In a Distant Valley, page 13
“Is that really a question?”
To illustrate his point, Nate nods toward the snowbank that Sophie has claimed as her own. Every time Adam or Brandon tries to join her at the top, she proclaims herself Queen of the Mountain and demands they slide back down to the bottom.
“It’s a good thing for girls to be assertive,” says Rose. “Adam and Brandon have to learn to respect that. Their dad sure as hell never did.”
As usual when she mentions Tommy, Nate’s jaw squeezes shut, as if he’s trying to hold back all the words he could say against the father of her children.
“Do you mind keeping an eye on them while I go inside and make hot chocolate?”
Gentle as his voice is, it feels like rejection when he walks into the house, leaving a space beside Rose so cold and empty it might as well be one of those black holes she read about in the book she gave Sophie for Christmas. When matter gets too close to a black hole, the book said, it is squeezed and stretched in opposite directions, turning into something resembling spaghetti. The idea seemed ridiculous to Rose when she read it, but now, sitting on Nate’s porch without him, she feels as brittle as the dried noodles that stick to the bottom of the pot when she doesn’t get it soaking fast enough.
Why did she have to bring up Tommy? Bad enough he’s tainted her own life; why does she have to spread the infestation to Nate’s house, too?
Suspicious as she was when Tommy called this morning to say his mother was in town, Rose was relieved the boys wouldn’t have to spend the day with him. There was guilt, too, though, especially after Adam and Brandon asked if they did something wrong, if their dad didn’t like them anymore.
She tried to make the day better for them. She gave them the same over-sugared cereal they would have had at Tommy’s apartment. She let them sit in front of the TV for as long as they wanted. She watched them push toy cars through the shag carpet. None of it was enough—Brandon barely spoke ten words all morning, and Adam kept smashing tiny vehicles into the walls, pretending all the pretend people inside were dead-dead-dead. He kept saying it like that, dead-dead-dead, in a hollow voice, until Rose thought she might scream.
It wasn’t until she told the boys they were coming out here to Nate’s that Brandon started talking again and Adam abandoned his fake murder spree.
She might be feeling spaghettified, but at least her kids are happy, Rose thinks as she watches them bring armfuls of snowballs up Sophie’s mountain. The pompom on Brandon’s hat is barely hanging on, Adam is growing out of his coat, and it’s only a matter of time before they realize their father is a piece of garbage. But at least they’re smiling now, laying those snowballs at Sophie’s feet. No black holes for them here under the stars on Davis Road. Only offerings to their Queen.
In the kitchen, Nate pours hot chocolate into five mismatched mugs, adding marshmallows to them all. When he hands Rose a cup from the Store ‘N More (Live bait! Fresh food! Good coffee!), she watches the tiny white clouds disappear into the steaming drink, turning it all the sweeter.
“Wait,” Brandon says. “We have to cheers.”
“What’s cheersing?” asks Sophie.
“It’s what you do on holidays,” Adam says. “And other special times. Right, Mum?”
Rose, who taught her boys the tradition over plastic cups of milk on Brandon’s second birthday, feels pride bubble inside her chest. Moments like this, she can almost let herself believe she hasn’t ruined them completely.
Adam and Brandon teach the ritual to Sophie, who loves it so much she insists they all clink their mugs together one more time, and another, and one more. Finally, Nate convinces her to bring the boys into the living room to watch a movie.
“They’re the guests, Soph, so you let them choose.”
“Okay, okay.”
Then it’s just Nate and Rose standing at the counter, where they pretend to be fascinated by the shiny red skin of some apples sitting in a Pyrex bowl. After a few moments, she can’t take it anymore.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s sit.”
They settle at the table. From the living room comes the familiar introduction to Beauty and the Beast. Even without glimpsing the television screen, Rose can see it perfectly, the slow pan through a fairy tale forest doomed to turn dark and twisted. She has never understood why the enchantress had to punish everyone else who lived in the castle—it wasn’t their fault their king-to-be was an asshole.
“Guess Sophie steamrolled them with the movie choice after all,” says Nate.
“Actually, it’s Brandon’s favorite. He’s been wanting to watch it for weeks, but every time we go to the library to try and rent it, it’s been checked out.”
For the first time since they all came back into the house, Nate smiles at her.
“It’s one of our favorites, too,” he says. “I love how excited Sophie gets about that room full of books. Gives me hope she’s got her priorities straight.”
Thanks to small-town gossip, Rose knows that Nate’s father, just like Tommy’s, grew up poor with parents who were no strangers to the belt or the bottle. Yet Bill Theroux found a way to rise above that crap and raise his own son right. Rose can’t puzzle it out, how the blight in one family tree can contain itself to only a couple limbs while the rot in others spreads from the roots to the tips of branches.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” says Nate, running his thumb around the mouth of his cup, emblazoned with the Frazier Lumber emblem. “I shouldn’t have walked away like that when you brought up Tommy.”
Usually, Rose would let this go with a shrug and an assurance that Nate doesn’t have to worry about it. No need for them to talk about her ex-fiancé, her history of shitty choices, or any other bad thing.
But something in the house has shifted—a softening of sound, a different light.
