Miller's Valley

  “She’s right,” I said. “The valley is gone.”

  “I miss it,” Ruth said.

  There wasn’t much left in the old kitchen. I’d already brought Ruth her place mats, vinyl with daisies in one corner that I’d given her for Christmas, and the frying pan she used for grilled cheese. She wanted the throw pillows from her couch, which had been ruined in the big storm. My mother got new furniture for Ruth’s place just the way she did for her own. While Ruth wouldn’t say so, I could tell by the way she ran her hand over it that she liked the flowered pattern on the new couch. It was more her thing than the old tan couch with the scratchy upholstery that had been in her living room for twenty years.

  “Just bring me a few things, Mimi,” she’d said. “I need my old egg turner, and the trivet on the stove. Oh, and that picture of bluebirds I have on the bedroom wall. And the mirror from the spare room, too. I can’t find my mother’s marcasite brooch. If your mother hasn’t taken it it might have dropped under the bed when they removed me.” That was how she described it until the day she died: “they removed me.” My mother wouldn’t give her chapter and verse on the removal, but I got the idea from Cissy that Ruth had spent so much time yelling and screaming the first day that the near neighbors, who weren’t that near, thought about calling the police.

  “I never liked that brooch in the first place, which is why she got it, and why she wants a brooch when she never goes anyplace is beyond me,” my mother had said. I thought the new arrangement was going to cause even more fights than the old one because sometimes Ruth could hear my mother’s comments about her, and vice versa. It depended on whether the door at the top of the steps, which divided one half of the house from the other, was open.

  The brooch was in the old silverware drawer, along with three forks and a bent potato peeler. It made me wonder if Ruth was developing dementia. That’s another bad thing about being a medical student, although I’ve found it gets better once you’ve practiced for a while. But in the beginning you diagnose everything. “There’s a name for what Ruth has,” I’d told my mother once when we were on the phone, and she hung up and then called me right back and said, “Mary Margaret, if you suddenly start to act as though you’ve invented medical knowledge it’s going to go hard for you and me.”

  “You should have been a doctor yourself,” I’d said.

  “If wishes were horses,” she said, and I almost hung up on her at that point.

  Cissy told me that when they’d left Andover a crew had come in and taken everything away, then bulldozed the houses and even some of the trees. But apparently Miller’s Valley ran so deep, and so many of the houses were already ruins or rubble, that the water authorities said the people who were left could just walk away. Ed had tried to describe how it would work, the way they’d redirect the dam to hold more water back until it flowed down the creek bed and turned it into a river, the months it would take for the water to run hard and fast enough to reach the level they’d planned, how everyone always thought you’d flip a switch and there’d all of a sudden be forty feet of water when it actually took time. That was good, he said, because then the animals had time to get out, the deer and possums and bear and raccoon and the silent unseen bobcats and porcupine, which my father always said were there but that I’d never seen in all my life, even dead along the road. They’d have time to flee, Eddie said, and that’s when I said, “I don’t want to hear any of it.” The water would come up and cover the houses, the barns, the fences, the old swing sets, the bales of hay, and the cornfields now lying fallow, and I didn’t want to hear any of it. A couple of crews had already taken down the trees around the valley lip so that when the water got to where it was finally going to settle, the surface would be smooth for fifteen feet or so, and I didn’t want to hear any of it. Below that everything else would start to rot and dissolve. It would take years and years to happen but it would happen.

  I didn’t want to hear any of it.

  I looked around Ruth’s house. It wouldn’t be any great loss. When I was little I thought it was pretty big, but now that I was big I realized it was pretty little. Maybe that was what Ruth liked. It felt kind of shut in. I had everything she’d asked for, but I figured I should take one last look in the attic, where she always took shelter when the water rose. I pulled down the old wooden steps with the chain from the ceiling, and one of the treads dropped right off with a clatter. The whole place was already falling apart. The water would do its work in no time.

  The things in the attic were the kinds of things you put in an attic because they really need to be thrown away but you can’t bear to do it, or don’t want to take the time. There were two chairs with broken cane seats, a couple of dusty milk bottles, one with dried flowers in it, and what was either a cot without legs or a stretcher. The droppings on the floor made me wonder where all the bats were going to go once the water got high enough. I figured they’d had centuries of moving from place to place when we wrecked their homes.

  There was a dusty little window at one end of the attic loft, and underneath it were three suitcases, a matched set, straw-colored with a wine stripe woven in. The biggest one had a hole gnawed at one end, right by the tarnished brass corner guards. There was an old set of drapes I’d never seen before inside, and two issues of Life magazine. One had General Patton on the cover. The second suitcase was empty, but even without a hole you could see and smell that the mice had been living in it for a long time.

  The third was one of those vanity cases that had gone out of fashion. I remembered when I was a little girl, watching an old movie with Ruth and seeing someone with one of those furs around her neck that still had its little head as she carried one of those cases off a train. Ruth said it was just big enough to hold your perfume and cosmetics and a nightie and slippers. Even then it seemed pretty useless to me.

