Reunion

by Therese Fowler

  “I’m pretty beat,” he admitted. “But I did catch a few winks between”—which flight had it been?—“Zurich and Miami. I’m doing all right.” Sort of. The image and feelings the word sleep conjured were beginning to take on a hallucinatory quality. Still, seeing as they were already walking, and it was such a nice night, and she looked so appealing in that white openwork sweater … “So what’s the detour?”

  “It’s stupid,” she said, pulling her hair up with both hands; she held it there with one while she fished in her skirt pocket and found an elastic band. As she fixed her hair into a ponytail, she continued, “See, I was out walking the other day, and I fell in love with a house—so I bought it. Maybe you heard?”

  He hadn’t. “Nope. I guess they didn’t think to tell me. You went for a walk and bought a house?” Not a hat, not sunglasses, not some cheap shell jewelry or a fake parrot on a metal hoop.

  She nodded. “I’m not an impetuous person, either.”

  “No, no, clearly not.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “It is a sort of improbable statement, coming from a woman who went for a stroll and spent a couple mill while she was out.”

  “I know. Do I sound even crazier when I say I couldn’t help myself?”

  No; this love he understood. “Not so crazy,” he said. With his foot, he nudged a toad and watched it hop a few inches, then stop. “I used to want to own a place here until I realized that, with the way prices have increased over the years, I’d have to sell my soul in order to afford it.” Which implied that she’d sold hers. And hadn’t she—she and pretty much everyone else in show business? He believed so, but it was hard to reconcile that belief with the evidence of her, damp, fragrant, present.

  He said, “I didn’t mean to say you sold—”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  For a long moment, neither of them spoke. He scratched his chin, thought about whether he should let his beard grow back, what the differences were between toads and frogs, whether or not the mist would turn to rain and drench them, or affect the shoot—anything to avoid analyzing his desire to extend his time with her. Alec would probably tell him he just needed to get laid.

  Blue said, “Anyway, I wanted to go … visit the place, just for a few minutes. I sign the papers tomorrow afternoon, but I haven’t seen it at night, and I just thought—”

  “That it might be smart to check for obnoxious neighbors who blast their stereos at full volume?”

  “Right, or—”

  “Zombies?”

  She laughed, and the sound penetrated, giving him that empty-belly feeling. He nudged the toad again, harder, popping it into the grass.

  “I hadn’t thought of zombies.”

  “Huh,” he said, “well you should. In fact, I’m pretty sure my high school math teacher was one.”

  “Oh, you went to high school here?”

  “I did.” Tough years, long past. “So where’s the house? Let’s go have a look.”

  “Okay, great—let me just take off these shoes.” She took them off and was immediately two inches shorter. “That’s so much better. Who invented heels, anyway? Bluebeard?”

  “Napoleon, I think.”

  As they walked, she asked him about how he’d come to live with Daniel and Lynn. Last she’d known, she said, he was living with his mother in one of the Chicago suburbs and seeing his dad whenever his parents could work things out.

  “Which was like never,” he said, surprised that he’d wanted to answer. “Then Dad got the job at Carolina and moved to Chapel Hill.” After which his mom declared his dad to be a self-centered, uncaring son of a bitch who would abandon his own son.

  Julian recalled knowing even then, at age ten, the term “bipolar,” given that his mom regularly declared she was not that, no matter what anyone said. He remembered, too, that he’d fought with her the night of her outburst, defending his father while at the same time secretly fearing she was right about him. “You made him want to go!” he’d yelled. “He had to get away from you!” He couldn’t tell, though, how much of his father’s alienation was her doing. Was she reacting to rejection? Wasn’t the divorce all because he wouldn’t be faithful, that he couldn’t keep his eyes, and hands, off the college girls? Or was all that in her imagination, as his father claimed? Had he taken the new post because he, Julian, had so much trouble connecting with him whenever they did spend time together? And how was he supposed to be able to judge?

