The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  “Mother—”

  It was hard remonstrating with her at the best of times, when I was sober and lucid. Now I stumbled through an insistence that she go right back in the morning. She looked scornful; as well she might, considering she was facing three drunk daughters and a trashed front parlor.

  “I don’t want everyone to know my business. I am on the hospital board. The neurologist went to high school with Theresa.”

  I sighed. More of that small-town reticence.

  Before I could speak, Theresa said calmly, “So we’ll take you into Buckhannon. The hospital there must have a CAT scan too. And no one will know who you are.”

  “There is no need for that,” Mother said. “I am fine. It was nothing but a low-blood-sugar problem this morning. I won’t waste my time or yours—”

  “Yes, you will.” I made my voice firm, as if I were talking to a recalcitrant deacon, or one of my former second-graders. And I used what always worked with that crowd: threats and rewards. “After we see the neurologist, we can stop by the computer warehouse there in Buckhannon. You wanted to learn more about computers and the Internet. I’ll buy you your own PC. You won’t have to use my little laptop anymore.”

  Amazingly, it worked. She hesitated, then said, “You’ll show me how to get on the Web? And do emails and chats on that PC too?”

  I promised. And she acceded.

  Of course, she had to have the last word. Once we’d reached an agreement, she cast an assessing gaze across the room. “It’s time,” she said, “to clean up this room and get on to bed.”

  And she turned on her heel and headed upstairs, leaving the three of us sullen and silent, our camaraderie smashed, our party busted.

  As we picked up popcorn and stacked plastic glasses, I assured my sisters that they could sleep late in the morning and let me handle the drive to Buckhannon. Neither protested, but neither seemed cognizant of my sacrifice either. I reminded myself that I was the eldest now, and that sacrifice was my duty.

  I was just getting into bed when the cell phone rang. Somehow I knew it was Tom. I hesitated, then crossed to the dresser and dug the phone out of my purse, hoping that he’d tell me that he was on the road back home. Instead he said, “Let’s go to lunch tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can talk this through. This isn’t much, compared to all we’ve been through, and I want you to know that, and know how much you mean to me—”

  “Tom.” I took a deep breath. “Look, I’m trying to deal with this. You refuse to tell me the truth, so I’ve been investigating it myself. And if—when—I track down that woman, well, then I’ll know why it happened.”

  “Track her down? Jesus, what is it you’re planning?”

  I felt a tiny thrill of pleasure. I’d scared him. “Figuratively. If you’re not going to tell me, I’m going to find out for myself, even if it means calling the hospital and—”

  I hoped for an oh, all right, a concession from him, the truth, or at least some start towards it. All I got was silence. I felt the crush of reality on my chest. “Not that it really matters. This is just the final act, you know. It’s just what’s making it clear it’s over, and it’s time to go on, both of us. I think it’s been wrong for a long time, but I didn’t have any real concrete explanation before. Now I know. This has always been between us.”

  “No, it hasn’t. It’s never been important—”

  “It should have been. It’s important to me. If I’d have known, we would never have gotten married, or have lasted this long, and you know that’s true. Even as it was, with this big secret still secret, it wasn’t really any good anymore.” I broke off. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say what I’d never said out loud before.

  “What? We’ve been together almost twenty years, and if it’s been bad, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “I know. You didn’t notice.”

  “Say it. Whatever you’re going to say.”

  He asked for it.

  “I was going to tell you. After you left that last time, when I wanted to live here in the states and you wouldn’t stay. I was going to tell you when you got back that it was time to end it, that we weren’t really together anymore, that I wanted to have a real home for Sarah and a real job and I wasn’t ever going to get that if I kept following you around.”

  “You were going to divorce me?” He sounded as if the idea was unknown to him, as if he’d never imagined it. Then his voice hardened. “So what happened? Why aren’t we divorced?”

  “I couldn’t. Not when you came back from Tehran. You needed me.”

