While I'm Falling

by Laura Moriarty

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Author Laura Moriarty, a recipient of the George Bennet Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, melted the hearts of readers and critics alike with her stirring debut The Center of Everything-a novel in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird. Now, in While I'm Falling, Moriarty again crafts a dramatic tale filled with unforgettable characters.

Release date: July 23, 2009

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 332

Sample

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

—J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement, 2008

ON A VERY COLD DAY during my sophomore year of college, when I was living just an hour away from home in a dorm, my father returned from a two-day seminar on financial planning to find what he initially thought was a stranger asleep in his bed. Even after he turned on the overhead light, he didn’t recognize the bearded face of the man sleeping openmouthed on one of the firm, supportive pillows he always missed so much while away. In those first confusing moments, my father later told me, he simply didn’t comprehend the situation. He would soon forgive himself this slowness—his experience as a trial lawyer had taught him that people often cannot comprehend the unexpected; the human brain can fail to register what seems impossible. “Blinded by naiveté” was how he explained it to me, in one of his more vulnerable—or perhaps more calculating—moments. Even after he turned on the light, he said, it took him several seconds to recognize the blond hair and pleasant face of one of the men who had worked on our roof the previous summer. Naiveté aside, I’m surprised he recognized the man at all. My father worked long hours, and so the repair of the roof, like everything that had to do with the house, had fallen to my mother’s domain.

The roofer’s tanned shoulders were visible over the top of the duvet. He did not wake when my father turned on the overhead light. Bowzer, our dog, was curled up at the foot of the bed, his silver chin resting on a lump that appeared to be the man’s right foot. When my father kicked the bed, the roofer turned and sighed, resting one pale arm over his eyes. He seemed to be groping for something—or someone—with his other hand, but still my father allegedly remained clueless. Our house was on a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Kansas City that is known for its safety, excellent public schools, and complete lack of public transportation; still, my father said that for far too long, he truly perceived the man as some kind of confused, unshaven transient who had broken in to take a mid-morning nap.

“I was exhausted,” he explained to me later. “Okay? Veronica? You understand? I’d been on a plane all day. All I wanted was to come home, change clothes—maybe even, God forbid, have someone make dinner for me—and I walk into that.”

He said the situation only started to make sense after he spotted the note. It was creased in half so it sat like a little tent on top of the roofer’s work boots, which were on the floor next to the bed, wool socks still nestled inside. Before my father even picked up the note, he recognized the lined yellow paper, a pad of which my mother kept in the drawer of her bedside table for copying down interesting passages in books, and gift ideas from the catalogues that she also read while in bed.

“O CLOUD-PALE eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes…” You look so beautiful asleep I can’t bring myself to wake you. But make sure you are gone by three. (And take this note with you!) I will call you. And I promise you, all day long, I will think about being brave.

The note was not signed, but my father of course recognized my mother’s handwriting, the careful cursive, the neat and even loops. He looked at her bedside table. There was the Philip Roth book she’d been reading before he left. Stri Vectin hand cream. A tube of the raspberry lip balm she had, for years—and in his opinion, very irritatingly—woken to put on in the middle of the night. His brain was able to register what was clear, but he was so surprised, he said, that his legs literally gave way, and he had to sit on the edge of the bed. Because of my father’s occasional back problems, my parents slept on an expensive mattress, the kind made out of the material that has something to do with astronauts—and apparently, it really could withstand the weight of a grown man sitting on the edge of it without disturbing a sleeping man, or even an elderly dog, lying in the middle. So my father had several seconds to look at the roofer’s slackened face, and to notice—to his even further surprise—just how young the interloper was. When I first heard the story from my bewildered and disgusted older sister, the roofer was reported to be about thirty years old. That may have been an exaggeration—to this day, my mother maintains he was closer to forty.

But we can all agree that my father—once he collected his wits—responded to the crisis with characteristic forethought and logic. I wouldn’t put all of this on his training as a lawyer. He is a huge fan of true crime—in his spare time, what little there is of it, he watches cop and private detective shows, Unsolved Mysteries, etc. He dropped the note where he’d found it, stood up, and took a large step away from the bed. His phone had a camera on it. He took it out of his pocket and took a picture of the sleeping man. He found the man’s flannel shirt lying on the floor, and he used it—as he had seen so many television detectives use latex gloves—to pick up my mother’s note. He slipped both articles behind her big oak dresser for safekeeping, and then crept over to his dresser, where he kept the small handgun he had purchased three years earlier after a house several streets away was burglarized—though it was a much nicer house, and the owners had been away at the time, skiing in Aspen.

