Reunion

by Therese Fowler

  So it was Daniel she’d seen in that car. How about that? He must have seen her, too—maybe he had told the driver to stop, and then thought better of such sudden contact. Maybe he thought he should follow official channels instead.

  Marcy was saying, “He claims you know him. Let me quote from the message, here: ‘Harmony Blue, please join Lynn and me for dinner tonight if you are free. Seven thirty, come as you are.’ How do you think he got your name? What won’t people try, huh?”

  “No, I do know him—them, I should say. Or, I did, a long time ago. He was my English teacher, senior year, and Lynn’s the woman I worked for after I left the pet store. Before I moved in with you.”

  Here was a rare apropos opening, when she could naturally tell Marcy the whole tale, her stupid story of schoolgirl naiveté and heartbreak. She’d kept it secret at first because she hadn’t wanted Marcy to think less of her. Then she kept it secret because it was easier than admitting she’d kept a secret from Marcy in the first place.

  The truth.

  She might be able to just work it in, casually. She was glad Marcy couldn’t see the sheepish, cringing look she knew must be on her face as she added, “I, well, I dated their son, Mitch. He was older, divorced; he had a young kid. He dumped me, and that’s why I was so depressed back then.”

  “I figured it was a guy,” Marcy said. Blue waited for more, for an accusation, for some sign of irritation, but Marcy apparently had no issue with her waiting two decades to reveal these details. Blue didn’t know what to make of such an anticlimax. Finally she just said, “Yeah. Men.”

  “So it could be a little awkward, seeing them,” Marcy said. “Do you want me to return the call and make your excuses?”

  Standing there with her hand still resting on the gate, Blue’s first impulse was to say Yes, do. Keep the past in its place—because even if the Forresters didn’t say it aloud, they would be thinking of how she had simply disappeared from their lives. They would be recalling an anxious young woman who must have seemed overly eager to please. She didn’t want to be that woman again, even for a moment; she didn’t want to see that woman reflected in their eyes.

  And yet… she couldn’t quite say it. Why be so cowardly? She was free tonight, and while things had ended badly with Mitch, that had nothing to do with Lynn or Daniel. They’d been so good to her. Like second parents—like first parents, really. She’d missed them. Maybe this was happy fate.

  “No, I think I’ll accept.” And as she said it, she smiled, a smile as wide as the well-known and well-loved version so familiar to the world. Wider, perhaps. And then she began to laugh.

  10

  fter speaking with Lila Shefford, of the sign, Blue sat down on the porch step to wait for the agent to arrive. Two million dollars was the asking price. Lila had not known, at first, that she was telling this to her, to Blue Reynolds, and so she’d justified the price, citing the large lot, off-street parking, original wood floors, good rental history, and new tile roof. “Great, I’ll take it,” Blue had said, leaving Lila momentarily speechless.

  Two million dollars. “Two million,” Blue said now; even aloud, the number was meaningless. She could spend twenty, or two hundred, and never really miss it—not that she would spend so much, or even truly could, if by could she meant was capable of. She, personally, was nowhere near that. What she was capable of was letting people who spouted ideas and ambition manage her business interests. She had holdings—stocks, real estate, publications—that she knew only by their summaries in her annual report. She, personally, was great at two things: hosting her show, and delegating. The nagging thought that she could be more, could do more, had a permanent roost in her conscience; she kept it fed with bits of someday soon, and wondered if someday was going to come.

  Marcy called back to say the Forresters’ address was a house on Eisenhower, “near the Garrison Bight, whatever that means.” She offered to bring Blue a change of clothes, if time ran out.

  “A bight is some kind of inlet. Don’t bother with the clothes, I’m fine like I am. Maybe I’ll have you call me a cab, though, if it comes to that. I’ll check my map for how far Eisenhower is from here.” She hoped to be able to walk over there; Old Town was such a pleasure. She felt ordinary here. She felt real.

