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Marcy said, “It’s a flower. Blue’s named after a flower.”
A sturdy, pale blue-to-violet flower that had grown in the shade garden of her grandmother Kate Kucharski’s postage-stamp yard. That was the way Kate had described it to Blue, postage-stamp. Near that garden, Blue’s mother, the adolescent Nancy Kucharski, daydreamed away her summer evenings—until she started meeting boys who had cars. And, at some point, a particular boy whose name began with L. Taking advantage of her mother’s overindulgent parenting style, young Nancy had launched her dating life at fifteen and, except for two pauses to gestate and deliver two daughters, had never stopped since.
The story Blue had liked to hear when she was young began not with teenage Nancy but with baby Harmony Blue, being delivered to the little house by a stork, Kate always said, which Blue had imagined as a white-feathered version of Big Bird. But the little house was too small; soon they moved to a bigger place, an apartment with three bedrooms. The stork brought Melody there.
In the evenings, when her mother was out and Melody was already asleep, Blue had urged her grandmother to tell her again about the home she’d been brought to as a newborn. When Grandma Kate described the yard of that house that way, postage-stamp, young Blue imagined a million little squares pasted down where grass would have been. A broad, level, gymnasium-sized spread of stamps, some of them as exotic as the ones that appeared on her mother’s airmail envelopes. The ones from “guys” who wrote from wherever the US Army had assigned them after something called a draft. Germany. The Philippines. Vietnam. Was one of those guys her father? Was the L from Cambodia the L tattooed on her mother’s hip? Did that explain the absence of a man in their home, when almost all the homes around them had mothers and fathers, not grandmothers?
“Don’t you worry about that father stuff,” her mother told her once, face close to the mirror while she darkened the mole on her right cheekbone, a mole matching the one that had just appeared on Blue’s five-year-old cheek. The L was covered that night by brown polyester bell-bottoms and a cheap gold-colored hip chain that draped low. Her mother rumpled her hair. “You two are my precious little gifts from God.”
She’d tried to believe that being a stork-delivered package straight from heaven made her superior to other children, children whose fifties-era ranch homes looked just like the one they moved into next, but whose families inside those homes did not. Those were common children. Normal children, who had normal families. What she knew, though, was that they were what she would never be, never have. What use in hoping otherwise? What use in puzzling over a black tattoo that was covered up almost all the time?
She’d made a valiant effort to be like her mother, like Mel. Nothing fazed them. Mel’s first tattoo, done when Mel was fourteen, was a wreath of words around her upper arm that read “Frankie Say Relax.” Blue had been as impressed with the act as with the sentiment. If Mel could be so bold, why couldn’t she? At the library, she paged through books with tattoo designs and slogans. She drew one on her ankle in permanent marker, a vine with heart-shaped leaves, then hid her work beneath her sock until the ink wore off. The truth of it was that when she was alone she sometimes still hummed, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” and waited for all things to right themselves, the way they surely would.
Voices from up near the cockpit told Blue that Peter and his wife had arrived. “Are we on schedule?” she heard him asking. She imagined him holding a stopwatch and waiting to tell the pilot, Go! If she was lucky he would stay up there; she had no desire to hear him fret aloud about tears and ratings and ridicule.
The flight attendant brought coffee in stoneware mugs, delivered from a cloth-draped tray. “What else can I bring you? We’ll be wheels up in about five minutes.”
“I don’t know,” Marcy said. “Blue, do you want anything?”
“No.” Or nothing that could be stocked on board, at any rate.
Janelle and Peter joined them in the cabin. “Did Marcy tell you?” Peter said. His round face was flushed and he was rubbing the top of his balding head, his habit when stressed. “YouTube, Perez—we cut it from our time-delayed broadcasts but it doesn’t matter, it’s everywhere. We’re telling everyone that your dog died yesterday morning, okay?”
“I don’t even have a dog.”
Peter looked at her like she was simple. “Work with me here, Blue.”
After cruising over what from Blue’s east-facing view looked like an infinite expanse of ocean, the Gulfstream bumped through clear but turbulent air and landed at the Key West airport, three hours ahead of when the crew would arrive via commercial airline. That airline provided TBRS with free freight and free airfare for the equipment and its users, for which Blue would thank them at the beginning and end of each broadcast in the week to come. That was how it was done. Endless back-scratching—so much that sometimes her back was raw from it.
“Jesus, there’s nothing to this place,” Stephen said, looking out his window as the jet taxied toward the terminal.
Blue leaned to look and saw a long stretch of shell-pink building that could pass for a warehouse except for the presence of two small jets and a gaggle of single-engine aircraft tethered close by. She said, “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know, something like Honolulu I guess. Something that doesn’t look like we’re going to have to unload our own gear.”
