The year She Fell (21 page)
From memory, I found the other switch at the top of the stairs. The bare lightbulb’s glare revealed a thin film of dust on the old oak floorboards, and a track of recent shoeprints. Rockport walking sandals, to judge by the logo. Ellen. (Sorry. I notice footwear.) To my relief, they led not to the hidden alcove but to a box in the corner, piled high with books. I didn’t bother to wonder what Ellen wanted from her old college textbooks. I didn’t have time. I had work to do.
Walking lightly on the balls of my bare feet, I slid around the old trunk with Great-great-grandfather’s Union Army uniform and pushed aside a stack of ribbon-frilled hatboxes. There, behind the post, was the orange crate that had once held all Cathy’s LPs and now held a stack of framed paintings.
They would never fit in my shopping bag, not without ripping it anyway. I stripped off one frame and slid the matted painting into the bag. Behind me I heard a creak—but it was just old-house noise, I was sure. Working quickly, I de-framed the rest of the paintings and hid them away in my bag. Then I shoved the hatboxes and Great-great-gramps’s trunk back into place, and fled the attic.
I was just hiding the paintings behind the towels in our joint linen closet when I heard Theresa’s sharp voice behind me.
I spent the next half hour distracting her from that linen closet and what it concealed. It was easy enough to do. I just had to get her to remember how much she hated me, and get her to tell me about it.
(It was odd, wasn’t it, that she was the one who ended up hating me. I should have been the one who hated, who blamed, who resented. After all, she was the one whose betrayal derailed my life so long ago. For just a moment, I imagined what it would have been like if, twenty years ago, Theresa hadn’t chosen to use my trust as another way to please my mother. Would Jackson and I—no. There was no profit in speculation. And no profit in hating her.)
She hated me, I learned, because I didn’t love my mother. Oh, she didn’t come out and say that, but it was clear enough. I wasn’t about to argue with her characterization. Whatever complex of emotion I felt for my mother couldn’t be reduced to “love”, no matter how I tried. And I wasn’t about to argue that she didn’t love Mother either, that while she was off in Romania and some cloister being separate and Catholic and pure, I at least called once a month and sent that card every two weeks and shipped tasteful and appropriate gifts every Mother’s Day, birthday, and Christmas. I might not have been a dutiful daughter, but I could play one on TV.
Theresa didn’t seem to think being a dutiful daughter required anything more than “love.”
Well, I supposed she must have felt gratitude all those years. Mother rescued her from a life of poverty. At least she waited until after my father died to gather the lost child to her bosom. And at least now Theresa seemed to regret the path she’d taken away from Mother. She seemed to be—perhaps this was only my wishful thinking—planning to leave the cloister and come home and take care of my mother in her old age.
It would be the perfect solution. Not that I would have offered that myself, but I didn’t want Ellen to feel obligated to take Mother into her home.
Yes. It would work very well. I thought as I left Theresa in her room and returned to the linen closet to remove the paintings. Theresa could resume her quest to be Mother’s best daughter, making up for her rebellious decision to leave home and become a nun. (We Presbyterians think of that as rebellious, at least.) Mother would have a faithful acolyte, trained by a religious institution nearly as autocratic as Mother herself. Ellen and I would be guilt-free.
I could give Theresa a secret allowance, so she would have funds of her own. Ellen would have to be the intermediary; Theresa would never take money from me. This plan preoccupied me as I re-hid the paintings in the window seat under my old ballet costumes. Mother and Theresa would have each other, and neither of them would have any more claim on me.
Next morning, Chris Riker
called to tell me the Porsche was all ready to go, and he could have someone drop it off if I wanted. I started to say yes, then, remembering the ride
Jackson
had offered, hesitated. No, I told Chris, I’d pick it up.
And then I looked up Jackson McCain in the little
Wakefield
phone book, and, without giving myself a chance to back out, called him and asked for a ride.
I waited out on the porch in the sunlight, titillated, thinking about him . . . It was, I told myself, just a leftover need to rebel that left me a little breathless, anticipating his arrival. I was hoping that Mother would look out her window and see him. But then, she didn’t seem to recall who he was. So it wasn’t much of a rebellion after all.
But I still felt the breath catch in my chest, the way it did for just a moment before the camera went on. Nostalgia. I had loved him with all the fierceness of youth, and he’d loved me back just as fiercely. I’d never felt that way again. But then, I’d never been sixteen again either. I was a grown woman now, hardened by experience and loss. I was lucky to be able to feel the mild interest the architect inspired in me. No reason to lament the loss of adolescent passion, so long after adolescence was done.
Jackson
arrived promptly, in the snazzy squad car. He must not have a wife, I told myself as I got in. A wife wouldn’t let him provide taxi service for single women. Unfortunately, the trip was too short for me to have time to figure out a way to ask him about his marital status. I did have time to tell myself that it was no concern of mine—just not enough time to be convincing.
Riker’s Garage was on
Wood Street
, backing up to the old railroad tracks. The young mechanics gathered in a knot near the third bay, glancing with equal interest at my car and at me. But once they realized that not all
Hollywood
stars looked or dressed like Jennifer Lopez, they went back to admiring the car.
