Miller's Valley

by Anna Quindlen

  “Like what?” I said, and she laughed, a real laugh, not mocking or sarcastic.

  “You never change,” she said.

  I’m not sure about that. That’s what Donald said when he showed up in Philadelphia, sure somehow that I was what he wanted, sure that deep inside I was still that little girl making change out of a coffee can and handing him his share of the money. Maybe everyone stays the same inside, even when their life looks nothing like what they once had, or even imagined. I don’t know LaRhonda well enough now to know whether she’s changed. She has a lot of money, much more than her father had. She was smart, plowing the profits from the restaurants into a development company, building houses and investing in office buildings. Steven would say she thinks big. She sent her children away to boarding school, and she said that it was because the education was better, and I have no doubt that that was true, although the high school is pretty good, plenty good enough for my kids. But it might be that LaRhonda didn’t want the day-to-dayness of mothering. Or it might be that I just think that because of the girl I grew up with. Just like her own mother, she has a big house now with a whole wing for kids that’s empty. Both her daughters live in California, one of her sons is in Texas, another in Denver. I see her in her Mercedes tooling around from one restaurant to another. She works longer hours than I do, managing everything she owns. She tells everybody that she’s sixty, which is funny because I’ll be sixty-five next birthday, and I can remember when we were both the same age. But whatever, as the kids say.

  The old-timers were skeptical, when I first came back to practice medicine, especially the men. “I’m not letting Bud Miller’s skinny little girl, who used to serve me eggs and hash browns, take a look at my prostate,” one of them said at the diner one day, not knowing I was in a back booth. On my way to the register I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You want to take your prostate somewhere else, Mr. Helprin, you’re welcome to do it,” and the whole place cracked up. But they got over it, most of them, and I have more patients than I can handle with all the new people. It’s good, being a doctor in a place like this. A little girl comes in with a sore throat, and you let her listen to your heart with your stethoscope, and fifteen years later you run into her mother at the market and find out she’s declared premed at the state university. A woman cries on your examining table after a miscarriage and then a year or two later she brings her first baby in for a checkup.

  But the same things that make it good can make it hard, too. I told LaRhonda I was putting her daughter Serafina on the pill for her cramps and her skin, but it was really because Serafina had been having sex since she was twelve and I figured her mother would kill her if she got pregnant. I went to Mrs. Farrell’s class to talk about careers in science and medicine and I looked around the room and knew which honor student had cut marks up and down her arms under her long-sleeved shirt. When a seventeen-year-old who played on the soccer team hung himself in a patch of forest above the reservoir I was maybe the only one who wasn’t surprised, although I did wonder whether his mother knew more about his being gay than she let on. My son gave me a hard look after that one, and I recognized it as a look I’d given my mother over the years, a look that said, You know things but you don’t do anything about them. Maybe my mother would have said the same thing to me that I wanted to say to Ian: it’s a lot harder to save people than you think it is.

  You know too much, doing what I do, sometimes too much for your own good. Three months after Nora left for college I looked across the kitchen table at my husband. The amber speckles in his dark brown eyes maybe made it plainer that the whites had turned yellow. He died of liver cancer the same week the daffodils finally flowered after a fierce winter. I held him up on the den sofa so he could see the flowers outside.

  “All I want to look at is you, Meems,” he said. No one, not even my father, not even my children, has ever loved me the way that man loved me, that’s for sure. There’s something satisfying in being loved that hard, maybe more than loving that hard yourself. I don’t know.

  Life is full of mysteries. What would have happened if Mrs. Farrell’s friend hadn’t told her about the scholarship? What if Steven had already sent that girl home when I showed up at that little house? Did the tiny mummy in Ruth’s suitcase wind up there before or after she moved into the house behind us? If before, is that why she turned out the way she did, a mummy herself in that clapboard crypt? If after—well, that’s a tougher one for me. There was only one man who spent any real time in Ruth’s house, which was really his house lent out to his wife’s little sister. That’s the man who died there, in one of the easy chairs, who preferred being there after his stroke to being in his own home. I wonder if Ruth had always been in love with Buddy, and if Buddy loved her back. I wonder if Miriam knew. I wonder if she knew about her sister and the baby. She was a nurse, after all. I thought my mother knew everything. She didn’t show a thing, when I stumbled off that drop-down ladder and back into the kitchen that day. She didn’t say, Mary Margaret, what is it, although I must have looked, in her words, like death eating a cracker.

