At the bottom of the attic steps, I fumbled for the light switch and flipped it. Now I could see the narrow stairs ascending to the creaking Stephen-King darkness. I took a deep breath and told myself old houses made noises, and ghosts didn’t, which only reminded me that any ghost could sneak up soundlessly from behind. Taking a deep breath, I forged ahead, aware that this fear was the only sign of guilt I’d allow myself.
From memory, I found the other switch at the top of the stairs. The bare lightbulb’s glare revealed a thin film of dust on the old oak floorboards, and a track of recent shoeprints. Rockport walking sandals, to judge by the logo. Ellen. (Sorry. I notice footwear.) To my relief, they led not to the hidden alcove but to a box in the corner, piled high with books. I didn’t bother to wonder what Ellen wanted from her old college textbooks. I didn’t have time. I had work to do.
Walking lightly on the balls of my bare feet, I slid around the old trunk with Great-great-grandfather’s Union Army uniform and pushed aside a stack of ribbon-frilled hatboxes. There, behind the post, was the orange crate that had once held all Cathy’s LPs and now held a stack of framed paintings.
They would never fit in my shopping bag, not without ripping it anyway. I stripped off one frame and slid the matted painting into the bag. Behind me I heard a creak—but it was just old-house noise, I was sure. Working quickly, I de-framed the rest of the paintings and hid them away in my bag. Then I shoved the hatboxes and Great-great-gramps’s trunk back into place, and fled the attic.
I was just hiding the paintings behind the towels in our joint linen closet when I heard Theresa’s sharp voice behind me.
I spent the next half hour distracting her from that linen closet and what it concealed. It was easy enough to do. I just had to get her to remember how much she hated me, and get her to tell me about it.
(It was odd, wasn’t it, that she was the one who ended up hating me. I should have been the one who hated, who blamed, who resented. After all, she was the one whose betrayal derailed my life so long ago. For just a moment, I imagined what it would have been like if, twenty years ago, Theresa hadn’t chosen to use my trust as another way to please my mother. Would Jackson and I—no. There was no profit in speculation. And no profit in hating her.)
She hated me, I learned, because I didn’t love my mother. Oh, she didn’t come out and say that, but it was clear enough. I wasn’t about to argue with her characterization. Whatever complex of emotion I felt for my mother couldn’t be reduced to “love”, no matter how I tried. And I wasn’t about to argue that she didn’t love Mother either, that while she was off in Romania and some cloister being separate and Catholic and pure, I at least called once a month and sent that card every two weeks and shipped tasteful and appropriate gifts every Mother’s Day, birthday, and Christmas. I might not have been a dutiful daughter, but I could play one on TV.
Theresa didn’t seem to think being a dutiful daughter required anything more than “love.”
Well, I supposed she must have felt gratitude all those years. Mother rescued her from a life of poverty. At least she waited until after my father died to gather the lost child to her bosom. And at least now Theresa seemed to regret the path she’d taken away from Mother. She seemed to be—perhaps this was only my wishful thinking—planning to leave the cloister and come home and take care of my mother in her old age.
It would be the perfect solution. Not that I would have offered that myself, but I didn’t want Ellen to feel obligated to take Mother into her home.
Yes. It would work very well. I thought as I left Theresa in her room and returned to the linen closet to remove the paintings. Theresa could resume her quest to be Mother’s best daughter, making up for her rebellious decision to leave home and become a nun. (We Presbyterians think of that as rebellious, at least.) Mother would have a faithful acolyte, trained by a religious institution nearly as autocratic as Mother herself. Ellen and I would be guilt-free.
I could give Theresa a secret allowance, so she would have funds of her own. Ellen would have to be the intermediary; Theresa would never take money from me. This plan preoccupied me as I re-hid the paintings in the window seat under my old ballet costumes. Mother and Theresa would have each other, and neither of them would have any more claim on me.
