Reunion (14 page)

“Blue …
” Marcy was laughing. “This is crazy!”

“Crazy!” she agreed, and bent to sniff the jasmine again.

“But hell, why not? I want to come see it! Oh, but first, here’s why I was calling you: Someone named Daniel Forrester left a message for you at the hotel’s front desk.”

So it
was
Daniel she’d seen in that car. How about that? He must have seen her, too—maybe he had told the driver to stop, and then
thought better of such sudden contact. Maybe he thought he should follow official channels instead.

Marcy was saying, “He claims you know him. Let me quote from the message, here: ‘Harmony Blue, please join Lynn and me for dinner tonight if you are free. Seven thirty, come as you are.’ How do you think he got your name? What won’t people try, huh?”

“No, I do know him
—them
, I should say. Or, I did, a long time ago. He was my English teacher, senior year, and Lynn’s the woman I worked for after I left the pet store. Before I moved in with you.”

Here was a rare
apropos
opening, when she could naturally tell Marcy the whole tale, her stupid story of schoolgirl naiveté and heartbreak. She’d kept it secret at first because she hadn’t wanted Marcy to think less of her. Then she kept it secret because it was easier than admitting she’d kept a secret from Marcy in the first place.

The truth.

She might be able to just work it in, casually. She was glad Marcy couldn’t see the sheepish, cringing look she knew must be on her face as she added, “I, well, I dated their son, Mitch. He was older, divorced; he had a young kid. He dumped me, and that’s why I was so depressed back then.”

“I figured it was a guy,” Marcy said. Blue waited for more, for an accusation, for some sign of irritation, but Marcy apparently had no issue with her waiting two decades to reveal these details. Blue didn’t know what to make of such an anticlimax. Finally she just said, “Yeah. Men.”

“So it could be a little awkward, seeing them,” Marcy said. “Do you want me to return the call and make your excuses?”

Standing there with her hand still resting on the gate, Blue’s first impulse was to say
Yes, do.
Keep the past in its place—because even if the Forresters didn’t say it aloud, they would be thinking of how she had simply disappeared from their lives. They would be recalling an anxious young woman who must have seemed overly eager to please. She didn’t want to be that woman again, even for a moment; she didn’t want to see that woman reflected in their eyes.

And yet… she couldn’t quite say it. Why be so cowardly? She
was
free tonight, and while things had ended badly with Mitch, that had nothing to do with Lynn or Daniel. They’d been so good to her. Like second parents—like
first
parents, really. She’d missed them. Maybe this was happy fate.

“No, I think I’ll accept.” And as she said it, she smiled, a smile as wide as the well-known and well-loved version so familiar to the world. Wider, perhaps. And then she began to laugh.

fter speaking with Lila Shefford, of the sign, Blue sat down on the porch step to wait for the agent to arrive. Two million dollars was the asking price. Lila had not known, at first, that she was telling this to her, to Blue Reynolds, and so she’d justified the price, citing the large lot, off-street parking, original wood floors, good rental history, and new tile roof. “Great, I’ll take it,” Blue had said, leaving Lila momentarily speechless.

Two million dollars. “Two million,” Blue said now; even aloud, the number was meaningless. She could spend twenty, or two hundred, and never really miss it—not that she would spend so much, or even truly could, if by
could
she meant
was capable of.
She, personally, was nowhere near that. What she was capable of was letting people who spouted ideas and ambition manage her business interests. She had holdings—stocks, real estate, publications—that she knew only by their summaries in her annual report. She, personally, was great at two things: hosting her show, and delegating. The nagging thought that she could be more, could do more, had a permanent roost in her conscience; she kept it fed with bits of
someday soon
, and wondered if someday was going to come.

Marcy called back to say the Forresters’ address was a house on Eisenhower, “near the Garrison Bight, whatever that means.” She offered to bring Blue a change of clothes, if time ran out.

“A bight is some kind of inlet. Don’t bother with the clothes, I’m fine like I am. Maybe I’ll have you call me a cab, though, if it comes to that.
I’ll check my map for how far Eisenhower is from here.” She hoped to be able to walk over there; Old Town was such a pleasure. She felt ordinary here. She felt real.

She’d bought several properties over the years. The loft in New York, the London flat. A Montana ranch—which she could not help thinking was a celebrity cliché. She rarely went there, and lent it out to almost anyone who asked. Peter and Janelle summered at the ranch with his two brothers and their wives and kids. Montana was beautiful, and she did enjoy being there. Yet there was something too wide open about the place, something that made her feel she needed to watch her back.

This, though? This close garden of tropical everything was a place where she felt right at home; no doubt it would be on her mind whenever she was anywhere else. She could already imagine how much fun it was going to be to get a landscape designer to help her sculpt the jungle before her, shape it—but not tame it, not entirely; its wildness was its appeal. Already she knew she wanted to have fish swimming in the rock pond, and one of those charming chickees over on the west side, by the wall, and strings of tiny white lights on the lemon tree.

Sitting here on the porch step, she could envision those lights, lights like the Forresters had strung through the pine swags that decorated their house that New Year’s Eve when what had been a friendship, a flirtation with Mitch, became something more.

1985, it was. About to be 1986 in the same way she was about to be nineteen, at the stroke of midnight. She’d made two wishes for that birthday, and the first of them had already come true: she was there at the Forrester’s. The second wish? The second wish depended on Mitch being there too.

He’d been twenty-seven, two years out of his PhD program and a very junior professor at Northwestern. Twenty-seven sounded old, but he was in tune with people her age because he spent his days exploring literature with them. His nights he’d owed, when he could persuade his ex, to a nine-year-old boy she’d heard about but had never seen.