  But none of that mattered now. Nor did Blue’s role in those events, if she’d had any. But he couldn’t help asking, “Did we ever meet?”

  “No,” she said. “There weren’t too many opportunities.”

  Why was her answer such a relief? It shouldn’t matter whether they’d been acquainted back then, her a teenager, him a kid who tried to forget reality by reading C. S. Lewis and Mark Twain. She was never going to think twice about him—or if she did, it would be as his stepmother, the way Daniel had suggested. He needed to wrap his brain around that and forget this odd pleasure he felt in having her so close. A physical reaction. Suppressable.

  Maybe.

  She continued, “I never saw you. It was just your dad, and your grandparents. They were … I was …” She sighed. “I didn’t have the greatest childhood either. But anyway, I lost touch with all of them until just last weekend.”

  She was so unlike his image of her that his mind was filling with questions, yet he couldn’t just start barraging her. Maybe if he shared first, she’d share, too—it’s what they always told the kids in the camps to do when they were trying to make friends.

  As if.

  He said, “Well, there’s not much more to my story. I lived with my mom until the summer before I started high school. She—you never knew her?” Blue shook her head. “She has some issues,” he said. “She’s doing pretty well now, but back then she was really at the end of her rope.

  “Her parents had died a few years earlier—not at the same time, but within a year or so of each other. So when she hit bottom, I came here to stay for a while.” He kept it simple; Blue’s sympathy was not what he was after. He shouldn’t be after anything, except maybe some charitable contributions—why did he need to keep reminding himself? Why wasn’t he in bed, sleeping off his journey and the beers and whatever was making him so much less sensible than usual?

  Blue paused, turning to look at him when she asked, “Why here and not your dad’s—or would you rather I didn’t ask?”

  “This was just a better choice for me.” He took a step, and she moved along with him.

  “Key West must have seemed like a teenage boy’s paradise.”

  “Sure,” he said. No need to tell her that his choice had been a test: if his father wanted him to live in Chapel Hill, he’d fight his decision to stay here. When that didn’t happen, Julian could only conclude that the offer to live in Chapel Hill had been made solely out of duty. It hadn’t occurred to him that maybe he’d been so convincing in his argument that he’d be happier here that his dad had believed him.

  “So you stayed here until you went off to college?”

  “Not college. I did more of a trade internship.” Extensive lessons with a photographer in Miami—and then he’d signed on with the Red Cross and taken a space-available military flight out of Homestead Air Reserve Base, bound for Chechnya.

  They’d reached the corner where her soon-to-be-vacation-home was located.

  “I assume it’s this one,” he pointed at the house closest to them, the only one with no lights burning, inside or out.

  She rested her hand atop the gate. “Yep, this is it.”

  He studied the shadowed structure, the dense, black jungle of a yard. She was lucky to get the wide lot. “Looks great. If you need some inspiration, you should tour some of the gardens in town while you’re here.”

  “Yes, Lynn suggested that too. Now she’s quite a gardener. I’m thinking of trying to grow some pineapple, like she’s done.”


  “Her friends say she has not only a green thumb but green hands.”

  “I can see why,” she said, nodding. “Beautiful place. I love the pool, and they have a charming guesthouse.”

  Where he should be sleeping right this very moment.

  “It’s so quiet here, so normal…” She turned and examined the houses around them, taking longer than he expected, as though her mind was elsewhere. He watched, curious. She said, “Can you believe I saw a macaw here the other day? Scarlet red—it was gorgeous. Just flying right through the trees!”

  He nodded. “I’ve heard of people turning them loose here. Beautiful birds, aren’t they?”

  “Yes—and the painted bunting. I just bought a sculpture of one. Do you think I’ll get any here, in the garden?”

  “In late winter you might. You like birds?”

  “I—well, I guess I do. I just never gave them much thought before coming here. Do you? I saw that picture you took of the … the …”

  “The frigate bird?”

