How good it would feel to call her sister that minute, share her excitement about the house and offer the use of it. She wished she felt she could make such a call. Wished Mel were not so threatened by her success. Why did Mel undervalue the riches of her own life—steady, true Jeff; two well-adjusted sons; a close-knit community that gathered often for fish boils and festivals and fund-raisers? Melody had a good, honest life, something to feel proud of.
In the beginning, Blue had been eager to share every success with her sister. When the show went into syndication and she bought her New York loft, she’d called Mel and Jeff to offer its use to them, thinking Mel would leap at the chance to stay free in New York. Before the farm, before Jeff, Mel had dreamed of designing edgy clothes, living in Greenwich Village, seeing shows off-off-Broadway and eating Chinese food every day. It was this goal, Mel had liked to say, that got her through the boring-ass days of her senior year. Then she’d met Jeff, and Jeff dreamed of owning his own spread, and Mel was so impressed with Jeff that she adopted his dream, dirt, weeds, worms, and all. Blue, though, was sure Mel hadn’t forgotten the appeal of New York. The day Blue’s offer on the Soho apartment got accepted, she’d call Mel and said, “It’s just a few blocks from where you used to want to live, remember? You and Jeff can stay there anytime you like—see the shows, order Chinese take-out—”
“I’m sure happy for you and that thirty-million-dollar salary raise you just got,” Mel said. “But People hasn’t run my story yet, on how we haven’t had rain in three months. It’s a dust bowl up here. Do you know what drought like this does to the beans? To our income? We’ll be lucky if we can keep the fuel oil tank filled this winter.”
“Oh. I didn’t—I mean, look, let me send you some—”
“I’m not looking for pity, and we don’t need anyone’s charity, Harmony Blue. We’ve got this far on our own, you know; two hundred acres isn’t a hobby farm.”
“It’s not charity. I have more money than I need, so why not—”
“I’m glad for you. Enjoy it. I gotta go.”
Mel was right to be cranky, Blue understood that. In her eagerness, she’d failed to see her sister’s point of view, failed to appreciate how widely the gulf had opened between them. She’d tried to be more considerate since then.
Unless something had changed Mel’s attitude—and Blue worried that years of plentiful rainfall and, now, a good lease deal with Green Giant wasn’t enough for that—this new house would, in Mel’s eyes, be just one more bauble for Blue’s collection. One more thing Blue didn’t need, one more extravagance highlighting their wildly divergent paths.
Suppose Mel knew the truth about what Blue didn’t have, couldn’t buy … ?
Then she’d know what a fraud her big sister was. Better to leave it alone.
“Onward,” she said, tucking her phone in her pocket and taking her egg to eat on the way.
loud cover filtered the morning sunlight, softening the lines of the shops and houses of Whitehead Street. The flora—she would have to check that guidebook, learn some plant names—seemed saturated with color. If she picked a leaf from a shrub and squeezed it, surely green would ooze through her fingers and drip onto the cool pavement.
From the sidewalk in front of the Hemingway Home’s entrance, she saw Julian standing in the open side yard, his back to her, adjusting a tripod. Balanced atop it was a small video camera—smaller by far than what her crew used. She couldn’t see Mitch yet, nor any of her crew, though the presence of light towers and a pair of screens suggested they were nearby.
“Good morning,” she called as she reached the porch.
Julian turned, glanced at her, looked away. “Good morning.”
“Did somebody drop the ball? My crew was supposed to set you up with our camera equipment.”
“This was all I wanted,” he said.
“Oh. All right. Where’s your dad?”
A shadow of displeasure crossed his face, so quickly she wasn’t certain it was displeasure—not certain it was a shadow, for that matter. “Inside,” he said, nodding toward the house. A colorful rooster strutted by them in the grass.
“Everything ready to go?”
“Yep.”
“Great,” she said, wanting to end the exchange. Yet she continued to stand there, searching for something more to say. Just to be friendly (she wanted to believe this explained the urge) after the favor he’d done her last night, the pleasant hour they’d shared. “Did you manage to get some sleep?”
