The year She Fell (36 page)

This trip to the boy’s birthplace was a manufactured excuse, but I intended to make the most of it. If there would be secrets in the hospital records, I wanted to know how accessible they’d be.

I had some experience at coaxing employees to betray the confidences of their bosses. “Whistle-blowing,” we’d call it, to make it sound more ethical. Downright socially responsible, even. And I’d learned early on that the further the employee was from the boss, the more willing they were to blow whistles. So I took my time driving up to
Pennsylvania
, took my time finding the hospital. I wanted the nightshift, those disaffected workers who traded in a normal life for an extra buck-fifty an hour.

As I waited for dark, I entertained the notion of telling Ellen the truth. It was always an option. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see this working out well no matter what, but when I sorted out the scenarios, the worst-case one was Ellen learning the truth. It would shatter us— but more important, it would shatter her.

But I didn’t know how I was going to pull this off. I wasn’t used to being so incompetent. I’d already screwed it up when I didn’t immediately come up with a plausible explanation for the boy. If I’d had time to prepare, I might have been able to make the one-night-stand story stick. But I was taken by surprise, and the lie must have shown on my face.

Too late now. Nothing to do but stem the damage.

This was a small-town community hospital, and they didn’t bother with any of that big-city security. I walked right past the reception desk and down the hall to the building directory, and located Records. I found my way down the echoing steel backstairs to the basement, and the old yellow cinderblock room that housed patient records.

The clerk playing Free Cell on the computer was a woman, fortunately, and startled to get a visitor this late. I put on the “I’m so harmless” smile and asked for help.

American women like an accent. And an Irish accent, that’s usually a winner, the Irish being on the safe side of the exotic spectrum. So I channeled my father’s real voice—not the Hollywood-Dublin brogue that he used for the tourist trade, but the real O’Connor, the light leavening of Irish—and told the clerk a story about a son and a scrapbook and an imminent departure for college, and she grinned and printed out the pages and stuck them into a nice clean manila envelope.

I didn’t even want the damned thing. I just wanted to know how easy it would be to procure it. Too easy, that’s how.

But I could hardly toss it in the trashcan in the waiting room. I took it with me out to the car, dropped it on the passenger seat, and drove to a hotel by the highway. I watched CNN international news for an hour, noting with some bitterness all the stories that could have been mine if I hadn’t sold my soul to academia. Finally I opened the envelope and glanced through the pages.

They were scans of the original records, fuzzy and gray but readable.

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to learn who brought her to the hospital— or if she came alone. I didn’t want to know how long her labor was, or whether she went for natural childbirth. I didn’t want to know whether she’d had the baby in the room with her or left him in the nursery.

Instead I looked for . . . evidence. Of whatever. There was a notation that she’d paid two thousand dollars in cash upon admittance. No comment on the oddness of that. Perhaps it wasn’t so odd here in the hills, where people kept their life savings in the most liquid form— cash hidden somewhere safe.

She’d signed the admittance form
Ellen Wakefield
, making an effort to imitate Ellen’s signature.

I slid the pages back into the envelope, and went to the back of the jeep, jamming the envelope under the tire iron. I was feeling sick. I’d gotten these records. The boy could too. Ellen could get it without ever resorting to a direct lie— this was supposedly her medical record, after all. And it would take her only a couple minutes to puzzle it out—

But they weren’t here in this
Pennsylvania
hill town, not my wife, not my . . . son. And maybe they’d never think to come.

There was no reason, given prior experience, to imagine I’d be that lucky.

I had another day to waste, and nowhere to go. So I stayed in the hotel room until just before checkout.
Atlantic
had emailed me the copy edits for a short piece I’d done on the origins of the radical right in
France
, and I spent a relatively pleasant half hour at the laptop writing up my arguments for retaining the three commas the butcher aka copy editor had removed. One thing I cherish about print journalism is the punctuation debates. No one in broadcast news gives a damn about commas. (And don’t get me started on Brian William’s antipathy towards true sentence predicates: “Another battle shaping up in the
South Carolina
primary. Three well-funded candidates appealing to disparate factions of the party.”)

Finally I turned the room key in and headed north. Time to kill, might as well.

I reached
Williamsport
around dinnertime, and stopped at an old Victorian mansion turned restaurant for a steak. The town was pretty in that
It’s a Wonderful Life
stage-set sort of way— wide streets and big old robber-baron mansions in one part of town, and little brick and frame bungalows across the tracks. The Little League stadium was an absurdly large monument to pushy parenthood. Not enough for kids to play stickball in the street—no, they had to be organized and coached and trained into teams and leagues and tournament champions. (Okay, so my plans for my daughter’s soccer scholarship started back when she first smashed a ball at the age of two-and-a-half . . . but seeing an institution devoted to such ambition made me question my motivation.)

There was a game going on under the overcast evening sky, two teams of fourth- or fifth-graders dwarfed by the big field, their parents scattered in the stands. I got out of my car and walked to the fence, watching the pitcher wind up. She was a little girl with a ponytail sticking out of the back of her cap and a fierce look on her face. Sarah always looked like that before she laid into a penalty kick, her little face scrunched up in a scowl.

