The year She Fell (32 page)

Ellen paced across the
kitchen as she told me about seeing her husband tense and unharmed in a dusty cell, the boy Brian hovering defiantly in the outer chamber. He couldn’t believe that she had come alone, without the police. Tom couldn’t believe it either. “He was so angry.”

“Well, you had to expect that. What did Brian say?”

“That Tom just had to tell him the truth. That’s all. And he’d let him go.”

“Did he threaten you? Did he say he’d hurt Tom if you went to the police?”

Ellen shook her head. “I don’t think he’s violent. I
can’t
think he’s violent.”

That didn’t comfort me. “Ellen, is Tom going to forgive you?”

“I don’t know.” She drifted up the stairs, looking back at me, her eyes troubled. “There has to be a reason, something terrible, that he won’t tell the truth. And whatever it is—maybe I won’t forgive him.”

I gave Ellen a couple valium and got her settled in her bed. When I checked on her a half hour later, she was sleeping fitfully. But at least her eyes were closed and her hands were still. I couldn’t sleep yet, so I roamed about the big old house, finally settling in again at Daddy’s desk, looking through the drawers for comforting little treasures—his old fountain pen, now dried beyond repair; a magnifying glass; a sketching charcoal, worn to an inch-long nub.

Finally I fell asleep on the couch with Letterman on softly, and woke up when the sunlight drifted in and Ellen came down.

“We have to figure out who the mother is,” she said, standing in the doorway. “Help me think this through. It has to be someone I know, or Tom wouldn’t be so resistant to telling me.”

So over coffee and toast, the cordless phone between us on the oak table, we sifted through the memories of that year long ago, when Tom and Ellen broke up and then married, and Tom’s two children were conceived.

“So who knew about you and Tom? That you’d married?”

She shook her head. “Everyone who cared. I mean, it was in the paper, the alumni magazine. It wasn’t a secret. But whoever it was, she and Tom were together the summer before we married. While we were broken up. So if she found out later that Tom had married, I suppose she could have done some research. She didn’t have to know me before, well, before the boy was born.”

“What about that summer before then? Who knew you were broken up? Not me—I was off at theater camp.”

“Mother guessed. She didn’t say anything, but she guessed. She was pleased about the breakup. Cathy too, I told her as soon as I got home. She kept introducing me to her rock-climbing friends, the male ones, I mean. She said I should jump back into dating right away, as the best sort of revenge. But I couldn’t do it. My friends here knew too—Janie and Linda mostly. I cried on their shoulders often enough.”

I shook my head. Janie and Linda were great gal pal types, but not likely candidates to tempt a man like Tom into folly. “Okay, let’s think this through. It must have been someone who knew about you to put your name on the birth certificate. Someone who knew your name and where you were born and that you and Tom had married.”

“I know. I’ve already figured that out. Maybe an old girlfriend of Tom’s went after him that summer. He grew up in
Washington
, and I know he went steady with a couple girls in high school. And he could have met one of them again, or she could have kept in touch with his father, and learned about me.” She shook her head despairingly. “But why would he bother to keep that from me? I mean, the child would be a complication, but he could have told me.”

Sternly I said, “Let’s not worry about the why now. Concentrate on the who. Who else would have known about your marriage?”

“Some of my sorority sisters were there. And a couple were pretty jealous of me for wrapping Tom up like that for so long and not giving them a chance. Everyone in the sorority house knew we’d broken up about an hour after it happened. You can’t keep news like that secret for long.” She frowned. “They’d all know where I was born and all that, because we were quizzed on each other’s background during rush. And you know how much you get to know each other living together for four years.”

I didn’t know, actually. I’d lived with my sisters for a lot more than four years, and never got to be able to predict what they’d do. I’d never have imagined, for example, that Ellen, the devoted wife and mother, would let her husband be held captive like this and not turn over all she knew to the police. “Any one of them in particular? Maybe one Tom fancied?”

She considered this without the jealousy I would have expected. Maybe she was beyond that. “Oh, one liked him very well, but Tom didn’t notice her, as far as I could tell. He wasn’t interested in the typical sorority girl. And I don’t think he’d be so resistant to telling me if it were just a sorority sister.” She glanced at the phone, then back at me. “I think it must be someone he has to protect. Someone who shouldn’t have had a baby then. Maybe someone famous. I don’t know.”

“Could be,” I replied. “The press loves to get hold of such stories. But who could it be? Who did you known then who now has to be protected from scandal in the tabloids?”

She gave a short laugh. “You, I guess. You’re the only one I can think of.”

“And here I confessed to a hankering for Tom’s Irish lullabies. But it couldn’t have been me. I think I’d remember. Besides, I was marooned in
Yellowstone
that summer, wasn’t I? Wearing fake deerskin and Indian beads in that summer-stock play.” I picked up a pen and wrote
1990
at the top. “Come on. Tell me everything you can remember about that year. There’s got to be some clue.”

