The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  I felt them all around, all the others. This should have been done in private, in our bedroom maybe, or some solitary glade in the woods behind our house. This was just us, just our marriage, not public property—but there we were, out front, all our terrors and dreads and intimate secrets shared now not just with each other, but the world. I think I realized then that it was over. We weren’t one anymore. We weren’t even two anymore.

  “No. That’s not it. I never laughed at you. I didn’t even know who she was.”

  I couldn’t finish my defense. At that moment a man came down the stairs, a gun in hand. It was the new police chief—I’d seen him before, at the jail opening last week. He took one comprehensive glance around the basement, then pointed the gun right at the boy. “Get down on the floor. Face first. Now.”

  Brian took a quick hard breath and dropped to the floor. The cop—he wasn’t in uniform; he was in a t-shirt and jeans, but there was a gold shield clipped to his belt—bent down beside him and put his knee right in the small of the back.

  “Jackson,” Laura whispered. I guessed she knew him. And to judge from the hard glance he gave her, they weren’t on the best of terms anymore.

  “Yeah. I followed you.” He roughly frisked the kid, finding a Swiss army knife in a back pocket. “I got backup outside. You okay?” he asked me.

  “Yeah. I just want out of here.”

  The boy coughed, and the cop eased up pressure on his back just a bit. “Where’s the key?”

  “I hid it,” Brian muttered. “Let me up, and I’ll get it.”

  “Okay. Just the key,” the cop said, rising. “And don’t forget the gun, because I sure won’t.”

  But as the boy started off towards the space under cellar stairs, Ellen got in between him and the cop. I knew what she was doing. I guessed I deserved it.

  “No, Jackson,” she said in her firm schoolteacher voice. “No key until we all agree there is going to be no prosecution. No arrest.”

  The cop looked honestly baffled. I can’t blame him. He was probably more used to crime victim’s spouses wanting revenge, not mercy for the criminal. But his gun never wavered. He just pointed it past her arm at the kid’s belly instead of his head, presumably so if he had to shoot the kid, he wouldn’t splatter Ellen with too much brain material. I owed this guy a beer.

  “It doesn’t work that way, Ellen. He gets the key. Your husband presses charges. If your husband doesn’t, I can still arrest the kid because I witnessed a crime.”

  “Then you’ll have to arrest me too,” Ellen said firmly. “For obstruction of justice.”

  The cop glanced back at me. I started laughing. It trailed off because I was too tired to keep it up. “I just want out of here. I don’t give a shit about pressing charges. He’s not really dangerous. He’s just . . . I don’t know what. Ruthless. Ellen knows where he got that from. Her side of the family.” She didn’t move, and I added, “Look, she means it. She might make you shoot her. Can we just forget all about this and go home?”

  He finally holstered his gun. “You know, Laurie,” he said conversationally to my sister-in-law, “I think your whole goddamn family is crazy.”

  It took a couple minutes for the kid to locate the key, but finally there he was, coming towards me. “Let me do it,” I said, thrusting my hand between the bars. He was chastened now, and didn’t protest as I took the key from him and unlocked that goddamned padlock and pushed open the door and walked a few feet into the open basement.

  Ellen put her hand on my arm. “You can come on back to the house.”

  I looked down at her hand. I didn’t know anymore what to feel. I should feel gratitude, I supposed, that she was offering this refuge. But she was just being nice, and I didn’t want that. I shook my head. “I’ll be okay. I just need to get cleaned up, and I’ll head on home. I have—” it seemed so strange, but it was true—“I have to prepare for that seminar. Starts . . . ” I couldn’t remember what day today was. “Next Tuesday. Hey, chief, can you give me a ride back to the hotel?”

  The cop shook his head. He didn’t mean “no,” he meant I was crazy. “Sure.” He fixed the kid with a sharp look. “I got my eye on you, boy. You better make this right, or I’m going to remember my sworn duty and pack you in that cell to see how you like it.”

