Monday, Monday: A Novel (27 page)

Everything had an unnatural clarity as she walked out to the car. The buttons on her sweater, her hand tugging the door handle, the moon with a part missing, the pinpoint stars. She sat in the passenger seat, so still at first that the only movement she felt was her own blinking. Car lights grew bright in her eyes on the highway. She stared them down. Passing through town, she saw the familiar places. The road came in segments. Jack turned here. Turned there. Shelly rocked forward and back in the seat as if this would speed her to Madeline. She kept her arms wrapped around herself and thought if she spoke she would scream. She tapped her feet on the floorboard and knotted her hands together. When the town was behind them, the road stretching ahead, the shape of mountains off in the distance under the moon, she forced the awful questions: “What did the sheriff tell you? Where is Devil’s Sinkhole?”

“An hour south of Kerrville. Outside Rocksprings.”

“What was he doing there?”

Jack could only repeat what the sheriff had said—that Dan and Madeline found a girl caught down in the vertical cave. She was caught on her rope and injured. Her boyfriend, up at the top, was trying to get her out when Dan and Madeline got there. Dan rigged himself with the boy’s harness and went down to get her. He managed to get her out, but the rope broke and he fell.

The anxiety to reach Madeline became intolerable. Shelly plucked at her hair and pounded the dashboard. When Jack pulled into a truck stop for gas, she got out and kept walking. He picked her up on the road. “What was he doing at Devil’s Sinkhole?” she asked him. “Why did he go there?” She rolled down the window, drowning herself in air and searching the moonlit landscape.

At the Kerrville hospital, Shelly got out of the car before Jack pulled to a stop. She hardly paused at the front desk long enough to ask where the morgue was, and was sent to the service elevators. She went down without waiting for Jack. The doors opened into a dim basement crowded with exposed pipes, discarded equipment, and hospital beds. A path the width of a gurney led to a door with a frosted window. Beside this door, Shelly found Madeline and the sheriff seated side by side in metal chairs, Madeline staring blankly at Shelly as she approached. Only when Shelly flung herself down in the chair beside her daughter and wrapped her in her arms did Madeline cling to her and sob against her shoulder. Shelly stroked her hair. “It’s all right, baby.” As if it could be.

The sheriff was tall, with gray hair and a gray mustache. A mole on his neck was the physical characteristic Shelly would later remember clearly about him. He held his hat in his hands. “We’re still working on how this happened. The short of it, ma’am, is that your husband saved the girl. I know her family; they’re from my county. Good people, ma’am. You can be sure your husband’s sacrifice is deeply mourned and greatly appreciated. I’m sorry to ask it, but we’ll need you to identify the body.”

Jack came down and Shelly asked him to stay in the hall with Madeline. “I don’t want to leave her alone.” The Sheriff told her he would get someone else to stay with Madeline so Jack could go into the morgue with Shelly, but before he had finished making the offer, Shelly turned and walked in alone.

The Sheriff followed her. The air inside was frigid and saturated with chemical smells. An attendant stood beside a gurney on which a body lay under a sheet. “I should tell you, ma’am,” the sheriff said. “I should warn you. Your husband fell a long way down. There’s damage. It’s extensive.”

Shelly stepped forward and lifted the sheet away from Dan’s face. The bruises made the face black. His skull was flattened and lopsided. Pieces of bone protruded. A gash on his cheek splayed the flesh open. His nose was off center, his jaw unhinged. His tawny eyelashes lay against his purpled skin like golden butterfly wings.

She took a step back, and then forward, and leaned over him, and took his face in her hands. She kissed his forehead and found it as cold as the room. She kissed him repeatedly on the bruises and the broken bones until the sheriff tried to coax her away, and she flung her arm at him.

“Ma’am—”

“No.” Smoothing her hands under the sheet and over his broken ribs, she felt his arms and fingers, and tried to hold his hands, but they were hard and unyielding. She kept expecting his eyes to open, his head to turn, and pulled the sheet farther back and stared at his chest, as if it might fill with breath. She placed her hand on his heart and thought she could feel a heartbeat, but knew there was none.