Lynn, who she’d grown very fond of in the year they’d been working
together, had told her the whole story: The winter before Mitch finished high school, he got his girlfriend Renee pregnant. She was from another school; they’d met at a party. “It wasn’t true love,” Lynn said. “These things rarely are. But he wanted to do right, so the weekend after graduation, he married her. Julian was born in August, and they all played house for a couple rocky years while Mitch was an undergraduate. Then Renee, sure that Mitch was screwing around, kicked him out—and even though he wasn’t cheating, he
went.”
Lynn shrugged. “Julian is a quiet boy, earnest as they come. I wouldn’t trade him for the world. But I can’t help thinking that, all things being equal, they’d have been better off if Renee hadn’t left the whole birth-control matter up to Mitch. How many times have I told him that good intentions make a lousy defense?”

Now Blue watched a trio of small white birds flit about in the trees. Parakeets? Finches? Maybe she’d get one of those bird-identifier books while she was here.

“No, no maybes: I
will
get one.” Unlike Mitch, she’d follow through. You had to start with the small things, right?

Back when she’d heard that story from Lynn, she hadn’t faulted Mitch. She’d seen Renee as conniving—a plotter who was willing to get pregnant just to snag him. Her opinion changed, though, when she feared the end of her relationship with him was coming and she began to wonder what
she
could do to keep him. A woman in love—especially a very young one—could so easily be blinded by desperation. If Renee really had entrapped Mitch, she’d gone too far, yes. But was what Blue got herself into after Mitch cut her loose any less appalling? At least Renee’s son knew his real parents, was raised by them. Having two separate homes was not ideal, but surely it had to be more ideal than knowing that neither parent wanted you, that you’d been given away.

Or maybe her son didn’t know. If Branford’s lead was solid, she might soon have a chance to find out. She knew this, intellectually. In her gut it still felt unreal, impossible.

Ah, but that New Year’s … everything had seemed possible.

She’d been elated by the invitation: finally, a chance for Mitch to see
her not as his mother’s receptionist, not as a nice girl with an overworked, eccentric mother and a sister who needed to be leashed; not just a young woman with her heart filled with hope at one day winning his. Surely there were lots of those types in his life.

Her second wish, the one that powered her through her anxiety at showing up at the party alone was simple: one kiss, from Mitch, at midnight.

How awkward she’d been … Unused to wearing high heels and snug dresses, she’d opened the old Chevy’s door and climbed out into the snowy street. The door groaned as she pushed it shut, and she was grateful no one was outside to hear it. Suddenly she was certain she was wrong for the event: too young, too unimportant—definitely too poor to dress well enough to match the luxury cars already lining the street, not to mention the enormous homes all around her, though she’d tried her best. Her dress, sleeveless yellow taffeta with a tight bodice, was a dance-scene dress she’d “borrowed” from her high school’s theater wardrobe after a stage production of
Grease
, for which she’d been a stagehand. She’d been waiting three years to have an occasion suited to the dress, never imagining that the first opportunity would far outclass it.

Rock salt crunched beneath her feet as she walked up the long sidewalk from the street. She stamped snow off her strappy, open-toed shoes, stupid for winter but the best she had, hoping that when the plows came past, her car wouldn’t be blocked in. Not that getting stuck there would be so awful.

Overhead, the suburban sky was the darkest gray, soft like silk velvet, with snow falling in gentle, lazy flakes. She’d pulled her coat close, hoping she’d be able to take it off before anyone noticed how tatty it was. How she would’ve laughed at herself if she’d known that one day she’d be dressed for free by Oak Avenue shops, in return, of course, for crediting them in her broadcasts. That she would go from worrying about what the scores of guests inside a single house would think of how she looked, to worrying about what the Greater Chicago viewing area would think of how she looked, to being watched, studied, parodied,
criticized—and yes, on occasion praised, too—by media and viewers worldwide.

Would people point and chuckle behind her back? Would they think her breasts were too big? Her dress too tight? Her hair too oily, when
glossy
was what she was trying for? Would Mitch think she looked pretty? Did she dare hope for
beautiful?
No; such hope would be tempting fate. Pretty, then. And she
was
pretty—she could see that now, and maybe she saw it then, too, if obliquely; after all, she did buy sparkly stockings, and steam press the dress, and spend two hours on her hair and makeup. Melody and their mother, crowding the little bathroom to prep for different party dates, had been as astonished as they were impressed.

And she did walk up to the massive, arched doorway of the Forresters’ home, a doorway that seemed half as wide as her entire house, a doorway that, along with the rest of the structure, demonstrated to Blue what had up until then been only disparate numbers on contracts she filed in broad metal cabinets—numbers that were Lynn’s commissions from sales to mall developers and tower builders and collectors of architecture by van der Rohe and Jenney and Sullivan and Wright. And after standing for a moment in the cold, still air with snow on her shoulders, her breath rising in silver clouds, her heart stuck in her throat, she did pull her hand from her pocket and ring the bell.

When at first it seemed that no one would answer, she thought she might turn and hurry back to the car, save herself from the possibility that she would leave there later as a fool. Then the door opened and there was Daniel. Fifty-something at the time, he wore a black tux with a yellow plaid bow tie. The tie’s pattern had shiny silver threads that shone in the porch light. She’d never seen him in anything so fancy. He clapped his hands once and said, “Well, Harmony Blue! Come in, come in.”

She stepped into the foyer, grateful for the enveloping warmth. “Hi, Mr. Forrester.” Though she’d seen him daily for an entire school year, it was awkward, both of them dressed up, neither of them ready to discuss
literature—or
she
wasn’t. Probably he could recite Twain in his sleep if required.