Monday, Monday: A Novel (15 page)

“They’ll be good parents,” her father said. “I’m certain of it. I know it’s hard, but you’ve done what’s right.” He spoke over his shoulder. She could see his eyes in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t look back at her.

She tried to think of Bolivia. Sarawak. Ecuador. All those pictures. The obstacle course—rapelling, rock climbing. The softhearted city girls killing the chickens for dinner, and Albert Schweitzer wearing his safari hat. The handsome guys on the hillside, herding sheep.

It was a different life that she could have lived. No longer part of her world. All she could see was the baby. Whole countries had fallen away.

17

AQUARENA

The thought of Austin broke her heart, so Shelly didn’t return to UT that year. She didn’t trust herself to live so close to the baby and feel like a normal person. Too sad to make plans for the future, she returned to the little town of San Marcos where she had spent the first months of the pregnancy. She rented a cheap apartment and got a job in the gift shop at a local tourist attraction called Aquarena Springs.

Aquarena wasn’t Ecuador, but a kind of a magical world of its own, with a Swiss sky ride of gondolas that floated like bubbles high over the tree-lined headwaters of the San Marcos River, and a submarine theater for underwater shows where beautiful girls called Aquamaids wore Polynesian sarongs and fed milk bottles to swimming pigs and had underwater picnics with Glurpo the witch doctor, their hair billowing luxuriously about them. Glass-bottomed boats glided among swans and ducks on the peaceful waters, looking down upon crystal springs bubbling below. Fountains sprayed water out of the river, creating rainbows in the sunlight. A frontier town next to the Visitor’s Center where Shelly worked had a jail, a blacksmith shop, and a general store. The barbershop where Gene Autry had shined shoes as a boy had been hauled in from Tioga, Texas. The saloon had a player piano. For a dime, visitors could fire electric rays out of a three-shooter pistol at a life-size talking wax gunfighter. They could walk through a fun house with trick mirrors and watch trained chickens play checkers and tic-tac-toe. They could clap their hands at the “scare goats” and see them fall down and go rigid.

Shelly had been working in the gift shop for less than a week when the skies dumped nineteen inches of rain on San Marcos, inundating a fourth of the town. It was the spring of 1970, the worst flood on record in San Marcos—a town that was prone to flooding.

She had driven to work early that morning, inching her way through the heavy rain in a used Chevy Impala her parents had lent her the money to buy, the windshield wipers useless against the blanket of water. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and tennis shoes, and carried her work dress in a bag to keep it from getting soaked.

Under a flimsy umbrella that tugged in the rising wind, lightning flashing and thunder exploding around her, she ran from the parking lot to the open breezeway between the restaurant and the gift shop. It was slippery in the breezeway, and Shelly stepped carefully here, avoiding the misty splatters. The air smelled cold and electric.

She found the gift shop brightly lit compared to the rainy darkness outside. Her coworkers, a petite coed named Miriam with a sleek bob cut, and a husky local girl named Sandi, who wore too much mascara, stood at the plate-glass windows, staring out at a deluge so heavy it curtained the river from sight.

“Nobody’s going to come today,” Miriam said as Shelly joined them at the window. “I wished they’d let us go home.”

“I feel like we’re in the submarine theater,” Shelly said.

“I guess they won’t be running the sky ride in this,” Miriam added.

“One time when I was little I saw the trees on Lime Kiln Road completely underwater,” Sandi said. “And that’s just half a mile from here.”

“They could not have been underwater,” Miriam scoffed, turning from the window and starting to count bills into the register. She had a persnickety personality, and neither Shelly nor Sandi liked her.

“You don’t know; you didn’t grow up here,” Sandi answered.

A man—a blur in the rain—ran alongside the windows in the direction of the restaurant. “So there are still people around,” Miriam said. “I guess we won’t be going home.” A trickle of water slid under the door from the breezeway. “What we need is a mop.” She went into the storage room to look for one, and came out with an electric fan, which she plugged in, facing it toward the door so it blew the encroaching puddle back in ripples.

