The year She Fell (17 page)

As I passed, I looked into the rear-view mirror to keep him in view. Theresa, sitting behind Mother in the back seat, saw him too. And, in the mirror, I saw her mouth, bare of lipstick and a little pale, widen just a bit as she raised her hand to wave at him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LAURA

Maybe it’s true you can’t go home again. But if you try, it’s best to do it in a Porsche.

That’s what I decided when Ellen told me about our aging mother and her new enthusiasm for revising her will. I didn’t want to go back to that dull little town, but if I didn’t, my old neighbors would assume I cared nothing about my own mother. And we couldn’t have that rumor getting into People magazine. So I’d make my return in my fancy sports car, and give them
 
the eyeful they wanted. I even stopped at a K-Mart in
Harrisonburg
and bought a long flowing chiffon scarf, in a shade of yellow that matched the Porsche. As I sped down the highway, I caught sight of my image in the sideview mirror. I looked like Isadora Duncan just moments before her dramatic scarf-death.

I was driving in from
Long Island
, where I had a summer home. It was a good time for me to leave. All my fellow Hollywooders were arriving, and the line at Starbucks of a morning was on the edge of insupportable.

The action was getting uncomfortably hot on another front too. My cottage was being renovated, and the architect, a gentle man named Alex, had started lingering over coffee after our blueprint consultations, musing that he hoped to be marrying and starting a family before he turned forty, and didn’t I think the cottage’s third bedroom would make a good nursery. I knew just a single word from me and he would ask me for something significant—a date, a wedding perhaps. But I couldn’t say the word . . .

Coward, I told myself, but I couldn’t help it. My sister’s email gave me the excuse I needed to escape, just for a week or so, the push-pull of attraction and resistance.

After I crossed the
Canaan
Valley
, the narrow road started climbing and twisting, and the Porsche started coughing. It had always been as temperamental as any starlet, and the clear mountain air infected it more than the worst
Los Angeles
smog. I managed to limp to the top of the mountain before it sputtered out, leaving me only enough momentum to coast into the scenic cut-out over the river gorge as an old pickup roared past me in the passing lane.

My cell phone was handy, but I didn’t pick it up. Instead I climbed out of the car onto the gravel shoulder, slamming the door behind me. The noise echoed through the gorge and came back to me a moment later as I leaned over the guardrail to look down into the abyss.

 
I hadn’t seen the gorge from this angle for many years, but I remembered it sharply as I stood there—the cragged stone face on the other side, the distant rush of the water below, the cool mist that rose in transparent billows into my face.

This was one of those family spots. My daredevil sister Cathy had rappelled down this one cliff one summer while Ellen and I watched, transfixed with fear, both of us begging her not to do it. She had to use three ropes, anchoring the first on the oak tree at the edge of the road—she said it was very uncool to anchor a rope on something manmade like a guardrail—then dropping to the ledge about a hundred feet below, fixing another rope to the stone face, and descending to another ledge. When she finally reached the floor of the gorge, she was just a tiny stick figure against the river, one stick arm waving up at us. She hiked out of the canyon and met us back where the river entered the valley east of town.

That’s how she died—not here, thank goodness. On the next mountain over, rappelling one afternoon, she fell a couple hundred feet to the canyon floor. Same river, however, just a few miles west.

Cathy had gotten all the risk-taking genes, I guess. All I ever did here at the gorge was sit quietly for hours with my back against the big boulder, quiet and attentive while my father painted the view. “You’re a good watcher,” he told me. He meant that as a compliment, as something we shared.

Daddy and I were the observers in a family full of do-ers. Mother founded and ordered and organized; Cathy experienced and conquered; Ellen strived and achieved. Daddy and I just watched. And Daddy painted what we saw.

The gorge, he told me, happened when one of the oldest rivers in the world started to eat away at one of the oldest mountains. He had to show me what he meant, and he painted it for me, a series of watercolors—a hundred-million years in the life of the gorge. The first in the series showed a little stream, running placidly down a mountain far more jagged and fierce than worn-out old Aidan here, as a brontosaurus bent its long neck to drink along the bank. And then another watercolor, elaborately detailed, with the stream gouging a channel through the mountain, a pterodactyl soaring overhead. And then another seven watercolors, on through the epochs, the gorge getting deeper and deeper and the mountain softening under the effects of time and erosion. The last showed a serious little girl in a baseball shirt, sitting on the boulder and looking down at the rushing river, hundreds of feet below.

They were just the sort of whimsy to delight an imaginative child. And they were mine. Once they had hung in a diagonal line across the back wall of my room. But the night I left home almost twenty years ago, I’d taken them down and hidden them in the attic.

Now might be a good time to retrieve them, to hang in my renovated summer home.

They better still be there.

Another daughter, with another mother, might have just staked her claim, might have come right out and said that she wanted them and her father would have wanted her to have them. But in some hidden recess of self, I was still that watchful child—and I still had the same mother, the one who had always denied me what I wanted most, and always for my own good.

