The year She Fell

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The year She Fell Page 21

by Rasley, Alicia


  “So who knew about you and Tom? That you’d married?”

  She shook her head. “Everyone who cared. I mean, it was in the paper, the alumni magazine. It wasn’t a secret. But whoever it was, she and Tom were together the summer before we married. While we were broken up. So if she found out later that Tom had married, I suppose she could have done some research. She didn’t have to know me before, well, before the boy was born.”

  “What about that summer before then? Who knew you were broken up? Not me—I was off at theater camp.”

  “Mother guessed. She didn’t say anything, but she guessed. She was pleased about the breakup. Cathy too, I told her as soon as I got home. She kept introducing me to her rock-climbing friends, the male ones, I mean. She said I should jump back into dating right away, as the best sort of revenge. But I couldn’t do it. My friends here knew too—Janie and Linda mostly. I cried on their shoulders often enough.”

  I shook my head. Janie and Linda were great gal pal types, but not likely candidates to tempt a man like Tom into folly. “Okay, let’s think this through. It must have been someone who knew about you to put your name on the birth certificate. Someone who knew your name and where you were born and that you and Tom had married.”

  “I know. I’ve already figured that out. Maybe an old girlfriend of Tom’s went after him that summer. He grew up in Washington, and I know he went steady with a couple girls in high school. And he could have met one of them again, or she could have kept in touch with his father, and learned about me.” She shook her head despairingly. “But why would he bother to keep that from me? I mean, the child would be a complication, but he could have told me.”

  Sternly I said, “Let’s not worry about the why now. Concentrate on the who. Who else would have known about your marriage?”

  “Some of my sorority sisters were there. And a couple were pretty jealous of me for wrapping Tom up like that for so long and not giving them a chance. Everyone in the sorority house knew we’d broken up about an hour after it happened. You can’t keep news like that secret for long.” She frowned. “They’d all know where I was born and all that, because we were quizzed on each other’s background during rush. And you know how much you get to know each other living together for four years.”

  I didn’t know, actually. I’d lived with my sisters for a lot more than four years, and never got to be able to predict what they’d do. I’d never have imagined, for example, that Ellen, the devoted wife and mother, would let her husband be held captive like this and not turn over all she knew to the police. “Any one of them in particular? Maybe one Tom fancied?”

  She considered this without the jealousy I would have expected. Maybe she was beyond that. “Oh, one liked him very well, but Tom didn’t notice her, as far as I could tell. He wasn’t interested in the typical sorority girl. And I don’t think he’d be so resistant to telling me if it were just a sorority sister.” She glanced at the phone, then back at me. “I think it must be someone he has to protect. Someone who shouldn’t have had a baby then. Maybe someone famous. I don’t know.”

  “Could be,” I replied. “The press loves to get hold of such stories. But who could it be? Who did you known then who now has to be protected from scandal in the tabloids?”

  She gave a short laugh. “You, I guess. You’re the only one I can think of.”

  “And here I confessed to a hankering for Tom’s Irish lullabies. But it couldn’t have been me. I think I’d remember. Besides, I was marooned in Yellowstone that summer, wasn’t I? Wearing fake deerskin and Indian beads in that summer-stock play.” I picked up a pen and wrote 1990 at the top. “Come on. Tell me everything you can remember about that year. There’s got to be some clue.”

  She talked slowly through the chronology, and I took notes on the back of an electric bill. July 1990. The child would have been conceived then. And in late July, Tom had called suddenly and proposed. Two weeks later, they were married, so quickly that none of us had time to come. Except Mother—she managed to get there, no doubt with a fixed smile and four place settings of silver wrapped up in pretty paper. A couple months later, Ellen was pregnant with Sarah.

  “I wonder if subconsciously, I knew something, knew that something had happened to him. That I had to bind him to me quickly or I might lose him.”

  “He didn’t want a baby so soon?”

