Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  Cary was still mulling over what I’d said.

  This is always kind of the tricky point of opening up to anyone I hope will become a bona-fide friend.

  We get to the actual personal-history stuff and some just decide I’m a pathological liar, or otherwise nuts—at which point they move right the fuck along.

  And maybe those were the healthy people.

  I mean, hey, there was a ton of crap in my personal record that required a willing suspension of disbelief—right up until you saw more of it raining down on my head in real time.

  Let’s just say I’ve never bonded with anyone over a shared love of sparkly unicorns or anything. It’s virtually always the dark shit. The damage.

  A more accomplished conversationalist might be able to tap-dance around all that. Or maybe I’d just never seen the point of trying. I figure land mines have a habit of making themselves known, no matter how many hours you invest in blathering about needlepoint or curtains or housebreaking new puppies beforehand.

  I just cross my fingers and come out of the cave with my hands up. Life is short and shallow sparkly-unicorn people have always bored the shit out of me, so why prolong the agony?

  I started in on my elk, which was actually pretty damn good.

  “Madeline…, ” Cary began.

  But Bittler interrupted, guffawing at something beside me with his mouth full before snapping his fingers at the waiter for more Scotch.

  “Hey you,” he yelled, “Pedro!”

  Frat boy chimed in with, “How ’bout some damn refills over here?”

  I turned to Cary. “You were about to say something?”

  “Your father and Hazy,” he said. “Tell me the rest.”

  “We should probably eat first.”

  I toppled both food phalli with the edge of my fork, then mashed them into vulva-shapes for good measure.

  Fuck Freud. Georgia O’Keeffe rides again.

  “Granddaddy Dare bought an autogyro before the war,” I began, once we’d plowed through the rest of the elk. “He’d had a hangar built for it on the property—big steel warehouse kind of thing on a concrete pad. Dad always called it a ‘Butler Building.’ ”

  “What’s an autogyro?” asked Cary.

  “Kind of a helicopter-airplane hybrid, before helicopters were invented. It had stubby wings with a propeller and a big overhead rotor, so you didn’t need a lot of ground run to take off and land.”

  He nodded.

  It was nearing the end of the school year, I explained, and Grandmama and Granddaddy had planned a trip to Canada to fish for salmon on the Restigouche River, taking Dad’s twelve-year-old sister with them.

  My father was to have stayed home with his nurse, in order to finish out the academic year. I don’t know whether my aunt’s vacation at Spence started earlier, or whether their parents just didn’t think it was problematic to interrupt a daughter’s education.

  My mother presumes this all took place on a Friday afternoon, when Dad had finished his week of school in the city.

  It would’ve been a day lengthening into summer, the fine old trees on the family place lush and verdant, the acres of close-napped lawn sweet with clover.

  “Hazy and Dad sneaked into the hangar, one day after school,” I continued. Something they’d done before.

  The boys were armed with slingshots, their pockets crammed with wooden matches.

  “Not the safety kind,” I said. “The strike-anywhere kind.”

  Cary blanched, hearing that part, knowing this wouldn’t end well.

  My stories tend not to.

  Somehow they’d learned the trick of shooting a match at the concrete floor sulfured head down so it’d burst into flame on contact before bouncing back into the air, like a stone that skipped once when skimmed across the surface of a pond.

  Maybe Hazy’s older brother had passed along this trick, maybe Dad had learned it from a fellow student at Buckley. Hard to say.

  “One of those lit matches bounced into a forty-gallon barrel of varnish,” I said. “I don’t know if the thing was just open at the top, or there was a little cap or something that had been left off, but the shit ignited and blew up. All over Hazy.”

  Cary grabbed my wrist.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “So,” I continued, “Dad told him to roll on the ground to extinguish the flames, but Hazy’s older sister—”

  “Jesus,” said Cary. “His sister?”