“God forbid,” Peter said from his seat behind Blue. “We wouldn’t want to overwork our guests.”
Blue told Stephen, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Yes, the airport was small, nondescript, but what was not to like? A thousand feet past the terminal was the Atlantic Ocean, sea green and gleaming, brilliant in the midday sun. Plus, there were palm trees; she’d always thought palm trees worth any amount of trouble, even unloading one’s own bags from the belly of a multimillion-dollar chartered jet.
A contingent of Key West folk was waiting to greet Blue as she descended the plane’s steps into the midday heat. A stout man of about forty came forward, his flowered shirt’s buttons straining such that it was obvious he’d bought the shirt fifteen or more pounds ago. Several photographers circled them, jockeying for position.
The mayor extended his hand. “Welcome to the Conch Republic!”
“Thank you, Mr Mayor,” Blue said, remembering his face from her prep file, but forgetting his name. It wouldn’t matter, Mr Mayor always worked—or Ms Mayor, as the case sometimes was. “It’s so thoughtful of you to take time out from your full schedule to meet our plane.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble. I speak for everyone here when I say we are delighted to have The Blue Reynolds Show in town. Whatever I can do to make your stay more enjoyable, you just let me know. Anything. I mean it. That’s a promise.”
Blue smiled her public smile, clearly delighting the man, who beamed in return. She said, “Yes, I will, I’ll let you know.”
Outside the terminal a few minutes later, Peter stood at the curb, where a battered, empty Toyota was idling in spite of the No Parking signs. He said, “Do you think the mayor could find out where our limo might be?”
Marcy took out her phone. “I’m sure I stored the number in here … they must just be running late …”
Blue stepped away from the group and leaned against a pole to wait, letting the heat and the salt smell of the air be her real welcome. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and savored the illusion of invisibility she’d once believed in when she was small.
There’d been a lot of waiting during her childhood, mostly waiting for her mother’s return—from a date, from a new-town-scouting trip, from a dead-end job. Melody, passive and untroubled, watched a lot of TV, entertained by Mork and Mindy or Remington Steel or Moonlighting. Blue, anxious, distractible, had better luck with books.
Without the interruption of commercials or the finite images of someone else’s interpretation of a story, she could more easily fit herself into the romance or drama unfolding inside a book’s cover. She filled empty hours, when her homework was done and the paper plates from dinner were cleared from the coffee table, with stories of clever women who won over reluctant bachelors. Women who defied parents or society in order to follow their hearts—inevitably to romance, and often to fame and wealth. Or women who traveled to exotic places in astonishing jets and were greeted by mayors who were glad to do their bidding. What a glamorous life, and so far removed from reality that she never thought to jump the chasm between her vicarious thrills and the methodical plotting that living such a life would require.
No, what she’d planned for was far more predictable and achievable: when she and Melody were both out of school, she would use what she earned working for Lynn Forrester to put herself through college and become a high-school English teacher. She’d assign her students the books she was growing to love under Mr Forrester’s guidance: books about Mark Twain’s river life, Willa Cather’s prairies, and of course the battlefields and savannahs and islands that featured in Hemingway’s troubled imagination. At eighteen she hardly understood the causes of Hemingway’s torments, but she had an instinctive feel for the tragedies in his stories. What is tragedy, though, at eighteen? It’s romance, and it was romance that had been fixed in her mind that fall after she met Mitch. Romance, and a steadfast determination that, whatever she did, she would not allow her life to turn out like her mother’s.
That, at least, had gone as planned.
Chapter Five (#u16723e4b-046e-5242-b128-b579a8e9c660)
Mitch sat on a bar stool in his parents’ kitchen, looking at the shopping list his mother, Lynn, had just handed him.
5lb potatoes
5lb shrimp
8 lobster tails
Lemons
Romaine
Tomatoes, onion
Cornmeal
Butter (unsalted)
2 Key Lime pies—Blond Giraffe
“A person could gain ten pounds just reading this list,” he said. “There are only four of us, you know.”
His mother, who’d begun rearranging things in her overstocked freezer, leaned around the door to squint at him critically. “I think you’d better stop at two or three pounds. You’re officially over fifty now, and you know, the older you are, the stickier those pounds get.”
“Tough to stop when I’m around enablers like you,” he said. “You want me to buy two pies and also show restraint?”
“We need two,” she said, going back to her task. “While you all were in the pool, I invited the girls from next door.”
