Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  “I’m Jesse,” he said, sitting down in the vacated chair. “I’ll be finishing up for Willow.”

  “Okay.”

  No hand-holding this time. Jesse let his eyes go unfocused, then muttered a few adenoidal niceties about how my life was like a rose, and the earth was our mother, and blah-blah-tofu-flaxseed-blah that I basically tuned out, being still not-a-little freaked by the shrill bedside manner of Karnak Numero Uno, frankly. Other than that, it was stultifying.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, when he’d finally droned to a close. “That was very, um, helpful.”

  Jesse nodded, smug. “Go in peace, sister.”

  “Jesus,” said Ellis, once we’d escaped the building. “What were you thinking about, the Spanish Inquisition?”

  “Pool boys, actually.”

  Ellis’s hand popped up for a high-five slap.

  I didn’t disappoint her.

  But I sure as hell should’ve kept my fingers crossed for a very long time afterward, because the universe was about to chuck a veritable barge-load of shit, sidelong, into the whirling blur of a rather enormous fan.

  The blades of which were angled directly toward still-oblivious me.

  7

  My front porch pillars were still twined with spiraling green Christmas garlands and strings of unlit-by-day white lights.

  “You know,” said Ellis, “it being March, you might want to think about taking down the holiday crap.”

  I shook my head. “Fuck that. I’d only have to put it all up again come Thanksgiving.”

  “You guys’re going to be here that long?”

  “Probably,” I said, kicking a small rock down the sidewalk. “It’s not like I exactly have a choice.”

  “Well, it looks like you’re in mourning for Martha Stewart.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” I kicked the little rock again, sending it skittering into the snowy grass of my lawn.

  A pair of fire engines caterwauled south along Twentieth, belching low plumes of diesel exhaust.

  Ellis shook her head. “I can’t believe Dean isn’t here for the girls’ birthday.”

  “But Bunny, it’s Pittcon,” I said, quoting my absent spouse, “the premier annual sales event of the global scientific-instrument industry.”

  “Sounds like a giant fucking drag.”

  “No doubt,” I said, “But they have it this time every year so he’s probably going to miss all our birthdays forever, barring employment catastrophe.”

  I peeked into the living room window before we mounted the front porch—no sign of children. “They’re not up yet. Want to sit out here for a while?”

  We settled back into the bouncy old metal chairs that had come with the house.

  “When should we open the girls’ presents?” asked Ellis.

  “After dinner, probably. Once we bring out the cake.”

  “When do you want to open your presents?”

  “I don’t officially turn thirty-two until Sunday—trying not to think about it.”

  “So Dean’s going to miss that, too?”

  I stretched out my legs, crossing them at the ankle. “Reply hazy. Ask again later.”

  “Shitheel,” she said. “He better come home with a deeply excellent present.”

  “T-shirt from the airport, probably. New Orleans if I’m lucky, Denver if I’m not.”

  “What’d he get you last year?”

  “Sushi delivery and a gold bangle from Tiffany. But I was just back from the hospital, having successfully whelped dual offspring.”

  Ellis nodded at that. “Raw fish and good jewelry… commendable.”

  “Except for the part about me having called in both orders myself with Dean’s Amex. Which started out as a subsidiary card to mine, by the way.”

  “And did you ask his permission first?”

  “Of course.”

  She shook her head, smirking. “Amateur.”

  “Dude. I am acquisitive, not floridly delusional.”

  A high, thin screech rattled the upstairs windows.

  “Hadley,” we sighed in unison, rising slow and weary from our chairs.

  Mom produced the candle that had graced my own first-birthday cake: a ladybug-strewn white stub she’d kept in the bottom drawer of her jewelry box for nigh on thirty-one years.

  She sank it into a yellow-frosting rosette on Parrish and India’s cake, added a tiny pink grocery-store taper “to grow on,” then lit both wicks with a stout kitchen match while I doused the living room lights.

  I looked at my mother’s face in the flickering glow, and pictured the old white-edged snapshot of myself in a high chair with a paper hat on my head as she leaned forward into the frame, slender-armed and laughing, touching another match flame to that ladybug candle’s wick for the first time.

