Monday, Monday: A Novel (44 page)

Andy came running and tried to save the painting, crying out, “Stop! Madeline! Stop!” over the scream of the wind. He tried to pull it from her grasp, but she clung to the wooden frame, shone the light at the face, and shoved her heel at the face again.

The green eyes splintered on the board. The cracked blue paint revealed the breast. The ribbon dangled in the hair. The pale smile split in two.

Andy tried to hold Madeline, but she struggled away from him and ran with the painting across the drive, and stopped and aimed the flashlight’s beam at it once again. The face was caved in. All that was left was the broken frame holding the pieces together.

She almost allowed the wind to sweep the painting away then, but her hands would not let go. She lost her bearings, and turned in a circle, unable to see where she was. The only light to orient by was the one she was holding. “Mom?” she screamed. “Mom?”

She heard her mother answering. Andy, from the darkness, flung his arms around her. A voice was crying something over and over again, and Madeline realized she had been hearing this voice for some time. Pulling away from Andy, she ran toward the crying, still clutching the painting, shining the light. Through the dust, the beam revealed the porch steps and the railing, and then the porch itself, and at the door a small boy in pajamas, coughing on dust, screaming for his mother, kicking his legs, trying to run to her while Jack, his arms locked around him, held him back.

52

MOONLIGHT VISIT

Even after the wind had slackened, and Jack had disposed of the portrait, and after Madeline, without a word to anyone, turning her back on Shelly, had taken Nicholas upstairs and curled herself around him on the sofa bed in the dark, and the others had gone to their rooms, and Wyatt had gone to the cabin, the awful scene continued repeating itself in Shelly’s mind in pictures as reckless and fragmented as if they had been snatched away by the wind. The house was unnaturally quiet with the electricity still out—nothing ticking or humming, only the walls settling and the wind worrying around the corners. Dust was everywhere. It covered the floors, the furniture, the quilt on Shelly’s bed. Shelly lay in the bed, looking at dusty shadows and dusty, slatted moonlight tossing over the walls. She wanted to go to Madeline and try to make things right again, and wanted, against her better judgment and convictions, to go to Wyatt for solace.

She was ashamed of her daughter. It was understandable that Madeline believed her mother was not the person she had pretended to be. But this could not excuse the bitter things she had said to Carlotta. She had been pitiless. Destroying the painting was one matter, and Madeline’s own loss. But blaming Carlotta for Dan’s death was spiteful and beneath her.

Shelly ached to forget the look on Carlotta’s face when Madeline had spat those words at her—how the candle Carlotta held had thrown the light upward over her features. She thought of sweet Nicholas, and of the tadpole buried under the cottonwood tree whose branches waved shadows through the shutters, and of Carlotta’s lost, unborn baby.

She might never see Wyatt again after tomorrow. She would manage the years ahead in the same way she had managed the last forty, but she was not sure how she would manage to say goodbye. If only she could carry her suitcase out to her car right now and drive home without a last look to haunt her memory, instead of lying here staring at shadows.

But she couldn’t possibly leave Madeline here, in such painful distress. And she didn’t want the sight of Wyatt walking to the cabin in the moonlight, as she had last seen him, with his back to her and the dying wind kicking up meager eddies of dust in the road, to be the final one. Already she was feeling the old compulsive need for him, and she knew from the past how hard it would be to outlive that feeling. Those moments on the South Mall had imprinted in her mind the idea that she needed Wyatt in order to survive, and while she had managed to prove long ago that she could endure without him, the impression was still there, as deep as ever.

She needed to gain something from this difficult reunion—even if only an ending she could live with.

Her thoughts moved from Madeline to Wyatt and back again, and to Carlotta and Jack and Delia, and always back to Madeline, until finally sleep began to come over her in dark shapes drifting like slow waves across her mind. In that near sleep, she imagined her body was whole again, her breast perfectly round, her arm moving with ease. She recalled Carlotta’s birth and the nurse who had referred to labor as “going over.” She had said Shelly was “going over.”

A noise at the window startled her and she sat up, thinking the wind had knocked something against the panes. She got up and went to the window and pulled the shutters open.

