“And?”
“And she’s got the records. Well, she can get them, I should say. Some of them for sure—I guess the mother’s basement is piled with file boxes—but she didn’t know how far back they go. And of course she couldn’t say how long it would take, but she promised she would search for records from the date range I gave and get back to me.”
Blue pulled her knees to her chest. There were boxes in some basement in West Virginia, one of which might hold the answer to years of anxious suspense. Her medical file, possibly with the adopting parents’ names written down somewhere, or maybe typed out, dark, precise revelations on white paper. Possibly along with their address.
Possibly along with nothing.
No strings. No trail.
“Okay, well, we’re closer,” she said.
“That we are. And look: If she won’t cooperate or there’s nothing there, you could still try going through the courts. If you were willing to go public, obviously.”
“That’s just not a possibility.” Her throat felt tight, and she swallowed to relieve the pressure.
“I know, I respect your position,” Branford said. “I was just saying. I hate to think of you wondering forever. So okay, I’ll keep on it, and maybe have something concrete for you real soon. No promises, of course.”
“Of course.” Never promises.
A beep sounded in her ear. “I have another call.” Her mother, the display showed. “I need to take it,” she said. “Keep me posted.”
“Absolutely.”
Her mother’s first question was, “Did you see my email?”
“The gondola picture?”
“Yes! Isn’t that so cool? Venice is … well, it’s not without its odor problems—cool, breezy weather is best. But even so, the city is amazing.”
“Are you back home?”
“No—we have a Monday morning flight. I just had to call to tell you, I’m getting married!”
“You’re not.”
“Yep I am. We are. Calvin proposed … let’s see … twenty-four minutes ago. We were—well, I’ll spare you the details—but I will say, he promised me a ring when we get back, because, you know, he knows a guy or something. Right now I’m going to call your sister, then Calvin and I are going out to get matching tattoos. I’ll tell you everything when I’m home, but I wanted you to know right away.”
“Mom—”
“Calvin’s dressed, I have to run. Much love.”
Much love. Blue tossed the phone and watched it slide over the bare floor, stopping in front of the tiny fireplace. She hadn’t even had a chance to tell her mother about the house.
She pushed her legs out in front of her, then lay back, feeling the cool wood where it contacted her shoulder blades, the back of her head. With palms spread and pressed to the floor, she looked up at the smooth ceiling. Its blankness soothed, the visual equivalent of the warm milk her grandmother had made for her when she was small.
Kate, her grandmother, had believed that three was a spiritual number. “Not only because of the Trinity, though there is that proof,” she’d say, but also because three was Nature’s number. The sun, the moon, the stars. Air, water, land. Red, blue, yellow. “Paper, rock, scissors,” Blue had said once, wanting to contribute her own wisdom, and her grandmother had laughed so hard that tea had come out her nose.
News always came in fits of threes, she’d said. If Blue had been paying attention, she might have anticipated her mother’s call, or something like it. First was the Forresters and Mitch, second was Branford—and now, third, the engagement.
Her mother was getting married.
It was lucky the cosmic number wasn’t four.
Part 3
Where so many hours have been spent
in convincing myself that I am right,
is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
JANE AUSTEN
19
fter spending most of the week at Harmony Studios editing the Lions pilot, adding historical footage and graphics using software he could only dream about before, Julian was taking Thursday off to see his mother. He rolled out of bed, put on a pair of gym socks and an old University of North Carolina sweatshirt, and turned up the heat. Soon the radiators were ticking with the promise of warmth—unlike the early April weather pattern, which was treating Chicago to a continuing wave of arctic chill. Spring was taking its sweet time coming to the Midwest. He was almost looking forward to leaving for Iraq—not that his trip was going to be any kind of tropical vacation; the temps would, however, be warm. Hot, in fact, and windy and dry.
Better that than this cold, and the sloppy, slushy dregs of winter still hanging around the streets and alleys, plastered to curbs and the bases of signposts. If he had any sort of view from his place—a view, say, like the one Blue’s office was said to have (she hadn’t asked him in, had hardly spoken to him, in fact)—he might be more eager to stay. A great view, a good reason, and the absence of crisis that was sure to follow his visit with his mom this afternoon. Once he told her what might be in store with Lions—and he had to tell her so she wouldn’t later accuse him of keeping secrets—she would be spitting venom for who knew how long. He would be glad to go riding around in armored vehicles, wearing night-vision goggles, glad to be sleeping, once again, on a cot.
When the coffee finished perking, he poured a cup and leaned against the counter. A series of heavy thuds sounded above his head. Whump. Whump. Pause. Whump-whump. He waited; the rambunctious four-year-old boy upstairs was slamming cupboard doors, he was pretty sure. Another thud, this one louder by far than its precursors, and then a wail that said the kid had jumped or fallen from the counter and was hurt. Julian waited to hear the mother, a twenty-year-old he’d heard was about to be evicted, come tend to him, then heard her yelling from her bedroom, the room right above his own. The boy yelled back, I wasn’t! and continued to cry, but less sincerely. Julian opened the broom closet next to his refrigerator, took the broom out, and used the handle to rap against the ceiling. He did it playfully, tapping a rhythm, and knew he had the boy’s attention when the crying stopped. He tapped again. A silent moment—and then the boy tapped back.
