The Blue Hour

by Laura Pritchett

  “It’s magic.”

  “It’s Sy, visiting us!”

  “It’s not Sy—”

  “—It might be Sy.”

  “Oh, quiet. None of us believe in that stuff.”

  “I do. Also, it could be a fairy.”

  “It’s a Christmas present.”

  “It’s climate change.”

  “Never before seen in a winter in Colorado. Look, I just confirmed it on the Internet—”

  “They’re neotropical migrants—”

  “—Did you know, they get their name from the gemstone?”

  “I believe in magic.”

  “I’ll call the paper. This is a first. A real first.”

  Antoinette sidled up next to him and gently took his hand. They stood, quietly staring at the bird, until he took his gaze off the beautiful bird to look at her. The shooting stars of gray in her black hair sprung from her head in crazy directions from the hat she’d removed; her dark eyes sparked as well, and looked straight into his own. Perhaps there were not three directions, but four: up, down, straight ahead, and inward. The compass of a life, pointing him in this new journey, and it didn’t bother him a bit to say so. Soon—not too soon, but soon—he would die, and this genius, this debt to nature, would be guiding him more strongly than ever. In the end, he’d have to pay his debt, and this debt had shaped this world more than any other force. He only wanted to resist it for as long as possible, be a part of it all, to stick around for the experience. To see what became of his life, and this world. There was no wealth but time. Perhaps he and the planet were running out, but he would try to notice and love it all while he still could.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Bear

  The day before Moon’s Solstice Party, and three days after Bird Count Day, on December 20, the winter’s second blizzard hit. There were two feet of fresh snow and it was coming fast as she’d ever seen it when Gretchen snowshoed over to Anya’s at 4 PM, Anya having just called and said, Please come, I can’t do tomorrow unless you come get drunk with me tonight.

  Gretchen now sits at the kitchen table, facing Anya, and the room is quiet and the blizzard is quiet. Oddly so. There are no howling winds, just a pouring from the sky. Everyone on the mountain is silent and staring out their windows, Gretchen thinks. They are considering the first blizzard, considering Sy, considering the two months that have passed since then. Everyone is worried about the trek down to Moon’s tomorrow, and how it will be a pain in the ass, but that they’ll give it a go.

  As if in response to her thought, Gretchen hears the faraway low hum of a machine. It’s Ollie Vreeland, she supposes: Of everyone on the mountain with a pickup and attachable snowplow, he is the most likely to start so early on the side roads, since the official county plows will only do the main road, and will only get this far up the mountain late in the day tomorrow. He did the same thing the whole night before Sy’s ceremony. Normally, he and the others with equipment—Joe and Lillie and Wendell—would wait until morning. Or see if the sun would do the job. But tonight, they’ll be out.

  Something about this brings a blur of tears, which makes Anya catch her eye, raise an eyebrow. They hold a silent gaze. The stillness in the room is still new, still catching up with them. Just a moment earlier, a child had been seated on each of their laps—Zoë on Gretchen’s lap, Michael on Anya’s—chattering away, excited by the snow, by the school break just started, by the loss of a new tooth by each of them, by the news that tomorrow they would get to meet a new girl named Honey who has just moved to the mountain. They’ve been ushered out now, tucked into sleeping bags with hot cocoa and popcorn, and are watching Peter Pan in the next room, and the women are still absorbing the reverberation of silence, each of them frozen for a moment, each with one hand on the table, holding a whiskey glass.

  Snow is still melting into Gretchen’s hair, from the outside of the braid to the scalp, but she feels warm and settled enough now to talk. She tilts her head toward the living room. “A little magic will be good for them. I watched this flick with them the night I babysat. You’ve got the bond between brothers and sisters going on. That’s good. And the power of imagination.”

