Monday, Monday: A Novel (46 page)

“Afterward.”

“And where were you?”

“Here.”

“With the girl?”

“The boy took the girl.”

“Here, by yourself?”

“With Daddy.”

“But—” And suddenly Shelly understood how it had ended—how Madeline had kept watch over the hole, in the dark, alone, screaming into it for her father until she no longer expected an answer but kept shouting into the echo of her own voice because there was nothing else she could do, and because she needed to drown out the unbearable silence.

Madeline plucked a rock from the ground and threw it into the cavern, crying, “Goddamn hole!” She fell to her knees at the edge where her father had fallen, crying into her hands. Shelly held on to her, coaxing her back from the rim, and they sank to the ground together, Madeline weeping, clinging to her mother in the prickly grass. The gray light became tinged with blue, and Shelly was suddenly aware of something fluttering around them, and realized that the bats were coming in. Madeline raised her face at the sound of their wings beating the air, and cried in terrible sobs as they descended, only a few at first and then thousands sinking into the cavern.

On the rough ground with their arms around each other, Shelly and Madeline saw the world come into view. The eastern sky turned orange, the light expanded rapidly, and the sun lifted hurriedly, as if pulled up by a string, flooding the pasture with color. The light did not flood into the hole, but they saw it reach the rim—the scarred shelf of limestone where Dan had fallen—and slide downward to the ledges where the swallows nested.

56

THE OYSTER SHELL

When Carlotta woke the next morning, it was to a dusty but sunny room and to the astounding knowledge of all that had happened not only the night before but during her whole lifetime, and even before that, when Shelly and Wyatt fell in love. It filled her with wonder that so many lives were blended with hers, all flowing in and out of one another like the colors in a piece of tumbled bloodstone.

From downstairs, there were voices. A door closed. The dog barked once. Carlotta pulled her robe on and went downstairs, where she saw Ranger waiting at the screen door with the obvious hope of escape. Shooing him out of the way with her foot, she went out onto the porch and found her father drinking coffee and reading a newspaper while Andy stood at the railing, remarking on the litter in the yard. Nicholas, in his pajama bottoms, was swinging so high in the porch swing that the chains rattled.

“Look how high I can make it go!” he told her, shoving off hard, his hair rising and flopping.

“That is amazing,” she said. “I had no idea it would go that high.”

Her father looked at her over his reading glasses, and she knew, because she knew him so well, that he was ready for the guests to leave. He wanted his porch back, dusty though it was.

Andy said, “Good morning!”

“Good morning. I take it we have electricity. I’m going to get some coffee. Does anyone need a refill?”

“No thanks,” Jack said.

Nicholas dragged his feet to stop the swing, and followed her inside.

“Where’s your mom and Nana?” she asked him.

“They’re gone,” he told her. “My mom left a note for my dad. They went home, and we’re going home too. We have to go home because my mom is there, and she’s going to feel bad about kicking the painting of Nana. Can I have some cereal?”

“Sure.”

She set out a bowl and a spoon and a box of cornflakes.

“The other man is gone too,” he said.

“The other man?”

“The tall one.”

“You mean Wyatt?”

“Yeah. He went.”

“This morning?”

“He came to talk to us on the porch and said goodbye. He told your dad he was going to call you.”

“Okay. Has my mom been down?”

“No.” He dumped the cornflakes into the bowl, and she helped him pick up the stray ones, then poured the milk for him.

“Can we look for some colored rocks to put on top of Jerry’s grave?” he asked her.

“Of course. I have a lot we can choose from up in my room.”

“Maybe we need a big one with Jerry’s name,” he suggested.

“Jerry was little. Little stones will be better.”

She sat at the table with him and drank her coffee while he ate his cereal; then they went together up to her room and looked through canisters and boxes. “This one would be good,” she said, holding up a jagged piece of blue chrysocolla. “It creates tranquility and serenity. And this rose quartz represents unconditional love, which is the kind you had for Jerry, because you loved him no matter what.”