  “Oh, no, he did. We both did. We thought we’d do it while we were young and had plenty of energy, and we’d get the wanderlust out, do the foreign assignments early, when she was still too young for school. Then Tom would have paid his dues and gotten a good post covering the Defense Department, or something like that, just in time for Sarah to start first grade.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “It didn’t work out that way. He liked the foreign assignments more. Didn’t want to come home. So Sarah ended up a cosmopolitan little kid.”

  I could remember receiving letters from the Middle East and Greece and Moscow, as Tom made his way from one hotspot to another. Ellen had always seemed to enjoy the variety, but it couldn’t have been easy to find teaching jobs at each new post, or to get Sarah settled over and over again.

  But we didn’t have time to think through that. “So you were pregnant by October?”

  “Yes. Sarah was born in August. And that boy was born in April.”

  I jotted April 1991 under August 1991. Then I stared at it. I’d seen that pairing before. “Wait a minute.”

  I returned a moment later with the manila folder. “Look what I found in Daddy’s desk the other day.” I pulled out the envelope with the dates written in Mother’s hand. “I don’t know what June 1979 or July 1990 means, but—”

  “He would have been conceived in July 1990. Brian.” She took the envelope and stared at the dates. “Mother . . .?” Then, slowly, she turned the envelope over. “Look.” She drew her finger along the address. Ellen Wakefield. 202 Loudon Road. Wakefield, WV. “It’s postmarked this May. Williamsport, Pennsylvania.”

  She slid her fingers into the slit at the top and withdrew a single folded sheet. “Dear Ms. Wakefield . . . It’s from him. Brian. This is the letter he said he sent to me here a couple weeks ago.”

  “And Mother intercepted it.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment. “She didn’t give any indication?” I finally said.

  “No. I mean, she’s been sort of distracted—you know. But she’s said nothing about the boy at all. Didn’t ask me if it’s true.”

  “But . . . ” I thought about the new will. “You don’t think that this donation to the college has anything to do with it, I don’t know, disinheriting you?”

  “No. She’s got to have figured it out, that I couldn’t have had a baby in April and another in August.” Ellen folded the letter back up. “Maybe she just thought he was some lunatic, and best ignored.”

  “But she saved the letter.” Okay, I always suspected my mother of darker doings. But still, why didn’t she pass on the letter, or throw it away? “She had some reason for saving it.”

  “What else is in the file?”

  “Nothing relevant.” I fingered through the other papers. “Stuff about the college, and President Urich’s resume. She probably put the letter in there to hide it, figuring no one would ever look into a folder labeled Loudon College.”

  “She didn’t leave a number where she’s going to be staying?” Ellen asked.

  “No. And of course she won’t have a cell phone to save her life. Ellen—you know, she isn’t really all that . . . predictable any more. Maybe this trip, wherever she’s going, has something to do with this boy?”

  Ellen shook her head. “I don’t know. I just wish she would have said something. Or passed on the letter, opened or unopened. I don’t get it.” She dropped the envelope back into the folder. “I don’t get any of this. I feel like my life’s been hijacked, and everyone I should be able to trust is suspect. Tom. Theresa. Mother.”

  I reached out and took her hand. “You can trust
me.” I meant it, even though I wanted so badly to call Jackson and tell him what he wanted to know. “Now let’s get back to the mystery. You got married in August. So a few weeks after—well, after the boy was conceived. And when did you know you were pregnant?”

  “Early in November, I think. The tests even then were pretty fast. You know,” she said, her eyes thoughtful, “you were the second one I told. After Tom, I mean. Remember? We were in Washington, and you stopped by to see us. You were running away from that boarding school.”

  “I was not. I’d turned eighteen. I was emancipated. I had every right to drop out of school.”

  “With a semester to graduation. We spent the whole time arguing about that, I think.”

  “It wasn’t like a high school diploma would help with getting acting jobs,” I said. “But I do remember, you told me about the baby. You were happy. Tom seemed happy too.”

  “He was. But it was all so new. I couldn’t have been more than two months along when you visited.”

