The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  No way to make it work. I’d never learned patience, but I’d picked up the art of resignation. And so in the morning I got in my car and drove back to Wakefield, resigned to seeing it through.

  I drove back the next day, checked into the same room at the Wakefield Super 8— still didn’t feel like home, thank God— and went out for a run in the evening cool, working the old kinks out of my knees. I spent a long time under the shower, then gave myself over to an evening of answering emails. I used to spend my work evenings in exotic bars, drinking with other correspondents, talking shop about bloody revolutions and evil dictators and wicked assignment editors. Now I typed noncommittal answers to students who didn’t like their spring semester grade.

  I ought to get back to real reporting. Away from this teaching trap.

  Better choose now. Pretty soon, I might not have a choice.

  I was watching CNN with half my attention—Mongolia was heating up again. I’d spent a miserable month there a few years ago, trying and repeatedly failing to send dispatches by satellite in that place where electricity was a rarity. So I was rooting a bit for the rebels when someone knocked at the door.

  It was the boy. Brian. He stood in the doorway, his shoulders hunched, his shorn head outlined by the floodlight in the parking lot. There was ultimatum in his eyes. I sighed and stepped back to let him in, wondering if I could get away with half the truth, the safe half.

  I turned to douse the TV, and he clipped me one good with some blunt weapon. I was fighting for consciousness when something covered my mouth and nose, and I gasped in the sweet sick stench, and descended into darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I woke raging. With a raging headache, anyway, and a tension in my chest that felt like danger.

  I opened my eyes to darkness. Breathed in, slowly, to decrease the pressure on my head. There was something cold and rough under my cheek— concrete— and the smell of dirt and underground must, and for a moment I thought I was back in Tehran, still a prisoner.

  No. That was in the past. I closed my eyes again and sorted through a mix of memory and dream until I assembled something resembling a reality. Wakefield. The Super-8. Sarah safe at camp. Ellen . . . no. Don’t worry about that now.

  I’d read the Sunday paper recently. Seen the Secretary of Defense squinting and gesturing on a Sunday morning talk show.

  It felt like a Monday. Very early.

  Graduate seminar starting . . . Tuesday. Some Tuesday. Next Tuesday? The one after that?

  Better not be this Tuesday, or I would probably have to cancel.

  I tested my body. Rolled over onto my back. Opened my eyes and turned my head to the pinpoint of light. In a few moments, I was able to distinguish a few shapes, darker than the darkness— vertical lines breaking into the faint light.

  I reached out a hand towards the lines. Felt cold metal. Closed my fist around it. A bar.

  Jesus Christ. I was in a cell.

  Again.

  I used the bar to pull myself to a sitting position. My head protested. I ignored it. I felt around me until I got some sense of the proportions of the cell. Six by eight, maybe. No window, just a slab concrete wall, cold and damp under my fingers.

  It all came back to me—Ellen, the fight, Brian at the motel. I raised a hand to the back of my head, felt the sticky hair, the bump. He’d attacked me. Drugged me. Brought me here.

  I was about to put up a yell. Then stopped. Better not to let him know I was conscious. Reconnoiter first.

  I’d been a foreign correspondent for fifteen years. I was always entering some new city, scrambling to learn a few words of a new language, scanning every room for evildoers and exits and escape hatches. So, though my head was splitting and my mouth was sore and fuzzy—the son of a bitch must have chloroformed me as well as clocked me—I yanked myself up and felt along the bars until I found the lock holding the cell door shut.

  It was a padlock, closed around a substantial chain. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness now, and I could make out a large room outside the bars, empty except for something ominous and hulking in the corner—a big furnace or boiler. Beyond that was that sliver of light, coming down, I thought, from a door at the top of a bare wood staircase.

  I closed my eyes and listened. I could hear movement upstairs. The hum of traffic outside. A highway. A rooster crowing nearby. I wasn’t in the middle of town, but not isolated either. Get out of this cell somehow, and I’d be okay.

