Monday, Monday: A Novel (45 page)

And here they sat, on these narrow steps, at this age.

“When are you leaving?” she asked.

“Early. I have a flight from Midland at noon.”

“To New York?”

He nodded. “Through Dallas.”

“And then to see your kids?”

“Yes.”

“Will you see Jack and Delia before you go?”

“Yes.”

“Will you explain to them that I’ve left because I don’t want Madeline driving when she’s so miserable and tired?”

“Of course. She’s still very angry?”

“Very.”

“I like her,” he said. “In spite of how she feels about me.” He laughed quietly, and the sound was a relief to Shelly. “She had nerve to do what she did to that portrait.”

“Yes she did.”

“She’ll get over this,” he said.

“Hopefully, she will. I’m the only mother she has.”

“Yes, and she obviously needs you.”

“Will you tell Jack and Delia how much I love them for all they’ve done?”

“They know, but I’ll tell them.”

“Tell them I’ll call them later. And I’m sorry to have hurt Elaine, Wyatt. I’m sorry about a lot of things.”

“We both are,” he said solemnly. “But I doubt either of us would undo any of them.”

“No. Who would ever undo Carlotta?”

“She is wonderful, isn’t she?” he said.

“And she’s forgiving,” Shelly said. “We’re certainly an imperfect set of parents to have found. Fortunately Carlotta has never minded imperfection.”

“No.”

“Reality’s fine with her. Do you remember the painting you showed me that first day when I went to your office—the very small painting of the apple on the windowsill?”

“All I seem to remember about that day is you.”

“The apple was bruised, and the windowsill was peeling. And you had painted it all exactly—with all the flaws, just like you painted me with the scars. Looking at that painting made me feel so comfortable. And Carlotta has your tolerance for what’s not quite right or perfect. I remember a fish in the pond Jack used to have in back of the house. It was missing part of its tail, and Carlotta thought it was the prettiest one.” She smiled to herself, thinking about Carlotta. “We did all right by Carlotta in the long run, didn’t we?”

“More than all right, in the long run.”

They sat a little longer, surrounded by the vast world filled with faraway things—the pinprick stars, the fracas of crickets and cicadas, and the occasional distant headlights of cars. Shelly had once said to Wyatt, as he shielded her behind the base of the flagpole, “Don’t go. Don’t leave me.” She did not say this now, though she wanted to. Instead she turned to him and touched his face, and said, “Don’t get up.” Then she forced herself to her feet and walked around the side of the cabin and slowly up the road.

55

THE WAY HOME

Madeline washed the grime from her face by flashlight, sponged herself with a washcloth, put on clean clothes, wrote a note for Andy, and whispered to Nicholas that his dad would bring him home tomorrow and she would see him when they got there. She wore a slipper on her injured foot and carried a satchel and a needlepoint pillow that featured a longhorn grazing on green grass.

Her mother was already in the Suburban, the motor running, the wipers sweeping the dust from the windshield, when Madeline tossed the satchel and pillow into the backseat and climbed in after them. “I’ll get this back to Delia later,” she said about the pillow. “Mind if I sleep?”

“That’s the plan,” Shelly told her. With a glance at the empty porch and the dark house and the road down to the cabin, and then at her daughter curled on the backseat with her head cocked stiffly against the pillow, Shelly started out. The road and the land were so blanketed in dust it was hard to tell one from the other. She turned onto the potholed street bordered by houses, and then onto the smoother Highway 67 through town, skirting fallen tree limbs and debris. Streetlights were out; crews were working. She picked up speed on the desolate part of 67 and then headed toward the endless stretch of Interstate 10.

Madeline, in the backseat, kept her eyes closed, not wanting to talk about anything that had happened tonight. For a long time, she said nothing. Shelly pulled into a truck stop on the interstate, and though Madeline was aware of the bright light shining down on her face, she did not open her eyes. She heard the nozzle clank into the car and the gas flow into the tank, but did not so much as shift her head on the pillow. On the road again, she managed almost to fall asleep, but her thoughts kept jolting her awake. She thought up arguments against Andy and her mother for the ways that she had been wronged. But after a while she began to realize that all this struggling would probably only lead her to the same place she could get to much sooner by simply accepting that what was done was over.

