The year She Fell (40 page)

I couldn’t finish my defense. At that moment a man came down the stairs, a gun in hand. It was the new police chief—I’d seen him before, at the jail opening last week. He took one comprehensive glance around the basement, then pointed the gun right at the boy. “Get down on the floor. Face first. Now.”

Brian took a quick hard breath and dropped to the floor. The cop—he wasn’t in uniform; he was in a t-shirt and jeans, but there was a gold shield clipped to his belt—bent down beside him and put his knee right in the small of the back.

“
Jackson
,” Laura whispered. I guessed she knew him. And to judge from the hard glance he gave her, they weren’t on the best of terms anymore.

“Yeah. I followed you.” He roughly frisked the kid, finding a Swiss army knife in a back pocket. “I got backup outside. You okay?” he asked me.

“Yeah. I just want out of here.”

The boy coughed, and the cop eased up pressure on his back just a bit. “Where’s the key?”

“I hid it,” Brian muttered. “Let me up, and I’ll get it.”

“Okay. Just the key,” the cop said, rising. “And don’t forget the gun, because I sure won’t.”

But as the boy started off towards the space under cellar stairs, Ellen got in between him and the cop. I knew what she was doing. I guessed I deserved it.

“No, Jackson,” she said in her firm schoolteacher voice. “No key until we all agree there is going to be no prosecution. No arrest.”

The cop looked honestly baffled. I can’t blame him. He was probably more used to crime victim’s spouses wanting revenge, not mercy for the criminal. But his gun never wavered. He just pointed it past her arm at the kid’s belly instead of his head, presumably so if he had to shoot the kid, he wouldn’t splatter Ellen with too much brain material. I owed this guy a beer.

“It doesn’t work that way, Ellen. He gets the key. Your husband presses charges. If your husband doesn’t, I can still arrest the kid because I witnessed a crime.”

“Then you’ll have to arrest me too,” Ellen said firmly. “For obstruction of justice.”

The cop glanced back at me. I started laughing. It trailed off because I was too tired to keep it up. “I just want out of here. I don’t give a shit about pressing charges. He’s not really dangerous. He’s just . . . I don’t know what. Ruthless. Ellen knows where he got that from. Her side of the family.” She didn’t move, and I added, “Look, she means it. She might make you shoot her. Can we just forget all about this and go home?”

He finally holstered his gun. “You know, Laurie,” he said conversationally to my sister-in-law, “I think your whole goddamn family is crazy.”

It took a couple minutes for the kid to locate the key, but finally there he was, coming towards me. “Let me do it,” I said, thrusting my hand between the bars. He was chastened now, and didn’t protest as I took the key from him and unlocked that goddamned padlock and pushed open the door and walked a few feet into the open basement.

Ellen put her hand on my arm. “You can come on back to the house.”

I looked down at her hand. I didn’t know anymore what to feel. I should feel gratitude, I supposed, that she was offering this refuge. But she was just being nice, and I didn’t want that. I shook my head. “I’ll be okay. I just need to get cleaned up, and I’ll head on home. I have—” it seemed so strange, but it was true—“I have to prepare for that seminar. Starts . . . ” I couldn’t remember what day today was. “Next Tuesday. Hey, chief, can you give me a ride back to the hotel?”

The cop shook his head. He didn’t mean “no,” he meant I was crazy. “Sure.” He fixed the kid with a sharp look. “I got my eye on you, boy. You better make this right, or I’m going to remember my sworn duty and pack you in that cell to see how you like it.”

The boy muttered something conciliatory and looked down at his boots. He was probably trying to figure out what it meant to “make this right,” and I was sorry I couldn’t help him there. I was a lot older and presumably a lot wiser, and I didn’t know myself. Nothing, probably, would make this right. I knew I had to deal with him somehow, reassure him, be a father, something. But I felt nothing at all for him. Nothing. No kinship, no hatred.

So I grabbed him around the neck, flung him into the cell, slammed the door, closed the lock, and pocketed the key. Then I said, “So what about that ride?”

The cop smiled. “Sure. Let’s go.”

A minute later I was standing out in the sunlight, feeling the breeze coming down from the mountains on my face. There are ways to feel pleasure even at the broken moments of life, and that’s what I felt. I had to remember this, because I had the idea I was in for more brokenness ahead.

Sticking my hand in my pocket, I found the key, and looked around for a worthy target. The mailbox, out by the end of the driveway. I sighted, and threw the key over there, and heard the clink of metal against metal.

“Good shot,” the chief said.

“I grew up in a pub. Played a lot of darts.”

I looked back at the porch, and Ellen was standing there. She was looking at me, not the key lying in the gravel. As I climbed into the cop’s Charger, she turned and went back into the house.

“You didn’t have any backup, did you?” I said as we backed out of the driveway.

“Nah. Figured I could handle it more . . . discreetly by myself.” He looked over at me. “Your wife was worried about your daughter finding out.”

He didn’t need to say it out loud—that if Ellen hadn’t protected the boy, there would be no reason to worry about Sarah finding out.

