Since We Fell Read online

  That’s why they’d never found him. James was his surname.

  His first name was Jeremy.

  4

  TYPE B

  Jeremy James had been teaching full-time at Connecticut College, a small liberal-arts institution in New London, Connecticut, since September 1982. That same year, he bought a house in Durham, a town of seven thousand, sixty miles straight down I-91 from where Rachel grew up in South Hadley, and about a ten-minute drive from the house her mother had rented in Middletown, the year Rachel came down with mono.

  He married Maureen Widerman in July 1983. Their first child, Theo, was born in September 1984. Their second, Charlotte, a Christmas baby, arrived at the end of 1986. I have half siblings, Rachel thought, blood relations. And she felt, for the first time since her mother had died, as if she were tethered somewhere in the universe.

  With his full name in her possession, Rachel had Jeremy James’s entire life laid out before her in under an hour, or at least the portion that was a matter of public record. He became an associate professor of art history in 1990 and a full professor with tenure in 1995. By the time Rachel tracked him down in the fall of 2007, he’d been teaching at Connecticut College for a quarter century and now chaired the department. His wife, Maureen Widerman-James, was the curator of European art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Rachel found several pictures of her online and liked her eyes enough to decide she was the way in. She’d looked up Jeremy James online and found his pictures as well. He was bald now and heavily bearded, and in all the photos he looked erudite and imposing.

  When she introduced herself over the phone to Maureen Widerman-James, there was only the slightest of pauses before Maureen said, “For twenty-five years I’ve been wondering when you’d call. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally hear your voice, Rachel.”

  When Rachel hung up, she stared out the window and tried not to cry. She bit her lip so hard it bled.

  She drove out to Durham on a Saturday in early October. For most of its history, Durham had been a farming community, and the thin country roads she drove along were pocked by great old trees, faded red barns, and the occasional goat. The air smelled of woodsmoke and a nearby apple orchard.

  Maureen Widerman-James answered the door to the modest house on Gorham Lane. She was a handsome woman with large round glasses that accentuated the calm but penetrating air of curiosity in her light brown eyes. Her chestnut hair was red at the roots and gray along the strands closest to her temples and forehead, and she had it in a messy ponytail. She wore a red-and-black work shirt untucked over black leggings and no shoes, and when she smiled, the smile took over her face in a flood of light.

  “Rachel,” she said with the same mixture of relief and familiarity she’d used on the phone. It cemented the unsettling realization that she’d said Rachel’s name more than a few times over the decades. “Come in.”

  She stepped aside and Rachel entered a home that looked like the home of two academics—bookcases in the foyer, consuming the walls in the living room, under a window in the kitchen; walls painted in vibrant colors, the paint chipped in places and never touched up; figurines and masks from Third World countries in various states of display; Haitian art on the walls. Rachel had been in scores of homes like this during her mother’s career. She knew what LPs would be on the built-in shelf in the living room, what magazines would dominate the basket in the bathroom, that the radio in the kitchen was tuned to NPR. She immediately felt at home here.

  Maureen led her to a pair of pocket doors in the back of the house. She put her hands to the seam between them and looked over her shoulder. “Are you ready?”

  “Who could be ready for this?” Rachel admitted with a desperate chuckle.

  “You’ll be fine,” Maureen said warmly, but Rachel caught a sadness in her eyes as well. As much as they may have come to the beginning of one thing, they’d also reached the end of something else. Rachel wasn’t sure if that’s where the sadness stemmed from but she suspected it. Nothing would ever be the same in any of their lives.

