The year She Fell (20 page)

Ellen nodded. “I know. But something feels different. When she gets back, you see what you think. Maybe I’m overreacting. She seems fine physically. She walks down the hill every day to the store, and back up again. It’s just—”

She didn’t have to say it aloud. We were both thinking the same word. Alzheimers. But I didn’t have time to explain how utterly foreign this concept was—our formidable mother with a weakened mind—when the matriarch herself returned with a wary but appropriately dressed Theresa, all spare body and straight cropped light hair and taupe crepe, still a nun, even without the wimple.

In the hall, I kissed my mother without a hint of awkwardness, one of those patented moves I’d learned from Joan Crawford—taking the hand (so that we didn’t have to embrace), leaning forward, pressing lips to cheek, and murmuring, “Mother.” But when I did, I faltered just for a moment, breathing in the fragrance that lingered on her powdered cheek. Chanel #19. I’d sent her a bottle last Christmas.

“Welcome home, Laura,” she said, drawing back. Her tone was so perfect, so admonitory, so courteous and reproving in reminding me how long I’d been gone, that I shot a glance at Ellen. At this moment, Mother seemed entirely Mother to me.

I turned to Theresa, and took a step towards her. She took a step back. It wasn’t an insult, I knew, but an involuntary response. She wasn’t used to being approached like that. I reminded myself that she had been in a cloister for a year, and moved to the side, as if all along I’d been planning to go pick up her shopping bag. “Hi, Theresa,” I said casually, as if we’d seen each other last week. “Did you bring home anything for me?”

Deliberately, she reached for the shopping bag and removed it from my hand. “Just some new clothes. For me.”

I smiled. She hadn’t changed either.

Ellen, of course, took over and made everything nice. She sensed that Theresa didn’t want to be asked about the clothes, and drew Mother towards the sun porch. “I made some iced tea. You sit down and I’ll get you both a glass.”

But Theresa chose to disappear up the stairs, so I was left with my mother. I inquired politely about the drive to Buckhannon, explained that my car was in the shop, and was tempted to mention
Jackson
. Instead, as casually as I could, I asked for local news.

Mother had a catalog of harmless and trivial news, about the garden club benefit and a new addition to the library. At first, she was making eye contact, and then her gaze drifted over my shoulder and over the garden, and a little after that, her recitation just sort of faded out. She was no longer paying attention to me.

Okay. That was weird.

I was about to say something when Ellen returned with a tray and a glass with ice and tea and lemon and spoon arranged just as we’d been taught. The bustle brought Mother back, and she focused her gaze on me. “So do you find the town much changed?”

I mentioned the commercial strip, and all the landscaping, and then, unable to help myself, I said, “And I see the police have some snazzy squad cars. Chargers, it looks like. That’s pretty racy for
Wakefield
.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Mother stirred her iced tea. She was a tough one—no lemon, no sugar, no Sweet and Low. Just tea and ice. “We had to bring in a new police chief, and he made some demands before agreeing. New squad cars, a new building.”

My heart started beating faster, but I kept my tone casual. “That must be one expensive police chief.”

She nodded, still stirring. “A young man out of
Bristol
. He’s used to a bigger city, with better facilities. But he came highly recommended, and we did need to upgrade our facilities. We don’t have a lot of crime here, but he was right that we couldn’t keep the city lockup in the basement of a house.”

I felt Ellen’s gaze on me. She knew who the new police chief was, and she knew who he was to me. Oh, not that we’d eloped, as Mother had gone to some pains to cover that. But she knew that we’d dated and that Mother had disapproved. And she knew what I was thinking. Mother knew the provenance of everyone in town: who was an aunt of whom by marriage, who had a cousin-in-law on the planning board, which derelict was connected to which founding family. Even without the personal connection, she should have known exactly who
Jackson
was, one of those worthless McCains who arrived from
Charleston
in 1984 and scattered out of town, one step ahead of the gambling commission, in 1992.

“Okay,” I whispered to Ellen as we went upstairs to change for dinner. “Maybe you’re right. But—” I stopped outside of the door to her room, looking around for eavesdroppers. I still didn’t trust Theresa. “But what can we do about it?”

Ellen sighed as we stopped outside my door. “She told me that nice young president from the college is taking us all out to dinner. So we can’t say anything then. And—here’s my thought—sometimes medications elderly people take can interact in weird ways. Maybe Theresa can go through Mother’s prescriptions.”

Before she entered the cloister, Theresa had been with a nursing order doing mission work in
Romania
. I wasn’t sure if experience with cholera and polio would help her interpret Mother’s pharmacology, but I supposed it couldn’t hurt.

Besides, it would make Theresa a party to our conspiracy, and thus equally culpable.

Was I paranoid? Maybe. But I had reason to know that Theresa’s first loyalty was to the woman who adopted her and gave her a life of relative luxury, not to the sort-of sisters who shared her home for a few years.

At the Farmhouse restaurant, the nice young president from the college fawned nicely over Mother, but in off-moments turned his charm on me. He wasn’t actually young—fifty-five at least—but he was as handsome and as blow-dried as any LA entertainment attorney. Merely a botany professor, he told us modestly, elevated to this leadership position because no one else would take it.