“The girls” would be the new neighbors, Kira and Lori, whom he’d met soon after arriving this morning and who had wasted no time in telling him how they’d met each other (at Fantasy Fest) and, thanks to some very savvy stock sales on Lori’s part, could now afford to call the place home. They’d also wanted to know everything about him. The things his mother hadn’t already told them, that is. Things she said she didn’t know. For example, how serious were he and his traveling companion, Brenda? She looked like such a nice woman, they said, from the glimpse they’d gotten through the flowering hedgerow. Was she really a professor of Victorian literature? “Indeed,” he’d answered. “And she just published a wonderful book on Lewis Carroll—Duke University Press, you should pick it up.” They’d looked at one another with suppressed laughter in their eyes. “No, seriously,” he’d said, “it’s really good.”
“I was wondering,” he asked his mother, “why did you tell them about Brenda?”
“Oh, you know how it goes. We hang out in the kitchen, we make a pot of tea, we chat, things come up. They were curious. We’re all curious.”
“Hmm.” In fact Mitch, too, was curious. He’d known Brenda for sixteen years, but there was no telling what would happen now that they’d gone ahead and dipped their toes into more intimate waters. Well, a little more than their toes, which was going to take some getting used to. The only reason he’d told his parents was as forewarning that Brenda, who they’d known was joining him for this visit, would now also be sharing his room.
Not once, while she was his best friend’s wife, had he coveted Craig’s nights with her. Not once had he mentally undressed her, let alone imagined more—though he had certainly noticed her curves and the appealing play of freckles on her skin, the times he’d seen her in a swimsuit. Taken more notice after he and Angie split, true. He’d noticed every attractive woman at that time, the start of a six-year stretch of single life dotted with oases of relationships with women who were more reluctant to get involved than to get busy, as the saying went. Younger women, mostly, but not all. Call him old fashioned, but he liked to truly know a woman before they took their clothes off together.
He was proud of having made only one embarrassing, clichéd midlife mistake: last year, with a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who was also his teaching assistant; an aspiring writer (they were all aspiring writers) whose quiet demeanor belied the specific and vivid tell-alls she posted on her web log, or rather blog—he was still playing catch-up on the evolving vocabulary. Her good judgment was lacking, true, but at least her writing was skillful: she’d written a post that said he was “sufficiently endowed, and capable with all the tools in his toolkit,” which, revealing as it was, was still nice to know, and he was also “tender, really; a credit to his gender.” His colleagues had enough ammunition with which to ridicule him, they didn’t need purple prose too.
Brenda had not, however, been any kind of prospect until she was suddenly widowed. Their new closeness might owe more to shared grief than shared passion … except, after last night it was clear the passion wasn’t lacking, not in the least. Was she just using him as a stand-in? Was she going to wake up tomorrow morning, or maybe Sunday, or next week, and realize he was only superficially like Craig?
Fine time to worry about that now.
He scooted his stool back and stood up. “So then,” he said, folding the list and putting it into his pants pocket, “the girls are joining us for dinner. Anyone else?”
“No—oh, except they’re bringing the baby, so you better pick up some Cheerios, and some apple juice, too.”
He smiled. “Mom, I think they’ll have the baby’s needs covered.”
“Probably, but you never know.”
Mitch’s father came into the kitchen, having changed his swim trunks for plaid shorts in red tones, which he’d paired with a blue tropical-print shirt. His crew-cut white hair was spiked and shining with hair gel. “What don’t you know?”
“More like what you don’t know,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “About matching.”
“And what you don’t know, about style and attitude. Let’s hit the road.”
Mitch looked down at his white golf shirt. It was boring. “Soon as Brenda’s changed,” he said.
His father sat down at the table. “Right, right, Brenda. How about you two?”
Mitch shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes.”
“I understand that,” his father said. “I hear it from the damn doctor all the time.” About the progress he was making, and was expected to make, recovering from his stroke. He was doing well, tackling the challenges of speech and motor control with determination born of stubbornness.
So yes, his father was doing well; the remaining challenge was in how they were all supposed to deal with what the neurologist could only describe as “crossed wires”—the highly technical term used to explain how it was that his father now and then slipped into another man’s persona. And not just any man: astronaut Ken Mattingly, whom his father had known as a teenager while living in Miami in the 1950s and whose career he’d followed ever since. The delusions were disconcerting, to say the least. One minute his father was Daniel Forrester and then, with no outward sign, he was the astronaut, only with Daniel’s memories conflated with what Daniel must imagine Mattingly’s life had been. Mitch found it maddening—he never knew who he’d get when he called—but his mother was actually entertained. “Gives me a little variety,” she’d said.