He picked up his mug and went to shave.
In a half-hour he was dressed and standing on the train platform with other clean-shaven men. The younger ones carried leather-look briefcases and wore suits that approximated the suits of the men they hoped to one day replace in jobs at banks and law firms and insurance agencies. They had the Sun-Times or Wall Street Journal tucked under their arms and spoke to seemingly no one using earpiece phones, a scene reminiscent of some of the science fiction he’d read as a teen.
He was decidedly unambitious looking, he knew, in his jeans and running shoes and down-filled vest. More like the trio of teens who appeared to be cutting class than like the strivers. Like a guy who didn’t have any direction beyond boarding the train and getting off somewhere nicer. Only the camera resting against his chest delineated him—and that as tourist, because who else would think there was anything to photograph here on an old platform at eight-fifteen in the morning?
He lifted the camera and aimed it past the southbound track, at the sagging wooden stairs clinging to the backs of stained brick buildings. At the top of one flight, maybe four stories up, was a Red-tailed Hawk perched with talons wrapped around the rotting wood rail. The breeze ruffled its neck feathers as it turned its head. The hunting would be good here, done between the rumbling arrivals and departures of commuter trains. Where there were humans, there was garbage, and where there was garbage, there were rats. There wasn’t a city he’d ever been in where this wasn’t the case, and where he hadn’t gotten some great close shots of hawks and owls and ospreys.
Alec had a theory, after seeing his urban-birds portfolio during a Chicago layover a few years back: “You identify with them,” he’d said.
“What, with the birds?”
Alec nodded. “I think so. These raptors are loners with keen
eyes, and they like to stay above it all, zooming in on their targets when the time’s right.”
“Okay, smart guy, then explain my other bird shots.” He’d pulled out another fat portfolio album and opened it randomly. “Here. Arctic loons in Bosnia.”
“Loners, divers.”
“Okay—bad example.” He flipped to another page. “Canadian geese. I have some terrific geese shots.”
“You don’t give a rip about geese. That was practice.”
That was true.
This hawk stretched its wings and he snapped a series as it readied to dive, and then it was gone. He capped his lens just as the platform began to vibrate with the approaching train.
His mom was waiting in her car at the Evanston station. She waved eagerly when she saw him; today was a good day, he could see it in how bright her eyes looked. He hated to change that with his news.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she said when he got in the car. “It’s so nice to see you ahead of schedule.”
“You look great.” He kissed her cheek.
“New earrings.” She twisted her head so that her silver-and-turquoise earrings swung, bouncing against a jawline that had drooped over the years. She was still attractive, times like this when she felt up to showering and dressing in what she called “out” clothes, wearing jewelry and makeup, too. She looked like any other fifty-something woman—maybe a little harder worn, if you looked closely at the deep lines in her forehead, the creases beside her nose and mouth. Who escaped trouble, though? Hardly anyone. There were a lucky few—like Blue—but the rest of the world had to struggle, on one level or another. Some on every level. There was no justice, and possibly no God, though he would dearly love to think otherwise.
They drove to her house, the house where he’d lived for most of his early years. It was a split-level on a small lot, the maples grown forty feet tall now, their bare branches etched across the sky above the dandelion-filled yard.
She pulled up to the garage and parked. “Do you think you can get the gutters done before you leave?”
“What, today?”
“Yes, yes today—actually, let’s do it first thing. We’ll borrow Marvin’s ladder, you can run the hose up there. I think I have a robin nesting up front, above my bedroom window, and that’s just a catastrophe waiting to happen if she lays eggs.”
“Okay, sure.” He understood impending catastrophe, had lived in a perpetual state of it for as long as he could remember.
“I hope it’s not too late already. Or maybe you could move the nest…” She went on talking about the pros and cons of relocating the nest while he unreeled the hose and then went to Marvin’s, next door, for the ladder. Finally he said, “Mom, let’s take it one thing at a time, all right? Let me get a look. Maybe there’s no nest at all.”
There was a nest, but no eggs. So while she was unhappy about ruining it, thwarting the robin’s hard work, she felt the action was justified. Ultimately, they were doing all the birds a favor, she said, watching him throw debris from the gutters onto the still-brown grass.
She said this again two hours later, when he sat down for lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup.
“Absolutely,” he agreed, dunking his sandwich.
“They’ll build someplace else, someplace safer.”
“They will.”
“I’m so glad you could get that done.”
Her look of relief was so real it pained him. How was he supposed to now tell her that his father’s life might soon become exponentially more wonderful than it had been before—which, compared to her life, was so cushy already? The prospect of PBS was one thing; a big-budget commercial production would be something else altogether.
He could wait, see what actually panned out… But putting it off any longer was its own recipe for disaster. Best to just give the bitter pill and commit to hanging around until the effects wore off.
“So, Mom, remember that thing I told you I would be doing with Dad this fall? The TV project?”