“Some,” he said. His hand rested, still, on one of the tripod’s knobs.
She had the feeling he would like her to move along, if not leave altogether. Fine. That was fine with her. “Well, good,” she said. “I’ll just, um, go in and say hello.”
“Okay.”
A quick look behind her as she opened the door confirmed her feeling that he not only wasn’t watching her, he was engrossed in getting the camera set—not that such a simple camera could take that much effort.
Inside the foyer was Mitch, one of her crewmen, and two museum volunteers, all four of them with Styrofoam cups in hand. Mitch’s face lit up when he saw her, provoking her to smile, too.
He said, “Good morning!”
“Hi,” she said, nodding to the other three. “I see you’ve all fortified yourselves.”
The mustached volunteer, who she knew from yesterday was a regular porch-sitting Hemingway look-alike, held his cup aloft and said, “Cuban coffee—don’t tell me you’re not hooked.”
“I’m supposed to avoid all caffeine,” she said, though the rich scent was making her want to revert to old habits.
“Good God, that’s inhumane.”
This morning she could not agree more. “So, what’s the schedule? Looks like Julian’s just about ready, out there.”
Mitch said, “He was out the door before I even got up this morning. Did everything go all right last night?”
She looked past Mitch, to the tall screened doors of the living room, and Julian outside. “Yes. Fine.”
“Glad to hear it. He seemed a little antisocial, and—”
“No, really, he was pleasant.” There was that word again. “And you? Did you all have a good time? Who won the pool tournament?”
“God knows. By the time we left, no one was keeping track of anything except who would buy the next round.”
“You don’t look any worse for the wear.” He looked very good, in fact. Engaging. Warm. The Mitch she remembered from long past.
He said, “You look very nice yourself. That color’s good on you.”
The look-alike volunteer said, “Can I get in on this mutual admiration society?”
“I will admire you very much,” Blue said, “if you can tell me where to find a cup of that coffee.”
Outside, Mitch positioned himself in front of the house while Julian double-checked the lighting and sound. Blue, now fortified with a cup of coffee herself, took the opportunity to assess him more fully than she’d done this week. He looked nervous at the moment, but he was without question more handsome than he’d been in his late twenties. As with so many men, the silvering of his temples and the lines around his eyes gave him character and dimension.
Julian, she noticed, looked almost nothing like Mitch. His eyes were darker, his hair was darker, he had fuller lips, a more pronounced nose, and bigger bone structure overall. Both of them were attractive; Mitch, however, was camera-ready
He noticed her watching him and smiled nervously. “Any tips?”
“Try running through the first bit without the camera on,” she suggested.
Mitch wiped his hands on the back of his pants. “Okay—good idea. J, just stand there but don’t film, okay? I’m going to run through the intro.”
He started, sounding confident for a moment before beginning to stammer. He stopped. “Shit, that was pretty lousy. Let me try again.” Again, he began well, then lost his concentration.
“Hell, I’m never going to get this right.”
“Maybe not, but you’ll have treated us to every swearword in the process,” she laughed. “Here, let me show you something.” She went to him and stood arm-to-arm, looking out toward the camera and avoiding Julian’s eyes.
This close to Mitch, she could smell soap and fabric softener, feel the heat of him through his shirtsleeve. An odd intimacy she couldn’t process just now. She pointed at the camera. “Okay, that’s your favorite student, the most promising kid you’ve had, ever. Give me a name.”
“What? Oh—um, Alicia. She’s astonishing, a prodigy, really; only twenty and almost done with her PhD.”
“Great. That’s Alicia, and she’s hanging on every word you say, right? She’s so glad she got to come to Key West and see where her literary idol came up with so many remarkable stories. She’s waiting for you to dazzle her.” She looked at him, modeling confidence. “Okay?”
