The year She Fell (8 page)

Jackson
something—I’d forgotten his surname, but I remembered him. When I worked summers in the library, he used to come in, a most unlikely patron of literature.
 
He’d looked like a hood with his tangle of dark blonde hair and torn t-shirt, but he was unfailingly polite whenever he asked to see the motorcycle magazines we kept behind the circulation desk. Once he asked me to direct him to a book on criminal law, and from the tense, conscientious way he took notes, I gathered it wasn’t because he was planning to go to law school.

Naturally, this was the boy my little sister Laura chose for her secret rebellious high school passion. I only knew because she called me at college and swore me to secrecy—“I have to tell
someone
,” she whispered. “And he’s nothing like you’d think—he’s a really evolved person inside.”

And now I guessed, looking at him in the crisp blue uniform there in Odom’s Market, that maybe Laura had seen some otherwise unrecognized potential in him, because apparently, sometime after his entire family was escorted to the state line, he’d evolved right over to the right side of the law.

He looked . . . very masculine.

Maybe it was the uniform. Maybe it was the aura of simultaneous safety and danger that seemed to surround cops, even in small towns like
Wakefield
. Maybe it was the gun on his hip, though I was, of course, a pacifist who didn’t believe in violence. I don’t know. But rather suddenly I realized how attractive he was—not with that abstract appreciation of male appeal that was all I used to allow myself, but with . . . well, real appreciation. His hair was shorter and darker now, but still a little tangled, and the smile he gave me wasn’t so shy, and he called me Ellen, not ma’am—he looked all too good to me.

I reminded myself that he was younger—four years younger, just like Laura. Not that at our age that was much of a difference. But he was Laura’s old boyfriend, which put him off-limits for life. And, oh, yeah, I was married.

So I didn’t proposition him right there in the meat department.

All I did was pick up the chicken breasts that were right next to the steak he was getting, so that our hands were in close proximity if not quite touching. There was no ring on his hand . . . and there was one on mine. It was truly sad, I thought, how little it took to make me feel illicit.

To divert myself from my own weakness, I said, “Oh, did you know Laura is coming back to town? She’s driving down from
New York
. She should be here tomorrow.”

His hand stilled, just for a moment, then he set the steak package down in his cart. “I thought she lived out west. In LA.”

“She summers on
Long Island
. Anyway, she’s coming for a visit.” Well, that was close enough to the truth. I wasn’t going to tell him that she was coming to help me assess whether our mother was going batty.

As if he could read my mind, he said, “Your mother doing well?”

It was casual enough, the sort of thing an ambitious young police chief might say about the town matriarch, whose favor was politically important. But he’d spoken it as a question, and as I assured him Mother was just fine, thank you, I felt my anxiety index rise. Surely Mother hadn’t called him and tried to report that Merilee had committed a theft. “Have you, uh, spoken to my mother recently?”

He started to answer, but just then the butcher in his blood-stained apron looked up from his cutting and said, “Hey, Chief! Hear you’re going to be a TV star.”

Jackson
turned to grin at him. “Yep, me and Katie Couric. Or the local equivalent.” He glanced over at me. “Not very impressive, comparatively. Your husband is on CNN, isn’t he?”

I didn’t want to talk about Tom, so I answered shortly, “Special correspondent. But he’s mostly teaching now. So what show are you going to be on? And when?”

“Tomorrow. The evening news on Channel 8. All about the
new city
lockup, and how to protect your kids against predators, you know, that sort of thing. Not CNN, so don’t expect too much.”

“I’ll watch for it,” I promised. And maybe Laura would be watching with me. Of course, maybe she wouldn’t want him now that he was on this side of the law.

Laura arrived as scheduled
the next afternoon—with a heavy duffel trunk, but without a car. “Lady Porsche,” she said, unpacking the trunk in her old room, the long narrow space off the back staircase, “couldn’t take the mountain air. She gave out up on the Gorge. You know where I mean—where Daddy used to paint.” She pulled out a crop top of the sort my teenage daughter might wear, regarded it regretfully, and laid it back in the suitcase. Not in the
Wakefield
wardrobe, I agreed.

We settled almost without volition into our usual camaraderie. Laura and I shared little but our looks and a common set of parents and the dubious honor of growing up Wakefields of Wakefield, but we’d always been friends as well as sisters. It was sometimes a bit dim, growing up in the shadow cast by our charismatic older sister, but there was safety there too, and a special access to the parent we both preferred (me secretly, Laura openly) in those years before his death Cathy got most of Mother’s attention, and they often went off to riding competitions, a mother-and-daughter team of equestriennes. So for weeks, and once an entire summer, we were left with Daddy, the most gentle of guardians.

Now it was a relief, after the tense and artificial encounters with my mother and Theresa, just to be with Laura, who understood when I was joking and knew how to tease me into laughing too.

And we wore more or less the same size. When I confessed I had nothing to wear to dinner with the college president, Laura insisted I borrow one of her Versace sundresses. I felt like Nicole Kidman as soon as it slipped over my head. I was calculating aloud how much of my monthly salary this would cost—all of it—as we descended the old staircase to the front hall, and I caught sight of Theresa, sitting on the deacon bench with her hands knotted in her lap. The glance she gave us was so closed, so unrevealing, that I knew she must be contrasting my ease with Laura with my distance from her.

