The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  Mother never said a word to me about it. I think she suspected the note came from one of Laura’s friends in the drama club. She was distracted for several days, constantly whispering on the phone, and then Merilee stayed overnight for three nights. Then Mother came home, this time with Laura.

  I’d done the right thing. Laura was ill, so ill that she was home only a few hours before Mother took her to the hospital. I knew better than to visit her. She came home three weeks later, so terribly thin that when fits of coughing seized her, I was afraid her ribs would break. She didn’t speak to me about what I’d done, and I didn’t try to defend myself. We seldom talked at all. We’d never really been sisters, so it was no loss to me.

  It was a wet, cold mountain winter, two hundred inches of snow altogether, and after only a week at home, it was clear that Laura’s lungs weren’t improving. So she went away again, this time to somewhere in Georgia, a convalescent hospital, I guessed. That summer she came home, still pale but no longer coughing. She was home only a week when Mother interrupted dinner to announce, “I’ve enrolled you for the summer session at a boarding school. You can catch up the semester you missed while you were ill.” She looked as if she anticipated a protest, but Laura only stirred the food on her plate. Mother tried again. “It’s in Louisville. They have a stable. You can ride horses whenever you like.”

  Laura looked up. “Louisville? There’s a theatre festival there, isn’t there?” And she smiled and pushed her plate aside and said, “I’ll go pack.”

  The next morning, as I returned from swim practice, she emerged from the house followed by a cab driver carrying two suitcases. She looked very grown up and stylish in a silk cardigan, her dark hair tied back with a Hermes scarf. I stood at the bottom of the front steps, waiting for her to do something. While the driver packed the luggage in his trunk, she watched from the porch. Then, gracefully, she descended.

  As she approached me, she said, very softly, “How nice for you, Theresa.” She trailed a hand along the banister. “Now you’ll have Mother all to yourself.”

  And then she smiled, a smile full of the irony I’d learned to expect from her, and got into the cab and left me behind.

  I didn’t see her again for six years, when Ellen and her husband Tom and their little daughter had us all over to their house in Brussels for Christmas. It was the second Christmas after Cathy died, and no one had much cheer, but Laura glittered. She was already a minor success in Hollywood from her role in a soap opera, and she had plenty of names to drop and enough money to buy us lovely little crystal flagons of perfume. She politely ignored me, and why not—I was nothing but a reclusive teenager, still in braces, quietly set not on college but the convent, and I kept out of her glamorous way then, and for the next decade or so.

  And now we were both home again, and nothing had changed. Laura was still glamorous in an understated expensively casual way, and I was still the one who didn’t belong.

  That first night home, as I sat there at the restaurant, picking at the first steak I’d seen in two years, the college president fawned on her. To her credit, Laura didn’t seem to like it. She was much nicer to the waitress who asked for an autograph than to President Urich when he suggested an honorary degree.

  And she stiffened when he touched her hand. It was just a little touch, nothing more than the insinuating friendliness of a salesman. But she didn’t like it.

  I found this interesting. Of course, she didn’t like him, that was easy enough to see. But she also didn’t like it when the restaurant manager came around and dropped his hand on her shoulder—and he was some old friend of hers from high school. She hid her reaction from him, smiling warmly up at him and speaking lightly of old times.

  But I noticed. And I understood. I didn’t like being touched either . . . for, I was sure, a completely different reason. People probably touched her all the time, just to see if she was real, because it must be hard to believe in what you see on TV and the movie screen. I didn’t like being touched because . . . well, no one ever touched me anymore. In the cloister, we never touched. It was a way of reminding ourselves that we weren’t really creatures of the body anymore.

  As the convent nurse, of course, I touched the other nuns, took their pulses, checked their blood pressures, palpated their abdomens— and felt them shrinking away under my professional hands. I would be the same, I supposed, if someone touched me so intimately— fingers on my wrist, my arm, my stomach.

  But Laura . . . I was struck yet again, watching her, with the odd notion that inside we were somehow similar. She might smile brightly and speak lightly and pretend to be a social animal, but I remembered her as a girl, playing her parts, putting on her costumes, speaking her lines. She did that to hide herself. I didn’t have her ability— I couldn’t disguise who I was. But I knew that quiet need to withdraw, to hide, to stay safe within.

  I didn’t want to look at her and see that commonality. So I told myself we weren’t all that much alike, after all. Touch of any kind was odd to me, alien. But it was just men’s touches she didn’t like, I realized as she and Ellen walked arm in arm up the porch steps to the house, their dark heads almost brushing as they talked—just like sisters.

  As soon as we got inside, I went off to bed.

  Insomnia and curiosity got me up again when I heard Laura rummaging around in the linen closet off our common bathroom. I got up from my too-soft bed and went to the bathroom door, and found her stuffing something behind the towels. Her first glance up at me was angry and guilty. Her second was all solicitousness.

  “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. I should have made sure your door was closed. Forgive me.”

