Something Blue

by Ann Hood

  She calls him back right away. She curls her toes in her sneakers, waiting for him to answer. She can feel sand in her shoes from the beach. Her skin is still tight from the sun.

  When Jasper hears that it’s her, she can feel his smile through the telephone wires.

  “Where were you?” he asks her.

  She doesn’t want to tell him about Nathaniel so she says, “At the beach.”

  “The beach. Great.”

  It wasn’t great, but she doesn’t correct him.

  “I wanted to see you before I leave,” Jasper is saying.

  Her hands and skin suddenly grow cold. “Leave?” she says.

  “I got a part in the road show of Singin’ in the Rain,” he says. Then he adds quickly, “Not the Gene Kelly part.”

  Lucy sinks onto her couch. “You did?’ she says. “Really?”

  “Chicago, Houston, Denver. The works.”

  “Here we are,” Lucy says. “Right where we wanted to be.”

  “Yeah,” Jasper says.

  He tells her he has rehearsals all week. Then he leaves on Monday for six months. “I want to see you first, though,” he says.

  They don’t set up anything specific. He just says he’ll call her. Lucy sits alone after they hang up and thinks about her life, this city, without Jasper in it at all. Jasper will be dancing his way across the country. Julia will be in Los Angeles. Even Katherine is gone. Lucy hugs herself tight, bends her toes and grips the tiny pebbles in her sneaker with them. She sits like that until, finally, she moves to her drawing table and begins to create a family for My Dolly.

  Lucy and Julia stand on the corner in front of Lucy’s apartment. Any minute now, On will arrive in the Ryder truck. He will pull up here beside them and Julia will get in and drive away. Lucy keeps watching the street, wishing he wouldn’t appear at all.

  “I’ll be back,” Julia is saying. “Listen, can you see me at Zuma Beach? Let’s face it. I’m a New Yorker. I’ll die out there with all that sunshine and stuff.”

  “They don’t have delis like we do,” Lucy tells her. “They don’t wear black.”

  “Pastels,” Julia says. “Can you imagine?”

  “You don’t look good in pastels,” Lucy says.

  “Or designer jogging suits,” Julia says. She is watching the street too.

  Julia has dyed her hair bright red. There are too many blondes out there, she told Lucy. Fake ones and real ones. Who needs to be just another pretty face? Her hair is the fakest red Lucy has ever seen. Stop sign red. Candy apple red. It makes Lucy want to cry.

  “You’ll make new friends out there,” Lucy says softly.

  “No,” Julia tells her. “I won’t talk to anybody. Except On. And him only sometimes.”

  “Promise?” Lucy asks her. And then she is crying. She is looking at her friend’s bright red hair and she is crying hard.

  They are both crying and hugging and don’t see the Ryder truck as it comes down Broadway with On in the driver’s seat. When he pulls up beside them, they finally let go.

  “They don’t have newsstands out there,” Lucy says.

  “Stop saying out there,” Julia says, trying to laugh. “I feel like I’m going to outer space or something.”

  “You are,” Lucy tells her. “What else would you call a place where everyone is blond and wears pastel jogging suits?”

  “Home,” Julia says. Her eyeliner and mascara have left rivers of black running down her cheeks. “Home.”

  Lucy nods.

  “I’ll see you Oscar night when you get your Academy Award for best screenplay,” Lucy shouts to her as Julia climbs in the truck.

  They are starting to drive away. Julia leans way out of the window. “See me?” she calls. “You’ll be my date.” They are almost at Houston Street. Her voice is faint. “Buy a black dress,” she calls.

  Lucy waves. She waves and waves until the truck is gone, completely out of sight.

  Lucy agrees to work one last Whirlwind Weekend as a favor to the company. “You were one of our best guides,” they tell her. It’s a weekend to London and she will have two trainees with her, Lisbeth and Marnie. They are eager and fresh-faced. They look like they do soap commercials, Lucy thinks when she meets them at the airport.

  Lisbeth says, “I bought both of my nieces a My Dolly last Christmas. They love them.”

  It still surprises Lucy when she hears things like this. She no longer watches toy stores stock their shelves with My Dolly. Now she concentrates on making a wardrobe and a family for it. She designs long dresses that look like sacks, with puffy sleeves and Peter Pan collars. They are made of faded cotton, worn corduroy.

  “Everyone wants to love that poor little doll,” Lisbeth is saying.

  “Well,” Lucy says. “Thanks.”

  She tells them about Whirlwind Weekends. How the people who take them are not travelers. How they are a little afraid of foreign things.

  “They like things they are comfortable with,” she says. “Hamburgers and pizza. Souvenirs that are not too exotic.”

  Marnie says, “But we can change that, right? I mean, we can expand their horizons. Show them new things.”

  She is a pale blonde, with fair pink skin and light blue eyes. She looks like a doll herself.

  “I mean,” she continues, “I spent my junior year abroad. In Switzerland? And at first, I was really scared and stuff. But pretty soon I got really acclimated.”

  “But you had a year,” Lucy says. “These people only have a weekend. You have to kind of protect them.”

  Lisbeth is nodding.