“He bought that gun so he could tell everyone he bought it,” my mother had said. “He bought it to make me insane.”

And truly, on the snowy afternoon that the discovery of the sleeping roofer gave my father some reason to finally load the gun, he didn’t load it. He wasn’t looking for vengeance, he told me, just the upper hand.

“He could have just asked him to leave,” my mother pointed out later. “Mr. Drama. You know what? He probably could have just cleared his throat.”

But my father did use the gun, the tip of the barrel, to nudge the roofer awake. “Get the hell out of my house,” he said, very calmly, or at least that’s how he told us he said it, with all the quiet bravado of someone who has watched several Clint Eastwood movies in the course of his life. My father does have a trial lawyer’s flair for drama—he tells stories well, and he has a good memory for dialogue. But neither my sister nor I was ever completely convinced that his actual delivery was so tranquil—our father is a very excitable person. He screams when he loses his car keys. He wails when he stubs his toe. In any case, the roofer woke up quickly and found whatever my father said, however he said it, sufficiently clear, and the gun sufficiently motivating. He raised his palms in surrender. He asked permission to stand. To my father’s surprise, the roofer was wearing jeans, his leather belt still buckled. And he wasn’t that physically impressive, now that he was standing up. He was several inches shorter than my father, and though his arms were broad and muscular, he was a little soft in the middle. “Cloud-pale eyelids?” my father asked me later. “Cloud-pale eyelids?”

The roofer, his eyelids now invisible above his wide-awake eyes, asked permission to put on his boots, almost every word, according to my father, followed by an “uhhh” or a “duhhhh” that strongly hinted he was not just temporarily terrified, but also permanently stupid. Of course, my father’s impersonation may not have been accurate or fair. Long after the roofer—his name, I later learned, was Greg Liddiard—returned to Alaska to marry his pregnant girlfriend, and my mother had little reason to defend him, she told my older sister and me that there were many different kinds of intelligence and stupidity, and that Greg Liddiard—her former boyfriend, poetry pal, whatever he was—hardly had the market cornered on any of them.

 

My father, by his own admission, felt pretty stupid himself. He wanted both me and Elise to understand he’d been blindsided. You think you know a person, he said. You think you have a good idea of what’s going on in your own home. Once he understood the real story, he said, he was all done playing the dupe. Less than two minutes after Greg Liddiard ran shirtless out the door and down our long, icy driveway to his van, which was still parked in the curb of the cul-de-sac, my father used his cell phone to call my mother on hers.

“She must have seen the number,” he told me, still incredulous. “Okay? Veronica? She must have known it was me.” He clearly remembered that my mother’s hello did not sound particularly guarded, not particularly friendly or unfriendly. She did not sound like a liar, a betrayer, a thief of his life energy, of his very life. She sounded, he said, matter-of-fact.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re home?” There was activity in the background, people shouting. At first, he pictured her subbing at the elementary school or the junior high, answering her cell phone in front of a room of bored or hostile young suburbanites as they misbehaved and switched identities and asked when their real teacher would come back. But it was Saturday. My mother was working her volunteer shift at the food pantry for the homeless shelter. How altruistic! He imagined her stacking cans of soup, wearing an apron, a self-righteous expression, and also her wedding ring.

“Yes,” he said. “I am home, Natalie. And I think you better come home, too. In fact, you better come home right away.”

She must have picked up on his tone. He said she was silent for a long stretch. Even with the background noise, he could hear her breathing on the other end.

“Yes,” she said finally. “We need to talk.”

He laughed. He actually laughed. He was nervous, he said, freaked out, standing in their bedroom, looking in the mirror at his own middle-aged face and realizing just how much was about to change. My parents had been married for twenty-six years. My mother was a junior in college when they met, my father in his second year of law school. Their union had survived early parenthood, a flooded basement, and the deaths of both of their parents. They had been allies against my sister’s first boyfriend, Kyle, who had been nice enough at first, but who threatened to set himself on fire in our driveway after my sister broke up with him. My parents were married when Reagan was president, when the first Bush was president, when Clinton was president, and then the second Bush as well. They had planned vacations, funerals, and my sister’s wedding, together.

“Oh my dear,” he said, almost tenderly, his voice wistful, or at least it was each of the several times he told this story to me. “Oh Natalie,” he said to my wayward mother. “I’m afraid you have no idea.”

