The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  I wondered if her nunly sensibilities would be shocked to find Ellen emerging from my shower. Yes, we were married, and had shared showers for 20 years. But still—it felt illicit, here in Ellen’s prim hometown, with her prim nun sister, and all the conflict between us, that we were together.

  To tell you the truth, it was another legacy of my Catholic boyhood. I didn’t want a nun to see the rumpled bed and figure out what I’d just been doing. At least, as far as I could see, she wasn’t wearing the habit. That probably would have traumatized me for life.

  Finally I opened the door to let Theresa in to my place of sin, and saw the boy behind her.

  “Cute trick, Theresa,” I said, standing back to let them both enter. “Have you checked his pockets for weapons?”

  She ignored me, and the rumpled bed, with equal dignity. “I need to talk to Ellen.”

  “She’s in the shower.” I briefly wondered how and when Theresa had met the boy. But he had to have found out about the family and where I was staying from someone. No hard feelings on my part. No feelings at all, in fact. I was done with all this. “Look, she’s going to be headed back to the house in a little while. Why not wait for her there?”

  “We can wait here.” Nuns, I learned in my eight years of parochial school, elevate impoliteness to a sacrament. They make it clear that their holy mission trumps your petty earthly concerns— like my feeling trapped in this small room with the kid who had recently held me at gunpoint and was now leaning back against the door looking defiant.

  “You can wait. He can leave.”

  Theresa glanced back at him. “I brought him because he wants to apologize.”

  I wanted to laugh at this. But apology was something to be encouraged in the young, so I turned my gaze to him and waited.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, looking down.

  “You can do better than that,” Theresa said. She sounded just like one of my primary school nuns, only they had paddles in hand when they rebuked.

  He finally looked at me. He was trying, with some success, to wipe the sullenness off his face and replace it with sincerity. It made him look even more like my brother Patrick. Patrick always had to work hard to look sincere.

  “I really am sorry,” he said. “I was wrong.” When Theresa’s nunly glare didn’t waver, he added desperately, “Really sorry.”

  I put us both out of our misery. “Okay. You can go now.”

  Now Theresa turned that rebuking regard to me. “And he wants to know about his mother.”

  I couldn’t help it. I said, “The phone’s over there. He can call home and ask her himself.”

  “My birthmother.” He was still standing by the door, looking harmless now, his head down. He was gripping the doorframe with one hand. “I just want to know what she was like.”

  I sat down in the chair to pull on my shoes. “I’m not the best person to ask. I didn’t actually know her very well, and what I knew, I don’t think her son needs to hear.”

  Of course, given my luck of the last week or so, that was when Ellen emerged from the bathroom in one of my t-shirts and her denim skirt. One look at her face told me she’d heard my comment and disliked it on three or four levels.

  I rose, adding, “Her sisters will be able to tell you more. And her mother, of course. Back at the house.”

  Ellen didn’t like that either, but I think it was the prospect of explaining all this to her mother that made her frown. “Mother is still out of town.” Thank God, her expression added. “But,” she added with determined brightness, “Why don’t I take you to our house, and show you Cathy’s athletic awards and equestrienne trophies?”

  For the first time, I felt sorry for Cathy, to be reduced to that, awards and the trophies. She’d lost Ellen’s love. Maybe she just meant for me to lose it. But she’d miscalculated. No matter what, Ellen was still with me, at least for the moment. But Cathy had lost the sister who loved her best, even long after death.

  Theresa looked at me sharply. “Are you coming?”

  It was that nun-tone. I had to remind myself that this was Theresa, not old Sister Lucia from Assumption Primary School. I would not get struck down if I didn’t obey. “No, thanks. I’m going to finish up some work before checkout time. And then head back home.”

  The boy looked up. I swear I saw dismay in his face. This was getting all too complicated for me, right at this point. With the boy looking like a heartbroken child, and Theresa glaring at me like I was the vile seducer and abandoner from some Dickens’s tale, I wanted to be alone. Well, I wanted to be alone with Ellen. Even with us so at odds, she was the only one who understood what I felt. Probably the only one who cared.

