The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  As he opened his mouth to protest, Laura grabbed my arm and dragged me out the hospital door, Ellen close behind. They collapsed into laughter against the railing.

  “You are so bad.” Laura looked back through the glass door into the lighted lobby and started laughing again.

  “Well, it’s true,” I said. “That’s what he’s worried about. That she’ll die without signing the new will.”

  Ellen, shaking her head, led the way back to her car. “You know you stole Laura’s line. That’s what she was dying to say.”

  “But I was way too polite,” Laura said, opening the door. “Unlike Sister Marie John here.”

  She was grinning at me as if she approved. As if we were kindred.

  And then, serious again, she said, “So go ahead. Ask Ellen.”

  So as we started home, I explained to Ellen what Laura and I had been supposing— that Mother was my mother in truth. Ellen was silent until she pulled to a stop in our driveway. “That’s pretty wild.”

  “I know,” Laura said. “But so is Mother grabbing up Theresa like that, just after Daddy died. She wanted her badly. And she had to have some way to make the Prices give up the child they were raising. Like Theresa was hers by right.”

  I wanted to believe it. It would mean I was wanted—wanted by Mother, and wanted by the Prices. This way they wouldn’t have given me up for money or because I was too much trouble, but because they had no choice.

  It was too tempting. It played too close to my fantasy.

  And it meant Mother had strayed from her marriage. And given up her own child. But maybe it was enough that she’d taken me back—

  Ellen turned off the engine and we went into the house. It was silent enough that we could hear the crickets calling in the garden through the open parlor windows. Laura led the way to the kitchen, flipping on the lights as she went. Ellen and I sat down at the table while she opened the refrigerator and studied the contents.

  “But wouldn’t we have noticed?” Ellen said. “Wouldn’t Daddy have noticed?”

  Laura looked back from the refrigerator. “We were just kids. And anyway, the reason I always suspected was that was the spring and summer you and I spent alone here with Daddy. Remember? Mother was doing her show-horse judging tour while Cathy was in equestrienne school. Or so she said.”

  “And she’s always been a big woman.” Ellen shook her head. “But Daddy would notice, wouldn’t he? I mean, he wasn’t the suspicious type, but really.”

  “Maybe he did notice. Maybe—” Laura glanced over at me. “Maybe he knew about the affair, and let her stay with him as long as she gave Theresa up.”

  I said, “Mitch thought that I was Mr. Price’s child by some other woman. I just called him and asked if Mother could have been the other woman. But he thought that was unlikely. Impossible.”

  Laura took out a pitcher of lemonade and closed the refrigerator door. “No, I don’t think it could be him. Jackson said something odd this morning. He said Mother had come to his office and forgot her laptop.” She got glasses out of the cupboard and filled them carefully. “And she’d also forgotten a DNA report. She’d wanted the DNA of someone— and it had to be related to this. I mean, it had to be. And hasn’t Mr. Price been dead for years? So she couldn’t have gotten a DNA sample. It had to be of someone alive now.”

  I nodded slowly. “The real father, I guess.”

  Laura took a seat and cupped her hands around her glass. “You know what she told Jackson. He said she had some crazy story about tracking a sexual predator in some chat room. I mean, can you imagine?”

  I said slowly, “Maybe, well, you know, it’s part of her condition. Maybe she’d had some mini-stroke already, as we suspected, and she was being paranoid.”

  Ellen put her head down on her hands. “I just don’t know. All this—concealing Brian’s letter, and suddenly wanting a laptop so she could investigate some weird issue, and she suddenly takes off for Charleston, only she wasn’t headed for Charleston.”

  “Maybe she’s in worse shape than we thought,” Laura said. “Guilt eating away at her? Keeping this secret for so long? And getting the letter from Cathy’s son—”

  Ellen raised her head. “Of course, the letter said he was my son. But she must have figured out pretty quickly that it was too close to Sarah’s birth.”