An owl—staring at her, his enormous face only a foot away. She took a step back. He was perched on the branch of the cottonwood tree, the dusty leaves shimmering around him. The wind pulled ragged pieces out of the clouds, and the moon appeared and disappeared, but the owl was still. His eyes were like black glass, the feathers blossoming out around them in patterns that looked as soft as fur and rippled in the air. His head was round, and his unblinking eyes were directly level with hers.

Shelly stared back, mesmerized, her gown loose around her. The owl slid his head to the side and back in a smooth and fluid movement, keeping his gaze on her, and blinked once, a slow blink, as if to acknowledge her. His beak was curved and yellow, his feathers striped and spotted. His claws curled around the deep grooves in the bark. He gazed at Shelly as if he had some pressing reason to be here.

How had he made that thudding noise against the window? Had he knocked a mouse against the panes? There was no mouse in his claws. Had he whacked the window with his wing? For a long time, she looked at him. He swiveled his head around in a languid movement, as if turning to look behind him at the dark land and Lizard Mountain. Then he fixed his eyes on Shelly again, thrusting his broad face next to the panes. He made no move to indicate he would ever fly away, and eventually Shelly reached out and carefully closed the shutters, counted slowly to ten, and opened them again, expecting to see the owl. But he was gone.

She peered from the window, through the broad leaves and across the stretch of land that Dan had walked the day he went to explore the mountain. She remembered how he had turned, waved his arms, and called for her to come with him.

Needing to see his face, she latched the shutters, lit a candle Carlotta had given her, and went out into the hall, where she found the row of Jack’s college annuals pressed between bookends Carlotta had once cut from a crystalline geode. Taking the annual for 1966, she returned to her bed. She set the candle on the table and turned the pages, struck by the clean-cut men in black-rimmed glasses, the girls with flipped hair. Dan’s face was in a row of faces; he was a junior that year, six years before she had met him. He looked friendly and clean-shaven. His hair was shorter than when she had known him.

She turned to Jack’s class picture, and Wyatt’s, and then to the memorial page in the front, where the names of students and faculty killed by Charles Whitman were printed on the pale and grainy sky above a flag at half-mast. She thought of how that boy had lifted his hand as if to wave before he fell, and how the girl who lay beside the steps had moved her legs languidly, up and down at the knees, and how Jack had run toward the boy who lay on the ground in the surfer shirt, and then fallen when the bullet struck him, and dragged himself up, and moved like an inchworm.

She turned to the class picture of Charles Whitman, with his crew cut and his bland young face. She had seen this picture before, and others of him in magazines—family photos and wedding photos. Forty years was plenty of time to come across even the things you didn’t care to look at. She recalled a picture of him sitting on a stone wall, another of him asleep with his dog. He had posed with his beautiful wife at the Alamo two weeks before murdering her. She remembered a snapshot of the note he had left with his mother’s body, saying how sorry he was to have killed her, and a graphic picture of him lying dead in a corner of the tower deck, his face pocked with buckshot.

Intending to wait the night out, hoping the candle would last awhile, she continued turning the pages.

53

THE UP END OF THE SEESAW

Madeline was too despondent to shower or bathe. Gritty with dust, she lay on the sofa bed, her arms wrapped tightly around Nicholas, her tears dripping into the back of his hair. Her ankle bled from kicking the painting; she had tied a dishrag around it. It was two o’clock in the morning. Her only consolation was the locked door. Nicholas sweated in his sleep; she felt the heat of his body and the rise and fall of his small chest as she lay against him and remembered the hateful accusations she had made toward Carlotta, and how she had broken the portrait, kicking it into pieces—shocking to her the moment she did it and even more so now. She had shoved her heel into the face with a powerful cracking sound.

What was left, now? What had she not ruined? How unfair to have blamed Carlotta for what happened at the sinkhole when she knew in her heart that she was the one at fault. Her father had gone to that place to distract her from her petulance and self-doubt and to jog her out of self-pity. And now she had tried to shift the blame because of that same persistent self-pity. If only Carlotta had been outraged to learn who her parents were and how they had deceived her, then she and Madeline would have been on the same side. But Carlotta had been gracious. She had chosen the side with her parents and Shelly and Wyatt, leaving Madeline teetering like a lone figure on the up end of a seesaw.

