Monday, Monday: A Novel (20 page)

“He and his cousin Jack carried me off the plaza when I was shot.”

Dan looked away from her, and wiped the sweat from his face with his palm. “Does he come here? To see the baby?”

“He’s been here, yes. When I was living in San Marcos. I didn’t see him. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son.”

He shook his head, as if trying to shake off what she was saying.

“He’s not in my life anymore.”

“Okay. Well.” But he didn’t move. “You couldn’t have told me sooner?”

“It didn’t seem right.”

He looked at her. “Are you all right?”

“You mean from telling you this?”

“I mean from when it happened. Are you all right?”

“If you are.”

When they got to the apartment they closed themselves in the bedroom. Dan didn’t ask about the affair, which he didn’t want to talk about. He asked how Jack and Delia had adopted the baby and why Shelly had kept so many secrets from him. Shelly herself couldn’t believe how many secrets there were until one by one she handed them over: the pregnancy, the adoption, her reunion with Carlotta, and now her fear of losing her once again. Her eyes burned with tears. Dan was dazed and asked if Wyatt was the reason she had kept these secrets. “Were you hoping he would come back?” In a moment of bitterness he asked if he was the consolation prize for losing Wyatt. His jealousy was raw and obvious.

It was the oddest thing, but facing Dan’s pain and standing exhausted in front of him, the story spread out between them, her face streaked with tears, she felt a sense of peace and salvation that was deeper than any she’d felt in all those six years since Wyatt Calvert had first lifted her into his arms.

23

LIZARD MOUNTAIN

The same feeling of pending loss hung over those summer months as Shelly had battled when she was pregnant and knew she would be giving the baby up to Jack and Delia. The difference now was having Dan to turn to.

He wanted to wait and meet Jack and Delia at a later time, when they were settled in Alpine, but he and Shelly both felt he should meet Carlotta before the move.

They met, for the first time, at Pease Park. Shelly was pushing her on the swings. Carlotta was two and a half years old, pumping her legs to make the swing go higher and squealing at the air in her face. Pulling her to a stop, Shelly said, “Carlotta, this is my friend Dan Hadley.”

Carlotta glanced at him, her legs still out in front of her as if for momentum, and told him joyfully, “Push me higher!” And he did. The three of them walked along Shoal Creek, looking for tiny marine fossils.

Throughout the summer, Dan listened to Shelly debate with herself about how often she should visit Alpine after Jack and Delia moved. “It presents such a huge problem about what’s right for everyone. What’s best for Wyatt’s family is if I don’t go at all. And I think Jack probably wonders if that wouldn’t be best for Carlotta, too. She’s young enough that she would forget me. But it doesn’t seem right to drop out of her life like that. If I didn’t think I should be in her life, I never would have started seeing her in the first place.”

Finally she proposed a plan to Delia. “What if I come once a year, and stay for a week or so? Maybe in the summers. It might be simpler for everyone than if I’m constantly popping in and out.”

“But wouldn’t it be hard for you—not to see her more than that?”

“I don’t think I can justify seeing her if I’m being selfish about it.”

She said goodbye to Carlotta the afternoon of the move. Jack had borrowed a pickup and had already hauled two loads to Alpine, and now the truck was packed with most of what was left and parked at the base of the shabby steps that led to the emptied garage apartment. Shelly sat with Carlotta in the truck’s cab, watching her pretend to drive. Carlotta had on a pair of Delia’s sunglasses with large frames, like the ones Jackie Onassis wore.

“I won’t be going with you, you know,” Shelly told her, keeping her tone light. “But I’ll come see you, and you can show me your new house and the beautiful mountains.”

Carlotta turned the radio dial and bounced on the seat to music she pretended to hear. She shook her curls and didn’t pay much attention to what Shelly was saying.

The forced casualness of the parting was difficult for Shelly. She said goodbye to Jack and Delia while they all stood in the bare living room, Delia holding a rag, Jack sweaty and dirty from carrying boxes.

She didn’t break down until she got home to her duplex and found that Dan was waiting there, having left work early to be with her and try to cheer her up.