  Self-pity loomed. I veered away. “Good to see you again, Theresa.”

  As they gathered near the door, I remembered the hospital records and retrieved them from under my laptop. “Hey, wait. I’ve got something you might want.”

  The boy took the manila envelope and opened it right away. “It’s some kind of medical report.”

  “Let me look. I’m a nurse. I can read them.” Theresa took the sheaf of papers and leafed through them.

  She took her time. The room started to feel a bit overcrowded. I wished Ellen would make them leave, make Theresa read all that gibberish in the car. Or, alternately, that she would move them aside and let me out.

  She got the hint. She pushed the door open and let the low light in, and the boy obediently walked out. Theresa was still reading, and was just out the door when she spoke, her voice trailing off as she walked away. “This doesn’t make sense. It says she’s—” and she added something in a mix of Latin and English, something I didn’t really get, having failed Latin in my one year at that Jesuit school— “—gravida 2—.”

  As Ellen followed them to the door, she reached out and touched my hand— just a fleeting touch, and a quick look that said, don’t leave yet.

  But I had to leave. And I wanted her to leave with me. Back home, in our own house, in our own lives, we could work this out. Well, maybe not. But we couldn’t work it out here, with all these other people around and Cathy’s memory eating away at the edges. She was dead, and there was no way to make that right or figure out what went wrong. But we were still alive, and still together, and we’d figure this out. We needed each other. That’s what happens when you marry young and stay together—you get grafted, bone-deep. It might not be good. It might not be healthy. But right now, it was what held me up.

  I couldn’t stay in this town anymore. Brian looked like he meant to hang around, and I wasn’t sure I could be in the same vicinity without—well, better not to speculate. And I had to get back to work. The first summer session was starting in a week, and I had to get my syllabus completed and copied, and . . .

  And I just wanted out. This little town, set deep in a valley and surrounded by brooding mountains, felt claustrophobic to me now. I could be home by mid-afternoon, if I didn’t get careless and drive off the ridge.

  I checked out of the motel, paying for this last night and the other two nights I hadn’t slept here, slung my duffel into the back of the jeep, and drove over to the Wakefield house to tell Ellen.

  That was a mistake. As I got out of my car, I could see them all through the parlor window— the three sisters, the boy, and Mrs. Wakefield, who had just arrived from wherever she’d been while all the excitement was unfolding. She’d dropped her overnight bag in the front doorway, and it was holding the door open. I stood there, one foot still on the porch, listening to an argument of some kind going on in the parlor to my left. I gathered the matriarch was being introduced to her new grandson, and it wasn’t going well. Laura was addressing her mother in a vicious, smiling tone, like Cruella DeVil, something about hiding letters and hiding the truth, as usual.

  I could just see Ellen there by the desk. She looked so weary, so done up, that I knew she’d had to be the one to explain it all to her mother, the betrayals, the secrets—and then there was this boy, the evidence that no one re
ally knew Cathy at all . . .

  I wanted to go to her and tell her to come back with me. But she saw me then, caught my eye, shook her head. I didn’t bother to interpret that— I just came into the house, went into the kitchen, got myself a glass of water, and waited. Ellen joined me a minute later, leaning against the counter with a sigh. She was still wearing my black t-shirt tucked into her jeans skirt. “Now Theresa has decided there just isn’t enough family drama, and she’s decided she has to find her birthparents too. That’s where she’s been all this time, up in the mountains searching for the Prices.”

  “Sounds like Laura’s got an axe to grind too.”

  “Yes, with Mother. She’s right, actually. Mother knew something. Brian sent me a letter here, and she opened it. And she had to know he couldn’t be mine, given the dates.” She shook her head. “But it all seems beside the point. Are you leaving?”

  “Yes. Come with me.”