  I heard his quick breath, and then, harshly, he said, “That was temporary. I don’t—I don’t need now.”

  “I know. I realize that. That’s why I can leave.”

  Another moment, and he hung up—not abruptly, not angrily, just a disconnection. I sat there with the phone in my hand, waiting . . . waiting for him to call back, waiting for the moonlight to dim, waiting for something to happen to mark this moment. But all that happened was my hand getting stiff, so I closed the phone and slid it back into my purse.

  I’d done it. Whatever it was, I’d done it. It was over now. Either he would call me and tell me the truth, and we’d find some way to go on, or I’d make my way alone. Either way, I suspected our life together was ending in some sense. But then, looking back, I realized we’d been living separately, or at least in separate marriages, all along. Secrets did that—they split reality into two parts, one for those who knew the secret, and one for those who didn’t.

  We were still on opposite sides of the line. But at least now I knew that much.

  Mother was up and dressed, but then, she always was, by seven o’clock, no matter what. Her cool silence didn’t bode well for the hour-long trip into Buckhannon. I decided I needed an infusion of coffee and a couple aspirin before I could pick up the keys and get in the car with her.

  At the last minute, Theresa came down the stairs, dressed in one of her plain new outfits, her eyes rimmed in red and her mouth drooping with weariness. I guess her years of abstinence hadn’t won her any indulgence when it came to hangovers.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  “Good. You can translate the medicalese.” I was about to transfer the whole unhappy task to her, but then I looked down at my keys. Theresa probably hadn’t driven in years, and West Virginia driving required some recent experience. “I’ll drive.”

  Considering how hung over I was, I should have asked Theresa to recommend me to the Pope for canonization. Instead, I herded a reluctant Mother and Theresa to the Volvo and unlocked the back door.

  “What’s this?” Theresa reached in and pulled out an overnight bag I recognized from home.

  A bag I’d left at home.

  She handed it over and I unzipped the top. Two blouses, some underwear, a pair of slacks and a skirt. One pair of casual canvas shoes. All compatible colors. A Ziploc bag with my toothpaste and toothbrush and other necessities.

  If almost two decades as a foreign correspondent had taught Tom anything, it was how to pack efficiently.

  I’d left my car locked—I always do—but of course Tom would have the keys, just as I had the key to his jeep on the key ring dangling from my hand.

  That was marriage. You might be breaking apart, but you still packed for each other.

  As Theresa got Mother settled in the car, I took the bag into the house and hung it from the staircase newel post. Then, glancing around to make sure no one was listening, I made a quick call to the Super-8 out on the bypass. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter. When I asked for Tom’s room, they told me he had just checked out.

  He’s given up and gone home, I thought. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  But the desk clerk went blithely on. “He’s made a reservation for tomorrow, though.”

  I thanked her and hung up, puzzling over this. It was a three-hour drive back to our house. Maybe he suddenl
y decided to go there. Or maybe he decided to go visit Sarah at her camp in Maryland. But why? Did he mean to tell her about our problems? Surely not—not without talking to me first. We weren’t that separated, I hoped.

  I could call his cell phone—no. I wasn’t chasing him. He knew my number.

  Slowly I put the phone away and went back to the car.

  I was stopped at a traffic light on Main when I saw the boy emerging from the Wakefield Herald office.

  He was here in Wakefield. The boy. Brian. The love child.

  As I passed, I looked into the rear-view mirror to keep him in view. Theresa, sitting behind Mother in the back seat, saw him too. And, in the mirror, I saw her mouth, bare of lipstick and a little pale, widen just a bit as she raised her hand to wave at him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LAURA

  Maybe it’s true you can’t go home again. But if you try, it’s best to do it in a Porsche.

