The year She Fell (19 page)

Three sisters. It was just a Chekhov play to me. In my mind, I had only two sisters, the ones I was born with. My father’s other daughters. Cathy and Ellen.

Not that I had anything against Theresa. But she came to us after Dad died, and so she wasn’t really my sister. She’d never known him, except as her mother’s employer, I supposed. Yes, my mother adopted her, but my father had no part in who she was or who she became.

I could think of her as my half-sister. That I could do.

So call it two-and-a-half sisters. Two point five sisters. I don’t know what Chekhov would make of that.

I didn’t blame Theresa for this. It wasn’t her fault she’d never known my father. It wasn’t her fault that Mother chose her specially. It wasn’t her fault that I’d been the youngest and then suddenly she was. It wasn’t her fault that Cathy died and left me with only one point five sisters.

Except the once, Theresa made no trouble for me. Another girl, one less scrupulous and careful, might have scored a few points with Mother by passing on the information that I was secretly seeing
Jackson
, but Theresa had kept quiet. All she did was study me with those big suspicious eyes, and I waited for her to present me with a blackmail demand. She never did, but just in case, I left money on her dresser, a few dollars every couple days. She had to know who it was from, because the bills smelled like popcorn from my weekend job at the Resource Cinema downtown. And she had to know what it was for, because, well, what else would it be for?

But we never spoke of it, and I learned later that St. Theresa couldn’t be bought.

She was, I came to realize, loyal only to my mother. But maybe not—after all, she left too, left
Wakefield
and this house and all of Mother’s many plans behind.

I wondered if Ellen’s summons would be reason enough for Theresa to emerge from her cloister for the first time in a year.

I know. What a collection. A minister, an actress, and a nun. It sounds like one of those jokes where St. Peter awaits at the pearly gates.

Ooh. Shiver. The pearly gates. And the lost sister. Involuntarily, my mind’s camera framed that shot. (Like most character actors, I thought I’d make a good director.) Open on marzipan archway into a blue sky. Cue the harps. Zoom into . . . lovely lost Cathy, all strong cheekbones and angel wings, amidst pillows of joy.

She would be bored to death.

Enough nostalgia. I raised the knocker and let it drop.

Mistake. This was my childhood home. I’d run in and out of this door a thousand times. The symbolism of knocking was all wrong.

I was about to twist the knob when the door opened, and Ellen stood there. “Laura!” Her sudden smile warmed me, and I remembered how easy Ellen was. No complications, no secrets, no blackmail, just a big sister who always remembered my birthday and bequeathed me her Narnia books the day she left for college.

We hugged there in the doorway, and then, laughing, she grabbed one handle of my suitcase and dragged it in. Together we managed to get it up the stairs, past the old family portraits, and, without any conscious thought, I tugged the case in the direction of my old room.

The upper hall was carpeted, so Ellen let her end drop and the wheels engage on the floor. “Good grief, what did you bring? Your whole wardrobe? I’ll have to borrow from you. I didn’t have time to pack, and I just have a couple outfits I bought at the mall.”

Once in the room, I heaved the suitcase up on the bed. “Help yourself.” We’d always been about the same size. In fact, the two of us were the sisters who actually looked like sisters—both dark-haired and blue-eyed, pretty enough but not very, slender but only through hard work and sacrifice.

“Or maybe we should just go shopping.” Ellen crossed to open the drapes. “Let’s see, there’s a choice between Wal-Mart and Milady’s Boutique.”

Hearing my sister’s teasing voice, for just an instant there, I felt glad to be home. Then I looked around at my old room, stripped of Daddy’s watercolors and the Bruce Springsteen posters and macramé wall-hangings. Now the bed was covered with a burgundy comforter, and a beautiful golden-locked antique doll leaned back against the pillow.

I’d never liked the antique dolls. They were fragile and precious and decorative. My mother bought each of us one every Christmas, and I always thanked her with a joyous smile and ran to put the doll away in the glass case in the hall outside my room. And there it would sit, with all the other dolls, and I would ignore it unless Mother was about, and then I would coo to it as I passed by, just like that girl in
The Bad Seed
.

I deserved nothing less than to have a secretive, deceptive, evil little daughter like me. It didn’t look like that was likely to happen, but my mother could only hope.

Just in case, I picked the doll up and put it in the satin-striped chair by the window. I hoped there wouldn’t be a moon tonight, or I’d wake to see those eerie eyes staring at me. I’d seen
Poltergeist
one too many times for comfort.

Ellen didn’t seem to notice my doll eviction. She was opening my suitcase and extracting the first bagged pair of shoes. “Theresa got here this morning. She actually is shopping.”

“Wal-mart or Milady’s Boutique?”

“Neither. Mother took her into Buckhannon to buy some clothes.”

“But why? I thought in her order, they always wore the habit.”

Ellen glanced back at me. “She left that order. And for this one she hasn’t taken her vows yet.”

I thought she’d already taken vows. I had assumed that no one would enter a cloister unless they were planning on life imprisonment. “She isn’t under vows?”

“Not that I know of. And I guess it’s easy to quit before that.”