  This one had crumpled newspaper on top, and as I started to pull it out I felt something solid at the bottom. When the paper was pushed aside there was a sweet sweet smell and a cloud of dust motes that shone like tiny sequins in the pale light. I stared down for a long time at what was inside. I’d seen what was at the bottom of that case before, in the office of the obstetrician with whom I’d done my OB rotation, seen it in the ER one night, a woman from West Philadelphia who’d been out with friends and couldn’t get to her own hospital in time. But it still took a minute or two for my mind to wrap itself around what my eyes were seeing, maybe because I’d never seen anything human really mummified before, the skin dark and leathery like the baby birds we’d sometimes find in the brush weeks after they’d fallen from the nest. What hair there was had come loose with the newspaper, so that it lay like bits of cotton candy over the little blunted face. It was half wrapped in a piece of fabric, a heavy yellow sateen, an old napkin or a random swatch, that was spotted brown in places. Maybe slightly less than full term, maybe just a small baby, what we’d called a neonate when we’d pulled it out of the backseat of the cab the West Philadelphia woman gave birth in.

  I let the lid of the vanity case fall, some of the newspaper sticking out around its edge, and I sat down on the dirty wood floor of the attic. I was breathing hard and I put my head between my knees because I thought I might pass out. I started to open the case again, to make certain I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, but as soon as I got another whiff of that sweet smell I knew it for what it was. I sat like that for a long time, until I heard my mother downstairs.

  “I’m coming down,” I called.

  “My goodness, you are filthy,” she said, turning from the kitchen counter where she’d been fingering the marcasite brooch.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t tell me she has anything up there worth saving,” my mother said.

  I looked at her, trying to breathe more slowly.

  “You all right, Mary Margaret? You might have had a reaction to all that dust and who knows what else up there from the squirrels and bats and whatever.”

  “I think I’l
l take a shower,” I said.

  “Not here you won’t. There’s not a towel left in the place, and the pressure’s always been bad since your father put in that new pump for the well. Come over to the house. I’ve still got some things in the bathroom.”

  My hair was wet when I pulled into my mother’s driveway and handed her a cardboard box from the backseat. Inside was the trivet, the egg turner, the picture, the mirror, and the brooch, all the things Ruth had asked for. “Tell Ruth I got what she wanted,” I said. “Tell her everything else in the house is gone.”

  I have to hand it to them, it was smart, the way they handled drowning the valley, smarter than I would have thought they’d be when Mr. Bally was trolling the back roads and cruising the counter at the diner. They didn’t make any kind of big announcement, and they were vague with the newspapers about the timing. Then one night after dark they closed the locks on the dam and began to channel the water in, slowly at first, and then faster, harder, so that on the evening of the third day the people in town said they felt a faint tremor and thought Miller’s Valley was having its first earthquake. Which I guess was true, in a way. First and last.

  I was certain of exactly where the water went as it followed its path. The Miller farm had always been known to be the lowest place in the valley. The pasture went first, then our house, then the house where Ruth lived, then all the rest. I wasn’t there when it happened, and my mother never talked about it, and Donald’s grandfather talked about it so often that it just became one of those stories that’s like wallpaper, where you don’t even notice the pattern or the detail after a while. It seems like a long time ago, now. It is a long time ago, I guess, more than forty years. Or it’s just yesterday. That’s the way things are, at my age.

  Donald and I stayed in the city for a couple of years after I graduated from medical school. A nice woman who was a hand surgeon kept telling me I should follow her into the specialty, but she also kept talking about how terrible her male colleagues and her work hours were. The women in anesthesiology and pathology were always talking about how manageable their schedules were, but I liked my patients conscious and alive. I finally figured out that I wanted to be the old-fashioned kind of doctor who gives a baby his first round of shots and then sees him through chicken pox, strep, puberty, and maybe even parenthood himself. And that was exactly what I became.

  Donald’s grandfather had his share of health problems, in the way old men living alone tend to do, since they don’t live like humans, sure don’t take care of themselves. We wound up driving north to Miller’s Valley a lot to stock his refrigerator. I taped reheating instructions to the things I put in the freezer, but half the time after a month I’d see them still in there, with halos of freezer burn around the edges of the Tupperware.

  “I’ll feed him a couple of times a week,” my mother said.

  “I’ll tell you, Mimi, your mother is a saint,” Donald’s grandfather said.

  “You’d better get up here,” my mother said one evening when, luckily, I’d just finished seeing my patients at the community clinic and the kids at Donald’s school didn’t have a game.

  The heart attack Donald’s grandfather had had could have been worse, and I was standing in the hallway, looking over the chart, figuring out what kind of home care we would need, when the cardiologist told Donald that it was a shame he lived so far away. “The high school is looking for a basketball coach,” he said. “Your granddad told me you’re the man for the job.” I saw a look on Donald’s face, and I realized that there was something in him that I’d never seen and that I, of all people, should have recognized. Except for his grandfather, there was no one left but me who’d really known the boy whose grandmother would sit him down at the table with a big cold glass of milk and a big wedge of warm pie and a fork on a folded paper napkin, a boy who had only been made to feel as though he was at home in one place in his whole life.

