Monday, Monday: A Novel (21 page)

“Lizard Mountain,” Carlotta said in a droll tone, keeping her nose to the glass, “looks like a lizard.”

“Yes, it does,” Shelly agreed.

“He has eyes,” Carlotta said. “He has a tail.”

At dinner, Carlotta sat beside Shelly and talked about her horse named Freckles while Jack and Delia talked with Dan. Afterward they sat out on the porch until late, Jack smoking his Camels, their conversation punctuated by the creak of chains supporting the swing and the high-pitched chirrups of crickets out in the darkness beyond the glow of the porch light. When the others had gone inside, Shelly stayed out, talking with Jack.

“I like Dan,” he told her. “He’s seems solid.”

“Very solid.”

“And you look happy.”

“I am. I hope you know how much I appreciate your letting us come here. I know it would have been easier for you not to.”

“True.” He drew hard on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. “But we would have missed you.”

The house was quiet when Shelly went inside. Dan was already sleeping, and Shelly returned to the window of their bedroom, sliding it open to feel the breeze and hear the rustling leaves and the pulsing sound of insects. The mountain sat hunched against the horizon, a dull black under the shimmering stars, the moon three-quarters full and lighting the mountain dimly.

The longer Shelly looked at the mountain, the more she wished it wasn’t there. It appeared hostile in this light—a dinosaur-lizard observing her with a small, immobile eye. The eye was formed by an odd stacking of rocks or a growth of trees or maybe a cluster of shadows from the tepid moonlight. Its stillness seemed aggressive. After a while she realized that the mute and staring aspect reminded her of the tower.

She closed the window and latched the shutters. Crawling into bed with Dan, she took his hand and slid it up under her nightgown and settled it onto her stomach, then lay there eyeing the room in the pallid light through the shutters. The dresser had a marble top and wooden drawer pulls carved to look like walnuts. A small rug covered a patch of floor. Mulling over her earlier conversation with Dan in the car, she thought how hard it must have been for him to keep to himself the shame he had felt all those years.

She wanted him to wake. She wondered if Wyatt had been here to this house, and if he and Elaine had perhaps stayed in this same room. The idea troubled her, and to dispel it she rose on her elbow and kissed Dan’s forehead, and then his mouth, and laid her head on his shoulder. Finally she moved his finger in a circle around her naval, and he woke up drowsily and made love with her.

When she woke in the morning, Dan had gone downstairs, and she opened the shutters and studied the mountain, plainly visible now in the morning sun: a jumble of sharp rocks darker and rougher than the flat land around it. Off in the distance were larger, imposing mountains, but they were pale against the sky.

Dan returned to the room while Shelly was getting dressed. “You want to go with me on an interesting outing?” he asked her. “Jack called the people who own Lizard Mountain, and they said we’re welcome to hike over there. It’s a volcanic dike that was probably active thirty million years ago. It used to have water, and still has depressions with plants and wildlife. Like its own relic ecosystem. Can I talk you into coming?”

They talked it over, but she decided to stay with Carlotta. She watched him from the window as he hiked out through the yellow grasses with his backpack. He turned and waved at her, calling, “Are you sure?” And she waved at him to go on.

She went to the grocery store with Delia and Carlotta and hung around the barn as Carlotta fed the horse oats out of a bucket and braided his mane. In the afternoon she ambled through the house, looking at knickknacks and photographs and all the different views from the windows. The parlor had a library alcove paneled in dark wood, and there on a shelf she discovered a framed photograph of Wyatt with Elaine and Nate. The three of them, wearing coats, were standing before a storefront window that reflected a narrow cobbled street. It was obvious in a glance that Elaine was pregnant.

Shelly stood staring at the picture. She tried to tell herself she didn’t mind about the pregnancy and shouldn’t feel hurt that she had not been told. Wyatt’s marriage had nothing to do with her. And yet of course it did. The baby Elaine carried in the picture would be Carlotta’s half brother or sister.