  That’s what I decided when Ellen told me about our aging mother and her new enthusiasm for revising her will. I didn’t want to go back to that dull little town, but if I didn’t, my old neighbors would assume I cared nothing about my own mother. And we couldn’t have that rumor getting into People magazine. So I’d make my return in my fancy sports car, and give them the eyeful they wanted. I even stopped at a K-Mart in Harrisonburg and bought a long flowing chiffon scarf, in a shade of yellow that matched the Porsche. As I sped down the highway, I caught sight of my image in the sideview mirror. I looked like Isadora Duncan just moments before her dramatic scarf-death.

  I was driving in from Long Island, where I had a summer home. It was a good time for me to leave. All my fellow Hollywooders were arriving, and the line at Starbucks of a morning was on the edge of insupportable.

  The action was getting uncomfortably hot on another front too. My cottage was being renovated, and the architect, a gentle man named Alex, had started lingering over coffee after our blueprint consultations, musing that he hoped to be marrying and starting a family before he turned forty, and didn’t I think the cottage’s third bedroom would make a good nursery. I knew just a single word from me and he would ask me for something significant—a date, a wedding perhaps. But I couldn’t say the word . . .

  Coward, I told myself, but I couldn’t help it. My sister’s email gave me the excuse I needed to escape, just for a week or so, the push-pull of attraction and resistance.

  After I crossed the Canaan Valley, the narrow road started climbing and twisting, and the Porsche started coughing. It had always been as temperamental as any starlet, and the clear mountain air infected it more than the worst Los Angeles smog. I managed to limp to the top of the mountain before it sputtered out, leaving me only enough momentum to coast into the scenic cut-out over the river gorge as an old pickup roared past me in the passing lane.

  My cell phone was handy, but I didn’t pick it up. Instead I climbed out of the car onto the gravel shoulder, slamming the door behind me. The noise echoed through the gorge and came back to me a moment later as I leaned over the guardrail to look down into the abyss.

  I hadn’t seen the gorge from this angle for many years, but I remembered it sharply as I stood there—the cragged stone face on the other side, the distant rush of the water below, the cool mist that rose in transparent billows into my face.

  This was one of those family spots. My daredevil sister Cathy had rappelled down this one cliff one summer while Ellen and I watched, transfixed with fear, both of us begging her not to do it. She had to use three ropes, anchoring the first on the oak tree at the edge of the road—she said it was very uncool to anchor a rope on something manmade like a guardrail—then dropping to the ledge about a hundred feet below, fixing another rope to the stone face, and descending to another ledge. When she finally reached the floor of the gorge, she was just a tiny stick figure against the river, one stick arm waving up at us. She hiked out of the canyon and met us back where the river entered the valley east of town.

  That’s how she died—not here, thank goodness. On the next mountain over, rappelling one afternoon, she fell a couple hundred feet to the canyon floor. Same river, however, just a few miles west.

  Cathy had gotten all the risk-taking genes, I guess. All I ever did here at the gorge was sit quietly for hours with my back against the big boulder, quiet and attentive while my father painted the view. “You’re a good watcher,” he told me. He meant that as a compliment, as something we shared.

  Daddy and I were the observers in a family full of do-ers. Mother founded and ordered and organized; Cathy experienced and conquered; Ellen strived and achieved. Daddy and I just watched. And Daddy painted what we saw.

  The gorge, he told me, happened when one of the oldest rivers in the world started to eat away at one of the oldest mountains. He had to show me what he meant, and he painted it for me, a series of watercolors—a hundred-million years in the life of the gorge. The first in the series showed a little stream, running placidly down a mountain far more jagged and fierce than worn-out old Aidan here, as a brontosaurus bent its long neck to drink along the bank. And then another watercolor, elaborately detailed, with the stream gouging a channel through the mountain, a pterodactyl soaring overhead. And then another seven watercolors, on through the epochs, the gorge getting deeper and deeper and the mountain softening under the effects of time and erosion. The last showed a serious little girl in a baseball shirt, sitting on the boulder and looking down at the rushing river, hundreds of feet below.