But it was only natural that I’d feel more comfortable with Laura. We were closer in age, after all—only four years apart. Theresa was ten years younger—practically a generation, or at least it felt that way. I’d left for college soon after she was adopted, and except for the occasional Christmas visit, we had little contact when she was growing up.

Even as adults Laura and I had spent much more time together, especially these last five years, when Theresa was sequestered away, first in distant Romania, and then in the cloister. And I owed Laura. She’d been a true support for me those long months Tom was hostage in Tehran, organizing petition drives, staying with Sarah when I flew to the Middle East to try and negotiate his release, recruiting her famous friends to lobby for him, even sending Tom newly released videos through the Red Cross—one of them, in fact, was instrumental in his escape.

So of course I was closer to Laura, for all sorts of good reasons.

It wasn’t because Laura and I were blood sisters, and Theresa only adopted.

But the whole time we were at dinner with President Urich, I felt it—that distance between us. I couldn’t call it estrangement, because Theresa and I were never close enough to become estranged. I tried to make an effort to include her in the conversation, to ask about her life. But it was no use. We had little to talk about and hardly any history together to draw on. It wasn’t either of our faults, just an inescapable family fact.

At least she has Mother, I thought as we arrived home and the two of them headed up to bed. And at least Mother has her.

The next morning, my
cell phone beeped before I’d even opened my eyes. I scrambled out of bed and grabbed the phone. “Sarah?”

“How’d you know it was me?” my daughter said. “I’m using
Taylor
’s phone.”

“Because I didn’t tell anyone else to call the cell phone.” I was just glad it wasn’t Tom— then I started wondering if she’d talked to Tom. Not that he would confide in her about our marital trouble, but . . . but eventually one or the other of us would have to tell her—about the past, about her half-brother. Her half-brother. That would be difficult.

To mask my nervousness, I infused a bit of maternal cheer into my voice. “What’s up, honey?”

Sarah just wanted reassurance. She’d been at camp two weeks, and she hadn’t quite settled into her new job as counselor. “I’m not used to, you know, being the boss instead of one of the campers.” She heaved a big sigh. “It’s such a responsibility. I have to make sure they get everywhere on time, and they don’t drown, and they don’t sneak over to the boys’ camp like we always used to . . . ” She stopped suddenly. “I mean, like we did that one time. Last year.”

I decided to let that ancient a transgression go unpunished, especially since she was obviously now learning why it was a transgression. I was just grateful she was the typical teenaged narcissist, obsessed with her own situation and incurious about why she could only call me on the cell phone and what Dad might be doing. Pretty soon she was reminiscing about her room at home, the one she didn’t have to share with another counselor, and her CD collection and the great donuts we always brought home after church on Sundays . . . I heard the threat of tears in her voice. For a child who had experienced three continents and four languages before she was ten, Sarah didn’t do change well. It made me dread the surprise coming up in her life.

But that could wait. “Sounds like you need a care package, honey. I’ll put one together today. And I’ll email you some jokes, okay?”

More cheerful now, she rang off, and I rose and, eschewing breakfast, walked into town to keep my daughter supplied with the necessities. It had rained the night before, and the hill was slick, but by the time I got downtown the sun was shining and the puddles were evaporating.

Main Street
looked clean and new, or as new as a downtown without a single chain store or neon sign could look. This was a real town, not one of those quaint little villages like the ones that had grown up around the university town where I now lived. The motley storefronts showed the town’s growth over two centuries. As I walked south down Main Street, I passed the tall brick Federal-style building that used to house the coal company headquarters, then a much shorter shingled hardware store with windows that hadn’t been washed since they first started stocking weed whackers. City Hall took up most of a block on the courthouse square, with the police headquarters just across the street. Three men in overall were taking the scaffolding down from an addition—it must be the
new city
lockup that
Jackson
mentioned.

On the corner, haughty like a grand matron, was the granite Greek Revival bank my father had managed until he died. I stopped and squinted through the big bowed window, seeing in the dim within the tellers and their new computers behind the old iron grates. I always wondered if it was that was what killed Daddy, if the tedium and stress of managing a whole town’s money ate away at his heart. He died so young and so suddenly, sitting at his desk with his hand turning the page of a posted transaction report.

We were lucky, his daughters. We all ended up doing what we wanted, not what was expected of us. Not one of us got an MBA and came back here to run the bank. We just cashed our dividend checks—the extended family still owned 30% of the bank stock—and went our own way. Perhaps Mother allowed that, against her own inclinations, because of what happened to Daddy—that wildlife artist trapped behind a banker’s desk.

At the world’s last surviving five-and-dime I stocked up on penny candy (well, nickel candy), a 64-count crayon box, and an
Incredibles
coloring book. I crossed the street to the bookstore and got her a couple of the tamer romance novels and the latest Buffy novelization, and even sprang fifteen dollars for a
Matchbox 20
CD. All of this I crammed into a priority mail box at the post office, except for a box of peanut brittle, which I planned to eat in memory of those summer camp packages Merilee used to send me.