Monday, Monday: A Novel (34 page)

Madeline went into the bathroom to set her toiletries on a shelf, and Shelly followed her in. It was a small bathroom, the footed tub rigged with a showerhead and enclosed by a curtain. The floor had rotted in patches where people had dripped water when getting out of the tub.

“Can you tell me anything more?” Shelly asked her.

“I honestly can’t. He ‘almost’ slept with her—that’s all I know. But I don’t want to talk about it right now. And I can’t believe Wyatt Calvert is going to be here and you were trying to tell me not to come. Not that I’m in the mood to meet anybody. When does he get here?”

Her mother sat down on the edge of the tub. “Very late tonight, I think. He’s flying into Midland, and then it’s a three-hour drive. We won’t see him tonight—he’ll go to the cabin.”

“Won’t it be strange to meet him, after so long?”

“A little strange, yes. It’s been a lot of years.” She brushed the question aside. “Sweetie, how do you know what Andy did?”

“Because he told me. He couldn’t wait to get it off his chest. In fact, I couldn’t get him to shut up.”

“Oh, honey. Just like last time.”

“Except last time was the first time, and this is the second. There’s a big difference. At least I know there weren’t any times in between, since he can’t keep a secret any better than that.” She plopped down on the floor under the towel rack. “I couldn’t make him stop talking to me through the bathroom door last night. Telling me all kinds of things I didn’t want to hear about. He said the woman reminded him of me. That was supposed to soften the blow. Can you believe he would say that? If it wasn’t for Nicholas, I’d divorce him. I swear. Even if I didn’t want to. But Nicholas ought to be able to get up every morning in the same house with his dad, you know? He’s a good dad. That’s the insidious thing.” Nicholas was calling from the sitting room. “Will you go see what he wants, Mom?”

“Of course.”

When Shelly left, Jack appeared at the open door and saw Madeline sitting under the towel rack. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. But can I ask you something personal?”

“I might not answer it, but you’re welcome to ask.”

“Have you ever had an affair?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“Nor would I tell you if I had.”

“Oh. Would you tell Delia?”

“Probably not.”

The dreaded tears had started again; they distorted her vision. Jack, in his plaid shirt, looked blurry. “Could you hand me some toilet paper?” Madeline asked.

He pulled some from the roll and gave it to her, and she wiped her eyes, bits of the paper clinging to her lashes. She saw white clumps when she blinked. She wanted to wash them off but was too reluctant to move from the floor. It was the first place she had found any comfort all day.

“Is this about Andy?”

She nodded, and blew her nose into the soggy paper. “I don’t want Nicholas to pick up on the tension. That’s one reason I came here. To get him out of the house.”

“He’s playing Tarzan. He’s fine.”

She tossed the damp ball of toilet paper into the wastebasket and got up and rinsed her face in the sink. Her eyes were red, her nose puffy. “I have to get hold of myself. Will you ask Mom to take care of Nicholas so I can go for a walk?”

Heading downstairs and out the front door, she started in the direction of the cabin amid the raucous screeching of insects. She had been making this trek from the house to the cabin since she was a toddler in diapers and the cabin was a shack where Carlotta kept her rock collection on plywood shelves.

She turned the light on and sat in the chair for a minute, then got up and slid the portrait out of the closet to see how the paint was holding up.

Not very well, she surmised in a glance. Some of it seemed to be missing. She leaned the painting against the wall and squatted down for a better perspective. A chip of blue, the size of a pea, had fallen away from the smocking across the bust, revealing a speck of tan-colored board.

How she had always admired this painting, with its eerily animate eyes. The stitching of the blouse was miraculous. The paint had the fragile look of pastel, but with a deeper sheen. The figure appeared so real that Madeline kept expecting it to move.

And yet something was not right. Looking more closely, she realized it wasn’t board under the peeling chip, but an underlayer of paint the color of flesh. She dabbed at a crack in the sloughing area and dared to pull a chip away, leaving a spot of brown that gave the disturbing impression of being a bare nipple under the blouse, as if her mother’s image had been painted over a nude portrait.