  “You could take that coaching job,” I said in the car on the way back to the city. The way the sentence hung in the air, it was like someone else had said it. But I guess it was me.

  I like it here in Miller’s Valley. When I understood that Donald wanted to come back, that he’d felt rootless all his life except for this one small spot on earth, I wasn’t sure I would. It’s changed now. That development Ed worked on is one of the older parts of town. Those sad little saplings are big pin oaks, and there are other, bigger, showier clumps of houses farther out. Miller’s Valley is like the rest of America, a small feeble downtown with rings of suburbs, like the rings on a tree. Seventies, eighties, nineties, now.

  When we first moved up from Philadelphia we rented a place right in town, but after six months the real estate agent, who had been in Tommy’s class at the high school, told me she had a house she thought we might like, an old Victorian with three fireplaces and a big wraparound porch. I did like it. I’d liked it when Steven fixed it up and sold it to those two guys for a weekend house, although I didn’t tell Donald that. Steven left before we came back to Miller’s Valley. He’d made enough money to go somewhere in the big-money burbs farther south, but then I heard from Fred that he got overextended and lost most of what he’d made, then later on that he was climbing back up again. I’d bet on Steven bouncing back for sure, and then maybe going bust again, and so on and so forth. When we bought that old Victorian I had a cabinetmaker come in to build some bookshelves, and he had to redraw his plans because the one new wall had studs that were too far apart, two feet instead of eighteen inches. I wonder how much Steven saved on lumber with just that one small change. But that was him all over, cutting corners. I guess he was just cutting a corner that day I walked in on him and that girl, whoever she was. One day a couple of years ago I looked him up on the computer. There he was, Steven Sawicki, posed next to a convertible in the desert with a pretty blond woman in a red dress who could have been his daughter but was probably his wife, given the two little boys in polo shirts standing between them. She looked like she’d been built from spare parts in a plastic surgeon’s office, and Steven looked like maybe he’d had some run-ins with that same surgeon, too, his face as smooth and unmarked as a freshly plastered wall. He runs a business in Las Vegas that rents luxury cars to tourists. You can have a Lamborghini or a Bentley for the day and roar around town pretending you’re somebody you’re not. “Living la Vida Loca,” it says on his website. Sometimes things turn out exactly the way you imagine.

  He looked happy in that picture, contented with the woman, the children, and the car, and I bet he is. He was always a glass-half-full guy, Steven. He was never mean, or dark, or hard-hearted. He just wasn’t ever really real. I don’t regret him. I don’t regret any of that, except for that one bus trip into New York City, and I only think of that every once in a while, not as something I’m sorry I did but something I had to do and wish I hadn’t. He was getting me ready for something else, Steven was. I understand that now. Our daughter, Nora, had a boyfriend in high school, my Lord, you could practically feel the sex coming off the two of them, Donald was in a rage. But I knew what it was, and what was coming. Later, when she met Eric in college, and married him, I knew it would last.

  When our son, Ian, met and married Devon, I knew it wouldn’t. But I smiled in the pictures, and danced at the wedding, and later I listened to him call her nasty names but I wouldn’t let him do it in front of their son. I make sure my grandson knows I’m his grandmother even if his mother doesn’t like me much. Everything follows patterns I’ve seen before.

  We were happy here, Donald and I. He was one of the most beloved guys in town for years, whether the team won or lost. If he went to the hardware store to get duct tape it would be two hours before he got home, so many people stopped and talked to him, the kids he coached, their parents, his fellow teachers, the old-timers who wanted to reminisce about his grandparents. “There’s a man who’s found his niche,” my mother said one evening when we watched him moving slowly around a potluck supper at the firehouse.
r />   Most of my own friends are what the natives call the new people, meaning people who have been in Miller’s Valley less than a hundred years. Some of them are only here on weekends. They’re lawyers and bankers and doctors in the cities, Philadelphia and New York and even Washington. That’s how it is with Nora. I’m happy for that much, my daughter and her husband and their little boys here most weekends and holidays. Ian lives in Ohio now and he’s likely to get tenure, but still I keep hoping he’ll come back, too, and at least he uses Nora’s house for a month every summer while she and her family are at the beach and he’s got his son, and so so do I.

  All these years after she was my lab partner at the community college, Laura is still one of my closest friends, and her daughter is one of Nora’s. She opened a shop on Main Street that sells nice little things. It doesn’t do that well, but well enough. LaRhonda and I pretend to be friends when we see each other, but we’re not, not really. Her youngest son and Ian were in Little League together, although her boy was a couple of years older. Right after the fourth baby she got a divorce, but she let Fred continue to manage the McDonald’s. She seems to have given up on the Holy Roller routine, which made it easier for the two of us to get through a couple of innings in the bleachers on a hot day with small talk. Even at Little League she had on expensive sunglasses and a purse that looked like it was made out of unborn calves. One day we were sitting side by side and she said, without turning to look at me, “Who would have thought the two of us would wind up like this?”