The year She Fell (52 page)

And Laura didn’t help. She didn’t say anything more at all about Cathy. She just put the pitcher of tea into the refrigerator and glanced around the kitchen. “Clean enough to pass Mother’s inspection when she gets home. I’m going to hit the parlor next.”

I didn’t offer to help. It only reminded me that Mother would be home soon, and that only she could answer the questions I’d suppressed for so long.

Finally I took my bag up to my room and got unpacked, and stood there by the window, looking down at the boy sitting on the steps. The truth was, I didn’t want to face Brian, knowing now that he had used me. It shamed me that I had trusted him so readily. I had never been the trusting sort, but he seemed so . . . plausible. Of course he did. He had researched the family. He knew I was adopted. And he knew how to reach me—asking my help, and then offering his own. And all along, he was planning.

Finally I forced myself to walk out onto the porch. Brian was still sitting there, his hands on his knees. He looked up, and then quickly down again. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

I was still too much the nun to sit down on the steps beside him, or to forgive him too quickly. Instead I crossed the driveway to the bench by the rose bushes and sat down there, breathing in the scent. “You lied to everyone.”

“Just you,” he said. “I told everyone else the truth.” After a second, he added, “Except about the gun, I guess.”

“The gun?” I echoed.

“I don’t have it anymore. The police chief took it.”

I sighed. “You’re lucky this is a small town. You’d be in jail otherwise. What were you thinking?”

He reached down to pull up a blade of grass that was growing up between the stone steps. “I guess I was thinking that I needed to know. That knowing is better than not knowing. And—” He glanced behind him to make sure the front door was closed. “And he wouldn’t tell me the truth. He’s supposed to be a journalist. They’re supposed to get the truth out there.”

“No matter who it hurts?”

He split the blade of grass lengthwise, then again. “Isn’t it better to know and be hurt than not know and be hurt?”

“I don’t know—” I didn’t know. Was I better off knowing that my family had fragmented, broken, died? Was I better off knowing that Mitch lived silent and alone and bitter? Was I better off knowing that I still didn’t know how I came to be, and how I came to the Wakefields? “But I do know that violence is wrong.”

It sounded patronizing even to my own ears. But it had an effect. Brian ducked his head again and dropped the grass blade onto the step.

“Yeah. I screwed it up. I know it. I knew it when I was doing it. But I did it anyway.” He glanced over at me, and then away. “At least now I know the truth.”

“At least now you know the truth,” I echoed. Then I added, “But you don’t know much else. You don’t know why. Why Cathy did this. Why Tom wouldn’t tell. Why she gave you up.”

“Yeah. Just the facts. They’re not enough, are they?”

“I’ve always known who my birthparents were,” I said. “But it turns out to be so much more complicated than that.”

“I guess.” He glanced quickly at me, then away. “I figured that when I saw your original birth certificate, how long it took to register the birth. I thought, well, maybe they’d tried to give you away then, but not gone through with it.”

Mitch hadn’t said anything like that, but maybe he wouldn’t remember. Maybe they wouldn’t have told him. Or maybe— maybe he was right, and there’d been another mother, another birth certificate, that his parents hadn’t made me either.

Brian was regarding me sympathetically now. “It’s hard, huh? I thought—I guess I thought finding out the answer was what I wanted.” He looked bleakly down at the town. Everyone was driving home from work now, and
Main Street
had what passed for a traffic jam in
Wakefield
. “But I wanted more than that really. I wanted . . . I don’t know. Birthparents who welcomed me.”

“And you found that your birthmother was dead.”

“Yeah.” He raised his head, and I saw in his eyes a hurt that I understood. “When did she die?”

I had to count back, through all the intervening years. “Sixteen years ago? No. Seventeen.”

“I was just a baby.”

“Yes.”

“How?” he whispered, and I remembered asking these questions of Mitch just yesterday. When. How. Why didn’t I know.

“It was a climbing accident. Cathy was a mountain-climber. She was rappelling one afternoon off a rock face just east of here, and her harness malfunctioned. Or she had it buckled wrong. She liked to rappel the rocks around here. And jump off bridges.”

He frowned, puzzling over this. “She sounds crazy.”

I almost smiled. “Well, she was, a little. She liked to take risks.” With men too, apparently. I didn’t understand it.

“What about him?”

“Tom?” I thought of my brother-in-law. I hardly knew him, even after so many years. “I guess he liked to take risks too. He’s always going off to war zones.”

“Yeah. I know. I read about him on the web.” He stopped, as if he suddenly remembered he’d used me, too, to get information about Tom. “He probably hates me now.”

“You should have thought of that before.”

“I should apologize, huh?” He scuffed his ugly army boot against the bottom step. “Not that it’ll matter. It won’t get me anywhere.”

I said grimly, “You don’t apologize because it’ll get you somewhere. You apologize because you’re sorry for what you did.”

“I totally screwed it up, didn’t I?” And then he rubbed his face with a fist, and I realized he was crying.