She picked the photograph up and studied it closely. Wyatt looked no different from when she had last seen him four years ago. He wore the same navy pea jacket he had always worn, and his hair fell at the same length over his ears. His sideburns were a little shorter than before. Nate stood exactly in front of him, his head cocked to the side and a sweet smile on his face, Wyatt’s hands resting on his shoulders. Shelly examined Nate’s features to see if they resembled Carlotta’s, but she couldn’t tell if they did. Elaine, standing very close to Wyatt, wore a long black coat and boots and a gray cloche hat that came down low on her forehead, covering her eyebrows. Her hair flowed out from under the hat, the ends fluttering around the bulge of her belly. She was as lovely as Shelly remembered.

A small noise made Shelly turn, and she found Delia looking at her.

“When was it taken?” Shelly asked.

“Last winter. The baby’s a month old now.”

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl. Her name is Margaret and they call her Maggie. I’m sorry, Shelly—I wanted the chance to tell you before you saw the picture. I should have told you last night.”

“Maggie Calvert,” Shelly said. It was a good name. She put the picture back on the shelf. “It’s all right. I’m married, you know? I’m happy. I’m not still in love with Wyatt. Can I ask you something, though? Have they been here to visit?”

“Yes, when we first moved in.”

She wished the answer had been no. “I guess Carlotta enjoyed having Nate here.”

“Yes, she did. Of course he’s two and half years older than she is, but they had a good time together.”

Late in the afternoon, Dan returned and stood in the kitchen with Delia and Shelly, guzzling lemonade and talking about the hike. “It was like a safari,” he said. “At one point I was looking at a fox, a hawk, and a coyote all in the same view. I almost stepped on a rattlesnake. It’s its own biological island over there. I’d love to know if anyone’s taken cores from the pond deposits or if they’ve dug test holes.”

Toward evening the heat began to lift. Jack returned from the campus, and Dan and Shelly followed Carlotta around the property on a rock hunt. “I understand that you like to collect things,” Dan told Carlotta. They filled their pockets with pebbles and stones and lined them up on shelves in a cabin down the road that Carlotta used for a playhouse. Dan told Carlotta the scientific names for the rocks, and she repeated and memorized them and made up common names of her choosing: Esmeralda and Sammy and Juan.

Later, Dan came into the bedroom and stood quietly looking at Shelly as she knelt before her suitcase, searching for a nightgown. “That picture on the bookshelves downstairs,” he said solemnly. “Is that Wyatt?”

She sat back on her heels. “Yes. With Elaine and Nate.”

“And you’re not in love with him anymore?”

“Not in the least. I’m in love with you.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Looking at him, she was sure.

He sighed, and half-smiled. “Just checking.”

24

MADELINE

Two years later, at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin, Shelly had a little girl whom she and Dan named Madeline.

The baby was tiny, and tenacious. She clung tightly to Shelly’s fingers. She didn’t look like Carlotta, who’d had pink skin and wispy cowlicks of red hair at birth. Instead she was pale, with straight black hair. Her lashes were long and her eyes dark and enormous.

Shelly’s mother came, and seeing her by the hospital bed reminded Shelly of the days after the shooting and the night when she woke from her terrible visions and fled to Jack’s room, and found Wyatt there.

Shelly was peaceful now, nursing the baby, though the ruined breast strained at the scars, tingling as if to produce milk though it could not. Madeline drew her head back, kicking with fury, and pushed her tiny nose up to the other breast, latching greedily onto it and settling happily into rhythmic suckling.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Shelly’s mother whispered.

Shelly stroked the baby’s soft face. “There’s plenty of milk. She’s doing fine.”

“Not about that. I’m sorry for what I did. The last time.” Tears began to flow down her mother’s freckled face and into the lines around her mouth, and Shelly remembered how her mother had not wanted her in their home at the loneliest time of her life, and how she had brought the red coat to the hospital as if a new coat could replace a baby, and how she had sat in the front seat of the station wagon without turning to look at her daughter whose heart was broken.

“Can you ever forgive me?”

“I’m not mad at you anymore, if that’s what you mean.”

“It isn’t, exactly.”

Shelly stroked the baby and kept her voice down so as not to disturb her. “I understand why you didn’t want me in Lockhart—I understand about Daddy’s reelection and everything.”

“I didn’t blame you for the fact that your father lost.”