How had she become this person who could say such things as she had said to her mother and Carlotta? She wanted to go home. She wanted the world to have no one in it except herself and her son.

Her foot had begun to throb. She could feel its pulse and the hard pounding of her heart. She dragged herself away from Nicholas’s damp warmth and ventured into the hall and to her mother’s door. It was cracked open, revealing a light from inside. Peering in, she saw her mother sitting in bed, looking at a large book in the yellow glow of a candle, her hair loose to her shoulders, her crooked arm revealed by the sleeveless nightgown. She looked sad, tired. But in the candlelight, with her hair down, she looked almost young.

Madeline opened the door and went in and sat down on the foot of the bed. “I shouldn’t have ruined the painting or said those things to Carlotta,” she said.

“It was a lot for you to take in today.” She spoke softly, but did not sound entirely forgiving. She looked at Madeline’s foot in the rag. “Have you put anything on the cuts?”

“No.”

“You need some ointment.”

Madeline shrugged. “What are you reading? Is that a UT annual?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t sleep. Sweetheart?”

“Look, I know I behaved badly,” Madeline said. “I’m thinking about leaving and driving back tonight. Andy can bring Nicholas home tomorrow.”

“You shouldn’t be on the road. You’re too exhausted.”

“I don’t want to be here tomorrow when everyone gets up. I especially don’t want see Wyatt Calvert. You’ve put his family in front of ours all these years.”

“No. That’s one thing I’ve never done. Our family was never threatened. I was honest with your dad, and I’m being honest with you. I know you think it’s late for that, but what is this really about, Madeline? If it’s about your jealousy of Carlotta, I wish you’d be bigger than that. You can, if you decide to be. You can get up in the morning and apologize to Carlotta and drive home. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you about my past before now, but nobody’s ever wronged you. You don’t have to live with my past—I do. And in case you’re wondering, I love you more than I love anyone else in the world, and that includes Carlotta.”

Madeline stood up. She hesitated. Then she said, “I’m going to get my things together and start back. I’ll leave Andy a note and tell him to bring Nicholas whenever they’re ready to come.”

The spark of alarm in her mother’s eyes was a meager victory.

Then Shelly flung the covers back and got out of the bed. “If you’re going, I’m going.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going to take you. You’re not going to get on the road like this. You haven’t slept in two nights. Get your things together, and I’ll say goodbye to Wyatt. I’ll meet you in the driveway in twenty minutes.”

“We both have cars here,” Madeline said.

“Cars are the least of our problems. I’ll leave mine.”

54

A NIGHT SKY

Branches littered the dark yard; piles of dust and sand lay against tree trunks and the tires of the cars. The wind had dropped to a breeze, and Shelly walked the road to the cabin, listening to coyotes chattering far away, their voices carrying with strange clarity through the empty spaces. The land looked blanched and colorless under the dust. Eyes glowed from the brush. A small bird flew from a century plant. Shelly walked in the wheel ruts. Searching the night sky, she saw no sign of the owl.

She rounded the scraggly willow trees and saw the rental car nosed up under the junipers. She didn’t at first see Wyatt sitting at the top of the three small steps of the porch, his elbows on his knees. She stopped walking when she saw him. “Hey,” she whispered.

“Hey.”

“Not sleeping?”

“No. Come sit down.”

She sat beside him, the moonlight fanning over the low terrain before them, and car lights crawling on the far-off highway. Stars salted the sky all the way to the ground.

“Madeline’s leaving,” she said. “So I’m going to take her.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.” He took a moment with that. “Shelly?”

“Don’t say anything I won’t be able to forget,” she told him.

And he said nothing. She remembered how helpless she had been lying in her puddle of blood on the South Mall—how Wyatt had looked running toward her in his wildly colored shirt. Slanted from her point of view. How he had saved her, and painted the portrait that now was in pieces, stuffed in the trash, and how he had made love to her, and left her.