The days passed slowly after that, but then the weeks and months sped up. Shelly talked on the phone long-distance with Delia and Carlotta sometimes, and Delia sent her a Polaroid of Carlotta sitting in a porch swing at the farmhouse.

Shelly could pick up her old plans to apply for the Peace Corps if she wanted to now. The dream had been delayed by the shooting and stalled by the love affair with Wyatt, and then halted by the pregnancy. She had managed to resurrect it briefly at Aquarena, and then had abandoned it when Carlotta had come back into her life. Now she was close to finishing school—she could go anywhere she wanted. She could apply to the Peace Corps. Dan said he would wait for her. But she was already too far away from Carlotta, and she didn’t want to leave Dan.

Just before Christmas she married Dan in a ceremony in an old Victorian house that had been converted into a restaurant called Green Pastures. It was the end of 1972. Their friends and coworkers came to the wedding, and Dan’s parents and several members of his family drove from Montana. Shelly had not met them before. They were pleasant and unassuming and seemed happy about the marriage. Dan and his brother shared the same quiet, understated sense of humor.

Shelly’s parents came too, driving in from Lockhart with some of their friends. Aileen came from Beeville, more dressed up than Shelly had ever seen her. Nancy, from Nau’s Pharmacy, sat up front with the family, and afterward told everyone how she had first talked Shelly into going out with Dan. “She wasn’t going to do it. She didn’t want to go on a date with anybody. I had to push her. I had to brag on him.”

With Dan’s savings they made a down payment on a small frame house in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood, not far from the university, and in the spring Shelly graduated with a degree in English and a minor in Spanish. She found a job in the front office of the Helping Hand Home for Children—a small facility occupying a block in her own neighborhood. She didn’t work with the children, who were mostly from abusive or neglectful situations and in the care of therapists, but many of them hung around her desk during the day and talked with her when they were waiting for the bus to take them to school or on outings. She grew to love them.

In blistering summer, she took a week off, and she and Dan drove west through the scruffy hill country of central Texas, the sun in their eyes and the windows down. They stopped at a filling station in Johnson City, ate burgers at a diner in Junction. Farther west, Shelly saw mountains for the first time in her life, and her heart began to pound because she was getting closer to Carlotta. She could tell that Dan was nervous about meeting Jack and Delia, so she tried to put him at ease by asking about the land formations they were passing. He said something about Precambrian times and the Permian Sea, but his manner was rote and uneasy. Even his knowledge of the land couldn’t make him feel at home where he was going.

“I think I’m being selfish to want you to come with me,” Shelly said at last.

“It’s not that. There’s something I have to tell you.”

She looked at him from the side, waiting for him to say what was on his mind. He seemed unnaturally still, one hand tight on the wheel.

“I’ve been needing to tell you this since the day I met you,” he finally said, with only a glance in her direction. “I was there that day. In the English building. I saw you.”

It took a moment for her to realize what day he was talking about.

“And I didn’t go out to help you. I didn’t know you, but that isn’t the point. The point is, I was a bystander. I watched. I can’t explain it. There’s no excuse. I was afraid of being shot.”

She was too stunned to speak at first. The memory of a face she had seen in the third-floor window of the English building that day came to her. The face had seemed to be looking at her, and she had felt strangely as if she could see herself through those distant eyes. Could it have been Dan’s face? Perhaps not. It could have been anyone’s. “Anybody would be afraid of being shot,” she said.

“No, not anybody. Not Jack. Not Wyatt.” She could see how he struggled.

“Pull over,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

But he didn’t pull over. Nor did he turn to look at her.

“You’ve never told anyone you were there?” she asked him.

“Is there a reason I would want to?”

“Well it doesn’t make any difference in how I see you.”

“So you say.”

“Give me some credit,” she said. “Look, there are people who would run into a burning building to save someone, but wouldn’t risk being shot at, and people who would get shot at but wouldn’t go into a burning building. It depends on a thousand things how people react—maybe just whether or not they’ve had coffee that morning, or a good night’s sleep.”

“I guess it’s lucky Jack and Wyatt had their coffee.”

“Stop it. I love you. It’s ridiculous for you to beat yourself up about something that happened ages ago.”