  He stood in the center of the room and turned as the doors opened. He was dressed not dissimilarly to his wife, though instead of leggings he wore gray jeans. His work shirt was also plaid and untucked, but his was blue and black, and worn unbuttoned over a white T-shirt. A few bohemian touches to him—a small silver loop in his left earlobe, three dark rope bracelets around his left wrist, a chunky watch with a fat black leather band on the other wrist. His bald head gleamed. His beard was trimmer than it was in the pictures she’d found online and he looked older, his eyes sunk a little farther back in their sockets, his face hanging a little lower. He was taller than she’d expected, but his shoulders were stooped at the points. He smiled as she reached him and it was the smile she remembered, the thing about him she’d remember not only to her grave but long after she was buried in it. That sudden, uncertain smile of a man who had, at some point in his life, been conditioned to ask for permission before he expressed joy.

  He took her hands, his gaze searching her, drinking her, darting all over. “God,” he said, “look at you. Just look at you,” he whispered.

  He pulled her to him with fumbling ferocity. Rachel returned the hug in kind. He was a heavy man now, around the middle and in the arms and back, but she hugged him so tight she could feel her bones make contact with his. She closed her eyes and heard the beat of his heart like a wave in the dark.

  He still smells like coffee, she thought. No longer of corduroy. But coffee still. Coffee still.

  “Daddy,” she whispered.

  And he pushed her, ever so gently, away from his chest.

  “Sit.” He waved Rachel vaguely toward a couch.

  She shook her head, steeling herself for the latest shit sandwich. “I’ll stand.”

  “Then we’ll drink.” He went to a bar cart and started fixing all three of them drinks. “She died when we were overseas, your mother. I did a sabbatical in France that year and didn’t learn of her death for years. It wasn’t as if we had any shared friends to tell me of her passing. I’m truly sorry for your loss.”

  He looked directly at her and the depth of his compassion hit her like a fist.

  For some reason, the only thing she could think to ask was “How did you meet?”

  He’d met her mother, he explained, on the train back from Baltimore, where he’d gone for his own mother’s funeral in the spring of ’79. Elizabeth was heading east with her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins to her first teaching post at Mount Holyoke. Jeremy was in his third year as a part-time assistant professor at Buckley College, fifteen miles north. They were dating within a week, living together within a month.

  He brought Rachel and Maureen a scotch and raised his own. They drank.

  “It was your mother’s first year on the job in an extremely liberal region of a liberal state at the end of a liberal decade, so cohabitation without marriage was acceptable. Pregnancy without marriage might have even been more so; some looked on it as admirable, spitting in the face of the dominant paradigm and all that. However, if she’d simply been knocked up by a person unknown? That would have made her seem tawdry and pathetic, a foolish victim unable to rise above her class. At least that’s what she feared.”

  Rachel noticed Maureen watching her carefully, half her scotch already gone.

  Jeremy started rushing through his sentences, his words spilling and stumbling. “But it was one thing to, to, to sell the idea to the general populace, the people she worked with, et cetera. It was quite another thing to try to sell it at home. I mean, I’m not a math professor but I can still do math. And your mother’s was off by two months.”

  Here it is. He just said it, Rachel thought, and took a big pull on her scotch, but I’m not hearing it somehow. I know what he’s saying but I don’t. I can’t. I just can’t.

  “I would have been willing, even happy, to be part of selling the fiction, but I wasn’t willing to keep up the lie in our kitchen, in our bedroom, i
n the day to day of our lives. It was insidious.”

  Rachel could feel her lips moving ever so slightly but no words left her mouth. The air in the room was thin, the walls contracted.

  “I took a blood test,” Jeremy said.

  “A blood test,” Rachel repeated slowly.

  He nodded. “The most basic kind. It would never conclusively prove paternity but it would conclusively disprove it. You’re type B, yes?”

  A numbness spread through her like she’d mainlined Novocain into her spinal cavity. She nodded.

  “Elizabeth’s was A.” He drained his scotch. Put the glass down on the edge of the desk. “Mine is also A.”

  Maureen placed a chair behind Rachel. Rachel sat in it.

  Jeremy was still talking. “You understand? If your mother was A and I’m A but you’re B? Then—”

  Rachel waved at the room. “Then there’s no way you can be my father.” She finished her scotch. “I understand.”

