The year She Fell (18 page)
I thought of him occasionally, of course. My first love. I was just as sentimental about that as any other woman, especially since our romance had so many Romeo-and-Juliet elements. But even the memory seemed too fragile to handle very often. Sometimes I almost didn’t believe it had happened. Maybe I was just remembering some old movie with a teenaged Natalie Wood (sometimes reviewers mentioned the resemblance between us)—the moonlit glade, those midnight encounters down by the old wooden bridge, that longing that tore me apart, that night we escaped to Tennessee, where anyone who could walk could get a marriage license . . .
And the sudden ending just two months later, with the avenging mother arriving, the law in tow. Tabloid material, for someone in my profession, but I was luckier than most in my ex-husband. Another man might have gone to the Enquirer with a lurid account of our youthful elopement, or sued me for some percentage of my earnings, claiming that my success was due to his inspiration. But
Jackson
never did that, and I never worried that he would. Our little marriage was like a shared secret, and neither of us ever broke it.
The silence though—I had to break that. It was a way to touch him without—without touch. “This is a seriously cool squad car. Like
Miami
Vice. But in
Wakefield
, it just seems so unlikely. And you—how did you manage to become a policeman?”
He shrugged, his gaze on the semi negotiating the hairpin turn ahead, the last big twist in the road before town. “I stayed in
Bristol
.” Bristol, that demi-city—half of it was in Tennessee, and half was in Virginia—was where we found a justice of the peace willing to marry two sixteen-year-olds. “Got on with the force there.”
I tried to imagine the young Jackson, the one I remembered, in a uniform. He must have changed so much after I left him there in the custody of that same
Bristol
police force—not that I wanted to leave, and I didn’t know then that he’d been arrested. Now he was back home, somehow having overcome that criminal record and his rancid family background, back in the narrow-minded little town that had trapped him before. “Why here?”
“I backed the wrong man for commissioner in
Bristol
, and after that, kind of hit the ceiling for advancement. And they were having some problems with the department here last year and needed an outsider to come in and rebuild it.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Allegedly,” he said, “the chief here was conspiring with an auto dealer to smuggle heroin in. Not for local consumption, luckily, but to ship up to
Pittsburgh
.” He glanced over at me. “You didn’t hear about it?”
“It’s not the sort of news my mother’s likely to pass on. So—so you were brought in to rebuild? You’re the new chief?” It seemed beyond unlikely.
Jackson
was a biker bad boy, back in our youth. Actually he was a sweet, generous bad boy, but definitely bad by the rules of the day—he’d spent a year at the reformatory before I met him. It was, of course, part of his allure to a girl like me.
“Yeah.”
Does my mother know? I wanted to ask. But that would bring back that past we weren’t addressing. Anyway, my mother had to know. She knew everything that happened in
Wakefield
. And she must have allowed it. She was on the city council, and I’d be surprised if anything of significance happened without her approval.
It didn’t make much sense. Mother—at least the one I used to know—wouldn’t have allowed Jackson back into town, much less given him a job of any power. Maybe that was another sign of something going wrong inside her. Maybe she’d mellowed.
But I didn’t want to think about my mother. I’d be seeing her soon enough.
Now I wanted to think about
Jackson
.
Other than police work, I wanted to ask, what else have you been up to for two decades? He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean much here. As I recalled, most men didn’t. They’d say it was because rings were dangerous when they were building or mining or whatever manual labor job they did. But of course, that was just an excuse. They probably hoped to fool some ignorant young poontang somehow.
But
Jackson
would wear a ring. He wore a ring when we were married. He was romantic that way. Or at least he had been, back when we were both sixteen.
We were passing the college, approaching Loudon Hill, and just like that all the ease and warmth of this encounter vanished. I was almost . . . home. I could see the big house ahead, dominating the hill, looming against the afternoon sun. I hated that house. Always had.
Jack stopped the car two blocks early, in front of Lacy Trotter’s house. “Isn’t this where I let you off?”
He was teasing me. He remembered who we were. Remembered what we were. And now I remembered too, at least that back in the old days, this is as far as he could come on his loud old Indian motorcycle without alerting my mother that we were together. “I have nine pairs of shoes in that bag. I don’t think I can drag it two blocks.”
“Suit yourself. Don’t blame me if you get grounded.”
He jammed the Charger back into gear and cruised up that last
In the circle drive in front of the house, he pulled to a halt and got out. I met him back at the trunk, and he hefted the suitcase onto his shoulder. He meant to take it inside for me, I thought, momentarily panicked. But all he did was carry it up the wide stone steps to the front door, where he let it slide down his body to the porch floor. He touched me lightly on the shoulder. It was nothing insinuating, nothing threatening, just a brush on my bare skin next to the strap of my dress. I waited for the reaction, the tensing, the shrinking away, but it never came. All I felt was the trace of warmth he left behind.