In the distant hills, there was a rumble of thunder, and the coach in the dugout looked up. “Game called!” the umpire shouted. The parents rose like good soldiers and started packing up their picnic baskets and folding their blankets. A few of the kids protested, but trooped off after their coach, heading home to beat the storm.

I went back to the car and sat in the driver’s seat, my legs out the open door, my feet planted on the gravel parking lot. I waited until all the cars pulled away and the first big drops of rain came down, splashing on my knees. Then I opened the envelope again and withdrew a single sheet— the scan of the boy’s tiny footprints. In the corner was an indistinct copy of a photo— the birth photo, the black mark of a paperclip visible at the top.

Ellen said he looked like me.

I didn’t see it. But then, Sarah looked like Ellen, and Ellen never saw it. She’d say, “No, Sarah looks like
Laura
,” which pleased Sarah no end, to be compared to her famous aunt. Laura and Ellen looked like sisters, of course, but still Ellen couldn’t see herself in Sarah.

I stared down at the picture. This baby looked like a baby. He also looked a bit like my little brother Patrick when he was a baby.

Okay. Patrick and I had always looked alike. Perforce, this baby looked like me.

There was none of
her
there I could see, and that was a relief.

I shoved it all back into the envelope and started up the car.

It took a moment to connect the laptop to my cell phone and start up the browser, but soon I had the boy’s address and a helpful little map. He lived over on the robber-baron side of town, but in a new development, in a big brick house on a small lot, squeezed in between two equally imposing demi-mansions. Through the rain-drenched windshield, I could see a Mercedes in the driveway. A husky boy in shorts and no shirt was out in the rain, hauling in the porch furniture. From the disgruntled look on his face, I imagined he was cursing the absent brother who wasn’t there to help.

He wasn’t poor then, this Brian. His father was probably an attorney or an accountant, his mother some similar profession, nice stable people in a nice stable town.

He should count himself lucky. Sarah had never lived in a brand-new house in a brand-new development with a pool and tennis courts.

I put the car back in gear and drove to a liquor store, got a fifth of Bushmills, and took a room in some anonymous motel off the highway. I could not envision how this could turn out to be anything but a disaster. Even once I’d finished a quarter of the bottle, I couldn’t come up with any plan. What did I know? That the medical records were available to anyone with a clever line. That the boy was persistent and unpleasant. That Ellen was regarding my withholding of information as a flat-out lifelong lie. That Sarah’s life was going to change, one way or another, along with her belief in me . . .

I could make separate peace with Brian. Swear him to silence, then tell him the truth. But he wouldn’t be able to keep that promise. He was nineteen. He wanted more than a name. He wanted an identity. He was longing for life meaning just as I was, my eighteenth summer, when I decided I was Irish, goddamnit, and went back to Kerry to live with my mother and brother and . . . well, be Irish. A month in the poorest nation in Western Europe, a month with no McDonalds, only two radio stations (one all religious music, the other Gaelic-language), two TV stations with no MTV, and a mother who expected me to kneel and say the rosary every night, taught me that my identity was that of an urban American teenager. I came home to DC and promptly filed for US citizenship.

Somehow I thought that lesson would be lost on this kid.

So maybe I could confess all to all. Shut the kid up, shut everyone up. But that looked to be even worse a disaster. The truth would hurt Ellen more than the lie did.

No way to make it work. I’d never learned patience, but I’d picked up the art of resignation. And so in the morning I got in my car and drove back to
Wakefield
, resigned to seeing it through.

I drove back the
next day, checked into the same room at the Wakefield Super 8— still didn’t feel like home, thank God— and went out for a run in the evening cool, working the old kinks out of my knees. I spent a long time under the shower, then gave myself over to an evening of answering emails. I used to spend my work evenings in exotic bars, drinking with other correspondents, talking shop about bloody revolutions and evil dictators and wicked assignment editors. Now I typed noncommittal answers to students who didn’t like their spring semester grade.

I ought to get back to real reporting. Away from this teaching trap.

Better choose now. Pretty soon, I might not have a choice.

I was watching CNN with half my attention—
Mongolia
was heating up again. I’d spent a miserable month there a few years ago, trying and repeatedly failing to send dispatches by satellite in that place where electricity was a rarity. So I was rooting a bit for the rebels when someone knocked at the door.

It was the boy. Brian. He stood in the doorway, his shoulders hunched, his shorn head outlined by the floodlight in the parking lot. There was ultimatum in his eyes. I sighed and stepped back to let him in, wondering if I could get away with half the truth, the safe half.

I turned to douse the TV, and he clipped me one good with some blunt weapon. I was fighting for consciousness when something covered my mouth and nose, and I gasped in the sweet sick stench, and descended into darkness.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I woke raging. With a raging headache, anyway, and a tension in my chest that felt like danger.

I opened my eyes to darkness. Breathed in, slowly, to decrease the pressure on my head. There was something cold and rough under my cheek— concrete— and the smell of dirt and underground must, and for a moment I thought I was back in
Tehran
, still a prisoner.