They started moving the merchandise up to the higher shelves. Some of the items were heavy, and Shelly had trouble lifting them with her crooked arm. She was lifting a box of ceramic piggy banks from under the desk when the door opened with a jangle of bells. Expecting to see the supervisor, she turned. But it wasn’t the supervisor that came in. It was a wave of water.

Miriam gave a confused laugh but cut it short because the water kept coming. The glass door was heavy, but the force of the flow held it open. Miriam tried shoving it shut, but the water swept her feet from under her and knocked her to the ground.

The water swirled around Shelly’s ankles in muddy whirlpools. She was surprised it came in so quickly and was so cold—much colder than the river. It felt like ice water. She sloshed toward Miriam to help her up, but heard a whirring sound from the blades of the fan splashing droplets into the air, and realized that the electrical cord was underwater. She ran to pull the plug out of the socket, but the water hobbled her and she lost her balance. On her knees, she crawled toward the wall and yanked out the cord. A buzz of electricity shot through her hand, and a spidery branch of fire traveled over the surface of the churning water.

Then the lights went out. Shelly was seized with fear to be in the dark. The rising water lifted her from the floor and shoved her across the room. In a flash of lightning she saw Sandi standing on the desktop, looking toward the windows with an expression of panic. She saw her plunge into the water and drag herself against the current toward the door to the breezeway. And in that instant she understood it was the river pouring in—not the rain. In minutes, it would fill the room.

Postcards swirled around her; snow globes bobbed in eddies. Slimy things brushed at her legs. Lightning cast an eerie sheen on the water and over the trinkets on the shelves—wooden pecking chickens and souvenir teacups and jars of polished stones.

The water tugged at Shelly’s sneakers and she kicked them off. “Kick your shoes off!” she yelled. The three of them tried to get to the door, but the water was up to their waists and then to their chests, and the floor slid out from under them. The postcard rack floated sideways, blocking their way. When they got hold of each other, Sandi was in the middle between the others. Shelly struggled against the current, but her left arm was weak and stiff. Trash clogged the water, and Shelly felt as if she were fighting through a garbage heap. Fish wriggled against her as she tugged at the doorframe.

For half a second after they had pulled themselves through the door, Shelly thought they had escaped to safety. But then the current grabbed them and sent them through the breezeway and toward the parking lot at a terrifying speed. Strung out and clutching each other’s hands like paper dolls, they tried to hold on to each other. But the water pulled them apart, and Shelly saw the others carried away from her, their heads bobbing as helplessly as volleyballs on the current. In the flickering lightning she saw Sandi sink, and then rise to the surface, and sink and rise again, her fat cheeks stained with mascara and her mouth open.

The current tangled Shelly’s hair into her mouth and eyes. Swimming sideways against the powerful flow, she angled for a nearby tree, but something rammed the back of her head and shoved her under the surface, where the deafening noise of thunder and rain gave way to a sudden quiet and a strange illusion of peace. Shelly squeezed her eyes shut and let the quiet hold her until branches and debris snagged in her hair and dragged her forward again. She tried to claw her way to the surface, but the branches trapped her and she could not get up for air. Through murky water she saw the leafy limbs in front of her face and tried to dig out of the snarl by kicking and thrashing. But the branches only seemed to close more tightly around her, scratching at her as she fought them. Her lungs ached, and she began, in a moment of panic, to think she would die. Her life had been wasted except for the baby. She was about to breathe water into her lungs when the snare of branches broke apart and allowed her to reach the surface.

The rain hit her face so hard that she wasn’t sure her head was above water until, in a flicker of lightning, she saw the tree she had been trying to reach rising in front of her. As if delivering her into its branches, the water swept her there. She kicked and pulled hard with her arms, hauling herself from the current, and climbed as high as she could.

In the tree, she clung to the branches, which swayed and rocked in the wind. She peered through a shroud of rain at lightning shimmering over the parking lot, where floating cars looked like whales. She watched the dark floodwaters sweep debris beneath her. Her teeth chattered and her heart pounded; she couldn’t forget how frightened she had felt when she was pinned under the surface, how strangely silent it was down there.