  For the first time she noticed the pictures on his desk and scattered on the bookshelves and side tables in the office, all of the same two people—his and Maureen’s children, Theo and Charlotte, through the years. As toddlers, at the beach, birthday parties, graduations. Landmark moments and others that could have been forgotten were it not for the camera. But full lives lived, from birth to college. For the past seventy-two hours, give or take, she’d thought they were her half siblings. Now they were just someone’s kids. And she was back to being an only child.

  She caught Maureen’s eye and shot her a broken smile. “I guess this isn’t something you could have told me over the phone, huh? No. I get it, I do.”

  She stood and Maureen came out of her own chair and Jeremy took two quick steps toward her. She realized they thought she might faint.

  “I’m okay.” She found herself looking at the ceiling, noting that it was copper, of all things. “I’m just really . . .” She searched for the right word. “Sad?” She answered her own question with a nod. “That’s it. Sad. Tired too. You know? Been a long hunt. I’m going to go.”

  “No,” Jeremy said. “No.”

  “Please,” Maureen said. “Don’t go. We made up the guest room. Be our guest tonight. Take a nap. Stay. Rachel, please.”

  She slept. She never would have thought it possible with all the shame. Shame in knowing how much they pitied her. That they’d avoided this conversation for as long as they had because they hadn’t wanted to reduce her to what she was now: an orphan. She could hear a distant tractor as she closed her eyes and the sound chugged through dreams she couldn’t remember. When she opened her eyes ninety minutes later she felt, if anything, even more exhausted. She went to the window and parted the heavy curtains and looked out on the Jameses’ backyard and the backyard that abutted it, that one strewn with children’s toys, a short slide of hard plastic, a pink-and-black buggy. Beyond the yard sat a small Cape with a pale slate roof, and beyond that farmland. The tractor she’d heard sat idle in a field.

  She’d thought she’d known what it was to feel alone but she hadn’t. She’d had an illusion to keep her company, a belief in a false god. A mythical father. When she saw him again, she’d been telling herself in one way or another since she was three years old, she’d feel whole, if nothing else. But now she had seen him again, and he was no more connected to her than the tractor.

  She came down the stairs and they were waiting for her in the small parlor at the bottom. Rachel stopped in the doorway and noted the pity in their eyes again. She felt like an emotional beggar, going from door to door her whole life, asking perfect strangers to feed her. Fill her. Fill her again.

  I’m a bottomless vessel. Fill me up.

  She met Jeremy’s gaze and it occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t pity she saw there but his own shame.

  “I get that we weren’t blood,” she said.

  “Rachel,” Maureen said, “come in.”

  “But that made it okay for you to leave me?”

  “I didn’t want to leave you.” He held out his hands. “Not you. Not my Rachel.”

  She entered the room. She stood behind the chair they’d placed across from the sofa where they both sat.

  He lowered his hands. “But once she’d decided I was the enemy—and she decided that the first day I showed any doubt about going along with her fantasy of who impregnated her—there was no quarter.”

  She took the seat.

  “You know your mother better than anyone, Rachel. So I’m sure you were well acquainted with her rage. Once it found a target to focus on or a cause in which to channel itself? There was no stopping it. Certainly no speaking truth to it. And once I got a blood test, I transformed from an enemy to a cancer in the body of that house. And she went after me with single-minded”—he searched for the word—“madness. She was either going to bring me fully to heel or she was going to expel me.”

  “Expunge you.”

  He blinked. “What did you say?”

  “She screamed it at you that last night—I will expunge you.”

  Jeremy and Maureen exchanged startled looks.

  “You remember that?”

  Rachel nodded. She poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher on the coffee table between them. “And that’s what she did. If she’d expelled you, Jeremy, that would have worked out okay for both of us, I think. But when she expunged you, you were erased. The dead have names and grave markers. The expunged never existed.”

