Blue Diary (10 page)

“Twenty-four hours?” Jorie looks even more distraught when she hears what Barney had assumed would be good news. Twenty-four hours of absence between Barney and his wife, Dana, is a matter of course. There are times when they meet in their own living room and Barney realizes they haven't spoken in days, and the worst part is, neither seems to care.

“Go on. He's waiting for you. And stop worrying. That's my job.”

Jorie has been anticipating this moment, but now that it's here, she finds she's afraid. The hallway seems perilous: the distance she must travel suddenly appears vast. What will she discover when she opens the door? Perhaps Ethan has changed overnight, grown sharp teeth, perhaps, or claws. Surely her fears are the product of a terrible night, for like her husband, Jorie has barely slept. She only closed her eyes for a fitful moment or two, and even then she dreamed of shadows, blue shapes shifting across her own garden, swooping down at her, darting so close she could see their eyes, cold and indifferent and dark.

She takes one last step, then opens the door to Dave's office. Instantly, she knows its all right. He is still the same Ethan, her dear husband, the love of her life. Jorie rushes to him and collapses against him, and Barney reaches to close the door, allowing them the privacy they so rightly deserve.

“Jorie,” Ethan says once she's in his arms. The word sounds like a prayer and, indeed, it is her name that has allowed him to get through his night of hell. He has walked through the fire with her name on his lips; he has drunk of it and found sustenance in it, until at last he was carried to the other side of the black river. He has contemplated this moment, re-envisioned it again and again, and now at last he's in it. He's already started kissing her, slowly and softly at first, and then desperate, earth-shattering kisses that make her sob.
Baby,
he says,
I don't want you to cry
But that's what she's doing, she can't stop herself, seeing him like this, falsely accused and stolen from their lives.

Ethan brings Jorie to Dave's old leather couch and pulls her onto his lap. He cannot let her go. But time is vanishing; they can't hold on to it, or stop it, or bargain for more. They gaze at each other, their yearning for each other and for the lives they've led until now is so painful, they can barely look at each other. Jorie rests her head against her husband's chest and listens to his heart. The rhythm is racing, but then it has always seemed to her that Ethan's heartbeat was faster than any other man's. He has the stamina of two men, the good looks of three, the heart of at least half a dozen. Sometimes when she watches him sleep, Jorie feels that he may indeed be an angel. drawn to earth by her selfish needs and desires. Perhaps she's trapped him here beside her, to sleep in her bed, and cat her dinners, and go off to work. when he was meant to be elsewhere. True love, after all, could bind a man where he didn't belong. It could wrap him in cords that were all but impossible to break.

“Barney says it will take twenty-four hours to get you out. I'm guessing it will be less once the court realizes how foolish this is.”

“Let's not think about time. ”

It is then that Jorie notices what grows directly outside Dave Meyers window. There is a row of orange lilies, all facing cast, drawn to the strength of the sun.
Blood lilies,
Jorie thinks. She gets up and goes to the window, drawn there just as certainly as the lilies are drawn to the sun. Outside. there are dozens of blue jays, picking through the damp grass. She thinks about how surprised she was when Collie told her that a jay's feathers had no blue pigment. and she blinks at the riotous blue blur as the birds take flight. There are fields of wild lavender beyond the sheriff's station, and the birds are always attracted to the purple blooms. It's the time of year when fledglings are especially susceptible to hawks, but they come to feast in the fields anyway. Jorie turns away from the world outside; she lowers the window shade and welcomes the darkness. Her universe is contained within this room. Fair skies and blue jays no longer concern her. Not anymore.

Ethan has been watching Jorie carefully. With every move she makes he can feel how time is coursing past them, shaking the floors and the ceilings, rattling their world. He can't get enough of Jorie, he can't let her go, and yet he's afraid that may be exactly what he's about to do. When Jorie turns back to Ethan there's something in his eyes she doesn't recognize. Then, all at once, she knows what it is. It's fear. It's the one thing she doesn't want to see. Everything looks blue in these moments: the walls, and Ethan's face. and the shadows that are cast upon them both, blue as hyacinths, lasting as heaven.