  Cell. My cell phone. Clipped to my . . .

  No belt. No wallet. No watch. No handy Bic pen to stab into his eye. No shoelaces. No shoes, for that matter.

  There was a clatter on the steps, and I dropped back onto the floor, facing out, almost closing my eyes. I could see through the slits of my eyelids the pool of light from a flashlight, moving closer, almost to the door of the cell. A pair of battered Doc Martens, the ragged cuffs of jeans, a bottle of whiskey dangling from a hand—

  The little fucker stole my $50 bottle of Bushmills.

  Insult to injury. Too much to bear.

  I stood up, grabbed through the bars at him. He stumbled away, fell backwards, dropping the flashlight, stumbling back into a metal pole. “You’re—”

  “Yeah. Let me out of here.”

  The boy retrieved his flashlight and staggered back towards me. “Not until you tell me what I need to know.”

  Just a kid, a malevolent kid with a drunk-ugly sneer and a grievance against the world. And especially against me. “What do you think you’re doing?” I was genuinely puzzled as well as angry. “You got a life, don’t you? College coming up in the fall? Friends back home? And you’re doing this?”

  “You don’t understand.” He slumped back against the metal pole. He really was drunk. I tried to decide whether this was good for me or bad.

  “I understand you’re on the verge of screwing up your life, for nothing. Let me go now, and—”

  Brian focused the flashlight on me, aimed the glare right into my eyes. “I’m not going to let you go till you tell me what I need to know. My—my whole identity is at stake. I need to know who I am.”

  I was getting really tired of that demand. “You don’t need to know anything. You know who you are, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. You understand what adoption is? It means all ties are severed. You don’t have to like it, but it’s true.”

  “Not fair.”

  The eternal adolescent lament. It would be amusing if I wasn’t the one behind the padlock. “Yeah, well, life’s not fair. And you’re going to make it worse you keep this up. What’s your family going to think when they hear about this?”

  He set the flashlight carefully on a pile of boxes, so its glow illuminated this half of the room. Then, exhausted from the effort, he took a big swig from the bottle. “I don’t care.”

  I watched him sway there in the wavering light. “Let me have a drink.”

  He just stared at me.

  “Come on. I paid for it. And I’m getting thirsty here.”

  Slowly he came forward, the bottle dangling from his fingers. When he was a couple feet from the bars, he held the Bushmills out.

  I grabbed at his wrist, yanked him forward, got hold of his collar, mashed his face against the bars. “Give me the goddamn key.”

  He was too drunk to be surprised by this change in his circumstance. He just grimaced, his face stretched tight against the cell door, and said, “Can’t. Not stupid. I hid the key somewhere else.”

  Roughly I used my free hand to search his pockets, pulling out a mesh wallet and a Chapstick, but no key. I kept tight hold of his collar, cutting off his breath, contemplating. I could—but I couldn’t. Of course I couldn’t. I shoved him away, and he fell back, protecting the bottle with his arms.

  Then he was up on his feet, backing away to the staircase, reaching his free hand, coming up with a handgun. I’d seen a lot of guns in my travels through terrorism, and this one looked real. So I backed away, into the shadows in the corner of th
e cell, and held my hands up, palms out. “Easy now. You’re not going to get anywhere with that.”

  He waved it around, sighted down the barrel, grunted. “I can scare you with it.”

  “Not when we both know if you shoot me, you’ll never get what you want.” I had no intention of giving him what he wanted anyway, but best to remind him of the reality. “Instead you’ll get jail time and a wrecked life. Where’d you put the key?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  “And if there’s a fire, are you planning on retrieving it and letting me out of here before I burn up?” That had been one of my preoccupations when I was imprisoned in Tehran. I was feeling the dread creep into me now, though I hoped it was beyond unlikely I’d be unlucky enough to face a fire. Unlucky, however, seemed to be my mode this last week.

  He was frowning, considering this. “I’ll make sure you get out.”