  “It’s never been clear to me when she arrived at the scene—she’s just suddenly there in every rendition of this I’ve ever been told—but anyway, she screamed at Hazy to get up and run to the brook, a hundred yards away.”

  Cary gripped my wrist tighter, but he didn’t ask me to stop.

  “Yeah, so… Hazy didn’t make it to the brook.”

  Dad’s parents took him away to the Restigouche the following afternoon. They didn’t talk to him about what had happened—or even mention it, ever again. They just told him he’d be coming with them for the salmon fishing.

  “That’s appalling,” said Cary.

  “No shit. My mother says that for months afterward, whenever my father heard a siren he presumed it was the police, coming to put him in jail for killing his best friend.”

  “But at least he talked to her about it. That must have helped.”

  “Right before they got married. He took her to visit Hazy’s grave.”

  I think that loss was the basis for everything, really. As though Hazy’s death were the first black rectangle tipped in an elaborate paisley arrangement of dominoes—if dominoes could somehow be made of anti-matter.

  My family is defined by the absences, the negative space.

  There’d been a dad-shaped void in my life for as long as I could remember, always bleeding just a little bit, around the edges.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I don’t know how you could come out of something like that undamaged. Especially to be left alone with it, as a seven-year-old kid.”

  “I’m terrified of fire,” said Cary. “Always have been.”

  “Me too.”

  He gave me one of those wonderful crinkly-eyed empathy smiles.

  Tribal identification.

  “Your turn,” I said.

  Cary took his hand off my wrist, drew in a deep breath. “This kid on my street—his house burned down when we were ten.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Everyone else made it out, the whole rest of his family. He died.”

  “You guys were close?”

  “Best friends. We were born a week apart. I still have pictures of us in a playpen together.”

  I put my hand on his wrist.

  “The worst part was…” He hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Well, you could smell it for weeks afterward. The whole neighborhood—even upwind. Rain didn’t help. I couldn’t sleep.”

  I shuddered.

  “I kept badgering my parents to buy rope ladders for all the windows, in case it happened to us. My father thought it was pretty funny. Teased me about it mercilessly.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but I think that’s a total dick move on your father’s part.”

  “He had a point.”

  “You were a little kid, Cary. And you’d just lost your best friend…?”

  “Yeah, but Madeline.” Cary shook his head, grinning at me. “We lived in a one-story house.”

  I smiled at that. “Well…”

  Before I could finish the thought, Bittler passed out. Face-first into his plate of elk.

  “Kanpai,” whispered Cary, whereupon I had to pretend I’d been overtaken by a sudden coughing fit to cover my laughter.

  23

  Cary showed up on our porch bright and early the next morning, mountain bike tucked under his arm.

  Dean was still in the shower so I answered the door. “He’s running a little late today.”

  “That’s fine,” said Cary. “Gives me
more time for coffee.”

  “Espresso or cappuccino?” I asked as he yanked off his Styrofoam helmet.

  “If you’re offering to foam some milk, cappuccino would be a dream come true.”

  “I’d be honored.” I started back toward the kitchen, waving him along behind me.

  He carried the bike inside, as always. It was a serious machine: carbon fiber and way too kuh-razy expensive to leave on a porch. My husband drooled with lust every time he saw the damn thing.

  The girls had finished their French toast, so I sponged off their faces and hands and lifted Parrish up out of her booster seat.

  “Hey there, little beauty,” Cary said, unlatching India so he could carry her to the playpen in my wake.

  I refilled the coffee machine and started it up.

  “So,” said Cary, “are we on for lunch at the Thai place?”

  I shrugged, a little embarrassed.

  “Madeline, you haven’t told Dean yet?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Why not? I would think he’d be happy about it, you getting a job.”

  “Well…”

  The machine started chugging in earnest, and it was time to get the foamer-nozzle into my glass of milk.

  I twisted the dial open and didn’t bother trying to finish my thought over the onslaught of noise, keeping the nozzle’s tip at the perfect depth so the froth burgeoned satiny and uniform, its bubbles too tiny for even Don Ho to detect.

