No Dark Valley (67 page)

He remembered watching Maddy in the backyard with Kimberly recently, being struck with the awful thought of somebody trying to harm her. He had stood there wondering how Kimberly and Matt would ever be able to send her away from home when she reached school age, to a place where boys were lurking everywhere with their lustful eyes and itchy hands. He could well imagine himself following her to school, then later hiding in the backseats of cars when she went out on dates, carrying a very sharp knife with him at all times. He couldn't bear the thought of attending her wedding someday, having to stand by and see some pea-brained boy put a ring on her finger and promise to love and cherish her forever, then watching them get into a car and go off to live together. How did parents weather such sorrow?

He had been ashamed of himself later for the way he had let his imagination run wild that day, like a girl's, and had even dreamed another awful dream that night with no satisfying conclusion, only a series of blunders on his part as he fought to get to Maddy, who was somewhere out of his sight, crying, “Help, Unca Buce! Help!” He had awakened with a start and slowly raised a hand to feel his face, hoping it wasn't wet. Surely, surely he hadn't reached the point of
crying
in his sleep.

Often these days when he thought about all the things that could go wrong in life, he found himself wondering at length about heaven, trying to conceive of a place of eternal peace and light and joy, a place on the other side of this world where he would be welcomed and would stand redeemed, where he would know and be known. There was a time when he had laughed about the concept of heaven, saying he'd be bored to tears in such a place. That was before he understood that heaven was a place “where no tears will ever fall,” as the hymn said, one of the ones written by the blind woman.

“So how does that sound?” Elizabeth said. “You hungry?” Suddenly Bruce realized they were standing next to Elizabeth's car. The parking lot was almost empty. Only one other car was still there besides his and Elizabeth's.

“Well, I was going to try jogging for a little while tonight,” Bruce said, “but food sounds better.” He had no idea what it was she had suggested.

“Okay, then, we'll meet you there. Is six okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “And where did you say that was?”

She smiled and shook her head. “C. C.'s—you know, the barbecue place over in Filbert?”

“Oh sure, sure.” He opened the door for her. “Sorry, I was just thinking about something.”

“Oh, I know all about that little male habit, believe me,” she said. “I get the same look from my husband—that vacant stare while I'm in the middle of saying something terribly important.”

“Yeah, well, cut us some slack,” Bruce said. “We can't multitask as well as you women can.”

“Tell me about it.” She laughed. “I bet you can't find things in the pantry or refrigerator, either—that's another masculine deficiency, you know.”

She was right, of course. Bruce recalled the time he had cut his hand back during the summer and couldn't find a Band-Aid anywhere in Kimberly's house, the time he had gone over to Celia's to beg one. Later, when he had complained to Kimberly, she had opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and pointed right to them.

“Okay, okay, enough,” he said to Elizabeth now. “Quit picking on us. What I was thinking about was this. How do you feel about separate schools for girls and boys?”

“What? Well,
when
? You mean middle school or what?”

“Everything—nursery school, elementary, middle, high school, college, grad school, the whole works.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Well, it's an idea. Not a very good one, though. I wouldn't want to teach only girls.” She got in her car and looked up at him. “What a boring educational experience. No men or boys around . . . to make fun of.” She closed her door and waved good-bye.

33

This World of Toil and Snares

On the Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving, something occurred which, though it lasted only seconds, Bruce knew he would never forget. He knew he would replay it endlessly, probably expanding and embellishing it a little each time. On the one hand he wished he had a videotape of it so he could watch it over and over, could play it in slow motion to observe every detail of the way it actually unfolded, but on the other hand he knew his imagination would supplement his memory to produce a version far more entertaining in the long run.

The gist of it was this: One minute Matt, Kimberly's husband, was getting out of a car at the front curb, calling to Maddy, who had been sitting on the front steps waiting for half an hour, “Come here, sweetie,” and beckoning to her from the open car door. And the next minute, before anybody could react, Celia was whirling out of nowhere, swiftly bearing down on Matt, her arms raised like Moses ready to strike the rock. All this Bruce and Kimberly were watching through the bay window inside.