Chris regarded them benevolently. “They sure fought over who got to work on that. We don’t get many Porsches around here. Hell, we don’t get
any
Porsches around here.” Lowering his voice, he confessed, “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to figure it out. But I went online and downloaded the schematics, and you know, it’s not all that different than a Volkswagen, inside.”
“Costs a bit more,” I said with a smile. “So did you charge me Volkswagen or Porsche rates?”
He grinned and handed me a perfectly reasonable bill. “I hear that real Porsche mechanics get paid like brain surgeons.”
“Well, all I know is, everyone but you that’s ever worked on this car had a brand new Porsche of his own.”
It was all very comfortable, very hometown, but then, as Chris ran my credit card through, he gave me a sidelong look. I knew that look, and anticipated the question. He handed me the credit card slip, and as I signed it, he said, “Could you maybe sign something else? I know my wife would like to have your autograph.”
“Of course.” I took the grimy legal pad he offered and hesitated, pen to paper. “What’s your wife’s name?”
“Sherry. She was Sherry Long. Maybe you remember her.”
Bits of memory kept coming back to me, the longer I was here in
Wakefield
. Sherry had been the head cheerleader, and she played the lead in
The Bachelor and the Baby
when I was a sophomore. I had wanted, with a quite irrational desire, to steal her smile—it was a real gleamer. “I remember Sherry. She had the most beautiful smile.”
He nodded, quite serious. “She still does. The dentist said she ought to do tooth-modeling, you know, like for Crest and stuff.”
Within me there is a nasty person always struggling to escape, and so I slammed the door shut on cruel laughter and wrote, “To Sherry—I’ll always remember your beautiful smile. Best wishes, Laura Wakefield.”
When I emerged from the garage office, I saw
Jackson
sitting not in his squad car but in my Porsche. In the driver’s seat. In some ways, I concluded, no boy ever grows up. I handed him the keys and got in the other side.
“Just up to the Rocks and back,” he told me. “And then I’ll let you have it back.”
By the time we got out on the highway, he was hitting a speed that would have gotten him arrested for reckless driving—if he weren’t the one who ordinarily did the arresting. The Porsche appreciated it, however. It wasn’t as if I ever took it to the limits of its considerable power.
But there was only so fast you could go in the mountains without sailing off into a gorge, so
Jackson
slowed to a safer pace once the road started twisting. Just as well. I was no longer used to the vertigo-inducing mountain roads, and felt distinctly ill. I concentrated on the button of the glove compartment, and, to distract myself from my stomach, said, “So Chris ended up marrying Sherry Long, just as everyone predicted.”
Jackson
shrugged. “Most everyone in our class ended up doing what was predicted. Only, you know, if they’d been taking bets over at Wakefield High back then, it would have been Sherry they’d have figured was going to end up in a TV star, not you.”
I considered this. “You mean me, a nobody in the drama club, working on the makeup and props and lighting, and getting only four lines? It is pretty funny, isn’t it? But you know, there aren’t many head cheerleaders who make it as actresses.”
“Why not? They’ve got the looks.”
“They might have the looks, but they don’t have the desperation. Most likely to succeed, I think, are the late bloomers. They have the right amount of insecurity, and they have something to prove, so they never get too comfortable.”
He adjusted the rear-view mirror and studied the reflection in it. My reflection. I felt a heat rise in my face—a blush. Jesus. I was an actress. I’d bared my breasts—well, just one breast, and there was only a glimpse of the nipple—before millions. A few thousand even wrote me about it, most from jail. But here
Jackson
was, just looking at my face . . .
“You aren’t like that. You were always beautiful. Even in high school.”
I should have protested, because it wasn’t true, but instead, I just murmured, “Thank you. You were the only one who noticed, I think.” I meant that last ironically, but it came out, oh, I don’t know, a little poignant, and I thought maybe I was just as insecure as those late bloomers, even if I’d never really gotten that bloom.
“Yeah, I noticed. All the time. Hard to ignore.”
And there we were, suddenly, back in high school, so young, so innocent—
He pulled the car into a scenic cut-out, and surprised, I looked up at the Plato Rocks, two fat fingers of granite that rose phallically out of the rounded feminine breasts of the hills.
He got out and walked to the grove under Plato East, and I took a deep breath and followed. The air was cooler there among the oak trees, and the sunlight filtered through the leaves to spackle the sheer granite face. They were each
Well, I came here to make out. Maybe Ellen too. But Theresa—not a chance.
I stole a look at
Jackson
, and thought maybe he was remembering a few make-out sessions here too. All with me, I hoped. I didn’t want him to have had those sweet dusky evenings under the towers with anyone else.
He broke the silence, though his voice was low, as if he were about to tell me a secret. “Do you ever think of back then?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. “Sometimes. Not often.” And then, haltingly, I had to explain. “It’s not that I don’t want to remember. But I’m afraid, if I think of it too often—”