The year She Fell (14 page)

I set the laptop on the coffee-table and used the couch to lever myself to a standing position. “He hasn’t moved out. I’m just—needing some time without him, and I guess that made him nervous.”

“Time without him? I would have thought you’d had enough of that years ago, when he was in
Tehran
.” When I didn’t answer, she added, “Well, maybe making him nervous is a good thing, huh?”

“No. When Tom is nervous, he grips tighter. I don’t need that now.” I forestalled more questions by heading to the door. “Mother gave me the papers on our trusts, and I’m going to look through them to make sure she hasn’t made more drastic changes.”

“Okay. Hey, maybe we should go out to dinner. Try that steakhouse over on the bypass.”

Somehow I doubted that white-meat-only Laura had a serious hankering for a porterhouse. She must have remembered that the steakhouse was the closest restaurant to the Super-8. “No, thanks. I’ll go out later and get some groceries.”

Laura kept her gaze on me as I shut the laptop’s lid and unplugged the power cord. “Ellen, really. I’m here, if you want to talk.”

I softened just a bit. “I know. But there’s nothing to talk about now.”

I walked upstairs to my room, wondering why I had echoed Tom’s defensive words. I guessed I was still trying to protect him—or at least Laura’s rosy view of our life together.

The trust documents were so dull I found myself nodding off somewhere between the boilerplate and the legalese. I leaned back against my pillows, hand still clutching the trust forms, and closed my eyes. Did I really want this old house, or did I just want to be the sort of person who could treasure all it represented? I’d spent the first half of my life here, in this very room, and the second half roaming the world. Neither felt right to me.

With a sigh, I returned to that other issue. I went to the little desk and fired up the laptop. Once I got to a map site, I typed in the name of the county in
Pennsylvania
where Brian’s birth was recorded. It was halfway between the state line and
Pittsburgh
. The name of the hospital escaped me, but there were only three in the county. I bookmarked their sites, and sat there unsure of my next step. Would there still be records of the birth? I could call—it was so dispiriting. Here I was, making like Nancy Drew, when the details didn’t actually matter, did they? No matter what, the essential truth was that Tom had deceived me, to protect himself and the woman who had put my name down on that birth certificate.

I copied the hospitals’ phone numbers and pasted them into my address program. But I was just going through the motions.

The clump of footsteps outside my door interrupted me. Not Laura— she moved too gracefully in those little Kate Spade sandals. Not Mother, who had a deliberate, stately tread. Theresa, by process of elimination. I listened as the steps faded, and fell back into my drowse.

More footsteps, from above, roused me. I sat up, the pages falling from my hand. Theresa was up in the attic.

All I could think of was that box of journals shoved into the corner . . .
 
and no doubt my footprints in the dust leading right to it.

I didn’t bother to put my shoes back on. I just headed up the steep attic stairs, the old oaken treads cool and smooth under my bare feet.

To warn her, I made more noise than necessary clambering up the last couple steps. She whirled around, clutching something to her chest. It was a child’s dress, or rather jumper—navy blue and severely cut.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said heartily. “I’m glad. I heard movement up here, and thought it might be rats.”

“Just me.” She turned back to the trunk, and stood there staring down into it. Finally she shook out the little dress. Without looking at me, she said, “Do you know what this is?”

“Your—your school uniform.”

“From first grade. St. Edward’s.” She touched the school patch on the bodice.

I stared at the navy blue uniform and memory flooded back—a little girl in the front hall downstairs, holding Mother’s hand. “You wore that the first day—when you came here to live.”

She looked up, but she wasn’t seeing me. “I’d forgotten that. You’re right. I had to wear it. It was the only dress I had. My other clothes were mostly jeans and t-shirts, hand-me-downs from Ronnie.”

“Ronnie?” I echoed.

“My—my brother.”

For a moment, I thought she might be crying. But no. I don’t think I’d ever seen Theresa cry, even at Cathy’s funeral. Suddenly I understood why that might be, why she might have stopped crying long ago.

I must have been so oblivious back then. I didn’t even know she had a brother in her birth family. I did remember her adoption, and Mrs. Price, her birthmother, but I was getting ready to go off to college that year, and regarded Theresa mostly as something to distract my mother from her grief over Daddy’s death—and from nagging at me to apply to Loudon College instead of “those Virginia schools.”
 
If I thought about it at all, I probably thought Mother was being very kind to take over the care of that sullen little girl when her family fell apart.

Unwillingly I thought of that other adoption—Brian. Tom’s son. That boy felt an emptiness, a loss, and he had never even known Tom and his birthmother, whoever she was. How much greater a loss it must have been for Theresa, taken from parents and a sibling she loved. I know there was a reason for the adoption—her father was dying, or so Mother had told us, and Mrs. Price couldn’t handle that and Theresa too. But still—

I climbed up the last step, and crossed the dusty floor. Theresa regarded me warily, but this once, at least, I determined to be her big sister, an intrusive, helpful big sister. I knelt down beside her and looked into the trunk. “What else did you find in there?”

