The year She Fell Read Online Free Page B

needed for a quick trip home. I bought only enough for two or three days. I didn’t want to get trapped there with my mother, and an inadequate wardrobe would impress her where the need to get back to my job would not.
    And then I headed west, into the darkness of the mountains. But I’d forgotten how hard it was to navigate that two-lane road that twisted across the three mountain ranges between the Virginia line and Wakefield . This area was so poor that even the little hamlets along the way didn’t have streetlamps, so there was nothing but my headlights and some weak moonlight to illuminate the dark road—and nothing could light up the sheer cliffs that would suddenly loom around a bend.
    So about eleven I pulled over in a scenic overlook and curled up as best I could in the front seat. There was no use looking for a motel of any sort. No one out here could afford to invest in a business. Sometimes, seeing my home state with the eyes of an expatriate, I marveled at how very poor it was. I’d gotten used to Virginia , not the wealthiest of states, of course, but one where new construction sites dotted each highway interchange, and almost everyone had indoor plumbing and electricity. West Virginia had played out coal mines and laid off chemical workers.
    I didn’t sleep very well, huddled there behind the steering wheel, and by dawn was ready to finish the drive. With the sun rising in my rear-view mirror I crossed the last ridge and headed down into the valley, past the ski resort where my sisters and I and everyone else in Wakefield had worked during high school, and along the winding Croak River to town.
    The highway opened up to four lanes and the strip began, a sudden shock of tacky color and neon after the soft green of the countryside. It wasn’t much of a strip, really, just a McDonalds and a couple gas stations and a Super-8 motel. What I would have given at sixteen for a McDonalds here in town. Back then, we’d pile a half-dozen of us into a car and drive all the way to Jasper, so a Big Mac took on the mystique of ambrosia from the heavens.
    Back then, the forbidden was so simple.
    The last time I’d been here was Christmas, when a foot of snow had buried the streets. Now the road was filled with morning light, and my mother’s garden club must have been working hard, because the median strip on Main Street was red and gold with zinnias the size of goblets.
    If I were a stranger, I’d have thought this was the healthiest town in a blighted state. Maybe I would even stay to lunch at one of the tea rooms on the courthouse square, and wander through the campus of the college that allowed us to claim to be an oasis of knowledge in the desert of ignorance.
    But I grew up here, and coming back evoked guilt—guilt that I left, guilt that I wasn’t building the community, guilt that I felt so trapped in the town that was supposed to be my legacy.
    Growing up a Wakefield in Wakefield , my parents always reminded me, conferred some obligations. Our great-great grandfather had founded the town, or at least founded the bank that funded the town, and ever since, for most of the town’s infrastructure—the city council, the library board and the schools foundation and the Rotary and the Philomathean society and the garden club and the philharmonic— you’d always find a Wakefield in charge . . . until my generation. Mother was still on half the boards in town, and a cousin ran the family bank. But my sisters and I scattered as soon as we got old enough to catch the early bus out.
    I wondered, as I drove down the street winding along the river, if Mother blamed herself for that.
    Not likely. I was the sort of mother who blamed myself. Margaret MacDonald Wakefield, however, was made of sterner stuff. She would tell me, if I asked, that I had to take responsibility for my own actions, and if I regretted leaving Wakefield , perhaps that was a sign that I’d made a mistake.
    I didn’t want to hear that.
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