  Anya nods. “It’s been a recent favorite.” Then she pushes her chair back and stands. She’s wearing red pajamas, soft pants and a button shirt, and something about the red makes her hair particularly blond, especially the strands that rise from the static. She walks to the window. Quickly and with purpose. She seems to be searching for something specific, as if looking for the very source of snow, or to see if perhaps Sy is out there. She manipulates her chapped lips between her fingers as her gaze wanders across the sky and snow. Gretchen can see it in her reflection, and Gretchen bites her own lip in worry.

  “And that crocodile. What’s his name?” Gretchen asks.

  “Tick-Tock.”

  “Yeah, Tick-Tock. The short days are hard. What we need soon is spring. Things are going to get easier, Anya. Hang in there.”

  “Incredible. Look how fast it’s coming.” Anya closes her eyes, then, in the way Gretchen recognizes as the moment when the alcohol of a much-needed drink is first hitting the brain, when you just start to let go. With her eyes still closed, she says, “You know, it keeps surprising me that Sy didn’t wait for the mountain bluebirds. He was always on the lookout.”

  Gretchen searches her brain for the right thing to say, but she is strung out on insomnia and tears and grief, having given herself fully over to the emotion of letting go of Joe. Finally, she says, “Yeah, it was Sy who pointed out the sandhill cranes flying overhead this fall. I wouldn’t have noticed them, they were so high. But he heard them. That weird garbled noise. Said to be a good birder, or a good liver, you had to use all your senses. That might have been the last conversation I had with him.”

  “That sounds like him.” Anya opens her eyes and smiles sadly into the window. “He loved inspecting feathers. I was remembering that about him the other day when I saw one stuck in the snow. How he’d stare at feathers as if the coloration or the design might reveal something. But especially, he loved the bluebirds. You’d think those would be worth waiting for.”

  “Well. We can’t—”

  “That night, the night he killed himself? He was standing outside in the snowstorm watching me fold laundry through the bedroom window. I saw him out there, and I ignored him. I could have waved or blown him a kiss, but I was annoyed. I just wanted to be left alone, I wanted him to go away.”

  “Oh, Anya. We can’t—”

  “I know. I’ve been thinking on this. I believe I gave him what I could the vast majority of the time, which is the best any of us can do. But that’s why he didn’t wait for spring.”

  There’s a burst of chatter from the room—the kids have spilled the popcorn, it seems—and there’s the sound of Captain Hook bellowing at Peter. Anya leaves the window and looks in the room briefly, tucks her blond hair behind her ear, comes to the kitchen table, and sits, facing Gretchen. “You saved them, the kids. From the bear.”

  “Good thing, too. That fact is helping you forgive me now. You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

  Anya tips back her whiskey with a flourish and finishes it. Pours another. “Yes, I am.”

  “Because I broke up with Joe.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I chose to end a love, and you didn’t have that choice?”

  “More or less. Although it’s true that I think my love for Sy had died. But I was assuming it would come back. I was waiting. I was trying. I was sticking with it.” Anya reaches over to pat Gretchen on her wet head. “You’re a coward, Gretchen. You’re stingy. You call yourself an unapologetic romantic, but it’s surely on your own terms.”

  Gretchen starts to unbraid her hair and finger though the strands. “Good for you, Anya. Call it like you see it. Thank you for speaking up. You’re right, I am. This might have been the greatest mistake of my life. And all you can do is forgive me
for it. I couldn’t picture my life with a kid in it. All that talking and explaining and listening and sitting down to do homework and going, going, going. It’s a big thing. As you know. And obviously, I didn’t want to decide later, after the kid knew me. She’s already lost her parents, has to be adopted by her quiet Uncle Joe, move up to this crazy mountain, and then, what, deal with me? No, it’s not fair. If I can’t constantly be on call to do stuff, and I just can’t, then it wasn’t fair to stay. Joe will find someone who can.” The words pour out in a quiet rush, as if Gretchen has been storing them up for too long. “Anya? I’m sorry. We can’t help what we want.”

  “We can,” Anya says. “We can help what we want. Sometimes. But listen. I have something I need to tell you.” She paused and took a big huffing breath that reminded Gretchen of the bear. “I’ve been Sergio’s lover for nearly two years.”

