Blue Diary (5 page)

When she came home later, Rosarie had to climb in through the bathroom window, and in the process, she slipped in the shower and broke a bottle of her favorite bath oils. She came marching into my room, smelling like vanilla and steaming mad. She pulled my hair and called me a traitor but I didn't care. As far as I was concerned, she could pull most of my hair right out of my head and I wouldn't be the worse for wear. I'd probably look better bald than I did ordinarily.

“You're going to pay for what you did,” Rosarie told me, and I was afraid she was right.

That next week I had a terrible feeling in my stomach. I wouldn't go over to Collie's. kept telling him I had headaches, the way my sister did, and I kept a cold compress on my forehead whenever he came over to watch TV Instead of paying attention to any of the programs we tuned in to, I was mostly keeping an eye on him, thinking about how good he was and how hed never hurt anyone and how he always expected the best from everyone. After a while. seeing his father's picture on TV felt like a dream, and climbing out my sister's window to call in and report him seemed as though it had happened to someone else entirely. I was starting to forget the whole thing. It's amazing what you can block out when you really try. Although some things stay with you no matter what; they affect everything that you do. My mother, for instance, no longer parked her car in the garage. She wouldn't even open the door. Squirrels could be nesting there, the roof could be falling in, and she still wouldn't go near. Some things you carry around inside you as though they were part of your blood and bones, and when that happens, there's nothing you can do to forget.

One day we got off the school bus on the corner of Maple and Sherwood Streets and I knew something terrible had happened, only this time to Collie. It was a hot day. and Collie and I had done our homework on the bus so we'd be free. It was the last week of school, and the day was as hot as August, with the sky a shimmering blue and the leaves turning dusty the way they did in the heat and so many birds singing you could hardly hear yourself think over their calling. knew something was wrong because the Fords' front door was open, and they never went into the house that way. Someone had left so quickly, he hadn't even bothered to close the screen.

When we went inside, it felt like one of those houses you see in films of disasters, how everything is always left exactly as it was at the moment when catastrophe struck. There was a bowl of strawberries on the counter, leaking red juice onto the wood, and a coffee cup left in pieces on the floor. Above the sink, the clock was ticking, too slowly, it seemed, for the time to be right. Through the window, I could see Mrs. Gage's cherry tree, sprinkled with the last of its snowy white flowers. Collie went through the house, room after room, calling for his mother, but anyone could tell that no one was home.

“This is weird,” Collie said when he came back to the kitchen. His face was so good it made you want to cry “She always leaves a note when she goes somewhere.”

Someone else might have called Collie a momma's boy, but I didn't make judgments like that. How could I when I had been such a daddy's girl? I would have been nobody's favorite if not for my father, who cared about people's true selves, not what they looked like or how mean they might appear to be.

“Well, she must have been in a hurry.” My heart was beating like crazy. I figured this was the way a criminal's heart must start pounding whenever he told a lie or acted like he hadn't been responsible for something he knew damn well he'd done.

I suggested we go to my house, where my grandmother probably had her soap opera tuned in. Whenever we watched it with her, my grandmother would tell us what was going on in the story, which she'd been tuning in to for more than twenty-five years, and her narration was always much more interesting than what was actually happening. We had fun trying to figure things out before the truth was revealed—who would run away together, who'd come down with amnesia, who would find true and undying love but that day I felt sick just looking at the TV I wished I hadn't been watching that night when Ethan Ford's picture came on. I wished I lived in another town, someplace where nobody knew me and I didn't have any obligations to do the right thing.

Collie's mother didn't come for him until it was very nearly dark. She knocked on the door too hard, the way people do when they're in a hurry, or frightened, or when their world has just fallen apart. When my grandmother went to let her in, she took one look at Collie's mother and said, “Jorie, what happened?”