  But Marnie frowns. “But, like with me,” she says, “I ended up wanting to do everything. Lake Lucerne and fondue and Zermatt and—”

  Lucy grits her teeth. “Well,” she says. “If they had a year, I’m sure they’d loosen up. But in a weekend, that’s a different story. You can’t change a life in one weekend.”

  “Well,” Marnie says reluctantly. “Maybe not.”

  Lucy reviews the itinerary with them. Even though she hasn’t done a Whirlwind trip in months, the schedule feels as familiar as ever. The Medieval Manor. The tour on the double-decker bus. Cats and the changing of the guard and shopping at Harrods.

  She explains how many dollars there are to a pound. She shows them subway maps. “And,” she warns them, “be careful crossing the street. Make sure you look both ways. They drive on the left there. And people can get hurt.”

  For an instant, Lucy thinks about going back. About forgetting the alphabet book, the My Dolly clothes and family, forgetting all of it and doing just this—Whirlwind Weekends. She finds herself almost longing for the regularity, the certainty of them. The way they never change.

  By the time they land back at Kennedy, Marnie and Lisbeth do not look as fresh-faced as they did a few days earlier. They look tired, all dark circles and dry skin. Their feet hurt and they are cranky.

  “You’d think these people have never been out of New Jersey,” Marnie tells Lucy.

  “They haven’t,” Lucy says.

  She gives them tips for fighting jet lag. She says, “Get some sea salt and take a bath in it.” She says, “Eat turkey.”

  She has a good case of it herself. For a time, when she did a trip every weekend, Lucy lived in a kind of overtired fog. She was almost used to crossing time lines. But it has been a while, and she finds herself feeling like Marnie and Lisbeth—sore and tired. Both nights in the hotel in London she woke at three A.M., unable to fall back asleep. She had warned them about the possibility of that happening, and she heard them next door to her, their television on, their voices and giggles.

  Lucy’s tired feet drag as she makes her way from the subway to her apartment building, through the lobby and into the elevator. She had thought she would get some work done tonight. Maybe even decide about doing Fawn’s book or not. It is then, as the elevator speeds her upward, that she realizes this is the first weekend that she hasn’t seen Nathaniel Jones in a very long time.

  Sh
e leans against the wall, realizing too that she has not missed him, or even thought about him. How, Lucy wonders, could she have considered leaving New York for a man she doesn’t even think about? Nathaniel Jones is not fun, she thinks. And the thought makes her feel lighthearted. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t want to move to Boston with him.

  When she steps off the elevator, she has forgotten her achy feet. She feels wide-awake. She feels alive. She walks down the hall quickly toward her apartment, her suitcase bumping along behind her. But then she stops, her suitcase a beat behind her.

  Lucy takes a deep breath. What she smells is this: a turkey roasting. A turkey with Grand Marnier and apricot stuffing. She puts down her duty-free bag filled with Tanqueray gin and Baileys Irish Cream. She presses her hands against the hallway wall to steady herself. Then slowly she walks toward her apartment, the smell of turkey growing stronger.

  Before she can find her key and open the door, Jasper opens it and steps out.

  “Hi,” he says, a little shyly. “I still had my key, so. …”

  She thinks about how good he looks, standing there like that. She thinks about how tomorrow he is leaving for six months. How nothing can be solved tonight.

  He says, “The doorman told me you left in your uniform, so I figured you’d be back tonight. Then I got this crazy idea—.” He motions behind him, toward the table set for two, the tulips bending in a vase, the wine poking out from an ice bucket.

  “I have to admit,” Jasper says, swallowing hard, “I was afraid of what I might find. You know,” he adds, embarrassed, “a man’s shaving gear. Or strange underwear. But then I thought, I have to chance it. I mean, sometimes you’ve got to take a chance. Right?”

  Lucy does not know what will happen when she steps inside this door. She knows only that she is not moving to Boston. That Whirlwind Weekends are behind her. That she has a project to finish. And that for tonight at least, she will take a chance with Jasper.

  “Right” he asks again. There is hope in his eyes.

  She says, “A lot can happen in six months.”

  “I know,” he says. He steps aside to let her in.

  “It smells good,” she tells him. And she moves against him, presses herself close and wraps her arms around him.

  “Didn’t I ever tell you,” Jasper whispers, “that turkey cures jet lag?”

  Lucy nods. Her head rests right against his chest. She hears his heart, beating strong and steady. Lucy smiles into his shirt. She will be here alone, she thinks, and everything will be fine.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s see what the night holds.”

  Jasper takes her by the waist and lifts her up, up into his arms like a ballerina, and jetés forward.

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE TO thank Lloyd and Gloria Hood, Melissa Hood, June Caycedo and Gina Gallucci, Bob Reiss, Gail Hochman, and Deb Futter for listening, reading, rereading, and always being there.

  About the Author

  Ann Hood was born in West Warwick, Rhode Island. She is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, and The Obituary Writer. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her other novels include Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, Waiting to Vanish, Three-Legged Horse, Something Blue, Places to Stay the Night, The Properties of Water, and Ruby. She has also written a memoir, Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time; a book on the craft of writing, Creating Character Emotions; and a collection of short stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life.

  Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the Paris Review. Hood has won awards for the best American spiritual writing, travel writing, and food writing; the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction; and two Pushcart Prizes. She now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and their children.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Ann Hood

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  978-1-4804-6684-5

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  ANN HOOD

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