Monday, Monday: A Novel (22 page)

After that, Madeline went to the closet every time she visited Aileen’s house. No one ever knew she was there. She talked to the lady in the painting about her wishes, and sometimes they came true. “You’re a fairy godmother,” she told her.

When she became tall enough to turn the light on from a string inside the closet and part the clothes and study the painting and realize, with a sinking heart, that this was not her fairy godmother but in fact only her real mother, much younger and different somehow, wearing a blue top and smiling at someone else, she stopped going to see the painting. She looked in on it sometimes, ruefully, suspiciously, feeling betrayed.

25

THE MARFA LIGHTS

In Alpine in the summers, Madeline and Carlotta gathered rocks to add to Carlotta’s collection. They slept in the same bed. Carlotta drove Madeline around the property in a golf cart, and they had pajama parties with Carlotta’s friends. Carlotta talked a lot and told ghost stories and showed Madeline how to string beads for bracelets and necklaces.

At times, when Shelly was home in Austin, the feeling that something was missing came over her, and she found herself looking around for Carlotta and wondering what her life would have been with Wyatt, as if a ghost family tagged along with her own. She wondered if Carlotta would ever learn that she was her mother, and what would come of it if she did. If it were in the distant future, would it even make a difference in how anyone felt? They were all so settled in the way things were, and it was plain the affair was over.

But of course the old transgression remained—Carlotta was living proof of that. And just knowing about it could be destructive for so many people. Elaine and Wyatt went to Alpine as often as Shelly did. Their children played with Carlotta. How would Elaine feel toward Carlotta if she learned the truth? How would her children feel? Suppose that after everything, the affair still doomed the marriage. How would Carlotta feel to have come from a destructive love affair?

It was already unclear how she felt about being adopted. On one of the trips to Alpine, when Carlotta was eleven years old and Madeline was six, Jack and Shelly drove them over to Marfa to try to glimpse the mystery lights at the edge of town. They parked beside the road and everyone climbed out of the car and stared into the night, waiting for the legendary orbs of bouncing light to make a rare appearance. Carlotta trekked off by herself, squatting down in the grass apart from the others: a beautiful child staring fixedly into the dark Chihuahuan Desert. While Madeline pointed out car lights and twinklings and distant glimmers that were only possibly there, Carlotta sat in the prickly grass and stared across Mitchell Flat toward the Chinati Mountains.

On the drive back home Jack teased her about how seriously she always took these outings to Marfa. She sat in the backseat, against the car door, her curls swirling about her face in the warm breeze from the open window, her eyes blinking in the dark, and she replied in a somber voice, “The reason I want to see them is to know they’re out there. I can’t know for sure, if I don’t see them.”

One night when the others had gone to bed, Shelly browsed the bookcase at the top of the stairs and noticed, in a stack of oversized art books on the bottom shelf, the title
Tempera in Modern America.
She knew from Jack and Delia, and from an article she had read about Wyatt in a UT magazine, that his paintings had begun to sell, so she pulled the book from the stack and scanned the index for his name. Several pages were listed. Sitting on the floor under the murky hallway light, she turned to those pages.

The first of the paintings took her breath. It dominated a full page and was different from anything she had ever known him to paint. It appeared to be painted partly in oil. The title was
1966
, the subject was the tower as seen from below on the South Mall plaza. It was not Wyatt’s usual realistic rendering, but contorted and complicated, the tower tilted, the rows of windows lopsided, the sky an innocent crayon blue that a child might choose. Only the red tiles of the roof of the main building, interlocking like a woven basket, and the clock face and the speckling of the white stones looked realistic. They clashed with the strange asymmetry.

Shelly had the sensation of time flipping backward, as if the floorboards beneath her had turned to the pebbled cement of the plaza. For years she had tried to leave that place behind, but this painting made her feel that she had not gained any distance at all and was back in that terrible blazing-hot world with its sickening smell of blood.

