No Dark Valley (16 page)

It was hard for her to separate the guilt from the anger, she felt them both so much of the time. Part of her blamed her grandmother's God for not letting her forget, for making her feel so keenly the weight of her guilt, for not having used all that power he was supposed to have to keep her from having an abortion in the first place. It was only further evidence to her that the God worshiped at Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle kept strict, unrelenting account of everything a person did and then proceeded to get even for all the years to come. Celia had decided long ago that she didn't want to have anything to do with that God, and she didn't know about any other. So what if it was true about heaven and hell? She would take her chances. Anyway, she couldn't imagine that heaven would be anything special with a God like that running things.

All of which meant that she blamed her grandmother, also, sometimes without even realizing she was doing it. Living with a woman like that had planted notions in Celia's head of constantly being watched and judged by the great almighty Record Keeper. It had activated her imagination to the point that it interfered with her enjoyment of life, even after she made her break with religion as a high school senior.

Renee and Ansell and her other friends used to laugh about Celia's conscience, calling it “the vermin within” and urging Celia to “exterminate” it by immersing herself in all the new things they were trying to teach her. “You know,
baptize
yourself with fun!” Ansell liked to say. Her own timidity and caution made her mad. If she didn't live with her grandmother, she had reasoned, she could have grown up with normal attitudes about enjoying life.

But another part of her blamed herself for slipping up that one time. She had always been so careful before then. And certainly since then. One of Celia's college roommates had teased her mercilessly about what she called Celia's “religious” approach to birth control. “Must be that heavy-duty Sunday school background of yours,” the girl had said. Celia had told her all about her grandmother and Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle.

That particular roommate was a history major named Amber, who regularly brought her boyfriend to their dorm room to spend the night. Celia had asked her once what she would do if she got pregnant, and Amber had laughed and waved it off. “It won't happen. But if it does, it's not like the end of the world. There
are
ways to take care of such problems, you know.” Amber hadn't come back to school the next fall, and Celia never knew why.

She looked around her now, at the storage cupboards in the workroom, the sink and countertop, the small refrigerator, which held a leftover Caesar salad she planned to eat after she closed the gallery that evening and stayed late to work on the computer. At least that had been the plan when the day started. Now she wasn't so sure. This day seemed oddly distorted, as if it had lasted for a whole week already. She thought of that Bible story from her childhood, the one where somebody—was it Joshua?—had lifted his rod and made the sun stand still. Perhaps someone had done the same thing today. Surely it hadn't been only this morning that she had played tennis at the Holiday Inn.

Her eyes landed on the letter again—the one from the lawyers telling her she was the sole inheritor of her grandmother's house. She felt a sudden and surprising pang of envy toward her grandmother—Sadie Madeline Ellsworth Burnes, though most people had known her as just Sadie Burnes. How unencumbered her life had been. She had simply gotten out of bed every morning and set about doing her duty. She read her Bible, did some housework, cooked a little, listened to a radio preacher, sent a card to a missionary or a shut-in, swept the front porch, hung out a few clothes—on and on with things like that until the day was filled up and it was time for bed. She could lay her head on her pillow every night without dreading the dark hours ahead and the dreams that came with them, and when the sun came up the next day, she would get up and start all over again. She could look at a school bus full of children passing her house and feel no burden of guilt.

As she did so often, Celia felt an intense wish gripping her heart, the wish that somehow there could be a way to go back and redo the past. One little mistake and you were never a free woman again. One especially handsome sweet-talker—a well-built PE major of all things, oh, the shame of it!—and you lost your head one night and got careless, thinking just this one time wouldn't matter. But it did matter, and it kept on and on mattering because you had to remember it every single day and night for the rest of your life.

And to think she had actually paid four hundred dollars to torment herself for the rest of her life. But how could she have possibly known how far-reaching the effects of that visit to the clinic would be? She had been twenty-two, not exactly a kid, certainly old enough to think for herself, so why hadn't she taken more time to consider it all? Why, when she was usually on the indecisive side about every little thing, had she so swiftly made up her mind to do that one huge thing?

And even when she had felt the first stirrings of doubt as they led her to the back room of the clinic, when her hands started trembling and the cold started seeping into her, why hadn't she had the courage to say, “Wait a minute, I need to think this through some more”? She often wondered if other clinics had people who sat down and talked to the girls before they took their money and told them to undress, who warned them about this thing they were about to do and about what it would mean for all the years to follow.

The sweet-talking PE major had lost his appeal as soon as Celia had discovered she was pregnant. She wouldn't have thought of seeking his opinion concerning what she was about to do nor of asking him to help pay for it. She dropped him like a hot potato and never offered a word of explanation. Nor did he press her to. He immediately took up with a tall, blond interior design major, and the two of them walked around campus looking like models for a college fashion magazine. Every time Celia saw him, she felt physically sick to think she had been so stupid.

“But life goes on,” she said now, quite loudly, in the back room of the art gallery. This was the refrain she forced herself to say after each episode of guilt knocked her down. Sometimes she said it a dozen times a day; other times she could almost make it through a whole day without saying it once. The gallery was a good job for her, much better than the newspaper job she'd had before, where she'd had to be around too many people all the time and cover stories that far too often seemed to involve children.

Some would probably say it didn't make sense, that the newspaper job should have kept her thoughts so occupied that she wouldn't have time to dwell on her own problems, but it hadn't worked that way for her. Coming to work at the Trio had been a great relief. Some days it was as if she had been granted a reprieve—not a pardon, never
that
, but at least a brief stay. At times she could get her mind on something here at the gallery and concentrate so hard she could actually forget for a while that a child would be alive today if it hadn't been for her carelessness.