  The eighth of March, 1964: my mother not yet turned twenty-five and me in a little blue smocked dress with a white Peter Pan collar, my swinging feet in tiny red socks. The colors have faded long since, but on that square of glossy paper I gaze upward with awe, drinking her in.

  And now I watched Mom lift up my daughters’ cake and start walking toward the living room, the door frame briefly illuminated as she stepped through it.

  Ellis started snapping pictures, the two of us singing “Happy birth-day Parrish and India” along with Mom before we grown-ups blew out the little teardrops of flame in their honor.

  I’d made party hats the week before, tall medieval princess cones of gem-toned poster board.

  This was the type of project I got up to during the girls’ naps, basically stuff I do when I have enough energy not to fall asleep on my feet, drooling, but am still goddamned if I’m going to waste a single rare moment of clarity on cleaning the fucking house. Ditto the extensive front-porch Christmas decor.

  These things weren’t earth-shattering, by any means, but even the tiniest modicum of creativity made me feel like a human being again. Albeit briefly.

  Maybe that’s why I’d left all the crap up on the porch: as testament to even my smallest actual accomplishment in the world above and beyond pushing a vacuum hose back and forth across the orange shag on my hands and knees. Again.

  I mean, you vacuum the rug, and it looks like shit again by the next morning. But first-birthday pictures stick around, and I wanted my kids to know full well that they had been adored when they were little.

  Parrish’s birthday hat was emerald green with a fat striped bee glued on, its waxed-paper wings glitter-veined. Perry’s was dark sapphire with tinfoil stars, comets, and moons. Ellis’s read GLAMOUR BUNNY in tiny pearls on lavender, Mom’s EMPRESS OF ALL SHE SURVEYS in rhinestones across a faux-ermine-trimmed field of scarlet. Hadley’s was hot pink with leafy vines of lemon-lime sequins, India’s saffron with a jade-colored Buddha seated atop a garnet lotus, the words OM MANE PADME HUM written beneath him in Sanskrit.

  After the cake, the girls started opening their presents, a project that required heavy guidance from the rest of us. Parrish kept sticking the bows in her mouth, Perry wept when he tipped his ice cream and cake onto the floor and stepped in it, and Hadley and India pretty much shellacked each other’s hair with frosting while the grown-ups were scraping Perry’s sticky mess out of the shag fronds.

  At that point, of course, the phone rang.

  “Go ahead, we’ve got this,” said Ellis, shooing me toward the kitchen. “If it’s Dean tell him everything’s under control.”

  I got it by the fifth ring.

  “Hey Bunny,” said my husband, “how’re the girls?”

  “Very happy and slathered with melting ice cream and crumbs,” I replied. “How are you? How’s New Orleans?”

  “Exhausting. Sorry I haven’t called before this, but they’ve been running me ragged. I’m just back up in the room for a quick shower and then we’ve got another dinner with clients.”

  “Anywhere good?”

  “Some Cajun place. Which doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

  Perr
y knocked Hadley over and she started to wail, so I stretched the cord of the kitchen phone as far as it could go out onto the back porch and shut the door behind me.

  “I miss you, Intrepid Spouse,” I said.

  “Listen, the car’s gonna be downstairs in a second. Did the girls like their presents? What’d we get them, anyway?”

  “We” my ass.

  “Parrish shoved Where the Wild Things Are into the middle of the birthday cake. I think that’s a thumbs-up.”

  He laughed. “I have something great for you. Saw it in the airport and knew you had to have it.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “I gotta run, kiss the girls for me?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Have a great time tonight. Knock ’em dead.”

  I was talking to the dial tone.

  Just as I was walking back into the living room, our doorbell chimed.

  I went to answer it, discovering a colleague of Dean’s on our front porch. Nice guy called Cary. We’d had him over to dinner a few times—our first pal in town, really. He and this chick Setsuko, the receptionist, were the only people at Jim’s office I dealt with at all regularly.