“People are going to say a lot of things about me,” Ethan tells his wife, as if this weren't occurring already. Down at the Safehouse and at the bakery, in the schoolyard and in the streets, his name has been repeated so often it has become an incantation, calling the bees from the fields, until there is a buzzing sound drifting over town, a low rumble that informs every word that is spoken aloud.

Though Jorie has heard none of this gossip, she knows people in a small town often feel the need to meddle, and she laughs, her voice sweet and clear. “Honey, don't you think I know that? People are always going to talk. That's human nature.”

Ethan thinks over the right way to tell her. He has thought it over for years, but the time has finally come, so he'll just have to say it as best he can. “I mean real bad things. Jorie. Things you won't want to believe.”

“How bad could it be?” Jorie sounds lighthearted. but that's not the way she feels inside. Fear is contagious. It doubles within minutes, it grows in places where there's never been any doubt before. “Are they going to tell me that you have another wife down in Maryland? That you want a divorce?”

“No.” His love for her is nothing to joke about, and he's stung by her mocking tone. Still, Jorie goes on teasing him.

“Maybe you've got a family you left behind. Three kids who called you Daddy before you moved up here and met me.”

“There's only you and Collie. You know that.” The thought of his son having to endure the taunts that are bound to arise makes Ethan's color deepen. His son's discomfort was the last thing he'd ever want.

Jorie knows what he's thinking, she can see the haze of guilt, the worry. the look on his face when he gets like this, for he's a man who always puts others' needs before his own. “Don't worry. Collie will be fine just as soon as you get home.”

Ethan gazes at his wife with gratitude and with sorrow. He never wants to stop looking at her. Jorie can feel his desire, on her face and her shoulders, in her blood and her bones, how much he longs for her. How many women have that, after all? They were destined to be together. Otherwise he wouldn't even be in New England: he'd be a good two thousand miles from here. Although. in truth, he wasn't on his way to New Hampshire the night he met her, as he's always told her. There was no job, and no friend up in Portsmouth. These were lies he made up on the spot. He told Jorie what he thought she wanted to hear, but that doesn't mean anything he said was true. In fact. he was headed for Las Vegas on the night they'd met, for he'd gotten it into his head that a man could start fresh there. He'd be one of thousands of individuals who'd made mistakes and could still manage to roll through town with no past and nothing to prove.

He'd spent quite a while working on the Cape, making good money, and at last he'd had enough to drive out west. At any rate. that had been his intention, but the thought of the desert had made him thirsty, and he'd pulled off the highway at the exit past the hundred-mile marker, where there is always a wreath tied to the fence in memory of Jeannie and Lindsay, those ill-fated high school girls who'd been such good friends of Jorie and Charlotte's. He skirted town on the twisting back roads, driving aimlessly until he saw the neon sign for the Safehouse. It was a sleety, bleak night, and the new truck he'd bought when the job on the Cape was through skidded on the bumps of King George's Road, but he kept driving fast. He needed a drink and he needed it badly; it was as if the Nevada sun was already striking his windshield, and maybe that was why he was so parched.

He figured one last stop in this godforsaken Commonwealth wouldn't kill him. He hated Massachusetts, the dark frozen months, the cross, melancholy citizens. He'd grown up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where the well water was a thousand times sweeter, the land was green and gentle, and everything that fell from the sky wasn't intended to destroy man and beast alike. He rolled down his window and let the sleet come in sideways, and he told Massachusetts to go to hell; he'd be gone by morning, headed toward sunshine and hope. Still, he had his overpowering thirst, so he parked in the lot of the Safehouse and went on in before he even knew the name of the town in which he'd arrived. He strolled up to the bar and ordered a beer, and while he waited for the bartender to slide the foamy glass toward him, he turned to the right, and that's when he saw her, her golden hair shining, pure sunlight in the blue shadows of the roadhouse.