Quickly, she turned the page. Some of Wyatt’s other paintings were similar: perplexing images, tempera he had combined with pale washes of watercolor and textured features in oil. The more recent resembled those he had painted during the years she knew him—tempera only, authoritative and unerring. It seemed as if he had made a name for himself by depicting the world as a hodgepodge of distortions, and then had returned to factual landscapes. Tree trunks. The study of sunlight on veined leaves. She preferred these.

In the morning she wandered behind the house with Madeline and Carlotta to visit a small fishpond Jack had dug. The pond was an imperfect oval, half-shaded, littered somewhat by droppings from the branches overhead, the bottom covered with colorful rocks and pebbles and the surface lush with floating hyacinth and lilies. Jack had laid large stones around the edges, and Madeline lay belly-down on one of these, peering into the pond, her small chin on her palms, the tips of her dark hair dripping into the water.

Carlotta prowled the perimeter, kneeling periodically to skim debris from the surface with a fishnet and peer into the depths and speculate about whether or not raccoons had raided during the night. “They don’t come every night,” she said. “Sometimes bobcats come. I had one fish named Becky with black spots, and all we found was her head.”

The fish were small and mottled. Carlotta identified the red-and-blue shubunkins, the orange comets and gold bitterlings. Her favorite was a small Sarasa missing part of its tail. “We had mosquito fish but they died.” She talked with surprising authority for an eleven-year-old, naming the genus and species of fish and their characteristics with the same eager command of knowledge that she brought to her rock collection, as if she imagined the world in categories, the objects organized and specified and as perfectly delineated as the objects in Wyatt’s paintings. In many ways she was like Wyatt, enchanted by the visual world. But something restless and driven in her reminded Shelly of herself before the shooting and before she fell in love with Wyatt. Shelly had discarded so many dreams of travel and adventure, and had never gone back for them, and now it was as if Carlotta trailed along behind her, picking them up. Each time Shelly saw Carlotta, the child was more like her.

“I would like to be a fish, but not in a pond,” Carlotta said. “In the ocean, where there’s coral.” She went on for a while about coral, and about how whales were not fish. Madeline protested about the whales, but Carlotta explained how the blowholes were like nostrils and some whales had two and some had one.

The day was warm; sunlight glinted in the ripples stirred up by Carlotta dragging the net through the water. A train not far away blew its horn. The fish propelling themselves in figure eights in and out of the lilies and underwater shadows reminded Shelly of Aquarena and the submarine theater and how Carlotta had stood at the expanse of glass, transfixed by the graceful ballet of the Aquamaids, pleading to go back down, down, as the theater rose to the surface.

In the warmth and peace of the morning, Shelly had grown sleepy standing over the pond and responding to the sweet chatter of the two girls. She was jostled alert when Carlotta said, “It’s possible my other parents might live by the ocean.”

Madeline’s face, with its large eyes, came up from its little perch on her palms. “You have other parents?”

“I have four parents because I’m adopted,” Carlotta told her, leaning out over the water to skim leaves from her reflection. “I have my real parents and my imaginary parents. I imagine all kinds of things about those. The mother who had me wasn’t married so she gave me to my parents so they could raise me.”

“Where is she now?” Madeline was incredulous.

“I think she might be in Beeville. That’s where I was born.”

Madeline pulled her legs up and sat cross-legged. “My mommy’s great-aunt Aileen lives in Beeville,” she said. “We go see her sometimes.”

“You’ve been to Beeville?”

“Mommy takes me.”

Carlotta turned to Shelly. “Would you take me too?”

Trying hurriedly to cobble the options together—all the things she might say—Shelly answered, “Your mother and dad should be the ones to take you, if you go there sometime.”

“Maybe I would see my imaginary mother,” Carlotta said. “She might be walking along the street and would look just like me, and I would know who she was. Or maybe I would see her, but wouldn’t know who she was.” She stared into the water. “Do you see that fish under the lily pad?” she asked Madeline. “His name’s Robert. Watch how he moves his fins. It’s very graceful. I’m going to learn to scuba dive when I grow up. There’s no place around here to swim. Cow ponds, that’s all, and you wouldn’t get in those, you’d get tetanus or something. One time there was ice on the top of the fish pond, and we could see the fish through it. My dad’s cousin Wyatt took pictures so he could paint what it looked like. He’s a famous painter. His wife is very good at horseshoes. They have a son named Nate who’s older than me, and his little sister is afraid of bugs. They live on a beach and can swim every day if they want to. You should meet Wyatt someday because he helped save your mother when she got shot in the arm.” Carlotta lifted the net and held it, dripping, above the water. Her eyes, for an instant, looked like Wyatt’s. “Isn’t that right, Shelly?”