And the thought of that mother moved me back into my fancy sports car, where I sat while the traffic passed me by, scarf lying limp around my neck, hoping that maybe Thomas Wolfe was right after all. It certainly looked like some force had prevented me from going home again, even though I had really, really tried.

But before I could give into destiny, climb out of the car, and hitchhike back to
New York
, a police car pulled up. A very cool police car, a black Charger, long and low and lethal. I ran through a checklist and determined that I wasn’t doing anything illegal, and thus was able to greet this representative of law and order with a smile.

The smile disappeared as soon as I saw the cop’s face.

Jackson McCain. My . . . this sounds so odd. I never thought of him this way. But that’s what he was . . . my ex-husband.
 
My first love. My last love, I thought in my cynical moments.

It had been, oh, twenty years. A long time with no contact. Neither of us were the sort to come back for high school reunions—for that matter, I supposed neither of us had graduated from Wakefield High. Two decades without a phone call, a letter, or an email.

I’d been holding my breath, but now I let it out, a long, shaky exhale. He still looked good, standing on the other side of my car door like he was planning on asking for my ID. He was wearing jeans and a Nike t-shirt (not a uniform—maybe he’d just borrowed the police car?) and his shoulders were broader and his face more tanned than I remembered. But his eyes were still the dark blue of the spruces up on the ridge, and his mouth still had that slight smile that dug a dimple out of his left cheek.

I couldn’t believe he was a cop. The
Jackson
I knew was, well, more used to the other side of the law.

He didn’t seem at all surprised to encounter me. “I saw your sister at Odom’s. She said you were coming back to town.” He walked around my car, studying it. “So when Chili called in that there was a yellow Porsche stranded on 32, I figured it had to be you. Yellow. That was always your favorite color, wasn’t it?”

That surprised me. Disarmed me. That he would remember—“You’re not really a cop, are you?”

“Nah. I just stole this squad car to impress you.”

The
Jackson
I remembered might actually do that. But—“You really are a cop.”

“Fraid so.”

“How—” It didn’t make any sense. But then, my being here made no sense. I’d sworn I’d never be back, except for another funeral, and here I was, without a dead body in sight. And Jack—well, I was amazed that the town let him return, much less handed him a badge and a gun.

He actually did have a gun, in a holster at his hip, half-concealed by the tail of his t-shirt. It made me think of Gary Cooper in those Westerns I watched leaning against my father on the old couch, of the tall lean lawman with the gun and the calm sense of the power of goodness.

“I—“There I was stuttering, like an understudy who hadn’t studied her lines. I took hold of myself. “It was good of you to come find me.”

He’d yanked open the hood and was shaking his head at the mystery underneath. “German design’s too complicated for me. How about I call you a tow? Chris Riker’s got a good garage on
South Street
.”

Chris Riker had been our star quarterback, got a scholarship to WVU. I was surprised at how immediately that information came back to me, as if
Jackson
had pushed a memory button. “I guess he wasn’t drafted into the pros after all.”

“Blew out his knee senior year. Didn’t bother to graduate. He was always good with cars.”

It was as if we were casual acquaintances, as if we had no past to remember.

Except, of course, that as he dialed his cell phone, he kept stealing glances at me. He couldn’t believe I was back either. I listened to his low, authoritative voice and thought, suddenly, inescapably, he’s a man now. My
Jackson
.

Phone call over, he jammed my rolling bag into his trunk and opened the door for me, and I slid in next to a little mini-laptop that whirred with incoming information. Without another word, he drove me back towards
Wakefield
, just like he’d done a hundred times before, after our private moments in the mountains.

Neither of us spoke as we passed one off-road glade, filled with sunlight and honeysuckle now, where long ago we’d spread a beach towel and made love. That had been the first time for both of us, and so gentle and sweet and passionate in my memory even now— even now, when nothing about passion seemed gentle and sweet.

Neither of us spoke. We couldn’t. If we spoke, the memory would shatter. I knew it. And so must he.

The town that I saw below us through the windshield was different from the one I’d left, more chains, more neon, more traffic. But I only pretended to pay attention to the generic commercial strip that lay ahead. What really mattered was the man beside me.

Jackson
. Hiding behind my sunglasses, I glanced sidelong at him. He was driving one-handed, his bare left arm propped on the window. Now that we were a mile past that memorable glade, he seemed so comfortable, so easy, that twenty years fell away and we might have been ditching school in his old Firebird.

We hadn’t spoken in twenty years.

It wasn’t that we hated each other. Far from it. It’s just that the teenaged elopement and our two months together became illusory almost as soon as they were over. No one knew that we married, except my mother, and once it was annulled the marriage was never mentioned. As soon as I could, I left
Wakefield
forever, and never in the two decades that followed did we contact each other.