He knew that if he didn't walk away right then, just forget about the beer and his terrible thirst, he might not walk away at all. He had a decision to make in an instant, or else he could easily find himself trapped in some no-name Massachusetts town where November was one of the foulest months on the planet, with ribbons of ice and lead-blue nights and a gloom that spread out from Front Street to the highway, where the handful of pink roses Ethan had spied had been tied to the fence in memorium of the high school girls who had died.

Memories were not what Ethan was after that night, nor was it love he was looking for. He still recalls thinking he needed to head for the door. He told himself that while he was unzipping his jacket, while he placed his money down, while he grabbed his beer and walked straight to her.

I should be on my way to New Hampshire,
he said to her. The lies came easy to him; it was the truth that was giving him so much trouble.
And I probably would be, but instead I'm standing here looking at you.

When she'd laughed, he'd stood there at her mercy, unable and unwilling to turn away. Her hair was honey-colored and long, and her eyes were a clear, startling blue that could stop a man in his tracks. Ethan could tell she was feeling the same thing he was from the way she was staring back at him and from the color that rose in her cheeks. She wasn't shy or cool, and she didn't play games. The friend who was with her, Charlotte Kite, tugged at her sleeve and tried to get her to join some old high school pals and play a round of darts, but Jorie paid her no mind.

Go on without me,
she'd told Charlotte, and Ethan knew there and then that she was the one. All his life he'd been closed up, like a locked door, like a cellar, and here it was at last, in the place where he'd least expected to find it, the key to everything he'd ever wanted, shining and golden. True love had appeared in front of him, in a roadhouse resembling scores he'd already passed by. He understood immediately that he would never leave this town again; no matter what its name might be, this was his address from this day on.

You don't think you'll regret standing here with me?
He smiled at her then. Not the calculated grin he knew drove women crazy, but the real one, the one that showed his soul.
You don't think you'll kick yourself later for not studying wíth your friends?

He peered through the knot of customers, strangers he couldn't care less about. A mass of faces, that's what they were to him, people he never wished to know. They were throwing darts and whooping it up, and although they were nearly the same age he was, they seemed ridiculously young to him. He might have looked good, a handsome well-built man in his twenties, but he was a hundred years old on this night, with shoes worn down from traveling, and only the last bits of cinder left for a soul. He gazed at this beautiful, innocent girl before him and he was well aware of how much he wanted her. All the same, he gave her one last chance to walk away.
Your friends look like they're having fun. You should probably go join them,
he told her, though it pained him to speak this sentiment aloud.

Jorie hadn't bothered to look behind her to see those young men and women she'd grown up with. She met his gaze instead.
They're not having fun.
She had moved closer to him, and he'd had to lean close in order to hear what she had to say over the noise of the place.
They just look like they are.

For thirteen years he has lived in Massachusetts, the place he despises more than any other. He has tolerated a steel-blue sea that is so cold in July it can freeze a man's blood. He has put up with snowstorms and ice in December, with Augusts so muggy the humidity forces dogs to take shelter beneath the drooping, dusty hollyhocks, where they pant in the heat. In Maryland, hollyhocks lasted long into autumn, skies were blue until Christmas, and when snow fell it was soft and tender, coating both hedges and fields. Throughout the years, he has risen every morning and gone to work no matter the weather or the circumstance; he has mended fences and cleared the old oaks from the woods behind the high school so that the ball field could be added. He has brought turkeys down to the senior center on Thanksgiving and has walked through fire for his neighbors without a thought to his own safety, so that among the other volunteers at the firehouse he is known for his own brand of wild bravery. He has cried at the birth of his boy, he's given thanks to God, he's walked the leather off his shoes at night when he goes out to ramble through the neighborhood after Jorie is asleep and at peace with the world. He has wished on stars and on his child's life, but nothing takes the past away, he knows that now. The past stays with a man, sticking to his heels like glue, invisible and heartbreaking and unavoidable, threaded to the future, just as surely as day is sewn to night.