Jorie Ford stood in our doorway and you could see how wrong something was from the expression on her face. Her hair was knotted and her clothes were wrinkled, and when my grandmother gave her a little hug, Mrs Ford started crying right there, half in and half out of our house. It happened fast, and then she pulled herself together just as fast. She was still upset, but she wouldn't let any tears fall. Not in front of us. Not with Collie there.

“What is it?” my grandmother asked.

Collie and I were sitting on the floor in the front room, sharing a bag of potato chips my grandmother had told us would ruin our dinners. Right before his mother knocked on the door, Collie had turned to tell me something; his face was animated and it seemed as if he was going to say something funny, he always had dozens of jokes, but he never did speak. When he saw that his mother had arrived, Collie got up and went to her. As soon as she put her arms around him, Jorie Ford started crying again. You could tell she didn't want to, she was trying with all her might to hold it back, but sometimes it's impossible to do that. I know that from personal experience. You have to turn yourself cold as ice in order to stop yourself, and then if anything falls from your eyes it will only be blue ice crystals, hard and unbreakable as stone.

I could tell from the way my grandmother was watching Collie and his mother that she was thinking about how quickly things could turn from good to bad. I would bet she was reminding herself of how precious every peaceful moment was, which is what she told me after my father died. She said that we had to savor whatever time we had in this world and believe in the ultimate goodness of the universe, but I had never been much of a believer. If anything, I believed that things got worse before they got better. I believed good people suffered. I believed I had lost my father, and I didn't really care much about the goodness of the universe without him in it. never said any of this to my grandmother. I would never do that. People who have faith were so lucky, you didn't want to ruin anything for them. You didn't want to plant doubt where there was none. You had to treat such individuals tenderly and hope that some of whatever they were feeling rubs off on you.

My grandmother asked if there was anything she might do to help. Considering the fact that Jorie had brought dinner over for us for two weeks straight last summer, there had to be something we could do to return the favor, for this was clearly her time of need. But Jorie shook her head; there was nothing. The sky was turning murky by then, a marine blue dipping into darkness around the edges. You could smell cut grass and heat even now. Tomorrow, the town pool would be opening, and Collie and I had plans to get there early, but I could tell we wouldn't be going. There would be races and diving contests, the way there always were on opening day, but it wouldn't matter. Not to us.

“Don't listen to anything anyone tells you,” Jorie told Collie. She sounded fierce when she spoke to him. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Collie said.

Some other boy might have started asking questions, but Collie wasn't like that. He had a serious look on his face, and you could tell he'd do exactly as his mother said.

“Everything will be fine,” Jorie assured him.

But from the way she was standing in the doorway in that deepening night, it was clear she wasn't sure of that herself; she was just trying to sound like she was.

“At least come in for dinner.” My grandmother reached to draw Collie's mother inside our house, but Jorie took a step back. She didn't want to be touched and she didn't want anyone to be kind to her. She was filling herself up with ice, and when a person starts doing that any human contact can be dangerous.

“We just want to be alone.” Jorie's voice was ragged and her mouth looked sour. She was usually so nice to everyone. She brought my grandmother vegetables from her garden, armfuls of lettuce and snap peas so fresh Rosarie and I argued over who would get the larger portion. As soon as these rude words were out of Jorie's mouth, you could tell she was sorry She stepped forward and put her arms around my grandmother. “I didn't mean that. I'm not myself,” she told us both, and we nodded as if we understood, then watched as she and Collie walked across Mrs. Gage's lawn to their own house, where all the lights were off and all the windows had been left open.

My grandmother and I went out to the porch and stood there in the dark. I could tell we both felt like crying, but for different reasons. One by one the lights turned on in Collie's house, but I already knew: his father wasn't there. They'd come to take him away while we were at school, and maybe that was for the best. Maybe it's better not to be at home when such things happened. Close your eyes and count to ten whenever sorrow strikes you, that's what my grandmother recommends, although in my opinion even ten thousand isn't a high enough number. But tonight, my grandmother didn't offer any advice. She only circled her arm around me, and she didn't even tell me not to be afraid of the dark the way she usually does. We could hear the leaves on the mimosa trees moving. We could hear the caterpillars that would turn into white moths before long. Soon enough it would be exactly one year since my father died. The night before it happened, he stood underneath this same sky and told me he would always love me, no matter what. He said that if somebody really loved you, you would always hear his voice somewhere inside your own head.

