Reunion

by Therese Fowler

  His camera gear had its own two cases; those were packed and locked and waiting on the kitchen table. Though he was bringing three cameras, probably he’d be reduced to using a single one for most of his work in Iraq. Close quarters and frequent movement pretty much guaranteed that once they left the base he’d be traveling light. He was taking extra gear anyway, now that he’d given himself some time to go roaming before the assignment began. There were still several Middle Eastern birds he hoped to spot, birds he hadn’t seen in Afghanistan; with Iraq at roughly the same latitude and of similar climate, much of the bird population would be alike.

  In particular, he was looking for the rare Red-backed Shrike, known by its eponymous back and thick black eye stripe, and then also the Blue-cheeked Bee-eater, with its black-in-white eye stripe, rufous throat, pale blue face, blue rump, green wings. A true beauty that wintered in Africa but should, by now, be back. Wouldn’t Blue be impressed with that one?

  Not that it mattered to him one way or the other.

  His father came into the living room, pulling his suitcase behind him. “All set?”

  “Yep.”

  “Here, look at this …” His father handed him a section of the newspaper. On the front was a photo of a kissing couple.

  “Ah,” he handed it back quickly. “So the flowers worked.”

  His father smiled. “You’ll have email access, right? I’ll send you Blue’s email address in case you think of anything more to put into the prospectus. I’m hopeless with the technicalities.”

  “My BlackBerry is pretty much an everywhere tool, so, yeah. I should have email, and phone, too. No telling if I’ll be able to answer …”

  “About that. You’re going to have to be hard-nosed about not following the troops into any gun battles—you don’t have to prove your manliness. I mean, you only have nine fingers left. Seems like you’ll need most of them for your work.”

  “Nah,” Julian said, playing off the light tone his father was trying for, “I bet I could get by with maybe six, depending which six they were.”

  “I’d feel better knowing you won’t be taking the chance.”

  “Dad, I’ll be fine. I’ve been in a lot of ugly places, I know what’s what.”

  His father nodded. “Just… just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “I will be,” he said. “You, too.”

  n route to Iraq, he did his best to clear his head of all domestic nuisances. None of it made a difference to the way he lived his life, after all. Until a few months ago, he had hardly given his father a passing thought—and Blue Reynolds none at all. Then he’d agreed to do Lions. What he ought to be occupied with was whether to buy the new Nikon lens he kept hearing about. That, and what the troops in Iraq liked to do when they were off patrol. He should be thinking of how to finagle another assignment to Bangladesh, to Hanoi, to one of the research stations in Antarctica—he’d never been to the bottom of the Earth. Though, really, what was there to photograph? Penguins, maybe. Whales. No matter, he could find something.

  The U.S. air base in Iraq looked more or less like every other desert base he’d seen, so much so that once he was standing on the tarmac, he didn’t bother to do more than lift his camera and scan his surroundings. No need to document more dun-colored landscape, more Humvees, more razor wire, more army-green cargo jets, more tired young men with thick necks and haircuts so high and tight that in contrast he looked like a hippie. Maybe he looked like one regardless, if hippies sometimes wore photo vests with their jeans and zip-side boots.

  Behind him, a woman’s voice: “Are you Julian Forrester, the photographer assigned to our unit?”

  He swiveled and saw a surprisingly attractive woman. Thick blond hair bound up under an army cap that couldn’t quite disguise it, long slope of a nose that went well with the slope of her waist to her hips, apparent even within the bulky tan camo fatigues.

  “I am,” he said, letting go of his camera while he reached to shake her hand.

  “Lieutenant Jenna Davies. I’m the battalion’s liaison officer.”

  “Good to meet you.”

  “Same here.” Her dimpled smile was an exclamation point.

  “How long have you been in-country?”

  “Four months. Interesting work, but I miss trees, you know?”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Oregon. But who knows when that will be true again?” she said. “We’ve got some in-briefing tasks to get through before I turn you over to the battalion commander. Come along this way.”

  He fell into step with her. She talked as they walked through the camp, pointing out the essentials. Her voice was high—distractingly, so that he paid attention to it, and to his curiosity about how she’d come to be an Army officer rather than some other type of professional dressed in a skirt suit and heels that would, he was certain, show off the long slope of lean calves.

  A woman with her looks electing to serve in the military was an incongruity that interested him. A sexist-sounding question, he was aware. He wouldn’t ask it. If he did, though, he’d mean no disrespect. She interested him—just not the way she might have if he wasn’t unwisely preoccupied with a different beautiful and interesting woman.

  Who right now was surely preoccupied with thoughts of his father.

  Just before Lieutenant Davies led him into the HQ tent, a flash of color caught his eye. He stopped and squinted, shading his eyes to see better: a bird, but which one, and where had it gone? He scanned the near horizon of temporary power poles, wires running from poles to tents, poles to tents—there, it had landed on a wire some fifty yards out.

  “Hang on,” he said, stooping to get his telephoto lens out and onto the camera while keeping one eye on the bird. Then he found it in the viewer, focused, shot. Half a dozen more frames. The bird leaned around to preen its wing, then turned obligingly so that he got a clear shot of its back. The hazy sky behind it was a good contrast for its vivid colors, and before he had the lens packed away again, he was envisioning a triptych made with this bird, the shrike, and the colorful Indian roller, all done in black mats with olive-wood frames.