  Laura frowned. “I wonder if she knew. Suspected. Because the only reason I realized Brian was Cathy’s and not the child of someone else was that I’d known Cathy was pregnant. And I only knew because I dropped in on her that fall. Maybe Mother knew, or found out later.” Her mouth tightened grimly. “And maybe it all came back when she got Brian’s letter. Maybe she blamed herself because she’d given up a child too—”

  I didn’t want to think about Brian, off somewhere sleeping in his car, I supposed, miserable and lonely and mourning a mother he never knew. “I wish Cathy were here for him.”

  “I wish she were here,” Laura said, “just to tell us what she remembers. She was the eldest, and knew Mother best. But—” she sighed and rose from the table. “It’s been a long day. Let’s get to bed.”

  We spent the next day at the hospital, taking turns in the waiting room. Around noon, Brian snuck in with snacks and drinks for us, and hung around until Ellen took pity and offered him a tour of town sites, like where Cathy had gone to grade school and won the softball tournament— and her grave. I wondered if she would drive him out of town to the cliff where Cathy fell.

  I got to sit with Mother for an hour or so, watching her face as she slept. I thought I knew her, but now I wasn’t so sure. Did my birth shame her so much that she had to hide it?

  Finally I went home to change and make some dinner. Then I just sat in the kitchen with my rosary, feeling the old rosewood beads bump through my fingers as I said each Hail Mary. There was always peace in this ancient exercise, but seldom any illumination. I’d never been the sort of nun who needed only to pray to learn. I always had to think and hurt to gain any wisdom.

  The doorbell pealed in the hallway. I stuffed the rosary into my skirt pocket and rose, wondering what new catastrophe was going to befall us.

  But there, outlined by the porch light, was Mitch. He’d shaved and put on a shirt that buttoned and jeans with intact knees. “I thought maybe we’d go find the old place,” he said.

  I stared at him for a moment, then looked back at the empty house. “Why not?” I closed the door, then followed him down the steps and past his pickup truck. “We’re walking?”

  “Don’t know if I’d be able to find it any other way. Never had a car till we left here.”

  I was feeling breathless, overwhelmed. He said nothing more as we walked down the street that fronted the river. He didn’t ask about my mother in the hospital, or about what I’d learned, or what I feared. There would be no small talk with him, I thought. No easy converse, no easy comfort from him. We just walked, side by side, to the bridge.

  Mitch stopped there and looked out across the river. “I haven’t been back here in, I don’t know. Twenty years.”

  “Now do you remember how to get there?”

  “Sure.” He gestured across the bridge to Gemtown, on the other bank of the river. “Couple streets over. It’s coming back to me.”

  And then, without waiting for my agreement, he strode across the bridge, and I had to run to keep up. But the air was cool there above the river, and I didn’t have to think of Mother in the hospital as long as we walked along in silence. When we reached the other side, I pointed across to a high white steeple silhouetted against the dark mountain. “That’s St. Edward’s.”

  “Yeah. Well. Didn’t spend much time there.” He glanced over at me with something like a smile. “Should see if they need a Madonna, huh?”

  “Schools always need Madonnas.”

  “Convents are more into the virgins, in my experience.”

  He said this pragmatically, and I guess to him it was the sort of marketing information he needed in his busin
ess. But for some reason, it made me want to laugh nervously. I covered it up with a cough.

  “So where’s your convent?” he asked.

  “Outside of Pittsburgh.”

  He glanced over at me. “You decided whether you’re going back?”

  I looked back at St. Edward’s, where I’d first decided to be a nun. “No. I can’t, now. I realize I went in for the wrong reason— to find my place in the world. I thought I’d gotten lost, and that was the only place to find me.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first to turn to the church for a refuge.”

  “It didn’t work. I kept switching. Mission work. Hospital work. Cloister. I didn’t fit into any of it.”

  He gave me a half-smile. “Know the feeling.” And then he was silent again, but it was an easier silence now.

  “Ronnie used to walk me to school this way,” I finally said. “First grade.” That was the only grade I’d attended before I was adopted and started going to the public school. Ronnie was in 5th grade then—he must have been held back at some point.