  They were just the sort of whimsy to delight an imaginative child. And they were mine. Once they had hung in a diagonal line across the back wall of my room. But the night I left home almost twenty years ago, I’d taken them down and hidden them in the attic.

  Now might be a good time to retrieve them, to hang in my renovated summer home.

  They better still be there.

  Another daughter, with another mother, might have just staked her claim, might have come right out and said that she wanted them and her father would have wanted her to have them. But in some hidden recess of self, I was still that watchful child—and I still had the same mother, the one who had always denied me what I wanted most, and always for my own good.

  And the thought of that mother moved me back into my fancy sports car, where I sat while the traffic passed me by, scarf lying limp around my neck, hoping that maybe Thomas Wolfe was right after all. It certainly looked like some force had prevented me from going home again, even though I had really, really tried.

  But before I could give into destiny, climb out of the car, and hitchhike back to New York, a police car pulled up. A very cool police car, a black Charger, long and low and lethal. I ran through a checklist and determined that I wasn’t doing anything illegal, and thus was able to greet this representative of law and order with a smile.

  The smile disappeared as soon as I saw the cop’s face.

  Jackson McCain. My . . . this sounds so odd. I never thought of him this way. But that’s what he was . . . my ex-husband. My first love. My last love, I thought in my cynical moments.

  It had been, oh, twenty years. A long time with no contact. Neither of us were the sort to come back for high school reunions—for that matter, I supposed neither of us had graduated from Wakefield High. Two decades without a phone call, a letter, or an email.

  I’d been holding my breath, but now I let it out, a long, shaky exhale. He still looked good, standing on the other side of my car door like he was planning on asking for my ID. He was wearing jeans and a Nike t-shirt (not a uniform—maybe he’d just borrowed the police car?) and his shoulders were broader and his face more tanned than I remembered. But his eyes were still the dark blue of the spruces up on the ridge, and his mouth still had that slight smile that dug a dimple out of his left cheek.

  I couldn’t believe he was a cop. The Jackson I knew was, well, more used to the other side of the law.

  He didn’t seem at all surprised to encounter me. “I saw your sister at Odom’s. She s
aid you were coming back to town.” He walked around my car, studying it. “So when Chili called in that there was a yellow Porsche stranded on 32, I figured it had to be you. Yellow. That was always your favorite color, wasn’t it?”

  That surprised me. Disarmed me. That he would remember—“You’re not really a cop, are you?”

  “Nah. I just stole this squad car to impress you.”

  The Jackson I remembered might actually do that. But—“You really are a cop.”

  “Fraid so.”

  “How—” It didn’t make any sense. But then, my being here made no sense. I’d sworn I’d never be back, except for another funeral, and here I was, without a dead body in sight. And Jack—well, I was amazed that the town let him return, much less handed him a badge and a gun.

  He actually did have a gun, in a holster at his hip, half-concealed by the tail of his t-shirt. It made me think of Gary Cooper in those Westerns I watched leaning against my father on the old couch, of the tall lean lawman with the gun and the calm sense of the power of goodness.

  “I—“There I was stuttering, like an understudy who hadn’t studied her lines. I took hold of myself. “It was good of you to come find me.”

  He’d yanked open the hood and was shaking his head at the mystery underneath. “German design’s too complicated for me. How about I call you a tow? Chris Riker’s got a good garage on South Street.”

  Chris Riker had been our star quarterback, got a scholarship to WVU. I was surprised at how immediately that information came back to me, as if Jackson had pushed a memory button. “I guess he wasn’t drafted into the pros after all.”

  “Blew out his knee senior year. Didn’t bother to graduate. He was always good with cars.”

  It was as if we were casual acquaintances, as if we had no past to remember.

  Except, of course, that as he dialed his cell phone, he kept stealing glances at me. He couldn’t believe I was back either. I listened to his low, authoritative voice and thought, suddenly, inescapably, he’s a man now. My Jackson.