Monday, Monday: A Novel (30 page)

Shelly resisted the impulse to turn and look at her daughter. She continued to peer into the medicine cabinet. “The painting?”

“The portrait. In the closet in the other bedroom. I used to go in there and look at it when I was little.”

Shelly searched an aspirin bottle for an expiration date. “I didn’t know you did that. I didn’t know you ever saw that painting. What would you do with it if you had it?”

“Hang it on our stair landing. I’m assuming you don’t want it, since it’s always been in the closet. But if you do…”

“I don’t.”

Madeline went down the hall to look at the painting, but she found the closet empty. “Where is it?” she called, then noticed the bulky shape in one of the lawn bags. The room was cold, and she shivered. Her mother had come to the doorway.

“What were you going to do with it?” Madeline asked her, untying the bag and pulling the painting out. “Tell me you weren’t going to throw it away.”

“I didn’t realize anyone wanted it.”

“Why would no one want it?” She settled it back against the wall. “It’s beautiful. Just look at it. Who was the artist? It sort of reminds me of Wyatt Calvert’s paintings, except they’re not usually of people.”

“Someone in the UT Art Department painted it. A student.”

“Male, or female?”

“He was a guy.”

“You posed for it?”

“Only for photographs. I think he painted from those.”

“Who was he? It’s not signed.”

“He was a graduate student.”

“Well it’s really a lovely painting. I love the smocking on the blouse. The way he did the fabric. It’s pretty fantastic.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Shelly said.

“Were you really going to throw it away?”

“I suppose I was.”

“Then I just rescued you.”

The rest of the day, they worked on funeral arrangements and sorted through Aileen’s knickknacks and linens and dishes. At dusk they sat in the kitchen among the boxes and empty drawers and had a glass of wine.

“To our dear, sweet, old Aileen,” Madeline said, sadly, raising her glass.

Shelly thought of the painting propped in the empty room at the end of the hall. It would hang in open view on Madeline’s stairwell, after all the years in hiding. She was glad it had been saved, glad Madeline was here in the house with her. Looking at her daughter across the table, she raised her glass and felt as if the upward movement lifted something else away from her—a lingering sorrow and sense of loss. For a moment she was at peace here in Aileen’s disassembled kitchen, forgetting that her secrets were buried no deeper than a few thin layers of paint.

33

UNPREDICTABLE SHIFTS

Carlotta first met Martin Tipton, shaggy-haired and wet, when he ducked into her rock shop to escape an autumn rainstorm, having ridden his mountain bike up from Terlingua to distribute a stack of newsletters about UFOs to storefronts around town. He stood at the counter of her shop, telling her of a UFO he had seen hovering over the haunted old Chisos Mine when he was seven years old. Soft-spoken for a proselytizer and younger than Carlotta, he had beautiful green eyes. He took an immediate interest in the rocks on display and bought a cheap necklace and a bundle of incense for his girlfriend, and a crystal for himself. The crystal was for good luck in the Terlingua chili cook-off.

He waited out the rainstorm in Carlotta’s shop and then went back to Terlingua, where he won the chili cook-off and broke up with his girlfriend.

Then he returned to see Carlotta. Eventually he became her boyfriend and hauled his trailer up to Alpine. Rock and gem sales had moved to the Internet now, and the shop was producing less income than in earlier years. Carlotta had begun to wonder if she would need to close it and find a more reliable way to support herself. To pay the mortgage, she rented out the space where she had lived on the second floor, and moved in with Martin.

He made beautiful love with her: his eyes, luminous as green chrysolite, looked as if they could see right into her soul, even if they never quite managed to do it. Every morning, she stepped from the trailer to see the sun rise over the vast plateau. Martin puttered around in Alpine and grew his marijuana plants in painted Mexican pots and spent a lot of Carlotta’s money on his UFO newsletter.

In the summer of 2006, after living with Martin for a year, Carlotta discovered she was accidentally pregnant. She hadn’t prepared for this but was immediately and profoundly joyful. She was thirty-six years old and had always believed she would marry and have a family at some unspecified time—always far in the future. She had dreamed of meeting her husband in the same vague, mystical ways that she had dreamed of meeting her biological parents. It would happen. It would be beautiful.