  Gretchen stands, sits, stands. Sits. Her hair, loose now and strewn around, is half wet and half dry. She catches her reflection in the window. She looks crazed. The strands that are wet are plastered to her shoulders and chest and the strands that are dry are floating up because of the static electricity. Her head rears back in surprise and she starts laughing. The image and the news are too bizarre. “What? What did you just say?”

  “I didn’t tell you because at first it needed to be a secret. Then, right as I was about to tell you—because I trusted you, and you’re my best friend, and I believed you’d understand—you took up with Joe.” Anya starts smiling now, amused by Gretchen’s giggling. “And Joe and Sergio are good friends! And Sergio had decided not to tell Joe, which meant you couldn’t tell Joe. And how could you start a good relationship with Joe while keeping a secret from him? I didn’t want you to have to hide something from Joe. Secrets are no good. This mountain is small. So I’ll forgive you and you forgive me.”

  But something has broken in Gretchen, a damn of tense grief is exploding out of her, and Anya is laughing too, if only out of the sheer joy there is in seeing someone laughing beyond their control. It is Gretchen who now goes to the window—she wants to look deep into the eyes of that crazy laughing witch she sees—and inhales deeply to try to settle the laugh. She can barely make out the tracks she made coming over here, the sunken path of snowshoe indentations that are lit by the house lights. Her eyes follow the path toward the apple tree. To the light of her house. Across the beautiful weighted, white world. She breathes in, deeply. “Well, holy shit,” she says to the window. “Has it been good?”

  “Very good. Although there’s a guilt factor to it all, of course. Although I do think Sy did, or would, understand. In the end, it sustained me through a lot.”

  “Is that where you were, the other night? When I was babysitting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not at a grief-counseling meeting?”

  “He is my grief counseling. Was.”

  Gretchen turns around and raises an eyebrow.

  “We’re ending,” Anya says. “Like you and Joe. Not because we dislike each other. But because it’s the right thing to do, so the other person can move on. I even love him. But I couldn’t have a life with him. So, see, that’s why I’m telling you. We’re in a similar spot. I ended it because it’s right. I need time to think. To get straight. And he needs to find some real love. He’s a good man, and his life is going by.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Sometimes the right thing to do is to walk away. If it’s gonna end in disaster.” Anya raises her glass and waits for Gretchen to clink it. “A toast. To being alone. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Gretchen toasts the glass and drinks. She feels suddenly warm, flushed, still sparkling inside from the laughter, and she winces with the realization she’ll have to muster the courage and energy to go back out in the cold in the middle of the night. Perhaps, she thinks, she could even get lost, the snow is coming down so hard. Maybe she should just spend the night here, on the couch, and wake to the sounds of a family, just to see what that was like.

  “This way we can all be friends,” Anya is saying. “We can make this mountain work. You’ll be able to be a nice neighbor to Honey. I’ll be able to see Sergio fall in love and start a family.”

  Gretchen notices that Anya’s eye crinkles have deepened. In the last two months, she has fully fallen into middle age, and Gretchen feels it too. “Anya, did you know that Joe told only one person about his niece, Honey? That Tate was likely dying and that Joe had been asked to consider adopting her? Did you know he told Sy, back in October?” Gretchen watches Anya’s eyes rise in genuine surprise and so knows the answer even before Anya shakes her head, no. “Sy told him to do it. To adopt Honey. That he wouldn’t want to live the rest of his life knowing he hadn’t stepped up.”

  Anya snorts. “Bit ironic. Since Sy didn’t step up. Fully.”

  Gretchen nods. “We gotta forgive him. Give him the benefit of the doubt. That’s our major work to do this winter.”

