Monday, Monday: A Novel (23 page)

When she turned sixteen and had a boyfriend, and was at odds with her parents and no longer believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church, the mystery of her biological mother taunted her, and there were times she almost told her parents she wanted to go and find her. She distanced herself from Delia, who was different from her in countless ways, and then felt lonely and unhinged for having done so. Sometimes it felt as if being adopted was like being spun around and blindfolded and turned loose in the world. Just twenty-five miles away in the Davis Mountains the telescopes of the McDonald Observatory peered upward through the blackest skies on the North American continent, and Carlotta sometimes went there with her father and looked at the crystal stars and imagined herself as one of them, a tiny pinpoint in the vastness. She loved the constellations because they gave the pinpoints a reliable place in the chaos.

But by the time she turned eighteen, she had come to enjoy the dizzy freedom of being rootless and no longer felt tied to Jack and Delia solely because they had raised her, but because she loved them. She wore skimpy hippie dresses that fell softly around her tall and statuesque figure, and read books about Buddhism. She studied rocks and crystals and their mysterious powers, and arrived at a philosophy that was grounded in the theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Having no interest in obscure logic and no confidence in ancient figurings, she did not read deeply into the works of these philosophers, but plucked from their writings the concept of a final cause, and believed that her own final cause would become the search for her parents. The only problem with a cause that was final was that it would come to an end, and she wanted to carry this one for a while longer. She liked wondering who her parents were. She wanted to travel, and have adventures, to learn to scuba dive in deep waters. She wasn’t ready to find answers, and wasn’t ready, just yet, to look for them.

She graduated from high school and spent a year learning how to use lapidary equipment from a jeweler in Marathon, driving the half hour there and back in an ancient Chevy pickup she bought from a rancher in Marfa. She cut rocks in a shed in back of the jeweler’s house, and made necklaces and belt buckles and bookends.

In the fall of 1989 she moved to Austin and attended UT, living with three friends in a ramshackle house on the south end of town. When she needed a quiet place to study she often stayed with Shelly and Dan, whom she knew as intimately as she knew her aunts and uncles. She made delicate necklaces of threads knotted with seed pearls and glass beads and gemstones, and on Saturday mornings she would set up a table alongside other venders on the Drag and sell the jewelry. Madeline sometimes helped her. Madeline was in middle school, intense and studious, with a watchful disposition. She played the flute in the school band and managed props for the Drama Department, so Carlotta sat through high school plays and sight-reading contests. Carlotta loved playing the older sister to Madeline and being with Shelly. She could talk to Shelly in ways she couldn’t talk to her own mother.

Dan often took Madeline on weekend campouts, and for her fifteenth birthday she decided on a family campout at Enchanted Rock, in the hill country, and invited Carlotta along. Shelly forgot the candles, so they stuck twigs in the cake and set them on fire. They laughed, trying to put out the flames, then licked the icing from the charred twigs.

Carlotta dated in college, a little recklessly, and broke hearts. She took scuba-diving lessons and pored over travel magazines. She dreamed of diving in Malaysia and the Great Barrier Reef and the Red Sea, and in the summers drove with friends to Florida to camp or stay in cheap hotels and dive in Ginnie Springs or at Pennekamp Park. The summer before her senior year she had the chance to go to Belize with friends and dive at Blue Hole, but her parents urged her to find a job and to start planning how to support herself after graduation.

“It doesn’t seem right to have the chance to go and not take it,” Carlotta complained to Shelly as they stood in a campus parking lot, Carlotta holding a pair of jumper cables that Shelly had brought her. She had come out of class, to find the battery in her old truck dead.

“But your parents have a point,” Shelly told her.

“And I can tell you don’t agree with it,” Carlotta said from under the truck’s hood as she attached a clamp to the battery. “You think I should go.”

“I think it should be between you and your parents.”

“You never wanted to travel?”

“Oh, I guess I did. I thought about joining the Peace Corps.”

Carlotta straightened and looked at her. “You did? I didn’t know that. Why didn’t you do it?”

“Well, the shooting, for one thing.”

