No Dark Valley (49 page)

The phone call hadn't lasted long. The only other thing Celia remembered her grandmother saying was “Have you gotten my letters?” Celia had said yes, nothing more. No word of appreciation, no apologies for not having answered them, no promises to write when things slowed down after exams.

And she hadn't written, not a single letter, even though the Christmas package from Grandmother had included a box of orange stationery with a decorative border of turkeys and pumpkins around each sheet, a bright green 50% OFF sticker still affixed to the lid. Trust Grandmother to buy something no one else had wanted, something left over from another season, then to leave the evidence of her penny-pinching ways right in plain sight.

Besides the stationery, the Christmas package had included a sheet of postage stamps, a crocheted bookmark in the shape of a cross, a pair of thick black knee socks, a plastic shower cap, and a paperback devotional book titled
Every Day With Jesus
. Funny how she could still remember every item in that box, a cast-off shoebox with $9.99 stamped over the original price of $19.99, wrapped with brown butcher paper and masking tape.

It would have been the simplest thing in the world to write Grandmother a letter on that orange stationery, to lick one of the stamps and put it on the envelope, then stick it in the mailbox that was only a few steps from the front door of her dorm at Blackrock. She had had plenty of free time during Christmas break that year. It wouldn't have had to be a long letter, just something short and general with a polite thank-you for the package. Just a gesture of common courtesy. She could picture Grandmother reaching into her mailbox on Old Campground Road, pulling out the orange envelope, and hurrying inside to open it. She would have called all the aunts one by one to tell them she'd heard from Celia; she would have carried the letter to church with her, then kept it tucked in her apron pocket for weeks afterward.

But no, Celia had been too proud and angry to write a letter. Too proud of herself for escaping her grandmother's house and too angry that she couldn't forget her. How cruel children could be. For that's all she had been back then, a selfish, stubborn child. And now, of course, she got to carry this around with her for the rest of her life, this weighty realization of the day-by-day, year-by-year disappointment her grandmother must have endured every time she opened her mailbox. It would be hard to pick out five things to do differently if she could do them over—there were so many more than five—but Celia knew for a fact that writing Grandmother a letter would be one of them.

With her foot Celia flipped the back cover of Grandmother's diary over to close it, then turned on the overhead bathroom light and stepped to the sink. She leaned forward and looked at herself in the mirror.
You are a miserable specimen of humanity
, she said to her reflection. She got up even closer and studied her eyes, the sad eyes everybody kept talking about. She really couldn't see what was so sad about them. They looked like normal eyes to her, except for the puffy eyelids right now. A man she used to date had called her eyes “bleen,” since he claimed they looked blue part of the time and green the others.

She stepped back away from the sink, still looking at herself, turning her head from side to side. She needed a good trim, something short and perky to make her look like a young professional. This cut had grown out too long, was dragging her face down. The same man who had called her eyes bleen had described her hair as “dusky blond,” which he said sounded much nicer than “dirty blond.” He had always called her Beautiful, never Celia.

Derrick Templeton—that had been the guy's name. He had been nice enough until she discovered some of his odd obsessions, one of which was the comic strip character Garfield. He had entire scrapbooks of Garfield comic strips from newspapers, all kinds of Garfield trinkets, like mugs and key chains and T-shirts, even a stuffed Garfield he kept on his bed. And then it hit her—Garfield, that was the missing president she had been trying to think of. James Garfield.

Well, at least that was one tiny success in a whole night of failures. She gathered up her hair and scrunched it up close to her head. Yes, she definitely needed a haircut. She knew that the cost was the main cause of her putting it off so long. Twenty minutes in a swivel chair and you had to fork over thirty bucks to somebody who had taken a one-year cosmetology course.

She thought of the last hairdresser who had given her a cut, a twenty-something over in Greenville at one of the malls. She had told Celia she was lucky that her hair color was the best for not showing gray. Celia had felt like slapping her at the time.

That same girl had also asked if she was married, then when Celia said no, she had set her lips in a way that seemed to say, “Well, let me hurry up and finish this old maid's haircut so I can get on to somebody more interesting.” And Celia still couldn't believe what else she herself had said without even thinking! As a follow-up to her “no,” she had added, “At least not yet,” after which she had spent the next fifteen minutes rebuking herself. Why should she care what this little twit of a girl at a beauty shop thought about her marital status? And who was she trying to fool? Any woman like herself, within sneezing distance of her thirty-seventh birthday, shouldn't be holding out any hopes of marriage. Besides, she
could
get married if she wanted to. Finding a man was not the problem—it was finding one she couldn't live without.

Which suddenly reminded her of something. If it was past midnight, that meant it was now the second of August—her birthday. She wondered how many other people forgot their own birthdays. If someone were to offer to buy her whatever she wanted most for a birthday gift right now, she'd have to tell them to put their money away unless they knew where a clear conscience was for sale.

She turned on the water at the sink, dampened a washcloth, and pressed it against her eyelids. She thought about the little white bottle inside the medicine chest. She could so easily take it out, unscrew the lid, shake out a pill, gulp it down, and return to bed for at least a few hours of sound sleep. Or she could tough it out. She could take a good hard look at herself for the rest of the night and decide what she was going to do.

She wet the washcloth again and reapplied it to her eyelids. After several long moments she opened her eyes again and saw that nothing had changed. She still had the hollow-eyed look of a person who had either been awake too late or crying too hard, or maybe both. No one would look at this face right now and think “cute” or “young.” If she told someone right now that she was thirty-seven years old, they would say, “Only thirty-seven? Is that all?”