The Incident—that's how he would always refer to it from this day forward—showed Bruce yet another side of Celia. He knew it was a story they would be telling for years to come. Thinking about it later, he supposed Celia could rightly be called the protagonist in the anecdote, while Matt would be the antagonist, and Maddy—well, she would have to be the source of conflict, the motivation for the action.

And what fine action it was. It would make a great movie scene. From Celia's angry righteous advance, with the terrible swift sword of her tennis racket raised above her head, to the initial shocked yelp emitted by Matt when he comprehended her intent and lifted his arm to ward off the first blow—what a nugget of high drama.

It was certainly understandable that Celia wouldn't have recognized Matt. Even though she knew by now that Bruce wasn't Maddy's father, she didn't know that Matt
was
. The rare times when he was at home, which hadn't been for a long time now, he didn't spend much time out in the yard, and because their two driveways weren't adjacent, she wouldn't have seen him getting in and out of the car.

Furthermore, since The Incident occurred after five o'clock, it was already sliding toward dusk and therefore getting hard to see. Besides all this, Matt had, for some reason, decided to grow a beard over the months he was in Germany, which made him look older and, combined with his olive complexion, a little sinister in Bruce's opinion, like one of Saddam Hussein's relatives.

“Think about it from her perspective,” Bruce was telling Matt moments after it happened, after he and Kimberly had rushed out of the house to set things right. “Let's go through the whole scenario,” Bruce said to Matt, who was still wincing and flexing his wrist. “This nice neighbor looks out her window and sees a strange man—” Celia interrupted him. “Oh, okay, this nice neighbor is getting things out of her car when she sees a strange man pull up at the curb next door. Then she sees the man open the car door—” Again Celia interrupted. “Oh yes, and it's not a car she recognizes, since the strange man rented it and drove it home from the Atlanta airport. And she then sees the strange man motion for someone to come, and she sees Maddy walking toward him—” Another interruption. “Yes, walking
slowly
toward him, a little shyly as though she's not exactly sure of herself.”

“And then the man says something, and the—” Celia interrupted again. “Oh, so she actually hears him say, ‘Come here, sweetie, I have something for you'—that makes it even more suspicious to her—and so the nice neighbor, having heard about such men in the news, grabs the nearest thing she can get her hands on, which happens to be her tennis racket, and rushes out to save the little girl, disregarding her own safety and any potential damage to her expensive piece of sporting equipment.” Bruce didn't really know whether the racket was all that expensive, but it sounded better that way.

“This nice neighbor,” he continued, “has no idea that the whole thing has been planned at the suggestion of the strange man himself, who happens to be the little girl's father returning home after a
long
absence and wanting to see if his daughter will know him, or that the little girl's mother is watching from inside.” He doesn't add, “or that the little girl's uncle is also inside, though he has strongly objected to being part of this tender little homecoming scene and plans to make himself scarce as soon as he has given the strange man a quick perfunctory handshake and helped him carry in his bags.” Bruce realized he should probably drop the word
strange
now, since it had somehow metamorphosed into meaning odd rather than simply unfamiliar.

So he couldn't blame Celia one bit, Bruce said. In fact, he said, they ought to thank her. “Oh yeah, sure, way to welcome me home,” Matt said, “
thank
somebody for almost breaking my wrist.” He was half smiling as he said it but was still massaging his wrist gingerly.

“I'm thanking her for coming to Maddy's aid,” Bruce said, almost adding, “You know, Maddy,
your daughter
, who has quintupled her vocabulary since the last time you saw her.” By now Kimberly was showering Matt with kisses and hugs, though the hugs were somewhat compromised by her rotundity and by Matt's concern over his wrist. Kimberly was laughing and crying at the same time and flapping her hands around, overcome with so many emotions she couldn't even put words together.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Madison, totally bewildered, had leapt into the arms of the closest person and the one who must have seemed to be most in control of his senses, which was Bruce. Evidently she wasn't quite convinced yet that the bearded man really was the same daddy who had left her almost four months earlier, had sent her a stuffed bear from Germany, and talked to her on the telephone every week.