“So then you never went?”

“It wasn’t a real loss. Looking back, it wasn’t.”

“It sounds like one. I have an idea. Why don’t you and Dan go somewhere, and I’ll stay with Madeline?”

“We might just do that someday. But in the meantime, I’m not taking sides about Belize.”

Eventually Carlotta talked her parents into paying for her plane ticket, and promised to get a job as soon as she graduated.

In Belize she fell in love with an Australian archaeology student named Sean, who was involved in excavating a pre-Mayan farming community. She stayed in Belize after her friends went home to Texas, and hiked with Sean through rain forests and the ruins of Mayan temples. When he returned to Sydney, she didn’t want to go home, so she took the ferry to Ambergris Caye and hired on with a dive shop in San Pedro. She hung about the markets, uncertain whether she was in search of something or in flight from something. Oddly, she often found herself thinking about Alpine—the dry air there, the sound of the train, and the unpretentious way of the people. She missed her mom and dad and wondered why she would come so far just to want to go home. An old woman she met in the market taught her to weave baskets, and on days she wasn’t working, she made jewelry from shells and coral and sold it on the beaches outside the hotels, sitting under the coconut trees, her freckles darkened by the sun, her hair a flaming orange. She wandered through shell shops, drawn to the clutter and texture and colors, and was browsing in a shop filled with jade and emerald jewelry, in an alley that led to the beach, when she realized what she wanted to do with her life.

The minute she thought of it, her heart started to race. She looked around the shop and made a mental note of how the shelves were arranged, and pictured an old adobe storefront next to a picture-framing shop on a backstreet in downtown Alpine that had long been up for sale, and thought about the jeweler in Marathon who had taught her to use lapidary equipment. Alpine just happened to be near places rich in petrified wood and fossils, and nearly in the shadow of the Glass Mountains, the very name of which filled Carlotta with awe and a sense of reverence. She could make necklaces and belt buckles and bolo ties with her own hands. She loved exquisite objects and discovering things and assembling collections and polishing stones. Was it any wonder? Her name, after all, was Carlotta Stone. She could call the shop Carlotta’s Stones.

She returned to Austin at the end of the summer and registered for fall classes, and talked to Shelly about her plans. “I’ll take a business class,” she told her as they sat in Shelly’s kitchen. “I keep designing the shop in my head—exactly where I would put everything. It’s like I’ve been moving in this direction forever. I just didn’t realize it happened to be in a circle. I know that area. I know the rocks, the fossils, the people. The building needs some work, so it’s cheap. It’s been for sale forever. And I could live upstairs. And we’re getting tourists out there now, you know.”

Shelly cradled a coffee cup and leaned back against the kitchen counter and looked at Carlotta thoughtfully, moving her thumb up and down over the smooth porcelain of the cup.

“It’s strange, I always had this idea of leaving Alpine and living near the water,” Carlotta said. “But now I’m excited about the idea of going back. I guess that’s okay as long as it’s not a retreat.”

“What would it be a retreat from?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. Something.” After a moment, she said, “I’ve considered trying to find my biological parents. I dream about it. But then I never seem to do it.”

“Oh?” Shelly steadied her thoughts. “Is that because you’re worried how your parents would feel about it?”

“No, not only that. I feel like I’d lose something if I found them. Some part of myself—something like that. And it doesn’t seem right to go looking for someone who’s not looking for me. It’s not like they don’t know about me. My mother certainly has to.”

Shelly was still moving her thumb over the porcelain. “How do you feel about all of that?”

“Like Pandora probably felt about the box,” Carlotta said. “And who knows what would fly out of it?”

The day before classes started, Carlotta got in her pickup and drove three hours south to Beeville, where she asked at a gas station for directions to the hospital. She stood in the hospital lobby and looked around and said to an elderly woman at the reception desk, “I was born here.”

It was a small-town hospital. Nothing special. She wasn’t sure what she had thought she would see.

