While I'm Falling (24 page)

Who knows how long she might have gone on like that if it hadn’t been for Greg Liddiard? An entire year passed between the morning of that grim conversation with Dan and the day work commenced on the roof. And for a week after that, Greg Liddiard and another man had sawed and hammered and thrown down shingles without much attention from her. It was summer, so she wasn’t subbing, and she hadn’t gotten many hours at DeBeck’s. So she was mostly at the house, paying bills, working in the garden. She went through the girls’ old clothes to see what she could donate. She played a Neil Young CD one afternoon, and later, when she was going out to check the mail, the older, shorter of the two roofers, the one who would turn out to be Greg Liddiard, called down to thank her for the music, saying he could hear it up on the roof and that he liked her taste; but she’d only nodded and smiled. She wasn’t looking for trouble.

Really, this was all it took. Greg Liddiard could have said anything about poetry. He could have been an idiot, though he was not. She was that starved for interaction, for real eye contact, even. She was standing by the window at the end of the hall, the afternoon sun shining so hard that her skin felt hot and she had to move away from it. Later, after he moved past her, when she turned and looked up at the sky, she saw that it was a cloudy day.

It was just one indiscretion, and never even fully realized. But as Dan liked to say, she had made her bed, and she could lie in it. Or sit in a booth at a diner, with all her worldly possessions packed in her minivan.

This is what she would tell her daughters, both of them, if they would let her. But Elise got angry when she talked about Greg. Veronica clapped her hands over her ears. She understood—they thought she meant to talk about sex; and yes, of course, that was private, and nothing they wanted to associate with their mother. But so much that was private could be helpful, instructional, and what she wished she could tell them was that what happened with Greg had little to do with sex and more to do with bravery. Even before she met him, she had grown tired of living cautiously. She wished she could tell them that as scared as she was now, she didn’t regret what she’d done. Passion wasn’t always rewarded. And yet that wasn’t the point.

Of course, neither of her daughters—the lawyer or the future doctor—was asking for any advice or wisdom from her at the moment. Just the night before, when she had come to Veronica’s door, when she’d had to tell her daughter she had nowhere else to go, Veronica had looked at her with a mix of sympathy and horror, and it had made Natalie want to run back out into the night, into the cold, to the van. She wanted her daughter to feel sorry for Marley; that was fine. She didn’t want her to feel sorry for her. She wanted to be someone her children could admire.

She thought she still could be. She felt sure of it for a while that morning, after she helped Veronica, after they’d gotten Jimmy out of the van; and she wanted to hang onto that idea that she could give each of her daughters something now, even after she had failed, even while she was falling. She did have something to give them. Because she knew she could get back up.

It was almost midnight when she closed the newspaper and stood to put on her coat. She’d only circled two ads, but she’d read the rest of the paper, cover to cover, except for Sports. She took just the Classified section and left the waitress five dollars. On her way out, the waitress waved and thanked her. Natalie, lifting her head, thanked her back.

I
KNEW, EVEN AS
I
TOOK
the test, that I was failing it.
List below the hydroxybutanol structures that have R configurations.
I’m not sure why I made myself stay the entire hour and a half.
What spinning pattern in the H-nmr spectrum would you expect for H atoms colored green in the structures below?
I probably could have walked out in the first fifteen minutes and gotten the same grade.

But the results would be the same. I put on my coat, handed in the test, and walked out into the cold morning. The sky was a bright, cloudless blue and the bells of the campanile were chiming. Across the street, two men on ladders used ropes to lift a giant Christmas wreath over the front doors of Strong Hall. The men did not speak to each other, but their movements seemed coordinated; the wreath slowly rose, perfectly centered. I found a bench and sat down to watch. I could do things like this now. It was over. There was nothing to cram for, no deadline looming over me. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be.

And so the ache in my chest returned. During the exam, and only during the exam, I had been free of the heavy sadness that I’d gone to bed with the night before. Now, again, I had nothing to distract me. The bench was concrete, and the longer I sat there, the colder I felt. But I didn’t get up. The wreath turned blurry in my eyes, and I pulled my hat down low on my head.

“So how’d it go?”

I looked up. Tim stood in front of me, no coat, just the same sweater he’d been wearing the night before, his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. I started to smile, but the expression on his face stopped me. His dark hair was combed, his chin cleanly shaved, but I could tell, just looking at his eyes, that he hadn’t slept.

“I was at the library.” He nodded behind him. “I saw you over here. I just thought I’d come over and see how it went. The test, I mean.”

I shook my head. I hated that I was the reason he looked so tired and sad. If I reached out, or even tried to go near him, he would stop me—I could tell. But he kept looking at me, waiting. He really did want to know about the test.

“I failed it,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’m sure it wasn’t as—”

“No. I did. I really did. But I’m fine with it. I don’t care.” I looked at the sidewalk by his feet and focused on not crying. If I did, he would feel sorry for me, and that wasn’t right. I tried to pretend I was yawning.

