Blue Diary (36 page)

“Who said you could be in my room?” she whispered, but I could tell she didn't care. Lately, she liked to have me around. There was something lonely about her now.

“I need you to write a letter to Collie for me.” Some lies are easy to tell, and this was one of them. “You have to tell him I don't want anything to do with him anymore. He's gone and I'm here, and I'm not going to wait for him forever.”

“Write it yourself” Rosarie told me, but I'd already gone to her bureau for some paper and a pen. “Can't you do anything?” Rosarie complained, but she still got a little charge when it came to breaking someone's heart, so she set to writing the letter.

“Tell him never really cared about him and that he should just forget about me. Tell him I hate him and that I wish I'd never known him in the first place.”

“You're meaner than I thought you were.” Rosarie grinned as she wrote to Collie. “Here you go.” She handed the letter to me when she was done. “Don't get all sappy about this.” she added, “but I've decided that when I'm gone from here you can have my room.”

“Gone?” I said, like I didn't know anything about it. when in fact I had been the only one home earlier in the day when Mark Derry stopped by to leave a plane ticket for Rosarie. I promised I'd give it to her, just as I vowed to tell her to meet Mark and the rest of the defense team at the jail at two o'clock the next day, but as soon as hed gone, I stuck the ticket in my night table drawer. It was round-trip to Baltimore, paid for by the defense fund. and I kept that ticket right where it was, even though I'd wanted Rosarie's room forever. I'd already decided that I wasn't about to tell her where she was supposed to go in order to make that trip to Maryland. “Gone for good?” I sounded so innocent, no one would suspect I had plans of my own.

“You wouldn't understand.” Rosarie told me.

But I did. I understood that if she followed Ethan Ford to Maryland she would ruin her life, and it would be my fault, and that's why I had her write that letter that I made certain not to sign with my own name.

That night, I watched the news with my grandmother. There was a good deal of carrying-on down at the jail because on the following afternoon Ethan Ford was going to be transferred to Maryland. People were demonstrating, for and against him. Mostly for, which shouldn't have surprised me, considering how Rosarie had reacted. My mother came in to watch TV with us; she sat on the arm of the couch the way she always told us not to.

“That is one handsome man,” my grandmother said when they showed a photograph of Ethan, the very same one I'd first seen at the start of the summer. “Let that be a lesson. You can't tell a book by its cover.”

“What do you think it means when someone's reflection doesn't show up in a mirror?” I hoped my question would appear casual, but I saw my mother shoot my grandmother a look.

“It means there's something wrong with the mirror,” my grandmother said, but I knew what it really meant was that there was something wrong with the man.

I went out to the garage when I was sure everyone was asleep. I climbed out my bedroom window and crept over to where the roof overhung the yard, then I jumped and circled around to the back of the house. The crickets were calling too fast, the way they always do at the end of August, and the air was humming. I carefully opened the garage door and slipped inside. It was cool and pitch dark. I felt my way along and sat down on the cement floor, where I took out the last two candles and some matches. I thought about my father while I lit the candles. I asked him to watch over Rosarie, even though she had so many bad habits and could be so rude. I begged him to help me protect her and not let her run off with some man who didn't even have a reflection, and I promised if he did this for me, I wouldn't come back to the garage late at night. I'd accept what had happened and what I had lost.

When I woke the next morning, I knew what I had to do. I got my bike and went through town and turned onto King George's Road. It was early and there was no traffic, and I pedaled so fast I was practically flying. I tried not to think too much or be too afraid. I went right into the county building and I told Sheriff Meyers that I had to see Ethan Ford. I said I'd been his neighbor all my life and his son's best friend and that I just wanted to say good-bye before they took him down to Maryland. I got a teary look, and that must have been the thing that convinced the sheriff to let me visit Ethan Ford even though he was getting flown down to Baltimore that afternoon, where he'd be met by a marshal and driven to the Eastern Shore, to the town where the whole thing happened.

“He's got a busy day, little lady, so I can just let you stay a minute or so,” Dave Meyers told me, and I smiled like I wasn't scared down to my toes. “Are you ready for seventh grade?” Sheriff Meyers asked, because his son Jesse was in my class, and Jesse was probably excited about a stupid thing like that.