  The boy muttered something conciliatory and looked down at his boots. He was probably trying to figure out what it meant to “make this right,” and I was sorry I couldn’t help him there. I was a lot older and presumably a lot wiser, and I didn’t know myself. Nothing, probably, would make this right. I knew I had to deal with him somehow, reassure him, be a father, something. But I felt nothing at all for him. Nothing. No kinship, no hatred.

  So I grabbed him around the neck, flung him into the cell, slammed the door, closed the lock, and pocketed the key. Then I said, “So what about that ride?”

  The cop smiled. “Sure. Let’s go.”

  A minute later I was standing out in the sunlight, feeling the breeze coming down from the mountains on my face. There are ways to feel pleasure even at the broken moments of life, and that’s what I felt. I had to remember this, because I had the idea I was in for more brokenness ahead.

  Sticking my hand in my pocket, I found the key, and looked around for a worthy target. The mailbox, out by the end of the driveway. I sighted, and threw the key over there, and heard the clink of metal against metal.

  “Good shot,” the chief said.

  “I grew up in a pub. Played a lot of darts.”

  I looked back at the porch, and Ellen was standing there. She was looking at me, not the key lying in the gravel. As I climbed into the cop’s Charger, she turned and went back into the house.

  “You didn’t have any backup, did you?” I said as we backed out of the driveway.

  “Nah. Figured I could handle it more . . . discreetly by myself.” He looked over at me. “Your wife was worried about your daughter finding out.”

  He didn’t need to say it out loud—that if Ellen hadn’t protected the boy, there would be no reason to worry about Sarah finding out.

  “Well. Thanks for showing. And the ride back.”

  He dropped me at the motel. No recriminations. No questions. Small town. No bureaucracy, no rules that couldn’t be broken. I supposed I should be relieved. There would be no story about me on the wire services, no speculations about the kidnapper, no sidebar about the last time I was trapped in a cell. It was all over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The hotel had kept the room for me. I yanked off the yellow police tape across the door and went in, my stomach clenching at the faint smell of chloroform clinging to the carpet.

  First I took a long shower. Then I got out and pulled on some shorts and went for a run. The high school track was deserted. Just me and the open air and the mountains all around.

  I ran back to the motel and took another shower. I thought maybe I should keep that up forever—shower and then run and then shower . . . stay in there forever. No need to face what was ahead of me.

  Instead I got dressed and called for a pizza to be delivered and fired up the laptop and checked my email. Two days worth of newsletters from various news sites, some jokes from friends, a couple more queries from students too worried about their grades to wait for the report to appear in the mail. And an email from Sarah. She hated the camp. She hated her boss. The kids were obnoxious and didn’t obey. And she was homesick.

  That was code for missing her boyfriend Josh, a slight red-faced boy who never spoke above a whisper when I was around. That could have been because the first time he took Sarah out, I took him aside and told him if he treated her with less than respect, I’d break every bone in his scrawny body.

  Sometimes being a father was really rewarding.

  But it also had its responsibilities. I sent off a quick reply, telling her to hang on for another week, and if she still hated it, her mom and I would come pick her up and she could get a job at the mall for the rest of the summer. I
figured that she’d be happier in a week and I wouldn’t have to make the drive. I read it over and then backspaced and deleted “your mom.” I doubted I’d be going anywhere with Ellen for a long time.

  By evening I was okay. I started going through my notes for the journalistic ethics seminar, noting down examples from my experience to illustrate each ethical point. I was amused now at how often reality defied the black-and-white dictates of the ethics textbook. Then again, life was always more complicated than any textbook writer could describe.

  I was getting better at this, this getting over being held hostage. Last time, as Ellen so kindly reminded me, it took years. This time—hell, four hours and I was back to normal.

  There was a knock on the door, and my pen froze on the page. I forced myself to put it down, get up, go to the door, and look through the peephole. Ellen was standing there, her face distorted by the fish-eye lens, surrounded by the glare of the floodlight. Probably her partner, the kid, lingered just outside of viewing range, mace in hand.