“Listen,” she said now, closing the freezer. “Get the lobster and shrimp from Rusty’s, over on Stock Island—Daniel, you can direct him—and you know what? Forget buying cornmeal, just bring home some of their conch fritters.”
She stood with her hands on her generous hips, surveying the kitchen as though looking for something that had just snuck away under her nose—the most iconic image he had of her, dating as far back as he could remember. Then she said, “Oh! Dad told you about The Blue Reynolds Show being in town this coming week, yes?”
Did his pulse jump a little with those words? If Blue Reynolds remembered him at all, it would be for things he wished he could take back. He said, “No; he must have forgotten.”
“I did forget, damn it!” His father slapped the tabletop. “But how about that, eh Mitch? The one you let get away.”
Brenda’s footsteps were audible as she came down the hall from the guest room they were sharing. The same one he’d shared with Angie. It didn’t matter that he was now fifty-one and twice divorced, he still felt awkward about rooming with a new girlfriend in his parents’ home. That they had known Brenda for a decade and a half was no help; they knew her as Craig’s wife, now widow. She was his colleague who taught works by the Brontës and Dickens and Carroll, not a woman he slept with. Did any of them feel as weird about this as he did?
Brenda stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. Her short auburn hair was dry, and she was wearing a summery black knit dress with a neckline that plunged a little farther than was usual for her. “Who did you let get away?”
“Blue Reynolds,” he said, attempting to sound casual, as though he also had Kate Capshaw and Kim Basinger in his past. “Only she wasn’t Blue Reynolds back then.”
“You dated Blue Reynolds? When?” She couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d told her he had moonlighted as a porn star. So much for sounding casual.
He repositioned a mango atop a bowl filled with fruit. “It’s not a big deal—and it was a long time ago.”
“Twenty-two years,” his father said.
Mitch was stunned. “You can remember that?”
His father shrugged.
“Blue Reynolds, really?” Brenda said as Mitch took his parents’ car keys off the hook near the counter. “You never told us—or me, at any rate, that you knew her.”
“It never came up.” Even Craig hadn’t known. “Shall we?” he asked, holding up the keys.
He hoped Brenda didn’t think he’d hidden the information deliberately. In truth, he’d never thought his short relationship with Harmony Blue, as she was called back then, was worth divulging to anyone, especially since she’d become Blue. What point was there? Sure, it would make great cocktail party fodder, but he’d be barraged with questions he either didn’t enjoy answering or had no answers for.
They had been young—or she had; too young for the complexities of his life at the time. He should’ve known better than to keep dropping by his mother’s office over that first winter, ostensibly to lend a hand with some rearranging and remodeling of the office space. There was something innately compelling about Blue, though, even back then. She was somehow both tough and vulnerable, somehow experienced and innocent, and lord, she was pretty. Their nine-year age difference was not so huge. He was not Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, for God’s sake.
If he’d been teaching during the summer session, that year after she finished high school, or if Renee, his first wife, hadn’t hauled Julian off to Maine for two months, he’d have been too busy to notice her. As it was, he’d gone from the intensity—or more like the insanity—of juggling a teaching load of three classes, his research, Renee’s demands and fits of jealousy, and erratic fatherhood, to the yawning expanse of days as wide open as the rolling farmland outside the suburbs where he sometimes rode his bike. Harmony Blue Kucharski, with her love of reading and Scrabble, had been a welcome distraction that summer. She was the subject of pleasant daydreams during the little down time he had in fall. By winter, he’d convinced himself that she was old enough to become something more.
He didn’t want to discuss, with Brenda or anyone, how he’d led Blue on—with respectable intentions, but still—and then broken her heart. And he didn’t want to discuss the domestic drama that led him to break things off. He didn’t want to talk about how he’d waited until his U-haul was packed and he was leaving for North Carolina before he stopped by Blue’s house, to apologize for being so harsh with her at the end. His coldness had been an act, to discourage any hope that they would get back together. He felt awful when her mother reported that she was gone. “She needed her own space,” Nancy Kucharski had said, shrugging. He knew this was right; she did need her own space, some separation from everyone who had relied on her too much.
So he’d moved on. That’s what you do when you’re powerless to fix what’s broken. You bury yourself in your work. You focus on your goals. You eventually find another woman who you think is right for you, and try not to be conflicted when the one you let get away shows up several years later on your living-room television every afternoon, transfixing your second wife—along with almost every other life-form free at that hour. You move on, because if you don’t, you end up like Renee—tormented, pessimistic, alone. You end up with no career, dependent on others to give you your worth.