“Even when he was dead,” Nicholas said.

“Even then,” she agreed. “And this green dioptase is quite rare and expensive. We won’t put it on the grave, but you can have it, because it heals sadness, especially in children. If you feel sad about Jerry, hold it next to your heart.”

He took it and turned it about in his hands and pressed it against his bare chest.

“And this is black obsidian for protection,” she said. “So we should put it on the grave to protect it. Also this malachite, for friendship, since Jerry was your good friend.”

In search of a special piece of water-polished seer stone, she opened a box of her personal items, each carefully wrapped in a sheet of brightly colored tissue paper. Unfolding piece after piece, she unexpectedly came across the fossilized oyster she had found when she was thirteen, on the school trip to Big Bend. She removed it from the paper and marveled at it, remembering how it had looked embedded in the canyon wall and recalling the imagined scenes of how she would present it, someday, to her mysterious mother, on a lovely beach or by a campfire. A small feeling of loss came over her, as gentle as the morning breeze floating through the window. She had so looked forward to meeting her mother, and it was disappointing that the meeting had already come and gone, and so long ago that she couldn’t even remember.

But there were other things to look forward to—a new job, in a new place, after she closed the shop. Maybe a diving trip at the end of the summer if she could afford it. And possibly even a baby in the future.

She showed the fossil to Nicholas—how the top could lift off and fit perfectly back together, and then she wrapped it again in the tissue paper, and put it back in the box.

Perhaps some day she would give it to Delia.

“Now let’s put these on the grave,” she said, gathering up the stones they had selected.

57

FROM THE TOWER

On a cold day in early January, eighteen months later, Shelly walked into the new art museum on the UT campus, climbed the steps to the gallery, and stood in front of a long row of Wyatt’s paintings that were perfectly spaced and beautifully showcased, few of them bigger than twelve by twelve inches, their titles tacked alongside them.

The painting titled
1966
was the first in the row. It looked uncomfortably small on the enormous wall, depicting the tower with off-kilter windows frozen forever in a scene that looked to Shelly surprisingly innocuous now—an afterthought to a moment long over. Maybe it was the magnitude of the surrounding white space, or the relative smallness of the painting itself, about ten inches square, but for some reason Shelly did not feel the same pang of emotion, or recognition, that she had felt when she came across this image years ago in the book of tempera paintings at the top of Jack and Delia’s stairs.

She stood before it a while now, listening to a young couple remark to each other on the clarity and tonality and choice of palette, and then moved on, walking the length of the wall and looking at Wyatt’s other paintings. She tried to see into the depths and decipher all the pale layers of color, but as always, she was stopped by the picture—the obvious whole. People, buildings, trees. Wet leaves and porous stone. They hung in front of her, as detailed as her own life, the thin layers of paint blended as inextricably as days that were over, adhered to one another as tenuously as flakes of pastry dough. The shades were lost in one another. They eradicated each other.

She was nearing the end of the wall, only a few paintings left to see, when a complex image confounded her. It was much larger than the others and depicted a window divided into panes—six across and four down—that reflected leafy branches and blue sky, and some distance away the middle portion of what Shelly came to realize was the tower, with its ascending rows of windows. The image was so perfect that if it were larger it might be mistaken for an actual window, though the viewer would be uncertain, because of how perfectly the reflections were painted onto the glass, whether the perspective was from the outside, looking in, or the other way around. Shelly was studying this conundrum when something startled her, and she took a step back.

A man’s face—in the window. Looking out. Ghostly features. Insubstantial as glass, obscured by the sheen of reflected leaves. A look of horror more vivid than the features themselves, in conspicuous eyes.

She looked at the title. The print was stark next to the complicated layering of the image—the reflections on the window, the shimmering glass itself, divided into panes, and the face behind it.
A Window.

She knew this window. She knew its shape, more wide than tall, and how it was bordered with white stone. It was the center window on the third floor of the English building, overlooking the plaza of the South Mall.