  I was going to ask what she was doing. Then I reminded myself that I was no one’s judge but my own, and I already had enough tallying to do on that scorecard. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  She was so relieved to get away with whatever crime she was committing she actually became sisterly, offering me tea and sympathy and medication. I didn’t trust it for a moment, but there was a treacherous weakness in me that longed for . . . I don’t know, comfort, perhaps, connection, maybe even just acknowledgment from this woman who had always taken pains to ignore me. We actually might have a conversation for the first time since . . . oh, I suppose since that long-ago phone call she made from Tennessee.

  I had to admire her, in a perverse way, as she bustled around, innocent as could be, getting me water for a melatonin pill and something she called a “slumber oil”, something that smelled like lavender. She seized my hand, and I steeled myself not to react as she massaged the oil into my wrist.

  It was all to divert me, of course. She never even glanced back at that linen closet where she’d hidden her drugs or her dirty videos or whatever it was she didn’t want Mother to find. Laura had always been a great sinner—unapologetic, uncaring, and unpunished. Not for her the long struggles with conscience, the self-imposed penances. She, like Augustine, sinned boldly.

  I was actually starting to feel drowsy, staring at her special aromatherapy candle as it flickered in reflection on the windowpane. Laura was lingering by the bathroom door, unwilling, I realized, to leave me while I was still awake and able to search for her contraband. As soon as my eyes closed, I knew, she’d be back in the linen closet, moving her goodies to some safer place. Then she asked me about the convent, her dark eyes bright with interest. I recognized that interest. She’d watched The Sound of Music avidly when we were children, and afterwards I came into the bathroom to find her kneeling on the floor, a towel like a veil on her head. She was pretending to pray just like Sister Maria. Now she was at it again, trying on the role of a nun.

  But then, wasn’t that what I’d been doing for much of the last decade? Auditioning for the role of a nun?

  “I might not go back,” I said aloud when she asked me what Mother and Ellen were too polite to ask.

  For once, Laura was speechless. She wasn’t used to candor from me, or, indeed, communication of any kind. Awkward
ly, she stammered, “I didn’t mean—I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not any of my business.”

  “No. It’s not.” That sounded too abrupt. I was too used to silence—I didn’t know how to converse any more. “I’m thinking of leaving the cloister. I think I’m not dedicated enough.” It sounded less pathetic than the truth—that they might not take me back. “I don’t want to have to ask permission to visit my own mother.”

  There was, for just a moment, a flicker of question in her eyes, and I read it as if the words were printed on her forehead—Your own mother? But—and then the confusion cleared, and she smiled, and all was well, and she pretended she didn’t have a moment of complete puzzlement, wondering what mother I was talking about. Not her mother . . . oh, yes. I was adopted. I was Margaret Wakefield’s daughter too. I was even, though this was stretching things, Laura’s sister Ellen’s sort-of sister.

  Not Laura’s own sister, of course.

  It was so automatic for her that I could hardly resent her for it. She honestly didn’t think of me that way, as her mother’s daughter. I couldn’t say what I was thinking, that I loved her mother, and she didn’t. But that was one of the paradoxical things about real families—they didn’t have to love each other, and they could still be each other’s family. If Mother and I didn’t love each other . . . I’d be no one’s at all.

  Not that Laura, secure in her blood-tie, cared about that.

  “I know that doesn’t make any sense to you. You only came back for the money—to make sure Mother doesn’t disinherit you.” I yanked the unfamiliar pillow out from under me and pushed it onto the floor, refusing to look at her. “I know you don’t care about her, but I do. And she needs me.”

  Laura didn’t answer for a moment, and I was forced to look up to see her reaction. She stood there by the foot of the bed, her pretty face serene under the expensive tousled hair-do. I didn’t matter even when I insulted her.

  “I do understand.” Laura went to the bureau and picked up the candle, touching the flame with a bold finger. “You have been so much better a daughter than I ever have. I know adopting you did wonders to distract her from my father’s death.” Then, in a theatrical good night, she licked her thumb and index finger and squeezed the flame, and the candle sizzled out, leaving us in darkness. A moment later, from the darker dark that was the adjoining door, I heard her add, “And it must have been such a comfort for her, after Cathy died, to still have a favorite daughter.”

  It was said in that deceptively gentle Laura way, just a philosophical musing about the odd twists and turns of life. But her implication was clear. I was a diversion for our mother, a substitute. Not a real daughter.

  It was one answer to a question I’d never asked out loud—why was I in this family, when only Mother had ever wanted me?

  The next day, I met the boy named Brian, or Adam as he was at birth, and he told me he was searching for his birthmother, and I recognized him as spiritual kin. He was no one’s too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I left the meeting with Mother’s attorney feeling better about her condition. I knew Ellen and Laura thought it was a sign of illness, Mother giving away our home. But they were just feeling hurt and abandoned. They weren’t really seeing her—how decisively she was behaving, how comprehensively she understood the legal situation, how clearly she understood her options. She was, as they say, all there. Ellen and Laura just didn’t like the decisions she made, and would prefer to call them the product of mental illness, not a conscious desire to rid herself of her possessions.

  I’d joined a convent, already renounced my worldly goods. I was more likely than they to understand Mother’s desire to divest.

  But I could just imagine Laura thinking—of course you do. You’re not her real child, so her worldly goods are not really your inheritance, are they?