  She’d bought several properties over the years. The loft in New York, the London flat. A Montana ranch—which she could not help thinking was a celebrity cliché. She rarely went there, and lent it out to almost anyone who asked. Peter and Janelle summered at the ranch with his two brothers and their wives and kids. Montana was beautiful, and she did enjoy being there. Yet there was something too wide open about the place, something that made her feel she needed to watch her back.

  This, though? This close garden of tropical everything was a place where she felt right at home; no doubt it would be on her mind whenever she was anywhere else. She could already imagine how much fun it was going to be to get a landscape designer to help her sculpt the jungle before her, shape it—but not tame it, not entirely; its wildness was its appeal. Already she knew she wanted to have fish swimming in the rock pond, and one of those charming chickees over on the west side, by the wall, and strings of tiny white lights on the lemon tree.

  Sitting here on the porch step, she could envision those lights, lights like the Forresters had strung through the pine swags that decorated their house that New Year’s Eve when what had been a friendship, a flirtation with Mitch, became something more.

  1985, it was. About to be 1986 in the same way she was about to be nineteen, at the stroke of midnight. She’d made two wishes for that birthday, and the first of them had already come true: she was there at the Forrester’s. The second wish? The second wish depended on Mitch being there too.

  He’d been twenty-seven, two years out of his PhD program and a very junior professor at Northwestern. Twenty-seven sounded old, but he was in tune with people her age because he spent his days exploring literature with them. His nights he’d owed, when he could persuade his ex, to a nine-year-old boy she’d heard about but had never seen.

  Lynn, who she’d grown very fond of in the year they’d been working together, had told her the whole story: The winter before Mitch finished high school, he got his girlfriend Renee pregnant. She was from another school; they’d met at a party. “It wasn’t true love,” Lynn said. “These things rarely are. But he wanted to do right, so the weekend after graduation, he married her. Julian was born in August, and they all played house for a couple rocky years while Mitch was an undergraduate. Then Renee, sure that Mitch was screwing around, kicked him out—and even though he wasn’t cheating, he went.” Lynn shrugged. “Julian is a quiet boy, earnest as they come. I wouldn’t trade him for the world. But I can’t help thinking that, all things being equal, they’d have been better off if Renee hadn’t left the whole birth-control matter up to Mitch. How many times have I told him that good intentions make a lousy defense?”

  Now Blue watched a trio of small white birds flit about in the trees. Parakeets? Finches? Maybe she’d get one of those bird-identifier books while she was here.

  “No, no maybes: I will get one.” Unlike Mitch, she’d follow through. You had to start with the small things, right?

  Back when she’d heard that story from Lynn, she hadn’t faulted Mitch. She’d seen Renee as conniving—a plotter who was willing to get pregnant just to snag him. Her opinion changed, though, when she feared the end of her relationship with him was coming and she began to wonder what she could do to keep him. A woman in love—especially a very young one—could so easily be blinded by desperation. If Renee really had entrapped Mitch, she’d gone too far, yes. But was what Blue got herself into after Mitch cut her loose any less appalling? At least Renee’s son knew his real parents, was raised by them. Having two separate homes was not ideal, but surely it had to be more ideal than knowing that neither parent wanted you, that you’d been given away.

  Or maybe her son didn’t know. If Branford’s lead was solid,
she might soon have a chance to find out. She knew this, intellectually. In her gut it still felt unreal, impossible.

  Ah, but that New Year’s … everything had seemed possible.

  She’d been elated by the invitation: finally, a chance for Mitch to see her not as his mother’s receptionist, not as a nice girl with an overworked, eccentric mother and a sister who needed to be leashed; not just a young woman with her heart filled with hope at one day winning his. Surely there were lots of those types in his life.

  Her second wish, the one that powered her through her anxiety at showing up at the party alone was simple: one kiss, from Mitch, at midnight.

  How awkward she’d been … Unused to wearing high heels and snug dresses, she’d opened the old Chevy’s door and climbed out into the snowy street. The door groaned as she pushed it shut, and she was grateful no one was outside to hear it. Suddenly she was certain she was wrong for the event: too young, too unimportant—definitely too poor to dress well enough to match the luxury cars already lining the street, not to mention the enormous homes all around her, though she’d tried her best. Her dress, sleeveless yellow taffeta with a tight bodice, was a dance-scene dress she’d “borrowed” from her high school’s theater wardrobe after a stage production of Grease, for which she’d been a stagehand. She’d been waiting three years to have an occasion suited to the dress, never imagining that the first opportunity would far outclass it.

