The year She Fell (9 page)

It was so much easier fulfilling my maternal duty when my daughter was in another state.

I was just emerging from the post office when I saw Tom’s jeep pass by. He saw me too, and did a quick U-turn. I found myself wishing that Chief Jackson what’s-his-name had seen it, but no patrolman emerged from the police station to issue a citation. Once again, Tom had gotten away with it.

He even got a parking place right in front of me.

I waited, indecisive, as he got out of the car. I didn’t like to cause a scene, not here on
Main Street
, not in my hometown where a public fight would have everyone gossiping that not even one of the
Wakefield
daughters could hold onto a man.

He stood there by the parking meter, casual and composed, his dark curly hair lit in flickers by the morning sun. If he’d looked at all anxious, at all contrite, I might have stopped. But he looked so easy, so calm, as if he were arriving for a perfectly normal visit with my family, only a couple days late because he’d had to finish some work.

I started towards home. He kept pace, so as far as anyone knew, we were just another placid couple out for a morning stroll. He even reached over to take the plastic shopping bag, but I switched it to my left hand, away from him. “How did you find out I was here?”

“Called your office. Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything. Jill just said you weren’t to worry about the wedding, that Chuck was handling it.”

He made it sound like just another normal marital exchange of phone messages—Lisa called; the faculty committee meeting has been postponed; did you get a parking ticket in DC last year, because some collection agency says we now owe $1200. I wasn’t going to let him get away with it. “Did you talk to Brian? Your
son
?”

He must have been ready for that, because he didn’t flinch. “He said he’d get in touch if he wanted to. He didn’t.”

“I can’t believe you aren’t more curious about this. About him. About who he is and where he’s been and if he’s been raised okay.”

He didn’t respond. He just kept walking with me, easy and calm. I knew he couldn’t be truly calm, but a passerby would never have imagined that we were confronting an issue that could destroy the marriage. Goaded, I said, “But then, apparently it’s much more important for you to protect yourself and the boy’s mother.”

The sidewalk sloped here to go under the railroad trestle, and my last words came resonant and echoing against the metal roof. This, at least, got a reaction from Tom. “It’s not a matter of protection.”

“So why not tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

This was going nowhere. I guess he thought if he said it frequently enough, and blandly enough, I’d just believe him. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to.

The big old Carnegie library stood on the corner ahead. A refuge. Before he could react, I quickened my pace and turned up the steps and into the limestone building. I paused there in the foyer, letting the glass door swing closed behind me, breathing in the cool musty air. I felt more at home here than in my mother’s house—I’d worked so many years here, shelving books and stamping cards under the sternly benevolent eye of Mrs. Lofgren. She was long dead, but her presence lingered like the smell of book dust.

Tom didn’t respect my sanctuary. He opened the door and came in, stopping beside me. In a low voice, he said, “Come on home, Ellen. This isn’t about us.”

Years of shushing patrons kept me from shouting at him. Instead, I said quietly, “If you really believed that, you’d tell me the truth. And if you don’t, you might as well go home, because I’m not going to stop asking.”

He said, “I’m not going home without you.” When I didn’t respond to the caveman routine, he added, “Look, I’ll check into that motel out on the bypass. Call me.”

I didn’t answer. I just walked away from him, past the circulation desk, into the stacks of encyclopedias, my sneakers making no sound on the marble floor. I didn’t look back, but eventually I heard the door open and then close again, and knew he was gone.

I meant to do it—meant to research that long-ago summer, meant to seek out the truth about Tom and the boy’s mother. Back home that afternoon, I even got out the journals again and read them over for clues. But my heart wasn’t in the task. I didn’t want to know.

Or rather, I didn’t want to have to find out for myself. I wanted Tom to tell me. It would mean—it would mean I mattered more than anything else, that what I wanted was more important to him than whatever he was concealing.

But his refusal meant the opposite.

I sat in my childhood room, on the window seat over the garden, my fingers resting on the journal, and thought, just like the girl I’d been when I still lived here,
I’ve never been anyone’s favorite.
It was silly, childish, but true in some primal sense. I’d grown up in middle-child purgatory. Dainty clever Laura was Daddy’s little girl, and proud fierce Cathy was Mother’s. Even after Cathy left home, I didn’t move into the coveted maternally favored slot—Theresa, the new daughter, did.

And now I realized I probably wasn’t even my husband’s favorite. In my sudden self-pity, I could just imagine nursing him in his final hours, and bending close to hear his last whisper . . . another woman’s name.

It was pathetic. I was a grown woman. I’d long since gotten over my childhood sense of invisibility. I knew that I mattered, that I’d made a difference in at least a few lives. But . . .

But from all my years of teaching and now of pastoral counseling, I’d learned that you never quite stop being a child. Adult relationships were always only one precarious step removed from replicating some childhood dynamic. I remember mothers coming to parent-teacher conferences and whispering, “She won’t let me have boyfriends. She’s run off three men already,” just as if their first-grader were their own puritanical mother. And I’d counseled husbands and wives who competed as fiercely as siblings, always sure the other was getting more attention or happiness or good fortune.

