The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  “Yes, Sister,” I said, and took this as my cue to run. But I’d hardly cleared the corner and looked back to see her when the lightning flashed— a single jagged bolt, directly over the gray-black steeple of the church.

  I was seven, and raised devoutly and superstitiously, and in the last year my life had been overturned. So I was ready for a sign, I suppose, that God hadn’t lost my phone number. And there it was.

  I cried all the way home, but with the rain on my face, my tears never showed. The new housekeeper, the one who replaced my mother, was watching from the window and met me at the door, a big towel in her hand. With a rough sort of gentleness, Merilee rubbed me dry, then applied the towel to my hair, letting me hide my face until I could stop crying.

  “Now you get out of those wet clothes,” Merilee said. And don’t leave them in your room. Bring them down to the kitchen, and I’ll pop them in the dryer with this old towel. And you can fold them up and put them away, and no one needs to know, right?”

  Gratefully I headed up the stairs to change into dry clothes. Merilee, somehow, understood. She was new too—maybe that was it. We were both still on probation around here.

  Seeing Sister Hugh again re-opened my memory and my conscience. It was Saturday. Catholics always went to confession on Saturday, so we could take communion on Sunday.

  I sat on my bed, holding my wet clothes in my lap, and thinking of my mother and my brothers—my old family, that is—going to confession. (My father—my only father; Mr. Wakefield had died before I was adopted—didn’t go to confession anymore, but no one seemed to mind. Maybe everyone assumed most men were going to hell no matter what.) It wouldn’t be at St. Edward’s, if they had moved to another town. Another town, another church, but it was Saturday there too, and Mama would be shepherding the boys into the pews and insisting they kneel and pray so they’d be spiritually cleaner even before the priest saw them.

  My heart hurt. I pressed my fist against my bony chest and closed my eyes, and I could envision them better now—Mama in her blue church dress, the one with the ruffle at the neck; Ronnie restless, eager to get it over with and back out into the fresh air; Mitch in the washer-faded work shirt, the only one he had with a collar—

  Mitch would be fifteen, wouldn’t he? And he was probably bigger than Mama now, and she couldn’t force him to go. So I erased Mitch from my mental picture. There were Mama and Ronnie, kneeling in the pew, staying on this side of sin; and on the other side were Dad and Mitch . . . and me. Unregenerate sinners.

  I’d been sent away. Maybe that was why.

  I started to tremble. The cold from the damp clothes was seeping into me. I balled them up and took them down the backstairs into the kitchen. Silently I handed them to Merilee, and without a word she took them and disappeared into the adjacent laundry room. I glanced back at the front room, where I could hear Ellen at her piano lesson. Mother would be at the library, where she volunteered every other weekend. Laura—well, I didn’t need to worry about Laura. She wouldn’t care if I was here or gone. And I sensed that Merilee would cover for me no matter what.

  So I grabbed a raincoat from the peg near the kitchen door and stole out through the back gate, down the winding service lane, and back into town. And then, for the first time in a year, I entered St. Edward’s Church. I was early—it was barely five o’clock—and the sanctuary was echoingly empty except for an old lady. She must not have had very many sins, because she was in and out of the confessional in a couple minutes.

  Then it was my turn. I slid into the little booth and knelt, and for a few seconds I knew pure panic. I was only seven, and it had been a long time since I’d performed this ritual. Then the translucent panel slid open, and the words came back to me. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a year since my last confession.”‘

  There began my apostasy years. In some ways, I was the best of Catholic children. I attended Mass and went to confession and said the rosary every night I could keep my eyes open after lights-out. (Sister Hugh saw me once at late Mass and, slipping into the pew beside me, took her own heavy rosewood rosary off her belt and, cupping it in her hand, slid it into the pocket of my jacket.)

  But then Sunday morning I went off dutifully to the Wakefield Presbyterian Church. I mumbled along with everyone else the prayer they called “The Lord’s Prayer” and I’d learned as “The Our Father”, strangling the “trespasses and trespassers” before it emerged and substituting the trite “debts and debtors.” At the greeting time I rose with the other children and filed out to Sunday school.