She knew she had always cared too much about her looks. She sometimes wondered how different her life might have been had she not been pretty. Maybe things would have been a lot better. She found herself suddenly thinking about the preacher's wife in Dunmore. Plain little Denise Davidson, with her very clear, very direct, very blue eyes, which were no doubt closed in peaceful sleep right now. She thought of Denise and Newt, their heads side by side on their pillows in the small white parsonage next to the church on Old Campground Road.

She wondered if Denise ever had nights when she couldn't sleep. Probably not. People with clean consciences usually slept well. But maybe Denise was a worrier. Maybe she stayed awake fretting over their finances or a recalcitrant church member or an upcoming doctor's appointment. She remembered what Denise had said to her that evening in the parking lot outside the church: “God reaches out to you in love and mercy. Nobody is beyond his saving power.” And just what did a naïve little goody-goody like Denise Davidson know about the great distances a person could travel away from God, about all the bridges he could burn as he fled further and further?

Celia went back into her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. She remembered a time long ago when she used to fall asleep praying in bed. When she first went to live with Grandmother, she was always afraid she hadn't prayed enough that day. She would force herself to lie awake, working her way through a long list of petitions until somewhere along the way she slipped into a dream and was out for the night. She also remembered the last year, when she would see Grandmother's light still on late at night, shining through the crack under her bedroom door. Sometimes as Celia tiptoed past her door, she would hear her voice, never in a loud showy display of piety but low and earnest, the words indistinguishable.

“Didn't sleep good last night”—that was a recurring phrase she had run across in Grandmother's diary. Often the reason followed: “Came a hard rain and kept it up till near dawn,” or “Heartburn from Molly's chili,” or, more often, something like “Celia not home till past 2
A.M.
” Never anything like “Bad dreams,” though. Grandmother would probably have considered it a sin to have bad dreams. She wouldn't have approved of anything that showed too active an imagination or hinted at hidden guilt.

Well, one good thing about staying awake all night was that it kept the bad dreams at bay. No crying babies tonight, no disappointed looks on the faces of her parents, no snarling cats or old women in caskets. But besides not being able to function tomorrow, staying awake had other drawbacks tonight. It left too much time to think about what had happened at the kitchen window earlier that evening. She was still mortified over it.

She had behaved horribly, had known it even as she spoke the words, and had been so ashamed afterward that she had actually broken down and cried in front of Elizabeth. They had finished the meal, cleaned up the kitchen together, and even sat in the living room talking for a good hour after that, but Celia had wished the whole time that she could go hide in a closet. Not that Elizabeth hadn't done her best to smooth things over, to salve Celia's embarrassment first with cheerful talk, then with confidences of some of her own past blunders.

But nothing could wipe away the meanness Celia felt, the echo she still heard of her small-minded accusations, her tone of hysteria. Oh, how unspeakably arrogant she must have sounded to Bruce! How petty and childish she had felt as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Perhaps it had been her loss of control, however, that had opened her up to what happened after Elizabeth left. Maybe she would have put off reading her grandmother's diaries indefinitely if she hadn't already erred so badly that night. Maybe after recognizing your blatant fallibility in one area, you were more willing to consider it in others.

Whatever the cause, she had opened one of the diaries around ten o'clock, while soaking in the bathtub, and had closed it an hour and a half later after the water was cool. She hadn't shed a tear during the whole reading of it, but at the end she had been overcome with remorse and pity, with the pain of her many failures, had bowed her head and let the tears come. She had watched them fall from her face into the bath water, had thought,
I am washing myself with my own tears
, had wished they could possess some healing for her guilt, some retroactive power to comfort her grandmother's broken heart.

So what was to be done? How could she ever know those fathomless billows of peace the hymn talked about? Her eyes lighted on the telephone beside her bed. What would Denise Davidson say if Celia called her right now? It would be easy to find out her phone number from directory assistance. But her husband would no doubt answer the phone. And what would Celia say to the Reverend Davidson? “Hi, Newt, do you know that song that goes ‘Peace, peace, wonderful peace'? Well, I keep hearing it in my mind, and I know it's past three in the morning, but I can't sleep, see, and I need your wife to explain something we talked about in the parking lot six weeks ago, about how the balancing act works between sin and mercy.”

Oh, the silly things that went through your mind when you were sleep deprived. Celia heaved a sigh and got up from the bed. She walked out into the living room. Maybe she could fall asleep on the couch. Maybe she should turn on the television and see what kinds of things came on at this time of morning. But she felt too restless to lie down again.

She went to her front door and unlocked it. She opened the screen and stepped out onto the concrete stoop in her bare feet. She looked up at the treetops, then past them to the black sky. One especially bright star stood out from the rest—a sign maybe? But then she saw it was only an airplane, and soon it was out of sight. It was a still night yet mild for early August.
I must do something
. The thought was bearing down on her.
I can't go on this way
. And then without meaning to, she fixed her eyes on the night sky and said aloud, “Show me how to start.”

She turned and looked across the driveway to Kimberly and Bruce's house. She saw again the look of shock, then anger, in his eyes through the kitchen window earlier that night. Holding the struggling cat against his chest, he might have presented a comical image, but when he had spoken he was deadly serious. She had been too flustered at the end to make amends, and she couldn't imagine bringing herself to apologize now. No, she would just ignore him and hope that he would, like any typical male, forget the specifics of the incident over time.

She stepped back inside and locked the door. As she turned to go back to her bedroom, her eyes landed on the small table beside the door, the one where she always laid her mail and keys. She usually discarded junk mail right away, but because she had been busy preparing for Elizabeth's supper visit, she hadn't done so that afternoon. And there, right on top, was a piece of junk mail with these words printed in bright red letters on the envelope:
Do you need help? Write for free information
. The return address was Marchant & Buchanan, Public Auctions—certainly not an enterprise to lend the kind of help Celia needed, but she looked again at the message.