  Mitch nodded. “He was a good kid. I mean, a bad kid. But good in the ways that counted. Took care of you. I couldn’t be bothered.” After a moment, he added, “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said awkwardly. It wasn’t like there was anything to forgive at this point.

  The street was potholed, spotted with rough black clods of broken asphalt. Across the river, I could see my own house, the Wakefield house, big and imposing, a seldom-used but still solid summerhouse jutting out over the water.

  Mitch was studying it too—the big house. “So Mom cleaned that whole place. Until you went to live there.”

  There were a couple of generations of class resentment behind that comment. And I didn’t know how to respond, except defensively. “She was well-paid, for these parts.”

  “What, for the work, or for giving you up?”

  That silenced me. And we quit trying to talk on the rest of the walk. We passed the old Union 76 station where I used to spend my quarter allowance on candy. It had been replaced by a new Shell with pumps that took credit cards.

  Then Mitch turned the corner. It was as if his feet and legs remembered how to get home. He walked with long strides to the next block, and then stopped, waiting for me to catch up. “Down there,” he said, pointing down the street. On either side it was lined with little frame tract houses. The lawns, side by side, were closely mown and edged with shrubbery.

  But the small green house to the west was surrounded by knee-high weeds and a rusted fence. On this long summer evening, the neighbors were out, sitting on their old porch furniture. They stared at us as we walked by. We were strangers now, although I thought I remembered the young man leaning against the porch rail as a boy in my first-grade class. He said nothing, and Mitch said nothing, walking with his hands in his pockets and his expression closed.

  He stopped on the walk in front of the little green house. It was shabby, sided with faded asbestos shingles, the screen door hanging off one hinge. The windows had that emptiness that signified that no one lived there anymore.

  “It wasn’t so bad when we had it,” Mitch said, as if in apology.

  “I remember it as so much bigger.”

  “You were a lot smaller then.”

  I followed him around the side of the house, and got to the back and remembered that it used to be fenced in, because we had a dog. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten the dog. “What— whatever happened to Pepper?”

  “Pepper.” The quizzical tone of his voice indicated that he too had forgotten about our fox terrier. “Yeah. Near the end, Dad got to be allergic to animal fur. So we had to take Pepper to the pound.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was really Ronnie’s dog. He loved her most.”

  For just a second, I wanted to protest that I loved her too. It came back to me now— sitting on that old back porch with Pepper, watching the cars creep up the alley in the evening. I’d packed away her memory the way Mother packed away my parochial school uniform.

  Ronnie wouldn’t have done that, I supposed.

  The alley was still there, but rutted and overgrown now. I crossed to where the gate used to be. Mitch joined me, a dark form in the twilight, and I led the way down the alley to the pool of light cast by a lone streetlamp behind the neighbor’s garage. “It hurts to remember. Hurts to forget too.”

  “Yeah. I know. Listen.” He surprised me by taking my hand. He didn’t look at me, however. “That last year, before Ronnie died. He wanted to come find you. He’d gotten straight, and I guess he wanted you to see him that way.” His grip tightened. “He was all excited about it. But—but I didn’t want him to leave the mountain. I figured, you know, he’d either find you or not find you, and either way, he’d get hurt. And he’d be out there, in the world, and he’d start using again.”

  My hand was trembling in his, and my voice trembled too. “That’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t. You don’t understand. I could have come with him, kept him straight. But—” He shook his head, half-smiling. “I was living with a lady, there in the cabin. And she was . . . you know. High-maintenance. I didn’t want to leave her alone there, because she might, well, leave me. She left anyway, a couple months later. And by that time, Ronnie decided I was right. Said that Mom didn’t want us to bother you. So he never brought it up again. And then he died, and I know he felt . . . unfinished. And it was my fault.”