When the torrent finally slackened and the current slowed, she ventured down from the tree and found her friends. The river had become an enormous lake. Slowly, it began to recede. People waded in water up to their knees. They found animals dead in their cages. The talking wax gunman bobbed in two feet of water. Cars had drifted away. Fish flopped about in the buildings. But no one at Aquarena had drowned in the flood. Shelly stood in the ruined gift shop in a daze, asking herself if there was a reason why, for the second time in her life, she had come so close to death, and yet been saved.

18

HER NAME IS CARLOTTA

The flood had floated twenty-four alligators out of their fenced enclosure, and they had to be rounded up. For days, while trash still hung in the willow trees along the river and Shelly swept dirty water and handled bloated souvenirs, workers carried alligators past the gift shop with their snouts taped shut and their legs secured behind their backs.

Shelly kept thinking about how it felt to be caged under the water. She didn’t know why the snag of limbs had let her go. Maybe a stick, haphazardly lodged in the tangle, had shifted at just the last second. Maybe some piece of floating garbage had jostled the mass of limbs at just the right angle, just the right time. She could still feel the panic, the ache in her lungs, with the same clarity that she could recall how the flies had waded about in her blood on the South Mall. Four years ago a single inch of all the inches between the tower deck and the plaza, twenty-eight floors below, had meant the difference. And now the sudden movement of a jumble of wreckage had saved her life.

She began to wonder if maybe her life was worthwhile after all—if maybe she was meant to resurrect her old plan to join the Peace Corps. She could work at Aquarena for another year and save up her money, then move back to Austin and finish school. She could improve her Spanish. In the Peace Corps, she could do some good in the world.

The debris was cleared, the spring showers washed the mud from the trees. Often at the end of the day Shelly took the sky ride, or the ferry, across the river and walked the Aquarena trails under tall trees shrouded with Spanish moss through a wonderland of gardens to historic sites—a replica of the tower of an old Spanish mission that had once stood on the banks, a gristmill powered by water, the log cabin of an early pioneer who had fought in the battle of San Jacinto and served the Republic of Texas and later bought this property on the San Marcos River. These days, a white-haired glassblower in a coat and tie and captain’s hat fashioned works of art for the visitors in that cabin. Sometimes he tied a blindfold around his eyes to show that he could create by touch alone. He talked to Shelly about blowpipes and paddles and thermal stress.

She became friends with the Aquamaids, who could hold their breath for two minutes underwater and casually sip air from a bubbling hose, and with the college guys who played the clownish witch doctor, and with the waitresses in the restaurant and the guys in uniform, who swung open the doors to the gondolas and swung them shut and shoved the bubble off to glide out over the water.

On her baby’s first birthday, in February of 1971, she rode the sky ride across the river and back so many times without stopping that she lost count of the number. Gazing down at the glassy river, at the swans drifting in formation, at the canopied tour boats, Ralph the pig performing his swan dive from the belching fiberglass volcano, she wondered if there was a birthday party for her baby, and what Delia and Jack had named her. She tried to picture the baby eating birthday cake. She wondered if she could walk yet, and if she could say any words.

In the spring, Shelly was alone at the register in the gift shop on a slow weekday morning when the tinkling bells announced that someone was at the door. She looked up to welcome the visitors and for a dizzying second didn’t quite place the family of three—a father and mother and a child on the mother’s hip. Because this was not where they ought to be, and the child was not an infant now, wrapped in a pink blanket.

Jack was holding the door open as Delia stepped inside. Shelly’s eyes remained on the child. She steadied herself at the counter. It flashed through her mind that she shouldn’t be seeing the baby—that there was something illicit in this. It was as if she were looking at one of the trick mirrors in the fun house, and the image was out of place or folded backward in time somehow. Something was not as it should be.

Except that everything was. The baby had orange curls and perfect skin and a perfect button nose, and her sturdy little legs were wrapped around Delia. She took in the sunny shop, the light from plate-glass windows pouring across the shelves of trinkets, and kicked her legs to get down. “Down,” she said, “get
down
.” Delia set her down, and she toddled toward an array of Indian drums and plastic tomahawks.