The year She Fell (41 page)

“Yeah. I don’t know how she tracked me down—”

“Oh, I told her. I cried on her shoulder for weeks. She had all the salient details. Your name, what you looked like, your father’s pub. She didn’t have to be a Sherlock to find you.” Ellen said this with an edge of bitterness, then added, “I’m not sure why she did it.”

“Revenge. That’s what she told me, anyway. She got me back for hurting you.”

“When did she say that?”

“In
Belgium
. You remember. She stopped there on her way to climb the
Matterhorn
blindfolded, or some fool stunt.”

“At night. She climbed it in one night.”

“Right. I came home from work, and there she was, sitting with you. I was too stunned to make any sense of it, but then you left to shop for dinner, and she told me all about her desire for revenge.” I added, “I thought she was nuts. Crazy. I thought she was going to tell you.”

“Did you know about the boy? Brian?”

“Not till then. And I didn’t believe her. I thought she just wanted to cause maximum pain. And she was jealous of Sarah. That was clear to me. She didn’t think it was fair that we had Sarah. So I thought she invented another baby, just to get back at me. And at you.”

“You hate her,” she said wonderingly.

“Oh, yeah.” I stopped and took a deep breath. “I did. It took me a long time to stop. It was so willful. She was trying to hurt me—that I could understand—but she hurt you too, even if she wouldn’t let you know because she wanted you to go on loving her. And so, after that, she was always there somehow with us, even if I didn’t think of her for years on end.”

“Sarah was still a baby then. So . . . 1992?” Ellen paused, then whispered, “That was the last time I saw Cathy. She did her climb and went home and then she was dead a month later.”

Neither of us could follow that thought any further. Finally Ellen said, “Laura knew, see. Oh, not about you. But she saw Cathy that winter. She was pregnant then. And Cathy told her she would have an abortion. But Laura told her I was pregnant with Sarah. She must have changed her mind then.” She whispered, “I don’t know how to feel about her anymore.”

I slid my hand up her bare arm to her shoulder. Remembered her sister, the fierce woman who took over my life for a little bit, and changed it and never stopped changing it, even after she was gone. Felt within for some compassion. “She wanted revenge for something. That’s what it felt like. I thought it was because I broke up with you, and maybe it was. But . . . but people break up. I know it hurt you, and I’m sorry I did that, but it wasn’t something that needed revenge.”

Ellen stirred against me, her hand clenching into a fist on my chest. “I never even noticed. I mean, she was always so tough and so strong. That summer—it was all about me. I was depressed, and she was my cheerleader, and she must have been so much more hurt and frightened than I was.”

“Or angry.” I covered her fist with my hand. “She was just striking out. At men, I suppose. And I’d hurt you, so she could tell herself it was for you.”

 
Ellen said wonderingly, “No. She meant to hurt me. I see that now. I don’t understand. It’s like she hated me.”

I wanted to disagree, but I couldn’t. “I thought she was trying to teach me a lesson. That I should appreciate you better. And it worked. But that day in
Bruges
—the way she looked at you. And Sarah. Like you’d cheated her. Like you got to be happy and so she couldn’t. I told her—” That I would kill her if she hurt my family. But I couldn’t say that now, though I said it then, and meant it then. “To leave you alone.”

“But why? I loved her. I mean, we were sisters. We were friends too. She didn’t have any reason to want to hurt me.”

“She was messed up. She must have been. More than the usual young mistake mess-up. That’s why she did it. Not really to hurt you. But because she was so screwed up.”

She sighed, pressed into me. “I hate this—hate all the disorientation. All week I’ve been looking at you, and can’t figure out what’s you and what’s my illusion of you. Now I have to look back at Cathy and wonder who she really was and how I could have deceived myself so much about her and what she felt for me.”

I didn’t say it, but I thought it—
and I had to look at my wife and know how far she could go away from me.

She sensed my thoughts. “Are you still mad?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.” She sighed. “Maybe we’ll forgive each other.”

“Maybe. I suppose it helps that we’re equally angry.”

“Makes it harder to abjectly apologize, however.”

“I don’t think,” I said, “that I’m going to be able to let go of this. I don’t believe in . . . in us anymore.”

“Neither do I.”

We were talking about two different things. She was talking, I assumed—I didn’t want to ask—about my keeping this big secret all those years. About the shadow. About how we both lived in different marriages, and only I knew it.

I was talking about the way she’d stopped loving me.

We’d had two marriages. Maybe three. There was that marriage early on, the one we shared, when Sarah was born and we were happy and we were both one. Then there was my marriage, the one I lived after Cathy came to
Belgium
and I realized if I was honest with my wife, everything would change. Then there was Ellen’s marriage, the one that started around when I was captured—when she stopped loving me but kept on caring for me.

She stayed with me all night.

I’d finished showering and was just pulling on some clothes when the door knocker sounded. I looked back at the bathroom door. Ellen was still in the shower. After a moment, I went to the door and looked through the peephole to see my sister-in-law Theresa standing there in the morning light.