He shifted his weight and crossed his arms. He gestured for me to scoot over. He sat on the bench, as far away from me as possible, and started rooting around in his book bag. He took out a calculator, another calculator, a book titled
Thermofluid Systems,
a can of Coke, the Sports section from some newspaper, and an orange. “I thought I might have some Kleenex,” he said. “I had that cold a couple of weeks ago.”

I smiled, wiping my cheeks with the back of my mitten. “Thanks for checking,” I said. I looked away from him, out across the street. The wreath was up above the doors now. The workmen stood below, looking up, one of them pointing at the red bow.

“If you didn’t want to move in with me, you could have said so.” Tim looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “If that really was the problem.”

I nodded, still looking at the wreath. This time last year, my parents were married. I was getting ready to go home for Winter Break. The Roofer was maybe already on the scene, but I didn’t know it yet. On Christmas Day, my family opened presents in the morning, and we ate turkey at the dining room table, and then we walked to Mr. Wansing’s for the neighborhood pie party, just like we did every year. When we were little, it was the Wansings, the husband and the wife. Mrs. Wansing died when I was in third grade, but I have a clear memory of her carefully getting down on her knees to look me in the eye and ask, very seriously, if I wanted pumpkin or pecan. After she died, my mother hadn’t thought that Mr. Wansing would keep inviting everyone over. He did, though. He bought pies at the store, and they weren’t as good as the ones that she had baked, but everything else was the same. He set out polished silverware and whipped toppings the exact way that she had done. He also put a framed picture of her on the big table where all the pies were, so it seemed like she was gazing out over them, smiling at their familiar guests.

And just last year, we had all gone: my mother and my father, Elise and Charlie, and me. I hadn’t thought much about it. I hadn’t known it would be the last year, how much everything was about to change.

Tim rested his elbows on his knees. Even with his knees bent, his long legs stuck out far from the bench. A man walked by, and he pulled them in. “I was just asking,” he said. “I wanted to help you. You hate your job, right? I was trying to help.”

“I know,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “Okay. That’s not completely true. I wanted you to move in. For me.”

“But you wanted to help me, too. I know you did.”

He gave me a long, appraising look. His gaze moved from one of my eyes to the other, and his mouth did something close to a smile. “I forget you’re younger.” He looked unhappy again. “It makes a difference, I guess.”

I nodded. Despite popular belief, it wasn’t always so great to be both young and in love. And yet, even at that moment, I had to sit on my hands to keep them from going to him. It felt like a physical pull.

We sat on the bench for a while, not speaking. Someone walked up and gave each of us a flyer for a garage sale.

He rubbed his eyes and looked up at me. “So what do you want, Veronica? You want to date around? You want to see other guys and then get back together? I’m not going to do that. I can tell you that right now.”

“No. That’s not what I want.”

“Then what? Do you know?” He pointed at himself. “Because I do.” The tops of his ears were pink, maybe from the cold, maybe not. He squinted up at the sky. “Eventually…I want what my parents have. That’s not a terrible thing. They’re pretty happy. Okay? I know you’re cynical right now. But sometimes it all works out. You would know that if you’d ever met them.”

This was probably true. Two stories about Tim’s parents stood out in my mind. The first was that before Tim’s eldest brother was born, his mother had been in a car accident that burned her left arm and some of her neck so badly that she was in the hospital for months, and Tim’s father had stayed with her every moment that he could, reading to her or just sitting there with her so she would know she wasn’t alone. The second story was that just last year, the two of them had been asked to leave a movie theater because they were laughing too much at a movie that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

“I wish I’d met them,” I said, only because it was true. He turned and looked at me, mad.

“Why?” he asked. “What’s the point? Just curiosity?”

I shook my head, as if that were a reasonable answer. He waited.

“I want…” I rubbed my eyes, trying to think. “I want to be with you, but…” But what? I didn’t have the word for it. It was the feeling of being in the semi, all those exits rolling by. “It would be so easy to move in with you. It’s what I want. But it might not be good for me.” Even as I said this, I heard how cold the words sounded, and I hoped he would hear in my voice that I didn’t mean them coldly at all. “I meant everything I said last night. It was just a dumb thing I did. I still want to be with you.” I reached across the bench and tugged on the sleeve of his sweater. I let my hand rest there on his sleeve, and he didn’t pull away for a while.

But eventually, he did. He was quiet as he packed his things back into his bag. When he finally started to speak, I thought I was going to get an answer one way or the other. But he only looked up at the blue sky and said that the weather was supposed to turn again and that it might snow. I closed my eyes.

“Look,” he said, standing up. “I don’t know what I think. I need some time.”

I opened my eyes, surprised. He must have seen it, because he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said firmly. “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.”

I nodded somberly. I understood what he meant. But I was still hopeful. Really, the fact that he was just thinking it over was as good an assurance as any. When did anyone ever really know what they were going to do? People who had been married for decades broke promises to themselves and to each other, good intentions or not. That was the way it was with love. You had to have a contingency plan, or be ready to come up with one quickly. No matter what he decided this week, he could, at any time in the future, change his mind.