  “I know.” Then: “He was such a big man, physically. Strong and solid, I mean. And something about that made me assume he was fine. Here’s how I think of him now: He was like a loosely held mold of sand, like those giant sand sculptures artists make on the edge of the ocean, and if I stuck my hand in too hard, he would simply crumble apart. So I didn’t.” Then she adds, “The one person Joe should have told was you. About Honey.”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t want to lose you. He was in denial. Hoping for some other solution.”

  “Yes. That’s what he told me.”

  “And you don’t feel like you could give him the benefit of the doubt?”

  “I could, actually. I can understand why he kept silent. I just don’t want to be a mother. It comes down to that.” The light from the TV flickers into the room as well, at odd angles and intervals and with a strange blue hue and all Gretchen can think to say is, “Next month, there will be two full moons. The second is the blue moon. I always wonder who named our mountain.” Then she is crying. The hiccup of breath, the need to inhale—she has to stand up to breathe. Anya follows her, fast and startled, as if some whistle or shout has just burst through the air. Suddenly they are holding each other, Gretchen is sobbing, Anya rocks her back and forth, and when Anya slows up, Gretchen takes over, rocking, rocking.

  They stay like that until something catches Gretchen’s eye, something moving outside. She’s trying to identify it. She keeps Anya tight in her arms, but her eyes wander across the landscape. It takes her a long time to realize it’s a series of large slides of snow falling from the apple tree and from the roof; the wind must be picking up, or the depth of snow is at its break point. For a moment, though, she thought perhaps that it was the bear. Walking on all fours in the snow, swaying her head back and forth, stopping at the apple tree, sitting on her haunches and sharpening her claws, as if preparing for the battle to defend her world.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Moon’s Solstice

  The memorial was a surprise. Sergio and Ruben had been working on it for a month, and they got to Moon’s early, with Angela there to approve its positioning and leveling, and they screwed hooks into the beams of the ceiling and attached two strands of rusted but strong thick chain, antique, from the Vreeland Ranch.

  The plaque itself was solid and large, a thick slab of polished beetlekill, the blue stain running rivers through the light pine. Attached to it was a framed photo of Sy carrying a newborn calf in spring, snow all around, the sunlight haloing around his shoulder and blurring him to some extent, so that he looked both of this world and the next. Sergio had attached thin strips of tackboard to the frame, at the edges, so that everyone could add their own photos of Sy, or of the animals he’d helped, as well as slips of handmade paper, which Jess had made by blending newspaper and old drafts of her manuscript with dried flower petals and pine needles, happily ruining a blender, pouring the concoction onto screens and drying it. On these thick pieces of h
omemade paper, people were to write the names of animals Sy had saved in thick black marker.

  This is the first thing everyone did as they walked in and were greeted. The snowstorm had ended just an hour ago, and so everyone was red-faced with the effort of shoveling out, or digging out their cars, or throwing sand and ice melt on the roads, or just the sheer cold. But every time the door dinged, there was a clatter of welcoming, and one table became covered with coats and gloves, and another with a few guitars and a violin, and meanwhile, new squares and rectangles of snow were left as everyone stomped their feet at the rubber mat. The tackboard got filled in too, with photos that everyone had been asked to bring, and with slips of paper. People stopped to scan the list as they took off gloves or drank their first beer.

  PEACOCK, MALE.

  TWO SOCKS, THE HORSE.

  OH-BEETLE-BEETLE, CHICKEN NEARLY KILLED

  BY THE MAMA BEAR

  KOBE, THE AKITA.

  PULLED DOZENS OF CALVES.

  HE STITCHED UP MY ARM. BUT DON’T TELL THE LAW.

  DON-QUIXOTE, THE DONKEY.

  PUT DOWN MY HORSE WELL. A KIND KILLING IS A GIFT TOO.

  MILKSHAKE, THE GUINEA PIG.

  There was a cheerfulness and burble to the conversation, and open gossip about the New One, since the rumor had been roiling around like clouds since last week, the one about Joe’s new blond-haired child named Honey. She’d moved in permanently, the story went, after her father’s funeral, but none of them knew the whole story, except Lillie, who was refusing to say anything at the moment.