  There was some function going on in the courthouse square, so as I left the attorney’s office, I skirted the sunny green, heading for the sidewalk. It was a pleasant morning, and I felt restless and unready to go home. Really, there was no need for me here in Wakefield, as all I was likely to do was alienate my sisters by insisting that Mother was just fine. But going back to the convent meant confronting the prioress over the issue of vows. She’d made it as clear as she could, given her gentle way, that she didn’t think my vocation was sufficient.

  I might argue with that, except it was the same argument made by my former mother superior, from the nursing order. You are with us for the wrong reason. This is a commitment, not an escape.

  I thought it unlikely that they would both be wrong.

  Laura was waiting under the Founder’s Oak, and after a moment’s consideration, I joined her there. But the tension was just too great. I excused myself to get us drinks, and then I wandered aimlessly along Randolph Street, glancing over at the bandstand and behind it the bright new brick police department. Laura was headed over that way, drawn to the crowd, no doubt. There would be lots of her high school classmates there, commending her on escaping this town and making her way in Hollywood. And there was that old boyfriend of hers, the bad one with the motorcycle, transformed now into the local police chief. This transformation was a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes, but I wondered if Laura would have any use for an upstanding man.

  Me, I was trying to avoid old acquaintances and their intrusive questions. But I’d promised Laura lemonade, and so I bought a couple cups and started back to the crowd. I couldn’t see Laura anywhere. I glanced back at the edges of the crowd, saw a vaguely familiar woman pointing at me, and instinctively turned my back. But a boy came running up behind me, panting out my name. Not Sister Marie John, the name I had answered to for so long, but the one I hadn’t been called since high school trigonometry class.

  “Miss Wakefield! Wait!”

  This was a small town. I couldn’t just ignore him. Besides, the attorney might have sent him to get me for some reason—

  I turned politely and saw a boy dressed in discards, an army vest, a torn t-shirt, ragged blue jeans. His hair was clipped short. He might have looked dangerous in an urban environment, but here he seemed vulnerable— his cheeks were a little pink from his exertion, and his blue eyes were shy.

  “Miss Wakefield, she—that lady back there—said you could help me.”

  I looked over my shoulder to see who it was who had recommended me. But she was lost in the crowd. “I can help you? How?”

  He looked down at his scuffed boots. Here it was June, and he was wearing battered old boots. I brought a dollar out of my pocket, but he looked up with alarm when I tried to hand it to him. “I don’t mean money. But—but she said you’d lived here a long time. And you could help me find the Vital Records office.”

  Why I’d been mistaken for a tour guide, I didn’t know. I hadn’t even lived here for a decade. But he was looking at me with such trust. “The what office?”

  “Vital Records. I just want to see if they have my birth certificate. I was adopted, see. And I’m trying to find my birth parents.”

  I looked back for Laura, but still couldn’t see her, and the lemonade cups were getting warm and sticky. So I dumped them unceremoniously into the nearby trashcan. Then I turned back to the boy. “You want to find your birth certificate?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know what county I was born in. Just that it was around here somewhere.” He was keeping up with me, regarding me with that trusting look. “I just, you know, want to know who I am. Where I came from. Why—why they gave me away.” He tried to smile, but it didn’t stay on his face. “Can you help me?”

  I drew a breath as we reached the other side of the street. Help him. I couldn’t help myself—but I was trained to help. And this was Wakefield. People helped. They thought nothing of driving the neighbor kids when they missed the school bus, or dropping off a casserole to a new mother. This boy didn’t want even that much help.

  “Let me think.” I’d gotten my birth certificate once, or rather a copy of it, when I
needed a passport. “I think you go to the county clerk’s office. But—” I tried to remember back. “But if you were adopted, I don’t think you get the real birth certificate. I—” I took a deep breath. “I’m adopted too, and they issued a new birth certificate.”

  “I know,” he said. “I read about all that on a website. They, like, pretend you were really born to the adoptive parents. Weird, huh?”

  I had never spoken about this to anyone. But I found myself confiding, “I was adopted when I was six. So no one pretended anything.”

  “Oh, well, you know, my parents—I mean, my adoptive parents—at some point they told me I was adopted. But as far as the state’s concerned, I was born to them. I thought I’d see if the original birth certificate, you know, slipped through on the county level.”

  “Well, the county clerk’s office is in the courthouse annex, I think.” I gestured to the low brick building across from the old courthouse. “I guess I can take you there.”

  I didn’t know where that came from. He could find his own way there. But he was so nervous, I wasn’t sure he’d go through with it by himself. And for the first time, I wondered if my own original birth certificate survived. Not that I needed it. I knew my birthparents’ name already. But—

  “It’ll make me feel more real, I guess,” he said. “Sometimes I feel . . . invented. Not organic. You know?”

  I didn’t look at him. But I nodded, and crossed the final street to the annex building. “I didn’t realize it’s so hard to track this stuff down.”

  “Well, usually it isn’t. But my par—my adoptive parents aren’t interested in helping. So I can’t be sure what county, or even what state, it all started in. I thought I’d, you know. Spend my summer learning what I can learn. There’s a whole lot of stuff on the Web that trains you in how to do this, see.”