Meanwhile Patsy Stewart had materialized in her front yard during all this, wearing an apron over her knit pants and holding what looked like a wooden spoon in one hand. Whether she had merely rushed out of her kitchen without thinking or whether she had armed herself to help Celia, it wasn't clear. At any rate, she remained rooted in one spot like a pointer marking a pheasant.

Bruce smiled at Celia, who looked humiliated now that she realized her mistake. He had to hand it to her—she sure wasn't afraid to get involved. He knew it was the kind of image destined to appear over and over in his dreams—Celia, quivering with courage and outrage as she raised her racket to strike again.

She was trying to stammer out an apology to Matt, who wouldn't even look at her, who was still rotating his wrist, then gently shaking it, apparently to see if his hand was going to fall off. Bruce wanted to give him a swift kick and tell him to stop acting like a baby, to be a gentleman and listen to this brave woman's apology, then accept it graciously.

At last Kimberly finally regained her powers of lucid speech and started nodding her head yes, yes, and blubbering that it was absolutely clear how Celia could have misunderstood. She even turned to Celia and gave her a sideways hug of gratitude, then went back to Matt's side and started smooching kisses all over his wrist. Matt, still acting like he had suffered some kind of mortal blow, reached back into the car and pulled out one of those cheap, glittery pinwheels he had obviously picked up for Madison at the airport gift shop. He held it out to her. Madison wriggled free from Bruce's arms and went forward to accept it.

Don't fall for tawdry enticements, Bruce wanted to say, but he reminded himself that Matt was, after all, her real father. His heart was filled with despair as he watched Matt take her into his arms.

To cover his defeat, he turned to Celia and asked to see her racket. He swung it a few times in what he hoped was considered good tennis form, then examined the logo and the writing along the side, as if he knew all about rackets. “Good old titanium,” he said, wondering when they had started using
that
for tennis rackets. “Great stuff. Low density, noncorrosive, high temperature stability.” He stepped back and pretended to serve a ball. “Atomic number twenty-two, which means that's how many protons are in the nucleus of a single titanium atom, and atomic weight somewhere around forty-eight, I think, which makes it heavier than, say, aluminum, but not as heavy as something like copper.”

Oh, smooth, very smooth, he told himself. Rule number one, whenever you can't think of the right thing to say, just start spouting scientific data. That should warm the heart of any woman.

Celia nodded—he couldn't tell whether it was from pity or politeness—and took her racket back. She apologized to Matt again, who must have heard her this time, because he at least had the courtesy to say, “Oh, forget it.”

At that point Kimberly let go of Matt long enough to issue an invitation for Celia to join them for Thanksgiving dinner, to which she replied with a hasty no, thank you, she was leaving for Georgia the next day around six to visit her aunt and uncle, which was a little over four hours away, which would get her there by ten-thirty or so if she didn't stop, which she didn't plan to. She had to be rattled, Bruce thought, to give out such a wealth of information.

Bruce walked back to her car with her, noting that Patsy Stewart hadn't moved. Put a beacon on that woman's forehead and she could be a lighthouse. Bruce gave her a friendly wave of dismissal and called out, “Everything's fine—just a minor misunderstanding. No need to call out the National Guard.”

He thanked Celia again for what she had done, asking her if she needed any help checking her oil or anything before her trip, then backing off immediately when she said no, she'd had that done by her mechanic on Monday along with several other things.

He stood in the driveway as she zipped her racket back into her case, which was in the trunk of her car. It was getting darker now, and he thought he smelled rain. “You planning to play tennis with your aunt while you're in Georgia?” he asked, and she had answered without turning around.