And here I was, falling into the same trap, thinking of Tom as the love-withholder, and me as the helpless child.

But I wasn’t helpless. I wasn’t. I deserved to be first in someone’s life. I didn’t deserve a man who kept hidden and cherished what must have been a secret passion for someone else. I could . . . leave him to it; leave him to his memories and illusions. I could just . . . leave.

I let myself feel that for just a minute, pushing back all the objections my practical mind raised—my daughter, my job, my house, my life. I could let go of the struggle to find meaning in this marriage, and accept the reality that it was built on a lie. I could—

But it wasn’t just this secret of his that made me consider the clarity and control of aloneness. It was that old longing to escape the curse of a long marriage—the grievances and obligations and patterns that build up, the half-truths and misunderstandings that take root, the tangle life becomes.

I’d cared too much for too long, and even when it was right, even when he seemed the only one in the world who knew me truly, I felt a sense of lostness. I’d lost myself in him too long ago to remember, and every now and again, I tried to seize me back.

This time, maybe I would succeed.

It was ten minutes after six
before I remembered that
Jackson
was going to be on the evening news. I can’t imagine why I cared, why I grabbed Laura by the arm as she passed through towards the kitchen and insisted she come sit with me and watch. It wasn’t as if love had much merit for me these days, or matchmaking held much charm. I was probably just trying to distract myself from my own problems—or maybe distance myself from that illicit thrill I felt when I saw the man who had been the boy in the library so long ago.

Laura, protesting, only perched on the edge of the chair. “This better be good,” she said. “I’ve got a pizza in the oven.”

We had to sit through a few minutes of weather before the local anchorwoman introduced the segment. I glanced over at my sister as
Jackson
came on the screen. She didn’t react in an obvious way, but she did quit squirming and glancing towards the kitchen as the interviewer asked him brightly about the next day’s dedication of the new high-tech prisoner lockup at police headquarters. Focus then shifted to the heralded topic: how parents could protect their children from the dangers of modern society.

I wondered if Laura saw the flicker of irony in his eyes as he mentioned the various crimes teenagers could get up to—shoplifting and joyriding and gang fights. I didn’t know which one of those sent him to reform school back before he reformed, but I bet Laura did. For all I knew, she’d been with him at the scene of the crime.

The interviewer seemed most interested, however, in a hazard that didn’t exist when young Jackson McCain was corrupting my sister and tearing up the streets of
Wakefield
. “What about sexual predators on the Internet?”

Jackson
shrugged, as if this wasn’t really top on his list of hazards. “They’re there, but they’re actually easier to avoid than the ones kids encounter in real life. There are a couple of precautions you might take. First, you have to make clear to your kids is they should never agree to meet anyone they meet on the Net, even if that person says he’s only thirteen. A lot of pedophiles pose as teenagers online, and there’s no way to tell how old they really are. So use parental control software and check the cache file every couple days to find out where your child has been. I make my daughter leave her door open when she’s on the Web, and her monitor can be seen from the hallway. So I can just walk by and check on her.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, absurdly disappointed, “that he was married.”

Laura gave me a sharp look, as if she could see right through me. “He’s divorced.”

I was about to ask how she knew, when Mother said from behind us, “The oven alarm is ringing, Laura.”

She was standing with Theresa in the archway, her gaze not on us but on the television—and Jackson McCain. Laura and I exchanged quick glances. I had gotten the impression that all those years ago, Mother had made like a Capulet and broken up that teenaged romance, but now she seemed not to recognize him. Another sign, I thought.

Laura rose and went to the kitchen to take care of the pizza. I started to say something about
Jackson
as his image faded from the screen, something that might elicit a response, but Mother spoke first. “That Internet. Everyone’s talking about it these days. President Urich says that the college is doing—well, whatever one does with the Internet. It’s very puzzling.” She turned to me. “Do you visit there, dear?”

Visit there. It sounded like a museum. “Well, I have email and Web access.”

“On that little computer of yours? The one you brought from home?” She was looking across the study at my laptop. “Can you show me?”

I wasn’t sure whether this sudden interest in high-tech was a sign of a failing mind, or a still-agile one. But my mother seldom asked for help, and, truth to tell, I rather prided myself on my computer skills. So after a quick dinner of pizza, peanut brittle, and broccoli, I sat Mother down at Daddy’s big old oak desk and gave her a lesson in surfing.

She wasn’t impressed with email—“I’d rather send an actual letter on my own stationery—” and most of the websites I showed her didn’t capture her interest. But she did ask to see a chat room. I did a quick search for one that focused on West Virginia history—there are chat rooms for everything, even something that obscure—and typed a query about our first governor. In about the time it took me to download my email, the erudite response scrolled down the page, complete with a citation from the only biography.

Mother politely shoved me out of the chair. “Let me try.”

I found it childishly gratifying to learn that my generally accomplished mother typed with two stiff fingers and had to be reminded to use the shift key. But she managed to compose a short note of thanks to the helpful historian who billed him/herself as WVUtrue. “How shall I sign it?” she asked, looking up at me. “My own name?”