“The stupid thing is, I still love Andy, and I don’t want to leave him,” she finally said, her eyes still closed.

“I don’t find that stupid,” Shelly said.

“But I’m afraid he’ll do it again. I don’t want to live my whole life knowing that my fears might come true, and just hoping for them not to.”

Shelly didn’t answer for a moment before saying, “But that’s what most of us do. And if they do come true, we survive and then walk down the middle of whatever road we choose then.”

In the slow passage of moments, blinking her eyes open, watching the moon slide down in the window, Madeline imagined what her life would be like without Andy. Eventually she sat up and looked at the apparition of her face on the dark window.

They had been driving for a long time through a vast, empty stretch when she saw they were approaching the turnoff toward Rocksprings and the sinkhole. The headlights caught the outline of a sign far ahead at the side of the road, and Madeline said, “There it is.”

“What?”

“The turnoff.” As they came closer, the sign began to come into focus. Madeline said, very quietly, “Maybe we should go there. Maybe we should see it.”

A light-headed feeling came over Shelly. She slowed and pulled to the shoulder and stopped in front of the sign, which said 41, 1
MILE.
For a moment, she and Madeline sat in silence, the headlights shining brightly on the green sign and the darkness around it, and then Shelly turned to look at Madeline. “You want to go there—now?”

“Do you?”

Shelly thought of the pictures she had seen in the book at the library—the aerial photograph of that enormous oblong stain on the landscape, and the diagram of the interior, and the picture taken from deep within, with the camera lens aimed up. Devil’s Sinkhole was to her the most evil and horrifying place on the face of the earth. She couldn’t imagine looking down into that monstrous cavern where Dan had fallen. And yet, she always had imagined it.

“In the dark?” she said. “When you’re exhausted?”

Madeline’s eyes glistened in the dim light. “My emotions are so saturated right now nothing could hurt me. I feel like I could face it now. I feel like maybe this is the only time I ever could.”

“And you think you need to face it?”

“Don’t you need to?”

She didn’t want Madeline to go there. She didn’t want to go there herself. But turning to look again at the sign in front of her, she felt the gravitational pull—for herself and for Madeline too. It was palpable. She tried to wish it away, but couldn’t. She got out of the car and leaned against the hood, looking in the direction of the sinkhole at nothing but a dark wash of grass and cedars. When she got back in the car, she centered her hands on the wheel. “Do you know the way?”

Madeline got in the front seat. “I can find it.”

Shelly pulled onto the highway. She exited onto 41 and drove for a long time on the flat road before Madeline guided her onto a small road of white caliche that glimmered bright in the headlights. Cedar grew dense on either side, brushing the sides of the car, an ever-narrowing tunnel. Past a gate, the cedars retreated from the road, and the road unfolded, white in the harsh glare, and the scooped moon sat almost on the horizon.

“Stop,” Madeline said.

Shelly braked slowly, and Madeline sat staring down the road as if waiting for someone.

“What is it?” Shelly whispered.

“This is where we saw the boy.”

“Here?”

Madeline thought of asking her mother to turn back. But they had come this far, and the gate had been open, and the past was just in front of her. “Running at us, down this road,” she said. “Yelling that his girlfriend was down the hole.” The frantic voice came back to her, the leather harness dangling, the bleeding hands, and the ball cap with a logo for Detroit Deisel. “Dad told him to get in the car.”

“Do you want to turn back?”

Madeline shook her head. “No,” she whispered.

Shelly eased forward. The pastureland on either side was rocky and level here, dotted with scrub oak and catclaw and prickly pear. A jackrabbit blinded by the headlights darted along before the car, swerving from side to side of the road until Shelly flicked the lights off and let it escape into the dark. A mile farther on, Madeline said, “I think we’re close to it.” Then she said, “Veer off here.”

“There’s no road here.”

“But veer off.”

Slowly, Shelly did so.

“Now, stop here.”