“That poor woman,” my grandmother said of Jorie.

We couldn't see them anymore. Their door was closed, and it was just as if they'd never even been standing here with us and we'd been alone the whole time. It's like that when people leave you behind. You get to wondering if you ever had them in the first place. Still, it was a beautiful night, and my grandmother went out to the lawn that had been in bad shape since last summer, uncared for and littered with weeds. She picked a pod of milkweed and blew on it until the seeds lifted into the sky. She has always told me that you could blow your bad fortune away by doing so, and as I watched the milkweed drift upward into the sky. I wished I still believed in things like that. I wished I could fly our troubles away.

CHARLOTTE KITE SMITH, STOOD UP by her best friend and her soon-to-be-ex-husband on the very same day, is a smart woman, one who is well aware that there are some losses an individual simply has to accept. She believes that bad fortune is a wake-up call and that most people would do well to have their eyes open. Those who were dreamers often wound up as sleepwalkers and Charlotte is not about to become one of them. She's a practical woman who's learned not only to curb her resentments, but has managed to temper her hopes for the future as well. Today during her physical, for instance, she wasn't surprised when her doctor suggested a biopsy for the lump that she'd found. Nothing has worked out quite as she'd expected: why should her body be any different? She had thought at this stage she'd have half a dozen children, when in fact she's living in her house on Hilltop alone. Through the years she's learned not to assume that she's already had her portion of bad luck, even though she lost her parents when she was barely out of high school, one following the other in a matter of months, and has recently gone through a prolonged and complex breakup with Jay. In Charlotte's opinion, suffering is not the border on the outer edges of one's life, but the cloth itself, elegantly stitched on one side, crude and miserably sewn on the other.

But who can dwell on such disappointments? Certainly not Charlotte Kite. It's a beautiful evening, far too rare and fine for her to waste feeling sorry for herself When she looks out the window of her house high on Hilltop, she can see the whole town before her, a grid of deep blue shadows and sparkling light, as though diamonds have been thrown down in the hillocks beyond the trees. Tonight, Charlotte runs a cool bath to wash away the scent of chocolate and rum that clings to her from the day's baking. She's used to spending her evenings alone, but perhaps her loneliness is the reason she continues to work at the bakery so faithfully, though it is now one in a chain of many and can handily be run by accountants and bakers who know the recipes and the business far better than Charlotte herself does. Still, she does not wish to pass her days alone as well as her nights. It's a big house she lives in, built at the turn of the century as a wedding present for Ella Monroe, whose father founded the town and left a ring of apple trees a mile wide around the old abandoned house where he once lived, smack at the end of King George's Road, a location that was wild frontier at the time, when it wasn't unusual for bears to eat their fill from the orchards and bobcats to claw at the bark of the saplings.

Charlotte's house is so large there are rooms she hasn't been in for months; the entire third floor, which might have been perfect for a nursery, has been closed down and even the cleaning service won't venture up there. Too many spiders, they complain. Not enough light.

So many of the girls Charlotte grew up with had been jealous when she'd married Jay Smith at the age of nineteen, the year after her parents died, but those girls are now grown women who consider themselves lucky that Jay passed them by. He seems to be a man who's constitutionally incapable of fidelity; in the interest of a peaceful parting, Charlotte has decided that in his case adultery should not be viewed as a lack of character, but rather as a hereditary defect, clearly evident in Jay's father, who, at the age of seventy-eight, is still chasing the ladies, marrying for the fourth time only weeks before he entered a nursing home.