  “Big of you.” I grabbed for something to hold onto in all this disorientation. “What time is it? I can’t even tell if it’s day or night down here.”

  “Six a.m. Dawn.”

  As soon as he said it, I could feel it, the sunrise. I needed this, needed the anchor to the reality beyond that wall. Needed to envision a world waking up, noticing I was gone . . .

  The boy took another swig from the bottle and then sat down heavily, his back against the pole, his legs stretched out ahead of him. In the uncertain light, his face looked green. He leaned his head back and let the gun clatter to the floor. Too far for me to reach. Then his eyes closed, and he groaned, and passed out.

  If he thought he was going to be an O’Connor, he better learn to hold his liquor better than that.

  My head ached and my nerves jangled, but I forced myself to get back under control. Now that I had some light, I explored the small confines of my cell. The kid had tossed a Boy Scout sleeping bag on the steel cot. No pillow. There was a steel sink and toilet in the corner, both bolted down. Neither had any parts that might pry the lock or chain loose.

  I sat down on the sleeping bag and studied the rest of the basement. There were windows, actually, but they were boarded up. If I squinted, I could see faint slivers of light coming in through the chinks, and I felt relief course through me. Sunrise. There would be light, at least a little, even when the flashlight’s batteries died.

  There was no way out.

  He woke up after a few hours, picked up his gun, and left, and I got to lie there trying to sleep while thinking about fires and mudslides and insanity and Ellen and Sarah . . .

  And him getting hit by a car and me gradually dying of thirst. (No water came out of the sink taps. I would die before I’d resort to the rusty stuff in the toilet bowl.)

  It seemed like afternoon when he returned. The flashlight had died, but there was enough light through the window boards to illuminate the bag in his hand. He’d learned his lesson. He stood several feet from the cell door and told me to hold out my hands. He set the bag and a plastic cup a few inches to the right and stepped back.

  It was just fast food, but tasted like the first McDonalds meal I had after escaping from Tehran. I could do commercials for them, you know? Tasted like freedom and home.

  He was replacing the flashlight batteries when I finished. “You wouldn’t happen to have bought a newspaper.”

  He glanced over at me, skepticism in his eyes. “No. Why?”

  “News junkie here. Also I want to see if they’ve figured out what you’ve done.”

  This hadn’t occurred to him, that the police might have been alerted. The kid was a good planner, up to a point, but I got the idea he wasn’t so adept at figuring out consequences. Or he just didn’t care. “They won’t know who did it.”

  “Ellen will.”

  This stopped him. Then he smiled. “Let’s make sure of that.”

  He drew a phone from one of his pockets— a small silver phone. Mine. “I found your wife’s cell phone number in your wallet. If I call that, I won’t have to worry about phone taps.”

  Okay, so he did have the occasional rational thought. Within the overall insanity, that is. (I didn’t tell him they could triangulate a cell phone call pretty quick.) I found I didn’t want him to talk to Ellen. I didn’t want him to worry her if she didn’t know. I didn’t want Sarah to know either. I just wanted to get out of here and go back to my life.

  The last time it took thirteen months to escape. But my captors were an entire guerilla organization, not a single American teenager.

  Then again, I had no qualms about killing my captors in Iran. I knew I wasn’t going to kill this one.

  He was already dialing, and I imagined Ellen hearing the ring and having to search for her phone—

  She found it. And the boy succinctly summed up the situation for her, and then he smiled and took the phone away from his ear. He punched a button and held it up. “Go ahead. It’s on speaker.”

  I’d had a hope he’d let me take the phone and I could call 911. But he’d thought this much through. “Ellen,” I said loudly. “Call the police. He’s got me in a cell, with bars, and a padlock.”

  I could hear her voice coming faintly through the tiny speaker. “No, I won’t tell the police about the boy. You know why. I’m not going to have him arrested of a felony when you can make this right with a single name.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ellen, he’s got a—”

  And the boy punched the speaker button off, and put the phone to his ear and said, “If you know the truth, call this number and tell me.”

