No Dark Valley (57 page)

She spoke again, maybe even asked another question, but he didn't hear her clearly. Something was suddenly shifting around inside his head. He started across the driveway, then stopped. Celia was standing down to his right on the other side of the driveway, Patsy in the front yard, up the slight grade to his left.

Madison raised her voice, twisted around in his arms to look directly at Celia, and said clearly, “My mommy fall down.”

“Fall?” Patsy said. “Did she say fall?” When she didn't get an immediate answer, she said, “Did she hit her head?” Then, “How far along is she?” and “Are you going to the hospital?”

The questions were coming too fast. Bruce could think of only one thing to say, and he said it: “Yes.” And even as he said it, he felt his feet make a slight change in direction so that he found himself walking straight toward Celia. It was a strange moment as he approached her, the look on her face almost as panicky as the one he had seen on Kim's face as they strapped her onto the stretcher. He wouldn't have been surprised if Celia had raised her hands and stepped back, shaking her head no, or if she had turned around and bolted for her apartment. But she didn't. She stood absolutely still and watched him get closer and closer, her eyebrows drawn down, her mouth slightly open, as if groping for words that wouldn't come.

And when he handed Madison to her, she took her with a small resigned sigh, almost as if she had known this time would come, as if she had been dreading it like an old nightmare. Madison stared fixedly at Celia, their noses not three inches apart. “My mommy fall,” she whispered, and Celia nodded, still frowning.

“I'll come back and get her as soon as I can,” Bruce said. “I don't know how long. I hope it won't . . . I mean . . . hey, I know, I'll leave my apartment door open so you can get inside and . . .” He made a face. “She might need a diaper. They're upstairs in the nursery. But watch out for the marbles.” Celia looked puzzled. “You'll see them,” he said. “Oh, and she hasn't had supper. Wait, maybe I should . . .”

“No, you go,” Celia said. “You go take care of your sister.” Bruce thought he might have imagined it, but it really did sound like she put a little extra stress on the word
sister
. He didn't have time now to wonder about it, but later it would be worth mulling over the very remote possibility that maybe she felt the least bit sorry about their argument through her kitchen window that day, about her misjudgment of him and her testy words, some empty threat about how she'd better never see that cat hanging around her apartment again. Or maybe her threat had been directed at Bruce himself. Thinking back, he couldn't remember exactly who had said what that day.

On his way to the hospital only minutes later, Bruce couldn't help worrying about Madison. Had he done right in leaving her with Celia? Would Patsy have been a better choice? If he ever had a child of his own, he knew he'd never be able to trust anybody as a baby-sitter, not even a nun or a Girl Scout leader or a grandmother with umpteen grandchildren. He thought of the scowl on Celia's face when he had handed Madison to her. He hoped she wouldn't forget to feed her. He should have told her how much Madison liked applesauce, grits, and dark brown toast. Those would be easy to fix.

It came to him that this rushing to the emergency room seemed familiar. Not necessarily something he had done himself, though. Maybe it was just that he had read about ER scenes a lot in the suspense novels he used to like. Or maybe he had watched too much television. People were always getting hauled to the ER on TV.

He wondered again, as he often did, if anybody else's mind worked the way his did, if other people ever imagined they were writing about their lives as if they were episodes in a book, and as soon as the first few words started forming themselves, he stopped and wondered if any other person in the whole world was using this same tactic right this very moment to distance himself from his trouble.

He doubted it, although there had been that girl he had met in Natchez years ago, a very intelligent Jewish brunette who used to make up impromptu limericks about the places they went, things they did, people they saw. She was very witty, that girl, and about five times smarter than any other girl he'd ever gone out with. Wasn't all hung up on the Ten Commandments, either, like you'd expect from a Jew; in fact, she regularly broke several of them.