“Well. Thanks for showing. And the ride back.”

He dropped me at the motel. No recriminations. No questions. Small town. No bureaucracy, no rules that couldn’t be broken. I supposed I should be relieved. There would be no story about me on the wire services, no speculations about the kidnapper, no sidebar about the last time I was trapped in a cell. It was all over.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The hotel had kept the room for me. I yanked off the yellow police tape across the door and went in, my stomach clenching at the faint smell of chloroform clinging to the carpet.

First I took a long shower. Then I got out and pulled on some shorts and went for a run. The high school track was deserted. Just me and the open air and the mountains all around.

I ran back to the motel and took another shower. I thought maybe I should keep that up forever—shower and then run and then shower . . . stay in there forever. No need to face what was ahead of me.

Instead I got dressed and called for a pizza to be delivered and fired up the laptop and checked my email. Two days worth of newsletters from various news sites, some jokes from friends, a couple more queries from students too worried about their grades to wait for the report to appear in the mail. And an email from Sarah. She hated the camp. She hated her boss. The kids were obnoxious and didn’t obey. And she was homesick.

That was code for missing her boyfriend Josh, a slight red-faced boy who never spoke above a whisper when I was around. That could have been because the first time he took Sarah out, I took him aside and told him if he treated her with less than respect, I’d break every bone in his scrawny body.

Sometimes being a father was really rewarding.

But it also had its responsibilities. I sent off a quick reply, telling her to hang on for another week, and if she still hated it, her mom and I would come pick her up and she could get a job at the mall for the rest of the summer. I figured that she’d be happier in a week and I wouldn’t have to make the drive. I read it over and then backspaced and deleted “your mom.” I doubted I’d be going anywhere with Ellen for a long time.

By evening I was okay.
I started going through my notes for the journalistic ethics seminar, noting down examples from my experience to illustrate each ethical point. I was amused now at how often reality defied the black-and-white dictates of the ethics textbook. Then again, life was always more complicated than any textbook writer could describe.

I was getting better at this, this getting over being held hostage. Last time, as Ellen so kindly reminded me, it took years. This time—hell, four hours and I was back to normal.

There was a knock on the door, and my pen froze on the page. I forced myself to put it down, get up, go to the door, and look through the peephole. Ellen was standing there, her face distorted by the fish-eye lens, surrounded by the glare of the floodlight. Probably her partner, the kid, lingered just outside of viewing range, mace in hand.

I let her in. She was my wife, after all. For the time being, anyway.

And she was alone.

“Where’s the kid?”

She glanced back through the open door, as if worried I meant it. “You shouldn’t call him the kid. He has a name.”

“Two, in fact. What’s up?”

It was all very casual, considering the circumstances. That is, until she came to me and, her expression purposeful, began unbuttoning my shirt.

I gripped her hands and they stilled.

“I’m a little old to be eager for a pity fuck.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were usually a clear gray, but now I couldn’t read them. Her hands closed into fists within mine. “Let go of my hands, or I’m leaving and going straight to an attorney’s office.”

“I don’t know that you’d find one open this time of night.” I relaxed my grip, and let her resume her unbuttoning. “Another ultimatum. Whatever happened to my generous, giving Ellen?” I meant it ironically, but it didn’t come out that way.

“I decided I’d get more respect if I became the demanding, difficult Ellen.”

“So,” I said, as if I didn’t already know, “what’s your demand?”

She wasn’t nearly as difficult as she’d claimed, and for at least a little while it seemed like all was well again. It had been a week or so since we’d last shared a bed, and everything had changed— but the magical thing about marriage was that you could in good conscience keep making love even so.

I told her, just to get it on the record, “I don’t
need
this.”

“But we do.”

I didn’t want to think about how much that composed wisdom of hers was concealing. She was hurt. She was confused. I knew that, even if she didn’t show it. I summoned up some courage, and, lying there in the dark, her head on my shoulder, I said, “Ask me. I’ll tell you.”

But she said nothing. I suppose, with all the mystery there was between, she couldn’t begin to choose a single question. So I started with a single answer. “You’re the only one I love. The only one I ever loved. That’s why I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want to lose you.” After a moment, I added, “And I couldn’t figure out how to explain it anyway.”

“You really didn’t know she was my sister.”

“No. How could I know? I’d never met her. There are a million Cathy’s out there. It never occurred to me.”

“You didn’t ask why she came after you that way.”

“I was 22. She came up to me in my father’s pub and wanted to take me to bed. You think I asked why? I thought I knew.”

“And you never guessed? All that time afterwards?”

“You know,” I said with some exasperation, “First I put it out of my mind because I was ashamed of the whole episode. And second—come on. Never in a million years would I have imagined your sister would do that. You always talked about how wonderful she was.” Ellen was silent. I didn’t like the sound of that, so I added, “And I didn’t meet her again. We got married so quickly she didn’t come to the wedding, thank God. And then we were posted to
Europe
.”

“But she knew from the first. That’s what you’re saying. She knew who you were and came and found you. Deliberately.”