  She sipped her water and looked around the parlor at its books and pictures and the record player and LPs just where she’d predicted they would be. She noted the hand-knitted throws and the place where the love seat buckled on the ridgeline and the various scrapes in the hardwood floor and the scuff marks in the wainscoting and the slightly cluttered nature of it all. She thought how nice it must have been to grow up here, to have been the children of Jeremy and Maureen. She lowered her head and closed her eyes and in the darkness she saw her mother and the playground with the low clouds and the wet swings where Jeremy had taken her as a small child. She saw the house on Westbrook Road with its piles of sodden leaves the morning after he’d left. Then she saw an alt-life in which he hadn’t left and Jeremy James was her father in all but blood and he raised her and counseled her and coached her middle-school soccer team. And in that alt-life, her mother wasn’t a woman consumed by a thirst to bend all the people in her life to fit her own fucked-up narrative of that life but was instead the person she was in her writing and her teaching—objective, rational, self-deprecating, capable of a love that was simple and direct and mature.

  But that’s not what she and Jeremy got. They got a conflicted, aggressive, toxic mess of outsize intelligence, outsize anxiety, and outsize rage. And all of it bound up in an outwardly competent, cool, and calm Nordic exterior.

  “I will expunge you.”

  You expunged him, Mother. And in the process you expunged me and yourself out of the family we could have been, we so easily and joyfully could have been. If you’d just gotten out of your own fucking way, you horrible demon bitch.

  She raised her head and pushed the hair out of her eyes. Maureen was there with a box of tissues as Rachel had somehow known she would be. What was that kind of attentiveness called? Oh, right. Mothering. So that’s what it looked like.

  Jeremy had moved to the floor in front of her, sat looking up with his hands clasped around his knees and his face lit with kindness and regret.

  “Maureen,” he said, “could I speak to Rachel alone for a minute?”

  “Of course, of course.” Maureen returned the box of tissues to a credenza, then changed her mind, brought it back and placed it on the coffee table. She refilled Rachel’s glass of water. She fussed with the corner of a throw rug. Then she gave them both a smile that was supposed to be comforting but curdled into something terrified. She left the room.

  “When you were two,” Jeremy said, “your mother and I fought pretty much every minute we were in each other’s presence. Do you kn
ow what it’s like to fight with someone every day? Someone who claims to dislike conflict but who in fact lives for it?”

  Rachel cocked her head at him. “You’re really asking me this?”

  He smiled. And then the smile went away. “It scours the soul, damages the heart. You can feel yourself dying. Living with your mother—from the time she’d decided I was the enemy onward, anyway—was to live in a state of perpetual war. I was walking up the driveway after work once, and I threw up. Just puked into the snow covering our lawn. And there was nothing specifically wrong at that particularly moment, but I knew that the second I walked into the house, she’d come at me about something. Could be anything—my tone of voice, the tie I chose that day, something I’d said three weeks earlier, something someone else had said about me, a feeling she had, an intuition she’d received as if by divine providence that something was not right about me, a dream that suggested the same . . .” He shook his head and let out a small gasp, as if surprised how fresh the memories could be even now, almost thirty years later.

  “So why did you hang in there as long as you did?”

  He knelt before her. He took her hands and pressed them to his upper lip and breathed in the smell of them. “You,” he said. “I would have stayed because of you and puked in the driveway every night and gotten an ulcer and early heart disease and every other possible malady if it meant I could have raised you.”

  He let go of her hands and sat on the coffee table in front of her.

  “But,” she managed.

  “But,” he said, “your mother knew that. She knew I had no legal footing but she knew I’d stay in your life, whether she liked it or not. So one night, the last night we ever made love, I remember that well, I woke up and she was gone. I ran to your room and you were there, sleeping away. I walked around the house. There was no note, no Elizabeth. No cell phones back then and we hadn’t made any friends I could call.”

  “You’d been there two years by that point. You had no friends?”