“Call me tomorrow if you need a ride to pick up your car. I’m off duty in the morning.”
Then he strode away, back past the latticed arch threaded with climbing roses, back to his Charger. The warmth of his hand was still on my shoulder, half-bared in a sun-dress.
Jackson
. I’d forgotten . . . oh, how he was, so funny and sweet. But I was thinking of the boy he had been. There were two decades of living in between, and whatever he had been then, well, he was a man now, a man I didn’t know.
I shook my head to clear the cobwebs of memory—and cobwebs were about all I had of my lost adolescence.
Just as well. I was back here for my mother, and I didn’t want to face her remembering what she had done to Jackson and me.
CHAPTER NINE
Twenty years.
Oh, it hadn’t been twenty years since I’d seen my mother. I’d flown her out for the Emmys the year I was nominated, and a couple other times too. And we’d had a few Christmases at my sister Ellen’s house. Ellen produced the only grandchild—so far—and so we all wanted to see little Sarah in her native habitat, gleefully ripping into the dozens of gifts under her Christmas tree.
And of course I called home once a month. Every third Thursday, at
LA time,
here in
West Virginia
. And every second Monday I went into the Hallmark shop down the street from my house and bought a nice card and jotted a nice note and addressed it and stamped it—I always bought the special flower stamp, because Mother was a gardener—and slid it into the mailbox at the end of my Brentwood street. Our relationship for most of the last two decades had been more than civil. I’d even characterize it as “pleasant.”
What can I say? I deserved that Emmy nomination. Mother deserved one of her own.
I was older now. Not so righteous. I’d lived among the amoral rich of LA all this time, and I’d pretty much decided the only sins worth resisting were violence and hypocrisy. There was no violence in my mother, other than the blistering heat of her X-Ray vision, maybe. But hypocrisy, well, that still bothered me.
Of course, I guess I was hypocritical too, or I would have broken with her out of righteous indignation all those years ago, instead of politely pretending we still had a relationship. It was just easier not to make an issue of being “estranged”, especially after all those tabloid stories about other TV actresses “estranged” from their mothers. I could just see a photo of my mother sitting here on the porch in the rocking chair and knitting and trying to look bereft and anguished over being excommunicated from her Hollywood daughter’s life.
Actually, I couldn’t see it at all. If I’m more discreet than the average actress, I learned it from my mother. She’d been entirely left behind by the whole Jerry Springer phenomenon. The last thing she’d ever want was her picture in People magazine, unless she happened to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
It probably sounds absurd, this tabloid obsession of mine. No publicity is bad publicity, and all that. But the truth is, in my position, bad publicity was . . . well, bad. I wasn’t a big star whose career success could be calibrated by how many scurrilous articles she garnered. I was that more common breed, the character actress, the supporting actress, the heroine’s best friend, the hero’s ex-wife, the witness who wasn’t guarded by Ice T and so dies in the season finale. I was good at the job, and never lacked for work, but I wasn’t beautiful and didn’t get paid to be glamorous and scandalous. Rather I succeeded because of my wry tone and quick wit and everywoman appeal, or so the reviews told me. The producers told me it was because I showed up on time, knew my lines, and didn’t insist on two personal assistants and a bowl of cocaine. That is, I was no diva.
Only divas benefited from negative press. That’s because TV series were built around them, and the more complicated their existence, the more complexity it lent their performances. (Most weren’t, I’m afraid, capable of complexity in acting, but in performing, yes.) Their roles were amplified by their reputations, so that some star playing the mother of a dying child took on additional resonance for all those who might have read an article about her mother or her son— she could be the role, plus herself.
But I wasn’t supposed to be plus myself in my roles. No producer wanted a supporting character amplified by real life. Any nasty little scandal attached to my name might be forgotten quickly, but the taint would remain when the casting director thought about calling my agent. “Didn’t she—what was it? Drugs? Something. Never mind. Let’s not take the chance. Kelli Willams might be available.”
I had a good life. A good career. A popular series just renewed for the third season, and a contract worth more per episode than most people earned in five years. Bi-coastal housing, money in the bank, the yellow Porsche, pretty clothes, hardback books, two good friends and twelve more I could enjoy without trusting. And the shelf-life of a character actress being considerably longer than that of a diva, I could conceivably work for another couple decades, maybe even into old age, as long as I stayed on the right side of the reputation meter. So I strived to be as boring as possible, and for the most part, I’d succeeded. I was under the radar of the tabloids, except once, and fortunately Jack Nicholson broke up with his young girlfriend that week, so there was no space for any of those celebrity date photos or breathless speculations about an engagement.
I lived discreetly, and it paid off now as it had paid off those years after my father died and Theresa came to live with us, when Mother told me I had three sisters now, and that I was to be especially nice to the newest one, who wanted so badly to be a part of our family.