He had both hands on the steering wheel now, and still hadn’t turned to look at her. “It was the most shameful thing I ever did. To stand there in that window and watch other people risk their lives to help.”

“But you’ve proven yourself in a thousand ways. You don’t have to feel ashamed of one moment for the rest of your life.”

He glanced in her direction. “I can’t feel entirely otherwise.”

It occurred to her that Carlotta would not have been born if it had been Dan, instead of Wyatt, who had come to help her. “I don’t think less of you, and I don’t have any regrets about how it happened.”

“Because it allowed you to meet Wyatt.”

“What—you think I love him more? Because he came out on the plaza? You think I’m only capable of loving one person my whole life? I don’t care that you didn’t go out on the plaza. It makes no difference to me one way or the other. I do care that you have this undeserved feeling of shame about it. How many people do you think were on campus, and how many of those do you think ran out there while he was shooting? Not many. Who knows why Wyatt and Jack did? Not because they’re braver. I know both of them very well, and I know you, and they’re not braver. Maybe they just acted together because they knew each other, or maybe Jack went out there because he’d been in Vietnam and he was used to gunfire, and Wyatt followed him—I don’t know. I
do
know that neither of those guys are any better than you.” She turned the vent onto her face for cold air. “You’re not a coward, and I’m not going to feel sorry for you as if you were.”

They drove in silence for a while, and eventually Dan seemed to relax a little. When he spoke, he sounded amused. “That wasn’t exactly the response I expected.”

“Well, it’s hot in this car,” she said.

“I do feel like I won the princess without slaying the dragon.”

“Hardly a princess.”

When they arrived in Alpine, Shelly squinted in the dimming light at directions she had taken down from Delia over the phone. Across from a Coca-Cola bottling plant and an old roadside map and curiosity store called Apache Trading Post, they turned onto a narrow road bordered by goat and horse paddocks, tin sheds and fenced yards. Pickups and trailers sat parked in the yards. As they turned onto a dirt road, their headlights scanned a shaggy overgrowth of lantana bushes and a spindly tree with dangling seedpods.

Ahead was an old two-story farmhouse with dormer windows and a wraparound porch. The lights inside were shining. A small mountain rose from the darkness behind the house. Dan pulled into the gravel drive and shut the motor off, and Shelly studied the large house in the fading light and noticed movement and the jostle of chains supporting a wooden swing on the lighted porch. A child peered out from the railing spindles, the light glinting on her red hair.

“There she is,” Shelly whispered. It was almost a year since she had seen her.

Dan reached over and squeezed her hand, and then Shelly got out of the car and waved at Carlotta. “Hi, sweetie,” she called softly.

Carlotta didn’t move from the porch at first, but when Jack and Delia came out she ran down the steps toward Shelly, looking back to see that they were coming too. She was three and a half years old now, barefoot, in a faded dress, her tangled curls flopping around her shoulders as she ran. Shelly leaned and scooped her into her arms, folding the warm little body against her.

“Leave the bags for later,” Jack said as Dan opened the trunk. “We’ll take care of all that later. Delia’s made plenty of food, if you haven’t eaten. Come on in.”

They all traipsed up the porch steps and into the house, talking about the drive and the need for rain, Carlotta silent and casting furtive looks at Shelly. Shelly’s first impression of the house inside was the chandelier in the front hallway speckling the walls with light and shining down on the massive newel post at the base of the stairs.

Delia led the way upstairs and into a corner bedroom lit by a table lamp with a tufted shade. The window shutters were open, the glass reflecting the lamplight, and Shelly stood close to the window and cupped her hands to see out past the reflections.

“Now that I see you, I think we’ve met before,” Jack told Dan. “We were on a committee to recount votes for a student government election.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Dan said. “When was that—in sixty-four?”

Gazing out over the carport at the sheen of a tin barn in the dwindling light, Shelly was awestruck. “This is beautiful, Delia.” She crossed the room to a window on the adjacent wall. Two fat limbs of a cottonwood with craggy bark and large triangular leaves nestled close to the glass, framing a view of the small mountain rising out of the flat terrain. Carlotta came to the window and stood next to Shelly, cupping her hands in the same way to fend off the interior light.