Monday, Monday: A Novel (28 page)

She poured herself a drink and sat at the table, looking at the object, so familiar, and still not touching it. She could remember so many times that Dan had pulled it out of his pocket and used it to sharpen pencils, or peel oranges, or shave down kindling to roast hot dogs on campouts. Uncertain whether to ever show it to Madeline, she finally picked it up and held it next to her heart.

When Madeline was home for spring break, Shelly decided to tell her about the knife. “Something came in the mail, honey,” she said, choosing her words carefully one day at noon when they were in the kitchen. Madeline had slept late and was just now drinking her coffee. “I haven’t known whether to show it to you or not. It’s your father’s pocketknife. Someone found it in—”

The blood drained from Madeline’s face even before Shelly finished the sentence, her skin becoming as pale as chalk against her dark hair. She reached for the kitchen counter to get her balance. Tears welled in her eyes, and she said in a breathless whisper, “I don’t want it. I don’t want to see it. Mom?” she cried, her voice childlike. “He used it to cut the girl free from the rope. So she would be safe. So he would be the one to fall. I saw it drop out of his hands after he did that.”

It was the most she had ever spoken about that moment that Dan fell, and Shelly could see in her face how clear the memory was. Her father had dropped through the same vacant air as the knife, and onto the same rocks.

After that, the knife began to seem like a curse in the house. It had been such a part of Dan’s daily life, and Shelly couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. But how could she keep it when it could create such unbearable visions for Madeline? She could hide it away at her parents’ house, or Aileen’s—but what for? What future use could she possibly have for such a memento?

When Madeline was back at school, Shelly drove to the cemetery and buried the pocketknife next to Dan’s grave.

On a Saturday afternoon shortly before Thanksgiving, Shelly came home and discovered an old green Plymouth parked in front of her house, a girl holding a baby leaning against the hood. The day was chilly and overcast, but the girl wore a pale summer dress that was modest and out-of-date as well as out of season. Her dishwater hair, thin and flyaway, danced around her face in the autumn breeze. She looked as if she was dressed for a country church service, except that her low-heeled white pumps were scuffed. Shelly assumed she’d had car trouble and was waiting here for someone to help her, and yet there was something about the girl that made her appear misplaced rather than merely inconvenienced. “Can I help you with anything?” Shelly asked her.

The girl approached from across the lawn, carrying the sleeping baby. “Are you Mrs. Hadley?” she asked with a timid and slow Texas lilt.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know how to say this, exactly, ma’am, but my name’s Amanda Shultz, and I’m the girl your husband saved.” Her face was thin and plain-featured, her expression somber. “I found your address in the phone book. I hope it’s okay I came.”

Shelly set her purse in the grass as if she was going to sit down with it, and then she picked it up again, unprepared for this moment. The girl had stepped out of a nightmare and here she was, holding a baby, wearing a summer dress and white pump shoes.

“I was afraid if I called ahead, you’d tell me not to come. I … just needed to talk to you for a minute. If that’s okay.”

“Would you … want to come inside?”

“Either way’s all right with me. I can stay out here.” She shifted the sleeping baby in her arms.

“No. There’s no need for that. Come inside.”

The girl followed her in, and Shelly showed her into the living room. “I’ll bring you something to drink.”

“Thank you, ma’am. But I don’t need something.”

“It will just take me a minute.” She went to the kitchen and tried to wait for her heart to stop pounding so painfully. She wanted a drink. Instead she filled a glass with ice and poured some tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator, then took it out and set it on the coffee table in front of the girl.

The baby was making snuffling noises, and the girl took a pacifier out of her purse and touched it to his lips until he latched onto it and drifted back to sleep.

“What’s your baby’s name?” Shelly asked, seating herself across from her.

“Cody. After his daddy.”

“He looks like a sweet baby.”