“What, that Hemingway thing?”
“It’s Hemingway and several others. A whole series is what he’s got planned.”
“Okay.” She cleared the dishes and turned on the water to wash them right away.
He got the dish towel and stood beside her. “Right, so, I stopped off at Daniel and Lynn’s before coming home—”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“No, well, it was just for the weekend. Really, it was completely last-minute. Dad was there to check out some Hemingway-related stuff and, coincidentally, Blue Reynolds was there—”
“Doing her show on location, I know. I saw some of that! They had Jimmy Buffett on—he did that funny song, the cheeseburger one.”
“So, it turns out she and Dad go way back, and, long story short, she thought she could help him with the series—”
“Way back to when?”
“What? Oh. I guess to when he still lived here in Chicago.”
This information stopped her questions for a moment. She stood very still, looking at him but not at him, then she said, “No; the show’s just ten years old, they did an anniversary special last fall.”
“It was before the show, when she was pretty young, Daniel said. Anyway,” he pushed on, wanting to get her off whatever anxious track she was poised to go down, “Blue’s production company—”
“Harmony. Her company, it’s called Harmony Productions, the logo’s at the end of every show. Wait—” She put her hand out. “Just hold on.”
Oh hell, here she goes.
“Don’t tell me she’s Harmony Blue … something. It wasn’t Reynolds … but what was it? Something Polish or Italian …” She looked up. “Right? Am I right? Harmony Blue is her real name?”
“I gather,” he said, puzzled by the tack she’d taken. What did this have to do with anything?
“She was the one he was dating the winter before he moved,” she said, nodding. “I can’t believe I never put it together before—but why would I? God, it was at least a dozen years later …”
“What was?”
“The show. And I didn’t start watching until, oh, maybe the fourth season. It never even crossed my mind—the ‘Harmony’ Productions, and the ‘Blue’ …”
Julian was sure she was about to discover her way right off a cliff—but instead, she drew him back to the kitchen table. “Come sit down. I have to tell you something I should have told you a long time ago.”
Nothing had been going right that winter when he was ten, she said. She’d slipped on the icy back steps and broken her wrist just before Christmas, which meant she couldn’t work (she was doing temp secretarial work then) which meant she couldn’t pay her January bills until at least February, which would lead to trying to catch up February’s and failing to cover March, April… who knew where it would end? Yes, she got child support and his father was paying half the mortgage, but she didn’t have a stable income let alone a career; he, Julian was her career, and he was being difficult, too. Always wanting to know when he could see his father, making her feel so inadequate, making her angry at Mitch, making her want to punish both father and son, even though she knew it was wrong.
She said, “Why did he get to be your favorite, that’s what I couldn’t understand. So, you know, I thought, well, if you saw less of him and more of me, you’d remember how much fun we had together when you were little, before you went to school.”
“Mom … I didn’t—I mean, it wasn’t like …” He stopped. What was he supposed to say?
“No, honey, listen, it wasn’t you. I’m trying to say, I did the wrong thing, but that’s how I was thinking at the time.”
Sometime in January or February, his father had come over unannounced. Fed up, but calm. He had a right to see his kid every weekend, it was part of their divorce order and if he had to, he’d bring in the sheriff to enforce it. What was her problem anyway, he wanted to know. He had gotten on with his life long ago, he told her, and she ought to get on with hers. D
ate. Go back to school. Something that would take her out of the walled world she’d built for herself.
“I demanded to know who he was seeing—as if I had the right, you know? I made a lot of noise about how his choices affected your well-being, and they did, but really I was just seething with jealousy—seven years after our divorce, and I still wasn’t over it. Oh, I was awful.” She’d made him tell her everything about the woman. A nineteen-year-old who worked for Lynn, whose name was very odd, she’d thought. Harmony Blue, like a flower child, a hippie with no morals and no shame.
She’d latched on to that image, she said, and even though his father assured her that this young woman was in every way a good person and would be a good influence on a young boy, she had made him out to be a pedophile.
“I told him I would get a restraining order, can you imagine? I’d go back to court for full custody and demand supervised visitation. Oh, I was awful, waving my cast around and threatening that if he kept carrying on with a child, he’d never see you again.”
She put her hands on the table, leaned down and pressed her forehead to the Formica. Julian stared, unsure what to do, what to say. It was awful, what she’d done to his dad, to Blue—who must have been devastated. It was awful all the way around.
With her head still down, she said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, no, not okay.” She sat up again and looked at him. “Not okay. It gets worse. I blabbed it to the head of his department, to the dean, to everyone at Northwestern whose name I knew. I said they couldn’t trust him, that I knew for a fact he’d slept with several of his students.
“It was pure vindictiveness, not a bit of truth. I was … way out of balance. It’s not okay, but, it’s done. The counselors have always said, accept the crime and its unchangeability Then accept that from this minute, I can choose a crime-free life.”
“Mom, you’re not a criminal.”
“Oh no?”
He shook his head, though with less conviction than he’d intended. So many things were coming clear to him now. “That’s why Dad moved, then?”
Reunion Page 18