  “That,” he said, pointing, “is a Blue-cheeked Bee-eater. It’s a migrant.”

  “Do you know the names of all the local birds?”

  He looked at her, the way her so-blond eyebrows were raised in a giveaway is-he-a-geek? expression. “Plants, too,” he said. “And fish. And the capital cities of pretty much every country including the post-Soviet ones.”

  “Wow,” she laughed. “Impressive.”

  Her eyes were an amazing color, like thick ice beneath bright sunshine. Assuming she signed a release waiver, he’d have magazine editors falling in love with her in no time. He imagined a caption: The New Face of the U.S. Army?

  “Right this way,” she said.

  24

  s if Blue didn’t appreciate it fully, on Wednesday Peter reminded her four times just what a coup it was to have Robert De Niro on this afternoon’s show. And she didn’t appreciate it fully, because while she was trying to keep the show’s focus on the press-shy actor, he was determined to turn the tables.

  She’d just asked him how he was doing. “Forget how I’m doing,” he said, that bit of New York gravel in his voice. They sat in identical armchairs that were angled to let them face each other and the audience. “I saw your prom pictures in the Post—you’re the one making news. Is there a slide you can put up?” he asked Peter, who stood next to a monitor in the wings. The audience cheered.

  Blue shook her head at Peter and said, “Now come on. Who I’m dating isn’t newsworthy. Tell me what’s happening in Tribeca.”

  “You should bring the new guy around and see what’s happening firsthand. We’ll have lunch at the Grill. What’s his name?”

  Blue ignored the question, asking, “How’s business at the Grill?” The audience laughed, loving the banter.

  “No, come on now,” he said. “I’ll need to know it when I see him, right? He looks like a
good kisser, by the way.”

  Cheers erupted, and someone yelled out, “His name is Mitch!”

  “Yeah? Mitch? I like it.”

  Blue sighed. There was no winning against his charm and the audience’s energy. She said, “Dr. Mitch Forrester, he’s an English professor, I’ve known him for a very long time, and it was just one date, okay? Now Bob, how about we at least mention that you have an exciting new film coming out…”

  Backstage afterward he said, “I hope I wasn’t too hard on you. You never talk about yourself. People, they like to know your life is good, that you have some happiness in it.”

  “You’re right. But now you owe me another visit so we can talk about you.”

  “I meant what I said. Come out to New York—come for the Film Festival. It’s a great time.”

  “I’ll check my schedule,” she said, hugging him before they parted, certain he was just as aware as she that neither of them had committed to anything.

  Next on her schedule was to check in with her sister and find out whether Melody preferred to wear fuchsia or yellow for their mother’s wedding. She understood that the task was less about accommodating their mother’s ceremony-design scheme than it was a scheme to make Blue and Mel converse about something. Anything. Their mother had said, “Weddings are about bringing people together for physical and spiritual connection—or reconnection, as the case may be.”

  How effectively she and Mel could connect over dress color remained to be seen. In a perfect world, the matter of a fuchsia dress or a yellow one would be at most a secondary concern for a pair of sisters who had, for what felt at the time like endless years, kept one another away from the abyss. They could see what might await them over the edge: loneliness, fear, arrest, pregnancy, addiction. They’d been tied together by shared bad luck, a tether that Blue had seen as unbreakable; if one stood, or one fell, so would the other. As it turned out, that had been just one more of her mistaken beliefs.

  She planned to make the call right after Branford, due in for a four-thirty meeting, left her office. Her secretary announced his arrival.

  Branford, who must be in his fifties, always looked shorter than she remembered, with deeper lines in his forehead, and less hair.

  “Well,” he said, walking up to where she stood at her desk. He clasped his hands in front of him. Calm. Reassuring. If only he could inject her with those elements so that the effect would remain after he left.

  “Let’s sit over there.” She pointed to the chairs grouped near the windows. Outside the nearer window was her access to the fire escape. At the center of the round coffee table in front of the chairs was her bird, the painted bunting.

  “Well,” he said again when they were seated. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. He had more hair on his knuckles than on his head. She stared at it, waiting for him to say more.

  “Well?”

  He looked up. “Well, she said she got through the funeral all right, with the help of God’s grace and her church community. She’s had visitors, and has been going to the homes of her friends for meals and prayer meetings, but she finally had a minute to go into her mother’s basement and thinks she’s seen the right box. She hasn’t dug it out, mind. But it looks like it could be the right one.”

  “Call me jaded, but does it sound to you like she’s asking for a bit more persuasion?”

  “She’s a receptionist for a well-digging company. Her mother had no life insurance policy,” he said.

  “I guess it’s hard to want to dig through boxes of medical files when you are overcome by grief, and life.”

  “It is.”

  “Really, I don’t mean to minimize her loss, but we already paid her pretty well.”

  He nodded. “She bought a lovely casket and got extra engraving on her mother’s grave monument.”