“No, but you let me blame myself. Mom? Why couldn’t you have been with me?” She looked at her mother. “I needed you. I really, really needed you.”

Her mother was crying harder now.

“You weren’t even there when the baby was born. You came the day I gave her up. You showed up after it was over.”

“I want to think I would do it differently now if I had the chance,” her mother said. “I wish I could go back. I hope the baby is okay. Do you ever hear?”

“Mom?”

“Yes.”

“I see her sometimes.”

“You mean you dream about her?”

“I see her. I go and see her. They’re living out near Big Bend, and Dan and I go and visit them.”

“You visit Jack Stone and his wife?”

Her mother had stopped crying, a look of disbelief on her face.

“We’re friends,” Shelly said. “We’re all friends.”

“But when … How did that happen?”

Shelly told her how Jack and Delia had walked into the gift shop at Aquarena with the little girl.

“But how can it end well?” her mother asked. “I just worry about how you would feel if…”

“Why can’t you just be glad for me?”

“What is she like? What does she look like?”

“Honestly, Mom, she has your red hair. And she’s getting freckles.”

Her mother stared at her, and then got up. She seemed not to know what to do or what to say, and finally, as if to do just anything, she lifted Shelly’s breakfast tray of cold eggs and toast and carried it to a table beside the door. She moved a vase of flowers that was too close to the edge of the sill. Without turning, her hands still on the vase, she said, “Do you think I could ever see her?”

Shelly looked down at Madeline, who was falling asleep as she nursed. “Maybe someday. But I have a picture of her in my billfold. You can take it and show it to Dad if you’ll bring it back tomorrow.”

Tucked behind the driver’s license was a photograph of Carlotta that Shelly pulled out and showed to her mother. Carlotta was perched on the barn fence, wearing a straw hat, leaning toward the camera. She was five years old.

*   *   *

In the years that followed, as Madeline grew up, Shelly and Dan took her to Alpine every summer, where she tagged along with Carlotta, who taught her to mount the horse bareback by climbing on from the fence, and to dance the hokey pokey and make mud pies with water scooped from the trough.

Shelly continued to work at Helping Hand three days a week while Madeline went to day care. She liked the people she worked with and was attached to the children, and she missed those who found their way into foster care or back to their families.

Sometimes she took Madeline to see Aileen. One winter Saturday while Shelly was on her hands and knees replacing Aileen’s bathroom floor with new squares of linoleum, Madeline wandered down the hall into a room she had never seen anyone else go into, and found herself alone. It was quiet in there, and though she was only four years old, she knew immediately that this was a serious place. The shades were drawn. There was a bed and a chair. A round mirror hung from a chain over a chest of drawers, too high for her to see into. She sat on the bed and swung her legs and stared at the closet doorknob. It was glass and looked like a bubble of light in the dim room. She heard her mother calling, and scrambled off the bed to hide in the closet, closing herself in.

The place was dark except for lines of light around the door. Madeline stood on her toes and felt the wall for a switch, but all she found were belts dangling from a nail. Clothes hung down around her. Everything in the closet felt cold and smelled cold. She felt something tickle her neck, and she let out a peep, but it was only a shirtsleeve. She sat down among the shoes. They were men’s shoes—big and dusty-smelling. Scooting back, she felt as if the wall were falling down on top of her, and she yelped and threw her hand back to stop it. She turned to look, and saw a face behind her and was startled until she realized this was only a painting. She couldn’t see well in the dark, but it was a lady’s face. She moved over and sat beside it and leaned back against the wall, pulling her knees up to make herself small.

After a while, she heard her mother enter the room, and whispering to the painting “Shhhhhh, that’s my mommy. She’s coming,” pressed her finger against the painted lips. Side by side with the painting, she stared anxiously at the door. She could hear her mother out there.

“Madeline, honey?” her mother called.

“Make her go away,” Madeline whispered to the painting. “Make her not find us.” Miraculously, immediately, her mother left the room. “You did it,” Madeline told the painting. “You did it!” She could hear her mother calling her from far away, and scrambled out of the closet to reappear in the kitchen.

“Sweetie, you scared me! Where were you?” But Madeline didn’t tell her mother where she had been.