But that idea was absurd. How on earth would her mother have been painted over a nude? Could the artist have been recycling the board?

She turned the bedside lamp on and studied the painting as a whole, rubbing her hazy eyes for better focus. With the light hitting it from the side, the paint’s texture was exaggerated, and Madeline noted for the second time that day how the blouse and the strands of hair trailing with the ribbon against the porcelain skin of the neck were painted more thickly. Pulling away another sliver of blue paint, she revealed the pale lines of the outer edge of a puckered scar.

“Oh,” she whispered wonderingly. This wasn’t some anonymous nude. This was her mother.

She was removing another fragment of blue when she heard a woman’s voice calling from outside and quickly shoved the painting back into the closet.

It was Carlotta who came in. She was wearing a sleeveless top and a skirt that sat low on her hips, and her hair dangled in springy curls around her freckled face. “Hey there,” she said quietly. “Your mom said I could probably find you here. She said something happened with Andy. So I guess that makes two of us in the same boat. Kind of unsettled. I’m glad you came.”

Her thoughts still on the portrait, Madeline could only nod.

“Are you coming back up to the house?” Carlotta asked her. “Do you want me to wait for you?”

“I’ll be coming up in a minute. But thanks.”

“All right. Well, I’ll see you up there.”

When Carlotta had gone, Madeline stood with her back pressed hard against the closet door while delicate winged insects flitted weightlessly in the lamplight.

39

A SECOND UNINVITED GUEST

Shelly took a hot shower in the footed tub, put her nightgown on, and got in bed, stuffing the pillows behind her back. She tried to distract herself with magazines, but kept setting them down. A tapestry of a farm scene hung off center over the dresser, so she got up and shoved the dresser over a couple of inches and then centered the rug. Her thoughts kept shifting from the situation with Carlotta to the situation with Madeline. She would not see Wyatt until morning—he would arrive very late tonight and stay in the cabin—but the thought of that meeting scared her. Her past had swung around in front of her, and tomorrow she would be forced to face it with her daughters looking on.

She could not even guess how the day would unfold. Jack and Delia had been planning to talk to Carlotta in the morning, but Madeline’s presence would upset those plans. They would have to find time away from Madeline. And then afterward, Madeline would have to be told. And this would be the worst-possible time for her to learn of the role Shelly had played in someone else’s marriage and of the ways she had distorted their family life to accommodate so many deceptions.

Eventually, Shelly got up and opened the shutters, slid the window up, and stood breathing the cool air and looking through the fluttering leaves of the cottonwood at the contour of Lizard Mountain.

The moon cast only grudging illumination on the landscape. Lights of far-off houses dotted the dark hills that loomed behind the mountain. Shelly watched them blink. So much of her life had taken place in this lonely west Texas outpost, and yet, even here, she felt a lingering sense of displacement. The last time she had been certain of where she was, and where she was going, was August 1, 1966, when she had started off to buy tampons from the Rexall on the Drag. The life she might have lived, if not for that day, was lost to her. She had headed northwest across the South Mall and been hauled off to the hospital in another direction, her life irreparably changed by the timing of her exit from the math class on that summer day when she was nineteen years old. Charles Whitman had singled her out of hundreds of people crossing the campus, and even now she wondered why he had decided on her. Was it only where she had happened to be on the plaza—like a piece on a chessboard? Had he simply, after shooting the boy who was walking toward her, lifted the barrel an inch or so and found her in his sights? Or was there some more personal reason he had chosen her—the color of her blouse or the way she hesitated before deciding to cross the hedged-in grassy square around the flagpole?

Maybe he had chosen her on nothing more than a random impulse. That was probably the case. But the older she became, the more she wanted to feel that she’d had a hand in the matter—that some action of her own had determined the outcome, that she had plotted her own misguided course. It seemed better than being a luckless victim of fate.

Looking out at the landscape, she recalled how she had seen Dan from this same window the day he hiked out to explore the mountain, and how he had turned and waved and shouted for her to come with him. She tried to picture him now, in the shadows of desert shrub, but his image was as faint and illusive as the tepid light of the moon.