  “I—”

  Theresa’s usually subdued voice rose enough that I could hear the edge of anger as she demanded something about her birthmother and more lies and—

  There was a sharp cry from the parlor and Ellen closed her eyes. “Theresa. It’s hard to believe that she was a cloistered nun two weeks ago. She’s so . . . wired.” She trailed her hand down my bare arm as she turned. It wasn’t quite a kiss. Good. I wasn’t ready for reconciliation yet.

  She went to the arch of the hallway. “Don’t leave.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  “You have to. I need time to get it straightened out here. We still have to deal with Mother, and her giving the house away.”

  “Let them take care of it, and come home.”

  “And you have to deal with Brian. “

  “No, I don’t. He’s got parents of his own. Doesn’t need us.” It came out fiercer, more entreating, than I intended. “We have a life, remember? Work and Sarah and a home. Let’s go back. We’ll work it out there.” I half-believed it, that we could work it out, that we could find some way past the past— but not here, where the past was all around.

  Her eyes were bleak. “Not if you leave.”

  If it was a test of my devotion, I chose to fail. She could stay here, or come with me. But she’d chosen once already to ally against me, and I wasn’t going to wait for another betrayal.

  I walked down the hall in time to hear Laura now channeling what’s-her-name, the coat hanger one— Joan Crawford. Silky venom-dipped voice. Absolute hauteur. Laura was, in my experience, a pleasant young woman, unassuming despite her fame. But now she sounded every bit a match for her mother. And it was her mother she was taking on again. “You can stop lying, Mother. I know why you hid that letter from Brian. And I know why you waited until Daddy died to adopt Theresa.”

  As I went out the door, I looked back to see Ellen’s stricken face. I must still be furious— surely two weeks ago I would have turned around and gone back to her, stood with her as she took on this family crisis. But I just kept walking till I got to my car, and then I kept driving till I got to the top of old Croak Mountain. I wasn’t going to hang around here waiting for one of us to give in and forgive the other.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THERESA

  I lived most of my childhood in sin.

  My childhood sin was uncertainty. That’s why I ended up, almost thirty years old, in a cloister where every move, every moment, was prescribed. There was nothing ambivalent about cloistered life.

  And that’s why I found myself in the prioress’s office lifting up my humble head and asking if I could leave the cloister for a few weeks to visit my mother. I knew what to expect— cloistered nuns weren’t let out for family visits. You renounced those earthly ties when the doors closed behind you.

  But she smiled gently. “My dear, of course you may go.”

  I stared at her. “But I assumed that—”

  “You haven’t taken any vows here,” she said. “This year as a lay associate is meant as a time of exploration and consideration. The sort of commitment professed nuns offer isn’t expected of the lay associate.”

  She wasn’t putting emphasis on that word lay, but I felt it anyway. For six years, I’d been a novice sister, under simple vows to a nursing order. I had sought dispensation from these vows only so that I could join a cloistered order. But the prioress insisted on an exploratory year, and so for the last few months, I was not “Sister” and not bound by vows . . . and I had never gotten used to it.

  Nervously I fingered the rosary in the pocket of my plain skirt. I wasn’t allowed yet to wear the habit of the order, but I tried to appear inconspicuous here in the house, in a modest outfit of the same brown color. I didn’t want to stand out, though of course I did. All the sisters knew me as the convent nurse, the one they consulted when they needed treatment.

  I’d always suspected the prioress would have turned me away entirely except for my nursing skills.

  “I don’t need to go,” I said. “My mother has two other daughters—”

  The prioress tilted her head to the side. “Why do you not call them your sisters?”

  This stopped me. I didn’t like personal questions—that was one reason I was a lay associate instead of a novice right now, because in the interview I hadn’t demonstrated sufficient humility. I was trying, however, so I humbly said, “The word sister means something else to me now.”

  “Hmm.” She sat back in her hard wooden chair and regarded me with that discerning look. This was supposed to let me know that she understood me, even if I didn’t understand myself. But she didn’t pursue the sister’s question. Instead she said, “You can use this visit home to consider the future. I think you know how greatly we appreciate your work among us, your kindness especially to the most aged sisters.”