27

INTO THE WOODS

Madeline began to feel as if Carlotta was always in their house—as if every day when she came home from school her mother and Carlotta were in the kitchen, discussing plans for Carlotta’s store. Madeline would walk in and put her books down and find the two of them talking about financing or suppliers or the pillows that Delia was needlepointing to add to the merchandise.

“She’s over here so much,” Madeline said to her mother one night after Carlotta had left.

Shelly was unloading a stack of clean clothes from a laundry basket into Madeline’s chest of drawers. “Yes, lately she has been,” she agreed, placing the clothes in the drawers. “Her friends aren’t business types, so she doesn’t have many people to talk to about the store.”

“I didn’t know you were so much of a business type.”

Shelly sorted the socks. “Does it bother you that she’s over here a lot?”

“It does when it seems like she lives here.”

“I thought you liked having her over.”

“I just wonder why she isn’t planning the store with Delia. You’re not her mother.”

Shelly turned and looked at her. “Delia’s in Alpine, and I’m here. Honey? Do you think you and I aren’t spending enough time together?”

Madeline shrugged. She was sixteen, and didn’t want to spend more time with her mother. Still, she wished her mother had seemed upset about that. Instead she seemed happy to work at the Helping Hand Home and then come home and talk to Carlotta.

How had Carlotta become like part of their family? She existed in their lives in some important but veiled way that Madeline couldn’t make out. There seemed to be gaps, and places where the pieces didn’t quite fit. Apparently, Jack and his cousin Wyatt Calvert had rescued her mother when she was shot by the sniper, and afterward her mother was bonded to Jack for life. But why? And why wasn’t she bonded to Wyatt? And why had Madeline never met Wyatt? She had seen pictures of him at Jack and Delia’s house and knew he was Jack’s cousin and a famous painter, and that he came to Alpine sometimes with his wife and two children. But when she asked her mother about him or said she would like to meet him, or suggested they buy one of his paintings, her mother offered brief answers about how Wyatt lived so far away and how they couldn’t afford his paintings.

He had saved her mother’s life, and so, in a way, he was important to Madeline’s, and it was odd that she’d never met him, and odd that her mother didn’t talk more about what had happened. When Madeline was seven years old and curious about her mother’s scars, her parents had taken her to the South Mall plaza under the UT tower and explained that the shooter was dead, that there was no more danger, and it had all happened a long time ago. Her mother had said the injured arm worked perfectly well enough to hold and hug her sweet Madeline, and then they had taken her off to throw pennies into the fountain.

The explanation had been plenty at that age, but now, in retrospect, it seemed dismissive and thin. It wasn’t as if Madeline was preoccupied with this distant event in her mother’s life, but she felt shut out of something about it, and sensed that Carlotta was somehow linked to whatever was being kept from her.

When Carlotta finished college that spring, Jack and Delia came to Austin to see her graduate, then helped her move her things back to Alpine and into the small apartment space on the second floor of the stone building that would become the store. Carlotta collected the merchandise and made jewelry from stones. She stocked the shelves, installed rows of bright track lighting that made the place sparkle, and sent out invitations for the opening.

Madeline dreaded the opening. It would mean at least a six-hour drive each way with her parents, and a party with a lot of people from Alpine whom she didn’t know.

So when her high school drama teacher called to say her class had been invited to perform a summer production of
Into the Woods
—a play they had performed three times already in the high school auditorium—for a larger audience at the Paramount Theater downtown, Madeline was, for a moment, thrilled to hear that the date was the same as Carlotta’s opening. She was essential to the production, in charge of costumes and a complicated array of props; she would have to stay and be part of it.

But then it occurred to her that her parents would have to choose one event over the other, and that her mother might prefer to go to Alpine, having seen the play three times already at the high school. Madeline didn’t need her at the play, but wished she would want to be there, and suspected she would only pretend to want to.

She found her mother outside, dragging the garden hose attached to a sprinkler dribbling water. “Mr. Barrientos called. The Paramount wants us to do
Into the Woods
this weekend.”

She saw the pride in her mother’s smile, and then the consternation. Saw her put the sprinkler down. It spurted a little stream at her mother’s ankles. “That’s great! But … this weekend?”