  I let her in. She was my wife, after all. For the time being, anyway.

  And she was alone.

  “Where’s the kid?”

  She glanced back through the open door, as if worried I meant it. “You shouldn’t call him the kid. He has a name.”

  “Two, in fact. What’s up?”

  It was all very casual, considering the circumstances. That is, until she came to me and, her expression purposeful, began unbuttoning my shirt.

  I gripped her hands and they stilled.

  “I’m a little old to be eager for a pity fuck.”

  She looked up at me. Her eyes were usually a clear gray, but now I couldn’t read them. Her hands closed into fists within mine. “Let go of my hands, or I’m leaving and going straight to an attorney’s office.”

  “I don’t know that you’d find one open this time of night.” I relaxed my grip, and let her resume her unbuttoning. “Another ultimatum. Whatever happened to my generous, giving Ellen?” I meant it ironically, but it didn’t come out that way.

  “I decided I’d get more respect if I became the demanding, difficult Ellen.”

  “So,” I said, as if I didn’t already know, “what’s your demand?”

  She wasn’t nearly as difficult as she’d claimed, and for at least a little while it seemed like all was well again. It had been a week or so since we’d last shared a bed, and everything had changed— but the magical thing about marriage was that you could in good conscience keep making love even so.

  I told her, just to get it on the record, “I don’t need this.”

  “But we do.”

  I didn’t want to think about how much that composed wisdom of hers was concealing. She was hurt. She was confused. I knew that, even if she didn’t show it. I summoned up some courage, and, lying there in the dark, her head on my shoulder, I said, “Ask me. I’ll tell you.”

  But she said nothing. I suppose, with all the mystery there was between, she couldn’t begin to choose a single question. So I started with a single answer. “You’re the only one I love. The only one I ever loved. That’s why I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want to lose you.” After a moment, I added, “And I couldn’t figure out how to explain it anyway.”

  “You really didn’t know she was my sister.”

  “No. How could I know? I’d never met her. There are a million Cathy’s out there. It never occurred to me.”

  “You didn’t ask why she came after you that way.”

  “I was 22. She came up to me in my father’s pub and wanted to take me to bed. You think I asked why? I thought I knew.”

  “And you never guessed? All that time afterwards?”

  “You know,” I said with some exasperation, “First I put it out of my mind because I was ashamed of the whole episode. And second—come on. Never in a million years would I have imagined your sister would do that. You always talked about how wonderful she was.” Ellen was silent. I didn’t like the sound of that, so I added, “And I didn’t meet her again. We got married so quickly she didn’t come to the wedding, thank God. And then we were posted to Europe.”

  “But she knew from the first. That’s what you’re saying. She knew who you were and came and found you. Deliberately.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how she tracked me down—”

  “Oh, I told her. I cried on her shoulder for weeks. She had all the salient details. Your name, what you looked like, your father’s pub. She didn’t have to be a Sherlock to find you.” Ellen said this with an edge of bitterness, then added, “I’m not sure why she did it.”

  “Revenge. That’s what she told me, anyway. She got me back for hurting you.”

  “When did she say that?”

  “In Belgium. You remember. She stopped there on her way to climb the Matterhorn blindfolded, or some fool stunt.”

  “At night. She climbed it in one night.”

  “Right. I came home from work, and there she was, sitting with you. I was too stunned to make any sense of it, but then you left to shop for dinner, and she told me all about her desire for revenge.” I added, “I thought she was nuts. Crazy. I thought she was going to tell you.”

  “Did you know about the boy? Brian?”

  “Not till then. And I didn’t believe her. I thought she just wanted to cause maximum pain. And she was jealous of Sarah. That was clear to me. She didn’t think it was fair that we had Sarah. So I thought she invented another baby, just to get back at me. And at you.”

  “You hate her,” she said wonderingly.