  Rock salt crunched beneath her feet as she walked up the long sidewalk from the street. She stamped snow off her strappy, open-toed shoes, stupid for winter but the best she had, hoping that when the plows came past, her car wouldn’t be blocked in. Not that getting stuck there would be so awful.

  Overhead, the suburban sky was the darkest gray, soft like silk velvet, with snow falling in gentle, lazy flakes. She’d pulled her coat close, hoping she’d be able to take it off before anyone noticed how tatty it was. How she would’ve laughed at herself if she’d known that one day she’d be dressed for free by Oak Avenue shops, in return, of course, for crediting them in her broadcasts. That she would go from worrying about what the scores of guests inside a single house would think of how she looked, to worrying about what the Greater Chicago viewing area would think of how she looked, to being watched, studied, parodied, criticized—and yes, on occasion praised, too—by media and viewers worldwide.

  Would people point and chuckle behind her back? Would they think her breasts were too big? Her dress too tight? Her hair too oily, when glossy was what she was trying for? Would Mitch think she looked pretty? Did she dare hope for beautiful? No; such hope would be tempting fate. Pretty, then. And she was pretty—she could see that now, and maybe she saw it then, too, if obliquely; after all, she did buy sparkly stockings, and steam press the dress, and spend two hours on her hair and makeup. Melody and their mother, crowding the little bathroom to prep for different party dates, had been as astonished as they were impressed.

  And she did walk up to the massive, arched doorway of the Forresters’ home, a doorway that seemed half as wide as her entire house, a doorway that, along with the rest of the structure, demonstrated to Blue what had up until then been only disparate numbers on contracts she filed in broad metal cabinets—numbers that were Lynn’s commissions from sales to mall developers and tower builders and collectors of architecture by van der Rohe and Jenney and Sullivan and Wright. And after standing for a moment in the cold, still air with snow on her shoulders, her breath rising in silver clouds, her heart stuck in her throat, she did pull her hand from her pocket and ring the bell.

  When at first it seemed that no one would answer, she thought she might turn and hurry back to the car, save herself from the possibility that she would leave there later as a fool. Then the door opened and there was Daniel. Fifty-something at the time, he wore a black tux with a yellow plaid bow tie. The tie’s pattern had shiny silver threads that shone in the porch light. She’d never seen him in anything so fancy. He clapped his hands once and said, “Well, Harmony Blue! Come in, come in.”

  She stepped into the foyer, grateful for the enveloping warmth. “Hi, Mr. Forrester.” Though she’d seen him daily for an entire school year, it was awkward, both of them dressed up, neither of them ready to discuss literature—or she wasn’t. Probably he could recite Twain in his sleep if required.

  He took her coat, handed it off, and said, “So it’s just you?” As in, had she brought a date?

  “Just me.” Her voice came out smaller than she wanted.

  He leaned over and kissed the top of her head, an affectionate gesture she was sure must have owed to champagne. “Happy New Year. Now come on, let’s get you mingling.”

  Lynn’s line of work brought her friendships with every kind of professional. Retail developers, sandwich-shop owners, hospital administrators, the mayors of Chicago and its suburbs north, south, west, and central. Blue knew many of the guests as voices on the phone, a few by sight; they looked transformed, that night, by the elegant tuxedos and chic gowns. As Daniel steered her across the room, she was impressed to see Morgan Cole, the statuesque WLVC-TV nightly news anchor, among other high-profile Chicago personalities.

  Lynn was standing near the buffet talking with her uptight assistant, Deb. “Harmony Blue, you made it!” Lynn said. “You look amazing. Wow!”

  Blue shrugged, embarrassed but delighted, too. Lynn was the most dynamic woman she’d known in her young life, so different from her mother that the two women might as well be different species.

  “Where’d you find that dress?” Deb asked.