  “Right. Frigate bird. Odd name, but amazing photo—you really have a talent.” She looked away as she said this, the way a shy woman might.

  “Thanks,” he said, rubbing the knuckle where his finger used to be.

  She opened the gate. “Anyway, I’m going to just step into the garden here … Do you want—”

  “Nah, I’ll wait here,” he said, because he did want, and that was a problem.

  “Okay,” she said, so easily that he was sure her invitation had been nothing but politeness. And why would it be more than that? He could take a good bird photo, so what?

  She dropped her shoes by the wall, saying, “I’ll just be a minute.” Then she stepped past the gate and disappeared into the shadows.

  He sat down on the curb to wait, resting his arms on his knees, his chin on his arms. The scent of jasmine was strong. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Would it always transport him, as it was doing now, to his teenage summers? Long days empty of purpose, when he longed for everything he couldn’t name and rejected everything he could?

  He pushed away the memory, thinking instead of being here, on the curb of a house that would soon be occupied by Blue Reynolds, of how bizarre it was to have her walking barefooted through the wild garden just behind him. How it was only thirty-six or so hours ago that he was sitting on the edge of his bare cot, packing his gear, imagining her as a lovely-but-fire-breathing dragon. Obviously she was no dragon. If anything, she was more like a lamb.

  A very, very wealthy lamb. A lamb with a hugely popular television show. A lamb who might yet gambol her way into the Forrester pasture, but not in any way he would find endearing.

  17

  ive am came too early for Blue. The alarm clock made a startling reminder that during the few hours she’d managed to sleep, Branford had been en route to some small West Virginia town where Meredith Harper—not Jones, he’d learned—had died from pancreatic cancer. The obituary said she’d moved there with her husband and daughter twenty years earlier. The husband died a few years later, the daughter was apparently still unmarried. He planned to drop in at the daughter’s unannounced. “I find it’s the most effective strategy in these kinds of situations,” he’d said.

  She shut off the alarm and pulled a pillow over her face, held it there, then threw it onto the floor.

  If she’d slept even three hours she’d be surprised. And what time she had slept was spent in the repeating loop of a dream she’d had before. She’d been at her mother’s childhood home, her own first home, the one with the tiny yard. Or it seemed to be that house; she had no true memory of it, had only ever seen bits of it in faded three-by-three Polaroids.

  In the dream, she lived there with only her grandma Kate; always they were rolling out pie dough. Blue’s palms were tight, dry, coated with flour, and everything she tried to grasp slipped from her hands. A pie tin, a glass of water … She tried to turn doorknobs but couldn’t. Her grandma leaned over the table, rolling, rolling … her blue polyester pants were loose across her thin backside; Blue knew she was ill, and tried to phone the doctor, only to have the phone slip and drop to the floor.

  Sometimes the dream ended here. Other times, like last night, she would dream that she was waking, a thick confusion where she discovered she was in her mother’s bed and her mother was still out. So she’d turn over, go back to sleep, and wake again, but not really wake, and her mother would still be gone.

  So the alarm was a relief, but the reality it brought was an anxious one. What would Branford learn? Would it get her any closer to her wish? Every possibility seemed equally possible and improbable. When would she hear from him next? And what if some radical terrorist group succeeded in nuking major U.S. cities, knocking out all communications before he called? What if it already had, and the news just hadn’t made it here yet?

  “Now that’s likely,” she said, sitting up and untwisting her nightshirt. Even if no one else on the island was tuned in to the larger world—which if the Green Parrot’s crowd was any indication, was not as farfetched as it might sound—Peter would be. With his earpiece phone and his does-everything palm device, he was like a walking media receiver. Janelle said he was up and checking the news at five o’clock all seven days of the week.

  The image of an entire nation of media junkies in chaos remained with Blue as she used the bathroom and then went to the armoire to choose clothes for the day. Linen shorts again, and maybe the violet tee …

  Violet, like Julian’s eyes.