“I was very surprised they chose me,” he confessed, “because I’m definitely one of those outside-the-box thinkers. I’m all for tradition, but this is a new century, and the ivy on those walls is getting dusty!” He leaned forward confidentially. “Do you know, I’m hoping to make Technology Week’s list of top-ten wired colleges this year. Small college division, but still . . . every student is given a laptop, and all the dorms have wi-fi access. And I particularly like to do online recruiting chats with interested high school students. That way we make sure that we’re getting a good crop of techno-savvy freshmen. Do you have a website?”

I had to admit my publicist had set one of those up, which so far had mostly led to a lot of creepy emails from techno-savvy prison inmates.

“I’ll be sure and visit it. Perhaps you could link to the
Loudon
College
site? Since you are an alum?”

This was news to me. “I am?”

“Didn’t you attend our summer science camps when you were in high school?”

Now that was thinking outside the box as far as alumni categories went. Summer campers. “Yes, maybe one summer.” Don’t get the wrong idea. I only did it to be near
Jackson
—he had to go to make up the credits he’d missed while in reform school. “But I didn’t even graduate from high school. My sister Cathy was the Loudon alum.”

“Ah, yes, I remember your sister. One of our athletic stars. On the ski team, wasn’t she? Forgive me for bumbling around like that.” He bowed his head as if to acknowledge our family tragedy, then looked up with a smile. “We’d love to award you an honorary degree,” he assured me. “You could give the commencement address.”

I was tickled in spite of myself. Yet was another example of his outside-the-box thinking. There I would be, an utterly uneducated actress, known primarily as “Uma’s best friend in
Casework,
the one who steals Uma’s boyfriend and then tries to commit suicide” (I was brilliant, sawing away at my wrists like that with a penknife), telling these little college graduates how fortunate they were to have coasted through Lit 102. But then, when I thought more about it, his offer stung a bit too. I resolved there and then that if I wanted to get a college degree, or high school diploma even, it wouldn’t be honorary.

“Speak to my publicist,” I told him. “He’s in charge of all my honorary degrees.”

Mother wasn’t pleased with me. After the nice young president dashed out to retrieve something from his car, she gave me a look—Bette Davis couldn’t have been scarier—and announced that she was thinking of endowing a building at the college.

“That’s nice, Mother,” I said, smothering a yawn. Ellen shot me a look of her own, more Burstyn then Bette, reminding me that very likely that nice young man was taking shameless advantage of our confused mother. I entertained the notion that perhaps it was Mother taking advantage of the nice young man, getting him to take us all out to the best restaurant in town (well, the selection was limited) by alluding to a potential windfall. But there was no use telling that to Ellen. I was a product of the corruption factory that was
Hollywood
, so I was quick to leap to suspicion. She had worked in schools and in churches, and those weren’t the sort of world to make her paranoid.

“Perhaps even a museum,” Mother observed. “A
museum
of
West Virginia
culture.”

I had only a moment to consider that when President Uriah—okay, his name was actually Urich—returned from his car with the college catalog, and slid it onto the table next to my plate of spinach pasta. Then he tapped my hand in a jolly old uncle sort of way. It took everything I had not to pick up my plate and dump it in his lap. But all I did was withdraw my hand from his vicinity and pick up the glossy little magazine.

Urich was all eagerness as I looked at photos of Phi Delts under the arch and the women’s lacrosse team, fierce with their face masks and raised sticks. I paused at a head-and-shoulder shot of Urich against the paneling of his office.

“Nice picture of you,” I said, giving it a cursory study. In the photo, he looked contemporary and cutting edge, traditional but definitely outside the box—his coat off, his rep tie knot loosened. Just over his shoulder, on the paneled wall, was a diploma and a framed watercolor of the famous arch.

My fingers stilled on the page. I felt Mother’s gaze on me. She knew. She was wondering if I knew.

I mustered twenty years worth of acting experience and casually turned to the next page. It was a grid of majors and requirements, and I managed a near-perfect grimace as I closed the catalog and handed it to Ellen. With a shrug I knew my mother would consider typically insolent, I said, “Great publication. Too bad you have to take classes to qualify for all the parties and sports you depict there.”

Mother gave me another look, one annoyed enough that it quieted my fear of discovery. As far as she knew, I had never seen what she must have known was in that photo of the president’s office—the watercolor by my father, one of a series he’d done of the college, with his bold strokes and odd way with borders, recognizable even in miniature.

She was already giving Daddy’s work away.

CHAPTER TEN

It was
nine p.m.
when we got home. Theresa excused herself and went right to bed. I guessed she was still on convent hours. I waited until Mother and Ellen also drifted upstairs, and then I waited some more. When Letterman was over, I flipped off the TV and the living room light and went to the kitchen pantry for a sturdy shopping bag. From there I went up the back service stairs, slipping my shoes off as I approached the second floor where the bedrooms were. It was another flight up to the servants’ quarters—not that we’d ever had live-ins—and the hall that ended at the attic door.

At the bottom of the attic steps, I fumbled for the light switch and flipped it. Now I could see the narrow stairs ascending to the creaking Stephen-King darkness. I took a deep breath and told myself old houses made noises, and ghosts didn’t, which only reminded me that any ghost could sneak up soundlessly from behind. Taking a deep breath, I forged ahead, aware that this fear was the only sign of guilt I’d allow myself.