  And then he rang off, and stood there grinning, and ceremoniously pushed the END button until the familiar “goodbye” tones told me he’d turned off the phone. “You got voice mail, I suppose? I’ll check that later.”

  Not without my password, I thought, but didn’t bother to say it out loud.

  He left again, taking the flashlight with him. Nice kid. Maybe I’d manage to kill him during my escape after all.

  There were a couple fries left in the McDonalds bag, so I decided to let him live.

  Ellen—she was with him. Oh, I knew she hadn’t planned this, hadn’t known of it beforehand. But she was on his side. Allying with him against me.

  A half hour later, they came down the basement steps together.

  Ellen’s face showed some shock when she saw me, standing there, my hands gripping the bars. But she recovered quickly enough. She crossed the room, the boy at her heels, and pushed a plastic bag through the cell door at me. I took it, brushing her fingers with mine, trying to remind her—

  There was bottled water in the bag, and aspirin, and protein bars, a newspaper and other necessities, but not a single bolt cutter. The boy was watching carefully, studying her, and so was I. Neither of us could quite figure out what she was about.

  “Did you call the police?” I asked in a low voice, but he heard, of course, and instinctively glanced behind him.

  “No. I just came to make sure you were all right.”

  “Does it look like I’m all right?”

  She nodded, but her eyes were indecisive. “You’re not hurt.”

  “Except for the knot on my head. He hit me with a gun, you know.”

  I expected shock, anger, outrage. I should give up expecting anything at all. She looked at the boy, giving him her admonitory third-grade-teacher gaze. “Give me the gun.”

  He turned into a third-grader, just like that, sheepishly reaching into his pocket and withdrawing the handgun and handing it over. I was treated to another anomalous sight, my pacifist wife efficiently removing the clip—she must have seen that on TV—and sticking the gun in one pocket of her purse and the bullets in the other. She said, “You will just get yourself in trouble that way. I understand why you’re upset, but don’t be stupid.”

  I understand why you’re upset. I pushed away from the bars and retreated to the corner, pressing back against the stone wall. “Ellen,” I whispered, and found my stronger voice. “Walk out of here and call the police and get me the fuck out of this cell.”


  Ellen didn’t react. She just stood there, one hand on the crossbar of the door, looking at the boy. He turned to me, looking scandalized that I would swear like that in front of her. I wanted to rip his face off, but —

  “I can’t, Tom. I told you. He needs an answer, and so do I.”

  “Why?” This came from deep in me. Why? Why do it? Why tear us apart for a stupid name that would fix nothing and change everything? What did she think it signified, that name? What would it give her that she needed badly enough to leave me here?

  A way out.

  That was what she wanted. It came to me then. She wanted out of our marriage, some excuse to escape. The mere fact of the woman wasn’t enough to ease her conscience—she hoped the identity would provide additional incentive.

  And of course she was right. The name would give her all the reason she needed.

  The boy had been speaking for some time, but I was just now starting to hear him. He thought Ellen was an ally, and his voice was plaintive, his face open and boyish. “I’ve always known that I was adopted. Always known that this wasn’t my real family. I always wanted to find where I came from— who I came from. What’s wrong with wanting to know my real family? That’s not so crazy, is it?”

  I waited for Ellen to say something sensible, like What’s crazy is kidnapping someone, but she only tilted her head, as if she wanted to hear more before making a decision. Well, I didn’t want to hear more. This kid and his whiny little quest for meaning — I might have had some sympathy yesterday, but not today.

  “I don’t know why you think you are due some extra serving of parents,” I said. “Most of us are stuck with the ones who reared us. Some of us don’t even get that much. Ellen there, her father died when she was a mere seventeen. Do you think she went out looking for a replacement? And me— yes, I still have a mother. A biological mother. Back in Mother Ireland. Let’s see. I saw her three times between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. She didn’t even come to our wedding, because she’s afraid to fly.”

  “But she’s blood,” the boy whispered.