  Julian. He was not at all what she’d been expecting. He seemed like an old soul, maybe because he’d seen so much. Too much, probably, but she admired him for it. And while he’d been reserved—even antisocial—at the Green Parrot, he was much less so afterward. She’s been expecting difficult, rigid, stubborn, but got funny and thoughtful instead.

  She chose a sea-glass green shirt and closed the door.

  There were worse places to ride out a crisis than the spit of land she was on right now. Imagine, no cell phone service, no television, no radio … nothing but warm days under blue skies, a horizon of palms and sea … she hadn’t tried coconut milk yet, but it might be good; she was open to it being good. Here, on a lounge chair with the sun browning her usually protected skin, there was a chance she would be able to forget everything that bound her to the mainland. In the shade of her new home’s trees, she could while away the days with fresh pineapple juice and all the books she’d been wanting to read since forever.

  Of course, everyone she cared most about would be safe—her mother (and Calvin, to keep her mother happy); Mel and Jeff and the boys; her boy, wherever he was—because she’d know if something had happened to any of them, the same way the Baltimore woman she’d had on the show last spring had known the precise moment her twin brother was killed in a small plane accident. Blue had been skeptical of the woman’s account when Peter first brought up the program idea, but it had proved out.

  If you were paying attention, the woman claimed, you could tune in to all kinds of things. Music on nearby radio stations, TV broadcasts, even other people’s thoughts—not mind reading per se, but “perceptive awareness,” she’d called it. Blue hadn’t said so, but she’d had one somewhat similar experience of her own: Three years before, she’d fallen asleep on a flight to London and dreamt of a grand house with a lake view, a white canvas tent set up on a clipped lawn, a party underway; a young man in cap and gown stood on the flagstone walk, welcoming an old man in a fine navy suit. It was nothing like her usual dreams—no story, no muddled emotions. She’d awakened certain that she had seen her son, a vision, not a dream. She was so persuaded of this truth that a week later she’d hired Branford, to prove it.

  Whereas last night’s dream persuaded her of nothing except to drink less before bed.

  She phoned down to the restaurant for room service. Grapefruit juice and a hard-boiled egg would do. Then she checked her email, half hoping Branford had jumped protocol and sent her some kind of optimis
tic update. Made it to West Virginia, found M’s daughter waiting up with files in hand. He hadn’t; in fact, everything in her inbox was work-related, except for one message from her mother. The subject line read, “Gone Fishin’” and there was an attachment. Probably junk, but with her mother, she never knew for sure. She opened the message.

  We had a whim. See pic. Much love.

  The attachment, a photo, showed her mother and Calvin sitting side-by-side in a painted gondola, a canal stretching out behind them. Her mother’s hand trailed in the water.

  Venice. Their whim was Venice.

  What was their world coming to, when her mother was running off to Italy with a man she’d only just met at the same time Blue was spending two million dollars on a house she’d only just seen? A house she’d visited last night in a dreamy mist, with a man she would not think about further. A house only a half-mile away from Mitch’s parents’.

  She hoped she and her mother both knew what they were doing.

  When her breakfast arrived, she was showered and dressed and ready, more or less, to face the day. She would spend the morning helping Mitch with the Lions pilot in whatever ways she could, then meet Lila Shefford at the closing attorney’s office at one. They’d expedited everything. Her own lawyer had overnighted the check; all she had to do was show up and write her name a few times, and then Lila would hand over the keys. Just like that, she’d own her fifth home.

  Melody might be willing to stay at this one. That Jeff didn’t fly had been Mel’s excuse for why they had never accepted her offers to use any of her homes when she wasn’t there. Blue was sure, though, that Mel preferred to avoid feeling like the poor relative, unable to enjoy what Blue had because she was preoccupied by what she and Jeff had not. Mel couldn’t have any objections to staying in a charming, unassuming house in Key West; despite its cost, it was no finer than Mel and Jeff’s house, and half the size. An ideal place for a couple who could finally vacation without their children.