The year She Fell (33 page)

I was no good with numbers or dates—I’d been failing both math and history when I dropped out of high school. I looked back down at my notes, but couldn’t make sense of them. “When was that again? That I visited you?”

“At Thanksgiving.
1990.”

Oh. I sat back, my back heavy against the seat cushion. “Brian was born in April. Conceived in July.”

Ellen regarded me in some puzzlement. “I’m guessing about July. Forty weeks before the birth. Tom wouldn’t talk about it. Even now, he won’t talk about it.”

Born in April.

It should have occurred to me right away. I took a deep breath. “You have the boy’s cell phone number?”

“He left it on my voice mail last night.” She turned her hand over. I could see traces of ink on her palm.

“Call him,” I told her. “Tell him he can let Tom go.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

TOM

So I lied.

I stood there in my front room and looked at the boy standing next to my wife, holding a birth certificate with her name on it, and I lied.

Of course I remembered who the boy’s mother was, which of the one-night stands she had been during that summer of my discontent. For one thing, she wasn’t a one-night stand, and for another, I was a good Irish boy, which meant I would never sin without the skin— that is, I always had condoms handy, even in pre-disease days, and used them. Except with her, except that once, when we were back deep in the mountains and fifty miles from the nearest Walgreens, and anyway, we were wet-slick with rain and I could hardly manage to get her clothes off, much less a condom on.

Eventually I knew about the boy too, at least in theory. I wasn’t sure I ever believed it, and I certainly never figured on him finding me if he existed. I thought she was the sort who would cover her tracks better than this. But then, from the very first, I misunderstood, misjudged, misapprehended her . . . in other words, she knew what she was doing every minute, and I never knew that at all.

She was a real education.

I sound cynical, and—well, I am, from this vantage point, having hit forty with a daughter not much younger than that girl that day. (Best not follow that thought, or wonder what my daughter is doing those nights after her campers go to sleep . . . this is how men like me are punished, you know. We are granted the great boon of daughters, for whom we would gladly die, and instead, we must watch them walk away with the most unworthy of our youthful counterparts. Poetic justice.)

I am a journalist, dedicated to truth. I spent a year and more in hell, defending the truth, or at least that’s what I told myself as I huddled there in a dank cell—I was the light-bringer, the one who dispelled the darkness.

But when it came time to focus the light on that little bit of darkness in my own life, well, all I could hear was my dad’s voice, “Time to be careful, lad. Don’t go pulling at that thread, or the whole wall could come tumbling down.”

My father, mixed metaphors aside, was a wise man when it came to protecting one’s own interests. He balanced his whole life, and mine too for a time, on the precarious formality of a marriage a woman he hadn’t seen for years. He would have lied.

But I had a better reason than self-protection. Or so I thought, when I saw Ellen’s face and that boy beside her—a younger, meaner version of myself. The truth was too volatile. It would destroy her. Or it would destroy us.

And the boy didn’t want to know it anyway. I could tell. He looked at the birth certificate and back at Ellen and I know what he was thinking—that he wanted her as his mother, this compassionate cautious woman with the graceful soothing voice. I couldn’t blame him. Everyone should have a mother like Ellen. I never stopped regretting that we couldn’t have more children after Sarah, because I knew (my Catholic boyhood meant somewhere within me I believed these things) up there in Limbo there floated a half-dozen sad children who were meant to be Ellen’s.

I don’t know any who would grasp at the chance to be mine, and this boy was no different. By the time he realized what Ellen meant by her introduction of me, he’d already connected with her, and regarded me with suspicion. He was already feeling protective of her, moving closer to her when he thought I might be threatening somehow—as I were some threat to my own wife. But maybe he sensed what I couldn’t say, that there was a threat there, and he was the embodiment of it—

 
The curse of the Irish (besides the drink, that is) is that we never escape our past. Never. We might go along thinking that we got away with it, but that’s an illusion borne of intoxication. There is no doubt. We will be punished for our own sins, not to mention the sins of our fathers and grandfathers before them.

It hardly seems fair. The English don’t worry about their crimes coming to pick like vultures on their flesh. Only the Irish.

The hell with it all. That was my thought as I watched the boy walk away. It was hot in the house, and the walls seemed too close, and Ellen was waiting for an answer. And there was none. There was nothing I could say to explain it all away.

When I came back from running, she was gone. I knew a moment of panic, then got hold of myself and checked the calendar on the refrigerator. Session meeting. That would last into the evening, and I’d meet her afterwards, and then we could talk. Only, of course, talking was exactly what I didn’t want to do.

I’d figured out a few options by the time I got to the church and approached her car. I could invent a woman, or apply a new name, an untraceable one, to a woman who had actually shared a bed with me that long ago summer. I could also, legitimately, point out that what happened before we were married, when we weren’t together, wasn’t grounds for—well, for whatever I thought I might have seen in her eyes that afternoon.

But she didn’t stay to listen. She drove off. Almost twenty years of marriage, and she’d never done that, just left me like that. Once, she refused to come with me on an assignment, because she had a new job, and Sarah had just started middle school. So I went off alone, and when I returned, a very long time later, she was still there in the same house. I’d always been the one to leave, and she the one to stay.