And her selfishness. At some point during the last fourteen years, she had admitted to herself without even meaning to that this had been a big part of why she had gone to the clinic that day. She'd had things she wanted to do with her life, and a baby sure wasn't part of them, not right then. A simple choice—and a totally self-centered one. It had been a black day when she had realized this. How depressing that a person's own mind could turn against her that way. Nevertheless she had recognized it as the absolute truth.

She had long since given up arguing with herself that it wasn't really a
baby
—and all those other attempts at justifying the act. It was nothing more than a little mindless clump of cells, not really a person, she had tried to tell herself for years. And any child brought into the world deserved to be loved and
wanted
, which this one wouldn't be. And, of course, it could have easily been damaged in some way even at that early stage; maybe it would have been born deformed and never . . . blah, blah, blah. Oh, she knew them all, the same old tired thoughts.

She got up from the table and splashed water on her face again. She needed to go through the day's stack of mail, make a couple of phone calls, and then start working on the mailing for the next show, which ought to go out in a week or two.

She was sitting at the front desk a few minutes later when she saw a mustard-colored Volkswagen van pull up in front of the gallery. She recognized it at once as belonging to Macon Mahoney, one of the gallery's newer artists. She sighed—far too many people were showing up this afternoon.

She had always thought that Macon Mahoney could be a character in a book. He could have been somebody Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn ran across while drifting down the Mississippi River on a raft, some good-hearted fellow who joined up with them to try to get Jim to freedom. Or put him in a frock coat and top hat instead of his customary jeans and T-shirt, and he could be in a Dickens novel—maybe a kindly neighbor of the Cratchit family or another clerk, a nicer one, in the office where Uriah Heep worked. Half of what Macon Mahoney said didn't make sense to Celia, but the other half was very funny and witty and showed a childlike love of life she didn't often see in grown people. He was polite, too, and never acted as if he thought he was anything special, though in her opinion he was an artistic genius.

She watched him get out of his van now and walk around to open the side door. He got back inside the van, but she could see him crawling around in the back of it. She wondered what he was bringing in now, for surely this was the reason for his visit. He usually stopped by every other week or so, bringing something he had recently finished or, more often, something old he wanted to swap for another piece of his in the gallery. Celia rarely had to worry about rotating Macon's pieces because he kept them rotated himself. He was always changing things around at home or entering something in a contest or lending pieces out, sometimes even giving them away.

He was immensely talented, although Celia thought that he explored so many different forms and media that he still hadn't found his home ground. She liked almost everything he did, however, so she didn't know what advice she would give to an artist like him—if an artist like him would ever ask her opinion, that is. Would you tell a Macon Mahoney to keep experimenting and producing these highly unique pieces in every style, or would you tell him to spin a wheel and then zero in on whatever he happened to land on, forgetting everything else? A specialty was something Macon didn't yet have, but was that a bad thing when you could do so much so well?

Celia remembered a lidded clay pot he had brought in with him the first day he had come to the gallery with color slides of his work. The pot looked like primitive southwestern art, a dusky mottled clay with crude figures of animals etched into it, like something you'd see on the wall of a cave, and she had fallen in love with it at first glance. In fact, she had bought it for herself before he left that day.

A “walk-in” is what they called artists like that who just showed up at a gallery to say, “Here I am and here are pictures of my stuff and wouldn't you love to represent me?” Dealers and gallery owners joked about them. The ratio of walk-ins that actually had something worth seeing to those who needed to find some other way to support themselves was probably about one to five thousand, but, amazingly, Macon Mahoney had been that one.

She would never forget it. It had been the first day of April last year when he had sauntered in and bowled her over with his art. She had almost asked him if it wasn't some kind of April Fool's joke, especially given the fact that he said such off-the-wall things. She thought surely he must be some famous rising artist from New York already represented by some big name like Castelli or Janis, but then it didn't make sense that somebody would go to the trouble to pull a prank like this.

It turned out that he was one of those rare undiscovered talents who had quietly matured in relative obscurity while he held down a part-time job at a health food store. Celia could tell from looking at his slides that he could only be expected to keep getting better. His studio was above a mattress store in Derby, one big room where he had both lived and worked until he married a music teacher in Berea the year before and moved into her house with her. Celia had known beyond a doubt that Craig, Ollie, and Tara would all vote to do a show of his work and then invite him to join the gallery, and she had been right.

Celia had gone to his studio a few days after his first visit, along with Tara, to see some of the works firsthand, and she had been astounded to think he had been living within twenty miles of the Trio for close to ten years and had never shown any of his work at a gallery. His new wife had been the one to first encourage him to visit some of the regional galleries and talk to some dealers about his work. He had never thought he was ready for that, had given most of his work away as gifts. And, in one of those odd connections you sometimes discover between two people you know, Celia had later learned that Elizabeth Landis had actually been the one to specifically suggest the Trio Gallery to him. It just happened that Elizabeth lived across the street from the woman Macon married.

He was out of the van now and walking toward the door with a rather large painting. Celia met him and opened the door for him.

“Hi, Macon. Got something new for us?”

“‘Ever reaping something new,'” he said, stepping sideways through the door. He turned the painting around and set it on the floor against the plate-glass window. “That was Tennyson,” he said. “Could be
Lady of Shalott
, but I'm thinking not. Maybe
Locksley Hall
or
In Memoriam
. That's memori
am
, you know, not memori
al
. Some people get those words mixed up.” He stepped back a few paces and scowled at the painting. “‘Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere.'” He glanced up at Celia. “That's William C-o-w-p-e-r. Rhymes with blooper. Cowper—lots of people pronounce his name wrong. Great poet. Wrote a lot of hymn texts. Old guy—died over two hundred years ago.”