  It was coming back to me. I’d gotten fifteen thousand dollars on my eighteenth birthday, the first installment of my father’s trust. I went out and bought a little used Mustang, bright red, and left my school in Louisville, heading east and north towards Broadway. I made a stop in DC to see Ellen, and then took a detour to see Cathy at the resort in the Poconos.

  I was no good with numbers or dates—I’d been failing both math and history when I dropped out of high school. I looked back down at my notes, but couldn’t make sense of them. “When was that again? That I visited you?”

  “At Thanksgiving. 1990.”

  Oh. I sat back, my back heavy against the seat cushion. “Brian was born in April. Conceived in July.”

  Ellen regarded me in some puzzlement. “I’m guessing about July. Forty weeks before the birth. Tom wouldn’t talk about it. Even now, he won’t talk about it.”

  Born in April.

  It should have occurred to me right away. I took a deep breath. “You have the boy’s cell phone number?”

  “He left it on my voice mail last night.” She turned her hand over. I could see traces of ink on her palm.

  “Call him,” I told her. “Tell him he can let Tom go.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TOM

  So I lied.

  I stood there in my front room and looked at the boy standing next to my wife, holding a birth certificate with her name on it, and I lied.

  Of course I remembered who the boy’s mother was, which of the one-night stands she had been during that summer of my discontent. For one thing, she wasn’t a one-night stand, and for another, I was a good Irish boy, which meant I would never sin without the skin— that is, I always had condoms handy, even in pre-disease days, and used them. Except with her, except that once, when we were back deep in the mountains and fifty miles from the nearest Walgreens, and anyway, we were wet-slick with rain and I could hardly manage to get her clothes off, much less a condom on.

  Eventually I knew about the boy too, at least in theory. I wasn’t sure I ever believed it, and I certainly never figured on him finding me if he existed. I thought she was the sort who would cover her tracks better than this. But then, from the very first, I misunderstood, misjudged, misapprehended her . . . in other words, she knew what she was doing every minute, and I never knew that at all.

  She was a real education.

  I sound cynical, and—well, I am, from this vantage point, having hit forty with a daughter not much younger than that girl that day. (Best not follow that thought, or wonder what my daughter is doing those nights after her campers go to sleep . . . this is how men like me are punished, you know. We are granted the great boon of daughters, for whom we would gladly die, and instead, we must watch them walk away with the most unworthy of our youthful counterparts. Poetic justice.)

  I am a journalist, dedicated to truth. I spent a year and more in hell, defending the truth, or at least that’s what I told myself as I huddled there in a dank cell—I was the light-bringer, the one who dispelled the darkness.

  But when it came time to focus the light on that little bit of darkness in my own life, well, all I could hear was my dad’s voice, “Time to be careful, lad. Don’t go pulling at that thread, or the whole wall could come tumbling down.”

  My father, mixed metaphors aside, was a wise man when it came to protecting one’s own interests. He balanced his whole life, and mine too for a time, on the precarious formality of a marriage a woman he hadn’t seen for years. He would have lied.

  But I had a better reason than self-protection. Or so I thought, when I saw Ellen’s face and that boy beside her—a younger, meaner version of myself. The truth was too volatile. It would destroy her. Or it would destroy us.

  And the boy didn’t want to know it anyway. I could tell. He looked at the birth certificate and back at Ellen and I know what he was thinking—that he wanted her as his mother, this compassionate cautious woman with the graceful soothing voice. I couldn’t blame him. Everyone should have a mother like Ellen. I never stopped regretting that we couldn’t have more children after Sarah, because I knew (my Catholic boyhood meant somewhere within me I believed these things) up there in Limbo there floated a half-dozen sad children who were meant to be Ellen’s.

