The year She Fell (49 page)

I remembered none of this. I remembered so little of my oldest brother, just the odd moments, a hulking presence in the kitchen, a hard voice. But I suspect my parents had long since lost control of the boys, and were trying to shelter me from them.

Maybe that was why they gave me up.

It wasn’t enough. “Do you recall anything else?”

He thought about this for a minute. “I remember Mitch and some uncle or cousin came to visit Ronnie at Pruntytown. Smuggled him in some cigarettes. Mitch was living with the cousin then. So Ronnie might have gone there after he was released. The cousin was a nice guy, you could tell he felt bad for Ronnie. But he was, well, the holler type.” He said this with the usual delicacy of those of us who grew up in town and didn’t have much in common with the secretive, suspicious people who lived in the mountain hollows. “I think he was from Rankin. Rankin’s down beyond the end of the valley—
Canaan
, I mean. Way down in
Webster
County
. Pretty far backwoods.”

He meant the other
West Virginia
, the primitive part, away from the ski resorts and whitewater-rafting facilities and our prim little college town. The poorest parts of the poorest state. From my bag, I pulled out the birth certificate I’d found in the trunk. There, in the space for “mother’s place of birth,” was written Webster County, WV. “You think they might have gone there? My parents?”

“I don’t know. I just have it in my mind that might be where Ronnie went, because Mitch must have been there.” His gaze was sympathetic. “You really don’t know where they went?”

I shook my head.

“You should ask your mother.”

This time I didn’t even bother to shake my head.

He said, “Look, that’s all I know. You could call the county clerk down in Webster.”

“Thank you.” I rose and left. Out on the street, I hesitated, then walked down to the Chevy dealer, the only place in town that rented out cars.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

As the convent nurse, I had to keep my driver’s license current in case I needed to take a sister to the hospital. I didn’t have a credit card, of course, but I was a
Wakefield
, so the rental agency gave me a car without a demur. The clerk insisted I also rent a cell phone, in case I got lost. “Just call back here, Sister, and we’ll tell you how to get wherever you want to go.”

That reassurance didn’t help me much. I didn’t know where I wanted to go, and anyway, I doubted the cell phone would work deep into the mountains anyway. But I followed the map the clerk had given me, and in a couple hours I was crossing into
Webster
County
.

I stopped the car in the parking lot of an abandoned store, and looked up at the broken plastic
Jenkins’ Food
sign. Above it was the rounded ridge of the mountains, cutting off the afternoon sun. Rankin was halfway up the road that wound along the slope, and there I hoped I’d find more information about the Prices. Brian might use the Internet, but I’d grown up in
West Virginia
, and I figured that most people in the mountains would never show up on any Internet search. Better to ask those who knew.

First, while I could still get a signal, I called home. I hoped I’d just get the answering machine, but Laura answered. She had me on the defensive immediately with her news that Brian had been using me to get at our family, and to get at Ellen’s husband Tom. I sat there in my rental car, feeling sick, as she accused me of helping him. If I had, it was inadvertent, but she didn’t care. And I supposed I couldn’t blame her. He’d gotten under my defenses. I was, after all, the most private of people, yet I’d told him things about me and the family that I’d never have told anyone else. He’d played me.

But I almost understood. He wanted so badly to know who he was, where he came from. And Tom had rejected him, refused to tell Brian what he needed to know. Not that Tom deserved what Brian did to him. But it was dangerous to deal with such primal questions.

After I hung up, I sat in the barren parking lot with the cell phone;. I should leave here. Go home. Forget the quest that Brian started me on. Help Ellen—

But even as I thought that, I knew I was lying to myself. I couldn’t help Ellen. I was just trying to avoid finishing what I’d started. The looming mountains were spooking me as much as Brian’s deception.

So I put the car into gear and started up the mountain.

They were all strange up
here on the mountain, strange like the people in the forests of
Romania
, where I’d served for two years. Insulated and isolated, suspicious and superstitious. The man at the Rankin store said he wasn’t sure if there were any Prices still around. All he would do was point up at the dirt road, and tell me about the lumber trails branching off, and the cabins hidden away in the hollows. Used to be Prices up there, he said.

There was a logging trail, or a mining road, every mile or so, up the mountain. I was starting to worry that I’d done real damage to the rental car, so I finally turned off onto one relatively unrutted lane and headed for the cabin at the end. It sat in a clearing, the forest behind it, an old cabin, but with new windows that glinted in the sun. Scattered about in the long grass were neat piles of wood— felled tree trunk and thick branches, still barked.

I stopped the car a hundred yards from the house and sat there for a minute, hearing the birds call in the woods. I’d just ask for directions, I told myself. I’d press the horn and wait for someone to come out.

No. That was rude. People in the mountains took exception to such things. I’d go up to the door and knock and then back off a few feet, ready to run if I had to.

I took a deep breath, got out of the car, and walked towards the quiet cabin.