“So why did you?” She asks, even though she’s pretty sure she knows the answer. Or at least she hopes she does.
Nate stares at his clasped hands on the tabletop. “You deserve so much better, Ro.”
From any other guy, it would be a line. From him, it’s everything—confession, apology, question.
He’s so close. All Rose would have to do is scoot her chair an inch to the left, and she could lay her head against his chest, let herself collapse into him. Just one movement, a simple letting go, and they could transform themselves into their own sort of island. Create a new universe.
“Mum?”
Spooked by Adam’s voice, Rose jumps in her seat before looking over to see him standing in the doorway. He’s staring at her and Nate the same way he stared at his cars earlier as he bashed them into walls. The same way Tommy would always look at Rose whenever she wore something he didn’t like or breathed too loudly or spoke too softly or asked too many questions or burned the toast or spilled the coffee. Hollowness in hazel eyes. Cold, blank space. Dead-dead-dead.
Nate must notice the look on Adam’s face, too, because he turns his attention to him in a subtle way Rose guesses he learned during one of his police trainings. Or maybe knowing how to soften someone’s anger is something natural.
“What’s going on, kid?”
Her son pinches his mouth the same way his father does right before horrible words spill out. Before he can speak, however, Nate rises from the table and reaches out to take his empty mug. He pours the remains of his and Rose’s cocoa into the cup, zaps it in the microwave, sprinkles fresh marshmallows on top, and hands it back. Adam blinks up at him for a few silent, eternal moments; moments where Rose is sure they are hovering at the edge of a black hole, about to stretch apart into nothing.
Finally, Adam says, “That movie is for babies. Can I hang out in here?”
“Of course you can,” says Nate. “Your mom was just saying she wished you would.”
“That’s right,” says Rose, reaching for Adam’s hand across the table. “I want you right here with me.”
LITTLE TALKS
Trudy has never understood the frenzy around New Year’s. The idea that anyone could go to sleep on the last night of December and wake up the first morning of January transformed into something new is ridiculous. You are who you are, whatever the date on the calendar. You can change your behavior, adjust your reactions to the world, but there are things that can’t be altered no matter how many resolutions you make.
“Don’t go getting profound on me,” says Bev when Trudy shares these ideas as they unpack books at the library while the rest of town is counting the hours until midnight. “We haven’t even opened the champagne yet.”
“I’m just thinking out loud. And I don’t know why you brought champagne. You know I hate the stuff.”
“It’s tradition. Don’t be such a buzzkill.”
Truth is, Trudy is annoyed with herself—why can’t she simply be here with these books, with this woman, and let the rest of the world go on unconsidered?
But while they work, she can’t stop thinking about cows. More specifically, the hay-like smell of fresh milk sipped before the sun has come up. As a child, Trudy hated everything about living on a dairy farm. Her parents were always overworked and over-worried; all her shoes were constantly caked in manure. No one expected her to carry on with the farm once she was old enough—that life was for her brother, Eddie, who didn’t mind getting filthy or rubbing bag balm on cracked udders. Yet forty years later, both their parents gone, Eddie having quit the business a decade ago after a heifer dealt a swift kick to his skull (no serious brain damage, though he does sometimes forget his birthday, and how many weeks make up a month), Trudy still wakes every day expecting to find a glass of fresh milk waiting for her in the kitchen. Almost hoping for it, disappointed when it isn’t there. And she doesn’t even like milk. She can only assume that the strange thirst must be a wired-in reaction, an intrinsic part of herself established nearly from infancy—maybe if she’d grown up on a potato farm, she’d wake each day craving hash browns instead. Either way, it proves her theory: there are things you can change about yourself, and things you can’t.
“Quit thinking, Tru. Start drinking.”
“When did you turn into a lush on me?”
“Somewhere around the time you turned into a philosopher.”
In the light from the desk lamp, champagne mist tendrils toward the ceiling. Bev drinks straight from the bottle—of course she forgot to bring glasses—then hands it over to Trudy, who takes one sip, then another.
“That’s right,” says Bev. “Fuel up for this box of psychological thrillers.”
She knows how Trudy feels about most of the titles she adds to the library collection each month—one white male author after another. Sure, there are plenty of books written by women, but the ones that circulate most are in the same vein as those written by men: Cheap thrills, unsurprising mysteries. Is it such a sin that she doesn’t want to read tales about muscled heroes saving the world from communism or aliens or cloned dinosaurs? Maybe she would prefer a novel about the private lives of women. Maybe she wants sex scenes that don’t use terms like throbbing member or pendulous breasts. Maybe she and all sorts of other readers are desperate to read of imaginary landscapes similar to their real ones, places with recognizable people and language.
“You’re getting too fired up, Tru. Take another sip.”
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“Was that unclear? And do we really have to work right now? It’s a holiday.”
With each mouthful of champagne, Trudy feels lighter and fuller at the same time. They are safe here in the library, which smells of books and the memory of sunshine caught on pages, cast on words written by people who died long ago yet still live on.
Bev takes another swallow. “I’m calling it. The books can wait.”