Next morning, Chris Riker called to tell me the Porsche was all ready to go, and he could have someone drop it off if I wanted. I started to say yes, then, remembering the ride Jackson had offered, hesitated. No, I told Chris, I’d pick it up.
And then I looked up Jackson McCain in the little Wakefield phone book, and, without giving myself a chance to back out, called him and asked for a ride.
I waited out on the porch in the sunlight, titillated, thinking about him . . . It was, I told myself, just a leftover need to rebel that left me a little breathless, anticipating his arrival. I was hoping that Mother would look out her window and see him. But then, she didn’t seem to recall who he was. So it wasn’t much of a rebellion after all.
But I still felt the breath catch in my chest, the way it did for just a moment before the camera went on. Nostalgia. I had loved him with all the fierceness of youth, and he’d loved me back just as fiercely. I’d never felt that way again. But then, I’d never been sixteen again either. I was a grown woman now, hardened by experience and loss. I was lucky to be able to feel the mild interest the architect inspired in me. No reason to lament the loss of adolescent passion, so long after adolescence was done.
Jackson arrived promptly, in the snazzy squad car. He must not have a wife, I told myself as I got in. A wife wouldn’t let him provide taxi service for single women. Unfortunately, the trip was too short for me to have time to figure out a way to ask him about his marital status. I did have time to tell myself that it was no concern of mine—just not enough time to be convincing.
Riker’s Garage was on Wood Street, backing up to the old railroad tracks. The young mechanics gathered in a knot near the third bay, glancing with equal interest at my car and at me. But once they realized that not all Hollywood stars looked or dressed like Jennifer Lopez, they went back to admiring the car.
Chris regarded them benevolently. “They sure fought over who got to work on that. We don’t get many Porsches around here. Hell, we don’t get any Porsches around here.” Lowering his voice, he confessed, “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to figure it out. But I went online and downloaded the schematics, and you know, it’s not all that different than a Volkswagen, inside.”
“Costs a bit more,” I said with a smile. “So did you charge me Volkswagen or Porsche rates?”
He grinned and handed me a perfectly reasonable bill. “I hear that real Porsche mechanics get paid like brain surgeons.”
“Well, all I know is, everyone but you that’s ever worked on this car had a brand new Porsche of his own.”
It was all very comfortable, very hometown, but then, as Chris ran my credit card through, he gave me a sidelong look. I knew that look, and anticipated the question. He handed me the credit card slip, and as I signed it, he said, “Could you maybe sign something else? I know my wife would like to have your autograph.”
“Of course.” I took the grimy legal pad he offered and hesitated, pen to paper. “What’s your wife’s name?”
“Sherry. She was Sherry Long. Maybe you remember her.”
Bits of memory kept coming back to me, the longer I was here in Wakefield. Sherry had been the head cheerleader, and she played the lead in The Bachelor and the Baby when I was a sophomore. I had wanted, with a quite irrational desire, to steal her smile—it was a real gleamer. “I remember Sherry. She had the most beautiful smile.”
He nodded, quite serious. “She still does. The dentist said she ought to do tooth-modeling, you know, like for Crest and stuff.”
Within me there is a nasty person always struggling to escape, and so I slammed the door shut on cruel laughter and wrote, “To Sherry—I’ll always remember your beautiful smile. Best wishes, Laura Wakefield.”
/> When I emerged from the garage office, I saw Jackson sitting not in his squad car but in my Porsche. In the driver’s seat. In some ways, I concluded, no boy ever grows up. I handed him the keys and got in the other side.
“Just up to the Rocks and back,” he told me. “And then I’ll let you have it back.”
By the time we got out on the highway, he was hitting a speed that would have gotten him arrested for reckless driving—if he weren’t the one who ordinarily did the arresting. The Porsche appreciated it, however. It wasn’t as if I ever took it to the limits of its considerable power.
But there was only so fast you could go in the mountains without sailing off into a gorge, so Jackson slowed to a safer pace once the road started twisting. Just as well. I was no longer used to the vertigo-inducing mountain roads, and felt distinctly ill. I concentrated on the button of the glove compartment, and, to distract myself from my stomach, said, “So Chris ended up marrying Sherry Long, just as everyone predicted.”
