Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  I wanted to be near water, preferably an ocean. Somehow it always felt like then I’d be able to escape if things got really bad. Which was crazy… I mean, what would I have done if there’d been a nuclear holocaust while we were living in New York City, stolen a canoe and paddled up the Hudson with the girls in their car seats at my feet? Not bloody likely.

  I trudged onward, wondering if my new pal Mimi had gotten any farther with the arson investigations. I decided to call her that afternoon once I’d gotten home and seen the lab results were in… after I called McNally at the paper and asked whether it’d be okay to review Alice’s Restaurant for next week.

  Despite what I’d said to Cary about not wanting to review a place I’d already gotten a free meal from, I realized Dean might take off at any time on another business trip, and I’d already spent this month’s hundred bucks from mom on babysitters.

  Or maybe I’d get a check from the paper, for the first three articles? Kind of ridiculous, really, to realize I’d have to spend it on child care so I could keep writing.

  Then again, I figured having even a semblance of a job was an investment in sanity—mine and Dean’s—whether or not I broke even at the end of the month.

  Thank God I could bring the kiddos along to the Thai place for lunch. That was at least twenty bucks I wouldn’t have to blow on getting someone to watch out for them while I took notes on the quality of satay and green-papaya salad.

  I’d loaded the wagon with boxes of apple juice and ziplock bags of Cheese Nips, but Parrish and India were sacked out for their morning nap beneath the white hooped-canvas roof. Perfect timing—they’d be bright and cheery at the office.

  I stopped for a minute to catch my breath, tucking a bright patchwork quilt under their dear little chins.

  And smiled to myself. Jesus but it had been a long time since Dean and I’d shared a good laugh.

  The girls were just coming around by the time I entered the corporate park, murmuring and chirping drowsily as I tried to remember in which of the several dozen identically stark, flat-roofed beige buildings I would find my Intrepid Spouse.

  The lawns looked as if they’d been spray-painted green, the parking lot asphalt was freshly smooth and black, and not one of the randomly capitalized company names emblazoned across each corporate barracks revealed a thing about what the persons employed within actually did: VanaTel, AccenTron, Tacti-Tek, MicroNext.

  I wandered right, left, and right again, squinting now and really wanting to get out of the sun, which had reached the blinding acme of its mile-high noonday glare.

  No one outside but we mad dogs and English majors…

  I turned one more corner and saw our beat-up Mitsubishi wedged into a row of shiny white and ice-blue LeSabres and SUVs.

  Here was Dean’s building, at long last—the company name etched in early-eighties-hair-salon sans-serif gold across a squat pink-granite headstone slab: IONIX, LLC.

  I checked my reflection in a spotless car window before heading toward the glass-doored entrance. Bonus: There was no actual dirt on my face, and I only looked half as tired as I felt.

  I hauled the red wagon inside, blinking while my eyes adjusted to the lobby’s dimmer interior light.

  Setsuko smiled at me—cool and prim and perfectly coiffed behind the reception counter’s speckled gray Formica.

  “Would it be okay if I parked this in here,” I asked, “or should I tuck it away somewhere outside?”

  She smiled again. “You can bring it right back here next to me, okay? I’ll watch it.”

  I thanked her and pulled the wagon around. She knelt down to help me pull India free, as I reached inside for Parrish.

  “Very, very pretty, your little girls,” she said, holding her hands out so India could grab on with chubby fists to steady herself. “Such cute dresses.”

  “Thank you,” I said again. “And thank you for looking after the wagon, Setsuko. You’re always so thoughtful.”

  “My pleasure. I’ll buzz your husband and let him know you’ve arrived. But you have to promise you’ll let me babysit, sometime?”

  “You’re wonderful,” I said. “And I will call you.”

  Dean and Cary and the girls and I were finally settled around a faux-walnut six-top in the Thai place, having secured a pair of booster seats once I’d taken each kid in turn to the ladies’ room for a quick diaper change.