  When I’d handed Cary his coffee, I crossed my arms. “I have another fire story.”

  “About these arsons?”

  “No,” I said. “This was when Dean and I lived in Syracuse. Right after we got married.”

  “The plot thickens.”

  “I had to watch someone getting prepared to light a house on fire, once. Scary as hell.”

  “Given our mutual history with flame, I can see why someone even thinking about doing that would’ve freaked the hell out of you.”

  “Well, it wasn’t so much the idea of him lighting it that scared me—more the fact that he planned to chain me to a fireplace inside it, first.”

  “Did he actually do it? I mean, not chain you to a fireplace in a burning house… you wouldn’t be here.”

  “He got as far as pouring a bunch of gasoline around. And then a lot of other stuff happened…”

  He shook his head. “Jesus. That’s just… I can’t begin to imagine.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re not exactly designed to imagine shit like that.”

  “And you still have the guts to walk through a place that burned down here?”

  “That wasn’t guts,” I said, “it was morbid curiosity. I mean, it’s not like the house here was still on fire at the time. It was just the aftermath.”

  He nodded, unconvinced.

  “But the people who show up first and deal with the actual flames,” I continued, “they have major balls. Running into a burning building to get people out? I can’t imagine.”

  Cary shuddered. “No fucking way I could do that. I don’t even like yanking burned Pop-Tarts out of the toaster oven.”

  I smiled at that image.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m picturing you with your eyes clenched shut, subduing your breakfast pastries with a fire extinguisher.”

  He laughed. “I’d be cowering outside in the parking lot, curled up on the asphalt and making little mewling noises.”

  That made me crack up entirely.

  “Yeah, big tough old Cary,” he said, smiling, “total pansy. But I’ve learned to live with my utter wussitude. And who knows, maybe this will help…” He shoved a hand into the right front pocket of his shorts and pulled it out again, my grandmother’s four-leaf-clover charm now centered in the valley of his meaty palm.

  “Hey, I hope so,” I said.

  “I’ll break the news of your employment to your husband at the first opportunity this morning. I’ve been craving pad Thai since we talked about this yesterday.”

  Dean breezed into the kitchen, briefcase in hand. “Somebody mention Thai food?”

  “Your lovely wife has some really great news,” said Cary.

  Dean looked at me, tense. “What kind of great news?”

  Thanks, Cary…

  “Um,” I said. “I got a job. As the restaurant critic at the New Times.”

  “Oh, thank God, Bunny.” Dean’s face flooded with relief and he slumped back against the kitchen counter, letting the strap slide through his fingers until his briefcase rested on the floor. “I thought you were going to tell me you were pregnant.”

  My husband and I looked at each other and both started laughing, somewhat hysterically.

  “Triplets…, ” I said, almost choking.

  “Quadruplets…, ” Dean replied, tears streaming down his face.

  “Boys…, ” we said to each other at exactly the same moment.

  Which made us both laugh so hard that Cary started looking seriously concerned.

  Dean slid down the base cabinet until he was cross-legged on the kitchen floor, and I couldn’t breathe—had to lean over, put my hands on my knees.

  Cary whacked me on the back.

  Which helped, a little.

  But just when I was calming down enough to inhale, I heard him say, “So I guess this means you’re okay with the newspaper thing, then?”

  Which totally set me and Dean off again.

  I sank to the floor, then flopped onto my back, kicking my sneakered heels against the orange linoleum.

  Cary cleared his throat. “I told Madeline we’d go with her to that Thai place out by the office. For lunch.”

  I banged my fist against his ankle. “Stop talking… you’re going to make me puke.”

  When we finally, finally stopped laughing, Dean wiped his eyes on his sleeve and said, “Sounds great, Bunny. Can you bring the girls in the wagon?”

  “I’d love to.”