When the car had come to a stop Madeline reached over and turned the motor off, and they sat in silence, looking at the brush lit by the headlights. “It’s in front of us.”

Shelly couldn’t see it. She stepped out of the car. Katydids chirped in the grass. The headlights shone through tall grasses and clusters of prickly pear and then abruptly dropped off into the hole. Beyond the hole, the faint gray light of morning etched the trees on the horizon.

Madeline took a flashlight out of the glove compartment and got out to stand beside her mother. In her memory, she saw the old white pickup gleaming in the moonlight, its back end sagging, lopsided, over the edge of the cavernous pit. She had forgotten until this second that the girl in the hole had been calling for help when they arrived. The sudden recollection of that beseeching cry was so strong and unexpected she felt as if she was hearing it again. “Listen.”

“What do you hear?”

“Something.”

“In the grass?”

“No.”

It came from the hole—a distant, echoing supplication, as if the sound had lingered there in the dark chasm for all these years and was now circling up from the depths with the rank smell of bat guano, and drifting into the open spaces over the rocky pasture.

Was the noise only a memory? Or was it the sound of bat pups calling for their mothers? The place was unchanged from that night. Time seemed not to have happened. The invisible sun lay below the horizon in the same way now as then, but with the promise of rising instead of sinking. It had the same measured timing, the same obstinate blindness to what was happening on the face of the earth. Even the air was the same as that night—dry and breathless. The same invisible creatures moved stealthily in the brush.

Madeline shone the flashlight at the hole and walked toward it, limping slightly from her injured foot. She stopped at the edge. Painting the beam along the sharp rim of the limestone, she found the scratch marks and gashes made by the underside of the truck, and steadied the light on them. “Here.” She looked at her mother. “This is where he fell.”

For a long moment, Shelly didn’t move. She stared at the blemished edge of the dark pit. And then she walked to Madeline and stood beside her. Madeline aimed the light down into the hole, but the beam faded to nothing. “He knew the rope was frayed even before he hooked onto it.”

She remembered how the boy had paced at the edge, yanking his ball cap on and off and yelling down to the girl who twirled like a tiny acrobat on the rope. The swallows had circled and dived, the bats had begun to chatter, the girl’s voice had seemed to vibrate with the sound, the dark had become darker, and her father had gone down while she had tried to hold on to him with the light. The dank smell of the guano brought it all back clearly. Even now, she had the desperate feeling that she must do something to call her father back.

He had come up out of the dark like an apparition, the girl in her tangle of rope hanging below him. He had almost been close enough for Madeline to touch him. He had tied the girl to the strap with his bent fingers, cut her loose from him, and condemned himself to the frayed rope that scraped at the rim.

“He told me to drive the truck. He said to be sure the brake was set, so I wouldn’t roll backward. He said not to use first gear—it was too close to reverse. He said to use second. I knew it would make the truck jerk, but he said it didn’t matter. He said to give it plenty of gas and let the clutch out slowly. And that’s what I did. He said it was the only chance to save her.” She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked her body back and forth as if she could soothe herself like a child. “He knew the girl would live and he wouldn’t,” she said, her tears beginning to flow. “He did. He knew.” His choice to save the girl had carved a path through time to this dark, quiet morning, this long, lingering moment between a mother and daughter beside an abyss in a pastureland in the middle of nowhere.

Shelly pictured how he had fallen—the exhaust from the tailpipe sputtering into his face, the rocks tumbling around him. The rush of air. “What did he say before he went down?”

“I tried to stop him—”

“But what did he say?”

“He said ‘I have to.’” Madeline bent over, tears flying from her face and twinkling in the headlights.

“He believed the rope would hold,” Shelly said.

“No. He wanted to save the girl. He knew it might not hold. And I knew. I had to know. Didn’t I? I couldn’t have stopped him from going in—no one could have stopped him. But I didn’t
have
to drive the truck. I didn’t
have
to—” She threw her head back. “He was here because of me! It was my fault! It was
all my fault
!” She stumbled away from her mother. “He took the truck to town for help—”

“Who did?”

“The boy—”

“Afterward?”