The Year She Fell by Alicia Rasley

Author:Alicia Rasley [Rasley, Alicia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family Life, Fiction, General, Contemporary Women, Family secrets, West Virginia, FICTION / Romance / Contemporary, Birthparents, Adopted Children
ISBN: 9781611940008
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books
Published: 2010-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

There’s no one who can do misery like an Irishman, and I did it right— a weekend of deep melancholy punctuated by jottings of broken poetry, three nights of whisky and comrades who’d also been destroyed by love once upon a time, and finally, when I sobered up, the phone at my desk singing a siren song.

I waited until after deadline, when everyone in the news room slid out the door bound for bed or bar. All alone then, I called Ellen. She sounded startled to hear my voice. Nervous. She would never be impolite, but I could hear something abrupt in the way she asked, “What was it you wanted?”

I sensed I had to get to the point quickly. She would find some excuse and hang up if I tried the small talk route. “I want to see you. Again. Soon.”

There was a quick intake of breath. “Tom . . . ”

“I can drive up tonight. Be there by morning. I have to be back by three for work, but—” But that sounded suitably impetuous and romantic—driving through the mountain night to get a glimpse of her, only to turn around and drive back.

“Let me call you back.”

This wasn’t the answer I expected. I started to worry. If she got away . . . “When?”

“A few minutes. I’m—I’m in the middle of something.”

Would she really call me back? I didn’t know. She wouldn’t lie, but maybe she’d find a way to forget. “I’ll call you back instead. Ten minutes.”

Ten minutes later, I had her back on the line. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Tom.” She was speaking carefully. “You were right back in May. We’ve run our course. No need to drag out the ending. It was just a college thing.”

She was reading this out loud. Jesus. She’d taken the ten minutes and written herself a script. I knew what that meant. She wrote things down when she meant to inscribe them in marble. Her to-do list was sacrosanct. If one night some dream inspired her to scrawl “Climb Everest” on a bedside pad, in the morning she’d be strapping on the crampons and picking up the ice axe. She believed in the certitude of ink on paper more than any reporter I’d ever known.

She meant to break up with me. Or not let me un-break up with her. I got scared. “Ellen, sweetheart, this isn’t some college . . . thing. This is a life.”

She didn’t have an answer to that in her script. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.

“I mean—” and I let it take over, that timeless rhythm, the voices of Yeats and Tom Moore and all the nameless bards who wrote the sweet sad songs I’d sing when I’d had a couple pints and Dad brought out his fiddle, the poets who always said the right words in the right key to make girls want to do what they oughtn’t to do, “I mean, this is killing me, losing you. I can’t do it.

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