Mitch’s face relaxed, and he smiled. “That’s brilliant.”
Blue backed away, out of the camera’s range. “I know. Do it.”
Julian said, “I’m going to shoot. In case he gets it on the first try.”
Mitch looked up into the trees, breathed deep, looked at the camera, and nodded.
This time, he was far more convincing. When he finished, she said, “Hey, that was terrific. Now, have another swig of that coffee and do it again.”
“Again?” Julian said. “That was really solid.”
“It was. Now that he knows he can do it, he’ll be even more engaging on the next take.”
Mitch said, “Maybe we should move on and then come back to it later if there’s time. I don’t want to waste half our day on the intro.”
She disagreed. “I’m not saying your prospective producers won’t watch the entire pilot, but look: If the first ten minutes don’t absolutely persuade them that you’re the guy and this is the show, you might as well not shoot the rest of it. Maybe that’s not fair, but that’s how this stuff goes.”
“That’s showbiz for you,” Julian said. He leaned down and put his eye to the viewer. “Ready.”
Blue gave Mitch a sympathetic smile. “Remember: Alicia’s waiting for you to prove she was right to choose Carolina and you over, um, what, Princeton? Harvard?”
He nodded and started again.
She watched, satisfied that he was warming to the task. Everything about this project looked promising. Julian had lit the set expertly, lending brightness without glare and making Mitch appear engaging. Mitch sounded clear and knowledgeable, a man enamored of his subject.
She wondered if she was irritating Julian with her direction. Even if she was, the outcome was proving her right. Just as Morgan had once advised her, no viewer would care about her words unless she pulled that viewer right through their television and into her world, whatever and wherever it might be. People thought it was easy—she’d thought it would be; she’d thought that all she had to do was face the camera and talk without flubbing the report. When she’d tried it that way, the results were snooze-worthy It hadn’t mattered that her hair was lustrous and her body lean, as unmarked as it had been before she’d gone off track and had a child. It hadn’t mattered that when she looked in the mirror, she saw herself as a contender.
I will be Diane Sawyer, she would say. I will be Barbara Walters. Even so, the results of her early assignments declared that she would remain a junior reporter whose best jobs were found-pet stories and the recounting of the minutes of suburban town hall meetings. Something needed to change.
Morgan’s advice had been for her to visualize the camera as one ideal viewer, someone she wanted to impress. She had visualized Mitch, a fact that now had a new, strangely fateful significance. That moment leading to this moment—was there not a strong message in all this that she should be attending to?
She would think, See what you’re missing?, giving the camera her best intense look. What you could’ve had? If he hadn’t dumped her, she would never have abandoned her good sense. There would have been no pregnancy and no adoption and no desperate need to reinvent herself as someone who mattered. In an alchemy of energy, she’d transmuted her anger at him, at herself, into determination. If she would never become a Forrester, then she would become something far grander. If not a princess like Cinderella, then a queen, like Elizabeth. She would use success not as revenge but as refuge.
It had worked.
Just as her advice to Mitch was working now.
He finished, and she applauded. “Give that man an Emmy.”
He bowed. “That felt great,” he said, as the crewman joined Julian to begin disassembling equipment and moving it indoors.
“You have the knack.” Certainly as much as most of the rest of television’s hosts, and, with practice, maybe he’d develop a persona that viewers would tune in for regardless of their interest—or lack of interest—in Herman Melville or Robert Frost.
“Thank you for being here, for shortcutting this for me in yet another way.”
She said, “It’s nothing.” It was becoming quite apparent, though, that it was something, more than just a good distraction while she waited on Branford. What, though?
“Really, Blue. This is awfully generous. After how I treated you—”
She waved away his concern. “Twenty years ago. Things didn’t work out, so what? It happens all the time.”
“Especially to me,” he joked.
“So why shouldn’t I help out an old friend, if I believe in what he’s doing?”
“Some women would as soon pull out their own manicured fingernails.”
“Well, I guess I’m not them.”