How differently she would do things now if she had the chance. She would go with him to Lizard Mountain. And later, she would stay behind in Austin for Madeline’s play on the day Carlotta opened her store, and Dan would never take the road to Devil’s Sinkhole.

Of course, all of this was pointless ruminating. Changing into her jeans and T-shirt, she went out into the hall and saw that Jack and Delia’s door, on the far side of the stairwell, was open, revealing Jack in his reading chair. Carlotta’s door and the door to the sitting room where Nicholas slept were closed, but Madeline’s stood wide open, the room dark and empty.

Shelly went downstairs and found Madeline eating yogurt and watching the small television that sat on the countertop, her legs, in sweatpants, propped on the table, her feet bare.

“You can’t sleep?” Shelly asked her.

“No.”

“What are you watching?”

“
To Catch a Predator.
You won’t like it.”

On the screen, a tall man in a suit interrogated a dumpy middle-aged man in a gimme cap who was seated, looking frightened, at a table.

“The guy in the hat was planning to have sex with a fourteen-year-old he met online,” Madeline said, licking the last of the yogurt from her spoon. “Only she wasn’t fourteen. It was a setup.”

Shelly searched the pantry for tea bags. “Delia usually has chamomile somewhere, doesn’t she?”

“In the canister by the sink.”

The man in the cap had started pleading. “I wasn’t going to do anything,” he said. “I swear. I just came here to talk to her.” His bottom lip trembled.

Shelly put a cup of water in the microwave. “If you don’t want to talk about this, just let me know. But were things all right with Andy otherwise? Before the convention?”

“They were fine.”

The pedophile was weeping and apologizing when Carlotta wandered into the kitchen in her bathrobe. “Oh, I hate this show,” she said. “I don’t like having to feel sorry for these creeps.”

“He wanted to have sex with a fourteen-year-old,” Madeline told her. “He brought condoms and a bottle of wine.”

“I don’t like watching him cry,” Carlotta said.

“I do,” Madeline told her.

Carlotta took a banana from the fruit bowl on the counter and peeled it as the man in the suit told the pedophile he was free to leave. The pedophile stood up shakily from the table and exited the house into a cluster of police officers who ordered him to the ground and handcuffed him. Shelly was dropping her tea bag into the trash when a car’s headlights fanned against the windows.

Carlotta went to look out. “It’s Andy’s car.”

Madeline turned her head. “Andy’s car?”

“He drives a Volvo, right? Dark color?”

“Yes.”

“Well he’s parked under the driveway light.”

Madeline swung her legs down off the table. “He’s not supposed to be here.” She went out into the hall and slammed the screen door as she left the house.

Shelly looked out of the window and saw Madeline approach the car and talk to Andy. “Let’s go upstairs and leave them alone,” she told Carlotta. But then she heard a cry from Madeline and looked out again to see Ranger, poised in the driveway, his pointed ears erect and his squat body tense.

Madeline shouted at Andy so loudly her words carried through the window, “Why did you let him out?”

“I didn’t know he was near the door!” Andy shouted back.

They lunged for the dog, but he scampered out of their reach and ran in a circle within the perimeter of light, his nose to the ground, as if he were in a spotlight on a stage. He paused for only a second before racing off into the dark. Madeline and Andy vanished with him.

Shelly ran outside and down the steps, with Carlotta behind her, just as Ranger dashed once more through the puddle of light and then darted around back of the house. They knew how important it was to catch him. Coyotes had nearly carried him off the previous year when he bolted out of the house one night and charged to the edge of the driveway, barking at them. Nicholas had foolishly run after him and seen a pack of them come out of the dark and grab Ranger, one of them snatching him by his throat and strangling his barks to a horrible gurgle. Only because Delia had driven up just at the right moment and scared off the coyotes by honking and flashing her car lights had the dog been saved. It could happen again, or he could escape to the highway and get lost, which also had happened one year.

“Get a tennis ball!” Madeline yelled from the shadows. “Bounce it under the light! He might come if he sees the ball!”

Carlotta rushed into the house to find one.