The fish meandered torpidly in the mossy pond. The train was blowing its whistle from farther away now. Shelly nodded. “That’s right.”

“He’s tall,” Carlotta told Madeline. “Sometimes I wish I lived near a beach. Alpine used to be underwater. Your dad told me that. That’s one of the special things about fossils—sometimes they used to be seashells.”

26

THE SECRET SIDE OF THE MOON

On a field trip to Big Bend in the seventh grade, Carlotta discovered a perfect fossilized oyster, still in its shell, embedded in the high wall of a narrow canyon. She had ridden two hours on the school bus with two dozen other thirteen-year-olds and a teacher, and was hiking through the canyon with the disorderly crowd when she found it. It was a cold day, and the noon sun shone directly down onto the canyon floor, lighting the dry streambed in which the students were walking, and creating shadows in the cracks and crevices of the walls.

The hike had become something of a slog for most of the students, with many stops and starts for the teacher to lecture. Several lagged behind, and some ran ahead, causing the teacher—a young man who was new to the school—to constantly count heads and call to those who were missing, admonishing them, “Stay with your buddy!”

During one of these pauses, while the teacher counted the students, Carlotta turned and studied the layered rock of the wall behind her and saw the edge of the oyster shell, ghostly amid remnants of other sea life—clams, sea urchins, snails, and corals all turned to stone and having the bleached look of dead things. What caught Carlotta’s eye was that the oyster shell appeared to be entirely whole, the halves clasped together. She pictured the canyon at the bottom of a deep sea, filled with plants and schools of fish and thousands of little creatures like this one burrowed into the shelf of rock. Turning to see that no one was looking, she pried it from the crumbling limestone and tucked it into her coat pocket. When the group began walking again she drifted to the back and pulled the fossil out of her pocket to get a better look, and the two halves fell miraculously open, parting to reveal the smooth stone mollusk that for thousands of years had been safely encased in its home.

She stopped walking, amazed, feeling the oyster with her thumb. It was shaped like a tongue and adhered to the bottom half of the shell. The top half she lifted and replaced—a perfect fit. How astonishing it was! And how fortunate that she had found it. What could it mean?

On the bus ride back to school she played games with her friends, and sang songs and laughed happily, but all the while she fantasized how one day she would give this beautiful little frozen oyster as a gift to the mother who had given birth to her. For thousands of years this perfect thing had been waiting, a symbol of how things fit together and belonged one half to the other, so that even when they were pulled apart they still could be placed together again, and the curves and edges would simply settle against each other. She imagined she would walk along a beach somewhere with her mother, and pull the oyster from a little silk bag and present it to her. Or they would be sitting under an open sky, or maybe by a campfire, and she would pull it out of her pocket and show her mother how remarkable it was, and how the halves fit and the creature inside was still whole.

Over the years, Carlotta’s fantasies about this scene would change, even while the fossil remained exactly the same, every ridge and curve familiar to her and always a source of hope and endurance, which for her were the same thing, because she anticipated with a kind of buried excitement the day when she might meet her biological parents.

Sometimes she would pretend those parents were watching her. They could be anywhere, such as the grocery store, or in another country. Or they could still be in Beeville. She liked to wonder, and she believed someday she would find out, but she didn’t feel in a hurry, because learning the truth would cost her the possibilities. Thinking about her biological mother was like thinking about the far side of the moon. She could imagine the far side had running water and exotic landscapes, but in reality she knew that if it swung around, and the sun shone on it, then likely it would only resemble the near side. And the moon would offer nothing to dream about anymore.