“No,” he said, “you are definitely not like other women.”
A negative, in her view. It was time for a change. “With your permission, I’d like to see whether my team at Harmony might have some interest in the series.” The offer was genuine, and if it created yet another thread of reconnection in the process, that would be more evidence for her developing theory. “What do you think?”
Julian approached, the camera under his arm and the tripod in his hands. As he pushed past them, he said, “Get one of those light towers, would you?”
Mitch waited until Julian was inside, then said, “I’m overwhelmed, Blue. This has been quite a week. Nothing is turning out at all the way I’d imagined it.”
18
t three o’clock Saturday afternoon, Blue was standing at the gate of her newest house, keys in hand. She had felt no trepidation in signing the paperwork, none in turning over the check with its seven figures. So why were her hands trembling now?
Rain fell, light but steady, pattering the umbrella she’d taken at Lila Shefford’s insistence. The commission Lila had just earned from this one sale was literally ten times Blue’s first-year salary at WLVC; the woman could afford to give away an umbrella. Blue was glad she’d taken it and walked the seven blocks. She was part of Key West now, an actual homeowner. No car ride would convey that feeling the way a walk over wet pavement, across—or through—puddles, past crowing roosters and a soaked but jovial mutt could, and did.
The gate’s latch slid easily. The gate itself moved easily, swinging wide open, inviting her to take ownership. She wiped her hand on her shirt and stepped onto the brick path. One step, another, until she was clear of the gate. She pushed it closed behind her.
A soft clicking from above drew her attention; there, beneath the sheltering umbrella of a banana-tree branch, sat a brilliant red macaw.
“Well hello,” Blue said. “Make yourself right at home.”
The bird cocked its head at the sound of her voice, then went back to preening its damp feathers.
She walked the rest of the way to the porch, stepped up, closed the umbrella and leaned it against the wall. The light was low here, close, and she fitted the key into the lock, wondering who else had done exactly the same thing in exactly this same spot, and whether they, too, had felt safe, protected as they turned the knob and knew they were home.
For th
e better part of an hour, she went from room to room slowly, looking each one over, noting the wide moldings at baseboard, door-jambs, ceilings, windowsills. The millwork, all hand-done in the very late 1800s, looked as though it would endure several centuries to come. The floors, too. Lila had said the flooring was made up entirely of reclaimed wood from wrecked European ships; this parlor floor, then, upon which she was standing, might well once have been a tree that shaded a valley cottage in Switzerland, or a stone farmhouse in an English copse. Later, it had been sawn, sanded, shaped into decking on a vessel that had carried people across thousands of miles of ocean—many times, probably—until some unfortunate night when the odds caught up with it. A storm? A battle? Who had been on the ship then? Who had lost their fortunes, who their lives?
“There are stories here,” she said, and her voice filled the small room.
Then her phone rang.
The caller’s number was the one she’d been waiting all day to see; her heart lurched. “Hello?”
“You know the code?”
She had to think. “Oh, Louisville, right?”
“Sorry for the delay. I had a small crisis at home—my daughter jumped off a swing and broke her arm when she landed.”
Blue sank to the floor and sat, legs folded. “But she’s all right? Do you need to go back?”
“No, she’s fine. Just wanted me on the phone with her while she waited for X-rays and all that.”
“So then, did you meet the woman, Meredith’s daughter?” Surely her heart would drum a hole through her ribs if it beat any harder than it was beating now.
“Well, her pastor showed up about two minutes after I did. It was a hard sell, getting her to agree to talk with me later, once she knew I was there to inquire about her mother’s records. I had to double my first offer.” He sighed. “I wonder if I’m losing my touch. Maybe I should retire. Do you think?”
She could not care less if he retired, as long as he did it after his work for her was done. “Did you go back yet, or—?”
“Just left her place three minutes ago. Spotless, but depressing. You know the type? Small, dark, shades always pulled so the neighbors can’t see her watching HBO or something.”
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