The thought that he would be Martin Tipton had never entered her mind. She had no intention of spending her life with him. When she told him about the pregnancy, he agreed with her that he wasn’t ready to marry or have a family. They both thought he should take his trailer and move on.

Carlotta decided to wait and tell her parents about the baby when she had figured out where she would live. She knew her mother had always wanted her to have children someday, but having a baby without a husband, and without a home, and with a business that was barely making a profit, would require logistical planning.

On a sonogram Carlotta saw the tiny, tiny heart in the little body no bigger than a knuckle, pumping and pumping. It was pumping too slowly the next time she saw it. The doctor told her to go home and put her feet up—to get in bed and rest. She understood he believed the baby would die. She got in bed, her energy sapped by the struggle for life inside her. When she returned to see the doctor the following afternoon, he searched for a heartbeat, moving the probe to detect a flicker. But it was simply gone. He wanted to schedule a D & C to scrape her uterus clean, but Carlotta decided to let her body take care of the baby its own way. She drove to her shop with a heavy heart, sat at the counter, and strung glass beads.

Ten days later, in her shop, the painful cramping started. She suffered the pain until the placenta came out, the spongy mass spreading inside the toilet like flattened pizza dough. She fished it out and searched for anything that might resemble a fetus, but she could find no solid matter.

A few days afterward, the tiny thing came out when Carlotta was taking a shower. She felt it slip from her body without any pain at all, and she held it in her hand. It was a small little thing, two inches long, curved like a nautilus shell. It had miniature buds of arms and legs, and she thought she could see the eyes. The umbilical cord looked like a piece of string and fell apart in her fingers. She wrapped the fetus in silk, then drove to a place where she had camped sometimes with Martin, on a creek called Peña Blanca, and buried it there among sparse grasses with a view of the creek and the mountains.

She had so wanted the baby. She could almost feel its presence inside her still. She would never forget how quickly life could slip from her body without any detectable leave-taking. A heart could just stop beating. Life was as tenuous as a flickering flame.

Within a week, Martin had moved away. Since the upper floor of the shop was rented out, Carlotta had no place to go. Too disheartened to tell her parents about the baby, she moved into her old room in her parents’ house and tried to take stock of how a woman who loved adventures, and loved water and scuba diving and seeing the world, would come to be hiding out in her childhood bedroom in the dry middle of Texas. The experience of losing a baby made her think of her biological mother. Why had she given Carlotta up? Where was she now, and what would she think of her long-lost daughter? For the first time in years, Carlotta thought perhaps she wanted to find out who this woman was. She had dug up enough rocks to know about sediment. It wasn’t as solid as it seemed. It had cracks. Porous areas. You could drop a fossil and break it. There would be ways to find her mother.

At her shop during the day she began to browse websites for information on how to search for adoption records. She looked at links to support groups and “search angels”—experts in facilitating reunions. She also searched for information about artificial insemination. She had seen the umbilical cord, no wider around than a string, disintegrate in her fingers, and had placed her tiny baby in its little dirt hole, and she felt disconnected, more incomplete than ever. Her life was like a dot-to-dot picture without the one or the two. She decided to talk to Shelly and see what she advised, or what she remembered or knew.

Loading a box of merchandise to sell on the Drag, she called Shelly to say she was coming to Austin, locked her shop and drove east with her truck windows down, the radio playing country songs until reception became erratic and the lyrics surged and faded with the rise and fall of the hills. During bursts of clarity and static, she reflected on the mysterious origins of her life. She parked on the side of the road and sat in the bed of her truck to watch the sun behind her hover above the road, as fierce and red as the round carnelian stones that were said to encourage boldness and initiative and self-realization and to banish sorrow. She continued eastward, watching the moon climb in the pale sky and spread its calming light on the flattening landscape.