“Wow.” I sat down on the bed, next to my suitcase. I don’t understand Theresa, I wanted to tell Ellen. Do you? But instead I did the how’s the family segment, and she countered with what’s going on with you, and it wasn’t till we were settled on the sun porch with diet cokes that she told me about Mother.

“It’s not very much, understand. She seems the same. But then there’ll be a moment, and she’ll say something she would never say, or something that isn’t true—And,” she added reluctantly, “there’s President Urich.”

“Who’s that?”

“You know. The president of the college. He’s practically moved in here. He thinks she’s going to leave the college a lot of money.”

Loudon was the local private college, an odd little place with a thousand students whose parents didn’t trust them to stay safe or straight up at WVU. The most amazing thing about Loudon is that its recruiters actually managed, year after year, to find 250
West Virginia
freshmen with parents wealthy enough to pay private college tuition.

Loudon was the family college. Generation after generation of
Wakefield
graduates. There was a plaque on one stone pillar, memorializing our grandfather, and another over the east arch for Daddy.

The school was an anachronism even when I was in high school and my mother kept mentioning how much Cathy had enjoyed “matriculating” there, and how much I too would enjoy it. I used to wander through the campus, looking up at those walls that really were covered with ivy, and imagined myself holding hands with Andy Hardy and joining Judy Garland’s sorority.

Even then it was hard to imagine Cathy there amongst the timid sons and daughters of real estate agents. But she always seemed to like Loudon, ever since that summer after 8
^th
grade when she went there to science camp. Ellen went to science camp there too, but when it came time to choose a college, she found all sorts of excuses to go to the bigger and better school across the state line. She didn’t live for rock-climbing and skiing as Cathy did.

Even I, the academic no-show, went to science camp one summer, curing myself forever of any desire for higher education. Instead I matriculated at the school of hard knocks, or at least the school of horny producers.

But Loudon was a fixture in my parents’ lives, where they met, where they courted back in the days when fraternity boys serenaded sorority girls on moonlit nights. And since then, Mother had worked to keep the college as the center of culture for this old town.

“What’s so strange about meeting with the president?” Automatically I used my finger to wipe up a condensation drop from the teak table under my glass, then rubbed my wet finger on my other wrist. It was warm out there with the sunlight streaming in and barely a breeze stirring the air. “She was president of the alumni association. And didn’t Daddy’s will endow two professorships?”

“This sounds like more than two professorships. This sounds like a new dormitory.”

A new dorm would cost millions. Not for the first time, I wondered how much money my mother actually had. (It was idle speculation, nothing personal. I didn’t need her money and didn’t expect that she’d leave me more than a token amount, if that.) There were the shares in the bank that Daddy once ran, and I presumed some safe old-money investments and insurance policies, and this house, of course.

Anywhere else, this old monster house with its three acres of gardens would be worth more than a million. But this was
West Virginia
. No one around here had a million to spend on a house. I felt a moment’s pity for whichever of my sisters got stuck with the place and had to pay to heat it during the long winters. “So ask to see a copy of her will.”

She laughed, a short, unamused laugh. “You first.”

“You’re older.”

“I’m not old enough for that.” For a moment, she was quiet enough that I could hear the bees buzzing in the rose bush under the window. Then she said, “I’m glad you both could come.”

“How did you explain about us all coming home? I mean, she’s got to figure that’s an unusual event.” Like the first time this century, and only once in the last century too.

“I let her think it was her doing. She kept talking about the college president, and about bequests, and I suggested that maybe we could all help her make the decision.”

“Oh, I get it. She’s supposed to think we’re so greedy that we’ll come back to insure our inheritance, if not to actually visit her.”

“Well, I didn’t know how else to justify it,” Ellen shot back. “Was I supposed to say that I was calling a family meeting because she’s losing her marbles?”

“I don’t know. But I would like to make it clear to her somehow that I have no expectations. I don’t want the house and I don’t need the money.” This was Ellen, I told myself. I could trust her, at least a little bit. “All I want is a few mementos of Daddy, maybe—” Yes, I trusted her. But I didn’t want to remind anyone of the watercolors. “Maybe his desk.”

She shook her head, smiling again. She never could stay mad very long. “Yeah, that big old heavy desk will fit right in with all that pretty white Euro furniture of yours. You’re welcome to it. It’ll cost a thousand just to ship it.”

I glanced behind me, worried that somehow Mother might hear. I didn’t think she’d wiretap her own house, but you never knew. “It’s so weird, talking like this. Like she’s going to die soon, and we have to divide up the possessions.”

“She’s not going to die soon. But we don’t want her giving away all her money before she does. I don’t know about you, but I really would prefer that she didn’t move in with me.”

I had to laugh at this. “I can just see the look on Tom’s face when you announce that he’s got to make room for his mother-in-law.”

As soon as I mentioned her husband, she glanced away, and her hand went nervously to the gold cross at her throat. I wondered if already he’d made it very clear that Mother would be moving in over his dead body. Not that I blamed him, but I didn’t like to see my sister anxious like this. I tried to reassure her. “She’s really very strong, remember.”