Finally she let the sheriff cover the body, but when the attendant started to roll the gurney away Shelly broke down and grabbed the rail, crying out, “What will happen to him?”

The sheriff stood holding his hat. “He has to be taken to San Antonio for an autopsy. The JP has requested that. It’s standard.”

“We don’t need an autopsy. We know how he died.”

“Yes, we do, ma’am. And we need to know which of the injuries killed him. I know it doesn’t seem necessary, but they’ll do a toxicology report. That’s just standard, ma’am.”

“No drugs or alcohol were involved,” she told him. “I can promise you that. He wouldn’t have been drinking—”

“I’m sure that’s true, ma’am. But they need to have it on record. You might think I’m presumptuous to say it, but I think you’ll want to have the record in case it ever eases your mind to know exactly what your husband died from—if it was head trauma, or what exactly it was. Maybe you don’t want to think about that right now, but if we don’t find out, it’s possible there might come a day you can’t think of another thing.”

He talked about paperwork, but she found it impossible to concentrate on what he was saying. “I need to get back to my daughter.”

Later, she walked Madeline out to the car and got in the backseat with her, and Jack drove them to Austin.

Wrapped in her mother’s arms, Madeline felt as if nothing was real, as if she was playing the part of a girl whose father had just been killed. She had thought the presence of her mother would be the answer to something, or the end of the grief—that her mother would take her into her arms and somehow the death would be over.

When they arrived home they found Carlotta and Delia waiting in the driveway in Shelly’s car. They went into the house, and Madeline looked at her father’s things, all where he had left him, his books and papers, the mug from his morning coffee still in the sink. She walked around the house in a daze. Shelly cried against Jack’s shoulder in the kitchen, and turned the stove on to make tea but forgot to put water into the kettle.

Standing before her father’s reading chair, Madeline broke down and wept terribly, and her mother came and held her tightly. She broke away and cried so hard she sounded like she was screaming. She saw how stricken her mother was and wanted to make things right again, but knew she never could, and knew her mother could not make things right either. Her mother’s tearful words of consolation were as empty as air, as empty as the space her father had fallen into. And Madeline knew then that the death would never be over. Nothing would ever be over. Her father would never come home.

Delia encouraged Madeline to eat, but she could not. Carlotta ran a bath for her. She lay in the tub, staring up at the ceiling and trying not to think about the terrifying depth of the sinkhole, the girl’s voice echoing up from the dark, the rising of the bats, the clarity of her father’s face in the beam of the flashlight when he told her to drive the truck forward. “Madeline, honey? Do this.”

She put on jeans and a bathrobe and walked, in the dark, down the street to the corner and back, trying to comprehend a world without her father in it.

She was unwilling to get into bed, and awoke in the night on the sofa. Shelly held her and talked to her. All night she stroked her and whispered to her, and soaked her hair with tears. Madeline wanted to blame her for what had happened—for her choice to go to Alpine. But she needed her too much, and she feared with a sickening horror and self-loathing that the fault was her own. Her father had gone to Devil’s Sinkhole only because she was being childish. He had wanted to distract her from the jealousy over Carlotta, which now, obliterated by her pain, she remembered like a distant nightmare, pitiful and obsolete.

“I drove the truck the rope was tied to,” she whimpered to her mother. “It was me. Daddy told me to do it.”

“Nothing is your fault, honey. Nothing is your fault. You were both helping the girl.”

And while Shelly held on to Madeline as tightly as she could, she felt in some way she had lost her, because Madeline was alone in a world with her memory of what had happened, and Shelly could not be there with her. She struggled to put together a puzzle of blank pieces, and even when she had them in place, they couldn’t create a picture. She had never seen Devil’s Sinkhole, had not laid eyes on the girl Dan had saved. She had not been there when he fell. She was blind to his death. She was even blind to her own terrible, dark grief, because all she could see in front of her, stretching out for years and years, was Madeline’s.