  That little dried-up thing was shrouded in newspaper. I could have looked at the date on that paper. I didn’t. That’s another mystery to me. Did it not occur to me, or did I not want to? I had my chances. I didn’t look at that newspaper when I first opened the suitcase, and I didn’t look at it the next morning, when I went back to the farm for the last time. I’d been up all night, thinking about whether just before they flooded the valley the state would send in police, or inspectors, to make sure everyone was out. I pictured one of them going to the attic, opening the case, calling someone, doing those things they do when a body turns up hidden in a house.

  Just after dawn I drove into the driveway. It was so quiet. People always said the valley was quiet. But I knew its background sounds, the old truck climbing the ridge, the burr of a baler, the cows, the cats. All gone now. There was the sound of crickets, and a buck cropping the grass near the road barked, coughed, and ran off when I stopped the car and got out.

  I carried the vanity case down the ladder, trying not to hold it too close, which wasn’t rational but I wasn’t dealing with a rational thing. The cap to the well behind Ruth’s house had a heavy padlock on it, and I had the key. I had my father’s whole ring of keys, a heavy steel ring that he’d made himself with maybe fifty keys on it. Ones for our house and Ruth’s, ones for the barns and the shed, for the basement where the Janssons kept their equipment that my father repaired and the garage where the Langers kept their mower that he worked on whenever it was spitting, keys to tractors and trucks all over the valley so that when something went sideways with a carburetor or a front-end loader he’d be ready even if no one was home. I guess you could call it a circle of trust, that ring of keys. Hard to imagine today giving one man the keys to so many different buildings and machines. None of them had been used to open anything in years. “Nothing as useless,” my father used to say, “as a key that doesn’t open anything anymore.”

  I used the key to open the padlock on the well cover. Then I opened the key ring and attached it to the leather handle of the vanity case and dropped it in. There was a splash, and then silence. The flashlight showed nothing but flat black water. I shoved the padlock back in place, hard, and listened to it close.

  For years my mind skittered around what I’d found in that case like a bug after the light gets turned on. I could have asked Ruth about it when she was dying, or I could have asked my mother. I just couldn’t do it. It seemed cruel somehow, to try to cast light on that sad small dried-up thing and whatever the story was behind it. But it was always there in my mind. Nothing is as it seems. There’s a news flash for you.

  I know from the Internet that there’s a Thomas A. Miller who is a dentist in Mobile, Alabama, and a Thomas A. Miller who sells real estate in Delaware, and one who is a student at the state university right here, and one who died in 1896 and is buried in Montpelier, Vermont, and there is a picture
of his tombstone. There’s a Thomas A. Miller who is serving a life sentence for murder, and God forgive me, that’s the one whose picture I looked for, but he was black and only eighteen. I like to think that in Texas or Maine or Oregon there’s a Thomas A. Miller who maybe changed his name or just lives off the grid and who remembers me the way I remember him, young and happy. I like to think that maybe he uses a computer the same way I do and he finds Mary Margaret Miller, MD, and he says to himself, Well, corncob, you did okay. There are a lot of reasons why I didn’t change my last name after I got married. That was one of them. Another was because, even before I knew I’d fly back here like a boomerang, I knew that I was the last Miller of Miller’s Valley.

  There’s too much missing people in my life, that’s for sure. I miss my mother, who died with her hand in mine when she was ninety, two years after her sister had. Ruth had a cough that wouldn’t quit, and I was pretty sure that it was lung cancer, but she wouldn’t go to the hospital for any of the tests or any of the treatments. I took care of her at home, and she went quietly, too. Her last word was Miriam. My mother’s last word didn’t really come out, was just a movement of her lips. I knew what it was, though. I could have told you what it would be all those years that she and I were sitting together, drinking tea, talking about the hospital when she was still working there and then when they rebuilt and expanded it and she volunteered at the reception desk and I was on staff. Maybe even if you’d asked that little girl listening at the heating vent what her mother’s last word would be, if you could get her to the point where she could imagine something as unimaginable as her mother’s death, she would have guessed that those dry lips would work themselves around the T and then the rest would lie on her tongue like a communion wafer before her last breath passed over the word Tommy like a long sad sigh.