She talked slowly through the chronology, and I took notes on the back of an electric bill.
July 1990
. The child would have been conceived then. And in late July, Tom had called suddenly and proposed. Two weeks later, they were married, so quickly that none of us had time to come. Except Mother—she managed to get there, no doubt with a fixed smile and four place settings of silver wrapped up in pretty paper. A couple months later, Ellen was pregnant with Sarah.

“I wonder if subconsciously, I knew something, knew that something had happened to him. That I had to bind him to me quickly or I might lose him.”

“He didn’t want a baby so soon?”

“Oh, no, he did. We both did. We thought we’d do it while we were young and had plenty of energy, and we’d get the wanderlust out, do the foreign assignments early, when she was still too young for school. Then Tom would have paid his dues and gotten a good post covering the Defense Department, or something like that, just in time for Sarah to start first grade.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “It didn’t work out that way. He liked the foreign assignments more. Didn’t want to come home. So Sarah ended up a cosmopolitan little kid.”

I could remember receiving letters from the
Middle East
and
Greece
and
Moscow
, as Tom made his way from one hotspot to another. Ellen had always seemed to enjoy the variety, but it couldn’t have been easy to find teaching jobs at each new post, or to get Sarah settled over and over again.

But we didn’t have time to think through that. “So you were pregnant by October?”

“Yes. Sarah was born in August. And that boy was born in April.”

I jotted
April 1991
under
August 1991
. Then I stared at it. I’d seen that pairing before. “Wait a minute.”

I returned a moment later with the manila folder. “Look what I found in Daddy’s desk the other day.” I pulled out the envelope with the dates written in Mother’s hand. “I don’t know what
June 1979
or
July 1990
means, but—”

“He would have been conceived in July 1990. Brian.” She took the envelope and stared at the dates. “Mother . . .?” Then, slowly, she turned the envelope over. “Look.” She drew her finger along the address.
Ellen Wakefield.
202 Loudon Road
.
Wakefield
,
WV
.
“It’s postmarked this May.
Williamsport
,
Pennsylvania
.”

She slid her fingers into the slit at the top and withdrew a single folded sheet. “
Dear Ms. Wakefield . . .
It’s from him. Brian. This is the letter he said he sent to me here a couple weeks ago.”

“And Mother intercepted it.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. “She didn’t give any indication?” I finally said.

“No. I mean, she’s been sort of distracted—you know. But she’s said nothing about the boy at all. Didn’t ask me if it’s true.”

“But . . . ” I thought about the new will. “You don’t think that this donation to the college has anything to do with it, I don’t know, disinheriting you?”

“No. She’s got to have figured it out, that I couldn’t have had a baby in April and another in August.” Ellen folded the letter back up. “Maybe she just thought he was some lunatic, and best ignored.”

“But she saved the letter.” Okay, I always suspected my mother of darker doings. But still, why didn’t she pass on the letter, or throw it away? “She had some reason for saving it.”

“What else is in the file?”

“Nothing relevant.” I fingered through the other papers. “Stuff about the college, and President Urich’s resume. She probably put the letter in there to hide it, figuring no one would ever look into a folder labeled
Loudon
College
.”

“She didn’t leave a number where she’s going to be staying?” Ellen asked.

“No. And of course she won’t have a cell phone to save her life. Ellen—you know, she isn’t really all that . . . predictable any more. Maybe this trip, wherever she’s going, has something to do with this boy?”

Ellen shook her head. “I don’t know. I just wish she would have said something. Or passed on the letter, opened or unopened. I don’t get it.” She dropped the envelope back into the folder. “I don’t get any of this. I feel like my life’s been hijacked, and everyone I should be able to trust is suspect. Tom. Theresa. Mother.”

I reached out and took her hand. “You can trust me.” I meant it, even though I wanted so badly to call
Jackson
and tell him what he wanted to know. “Now let’s get back to the mystery. You got married in August. So a few weeks after—well, after the boy was conceived. And when did you know you were pregnant?”

“Early in November, I think. The tests even then were pretty fast. You know,” she said, her eyes thoughtful, “you were the second one I told. After Tom, I mean. Remember? We were in
Washington
, and you stopped by to see us. You were running away from that boarding school.”

“I was not. I’d turned eighteen. I was emancipated. I had every right to drop out of school.”

“With a semester to graduation. We spent the whole time arguing about that, I think.”

“It wasn’t like a high school diploma would help with getting acting jobs,” I said. “But I do remember, you told me about the baby. You were happy. Tom seemed happy too.”

“He was. But it was all so new. I couldn’t have been more than two months along when you visited.”

It was coming back to me. I’d gotten fifteen thousand dollars on my eighteenth birthday, the first installment of my father’s trust. I went out and bought a little used Mustang, bright red, and left my school in
Louisville
, heading east and north towards Broadway. I made a stop in DC to see Ellen, and then took a detour to see Cathy at the resort in the Poconos.