I wondered if her nunly sensibilities would be shocked to find Ellen emerging from my shower. Yes, we were married, and had shared showers for 20 years. But still—it felt illicit, here in Ellen’s prim hometown, with her prim nun sister, and all the conflict between us, that we were together.

To tell you the truth, it was another legacy of my Catholic boyhood. I didn’t want a nun to see the rumpled bed and figure out what I’d just been doing. At least, as far as I could see, she wasn’t wearing the habit. That probably would have traumatized me for life.

Finally I opened the door to let Theresa in to my place of sin, and saw the boy behind her.

“Cute trick, Theresa,” I said, standing back to let them both enter. “Have you checked his pockets for weapons?”

She ignored me, and the rumpled bed, with equal dignity. “I need to talk to Ellen.”

“She’s in the shower.” I briefly wondered how and when Theresa had met the boy. But he had to have found out about the family and where I was staying from someone. No hard feelings on my part. No feelings at all, in fact. I was done with all this. “Look, she’s going to be headed back to the house in a little while. Why not wait for her there?”

“We can wait here.” Nuns, I learned in my eight years of parochial school, elevate impoliteness to a sacrament. They make it clear that their holy mission trumps your petty earthly concerns— like my feeling trapped in this small room with the kid who had recently held me at gunpoint and was now leaning back against the door looking defiant.

“You can wait. He can leave.”

Theresa glanced back at him. “I brought him because he wants to apologize.”

I wanted to laugh at this. But apology was something to be encouraged in the young, so I turned my gaze to him and waited.

“Sorry,” he muttered, looking down.

“You can do better than that,” Theresa said. She sounded just like one of my primary school nuns, only they had paddles in hand when they rebuked.

He finally looked at me. He was trying, with some success, to wipe the sullenness off his face and replace it with sincerity. It made him look even more like my brother Patrick. Patrick always had to work hard to look sincere.

“I really am sorry,” he said. “I was wrong.” When Theresa’s nunly glare didn’t waver, he added desperately, “Really sorry.”

I put us both out of our misery. “Okay. You can go now.”

Now Theresa turned that rebuking regard to me. “And he wants to know about his mother.”

I couldn’t help it. I said, “The phone’s over there. He can call home and ask her himself.”

“My birthmother.” He was still standing by the door, looking harmless now, his head down. He was gripping the doorframe with one hand. “I just want to know what she was like.”

I sat down in the chair to pull on my shoes. “I’m not the best person to ask. I didn’t actually know her very well, and what I knew, I don’t think her son needs to hear.”

Of course, given my luck of the last week or so, that was when Ellen emerged from the bathroom in one of my t-shirts and her denim skirt. One look at her face told me she’d heard my comment and disliked it on three or four levels.

I rose, adding, “Her sisters will be able to tell you more. And her mother, of course. Back at the house.”

Ellen didn’t like that either, but I think it was the prospect of explaining all this to her mother that made her frown. “Mother is still out of town.”
Thank God
, her expression added. “But,” she added with determined brightness, “Why don’t I take you to our house, and show you Cathy’s athletic awards and equestrienne trophies?”

For the first time, I felt sorry for Cathy, to be reduced to that, awards and the trophies. She’d lost Ellen’s love. Maybe she just meant for me to lose it. But she’d miscalculated. No matter what, Ellen was still with me, at least for the moment. But Cathy had lost the sister who loved her best, even long after death.

Theresa looked at me sharply. “Are you coming?”

It was that nun-tone. I had to remind myself that this was Theresa, not old Sister Lucia from
Assumption
Primary School
. I would not get struck down if I didn’t obey. “No, thanks. I’m going to finish up some work before checkout time. And then head back home.”

The boy looked up. I swear I saw dismay in his face. This was getting all too complicated for me, right at this point. With the boy looking like a heartbroken child, and Theresa glaring at me like I was the vile seducer and abandoner from some Dickens’s tale, I wanted to be alone. Well, I wanted to be alone with Ellen. Even with us so at odds, she was the only one who understood what I felt. Probably the only one who cared.

Self-pity loomed. I veered away. “Good to see you again, Theresa.”

As they gathered near the door, I remembered the hospital records and retrieved them from under my laptop. “Hey, wait. I’ve got something you might want.”

The boy took the manila envelope and opened it right away. “It’s some kind of medical report.”

“Let me look. I’m a nurse. I can read them.” Theresa took the sheaf of papers and leafed through them.

She took her time. The room started to feel a bit overcrowded. I wished Ellen would make them leave, make Theresa read all that gibberish in the car. Or, alternately, that she would move them aside and let me out.

She got the hint. She pushed the door open and let the low light in, and the boy obediently walked out. Theresa was still reading, and was just out the door when she spoke, her voice trailing off as she walked away. “This doesn’t make sense. It says she’s—” and she added something in a mix of Latin and English, something I didn’t really get, having failed Latin in my one year at that Jesuit school— “—gravida 2—.”