  We plopped Parrish’s chair between Cary and Dean, with India and me ensconced directly across from them.

  I’d broken out the Cheese Nips and boxes of apple juice, tied the girls’ bibs around their necks, and finally settled down myself to peruse the menu.

  All I really wanted at this point was a personal gallon of Thai iced coffee—extra heavy on the caffeine—but I ran a list of appetizers and entrées past my dining companions that seemed like a reasonably varied overview of the place’s culinary aptitude.

  Cary and Dean were discussing some new technical developments at work. I’d gotten a D-for the year in high school chemistry, so they might as well have been reciting toaster-oven instruction booklets in Lithuanian.

  Our young waitress returned with a round of ice waters and my blessed gigantic vessel of high-octane caffeine, whereupon I proceeded to order a yellow curry and a green, a beef salad, the requisite pad Thai and chicken satay, and a handful of other house specialties I’d have to remember to write down and rate in my trusty notebook the minute we were back out the door.

  India started tossing back Cheese Nips as Parrish drained her juice box.

  “Look,” said Cary, “I think Bittler’s embezzling.”

  I looked up, suddenly interested. “What?”

  “You’re getting paranoid,” Dean said soothingly. “I mean, the guy’s an asshole, but—”

  Cary shook his head. “When was the last time you got reimbursed for expenses? He’s late again, right? Used to take him a month, then six weeks. Now we’re talking two months, minimum. Sometimes more.”

  Dean nodded, his face sour. “Not for the VPs, of course.”

  Cary ran the tip of his index finger along the rim of his water glass. “Just for the underlings. The people who can’t really complain, am I right?”

  Dean nodded again.

  “That’s totally shitty,” I said.

  “I had to hit up my father for the entire rent check this month,” said Cary. “I promised I’d pay him back as soon as I got reimbursed, but still…”

  Parrish got a Cheese Nip wedged in one nostril. I reached across the table and pulled it out.

  Dean leaned back in his chair. “It’s not like we’re lagging in receivables. P and L’s looking damn solid. We outdid ourselves on sales this quarter—and most accounts are paying early.”

  “That’s my point,” said Cary. “There’s no cash lag. Just Bittler, fucking around. But there’s some weird shit going on with shipping spares, too. Fulfillment’s all backed up.”

  “Well, that’s not good,” said Dean. “But really, man. I mean, I hate to say it, but you’re sounding a little paranoid.”

  India chortled and shrieked with joy beside me.

  I looked over to check the level on her Cheese Nip cache only to realize that she’d managed to drink my entire liter of iced coffee while I’d been distracted with adult conversation.

  Oh fucking well, so much for the afternoon nap.

  “Look,” Dean was saying, when I tuned back in to the grown-up channel, “you get that kind of wrinkle occasionally, with this whole just-in-time business model. Somebody forgets to replace one little belt on a drill press in Malaysia, and the global supply chain gets tweaked for a month. Shit happens. Just another downside of the old Japanese Management Style.”

  “You guys heard about the four international CEOs who got abducted by a Marxist revolutionary front?” I asked.

  They shook their heads.

  “French, British, Japanese, and American. Marxists have them up in a plane, tell them they’re going to push them out one by one,
so do they have any last words…”

  Parrish threw a Cheese Nip.

  “Brit says he wants to sing ‘Rule, Britannia,’ French dude asks if he can do the Marseillaise, and the Japanese guy pipes up that he’d like to deliver the lecture on management techniques he was going to present at the conference they’re never going to get to attend now.”

  “And the American?” asked Cary.

  “He says, ‘Just shoot me first, before I have to listen to another fucking lecture on Japanese management techniques.’ ”

  They liked that.

  But Cary got serious again quickly.

  “Look, Dean,” he said. “Have you been out to the warehouse lately? I’m telling you, something’s fucked up.”

  25

  I haven’t had any reason to go out to the warehouse for a while,” said Dean. “Not for a couple of months, anyway.”