Speeding to the emergency room, Bruce remembered a particularly clever Jewish girl from Natchez, who never once, during his acquaintance with her, had kept the Sabbath holy
. The words fell together easily. That kind of story opening would tease the reader in both directions, past and future. He wouldn't ever use it, though, as it might sound a little irreverent. He wouldn't want to come across as making fun of the Bible.

Or how about trying a limerick of his own?
There once was a mommy named Kim, whose figure was not very trim; She heard a loud crash, she made a quick dash
 . . . But he stalled on an ending. He tried several, but none of them would work. The mind a fascinating piece of equipment. So much of what it did seemed to be diversionary, to keep from overloading itself with reality. He eased up on the accelerator. It wouldn't do to get pulled over or, worse, to have an accident on his way to the hospital.

What he needed to do right now was to pray. He was ashamed that thus far his thoughts had been so scattered that he hadn't even stopped to form a genuine prayer, only a few frantic
help
me's in between everything else. Strangely, though, with every
help me
he had seemed to hear an immediate response: “Don't be afraid; I'm here; it's all right.”

He thought of his sister and the baby she was carrying. He knew he could play the male role and act strong on the outside for her sake and Madison's if something bad happened, but he could imagine himself crumbling inside, lying awake at night, walking around like a drugged man for days on end, losing his train of thought right in the middle of explaining genetic mutations to his students and wandering out of the classroom into the hallway.

He started praying as he drove, then broke off when he heard another siren and saw a fire truck zip by going the opposite direction. So many tragedies overlapping one another. He thought of the pan in Kimberly's kitchen. He
had
turned the stove off, hadn't he?

His mind returned to the earlier thought—would Madison be all right in Celia's care? What were they doing right now? Surely Celia wouldn't treat a child, a baby really, as rudely as she had treated him in the past. Maybe he should have left her with Patsy after all, even though he hated to think of a beautiful, perfect little girl like Madison having to spend even a few minutes with dull, unimaginative Patsy.

Maybe Celia would play something on her clarinet. Madison loved music. Or maybe she had drawing paper and paints in her apartment and would let Madison finger-paint. Probably not, though. That would be messy. He remembered how tidy Celia's apartment was, how fastidious she always looked. He remembered an old movie his mother had liked—
Father Goose
with Cary Grant—in which Leslie Caron called herself a “picture straightener” type. That was Celia. He could imagine her making regular rounds in her apartment to straighten all her paintings. But then maybe Celia had a hidden side. Maybe she secretly loved kids and noise and a little unpredictability.

He thought of a conversation he had had yesterday with Elizabeth Landis, who had accepted a permanent job at his school a few weeks ago when an eighth-grade English teacher had suddenly resigned due to “health problems.” That was the official announcement at their weekly faculty meeting, though they all knew it had to do with the protracted divorce she was going through. “Severe depression” hardly began to describe the woman's mental state now, though the way she used to talk about her husband in the teachers' lounge would have made you think she'd welcome a divorce.

Elizabeth, who had already been called on to sub for this same teacher many times since school had started in September, had stepped right into the job, and because their classrooms were catty-cornered to each other's, Bruce and she had fallen into visiting for a few minutes after school each day. She had even volunteered to help with the recent auditions for
A Midsummer Night's Dream
and was sitting in on some of the rehearsals.

Bruce judged that Elizabeth was probably a good ten years older than he was, and he had already decided she must have been one of the smart, quiet girls back when she was in school. But not boring, definitely not that. She was a tall woman and pretty in a natural understated way. She had a fertile mind and a quick sense of humor when you got to know her. Married, of course—the good ones always were—but Bruce had thought more than once that if he had been born a decade earlier or she a decade later, he would have spotted her a mile off as somebody worth pursuing, though a smart woman like her probably wouldn't have given him the time of day, since his attention up until the last couple of years hadn't exactly been aimed at a woman's mind. He wondered if Elizabeth's husband knew what a very nice wife he had. He was a musician, she had told Bruce.