30

THE LOST YEARS

Part of the trouble for Shelly was simply knowing the sinkhole was there, a few hours’ drive away, a dark presence day and night. She could not picture it and could not bring herself to think of ever going to look at it, but the fact of its existence haunted her. She felt unbearable guilt for what had happened there. Her decisions that had set Dan on that road to Devil’s Sinkhole had begun so far back in life that she was unable even to trace them. Her nights were filled with frightful dreams of Dan falling into the dark abyss.

He was lauded as a hero on the nightly news and in newspaper headlines—
HEROIC GEOLOGIST DIES IN RESCUE
—his death a shocking blow to his parents and coworkers and everyone who knew him. Shelly held his funeral service outdoors because she knew he would want that. His friends gave moving tributes, speaking of his kindness and professionalism and extraordinary character, and one of them played guitar solos of “Everything I Own” and “Let it Be.” It was a crowded ceremony, under a stand of oak trees, on a scalding day.

In the months afterward, Shelly devoted herself to Madeline and immersed herself in the office work at Helping Hand. She knew all of the children there, saw them as they came and went from their daily activities, helped to arrange for their appointments and schooling and foster care. She talked with the young therapist, named Molly, about the children’s sad wounds and enormous needs. She asked Molly for advice about how to help Madeline cope with the trauma of what she had witnessed at the sinkhole, but everything Molly suggested involved Madeline talking about that night, which Madeline wasn’t doing.

And still the sinkhole was there, always a dark place on a dark horizon. Shelly wondered if going to see it in daylight would make it seem less frightening and diminish it in her consciousness. A friend she had known since Madeline’s preschool days offered to take her there. “We could face it together,” she said. But Shelly felt as if the place had power enough to draw her down into an invisible, expansive depth from which she would never come back.

On long weekends during the year and for whole weeks during the summer, she and Madeline escaped to Alpine. Madeline’s envy of Carlotta had been swept away in the flood of grief, and she regarded Jack and Delia and Carlotta, and the fresh air of west Texas—so familiar since childhood—as a refuge.

Shelly talked with Jack and Delia about Dan’s belief that it was time to tell the girls the truth about Carlotta, but in the end the three of them agreed that Madeline’s world had been shattered enough as it was. Madeline needed her mother. She also needed the Stones, who along with her mother and grandparents were the closest she had to family. Learning the truth now could only strain the relationships she was dependent on.

During the visits to Alpine, Madeline sat in the porch swing, lost in romance novels, and Shelly took walks on the country roads with Delia.

The hardest part of the trips was passing the highway exit to Rocksprings, coming and going. Madeline became quiet, and fidgeted with the radio in search of a clear station, or sat stone-faced in the passenger seat as if she didn’t see the highway sign. Shelly was always grateful to leave that stretch of road behind.

When Madeline turned eighteen in 1993, she decided she wanted to be an elementary school teacher, and she earned a college scholarship from Trinity University in San Antonio. Shelly helped her settle into the dormitory, then drove back home to Austin and started her life alone in the house that she had bought with Dan. For two years, she had battled Madeline’s sorrow with a fierce maternal instinct that had helped her to survive her own. Now she sank deeply and suddenly into a frightening depression. Most of her friends and the people she worked with at Helping Hand were married, and Shelly was single now, a forty-six-year-old widow. She started drinking at home in the evenings, first wine and then vodka. She knew exactly what was happening: Her daughter was gone, and she felt melancholy and hollow, with too much time on her hands, having to face the fact that she was alone.

One rainy day she came home from work and found in the dripping mailbox a padded envelope from Texas Parks and Wildlife that contained a small but weighty object. She took the envelope inside and opened it, making a little cry of alarm when the pocketknife that she and Madeline had given to Dan one Christmas, engraved with his initials, dropped onto the kitchen table.

She let it lie there, reluctant even to touch it. He had always carried it with him, and she had wondered why it was not among the items returned to her by the sheriff, or by Jack when he had retrieved the Bronco from Rocksprings to sell it for her. She had wondered where the pocketknife was.

In the envelope, she found a letter from a biologist explaining, with condolences, that he had discovered the knife in the sinkhole when he was studying water bugs in the underground lakes. “It was on the rocks in the scree pile. I thought from the initials that it might have belonged to your husband.”