  “Oh, yeah.” I stopped and took a deep breath. “I did. It took me a long time to stop. It was so willful. She was trying to hurt me—that I could understand—but she hurt you too, even if she wouldn’t let you know because she wanted you to go on loving her. And so, after that, she was always there somehow with us, even if I didn’t think of her for years on end.”

  “Sarah was still a baby then. So . . . 1992?” Ellen paused, then whispered, “That was the last time I saw Cathy. She did her climb and went home and then she was dead a month later.”

  Neither of us could follow that thought any further. Finally Ellen said, “Laura knew, see. Oh, not about you. But she saw Cathy that winter. She was pregnant then. And Cathy told her she would have an abortion. But Laura told her I was pregnant with Sarah. She must have changed her mind then.” She whispered, “I don’t know how to feel about her anymore.”

  I slid my hand up her bare arm to her shoulder. Remembered her sister, the fierce woman who took over my life for a little bit, and changed it and never stopped changing it, even after she was gone. Felt within for some compassion. “She wanted revenge for something. That’s what it felt like. I thought it was because I broke up with you, and maybe it was. But . . . but people break up. I know it hurt you, and I’m sorry I did that, but it wasn’t something that needed revenge.”

  Ellen stirred against me, her hand clenching into a fist on my chest. “I never even noticed. I mean, she was always so tough and so strong. That summer—it was all about me. I was depressed, and she was my cheerleader, and she must have been so much more hurt and frightened than I was.”

  “Or angry.” I covered her fist with my hand. “She was just striking out. At men, I suppose. And I’d hurt you, so she could tell herself it was for you.”

  Ellen said wonderingly, “No. She meant to hurt me. I see that now. I don’t understand. It’s like she hated me.”

  I wanted to disagree, but I couldn’t. “I thought she was trying to teach me a lesson. That I should appreciate you better. And it worked. But that day in Bruges—the way she looked at you. And Sarah. Like you’d cheated her. Like you got to be happy and so she couldn’t. I told her—” That I would kill her if she hurt my family. But I couldn’t say that now, though I said it then, and meant it then. “To leave you alone.”

  “But why? I loved her. I mean, we were sisters. We were friends too. She didn’t have any reason to want to hurt me.”

  “She wa
s messed up. She must have been. More than the usual young mistake mess-up. That’s why she did it. Not really to hurt you. But because she was so screwed up.”

  She sighed, pressed into me. “I hate this—hate all the disorientation. All week I’ve been looking at you, and can’t figure out what’s you and what’s my illusion of you. Now I have to look back at Cathy and wonder who she really was and how I could have deceived myself so much about her and what she felt for me.”

  I didn’t say it, but I thought it—and I had to look at my wife and know how far she could go away from me.

  She sensed my thoughts. “Are you still mad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too.” She sighed. “Maybe we’ll forgive each other.”

  “Maybe. I suppose it helps that we’re equally angry.”

  “Makes it harder to abjectly apologize, however.”

  “I don’t think,” I said, “that I’m going to be able to let go of this. I don’t believe in . . . in us anymore.”

  “Neither do I.”

  We were talking about two different things. She was talking, I assumed—I didn’t want to ask—about my keeping this big secret all those years. About the shadow. About how we both lived in different marriages, and only I knew it.

  I was talking about the way she’d stopped loving me.

  We’d had two marriages. Maybe three. There was that marriage early on, the one we shared, when Sarah was born and we were happy and we were both one. Then there was my marriage, the one I lived after Cathy came to Belgium and I realized if I was honest with my wife, everything would change. Then there was Ellen’s marriage, the one that started around when I was captured—when she stopped loving me but kept on caring for me.

  She stayed with me all night.

  I’d finished showering and was just pulling on some clothes when the door knocker sounded. I looked back at the bathroom door. Ellen was still in the shower. After a moment, I went to the door and looked through the peephole to see my sister-in-law Theresa standing there in the morning light.