I sighed. We were supposed to be peacemakers, those of us who had dedicated our lives to the Church. We were supposed to help heal rifts. But I’d always been better at healing bodies. Finally I stood up. At least he was taking my mind off those graves back in Paulsen. “Look. Go get some sleep. Tomorrow morning, I’ll take you to see Tom.”

The next morning, Brian
apologized, and Tom accepted it, or at least didn’t reject it. He was cool and annoyed, but controlled. It could have been worse. Ellen, at least, went out of her way to be nice to Brian, taking him home from the motel in her car and getting out the photo albums and spreading them over the coffee table. She was very polite but distracted as she turned the pages and pointed out yet another photo of Cathy on horseback, Cathy in climbing gear, Cathy graduating from Loudon.

Brian looked up at me just once, his face stricken. Quietly I bent and from the table took the envelope containing Cathy’s medical records. Out in the hall, I went over the charts one more time, puzzling.

It was easier to translate the medical jargon than to remember how complicated my life had become.

 
I wasn’t used to this, not since I’d left all the anguish of the clinic in
Romania
. I wanted to retreat to the quiet sanctuary of the cloister— but Mother Prioress would just tell me I was escaping, and she would be right.

I heard the front door open, and, glad to get away from the tension, I dropped the file on the chair beside me and rose. Mother was at the front door, halfway into the house, staring at her overnight bag. “Mother?” I said, and slowly she looked up at me.

“I forgot my laptop,” she said in a wondering tone. “I can’t believe it.”

“It’s all right, Mother.” I almost told her it wasn’t the worst thing that was going to happen today. But I couldn’t bring myself to reach out to her. She’d withheld so much knowledge from me, and now it turned out that she’d kept Brian’s letter from Ellen. So many secrets . . . and some of them were mine.

Ellen heard us and came out into the hall. In a tight voice, she said, “Mother, perhaps you can join us. There’s someone we’d like you to meet.” She took Mother firmly by the arm and drew her into the parlor.

I stood by the door, longing for escape, feeling sorry for Brian. Whatever he had done, he didn’t deserve to be trapped in there with my mother when she was feeling defensive. His . . . grandmother.

Ellen was at the desk, rummaging through the lower drawer. I could see the bitterness on her face as she pulled out a folder. “I found this. It’s got Brian’s letter to me in it. Opened. You knew about him. And you didn’t tell me.”

Mother wasn’t ready for this. She had the expression of someone who had just awakened— blank and startled. My sympathy was stirred, and I had to grip the doorframe to keep from going to her.

Ellen, usually so calm, was shaking as she tried to hand the folder to Mother. “Tell me why you thought I shouldn’t know.”

Mother took the folder but didn’t open it. She held it to her chest and murmured, “I was just trying to protect you.”

“It didn’t work.” Ellen gestured to Brian, who was sitting abashed on the window seat. “He felt ignored. And so he decided to go to extremes. He abducted Tom. Do you understand? Mother?”

Mother slowly turned her gaze on Brian. He looked down, and I couldn’t see much trace of the confident boy who instructed me in the investigation of adoption. I wondered how long he had been without a good night’s sleep.

Laura slipped past me into the parlor, hardly sparing me a glance. This was her moment, I knew. She’d always hated our mother, always distrusted her, and now she finally had reason. And so she joined with Ellen, the two of them talking in low, angry voices, accusing Mother of lies and deception and secrets. Always secrets, more secrets.

Brian was sitting there, his back stiff against the window. Tears were running down his face. Through the glass, I saw Tom getting out of his black Jeep. He took one glance over at the window, and then away from Brian.

I felt disconnected and disoriented. Brian had lied to me, of course, but I should be his friend—he needed one now. He came here expecting to find a family. Maybe that was foolish, but I understood. And what he found was anger and dismissal. And the one he’d come for, his mother, had been dead most of his life.

I should reach out to him. But Mother was talking, justifying herself. She would have contacted Brian eventually, told him the truth. She just had to get a few things straight before then.

Ellen left then. She must have seen Tom’s car. Automatically I stood aside to let her by. Mother turned too, as if she was going to follow. But I didn’t let her even start across the room towards me. “Mother. Wait. I want to know too. Why am I here? Why did you adopt me?”

She looked at me finally, her brow furrowed. “You know why, dear. I’ve told you. Your father was ill. Your mother needed help.”

“But she’s not my mother,” I said, and the truth of this shivered through me. “She didn’t give birth to me. I know that now. So she gave me up. Now tell me why. Why did you take me?”

Mother reached out a hand to me, but I didn’t take it. “Come, dear, this isn’t the time to worry about something so deep in the past.”

 
“You can stop lying, Mother,” Laura broke in. “I know why you hid that letter from Brian. And I know why you waited until Daddy died to adopt Theresa.”

I hardly had time to realize what Laura was saying—that she knew where I came from, why I was here. She’d never said anything to me, but now—

 
Mother was shaking her head in that placating way. “Laura, you’re just trying to stir things up. Theresa is with us because we love her.”

“It’s because you’re hers, Theresa.” Laura was looking directly at me now. “She went away one spring and had you. She couldn’t keep you because Daddy would know she’d been cheating on him. But once he died, she took you back. She gave you up and then she took you back.”