  Cary and my husband had quickly become biking partners, on the commute to work most days and often recreationally on weekends. Maybe because they were both six-five, evenly matched for racing each other up and down the canyons.

  “Hey there,” I said, stepping back from the doorway and waving him inside.

  He shook his head, the motion making a hank of dark hair fall across his left eye. “I gotta run home in a minute, just wanted to stop by and wish the girls happy birthday.”

  “How come you’re not in New Orleans with the rest of the gang?”

  “Someone had to keep the home fires burning.”

  “By which you mean Bittler’s being a vindictive asshole again?”

  Bittler was Cary’s boss but not, thank God, Dean’s. Nasty little man.

  “Exactly,” he said, laughing. “Left me behind with stacks of bullshit paperwork.”

  “He’s just jealous… And for chrissake, Cary, it’s cold with this door open. Come inside and meet my mom and my best pal from college. Have a slice of birthday cake.”

  “Well, if there’s cake,” he said, stepping into the front hall.

  I closed the door. “Let me take your coat.”

  “Take these, instead,” he said, producing two presents from behind his back.

  They were wrapped in tinfoil, bachelor-style, but he’d sketched a pretty decent Elmo on one package and Big Bird on the other with a black Sharpie.

  I took them out of his hands, complimented his artwork, and then stood on tiptoe to give him a peck on the cheek. “You are an awesome friend. Thank you.”

  “And you told me you didn’t know anyone here yet,” said Ellis, waving good-bye to Cary from the front porch after he’d wolfed down both his slice of cake and the beer she’d insisted he split with her after that, paperwork or no paperwork.

  I laughed. “Fold your tongue back into your mouth, you unrepentant slut.”

  “Oh, like you don’t think he’s a hottie.”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “Well then,” she said, nodding, “no wonder you’re friends.”

  “Mostly he goes biking with Dean.”

  “Biking: the new golf,” she said. “Our generation’s excuse to leave your wife alone with the children all weekend.”

  “Exactly.”

  8

  Mom and I stood on the front porch the next morning, kissing Ellis and brood good-bye before they headed out for the airport.

  “Ciao, my darling—keep those cards and letters coming!” I said as we all broke free and Ellis started down the steps.

  She paused, looking back up at me. “Speaking of, madwoman, I think you should try figuring out how to use email. You guys have an account, right?”

  “Dean does, I think.”

  “I mean, it’s great that you’ve finally started writing letters, but if you upgrade to the cutting-edge technology available to us in the late twentieth century, we could alleviate each other’s suburban angst and alienation without having to buy stamps.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  She blew me a kiss. “That’s all I ask.”

  Mom and I kept up our farewell waving until she’d lurched away from the curb in her rented mini-van, homeward-bound.

  “That one won’t stay married,” said Mom.

  “Oh, come on. Not even for the health insurance?”

  Mom laughed. “No way in hell. She’s too much like me.”

  Parrish made a strange little noise and I was suddenly enveloped in a rather foul diaper-centric miasma.

  “Good God,” said Mom. “What have you been feeding that poor child… liver and kimchee?”

  Breathing through my mouth, I swung Parrish up onto the changing table’s squishy white-vinyl-sheathed mat, cooing “pop-pop-pop pop” as I tugged open the inseam snaps on her overalls.

  “Pop!” she agreed.

  I peeled back her diaper’s tape squares, gripping her crossed ankles in my left hand. “Bottoms up.”

  Her Pamper brimmed with khaki-avocado gruel, rank as a Tangiers latrine.

  “We may need to go ix-nay on the occoli-bray, ma petite.”

  I’d just flipped said offending diaper into the step-bucket and grabbed a thick wad of butt-wipes when the goddamn phone rang.

  Doing an expert swab of my daughter’s lower decks, I re-toed the garbage open while yanking the receiver up off the hook, then held it pressed between my left ear and shoulder. “Hello?”

  “Is Madeline Dare available?” A man’s voice, Midwestern.

  “This is she,” I said, keeping Parrish’s ass aloft as I groped blind for a fresh diaper.