It was after midnight when she arrived at Shelly’s house. Shelly had gone to sleep but had left a welcome note in the kitchen. “Make yourself at home. If you have to set up your table early and I’m not up, help yourself to coffee and I’ll pick up some rolls from the bakery and meet you at your table for breakfast. I don’t need to be at the office until eleven.”

Early the next morning, in a coin toss, Carlotta secured a prime spot in the market on the dead-end stub of the pavement at Twenty-third and the Drag. She set up her table, laying out jewelry and baskets of beaded scarves. The Drag had changed since she had been in school here: an Urban Outfitters now inhabited part of one block, and down the street the old café called Quackenbush’s had picked up and left. The market area looked brighter and cleaner than when Carlotta had last seen it, but the tables were sparse this morning, the artisans fanning themselves, their merchandise a hodgepodge of copper rings and leather bracelets, homemade soaps that sweated in the heat, belts and bags hanging from clothes rods. Everything was limp and hot already; only a few of the tables were shaded with canopies. The landmark murals on brick walls flanking the market were a dizzying sea of Texas wildflowers and cityscapes and cartoon figures of Texas heroes and celebrities. In the largest mural, Stephen F. Austin cradled an armload of armadillos.

The UT tower had found its way into all three of the murals, and the actual tower loomed over the red roofs of the campus across the street. The blazing sun was too hot already—the sun no longer the symbol of inspiration that it had seemed the evening before. Now it sapped at her resolve. The only people out at this time of the morning, with students away for the summer, were panhandlers dozing in storefronts along the sidewalk with their dogs.

34

CARLOTTA’S QUESTION

At nine in the morning, Shelly parked at the block where many years ago she had seen Wyatt standing on the sidewalk, holding Nate, while Elaine got something out of the car. The scene had deeply troubled her at the time, but this morning she thought of it only briefly, wondering what Nate Calvert would be like now, at nearly forty years old. With a bag of pastries under her arm and cups of coffee in her hands, she hurried down the sidewalk until she spotted Carlotta, who stood in the bright sunshine at her table at the edge of the market area, demonstrating for a customer the different ways to tie a scarf.

Shelly stopped and watched her for a moment. Carlotta’s hair was gathered in a fat braid that glittered orange-red in the sun; her summer dress was loose and had a pattern of airy flowers. She was delightful to look at—tall, like Wyatt, and freckled like Shelly’s mother. She turned and saw Shelly and greeted her with open arms. “You’re here!”

“I am!” She held up the bag. “They were out of the rolls you like, so I got an assortment.”

When the customer had purchased a scarf and moved on, Shelly borrowed a chair from an old man fanning himself over a table of tooled wallets and pulled it to Carlotta’s table. She sat beside Carlotta and was taking the pastries out of the bag when Carlotta said, “I need to talk to you about something important. First of all, I broke up with Martin.”

“Oh, honey. I’m sorry.”

“I was pregnant.”

Shelly tried not to let surprise register on her face. She took Carlotta’s hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.

“I miscarried. Three weeks ago. I hadn’t told Mom and Dad I was pregnant—I was going to do that whenever I could figure out where to live and how to support the baby. But then it just seemed wrong to tell them after it was over. There was no point in it.” She shooed a fly from a cinnamon roll. “I wasn’t very far along when it happened. That was a blessing. And I’ve moved back in with Mom and Dad until I can figure out what to do now. It’s possible I’ll close the shop, as much as I don’t want to. It’s just not making enough. I could close it and sell things online, but I’m not sure I want to do that. It’s the shop I like—not just the merchandise. Anyway, I’ll find a job if I close it—I can worry about that when the time comes.”

A teenage boy with lip rings and wooden plugs in his earlobes paused to look at a basket of crocheted bracelets. When he was gone, Carlotta said, “Also—and this might be a surprise to you—I was thinking about trying to find my other … my … biological parents.”

Shelly’s face flushed hot with a prickling sensation. “Oh?”

“There are a lot of sites on the Internet where you can sign up and they’ll help you with the search.”

“Have you talked to your mom and dad?” Her eyes swept over the bright murals with their caricatures of Michael Dell holding his computer and Matthew McConaughey running naked with bongo drums, the cartoon towers hulking in the background.