 

From this point on, the story gets even more slippery. Though unsolicited, my mother and father have each given me a different account of the Day of the Sleeping Roofer, and what happened after she came home. My father said he confronted her with the note, the shirt. My mother said he didn’t need to. He said she sat down at the dining room table, still wearing her long wool coat. She did not appear exactly devastated. If anything, he said, she seemed disoriented, her big eyes staring at the striped wallpaper and crown molding that she herself had picked out and nailed on, as if she’d never seen them before. My father repeatedly emphasized that she looked a little demented—her hat crooked over her curly hair, her cheeks bright red from the cold. He said she didn’t have anything to say for herself. He said he watched her stare at the wallpaper for a while, her runny nose unwiped, and then he went upstairs to get his travel bag, which was, conveniently, still packed, ready to go. He carried it back downstairs, past my catatonic mother, and out the side door to the garage, his heart, he said, a brick in his chest.

He’d only driven to the end of the block when it occurred to him that he had not done anything wrong. He still wanted to take a shower, and he didn’t want to take it in a hotel. He wanted to take a shower in the house that he had worked over sixty hours a week for over twenty years to pay for. So he drove back to the house and yelled this at my mother, his breath turned to vapor in the open doorway to the garage.

My mother agreed, according to my father. Or at least she understood he was right. She left for a hotel. She took only a suitcase the first time she left. Five minutes later, she came back for Bowzer, and all of Bowzer’s medicine, worried, she said, because my father was unfamiliar with the dog’s complicated care routine. My father admits she was contrite and dignified in both of her exits. Of course, he added, with no real malice, she could afford to be contrite at that point. She still had her credit cards.

 

The next afternoon, forty-two miles away, I went on my second date with Tim Culpepper. We went sledding on dinner trays I stole from the dining hall, and then spent an hour making out in his car, the heaters on high, Nick Drake on the little stereo. After he dropped me off, I was still so happy, and smiling so much, that people next to me on the elevator looked uncomfortable. When I got to my room, my phone rang. I had to tuck the cold dinner trays under one arm to get my phone out of my coat pocket. It was my sister calling from San Diego to tell me about the Sleeping Roofer. I stood still in my doorway, the light of the hallway bright, my room still dark, the phone pressed against my ear. My mittens were wet from the snow.

“Are you still there?” she asked. “Veronica? Did you hear me? Mom and Dad are getting divorced.”

The dinner trays fell on the toe of my boot, and then clattered on the linoleum floor. I said, “What? No they aren’t.” I had just talked to my mother the week before. She’d been worried about my scratchy throat, my sniffy nose. It was just a cold, but she’d wanted me to go to the doctor. She didn’t think I was getting enough sleep.

“I just got off the phone with Dad,” Elise said. “He’s already talked to his lawyer.”

It was a typical Elise response: irrefutable, no way out. I did not argue again. But when she told me about the Sleeping Roofer, I silently shook my head, not believing her at all. I could not reconcile the idea of it with all I knew of my mother. She was not a careless person. She smiled a lot, but not just at men. She smiled at old ladies. She smiled at squirrels. She was not a seductive flirt. Our neighbor, Mr. Shunke, would whistle at her when she was out gardening, but she would only roll her eyes. She wore comfortable shoes. She read magazines that had mostly recipes. And more importantly, she had been my mother. I had grown up with her kindness, taking it for granted, using it up.

“I have to go,” Elise said. She wasn’t crying, but her voice was quiet. “Charlie’s home, and we have dinner plans with someone at my firm. I’ll call you later.”

I was still holding the phone, staring at it, when Tim Culpepper knocked on my door. I’d left my hat in his car. He held it out to me, looking uncertain and very tall. I said, “My parents are getting a divorce.”

He came in and sat next to me on my bed, and spent much of the rest of the evening listening to me say, in so many different ways, that I was just really, really surprised, that I had not seen this coming at all. He said, “I don’t know what to say.” But he kept sitting there. I told him I was sorry for crying in front of him when he hardly even knew me. He said, “Oh come on, if I had a dollar for every girl who pulled this…” But he looked at my eyes and didn’t make any more jokes.

