Jackson shrugged, as if this wasn’t really top on his list of hazards. “They’re there, but they’re actually easier to avoid than the ones kids encounter in real life. There are a couple of precautions you might take. First, you have to make clear to your kids is they should never agree to meet anyone they meet on the Net, even if that person says he’s only thirteen. A lot of pedophiles pose as teenagers online, and there’s no way to tell how old they really are. So use parental control software and check the cache file every couple days to find out where your child has been. I make my daughter leave her door open when she’s on the Web, and her monitor can be seen from the hallway. So I can just walk by and check on her.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, absurdly disappointed, “that he was married.”

  Laura gave me a sharp look, as if she could see right through me. “He’s divorced.”

  I was about to ask how she knew, when Mother said from behind us, “The oven alarm is ringing, Laura.”

  She was standing with Theresa in the archway, her gaze not on us but on the television—and Jackson McCain. Laura and I exchanged quick glances. I had gotten the impression that all those years ago, Mother had made like a Capulet and broken up that teenaged romance, but now she seemed not to recognize him. Another sign, I thought.

  Laura rose and went to the kitchen to take care of the pizza. I started to say something about Jackson as his image faded from the screen, something that might elicit a response, but Mother spoke first. “That Internet. Everyone’s talking about it these days. President Urich says that the college is doing—well, whatever one does with the Internet. It’s very puzzling.” She turned to me. “Do you visit there, dear?”

  Visit there. It sounded like a museum. “Well, I have email and Web access.”

  “On that little computer of yours? The one you brought from home?” She was looking across the study at my laptop. “Can you show me?”

  I wasn’t sure whether this sudden interest in high-tech was a sign of a failing mind, or a still-agile one. But my mother seldom asked for help, and, truth to tell, I rather prided myself on my computer skills. So after a quick dinner of pizza, peanut brittle, and broccoli, I sat Mother down at Daddy’s big old oak desk and gave her a lesson in surfing.

  She wasn’t impressed with email—“I’d rather send an actual letter on my own stationery—” and most of the websites I showed her didn’t capture her interest. But she did ask to see a chat room. I did a quick search for one that focused on West Virginia history—there are chat rooms for everything, even something that obscure—and typed a query about our first governor. In about the time it took me to download my email, the erudite response scrolled down the page, complete with a citation from the only
biography.

  Mother politely shoved me out of the chair. “Let me try.”

  I found it childishly gratifying to learn that my generally accomplished mother typed with two stiff fingers and had to be reminded to use the shift key. But she managed to compose a short note of thanks to the helpful historian who billed him/herself as WVUtrue. “How shall I sign it?” she asked, looking up at me. “My own name?”

  “God, no,” Laura said, coming in with the hand-vacuum and heading for the peanut brittle crumbs on the carpet. Without Merilee, the house’s condition was beginning to deteriorate. “You never know what nuts lurk out there. If they get your real name, they can get your address—and you don’t want that.”

  After long discussion, Mother settled on the screen alias of “WVbornandbred” and sent her note. “Now tell me,” she said over the noise from Laura’s vacuuming, “about this cache thing the young police chief was talking about.”

  I clicked on the pull-down menu which listed all the websites I’d visited in the last ten days—then, as I got a glimpse of “alzheimers.net”, clicked it off.

  “What was that, that list?” my mother asked pointing to the screen where it had been.

  “Oh, nothing. The cache. It’s a history list of the sites visited recently—”

  “That’s what Chief McCain was talking about. Checking the history to see if children are visiting porn sites.” Mother reached out for the mouse, but I slid it out of the way. “How does one do that? Just click on that?”

  I shot an imploring glance at Laura. She turned out to be more web-savvy than I had imagined, and her actor’s sense of timing was impeccable. “Isn’t it under Options too, Ellen? You know, where you can set the history limits, and clear the cache?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, trying to mask my relief. “Here, Mother. You just click Options and Web Preferences, and here’s where you decide how long a list of visited sites you want. And here, click this button and it clears the history list.” I clicked the button, and somewhere inside the computer, all those URLs for sites about mental deterioration in the elderly disappeared. “Now look.” I clicked on the pull-down arrow, and the history list came up blank.