  He turned to Cary. “I’m sorry to be a pain in the ass, but would you mind throwing your bike in the back of my car? I have to haul a pile of shit out to the office. Or you could ride and I’ll drive. Sorry I didn’t call this morning, let you know you could’ve gone direct.”

  “Free excellent coffee and a nice chat with Madeline,” said Cary, raising his glass. “Not to mention getting to watch the pair of you lose your shit like that? Totally worth it.”

  Dean stood up, kissed the top of my head, and ducked his head under his briefcase strap. “We should hit it. Sorry to run so late, Cary.”

  He walked out to the dining room, stepped over the playpen fence, and hoisted the first of two cardboard cartons up off the table.

  Cary put his helmet back on, hooked his bike over one shoulder, and reached for the second box. “I’ll get this one.”

  Dean shifted his own, exhaling. “Watch your back, they’re heavy.”

  I pulled a corner peg out of the playpen and pulled it open so they wouldn’t have to haul themselves over the railing, thus encumbered.

  While they duck-walked single file toward the living room, torsos tilted back to counter the weight of their respective burdens, I jogged ahead to open the front door.

  “Great to see you, Madeline,” said Cary, breathless. “Thanks again for the fortifying beverage.”

  “Dude,” I said. “Thanks for being so subtle.”

  I heard him cackle as he started down the porch steps.

  24

  I always took what the girls wore pretty seriously, opting that day for contrasting OshKosh overall jumpers, shiny black lug-soled mary janes, striped tights and turtlenecks, and little knit hats that looked like a strawberry and an eggplant, respectively.

  This wasn’t some grown-up reversion to playing with dolls; I’d preferred fort-building and Hot Wheels as a kid.

  It was more because I still felt the sting of my own childhood wardrobe: half raggedy Salvation Army crap, half outlandishly expensive castoffs from older and wealthier cousins back east.

  If
you would like to make a small child morbidly self-conscious for life, equip her with a large vocabulary and send her to public elementary school in early-seventies Stevie Nicks California wearing knee-socks, penny loafers, kilts, and moth-eaten shocking-pink/acid-green cable-knit Shetland sweaters that have been monogrammed with other people’s initials.

  Trust me, she will be contemplating the abyss by third grade and quoting Kafka under her breath well before she ever attends a middle school dance.

  It was gorgeous out, surprise surprise. Sparkling sunshine, fluffy clouds, trees just budding out into pale leaf or fluffy blossom.

  Three generations’ worth of blooms from the local iris farm, Long’s Gardens, nodded from virtually every yard and swale like orchidy daffodils: salmon, cobalt, amethyst, Burmese-ruby fuchsia, yellows from butter to egg yolk to topaz, nursery-pastel pinks and powder blues.

  I pulled the wagon onto the Boulder Creek Path and a slight breeze picked up, making new aspen leaves quake and shiver along white boughs so they all winked in the light like a thousand buckets of loose change tossed in the air at once.

  Dean’s office was situated in one of those eastward industrial parks out where Boulder started getting really high-plains-y and treeless.

  I’d figured it would be a thirty-minute walk, and that I could use the exercise, but the creek path was hilly enough to slow me down with the girls’ wagon in tow.

  Then I got out onto the flats and had a moment of vertigo when it struck me once again how very broad the high plains were.

  Okay, maybe it’s not vertigo when you aren’t standing on top of something tall and looking down. It was all sideways.

  The whole Big Sky Heartland thing made me itchily paranoid, like I was about to get strafed by some Hitchcockian crop-duster biplane, or burned at the stake for being pro-choice and anti–Jell-O salad.

  There was just something about the sheer numbing expanse and tonnage of those amber waves of grain, once you’d turned your back on purple mountains’ majesty.

  This was Dean’s line of country, not mine. It must have reminded him of the corn-rowed acreage of his boyhood: that overcast upstate New York landscape in which things botanical were planted for income, not decoration.