  “Well, I needed to check over some shit this morning,” said Cary.

  Dean nodded. “What kind of shit?”

  “Invoices that were misnumbered. A spares order for that new Pemex facility. Same problem we had with Bangalore last month, remember?”

  “Of course,” said Dean. “Rajiv wanted to beat the hell out of me.”

  “Well, different client, same clusterfuck. I’m telling you, Bittler’s doing some weird shit.”

  “All appears yellow to the jaundiced eye,” said Dean.

  “Jaundice didn’t re-key all the warehouse locks without telling anyone,” retorted Cary.

  That got Dean’s attention. “What?”

  “I went out there this morning,” Cary said. “Couldn’t get in the damn place. Setsuko says Bittler’s got the only set of new keys. And he’s conveniently in Houston all week. What the fuck, right?”

  Dean thought this over.

  “Come on,” said Cary. “Your wife should do some investigative reporting, here… 60 Minutes the guy a little. Right after she figures out who this arsonist is—”

  “What arsonist?” asked my husband, turning toward me.

  “Um,” I said, swallowing audibly. “The guy in my second article.”

  Dean started shredding little bits off the edge of his napkin. “I thought you were writing about restaurants.”

  I looked down at the table. “I got an extra assignment.”

  “That you conveniently neglected to mention this morning?”

  “Yeah, I was totally hiding it from you, Dean,” I said, crossing my arms.

  Well, technically I had been, of course, but this whole cranky-husband-bullshit thing was starting to piss me off.

  He looked up at me, having now destroyed his entire napkin.

  I stared right back. I mean, when had he decided our marriage was a dictatorship, for fuck’s sake?

  “Madeline’s really talented,” said Cary, smiling at me. “You have to read her stuff. It’s outstanding.”

  “No,” said Dean. “Not outstanding. By any stretch of the imagination.”

  Cary’s eyes widened and he turned toward Dean, but my husband was focused on me.

  “Not even acceptable,” Dean continued, frostier with each syllable.

  “Acceptable to whom?” I asked, looking him straight in the eye.

  He leaned forward, nostrils flared just a bit. “Jesus Christ, Bunny, what the hell were you thinking?”

  “What the hell do you think I was thinking? I’ve finally got a job again, doing what I’m good at. I’m making a little money, trying to do my bit for the familial finances.”

  Okay, so not exactly in any big fat profitable way, yet, but still…

  “Goddamn it,” said Dean. “You’re a mother now. Haven’t you put us both through enough of this shit already?”

  Both my hands were clenched into fists now. “Enough of what shit, specifically?”

  “Your morbid fascination with violence and mayhem. Your goddamn death wish.”

  “I do not have a death wish.”

  “Really?” He pursed his lips into an annoying smirk that made me want to kick him, under the table. “Let’s see… there’s the guy who was going to light you on fire, the woman who tried to push you off the fourth-story roof, oh… and the gang boys in Queens who were planning to shoot you, after they’d managed to run you over with a car and break your arm during a homicide investigation. None of that qualifies as a flirtation with your own mortality?”

  “None of which I sought out,” I said. “Or even instigated. I mean, if anything, I have a life wish. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here—”

  Cary’s head swiveled back and forth between us, following these volleys.

  “And now you’re jumping right back into it,” said Dean. “Putting yourself at risk. Putting our children at risk. Our daughters.”

  “I am not,” I said, starting to tear up. “I am not.”

  But my gut went cold with fear at what he was suggesting, like I’d just choked down an entire tray of ice, and the tray—the old aluminum kind with a ratchet-lever on one end to tilt the cubes out of their tinny rectangular partitions.

  Hadn’t I thought the exact same thing myself, when I assured McNally the first day we met that I had no interest in anything other than restaurant pieces?

  Yes. Of course I had.

  “You need to give up this writing shit,” said my husband.