Elizabeth had come to his classroom yesterday to show him some poems her eighth graders had written. Bruce had been sitting at his desk absentmindedly twirling a ruler around on top of a pencil—the same ruler and pencil he had confiscated from a boy an hour earlier who had been doing the same thing with them. He was thinking about how poorly most of his seventh graders had done on the chapter test that day over the major plant groups, wondering if he was expecting too much to think that they would recall the difference between xylem and phloem, between ferns and club mosses, between gymnosperms and angiosperms, all of which he thought he had made crystal clear in class but evidently hadn't.

Elizabeth laughed at him from the door. “Reverting to your childhood, huh?” she said, then came in and sat on one of the student desks facing him. She handed him the poems.

He could feel her watching him read them. He tried to make a few comments that wouldn't give him away as a total nitwit when it came to poetry. She told him she had gotten the idea for the assignment from a meeting she had been to recently—a poetry club she sometimes attended. And oh, she said, he'd be interested to know that his next-door neighbor, Celia, had spoken to her poetry club one time back in May.

Though Bruce pretended disinterest at the mention of Celia, Elizabeth must have read something different on his face, for she paused. “You know, I really think the two of you could become friends,” she said. “I've thought that ever since I found out you live right next door to each other.”

Bruce could still picture the astonishment on Elizabeth's face as she had stood behind Celia that day in August listening to the two of them exchange insults through the window. “One of you would have to make the first move, though,” she said, rising to pick up the poems from Bruce's desk. “One person always has to do that.”

He didn't say a word, merely shrugged, picked up the ruler once more and gave it another vigorous twirl. First move? Is that what she had said? If she only knew. Elizabeth had heard the argument that day, but she didn't know about all his first and second and third attempts to be friendly before that. Not unless Celia had told her, and he felt sure she hadn't. The only thing Elizabeth knew about was that one conversation, white-hot and razor-edged—and whatever else Celia had chosen to tell her, which would be nothing that painted him in a favorable light.

Before she left his classroom, she paused at the door and said, “Celia is a lot different from your first impression of her. She really is. You need to be patient with her, give her a chance. I think she's got some things in her background that make her . . . well, let's say not the easiest person to get close to. I don't even know what they all are, but I'm working on it. She's really very nice, Bruce. Very nice. We're on the same tennis team, you know.”

And how was he supposed to know that? Bruce thought. He had never figured Elizabeth for a tennis player, though he could see it now. She seemed a lot more languid and low-key than Celia, however, so he wondered how quick she was on the court. Maybe he should play her sometime. Surely he could beat a woman ten years older than himself. That would be pretty humiliating if he couldn't.

Not that he had a superinflated ego like some men. He remembered all the mean stuff men had said about the woman golfer who had sneaked into an “open” tournament in Asheville last year and who had placed twelfth out of sixty-two entrants. Vic Darnell, that was how she had signed her name on the registration form, but later it came to light that Vic was short for Victoria. Bruce had applauded her at the time, though he had paused to wonder whether he would feel differently if he had been one of the fifty men who ranked below her.

After Elizabeth had left his classroom yesterday, Bruce had roused himself to flip through a book he had picked up from the Derby Library, titled
Plays for Today's Young Teens
, and right before slamming the book shut, he had come across a play called
First Impressions
. Funny coincidence. Well, he had certainly not been guilty of forming a hasty first impression of Celia. No, he had remained generously fair-minded, he thought, until the fifth or sixth impression had confirmed the first one: Celia, with her nose in the air, rode a very high horse.

Bruce suddenly realized he needed to turn on his headlights. Driving along toward the hospital, both impatient to get there and dreading what he might learn, he could hear again the sound of hymns drifting out of Celia's apartment. He wondered how she knew a song like “The Old Rugged Cross.” Could it be that she knew other hymns, maybe some of the same ones they sang at Community Baptist every Sunday? He wondered if phrases from those songs ever came to her at odd times during the day or night, as they did to him. Surely not.