Jackson shrugged. “Most everyone in our class ended up doing what was predicted. Only, you know, if they’d been taking bets over at Wakefield High back then, it would have been Sherry they’d have figured was going to end up in a TV star, not you.”
I considered this. “You mean me, a nobody in the drama club, working on the makeup and props and lighting, and getting only four lines? It is pretty funny, isn’t it? But you know, there aren’t many head cheerleaders who make it as actresses.”
“Why not? They’ve got the looks.”
“They might have the looks, but they don’t have the desperation. Most likely to succeed, I think, are the late bloomers. They have the right amount of insecurity, and they have something to prove, so they never get too comfortable.”
He adjusted the rear-view mirror and studied the reflection in it. My reflection. I felt a heat rise in my face—a blush. Jesus. I was an actress. I’d bared my breasts—well, just one breast, and there was only a glimpse of the nipple—before millions. A few thousand even wrote me about it, most from jail. But here Jackson was, just looking at my face . . .
“You aren’t like that. You were always beautiful. Even in high school.”
I should have protested, because it wasn’t true, but instead, I just murmured, “Thank you. You were the only one who noticed, I think.” I meant that last ironically, but it came out, oh, I don’t know, a little poignant, and I thought maybe I was just as insecure as those late bloomers, even if I’d never really gotten that bloom.
“Yeah, I noticed. All the time. Hard to ignore.”
And there we were, suddenly, back in high school, so young, so innocent—
He pulled the car into a scenic cut-out, and surprised, I looked up at the Plato Rocks, two fat fingers of granite that rose phallically out of the rounded feminine breasts of the hills.
He got out and walked to the grove under Plato East, and I took a deep breath and followed. The air was cooler there among the oak trees, and the sunlight filtered through the leaves to spackle the sheer granite face. They were each 300 feet tall, and served as training spots for rock climbers. My sister, in fact, had taught climbing here—Cathy, that is. The rest of us only came here to make out.
Well, I came here to make out. Maybe Ellen too. But Theresa—not a chance.
I stole a look at Jackson, and thought maybe he was remembering a few make-out sessions here too. All with me, I hoped. I didn’t want him to have had those sweet dusky evenings under the towers with anyone else.
He broke the silence, though his voice was low, as if he were about to tell me a secret. “Do you ever think of back then?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. “Sometimes. Not often.” And then, haltingly, I had to explain. “It’s not that I don’t want to remember. But I’m afraid, if I think of it too often—”
“You’ll wear it out. I know. Or it’ll break.”
“Or it will stop being special.”
He reached out and put his hand on the rock face. “Maybe that won’t happen.”
Now we were speaking in hushed tones, and I realized that he too had locked away the memory in some secret box somewhere, to keep it safe. “Maybe not.”
“What do you remember? About that time in Tennessee?”
I reached out too and touched the rock. It was warm from the sun, and smooth from a million years of erosion. I couldn’t imagine how Cathy had climbed it. “Not very much, after my mother found our phone number, at least. I remember after she called, we had to move to hide from her. I remember they wouldn’t give us back our security deposit, and we went to that cheap motel. Then I got sick.” I managed a smile. “I always think of it as the Tennessee disease. I got it in Tennessee. And in that Tennessee Williams play, the girl gets it. Her name was Laura too. And she said it was an old-fashioned disease. Pleurosis. Only she called it blue roses.” It turned into pneumonia, both lungs, and Jackson took me to the hospital. I was afraid they’d find my mother, or she’d find me, and I determined to get out of bed the next morning and find my way back to Jackson.
I never got the chance. Jackson disappeared, and Mother appeared.
“I remember the hospital,” I said. “But I don’t remember much after that.”