She edged a few inches away, but she didn’t leave. Instead, silently, she folded the uniform and set it on the floor. Then she reached in and pulled out another little dress—a red plaid winter dress, with velvet cuffs. The waist was about as wide as a coffee can. “Mother gave me that for my first Christmas here.”

“It’s so cute. Isn’t it hard to imagine you were ever so small?”

The trunk contents were neatly organized, the clothes on the left and a stack of books squared into one corner. In the middle was a pair of white ice skates. “Cathy gave me those.”

“I remember. She was training you for the Olympics.”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t very good. I learned to skate backwards, but that was all.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort, she also failed to make me an Olympic skier.”

It was a rare moment of connection between us. But it couldn’t last. Theresa put the skates and the books back into the trunk, all except for one little plastic photo album, which she shoved into her pocket. Then she laid the velvet dress on top, and the uniform over that, and closed the trunk. “You go ahead on down. I’ll turn off the lights.”

It was a dismissal, polite but clear. I knew better than to push further. We had touched, if only for that moment. She knew I cared. And I knew—what? That she was thinking of the distant past, of what she had lost when she became one of us.

All that dust dried my throat, and I went down the backstairs into the kitchen for a glass of iced tea. Laura was already in there, talking on the phone, and as soon as I saw her face, I knew something was wrong.

She hung up and turned to me. “That was
Jackson
. He said one of his men found Mother sitting in her car out by the highway. The car had gone off the road and hit the guardrail. Mother didn’t seem hurt, but she was dazed, so they took her to the hospital.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I need a drink.”

It wasn’t the sort of thing I usually said. In fact, I’m sure I got the line from some sitcom. But it seemed perfectly appropriate when we walked back into the kitchen that evening. I did need a drink, maybe more than one.

“I need ice cream,” Laura said, opening the freezer door. “This is making me regress to childhood.”

I regressed only as far as college, using Laura’s ice cream and Mother’s liqueurs and blender to create the sorority house version of a cocktail. “Just try it,” I urged Theresa. “It tastes just like a milkshake. Only with a kick.”

“And we won’t count the carbs.” Laura took a slurp of the grasshopper shake (crème de cacao and crème de menthe, plus Haagen Das) and then tasted the pina colada. “You know, we could open a milk-shake tavern. These are really good.”

Theresa looked dubiously down at her glass. “That’s a lot of liquor.”

“The ice cream coats the alcohol and nullifies the effects,” I said positively. I gave the blender jar a quick rinse and then sat down at the kitchen table, suddenly exhausted. “Do you think Mother is really sick?”

Theresa took a seat across from me. “I don’t know. The doctor gave her the standard treatment for a stroke, a clot buster, but he didn’t seem very worried if he’s waiting till tomorrow to schedule a CAT scan. And Mother seemed perfectly lucid when we got to the hospital.”

“All a mistake—she wasn’t in an accident.” Involuntarily, I was mimicking Mother’s dismissive diction. “She was just pulled over for a moment, daydreaming.” I thought about that. “Mother doesn’t daydream, could she?”

“It doesn’t sound like her,” Laura agreed. “But she sure seemed alert enough when we saw her. I loved the look on your face when she asked you to bring your laptop in so she could check her chatrooms.”

“I am
not
taking the laptop to her. I refuse. She can just wait until tomorrow.” I could feel Theresa’s gaze on me, and I flushed. I sounded something less than Christian, I knew, but—but I really liked my little laptop, and Mother had already broken it once. Leaving it alone with her would be like, well, leaving an infant alone with a four-year-old. I decided to change the subject back to something important. “Theresa, have you had any experience with those mini-strokes the doctor was talking about?”

“We have five very old nuns at the convent, so I’ve seen the mini-strokes before, and the big ones too,” Theresa said. “I don’t know. That momentary loss of awareness is suspicious. But the most important symptoms are loss of vision and numbness in the limbs, and she said she had none of that.”

“Can we believe her?” Done with her milkshake, Laura set the glass in the sink and crossed to the refrigerator. “I mean, it’s not like she has been all that open with us about anything lately.” She rummaged around and pulled out a six-pack of Sam Adams beer. Holding it up, she said, “Like this. Can you imagine Mother drinking a beer? But for a college professor—I mean, Sam Adams would be the drink of choice. Classy and casual.”

“You think she’s stocking beer for him?” I said doubtfully.

“Why not? She’s going to turn our home over to him.”

Theresa said, “Our home.” When we both looked at her, she added, “It’s gone from being the burden none of us wanted to ‘our home’.”

I gazed out the wide window to the sunset reflecting on the surface of the river. The rose-yellow light was fading in the backyard. “I don’t think I ever imagined she’d give it away. I still can’t believe it.” I glanced at Theresa. “Did you mean it about coming back to live here someday?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think it would be proper now that the college president might be in residence.”

It took a moment before I realized she’d made a bit of a joke. “But if you really want to, Theresa, tell her that. If you say that you want to come home, she can’t deny you that chance.”

She shook her head, but said nothing more.

Laura removed one beer bottle and put the rest back in the refrigerator. “I meant it when I said I’d help out with the expenses.” She popped the top off with a practiced flick of her thumb. “I—I actually kind of think this is maybe not so bad. Being here, I mean.”