The girl took a sip of the tea. “That’s good tea. I guess you’re wondering why I came here. It’s not something big I have to say, just that I … Well, I wanted to say … I guess I just needed to say how sorry I am for what I did and that I wished it hadn’t of happened. It was my fault. Me and my boyfriend’s. He’s my husband now, but then … we was just stupid in what we did. It seemed like a pure lark at the time—like we’d go down there and look around and come up and go and tell our friends about it. And then it was all so terrible, and your husband … well, what happened, you know. I can’t forgive myself. That’s what I came to say. I wouldn’t dare ask you to forgive me when I can’t forgive myself, but I wanted you to know how sorry I am. How bad I feel.” She had started to cry.

Shelly wanted to offer some reassurance, but she was too staggered by the girl’s presence to know how to respond. “Amanda—”

“I don’t expect it to mean much to you, but I had to say it. My mama said not to come here, that you had enough to worry about without me showing up to remind you about it, but I just can’t feel right until I’ve said it all. I wanted to say I’m religious now. I’m married to Cody, who was with me that night when it happened, and we go to church and Sunday school, and people is always telling me I owe my life to God because I came so close to dying. And I say it wasn’t God that showed up that night; it was Mr. Hadley. And they say maybe God sent him. But I say why would He do that? It was me that went down there. Why should Mr. Hadley pay for what I did? I can’t make it right in my mind. I’m not that good of a person that ought to get saved by somebody. And I can’t quit thinking about why he did such a thing, and if I can ever be worth it. My mama says maybe my baby’ll turn out worth it, so I’m hoping that might be the case, but it makes no sense to me why Mr. Hadley would have to die. If God had of wanted a hand in it, He might of just changed my mind about going down there in the first place.” She frowned, and settled her gaze on the far wall. “Is that over there a picture of Mr. Hadley?”

Shelly turned and looked at the picture.

“And is that your daughter with him?”

“Yes, it is.”

“She was a help to me too.” She gave a forlorn smile. “What can I do to make it okay in my mind? Do you know what I mean?” Tears ran down her face, and she rubbed them off with her palm. “I guess you can’t know, really.”

“Maybe I can. A long time ago, there was someone who saved my life. Actually, there were two people who saved me, and one of them was badly hurt when he did it.”

“Did he die?”

“No.”

“And did you make your peace with it in your mind?”

“I guess the only way I made peace with it was to quit trying to make sense of it.”

Amanda laid the sleeping baby down on the sofa next to her. She tucked the knitted blanket around him and took another sip of the tea. “Can I look at the picture?” she asked.

“Sure. And he’s in some of the others, too.”

The girl got up, leaning forward for a second with a small catch in her side as she rose.

“Are you all right?” Shelly asked her.

“Oh yes, I am. It’s only when I just stand up that I feel it. Two of my ribs were broke from the rope and it’s just scar tissue inside. I can’t hardly catch my breath sometimes.” She straightened slowly, then crossed the room and studied the wall of family pictures, moving from one to the next. Shelly got up and stood beside her and told her about them.

“He looks different from what I thought. The picture they had in the newspaper looked different. Your daughter has got pretty eyes. Where is she at right now?”

“She’s away at college.”

“Really? I might go to college myself when my baby gets old enough. There’s one in Uvalde. It’s more than a hour away from where I live, but if I had time I could do it.”

The baby woke, kicking his blanket off, and Amanda went to the sofa and gathered him up. “I guess I better go on before he starts squalling,” she said, working the pacifier into his mouth again. “He can be awfully loud when he’s hungry. I got a bottle out in the car.”

“I’m afraid you didn’t find what you came here to find,” Shelly said regretfully.

“Well. But I’m real glad I came.” She stroked her baby’s face. “It means a lot to me that you were so nice. And I liked seeing the pictures. Now I can know what he looked like.”

When Amanda had gone, Shelly stood in front of the wall of photographs, looking at the faces, feeling that she could make no sense of her past, and that she had failed to face the present. Finally she got from a cabinet the video Dan had made of Madeline’s play at the Paramount, which Jack had returned with the other items he had retrieved from the Bronco. Drinking a shot of vodka, she sat in front of the television and tried to lose herself in the scene before her, as if she could concentrate hard enough to turn the screen into a stage, and go back in time, and be there in the theater with Dan. She pictured Madeline scrambling with props behind the curtain, and tried to envision the people around her, the ornate domed ceiling, the red-cushioned seats. She closed her eyes. The sound quality of the video was indistinct, the music raspy and distant and most of the lines too faint to make out, but she heard clearly Dan’s gentle laughter at the parts meant to be funny, his whispered conversation with the people seated beside him. “No, she’s not in it; she’s in charge of the props,” he said, and “Is this thing making an irritating noise?” She wept, and curled herself on the couch and kept her eyes closed, and listened to the entire play so she could hear every word that Dan had spoken and be with him on that last day of his life in the only way she now could.