Usually, Trudy would argue—she, the steward of these books, bears the responsibility of getting them sorted, cataloged, and organized on the shelves. But Bev’s right. Some things can wait.
They shift closer in the lamplight, surrounded by stories written by men who would never imagine it could be like this. Easy. Joyful. Completely unremarkable, in the best possible way. Outside, snow is falling, silver flakes caught under streetlamps; beyond the library’s brick walls, cars and trucks drive down the street, tires hushing against pavement—a sound like a whisper, or a heartbeat. All over Dalton, in houses, in parked cars, at Frenchie’s, people are lamenting the end of one year and welcoming a new one, making promises that won’t be kept. All over town, people are singing old songs and new songs, dancing and drinking to music that might drown whatever sorrows they hold inside.
But all of that belongs to the other world, the one out there.
In here with Bev, where the world can’t enter, there is only the best kind of silence—and laughter, always laughter.
There are some things you can change about yourself, and some you can’t.
A few days into the new year, Bev is at the Store ‘N More, in the middle of assembling Larry Briggs’ usual lunchtime sandwich, when all the lights go out and the hum of the coolers abruptly shushes.
“Power’s out,” Angela yells from the cash register, and Bev has to suppress the Trudy-like urge to shout back that there’s no need to state the obvious.
“What the hell happened?” asks Larry, clutching his bag of pastries—two donuts and one cream horn today.
“No idea.”
“Jo ain’t got a backup generator in this place?”
“Apparently not a working one.”
Larry brings his stuff to the register, where Angela tells him he might as well take it for free, since she can’t run credit cards without power. He drops a wad of cash on the counter, insisting she keep the change, and heads into the still-dark morning.
After he’s gone, Angela wanders down to the deli, where Bev is already on the phone with Jo, sleepy-voiced and unusually foul-tempered.
“What do you mean the power’s out?”
“I mean it’s out.”
“How can it be out?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling.”
While Jo grumbles about old wiring and circuit breakers, Angela sways from one foot to the other, fussing with the hem of her blouse.
“So?” she asks the second Bev hangs up. “What do we do?”
“Jo’s coming in. She says it’ll be about an hour.”
“Should we close in the meantime?”
Bev considers. Larry was the last of the mill crowd today, marking the beginning of the usual lull before other eight-to-fivers come in for their coffee and cigarettes.
“I guess we stay open,” she says. “If anyone shows up, they can either pay with cash or come in later after the power’s on to settle their bills.”
She can tell by the disappointment on Angela’s face that she was hoping this meant she could go home and crawl back into bed.
“Let’s have some coffee before it gets cold,” says Bev. “Might as well settle in and relax for a bit.”
They sit in Jo’s office, which has a clear view of the front in case any customers wander in. Jo hasn’t put up a new calendar yet, and Bev stares at the final days of 1995, wondering how time can go so quickly and so slowly all at once.
This coming summer will mark six years without Bridget. Over half a decade, even though it often feels like it was just a minute ago Bev was visiting with her daughter-in-law out at the farmhouse, sipping iced tea on the front porch. They could talk for hours or sit for long stretches comfortably saying nothing—exactly the relationship Bev would have wished for had she ever had a biological daughter.
“Want to hear something dumb?” says Angela, nodding toward the calendar. “Momma says it’s bad luck to change the pages too late. Or too early.”
“My mother used to say the same thing.”
“Mine would probably say this power outage is some kind of omen, too. Like it’s a sign 1996 is destined to be a crappy year.”
“Do you think that’s true?”
“I think it’s ridiculous.”
Bev sips her coffee and remembers the tarot reading she and Trudy went to decades ago over in Prescott. It was a lark; neither of them believed in that sort of falderal, as Tru called it. The psychic wore a gauzy shirt with no bra, providing a clear view of her nipples under the dim red light of a room that reeked of patchouli. You’re both seeking a soulmate, she told Bev and Trudy, who laughed when they said they were married. The psychic peered at them with sharp eyes. People marry the wrong people all the time, she said. But I’m not telling either of you something you don’t already know, am I? Less than a year later, during a Girls’ Weekend down in Bangor, Bev and Trudy kissed in a corner booth of a low-lit hotel bar, and finally they saw it all so clearly.
“Ridiculous things can be true,” Bev tells Angela.
“Like God? Because Momma believes in him, too.”
“I can’t speak to that.”
Angela falls quiet, seeming to consider this as she stares at the scuffed toes of her clogs. After a couple minutes, she throws her empty cup in the trash, then starts digging through the paperwork and catalogues on Jo’s desk until she finds the beach-themed calendar for 1996. She pulls the old one from the wall, hangs the new one in its place.
“Just in case,” she says.
Something on Angela’s face—desire fighting against what might be despair, or fear, or loneliness—makes Bev feel the same protectiveness she experiences whenever Sophie grabs her hand during the scary parts of her cartoon movies. The same way she used to feel during Nate’s childhood whenever he would ask if lightning could strike the tree outside his bedroom and send it crashing through the roof.
Bev wishes she could give Angela a hug. Sensing that would be the wrong thing right now, she decides instead to ask her something she didn’t ask Bridget enough before she died.