He’d had things to do with his life then, and still did. A wise man would right now put aside all thoughts of that girl of the past in favor of thinking about the woman of his present. With any luck, they’d be able to get his Lions business accomplished without further mention of that past. The island might be small, but a celebrity and her entourage should be enough of a spectacle that he could see them coming and avoid them entirely.
Chapter Six (#u16723e4b-046e-5242-b128-b579a8e9c660)
Julian Forrester’s BlackBerry buzzed in his pocket, reminding him he was due to phone his grandparents, but he ignored it and kept his attention on his two good friends who stood, hands joined, at the center of what was ordinarily the mess tent. Through his camera’s viewer, he studied the pair. They looked something alike: both had short black hair, both were lean, both had skin darkened by a sun that seemed to shine more harshly on the kinds of people they served—except on this evening, when that same sun, heavy now on the western horizon, was lighting their faces so beautifully it was as if their marriage really was being sanctioned by God. They gazed at each other as though they shared a delightful secret. He pressed the shutter release, capturing their look if not their thoughts.
“Wow,” Brandy whispered, close to Julian’s ear. Her warm breath gave him a shiver. “They are so in love.”
Love. He’d seen the look on other faces: mothers in Darfur whose children were finally getting a nutritious meal; fathers, as they watched a child finally grown strong enough to kick a soccer ball across a dusty yard … That made sense to him. What Alec and Noor had, though, was for the most part beyond him. If not for his grandparents’ enduring, happy marriage of fifty-four years, he wasn’t sure he would buy it at all.
A minister, his camouflage uniform somehow neatly pressed despite the heat, spoke sincerely about the obligations Julian’s friends now faced. Trust, intimacy, and devotion, every day, forever. What an incredible ideal. Who could meet such obligations, especially these days? He approved of trying—ask anyone, they’d say he was willing to give most things a try. Fried caterpillar. Lamb’s brains. Cliff diving in Croatia in the dark. Marriage, however, was almost certain to have a much worse and more enduring outcome than any of those stunts; he would leave that to the truly courageous.
He focused the Nikon, pressed the button as Alec pulled Noor close, pressed it as Noor tipped her face upward, pressed it as Alec’s lips met hers, pressed it as the kiss became two wide smiles and the couple turned to face the crowd.
The forty or so guests inside the tent applauded. It was done. Noor and Alec were now a single entity where before they had just been a great guy and a smart woman who did the kind of stuff he did: ramble around the planet trying, in their meager ways, to undo the undoable. What little they did manage to accomplish—provide water and food and medical care and sanitation, give the people a presence, a face, a voice—had to be enough.
Today his efforts were being made in Afghanistan, just as they had been for the last seven months, while tent camps for refugees continued to multiply and spread across the south desert like a plague. Before here he’d worked in Bangladesh, Malawi, Croatia, Darfur, Mississippi, Indonesia, Bosnia … all beginning with Chechnya in early 1995. His history was a blur of turbulent flights and iffy food, desperate children and chaos. He felt like thirty-two going on sixty.
His collection of photos and video and the documentaries he’d shot all preserved the stories that had begun to merge in his memory. One tent camp after another. One starving family, one mother dead of AIDS, one village torched, one empty-eyed girl working as a sex slave, one boy with hands lost to a machete—his memory was overflowing with the atrocities he’d documented with a succession of cameras that had, so far, seemed to protect him from any serious harm. He’d gone to sleep hungry countless nights. He’d been shot at, he’d been cursed—literally, if not effectively. In Bosnia three years back, a disgruntled Mafia type had cut off his left hand’s little finger and threatened his thumb if he didn’t leave Sarajevo that day (which, as soon as he was bandaged, he did). That was the worst of it for him, though. He was lucky.
Interspersed with all that were moments like the ones now unfolding in this tent. Weddings, and births; lives begun and lives saved; hope restored. Events like these kept him going. A person could be only so skeptical when they’d witnessed the expressions he was seeing on his friends’ faces right now. He didn’t, however, hold out much hope of wearing such expressions himself. Just before he’d packed out from his previous assignment, in Kabul, his now-ex-girlfriend announced that he was “congenitally incapable of permanent connection.” He hadn’t told her much about his parents, so she had no idea how accurate a statement that was.
The wind kicked up, flapping the tent’s walls and roof, blowing in the fine grit no one much noticed anymore, though it was murder on his camera equipment. He spent nearly as much time huddled over his stuff, cleaning it with tiny brushes and ear swabs, as he did putting it to use.
Alec walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Can you believe she actually went through with the wedding?”
“Hell, if I was a woman, I would’ve locked you down myself a long time ago—so yeah, I can believe it.”