I didn’t want to call either my mother or my father. I didn’t want to hear them say it, and I didn’t know what I would say. Tim nodded. He didn’t say he had to go. I told him, again, how surprised I was. My family had just spent Christmas together. Elise and Charlie had come in from California. They stayed in her old room, and I stayed in mine, and on the afternoon of Christmas Day, we’d walked over to old Mr. Wansing’s for the neighborhood pie party just like we had on every Christmas Day of my life. Everything seemed normal. My mother got my father a recording device that looked like a pen, something he could use at work. My father got her a juice machine. They’d sat next to each other on the couch in bathrobes and watched as we opened our presents from them. In my memory, they both looked happy.

After a while, Tim started to look tired, his green eyes squinty, his long arms going wide when he stretched and yawned. I told him he could go if he wanted. I would be fine, I said. But I knew I wouldn’t be. I didn’t know what I would do with myself the rest of the night. I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I wouldn’t be able to study.

He raked his hands through his brown hair and said, “This may sound stupid, but when you’re this upset, sometimes TV is good.”

I didn’t have a television, so he took me to his apartment, where I watched infomercials and a documentary on coral reefs until I fell asleep on his couch. He slept in the chair beside me, his legs dangling over the armrest, one of his hands in my hair.

I never liked living in the dorm. Even as a freshman, I disliked the noise, the ugly, orange-cushioned furniture, the communal bathrooms halfway down the hall. During my first visit home, I worked out a careful budget to show my parents that their costs would actually go down for my sophomore year, even when taking utilities and food into account, if they let me move into an apartment with two other girls on my floor. My mother seemed persuaded, but my father would have none of it. He seemed preoccupied by the idea that I would somehow be killed as soon as I had to buy my own groceries. He didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of me walking or biking to the store. He didn’t care that one of my roommates would have a car. He worried my roommates would not be careful about locking doors and windows. He worried that they would skip out on their share of the rent, or suddenly start smoking, or have weird boyfriends. And then, he wanted to know, what would I do?

There was no arguing with him when he got like that, impervious to logic, talking too quickly to hear anything I said. Elise might have known what to say, or yell, back at him; but all I could think was that I had nothing to negotiate with, nothing to threaten, nothing to withhold.

Later that night, my mother tried to plead my case. She didn’t know I was listening. She thought I’d gone out to walk Bowzer, but I was just standing in the mudroom, scratching Bowzer under his collar so he would stay quiet, my ear pressed against the door.

“You read way too many of those crime books.” She sounded angrier than I was. “They are making you completely paranoid. And no, do not talk to me about everything you’ve seen in court. You have to quit talking to Veronica like that. I don’t want to teach her to be afraid of everything.” Here, to my surprise, her voice broke.

He started in with a “You don’t kno—” but she made a yelping sound so loud and sudden that I pulled away from the door, and my father actually stopped talking.

“She is making a perfectly reasonable request,” my mother said, her voice quiet now, her breathing even. “I think we could at least consider it.”

A long silence followed. I leaned close to the door again, waiting. I smelled cookies baking, chocolate chip. She would send me back to the dorm with several bags, enough to give out to my friends.

“Okay,” he said. “I considered it. And the answer is no. She’s safer in the dorm. I’m paying for the dorm. I’m not paying for an apartment yet. Period.”

He was calmer the next time we talked, though he didn’t change his mind. He said I would have to stay in the dorm until he could get my mother a new car, so I could have her minivan, which was old, but big and safe and reliable.

I didn’t press him after that. My parents didn’t discuss finances with me, but I had a good idea of why my mother was still driving the same minivan that she had been driving since I was in grade school, and why we had canceled our membership to the country club, and why I was only encouraged to apply for a college where I could get in-state tuition. My father was still making a good income, but there had been some bad investments, and then the nursing homes for both grandmothers, and then the funerals, and then the problems with the house.

My mother had been the first to notice the dark patches on the ceiling in the upstairs hallway. The night they got the estimate for a new roof, they stayed up late and argued, their words rising up from the heating vent in my room. My father said they would have to go into the retirement money, but my mother didn’t want to. He held firm. She was being ridiculous, he said. They had to pay off credit cards, and the home equity loan. The interest rates were killing them. She needed to do the math. They had plenty of time before he retired, and in just a few years, there would be no more nursing home bills, and no more funerals, no more poorly chosen stocks, and I would be the only one in school. He would reinvest in their retirement then. Smooth sailing, my father told her. For now, they just needed to get out of debt.

 

Of course, the roof repair ended up costing more than either of them could have known. After my father came home to find the Sleeping Roofer in his bed, it was pretty clear to all of us he would not be buying my mother a new car after all.