  “We want your eyeteeth,” said the guy.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your eyeteeth,” he said. “We want them.”

  “What’re you, like, a fetishist? Jesus, I’m changing my kid’s diaper here, trying not to goddamn inhale.”

  The guy laughed. “This is Jon McNally at the Boulder New Times. Your cover letter claimed you’d give your eyeteeth to write for us?”

  Fuck me.

  With a chain saw. Not gently.

  I’d written that four months ago. But still…

  “Wow,” I said, sliding the fresh dipe under Parrish’s ass. “I am now hugely deluged with an abject dump-truck-load of embarrassment.”

  “Your writing clips are stellar, though.” He sounded amused.

  “Um. Thank you.”

  “We need a restaurant critic, maybe some local art coverage. Any way you could swing by this afternoon?”

  Thank God for Mom. “You bet.”

  “Threeish?”

  “Awesome,” I said, before hanging up.

  I snapped Parrish’s overalls shut and swooped her off the changing table, twirling us both around three times with a giant grin on my face before plopping her down in the playpen.

  The paper’s small gray building was flat-topped and rectilinear as soot-besmirched sugar cubes, precisely stacked. Things were sparser, this far south of downtown: My neighborhood’s stately trees were testimony to the nineteenth-century East Coast diaspora’s arboreal homesickness.

  Someone panted “on your right!” and a fish-school of stringy marathon types jostled me hard on the sidewalk, tropical in their Day-Glo Lycra.

  I checked myself for errant chunks of toddler spoodge in the New Times’s shiny glass front doors and hustled inside.

  “I’m here to meet with Jon McNally?” I said to the chick behind the bullpen desk nearest the top of the entry stairs.

  She was a bit older than me, whole-grain buxom with thick dark braids wrapped around her head.

  “He’s in that corner cubicle, over by the windows.” She smiled, pointing. “I think he’s still on the phone, but if he’s expecting you just go in and grab a chair.”

  “Cool. Thank you so
much.”

  I felt ridiculous in my Manhattan-interview pearl earrings and black blazer. The indigenous dress code was grunge flannel and high-tech hiking sneakers, like they were all just back from a group-bonding rappel off the roof of the Hotel Boulderado. I pictured GORP-and-Gatorade office parties, with Secret Santas exchanging pitons, carabiners, and foil hiking-trip packets of freeze-dried beef Stroganoff.

  I poked my head around the corner cubicle’s doorway. McNally had his feet up on the desk, a phone to his ear, and his beat-to-crap leather chair tilted as far back as it could conceivably go.

  Any self-respecting wife or girlfriend would’ve long since barbered the man’s loose gray curls while he slept, with poultry shears.

  “Benny, come on,” he was saying.

  His was face sun-browned as oiled teak except around the eyes: the old reverse-panda ski tan. He caught sight of me and smiled, palm across the receiver’s mouthpiece as he silently mouthed Madeline?

  I nodded and he held up an index finger to say he’d be just another minute, then pointed toward two chairs alongside his desk.

  I took the one near the window, checking out a picture of him hanging by an all-too-thin rope off this crazy-vertical rock formation south of Boulder: the Devil’s Thumb.

  Death-wish mountain-climber dude. Perfect.

  “Three fires last week and you’re telling me there’s no connection?” He shook his head, raggedy locks bouncing. “Don’t fuck with me here, Benny. You never could lie for shit.”

  I laughed, McNally smiled at me, and the voice on the other end of the line got a whole lot louder.

  He tilted his chair farther back, eliciting a creak of protest. “Of course I wouldn’t jeopardize any ongoing investigation. You know me better than that, for chrissake.”

  He leaned forward, grasping for a notepad and pen that were just out of reach.

  I pushed them closer, and he smiled his thanks.

  “Fine, Benny… off the record. But you’re gonna tell me everything in the end. You always do.”

  I stifled a second laugh and McNally shot me a conspiratorial smirk.

  He covered the mouthpiece again, looked at me. “You want coffee or anything?”

  I shook my head. “I’d rather just listen, if that’s cool.”