  I felt oddly like laughing, imagining this tough, big man worried about his high-maintenance lady. But it was sad, too, that he blamed himself. I wiped my wet cheek with my free hand and said, “No, it wasn’t your fault. You were just trying to protect him. And I don’t know what would have happened, if he’d tried to find me. My mother—she might have . . . ” I swallowed and tugged my hand free. “I don’t know what she would have said if he’d come to the house looking for me. She probably would have lied. Said I was still in Romania. Or that the cloister didn’t allow me any visitors. She had— has— so many secrets. We’re just figuring that out. And so Ronnie probably wouldn’t have found me anyway. And that might have hurt him more.”

  “Okay.” He looked around us, at the trash heaped up against the neighbor’s brick retaining wall, and added, “Let’s get out of here.”

  We retraced our steps back to the bridge, and when we got there, I said awkwardly, “Thanks for coming.”

  He shrugged. “Just don’t like coming down here. Up mountain’s . . . easier.”

  “Well, you’re here now.” I looked away, over the river at my house. One or both of my sisters must be home, because the kitchen window was a square of yellow light. “I’m sorry about the phone call earlier. You must have thought I was crazy.”

  “Yeah, well. You really think Mrs. Wakefield was your mother?”

  “It—it seems plausible. Laura—my sister—I guess has always suspected that, that Mother waited until her husband died to adopt me because I was the, uh, the product of an affair. And I guess she left town that spring and summer before I was born, supposedly judging at horse shows.”

  Slowly he replied, “The one thing that was hardest was Mom giving her child away. It never made sense to me that she could do that. And Ronnie— he couldn’t get past it, kept thinking it meant something. Don’t know, like she was trying to protect you from us. But if you were really a Wakefield— what could Mom do? Even if she didn’t want to, she’d have to let you go.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “I suppose it is better. I don’t have to feel so . . . so abandoned. Or rejected. But it worries me too. You know, that it’s what I want. To feel wanted.”‘

  “Yeah. So automatically you’re suspicious you’re making it up.” He regarded me with a half-grin. “Maybe you should spin it positively. Two families wanted you. Only one could have you. Lucky for you it was the rich one.”

  I had to smile back. “That’s not really the way I look at things. Positively, I mean.”

  We starte
d across the bridge, and he said, “Course if you’re right, that means . . . weird. That we’re not related.”

  This silenced me. This made him feel better, that somehow it was better for his family if I wasn’t really theirs. And maybe he was right. But still—

  Finally he prompted, “You’re not still thinking that my dad—”

  “No! No.” I sighed, letting go of the memories of that first family of mine. “I was just trying to make it make sense. But my sister told me something—she said that my mother had been trying to get some DNA tested, and we figured out it must be the father’s. And your father died a long time ago. So it can’t be his DNA.”

  He regarded me quizzically. “But why wouldn’t she know?”

  “What?”

  “Why would she need to check DNA? I mean, unless she was really getting around, she’d know who the father of her own child was, wouldn’t she?”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it. He was right. Mother wouldn’t need a DNA test to identify the father. “But why then? Unless I was hers, why would she go to so much trouble to keep me close and get me back?”

  Mitch considered this for a moment. He didn’t seem shocked at all of these scandalous doings. I guessed where he came from, he learned to be tolerant. “Maybe you’re still family. Like her sister’s kid. Or her husband’s kid by another woman. Or—”

  I thought of what Laura said about that time I was born. She and Ellen were left home with their father all spring and most of the summer, a halcyon period, from Laura’s perspective. But Cathy—

  I took off at a run towards home, hardly hearing his startled yell. When I got back, breathless, to the porch, he was right behind me. And he was with me when I went in to tell my sisters who I was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JACKSON

  Small-town policing is all about discrimination. I don’t mean racial discrimination. I mean the discrimination that lets a cop decide not to arrest the kid smoking dope behind the stadium, or the old guy shoplifting lipstick from the Walgreens. You learn quick what will deter and what will aggravate. So while I’m for sure hauling a drunk driver down to the city lockup and charging him, that town drunk staggering down the street, I’ll just take him to his house and shove him through his doorway. First do no harm—the cop’s motto.