  Blue chewed the inside of her lip, then said, “Okay, offer her ten thousand to get the box out and carry it to wherever she can open it and view its contents. If she happens to discover something of value, she’ll get fifty grand more. God, I feel sleazy—I can’t wait for this to be resolved.”

  “Odds are good that this will do it.”

  Odds. Like the odds of a girl with irregular periods getting pregnant by accident? Like the odds that someone without strong religious conviction would still elect not to abort? She was not fond of playing the odds.

  Her email pinged. She stood up to go to her desk, saying, “Meantime, let me pay you what I owe you.” At her desk, she unlocked a drawer and took out a plain white envelope. He joined her there and she handed it to him. “You know how much I appreciate your efforts.”

  “Hey, to me, it’s a privilege. It’s not easy being you, I know that. People like you need people they can rely on. I don’t mind saying I take pride in what I do—even if, you know, I can’t exactly brag about it all to my friends.”

  He left, and still she put off calling Mel. In a perfect world, she and her sister would be the closest of friends and, if not quite that, then good friends and spirited debaters of their differences. They would talk often, commiserate about men and children and in-laws and their mother—who had decided to be married at the next full moon in order to give the couple, in her mother’s words, the most auspicious start.

  She and Melody, in that perfect world, would meet for lunch at the Park Grill and speculate about their father’s identity over jumbo scallops and French onion soup. I think his name is Linus, she might say, and he was a wealthy, married man with other kids and a passionate wife who’d kill him if she knew about us. Melody, being more like the Mel of their younger years, would protest, No, his name is Luis and he was in the country illegally—from Portugal—but he was a communist, and before Mom could marry him he was arrested and deported. They would sit beneath the colorful umbrellas and discuss whether the park’s Cloud Gate sculpture was best enjoyed while under the influence—of wine, like the Zinfandel they’d be drinking, or something a little more illicit. And Blue would be able to talk about how it had been, that year she was away.

  In a perfect world, she would have felt able to tell both her sister and their mother about her pregnancy when she first discovered her condition. Like Stacey, from the show last month, she would have owned up to her mistake. She would have gone to her pastor—if she’d had one—or priest (even less likely, all things considered), and asked to be forgiven. God, how stubbornly certain she’d been that none of those kinds of people were capable of fixing the mess she’d made. More than that: she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing her as vulnerable and unwise.

  Had she made any progress in all these years?

  She had been the even-keeled one in the family, the one who was going to outsmart poverty and disadvantage—so how, after years of lecturing Melody on her wild behavior, could she with her growing belly have faced Melody, who by that time was engaged to Jeff? How could she, after a year of crowing to her mother about how perfect the Forresters were, and later, how she and Mitch had their future mapped out—how could she reemerge from months of willful exile, pregnant and destitute, and say to her mother, Now what should I do?

  The only solution, then, had been to undo it all before she was found out—far easier then than now. Now, so many keen eyes were tracking her every movement that she often felt pinned, a butterfly in a lepidopterist’s display. Look at those colors, that pattern! Oh, but wouldn’t she be even prettier if that orange area were yellow? If the black was purple? What was she doing, fitting on these bushes when her type are supposed to enjoy those? How could she let herself be netted—isn’t she smarter than that?

  God, she hoped so.

  Turning her attention to her email, she saw a message from Marcy—Your Trip Itin.—confirming her trip back to Key West next Friday evening. She counted on her fingers: nine days away.

  There was an email with an attachment from Mitch: Lions prospectus and pilot, which she’d asked for. She was forwarding it on to Harmony’s production head when there was a
new ping, and a new email appeared, from a sender whose name was a cryptic series of numbers and letters. This email had an attachment, too, and the subject line read, You might like this one. It had to be junk. This one would be a Rolex, an erectile dysfunction medication, a Mexican vacation offer, a device guaranteed to increase penis size. She went to delete the email, then held off; their spam filters had been so good lately that she wasn’t getting junk anymore.

  She picked up the phone and called Erin, their techie, getting her voicemail. “Erin, it’s Blue. Would you stop by and let me know if it’s safe to open an email? Thanks.” Paranoid as she sounded, the last thing she wanted to deal with now was another computer virus that would grind their system to a halt.

  Now, for Melody. With phone in hand, she went to the window, opened it, and climbed out onto the fire escape.

  Below, the street bustled with delivery trucks, cars, pedestrians with jackets unzipped to better appreciate the warming day. The sound of a man singing opera came from up the block. A woman on a rooftop to the east stood before an easel, painting something Blue couldn’t make out from here. The picture might be a roofscape, it might be the rusting bicycle leaning against the roof’s lip—or maybe something from the woman’s imagination. Suppose she yelled across, What are you painting? Would the woman be flattered by Blue Reynolds’s attention, or would her concentration, her creativity, be ruined?

  And if the woman’s could be, might Mitch’s? Maybe she was wrong to have meddled in what he, and Julian, were so capable of doing on their own. Everyone wanted to do things bigger, make them more—she was guilty of succumbing, guilty of nodding yes, of signing off on the next new strategy to seduce more advertisers, grab more viewership. She had nothing against success; she just worried about what might be getting lost if in making more a person ended up with less.