Was it possible? Had Wyatt seen the face in the window, just as she had? Was it Dan’s face? Wyatt could not have known that—not then, and not afterward. She had not told him about Dan’s confession of how he had looked down from that window, a bystander, as Wyatt and Jack lifted Shelly from the hot cement of the plaza. There had been no reason to share with Wyatt what Dan was most ashamed of. If he had seen Dan in the window that day, he could not have surmised the significance to any of their lives.

And yet here the face was, ambiguous, all but obliterated by sky and trees and the tower across the way with its many windows having reflections of their own, but looking out with eyes that seemed to grasp the full pathos of everything happening beyond the panes of glass.

Could Wyatt, with Shelly in his arms, have looked up at that window at the same time Dan was looking down, and recognized in the distant impression a presence that would linger there, in spirit, long after the moment had ended? Dan had once said that he felt as if, in marrying Shelly, he had won the princess without slaying the dragon.

In the end, at Devil’s Sinkhole, he had finally slain it. His words to Madeline before he lowered himself over the edge—“I have to”—were proof enough of that.

Everything now in Shelly’s life had come from that moment when Dan looked down from the window, and Wyatt looked up. Carlotta came from that moment. Dan’s regrets, and his atonement. Madeline’s loss of her father. All of it was set in motion at that exact moment that now confronted her from the painting.

She studied the painting a while longer, trying to figure out what to do with the emotions it evoked, and finally she went downstairs and left the building. Rain and sleet were forecast, but she saw no sign of them yet; the day was brisk and sunny. It was nearly four, and shadows stretched in rows like ladder rungs from the small trees trying to get a roothold around the massive new building. She heard traffic from Martin Luther King Boulevard—Nineteenth Street, as she had known it—but this area of stone archways and winter grass and rows of small trees was mostly shielded from noise. Shelly was aware of the tower off to the north, invisible from where she stood, hidden by the many rooflines of tall campus buildings. The tower had been on her mind in one way or another for most of her lifetime, but over the years it had lost its sinister stare. If she could see it from where she now stood, the clock would look like any other immense clock, the shattered glass replaced long ago, the observation deck enclosed with a wire fence. Even the tower’s looming height would be less impressive in the clear, gusting winter air.

As she looked in that direction, wrestling with the feelings the painting had stirred up, it came to Shelly suddenly what she would do. She would go up there.

Buttoning her coat, walking purposefully, she turned left on Twenty-first Street, and then turned again at the fountain with the bronze horsemen and winged rider, the wind blowing a cold spray into her face. She walked past Benedict Hall, where she had studied imaginary numbers that day.

How confused she had been about those numbers. She recalled now the parting words of the teacher as he had dismissed the class, a quotation from some famous mathematician about perfection—that a person would achieve it not when there was nothing left to add, but when there was nothing left to take away. It had proved to be true enough in her own life: She had never come anywhere near perfection, but had come close to a rightness with herself, through her losses.

She had walked out of Benedict Hall on her way to the plaza, an average girl from Lockhart, with flipped hair, wearing Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals and a pencil skirt too tight and a cotton blouse dotted with tiny flowers. Other people were coming and going now, in sweatpants and hoodies; it was winter break and the campus was quieter than usual but still imparted that sense of life and youthful expectation. It was, Shelly realized, a Monday.

Up the walkway, under the bare trees, surrounded by the cawing of grackles, she headed for the plaza. Under the bronze statue of Woodrow Wilson, she climbed the steps and started across, remembering the boy with the transistor radio, and the tinny sound of the song. Emblazoned on the front of the main building before her was the Bible verse
YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE
. Long ago, she had found these words too abstruse—easy enough to dismiss in spite of their size on the building. She would like to think of them now as relevant to Carlotta, and Madeline, and all the secrets revealed and truths exposed, but the words still seemed to her useless and too high-minded to capture anything real about life. The truth did not set you free; it bound you to your life. It bound you to the people you loved.