  Cary blanched, turning toward me with such a tenderly crinkle-browed faceful of sympathy that I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to hug him or crawl out of the restaurant in shame.

  Yes, Dean had been tantrummy for the last couple of months. But this was different. He’d never bullied me in front of a friend before, never in public.

  I surveyed him through narrowed eyes: the pompous jut of his chin, the moue of entitlement twisting the corners of his mouth.

  And suddenly I felt like I’d x-rayed through to what this was really about.

  Not about danger for me, not even concern for the girls’ safety… at least not at the root of it all.

  My father would’ve laughed, summarizing with the Marine Corps’s unofficial motto: Shit flows downhill.

  Dean was at other people’s beck and call all day, every day. Bittler and the rest of them.

  “Working for wages,” his father said, every time we visited the family farm—a mere three words to dismiss his son’s every achievement, out in the world.

  Damn right it all comes downhill, and here I am, up to my waist.

  “You need to give up this writing shit, Madeline,” Dean said again. “You’ve never made any money at it, and I want a homemaker.”

  I was just about to tell him to get royally fucked and rot in hell when India knocked his water all over the table and the waitress arrived with our lunch.

  26

  Dean was petulantly silent with me for the rest of the meal, not to mention the entire drive back to Ionix after lunch.

  Yet he chatted with Cary as though nothing had happened, while I sat in the backseat between the girls.

  And the whole time my confidence receded, the way the tide does before a hurricane hits. Maybe Dean was right, maybe I was putting the girls in danger, and I sure as shit wasn’t making any money. In fact I had to rely on being subsidized by my mother even to attempt this job, this hobby.

  “Listen,” I said, reaching forward to put my hand on Dean’s shoulder, when he’d pulled into a parking spot back at work.

  He flinched my hand off and yanked up the emergency brake. Pocketing the keys without a word, he got out, slamming the door shut behind him, and stalked back into the lobby.

  Cary and I took a minute, just sitting there with our seat belts still on.

  “You okay?” he asked at last, turning around to give me a tentative smile.

  “Sure,” I said, from my perch between the girls’ car seats. “I’ll be fine. Eventually.”

  I didn’t feel fine. I felt like a small dog that had gotten its ribs kicked in by the very human it most wanted to serve and protect.

  Cary was still doin
g sympathy-face. “That was total bullshit, everything he said in the restaurant.”

  I looked away. “It’s complicated.”

  “Your husband is being an utter dickhead. What’s complicated about that?”

  “I mean, from a certain perspective, I can see his point. He’s got a right to be concerned…”

  “ ‘Concern’ my ass, Madeline. There is no excuse for spewing vitriol at your wife in a restaurant. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”

  “Granted, Dean’s mode of expression was appalling. And I’m sorry you had to be there…”

  “Does he speak to you that way at home? When you guys are alone?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Madeline, that was not a rhetorical question.”

  “Cary… look, Dean and I, we’re both exhausted.”

  “Answer me.”

  “Oh, great. Now you’re going to start ordering me around?” I looked out the window.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Please. Talk to me about this. I’m your friend. I think it’s important.”

  “Does Dean do this at home, when we’re alone?” I said. “Yes. Often. He’s been an asshole since we moved here. Intermittently, but still… huge gobs of assholish-ness.”

  “Madeline,” he said, putting his hand on my knee.

  “Look, do you think I’m endangering myself, or the girls?”

  Cary thought about that. “Do you feel like you might be?”

  “Well, I’m not investigating an ax murderer or anything,” I said. “This is just some guy who likes to light shit on fire. Junior-varsity crap.”

  “Compared with that other stuff Dean was talking about?”

  “Yeah.”

  Stupid, dangerous, lethal “stuff ”… and my fault for getting caught up in it, every damn time.

  “People have really tried to kill you?” asked Cary. “Not just the guy who wanted to chain you in the fireplace?”

  I sighed. “Several people.”

  “Seriously? Jesus…”

  “You got a few minutes? I’ll flesh it out for you.”