  I don’t know any who would grasp at the chance to be mine, and this boy was no different. By the time he realized what Ellen meant by her introduction of me, he’d already connected with her, and regarded me with suspicion. He was already feeling protective of her, moving closer to her when he thought I might be threatening somehow—as I were some threat to my own wife. But maybe he sensed what I couldn’t say, that there was a threat there, and he was the embodiment of it—

  The curse of the Irish (besides the drink, that is) is that we never escape our past. Never. We might go along thinking that we got away with it, but that’s an illusion borne of intoxication. There is no doubt. We will be punished for our own sins, not to mention the sins of our fathers and grandfathers before them.

  It hardly seems fair. The English don’t worry about their crimes coming to pick like vultures on their flesh. Only the Irish.

  The hell with it all. That was my thought as I watched the boy walk away. It was hot in the house, and the walls seemed too close, and Ellen was waiting for an answer. And there was none. There was nothing I could say to explain it all away.

  When I came back from running, she was gone. I knew a moment of panic, then got hold of myself and checked the calendar on the refrigerator. Session meeting. That would last into the evening, and I’d meet her afterwards, and then we could talk. Only, of course, talking was exactly what I didn’t want to do.

  I’d figured out a few options by the time I got to the church and approached her car. I could invent a woman, or apply a new name, an untraceable one, to a woman who had actually shared a bed with me that long ago summer. I could also, legitimately, point out that what happened before we were married, when we weren’t together, wasn’t grounds for—well, for whatever I thought I might have seen in her eyes that afternoon.

  But she didn’t stay to listen. She drove off. Almost twenty years of marriage, and she’d never done that, just left me like that. Once, she refused to come with me on an assignment, because she had a new job, and Sarah had just started middle school. So I went off alone, and when I returned, a very long time later, she was still there in the same house. I’d always been the one to leave, and she the one to stay.

  Now she was leaving.

  I waited another couple days. Well, I wasn’t waiting—I had the journalism review to get to bed. Through war and famine and riots, I’d never missed a deadline. I wasn’t going to let a spot of marital trouble screw up my record.

  As I finished a few last-minute edits, and approved the cover revision, I gave a thought to the boy. Where did he live? Where did he go after he left our house? Back to his own family, his real family? Would he try to contact Ellen again?

  He didn’t try to contact me, that�
��s all I knew.

  But then, neither did Ellen.

  I spared a few minutes to go online and punch in his name and his approximate birthdate. He showed up in a two-year-old list of honor roll students at a high school in Williamsport, PA.

  He didn’t look like an honor roll student. He looked like a disaffected young thug.

  Williamsport. Home of the Little League World Series. (Journalists’ minds are full of such useless connections.) I wondered if he’d played Little League baseball. Sarah never had, because we spent her childhood mostly in Europe, where everyone played soccer. She was a great forward—took after me. We hoped she’d get an athletic scholarship next year and save us the college tuition.

  The boy could have played soccer, I supposed. He looked light on his feet. And athleticism was in his genes too, I guessed.

  I didn’t want to pursue that thought, and logged off.

  Forty-eight hours later, the journalism review was at the printer, and the only signal from Ellen was a singularly unrevealing email. I’d called every hotel in town, and spent a stupid hour driving around all the bed-and-breakfasts, scouting for her car in the parking lot. We’d been investigating doing a B&B ourselves, to help pay for our ever-ambitious renovations, so the owners of the small inns and private houses all knew us. I had to be circumspect. I didn’t much care for myself, but Ellen’s job was ever-precarious, balancing as it did on the mutual antipathy of two warring religious tribes. Any suggestion of instability at home, and one or the other group could use it against her and get her removed from the pulpit.

  I could make some comment about these good religious folk, but I won’t bother. Hypocrisy should come as no surprise from that quarter.

  That’s why I held off calling her at work. Neither of us was the sort to conduct loud shouting battles on the phone, but I didn’t want her breaking down there in her office. Still I was getting worried. So, making my voice as cheerful as I could, I greeted the church secretary and identified myself, and then waited. My instinct for silence proved correct. If I’d asked for her, Jill would have been taken aback, as it turned out that Ellen wasn’t there, hadn’t been there, since the session meeting.

 

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