  Then later that afternoon, I’d make some excuse and slip away, down to town, and enter the church a few minutes into the five p.m. Mass. I’d glance around, just once, just in case Mama had come back and was waiting for me to join her. And I’d wait afterwards to make my confession to the parish priest.

  Father Gallagher was a kind man, and sensible too—I see that now. He warned me against the sin of over scrupulosity, which, come to think of it, my latest prioress mentioned too. I was a good girl, and my soul was safe, even if I did go to the Protestant church.

  His assurances didn’t work. I felt the weight of blasphemy heavier and heavier within me. Sometimes I worried I’d be sent to hell, or for a very long uncomfortable stay in purgatory. The Protestants had their own hell, and I thought it likely that I’d also be in for a stay there.

  From the perspective of an adult, this all sounds melodramatic. But it was very real to me then. In the past year, I had been taken from one family and inserted into another, and changed name, class, home, school, and religion without notice, and I suspected the reverse could occur, or something worse, if I didn’t pass through this probationary period. Unfortunately, no one told me how long that probation was, or how I’d know I was done with it . . . in fact, no one told me that I was on probation. I just knew it.

  When I was eleven, I finally took a stand. My Sunday school classmates were all starting confirmation class. I had to stand up for what I believed—even if it meant being … cast out into the desert.

  So when Mother, at breakfast one winter morning, held out the application for confirmation class at the Presbyterian Church, I didn’t take it. “I’m—” I was going to say something positive, something strong, something St. Stephen would have said before the Romans skewered him. But at the last moment, as I gazed at the only mother I had left, I mumbled, “I don’t know if I want to be confirmed,” I said.

  My voice was so weak, I wasn’t surprised when she looked blank and asked me to repeat what I had said. When she finally understood, she regarded me with confusion. “You don’t?”

  At least I saw no anger in her eyes, no denial of me for this defiance. “I … I don’t think so.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “It is your decision, Theresa. But . . . I do wish you’d think this through. Sunday after church, you must talk this over with the minister.”

  I didn’t have to make good on that pledge. When Sunday came around, Mother was gone. When I finally got up, nervous about the coming confrontation, I found only Merilee downstairs in the kitchen, making a pot of soup. “Your mother had to leave town,” was all she said as she ruthlessly chopped the celery into little cubes.

  I was too relieved to puzzle long over my mother’s unprecedented absence, and dutifully did my homework, sat alone in the dining room to eat Merilee’s soup, and helped her with the dishes. At five, I put on my coat and said I was going down the hill to my friend Katie’s house to study for a test.

  Merilee glanced up from the classifieds at the old grandfather clock and sighed. “No word from your mother. I guess I’ll be here for the night.”

  “You don’t have to stay,” I said, hesitating at the door. “Laura and I will be fine for one night by ourselves.”

  “Laura?”

  Merilee looked disconcerted, and I realized that I hadn’t seen my older sister all day. That wasn’t so unusual; Laura was almost seventeen, and we hadn’t ever been close in the
five years since I came to live here.

  Looking back from adulthood, I could hardly blame her—she’d been the baby of the family before I came along and dethroned her. Now I realize that I was adopted soon after her father died, and she very likely associated the two events.

  Back when I was a little girl, accompanying my mother to work—my other mother, the housekeeper before Merilee—Laura kind of liked having me to boss around in a genial big-girl way. She was an entertaining playmate, with an extensive set of Barbies and endless imagination at making them move around the Barbie Townhouse and Barbie Office Building. She’d enact great melodramas that would alternately terrify and thrill me. I still recall the one where a beautiful blonde Barbie went under the hairdryer at the Barbie Hair Salon, and then (Laura performing some sleight of hand and replacing this Barbie with one she’d altered) emerging with her hair a sickly green and broken off on one side. “And she is to be married tomorrow! But she can’t let Ken see her this way! So she jilts him at the altar! And doesn’t tell him why! And Ken—” Ken, I’m afraid, got into his low-slung pink roadster and brokenheartedly drove off a cliff; quite a common means of suicide in the mountains around Wakefield, as a matter of fact.