  But . . . Another word with too much meaning. But the cloister is not for everyone. But your vocation isn’t clear to me. But you might have come to us for the wrong reasons. But the cloister isn’t a refuge from the world but a place of prayer for the world.

  She had said this all before to me, in one way or another. Now she added another gentle recommendation. “You have been so devoted. I know you gave up another vocation to join us. It’s just that I think the answer you seek might be out there, not in here.” She paused and said, “If after this time, you feel that your vocation is with us, we must have another talk.”

  It wasn’t a promise—more of an order. Go home. Listen. Watch. Think. Decide.

  And so I rose and bowed my head and murmured my thanks. Then I went back to my room—set off from the actual cloister because I was not yet under vows—and gathered up my few garments for the journey back into the world—the loud, bright, sinful world. The one we prayed for in our quiet monastery.

  A true daughter of Eve. I had been born into sin, and would never escape it entirely.

  Obedience should have come easily to me. I could still hear the admonition of my mother—my other mother, the one who left—during those last moments we had together, “Be obedient! Mrs. Wakefield will give you a good life, if you just obey.”

  So I didn’t protest when my name was changed from Terri to Theresa. I liked Theresa better. It sounded . . . classier. And when you start out life as a housekeeper’s kid, and find yourself suddenly deep in the bosom of the richest family in town, you grab for every handhold of class you can find.

  I dutifully attended the Sunday morning service at Wakefield Presbyterian Church because that was what everyone else in the family did. The church wasn’t like my old one. It was bare of statues and crucifixes, and service was austere, with unfamiliar hymns and an uncomfortably long sermon.

  But one Saturday afternoon, when a storm threatened, I took a short cut home from the playground, right past St. Edward’s, my old church. The little brick school where I’d attended first grade was right next door, and as I passed, Sister Hugh, the principal, came out of the front door with an umbrella. Amazed at this sight, I stopped short on the sidewalk under the oak tree; fo
r some reason, I had never before realized that nuns could get wet. She peered out at me. “Terri Price? Is that you?”

  Hearing my old name scared me. It was as if I was being called back to that old identity, yanked back into that past of poverty and fear and illness and parents who were anxious all the time. But I couldn’t lie to a nun. “Yes, Sister.”

  She glanced up at the dark clouds breaking over Croak Mountain and snapped open her umbrella. “I thought your family had moved.”

  I felt a sudden hunger to know more. No one had told me my old family had moved. No one had told me anything, really, except that Mrs. Wakefield was going to be my new mother, and I had to be good for her.

  I didn’t think I could explain about the adoption—I didn’t entirely understand that myself. So all I said was, “I go to public school now.”

  “I don’t see you in church either.”

  There was no way to deny it. St E’s was the only Catholic church in town. “I go to public church too.”

  “Public church? You mean Protestant?”

  There was that word. I didn’t really know much about the distinctions between churches, but I knew Protestant was a bad word, and if I hadn’t known it before, Sister Hugh’s contemptuous voice would have told me. “I guess so, Sister.”

  She shook her head. “I should talk to your mother. She must know better than that.”

  The rain started, a few big drops that broke open on my bare head. I hunched my shoulders. I couldn’t begin to explain about my mother, my old mother, that is, and why Sister Hugh couldn’t talk to her. “I still pray to God,” I said weakly.

  “And to the Blessed Virgin Mary?”

  “No.” When I saw Sister Hugh’s face go still, I said quickly, “I—I lost my rosary.” Or I forgot to pack it, or someone had taken it out of my possessions before I moved. My old mother, maybe, who wanted me to obey my new mother.

  Sister raised the umbrella over her veil, shaking her head. “I suppose it doesn’t occur to your parents that they are putting your soul at risk. And your brothers’ souls too.” Coming down the steps, she added, “I’ll pray for you, child.”