“Oh, yeah,” I said to him, like I cared about anything beyond the next few minutes. “I can't wait.”

“Weren't you friends with Hillary?” he said, referring to his daughter. who was such a snob she wouldn't speak to me, especially after I wrote what I thought of her on the wall outside the school.

“I don't think that was me,” I told him.

The sheriff led me down the hall. He said hello to the guard, Frankie Links, then unlocked the door into the jail. Dave Meyers was cheery and whistling, but that didn't fool me, there was nothing cheerful about what was happening today Nobody else was incarcerated in the jail, which figured in a town like Monroe, but the emptiness didn't feel like a good thing. The fact that it was clean and had a long line of fluorescent lights switched on didn't hide the darkness inside, and just walking down the hall gave me goose bumps along my arms.

When we got to his cell, Mr. Ford was waiting. He must have heard our footsteps, because you could tell he was expecting company, although he certainly wasn't expecting me. He looked the same as all those boys who came searching for Rosarie and wound up talking to me instead, disappointed and let down, but this time the flicker of disappointment I noticed made me happy Then, just as fast, I got scared again. Dave Meyers was unlocking the jail cell so I could go inside, which was just about the last thing I wanted to do in my life.

“I can talk to him from here.” Even I could hear that my voice was fluttery “Right through the bars.”

“It fine for you to step inside,” Dave Meyers urged. “Go on in.”

I had no choice but to do it and be face-to-face with Ethan Ford, even though I knew he had no reflection and that he probably never would. I went up to him like I wasn't nervous, like I'd been to jail each and every day of my life. You wouldn't think I'd be a good liar, but I am. For a second I thought about the fact that Mr. Ford was where he was because of me, but then I closed that idea out of my mind. Too many people's lives have changed because of what I did for me to think about it anymore. So I kept to the subject. I told him Rosarie sent me to see him because she didn't want to let him down in person. She wouldn't be making that trip to Maryland to work for the defense fund and she wouldn't be meeting Mark Derry and the other members of the defense team today, that's what I said, and I used kind of a snippy tone, like our whole family was far too good for him and we knew it. Like he was just some charity work that Rosarie had fooled around with over the summer.

“Wouldn't you know it, but she fell in love,” I say.

I see that flicker in his eyes again when I say the thing about love, so I keep on going. I make up a beautiful name, the name of the sort of man who would be honest and true, not that Rosarie deserves that sort of devotion. “Michael Dove,” I say with a real sorrowful sound to my voice, like I feel bad for Ethan Ford, like he's missing out on a really good thing by missing out on Rosarie. Michael Dove who's going to law school out in California, and Rosarie's going off with him. She's already a thousand miles away from here, and, anyway, she can't go helping out every man who's in trouble. When it comes right down to it, she's got her whole life ahead of her.

“I guess I'd like to hear Rosarie tell me that for herself,” Ethan Ford says, and for some reason I get even braver then. It's hearing him say my sister's name that does it. It's thinking about the look in Collie's eyes when we came out here and the way he rode his bike into the fence, like he couldn't be any more wounded than he already was no matter how he might bleed or what he might break in half.

I hand Ethan Ford the letter, which is a good thing because I can tell he doesn't believe me, at least not yet. You can see doubt in a person's eyes, but that disappears fast when he reads the letter. Rosarie thought what I told her to write was too heartless when she thought it was for Collie, and I guess she was right from the look on Ethan Ford's face. If I didn't know better I'd pity him, but I'm not the pitying kind.

I'd been afraid he'd laugh at me and tell me he was going to write to Rosarie and that he'd manage to get his way somehow; he'd send line after line of sweet words that would lead her down to Maryland eventually. But I guess that letter I had her write was pretty good, and I could tell he recognized Rosarie's handwriting, just like I hoped he would, and I have to say I hope his heart did break, even a little, even though I knew it was impossible with a man like him. The whole time Ethan Ford was begging his wife to come to Maryland, he'd been making plans for Rosarie to be there, too. I bet once he got there he'd find someone else, someone who worked for the court, maybe, some girl who was lonely in some deep way, just like Rosarie. Even I could tell that he was the kind of man who needed a woman to believe in him, and who she was mattered far less than how much faith she had in him.