  I miss Donald and my mother, and I miss Ruth, and the Langers, and my father, I still miss my father. It’s the little things that get you. I go into the toolbox to hang a new spice rack and can’t find the right screwdriver, and I hear a tongue clicking in my ear and know it’s Buddy Miller, saying to himself, How did I raise a girl who doesn’t keep her tools handy? I miss Callie, too, who comes up for holidays and a weekend visit a couple of times a year. Clifton bought her a little house in California when he started getting steady work out there as an actor, and it was nice, with a tangerine tree in the backyard. None of us could get over that, that Callie could go out back and just pick herself a bowl of tangerines, except for Donald, who’d lived there himself. Callie said they were the best tangerines she’d ever had, but she and Doug didn’t use the house much and eventually she told Clifton to sell. The two of them just stayed with him when they went out there. When Clifton won an Emmy for that TV show he did, he held up his award and said, “This one’s for you, Dad. I’m your boy.” Callie thought he meant Doug, and maybe he did. But I don’t think so. I spent more time watching his son be dazzled by Tommy than she did, or maybe she couldn’t see it because she was still angry, for getting dazzled herself, even for a couple of nights.

  I don’t really miss the Miller’s Valley I used to know, the one in which I grew up, my very own drowned town. It’s been gone a long time now, almost as long as my brother has. They’re talking about having a big celebration for the fiftieth anniversary of the recreation area when it comes around, and that’ll clinch it. If something’s been around fifty years, it’s been around forever. Most people think it’s always been there. They run fishing boats and go ice skating and sit in folding chairs and look out over the place where we all lived and it’s just water to them, as far as the eye can see. I guess it’s just water to me, too. I think there were a lot of reasons my mother was satisfied to see water close over the top of the valley and the farm, some that I don’t like to examine too closely, but one was that she worried that I’d come flying back out of habit or duty and she wanted me to leave. But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go. When I talked to Cissy about Andover, when I was a kid, I thought her life, her past, her childhood, all of it was buried down there under the water. I didn’t understand that it was above the surface, in her, the way mine is in me.

  The pipe narrows at one end and opens at the other. Donald gone, and his grandfather, and my mother and father and Ruth, and LaRhonda’s parents, too. But then there’s Nora and Ian, and their children, and all the kids I see on the streets and in the drugstore, the kids of my kids’ classmates, the grandchildren of my own. Lots of people leave here, that’s for sure, but people stay, too. And some are like me. They circle back.

  I never go over that way, to the recreation area. Never have, in all these years, even when the kids wanted to water-ski or swim. I let them go with someone else. I don’t even drive by there. But every couple of years I have a dream. I dive down into green water and I use my arms to push myself far below the surface and when I open my eyes there are barn roofs and old fences and a chimney and a silo and sometimes I sense that Tommy’s there, too, and the corn can, and my father’s workbench, and a little tan vanity case floating slowly by. But I swim in the opposite direction, back toward the light, because I have to come up for air. I still need to breathe.

  For my mother and father

  Blessed forever in both

  BY ANNA QUINDLEN

  FICTION

  Miller’s Valley

  Still Life with Bread Crumbs

  Every Last One

  Rise and Shine

  Blessings

  Black and Blue

  One True Thing

  Object Lessons

  NONFICTION

  Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

  Good Dog, Stay

  Being Perfect

  Loud and Clear

  A Short Guide to a Happy Life

  How Reading Changed My Life

  Thinking Out Loud

  Living Out Loud

  BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

  Happily Ever After

  The Tree That Came to Stay

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNA QUINDLEN is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She is the author of eight novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, and Miller’s Valley. Her memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012, was a number one New York Times bestseller. Her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at The New York Times she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in Loud and Clear.

  AnnaQuindlen.net

  Facebook.com/​AnnaQuindlen

  @AnnaQuindlen

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