“Divorce is expensive,” he told me, not long after he’d moved out. “Damn lawyers.” He tried to laugh, but he looked a little dazed, and still as shocked as I was by what my mother had done. He was just getting over the flu, he said. His courtroom baritone was croaky. He’d aready gained some weight in his belly—my mother had been the one to monitor how much butter and salt he used.

“I can keep up with your tuition, no problem,” he said, his gaze avoiding my face. “I don’t want you to worry about that. But money’s a little tight. In fact, if you could think of any way to offset some expenses, I would very much appreciate that.”

So I returned to the dorm my junior year, this time as a resident assistant. I got three meals a day and a single room. In exchange, I had to attend a two-week summer training rife with workshops on things like fire safety, eating disorders, and CPR; during the year, I had to be in the dorm from six p.m. on for seven or eight nights a month in case there happened to be a fire, an eating disorder, or a youthful heart attack. The only other thing I was supposed to do was come up with a variety of event programming to make the dorm feel smaller and less institutional, at least for the freshman girls on my floor.

“I’m sorry,” my mother wrote in an e-mail. “I know you were excited about an apartment.” I could not tell if she meant “sorry” in the universal sense, just extending sympathy, or if she were specifically sorry for her actions, namely, having a slumber party with the Roofer. It was hard to know if she felt sorry about that at all. In those first few months after my father moved into a condo by the Plaza, my mother actually seemed happy, though the Roofer had long disappeared; she presented herself as pleasantly uncertain about what her future held—she didn’t know whether she would stay in the house or move to another part of town, or even to another city. She didn’t know if she wanted to go back to school. “I’m catching my breath,” she told both me and Elise. “I’m just going to wait a bit before I make any decisions.”

But by the time I moved home for summer break, there was a Realtor’s sign in the front yard, though she did not appear ready for any kind of open house. Elise’s room, my father’s study, and one of the bathrooms had been sealed off with some kind of plastic sheeting—my mother said she was trying to cut back on air-conditioning. She’d realized how bad it was for the environment, she said. It was the same reason she’d let the lawn go, she said—all that wasted water and energy and gasoline for the mower. I asked her, half-joking, if that was also why she had stopped using the vacuum cleaner, and the mop. And the dishwasher. Throughout my childhood, my mother had been an energetic housekeeper. She’d baked bread. She’d kept a little flagpole by the front door, with a different colorful flag for every holiday and season. But when I first came home that May, the Christmas flag, with its faded smiling snowman, was still flying over the doorway. Inside, small tumbleweeds of dog hair drifted under the ceiling fan of the living room.

She’d gotten a job selling accessories at DeBeck’s; it was just for the summer, she said. In the fall she would start subbing again, and figure out what she really wanted to do. She brought home fast food for dinner—mostly turkey sandwiches from a sub shop in the mall, and she ate hers right off the foil wrapper they came in, sliding mine to me across the table. She insisted we eat dinner together whenever possible, but she was difficult to talk to. She jumped around a lot in conversation. She asked me the same questions twice.

I, on the other hand, did my best to ask her no questions at all. I did wonder if she had been in love with the Roofer, and if she was heartbroken for him, and not my father. But I could not bring myself to ask her this. She was different now, too open, more than ready to tell me too much. She seemed desperate in a way that my father did not. I was anxious to get back to school, to Tim, to my friends, to all my plans, and to my own unruined life. My mother and I looked alike. We had the same dark, curly hair, the same brown eyes and long noses. But we were not the same person. That whole summer, I could feel myself pushing away from her, like a swimmer trying to escape someone reaching out, about to drown.

 

A week after I moved back into the dorm to begin my junior year, she sold the house. The buyer, who apparently had the rare ability to look past an overgrown lawn and plastic-wrapped rooms, wanted to close in thirty days. My mother acted as if she’d won the lottery. She was excited about moving into a new apartment, she said. It would be so nice to have all the maintenance taken care of, and so much less space to clean.

I understand now that I was refusing to see what I didn’t want to. I could have asked her more questions. I could have asked her how she really was doing. In my defense, I will submit that I was young. And she said, repeatedly, that she was fine, absolutely fine.

Just a few months later, winter descending again, she started to seem askew. I came to stay with her over Thanksgiving, and most of her things were still in boxes at her new apartment—she said she didn’t have time to unpack. She kept newspapers spread out . . .