  All that stopped once I came to live with them. Laura and her expressive face and her graceful hands and thrilling voice withdrew. She wasn’t the sort to practice open hostility, but after a few rebuffs when I asked to play Barbies with her, I got the message. And if I didn’t, I got it when, on my eighth birthday, she packed up every last little bit of Barbie paraphernalia into a cardboard box and left it on my bed with a note, “You can have them all now, if you want to play with them so bad.”

  I never did. I never even took them out of the box. I could be stubborn too.

  And so we’d lived for four years in adjacent rooms, sharing a bathroom, sharing a mother, sharing a pair of sisters, and never touched. I think, by the end of it, I hated her.

  “Where is Laura?” I asked Merilee, pulling my gloves on and glancing out the window. I should take a flashlight. It would be dark before I got home from Mass.

  “She—she went with your mother, I think. So I have to stay tonight. Can’t let you be alone.”

  I walked on down the hill and across the bridge to the church, but my responses to the prayers during Mass were automatic and mumbled, as I worried over Merilee’s revelation. If Laura didn’t much like me, I thought she very likely hated our mother. She hid it quite skillfully, and I’m not sure Mother recognized it. But I was an intuitive child and, besides, I’d already felt the Laura brand of alienation. Laura played a certain part whenever Mother was near, the composed, self-contained, self-sufficient girl that I suspected she’d cribbed from repeated viewings of early Grace Kelly films. It wasn’t an unusual type among upper-class girls, and in fact was rather prized as an effective way to be elite without seeming snobbish. But it wasn’t Laura, not the Laura who once created tragedies with Barbies and now whispered on the phone with her secret boyfriend, the bad boy from reform school with the old Indian motorcycle.

  I knew about that boy because of our shared bathroom. Each of us had a door into the bathroom, and sometimes, if both doors were open, I could hear Laura moving about in her room and talking on the phone Ellen had given her for her sixteenth birthday. And whenever she talked to that boy, her voice got low and sexy and much more like Marlene Dietrich than Grace Kelly. Not to mention that once, on my way home from confession, I saw Laura behind him on the motorcycle, her dark hair flying back like a pennant. Her face was alight in a way I’d never seen.

  I took some comfort in that. I wasn’t the only one in the household living a secret life.

  But now Laura and Mother were off somewhere together, probably in Charleston shopping for party dresses and Christmas presents. Ellen was away at college, and Cathy, the eldest sister, was living at the ski school in Canaan Valley, teaching Senate aides and lobbyists how to slalom.

  And I was left alone, sitting in a church by myself.

  The organist struck up some dirge of a postlude, and the priest hustled out the side door, and I hunched up against the cold and walked out into the night. Around me families were sliding along the icy sidewalk to their cars, little knots of relatives bickering genially about dinner and homework.

  I dug my hand into my pocket and came up with a quarter. Down the street, near the Shell station, I found a pay phone, pulled the accordion door shut, and opened the phonebook.

  There was only one Price listed. Louis. I didn’t recognize the name, but I figured he must be related somehow. As the phone rang, I invented my cover story, and sent up a silent prayer as I told the man who answered that I was Mrs. Joan Price’s cousin’s daughter, and my father was dying, and he wanted me to contact her before it was too late.

  Louis didn’t question this. But he had no answer for me either. “I don’t know that family well. We’re not related, at least not that I know of. But I worked out at the mine, and people were always confusing me with Pete. Because of the name. But I don’t know what happened to him. They moved. Years ago.”

  “You don’t know where they were going?”

  He sighed. I heard the wheeze in his voice. “I figured he went south. To get out of the cold. The black lung, you know.”

  “They all left? The whole family?”

  Now he sounded impatient. “I told you, I don’t really know them. I just remember he quit and they moved out of town. Tell you what. Give me your name and number, and if I hear from them, I’ll have them call you.”