“I do.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“It was a mess.” Jackson traced a finger down a vein in the granite face. “I was going crazy worrying about you. You got so sick so fast. And I knew they wouldn’t let you stay in that hospital long without insurance. So that night, I did something stupid—broke into a drugstore, looking for medicine. I got caught, naturally. But the cop—I told him that whatever he had to do was okay, but could he make sure my wife got home, because she was sick and someone had to take care of her if I couldn’t.”
He looked away. “I guess Wade thought that was touching, you know, a young delinquent like me having a wife, and so he promised he would, and I guess—well, you’d know better than I do what happened.”
“I remember. He met me at the hospital, and called my mother, and she came down. He was kind.”
“Yeah. He came by the juvie center a couple days later and told me you were back with your mother, and that she was going to get you better, and fix everything. And I guess she did. The annulment and all.”
“I—I didn’t think I had a choice. I knew you’d gotten into some trouble. Mother never said anything, but I thought—you know. That she could make it worse for you somehow. Get you tried as adult, maybe. So I went along with the annulment. Did that hurt you?” I whispered.
“Nah. It was the right thing. I was up for eighteen months, you know, and I knew you were really sick and I wasn’t going to be able to take care of you, and it all seemed so . . . broken by then. I thought I’d messed up your life enough, and I guess I was relieved that you weren’t going to be dragged down with me.”
“I—I wasn’t strong enough, you know. I was so sick, and I thought the same thing, that you didn’t need me to worry about. It was months before I recovered, and I wouldn’t have been anything but trouble for you.”
“I know. I always knew it. I never blamed you.” He smiled. “Wade kind of took an interest in me after that. He came out once and said you’d called him and that you were better and I wasn’t to worry anymore. “
I pawed at my face. Tears. I hadn’t cried, except at the movies, for years. But then, I hadn’t thought of those two sixteen-year-olds in years. “He told me you were in school. I knew he meant the juvenile prison farm. I didn’t know what had happened, but I wanted you to know you didn’t have to worry about me anymore.”
“I—you know. It kind of overwhelmed me, to hear you were better, and that you’d thought to call him, and that—And so I broke down some, which was sort of embarrassing, but he understood. He and his wife applied to have me come stay with them a couple weekends. And then, when I turned eighteen, I got out. And he helped me get the record expunged so I could join the Bristol force.” After a minute, he added, “He’s the one I wanted for chief
, who got forced to retire instead. “
“He was kind to us. He didn’t have to be.”
“Yeah. Christ. Can you believe how young we were? And we got married. It was crazy.”
“It was romantic. Daring.”
“Just like in the movies.” He glanced at his watch, and turned back to the car. “Look, I got to get back to town. They’re dedicating the new police building this weekend, and we got a lot of boxes to move first.”
I was both disappointed and relieved that our interlude was over. Once back in the car, I said, “Oh, yes. I heard you made extortionate demands to the town board. Chargers as squad cars, a new building.”
“We needed one. The old building never had a lockup. They just put a cell in the old house the police chief used to live in. And that’s cruel and unusual punishment, to be locked up in somebody’s basement.”
I caught his grin and realized he knew this from experience. “So do you live out there in the house over the lockup?”
“No way. It’s over on 21, halfway out of town, and falling apart. Besides, the last chief, he used to store the heroin in the garage. I was worried if I lived there, a packet he left behind would show up, and they’d figure I was in on the business too.” He turned back onto Main Street and shot me a glance. “And it was no sort of house for a kid, anyway.”
I felt a pain in my chest, a sudden seizing. Stupid, I told myself. Stop it. Nothing showed in my voice, however. “I know what you mean. A child could get locked into the cell. Especially if there was more than one child. A few times I would have liked to lock my sisters behind bars.” The barest pause, as I gathered my composure. “Do you have just the one?”
“Yeah. Carrie. She’s twelve.”
Twelve. So he probably waited years before he married again. That at least was some comfort. “Is she going to be at the dedication?”
“No. She lives with her mother back in Bristol. We got divorced last year, before I took this job.”
The year She Fell Page 14