Now she was leaving.

I waited another couple days. Well, I wasn’t waiting—I had the journalism review to get to bed. Through war and famine and riots, I’d never missed a deadline. I wasn’t going to let a spot of marital trouble screw up my record.

As I finished a few last-minute edits, and approved the cover revision, I gave a thought to the boy. Where did he live? Where did he go after he left our house? Back to his own family, his real family? Would he try to contact Ellen again?

He didn’t try to contact me, that’s all I knew.

But then, neither did Ellen.

I spared a few minutes to go online and punch in his name and his approximate birthdate. He showed up in a two-year-old list of honor roll students at a high school in
Williamsport
,
PA.

He didn’t look like an honor roll student. He looked like a disaffected young thug.

Williamsport
. Home of the Little League World Series. (Journalists’ minds are full of such useless connections.) I wondered if he’d played Little League baseball. Sarah never had, because we spent her childhood mostly in
Europe
, where everyone played soccer. She was a great forward—took after me. We hoped she’d get an athletic scholarship next year and save us the college tuition.

The boy could have played soccer, I supposed. He looked light on his feet. And athleticism was in his genes too, I guessed.

I didn’t want to pursue that thought, and logged off.

Forty-eight hours later, the journalism review was at the printer, and the only signal from Ellen was a singularly unrevealing email. I’d called every hotel in town, and spent a stupid hour driving around all the bed-and-breakfasts, scouting for her car in the parking lot. We’d been investigating doing a B&B ourselves, to help pay for our ever-ambitious renovations, so the owners of the small inns and private houses all knew us. I had to be circumspect. I didn’t much care for myself, but Ellen’s job was ever-precarious, balancing as it did on the mutual antipathy of two warring religious tribes. Any suggestion of instability at home, and one or the other group could use it against her and get her removed from the pulpit.

I could make some comment about these good religious folk, but I won’t bother. Hypocrisy should come as no surprise from that quarter.

That’s why I held off calling her at work. Neither of us was the sort to conduct loud shouting battles on the phone, but I didn’t want her breaking down there in her office. Still I was getting worried. So, making my voice as cheerful as I could, I greeted the church secretary and identified myself, and then waited. My instinct for silence proved correct. If I’d asked for her, Jill would have been taken aback, as it turned out that Ellen wasn’t there, hadn’t been there, since the session meeting.

“Oh, hi, Tom,” Jill said. “If this is about the wedding, Chuck has already spoken with the bride and groom, and it’s all going fine. So tell Ellen that she can forget about that and just concentrate on getting her mom well.”

Her mom. Ellen would never refer to her formidable mother that way, but it was all the clue I needed. I thanked Jill, promised to pass on the word to my wife, and hung up.

I hesitated there in my office, my hand on the receiver. It could be that her mother’s was only a cover story, and Ellen had headed off to the
Caribbean
for some restorative reggae and ganja. But she wasn’t one to lie, even when it didn’t matter.

She’d gone back to
Wakefield
.

Funny. I’d never imagined Ellen running back to her mother after an argument. But apparently that’s what she’d done now.

I settled the receiver back in the cradle and got up from my desk. No need to call. It was Friday, and with Sarah away at camp, I had nothing much to do till my summer seminar started in ten days. I’d just track Ellen down and make her understand that I’d done what was best for the both of us.

That’s the problem with marriage. You end up so tightly bound that doing the selfish thing feels like doing the right thing, because anything that hurts you hurts the marriage.

And hurting the marriage—one way or another, I’d done enough of that already. So, with the best intentions in the world, I went to tell my wife more lies.

Ellen was from the
best family in
West Virginia
. She used to say that with a laugh, adding that it meant their trailer was mounted on cement blocks, not old railway ties. But even the poorest state had its aristocracy, and the Wakefields were the
West Virginia
version— connected to the Randolphs of Virginia and the Beauchamps of North Carolina and all those other forefather slave-owners. (It was okay, Ellen assured me earnestly early in our relationship, because
West Virginia
, alone of all states, was born of abolition—it broke off from
Virginia
after secession.)

It wouldn’t do to be obviously rich in a state that mingled the worst of industrial pollution with the direst of rural poverty. So the Wakefields were modest compared to their counterparts in
Virginia
. They lived quietly for generations in the biggest house in the town named after old General Wakefield (one of those many Union generals who never won a battle), endowing the local college, setting up genteel associations, donating books to the library.

I don’t mean to make light of the family. It’s a worthy task for a century or so, to build a town and make it work. If the Wakefields had done it on a larger scale, for an entire country, perhaps, I’d have covered it admiringly in some front-page analysis. After a decade reporting on nations ruled by evil despots or incompetent socialists, I had a sneaking appreciation for an effectual benevolent dictator, and so, I suspected, did the town of
Wakefield
. Hence the ascendancy of Mrs. Wakefield, who ruled with the sort of noblesse oblige generally unknown in
America
.