  I mumbled something, and he pretended to take it down, and as I hung up I realized that I was all alone, forever. I would never find them, and they would never look for me.

  Mother came home the next day, alone. Laura, she told me, was staying in Morgantown with Aunt Jane for a little while. She didn’t tell me why, but I decided, piously, that I should pray for Laura, because she must have gotten into trouble. Mother was trying to separate her from that biker boy, probably.

  Laura’s transgression, whatever it was, gave me courage. She had defied Mother and survived. So the next Sunday, when she came to wake me for church, I sat up in bed, geared up my courage, and said, more positively this time, “I don’t want to be confirmed. I don’t feel right about it.”

  Mother stopped with one earring on and one still in her hand. She studied me for a long moment, and I closed my eyes and prayed hard, inarticulately, that someone, either Jesus or Mother, would forgive me whatever sin I ended up committing.

  Jesus could send me to hell. Mother could send me back.

  Only there was no “back.” My old family was gone.

  “Mother?” I said, and opened my eyes.

  She fastened on the other earring and stepped back from my bed. When she got to the doorway, she turned to me. “You do what you think is right, dear. I know—I know that your early training was in another faith, and I understand that this might all be confusing to you.”

  Weak with relief, I sank back onto the pillow. “I thought you might be angry at me. Send me away.”

  “Send you away?” Her eyes blazed fierce, and though she never moved closer to me, that fierceness was very like an embrace. “You don’t need to worry about that. Ever. I don’t give up my daughters.”

  I let that fierceness comfort me, and only when she was gone did the errant thought come into my mind—but what about Laura? You sent her away.

  Just as, I supposed, my own mother—my first mother—had sent me away.

  But she had to, I whispered inside my head. She must have had to.

  And Mother must have had to send Laura away.

  A few weeks later, I learned the truth about Laura, or part of it. Laura called, and I answered. I said only that I would go get Mother.

  “No!” she said.

  In the silence that followed, I heard the crackle of long-distance.

  “Look, Theresa, all I want is for you to tell her that I’m okay. And she’s not supposed to look for me. I’m fine
and I don’t need—” here her voice went rich with irony—“to be rescued. Got that?”

  I was a quick child, sensitive to nuance. And I’d been watching Laura for months, wondering. “You ran away, didn’t you? With that boy.”

  “Yeah. And I’m not coming back. So just tell her not to worry about me.” From somewhere came a deeper voice, and Laura’s answering laugh, and then she said, quickly, “I’m fine. I’m not just fine, I’m happy. Okay?”

  “But—” I was overcome with something—envy? Admiration? Here was someone who was sinning and not suffering for it. I wanted to keep her on the phone. I glanced around the front hall, into the living room, up the big staircase. There was no sign of Mother. “But what if something happens? What if—what if Mother gets sick? How do we find you?”

  I could sense her hesitation, and remembered that she’d already lost one parent. So what. I’d lost two. “She’s getting old, you know,” I added. “She could get sick.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a phone number you can call. But you have to hide it and not show it to Mother, all right? Unless there’s an emergency, like someone getting sick.”

  “All right,” I replied carefully.

  She still hesitated. “You have to promise. Really promise. A sister’s promise, okay?”

  A sister’s promise. That was rich. She didn’t even introduce me to her friends as her sister. It was always oh, yeah, and this is Theresa.

  “I promise.”

  I found a pen and pad in the drawer and dutifully took down the number. Then I said, politely, “Goodbye,” and we hung up.

  I prayed about it for several weeks, but got no answer. I hid the phone number in my old math textbook, and for another few weeks, every time I glanced at the bookcase, I felt the phone number’s heat burning through the pages and binding.

  Finally, I retrieved the paper and took it with me on my next trip to the library. Back in the corner, there was an IBM typewriter for the use of patrons who wanted to type a letter or a resume. In all caps, I typed LAURA, and the phone number. Then I put it in an envelope and typed our address and mailed it to my mother.