But I’d gotten only halfway when I heard something behind me— a growl. I turned and saw something silvery-gray, with eyes that glowed yellow. A wolf, only I thought it must have been bred with a big dog, because it had patches of dark on its coat and ears that flopped. And it wasn’t scared of humans, the way a wolf should be.

It growled again, deep in its throat. If I ran—

Then I heard a man say, “Stay still.” He was right behind me, then right up against me, and I could feel his breath on my neck, his calloused hands on my arms, as he pressed up against my back. It was the closest I’d ever been to a man. Ever. I didn’t know that was the way men felt— hard and big and threatening and protective. I didn’t want to know it either. I started to pull away, but then the wolf-dog’s growl started low again, and the man tightened his grip around me. “Just wait.”

He shoved me in the direction of my car and we walked in a way that must have looked, and certainly felt, peculiar— pressed together like a pair of sack-racers at the county fair. When we got to the car, he pulled open the door and pushed me inside.

He slammed the door and walked purposefully away, back to the cabin on the edge of the woods. I could see him better now. He was a big man, like one of those bodybuilders on TV, with a dark stubble of beard and unruly hair, and biceps bulging out under the sleeves of his faded blue t-shirt. I sat there in the car with the window rolled up, sweating and scared, staring at the wolf-dog a dozen yards away. He was staring back at me. Neither of us gave in and left.

A minute later the man emerged with a shotgun. Before I had time to cry out he discharged it, not at the wolf but in front, scattering shot and dirt. The wolf hesitated for just a moment, looking at me, then ran back into the woods.

Setting the gun against a tree, the man came back and opened my car door.

I couldn’t breathe. I remembered, back in nursing school, some psychology study on the effects of adrenaline on the emotions—people coming off a roller coaster at a theme park were asked for directions by “an attractive member of the opposite sex”, as the researcher put it coyly. A high proportion of the roller coaster riders, it was reported, felt heightened attraction and sexual interest, due to the adrenaline rush of the dangerous ride.

Adrenaline. That would account for the trembling in my limbs, the inability to breathe, the sudden wonderment— this is what Ellen and Laura meant. This was . . . desire.

Danger. Adrenaline. A man. That was all it was, a combustible combination of chemical factors. And I looked in his dark eyes and knew he felt it too, and for the first time in my life I knew that real unity was possible, right there in the tangled grass next to my car.

But even as his hand closed on my wrist and pulled me from my car seat, I remembered it all—my past and my plan and myself. This wasn’t what I was seeking, this hot bright claim. And just as his mouth closed on mine, I got my hands up between us and shoved at his broad chest.

I had just a second’s taste of him—it was so alien, so sweet and dangerous, that taste.

With a rough laugh, he released me. His hands dropped from my arms, his body pulled away. My blouse felt damp there, where we’d been joined, but I didn’t know if it was his sweat or mine.

“It’s not safe here for you,” he said. His voice was rough too, but it was a town voice— educated, at least a bit, not the sullen half-words of the mountain folk. “You better get on back to town.” He walked away, back towards his cabin.

“Wait!”

He turned, and I saw the light in his eye, his arrogant stance. He thought— he thought I was going to let him. Let him take me, there on the unmown grass. I had to speak quickly, before — before I felt that again, or felt it enough.

“I’m looking for a house. It’s supposed to be off the dirt road, but I haven’t seen the name on any mailbox.”

“Who you looking for?”

“The Prices.”

And then the heat in his eyes gave way to wariness. “What do you want with them?”

“Someone down in Rankin told me they live up here. I—I used to know them.”

He studied me now. After a moment, he shook his head. “Don’t know you.”

“I know.” I was impatient now, angry at him, angry at myself, for that moment when we might have—“I said, I’m looking for the Prices.”

“I’m the only one around here. And I don’t know you. Now goddamnit, get back to town. I got to get hold of that wolf and take him back up the mountain a ways.”

I felt behind me for the car. The metal under my hand was hot from the sun, but I leaned back anyway. He was the only one around here . . . “What is your name?”

He gave me an annoyed glance as he picked up his gun. “Price. Mitch Price.”

And then he walked away, back to his cabin, without a glance back at me.

It took me a minute to get going, and by that time he’d disappeared indoors. But slowly I crossed the yard to the front porch. To the left of the house was a lean-to, and even from here I could recognize the carved wooden statues underneath, a half-dozen of them covered in clear plastic, all of them variations of the Blessed Virgin.

Surely there were no Catholics back here. Snake-handlers, yes. Maybe the Mitch I remembered, the one who quit going to church right after his confirmation, had found his faith again.

I knocked on the door and waited, and eventually he opened it and stood there, his face closed and grim. He didn’t want to let me in, but he could hardly send me away. Mountain hospitality was a complicated matter, but he’d introduced himself, and so I was due a minute or two.

So with ill grace, he stepped back from the door and let me pass into the clean-swept, almost barren front room. “What do you want?”

It was hard, after—after what happened, to say the words. “My name is Theresa Wakefield.”