A week later she went to the library and combed through books on Texas caves and geology until she found pictures of Devil’s Sinkhole, and forced herself to look at them.

The first was an aerial view taken from high above. The sinkhole was pitch-black and oblong in shape, surrounded by stubby vegetation that appeared to be cedars. The caption said the depth exceeded three hundred feet.

On the opposite page was a diagram of the interior—a huge, vacuous pit. Below ground level, the space bulged out like a fishbowl. From the bottom rose a mountainous dome of rubble, which the caption explained was created thousands of years ago when the surface had caved in. Tracing a line down from the rim, Shelly could see that Dan had fallen onto the side of this subterranean mountain. “The scree pile,” it was labeled. The caption said the rubble was covered in slippery bat guano. Creatures found nowhere else on the earth—shrimplike crustaceans and carnivorous beetles—dwelled in the underground lakes that flowed at the base of this pile of broken rocks. A tiny standing figure was drawn to scale on the peak, indicating the frightening size of the cavern.

The final picture was taken from deep within the cave, the camera angled upward toward the circle of sunlight. Shelly thought of Dan as he had fallen, lying there at the bottom. She studied the slant of the sunlight, wondering from which direction the moon had been shining that night, and if it had cast its light over his body.

The next weekend she got in her car and started for Rocksprings. She drove through Johnson City, Fredericksburg, and Kerrville, holding the wheel tightly and watching the monotonous road under the gray sky. At the Rocksprings exit she pulled to the side and stood in the dry grass, holding her coat closed against the wind. She tried to summon her courage, but the longer she stood and contemplated going to the sinkhole, the more terrified she became. For an hour she paced in the winter grass, got in and out of the car, braced herself against the wind, pictured the place. She imagined herself driving up to it and getting out of the car and walking up close to the edge, looking down into the dark.

When she finally drove on, it wasn’t in the direction of Rocksprings and the sinkhole, or back to Austin. She drove straight on to Alpine, where she arrived stunned by her own weakness and the severity of her fear.

Bundled in a blanket, standing out on the porch that night while Jack smoked a cigarette, she told him about the girl’s visit and about the pictures she had seen of Devil’s Sinkhole, and talked about how lost she felt, and how she couldn’t stop blaming herself or get rid of the notion that her insistence on being involved with Carlotta had led to Dan’s death. “I can spin it out in my mind any way I want to,” she said. “But it all lands in the same place.”

He listened without saying much, leaning back against the porch rail and blowing the smoke into the cold air.

After a long pause, she said, “And I think I’m drinking too much.”

He drew on his cigarette. “I know it.”

“I want to stop it.”

“Okay. Then stop it.”

“It’s not so easy. Look at you, with your Camels.”

“True enough. I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll keep it to one drink a day, I’ll keep it to one cigarette.”

“You can do that?”

“I’m already down to two.”

“So if, sometime, I have more than one drink, I’m supposed to call you and tell on myself?”

“That’s right.”

“And you trust me to do that?”

He drew the smoke in, and blew it out slowly over his shoulder. “I’ve known you a long time, Shelly. I’d trust you to do anything you said you would.”

31

ANDY

Madeline earned her master’s from Trinity at an accelerated pace and returned to Austin to share an apartment with a friend and find a job. Having already completed her student teaching and certification, she was hired as a substitute and then as a full-time fourth-grade teacher at Casis Elementary in the west Austin Tarrytown neighborhood. Her friends told her she would never have a social life if she spent all day with fourth graders, but on a trip to a luggage store in the mall she struck up a conversation with a customer named Andy Fischer—a handsome man three years older than she was, with dark hair and olive skin. Before long, they were dating.