I thought about Collie on that day when we went inside his house and no one was home. That was heartbreak, pure and simple, the worst kind there was. If I was the cause of that, so be it. Hearts were made for being broken. There's really no way around it if you want to be a human being. That's why on the day Collie left, I didn't go racing over to his grandmother's house. I didn't stand in the street or chase after him. I didn't even cry. Instead, I stayed in my bedroom and I locked the door, even though I knew he was getting farther and farther away.

“What about Collie?” I said. I had my nerve, I really did, but I just couldn't stop. I didn't even think about the fact that Dave Meyers was down the hall, on the other side of the door, going over some paperwork the court in Maryland had sent up, and that he'd probably never hear me if I screamed. “You're asking about Rosarie, but don't you want to know if I've heard from Collie? I thought you'd be a little more interested in him.”

I said it in a rude way, even though the jail door was locked behind me. I really didn't care.

“Have you heard from him?”

I could tell from the way Ethan Ford sounded that even after everything that had happened and everything he'd done, in his heart, Collie was still his son. But that kind of thing never shook me. I knew what my answer should be.

“No,” I told him. It was the kind of lie that felt good in my mouth. “Not one word.”

I didn't cry when Collie left, or when my father died, but for some strange reason, I started crying right in front of Ethan Ford. I told him I was sorry, and he nodded like he understood, and for a minute I felt like I was ready to believe in him. And worse, like I was willing to forgive him, but that feeling didn't last. It was still so early that the birds in the bushes were waking, and we could hear them even in this jail cell, and listening to their chattering helped me snap out of it. I thought about Jorie Ford crying in her garden, and that's when I saw that Ethan Ford was a whirlwind and that we would all be much better off when he was gone. I thought about my sister being willing to miss out on her senior year of high school because of him, and I didn't feel so bad about turning him in. When one door closes, another one opens, that's what I've found to be true.

I knew that by giving Ethan Ford that letter I was fated to always be envious of Rosarie, but I don't mind. Now that I'd gotten rid of him and the destruction he would have caused, my sister's life will always contain more than mine when it comes to some things, but there are times when I'll know more. I'll know that sometimes those who love you best are the ones who leave you behind.

When the sheriff came to get me out of that jail cell, I couldn't wait to get away. I said good-bye, but Ethan Ford didn't hear me, or maybe he just didn't care to answer. went to Hannah's and bought myself breakfast. I got my favorite things—pancakes, toast, and a chocolate milk shake, and then a slice of apple pie. Kelly Stark was there with her sisters, Sophie and Josie, and they came over and sat with me even though Kelly wasn't speaking to Rosarie anymore. She was crazy in love with Brendan, and he was taking up most of her time.

“You look like you're celebrating something,” Sophie said. She was pretty smart, I had to hand her that.

“Maybe.” I didn't have to trust the first person who was nice to me, but I thought if I ever did, it might be Sophie.

“How's Rosarie?” Kelly asked. You could tell in her voice that she was concerned, not that she was going to ruin her life in the name of friendship. Each of the Stark girls was smart, and they had that beautiful long hair, but when you were sitting right there with them, it was difficult to hate them in spite of how lucky they were.

“She's not too good, I said of my sister. ”But I think that will change.”

That afternoon, while Ethan Ford was being transferred to Maryland, Rosarie didn't know to show up at two o'clock to meet Mark Derry. Instead, she waited by the phone, her suitcase beside her. When darkness fell, she phoned over to the Derrys' to find out what the plan was, but Brendan hung up on her. She had to call again and again, and by the time she finally got through, the plane had already left. Mrs. Derry informed Rosarie that she'd been instructed not to give out Mark's phone number at the hotel where he was staying, the better to avoid reporters and other prying minds, and that Rosarie should probably turn her attention back to school, which started in a little more than a week.