  Blue, recalling the theft, couldn’t meet her eyes. “It’s, um, my sister’s. Melody bought it at The Limited, I think.” The Limited had been the height of fashion to Blue, who could not have imagined she’d one day wear Prada, have couture designed just for her, auction off that same couture for charity. She’d said, “You look really great—both of you, I mean.”

  “This,” Lynn said, indicating the silver beaded sheath she wore, “was hand-sewn. Can you imagine? And you think office work is tedious!”

  Deb surprised Blue by saying, “It is tedious—but Harmony Blue, you’re doing a great job. I love your dress. And your hair’s gorgeous tonight, too. I wish mine curled like that. Oh—there’s Mark Poole; I need to ask him about those contracts.”

  Deb, charitable? What else could it mean but that her wish had a chance?

  She watched Deb go, taking the opportunity to scan the room for the face she was longing to see, was always longing to see. Her crush on Mitch wasn’t so sensible; he was older, divorced, an assistant professor, a father. But he was also charming and smart and kind. And she’d thought maybe she was reaching for an ideal she wasn’t entitled to, but at least she wasn’t like Melody, always coming home reeking of smoke, glassy-eyed and dismissive. Was it so bad to have stars in her eyes, to want to one day tell her grandchildren how, on the stroke of her nineteenth birthday, a prince gave her one magical kiss?

  And then what? they would ask, all of them eager to know more about the story of their own histories.

  Well, she would say, the prince finally realized he was madly in love with her, and made her his princess.

  Blue had stood there listening to Lynn talk with Mary Conner, a facilities manager for Marshall Field, about the rising per-square-foot costs in the Loop. She’d nodded now and then as if she were a Realtor-in-training. Her mind, though, had been on Mitch, and the hour (nine fifteen), and her wish’s odds of coming true.

  When she saw him, he looked like a prince. His hair, almost as dark as hers, was mussed a bit and fell onto his forehead. Rakish, she thought the word was—not from English class this time, but paperback romances. He wore a tux like most of the other men, but with a brilliant blue bow tie and vest. Even in the low light of twinkling strings and glowing candelabras, his eyes shone blue. Like the Earth from space, she thought. Like Lake Michigan from the Hancock building on a sunny afternoon. As blue as she felt each time they parted.

  How sill
y she’d been, how young …

  If she hadn’t been there that night, though, if she hadn’t been so wound up about Mitch, she wouldn’t have met Morgan Cole, who would later become her mentor. Morgan was glamorous and warm and smart. She kept the whole circle of listeners enthralled with a tale of how, as a new reporter, she’d done a story at the Brookfield Zoo and was accosted by both a chimpanzee and the chimp’s trainer. The anchor-woman’s laugh was like a Christmas bell to Blue: cheerful and resonant with hope and pleasure. Blue would remember this later, when, postpartum, she went searching for a new life to escape into.

  But that night, with Mitch close enough to touch if she were to let her hand follow her desire, she’d felt that all was right with the world. When she glanced at him, caught him looking at her, she knew, just knew, that she would see her wish come true.

  Daniel Forrester asked her to dance and she did, imagining herself as Cinderella, Daniel as the king. The string quartet played, and Blue spun, dizzying circles that made her laugh. She loved this party, she loved the Forresters, she loved this house, this life.

  Mitch cut in. “Dad, may I?”

  “If you must,” Daniel said, putting her hand into Mitch’s.

  Mitch looked down at her. His eyes were so inviting she wanted to dive into them. “Thank you, Harmony Blue, you’ve made my night.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  He laughed and held her tighter. “It’s not what you do, it’s just that you are.” It was enough to make any girl swoon.

  The quartet stopped playing, temporarily, at five minutes to midnight.

  “Let’s get some cool air,” Mitch said. He took a bottle of champagne and she followed him past the buffet, through the kitchen, through the mudroom, to the back door.

  He opened it and she said, “Wow, look at the snow!” It fell heavier than before, an audible rain of snowflakes, confetti tossed down by the Nordic gods of winter. She thought she’d never heard anything more pure.