Reunion (33 page)

Almost.

et’s order Chinese,” Mel said as they stood on the front stoop waving goodbye to the final guest. “My treat.”

Blue was about to protest Mel’s paying when she saw her mother’s pointed look. “That sounds great. Mom, what do you think? Chinese tonight?”

“Excellent plan.”

They turned back to the building, a three-story Lincoln Park walk-up
from the late 1800s. Blue loved the stone and brick, the character of the arched doorway and bay windows. She’d bought it for her mother—the entire building of three restored units, two of which were rented out—that first syndication-salary year. Bought this place, the New York loft, the Montana spread, and still had so much money left that, in a fit of guilt, she gave three million dollars away piecemeal, writing out checks to more than a hundred different charities in one afternoon. She remembered her hand shaking, the urgency. There was no reason she should have so much money. She hadn’t
earned
it, didn’t deserve it, found the whole nature of the business she’d gotten into improbable and unreal.

In those first few months, she often woke in the middle of the night and called Marcy, her touchstone. “How did I
do
this?” she’d ask. “How did I get here?” And Marcy would say things like, “I bet Neil Armstrong said the same thing when he walked on the moon. All I did was climb into the rocket.’ Except, yeah, he was a great pilot and all that other stuff first.” And Blue would wonder if Armstrong had looked back at the Earth with a sense of no longer belonging there.

“So, Mom,” Mel was saying, “what do you think your most entertaining gift was? My vote is the pink feather-wrapped handcuffs.”

Blue said, “I thought you didn’t like thinking about Mom and sex.”

“I don’t. I’m hoping she’ll re-gift them to me.”

“Let’s go inside,” their mother said, “so we don’t embarrass the neighbors.”

When they were upstairs again, Blue said to her mother, “About my present…”

“I love the idea,” which was to have the wedding and the reception in Key West, travel and accommodations for all the guests paid for by Blue. “Your yard sounds like an ideal setting for the ceremony.”

“Jeff won’t go,” Mel said, searching a kitchen drawer for the take-out menu. “If it was here, we were going to drive down, like always.”

“Come on,” Blue said. “He’ll get on a plane for this.”

Mel shook her head. “He won’t.”

“That’s crazy—he’s missing out on so much.” Mel looked at her. “Huh. He says the same thing about you.” Blue was stung. “My life is jam-packed. What the hell does he know?”

Mel found the menu and shut the drawer. “He knows that his wife and his sons are the best things in his life. Don’t you
want
kids?”

“Girls,” their mother said. “Let’s order, and then let’s talk about how we can organize a plan that will work for everybody.”

“I’m not trying to be argumentative, Mom, I just want to know.” And Blue wanted to tell her. She looked at her sister, the person who, of all the billions of humans on the planet, was most similar to her by genetics, by history, and wanted to spill it all. She wanted to tell them both,
I screwed up
, wanted to say she’d been wrong, yet not wrong, and have them understand. She wanted them to
know
her, yet feared it as surely as Jeff feared his inaugural flight spiraling nose-first into the ground.

She said, “I think I’ll have the mu shu pork.”

ater, when all the lights were off and Peep had climbed into his usual nighttime spot on the chair across from her bed, Blue slid beneath her covers and closed her eyes; maybe the future would appear there and put her mind at ease.

But no, it was the past. That cold day when she’d gone to meet Mitch at the Shedd Aquarium, anxious hope sitting like a stone in her stomach. She’d taken the Metra into the city from Homewood. She should have known he would not have chosen the public setting if what he wanted was what she’d wished for. She should have known there would be no proposal, no ring that sparkled with the brilliance of the sun off the lake’s surface. She knew enough to be nervous, but was determined not to let her fear keep her from what might well be the greatest surprise of her life—who could say that wasn’t what her sixth sense was telling her? And so she’d taken the train to Roosevelt, emerged from the station and zipped her coat against the wind. Put on ChapStick. Snugged her hat over her ears and walked the quarter-mile with eyes watering. Watched
him watching her from the steps, arms wrapped around himself as much because of what he was about to say, she would soon discover, as to keep out the cold. The lake was unbearably blue behind him.

If she’d been wearing her fictitious hindsight glasses that day, she would have spared herself the embarrassment of stubborn hope, not to mention train fare and frozen earlobes. She’d have let him break up by phone—or would have broken up with him—or, if she’d put the glasses on sooner, would never have pinned her stubborn hope on him to begin with.

If she had a pair now, what might she see, and save?

She fell asleep wondering.

Late in the night, she had a dream. She was in the house in Harvey, where she and Marcy had lived with Marcy’s boyfriend and his friend, only here the friend was Mitch, and she was waiting for him in her tiny bedroom. Hardly room in there for the old mattress; the walls felt close and the room was shadowy, the sky outside darkened as if preparing to storm. She held a book open in her lap and tried to decipher its words, but each time she started, they changed, became nonsense. Frustrated, she stood up and looked out the window. The view was of a tropical garden, dense with trees and vines; a naked man stood with his back to her, solid, broad shoulders tapering to his waist. Who knew he looked this good? Why didn’t he come in? She rapped on the glass and he turned and she saw … Julian. For long moments she felt locked in his gaze, felt as if he could truly
see
her. Then she held up her hand in greeting, putting her fingertips to the glass, looking at the spots where each finger made contact. When she looked outside again, he was gone.

She woke in the morning with the dream as vivid in her memory as if she’d taken a literal journey during the night. It
was
a journey—to the truth of what she wanted,
who
she wanted, a truth she’d been ignoring. “Oh. My. God.” Her face felt hot, betraying the arousal she would much prefer to still deny. She jumped out of bed, as if leaving the scene of a crime.

“Nope,” she said, getting a box of Lucky Charms from the pantry. “Not,” she said, pouring a glass of orange juice. “No, I’m sorry. No.”

Peep came in and seated himself in front of the refrigerator. Blue obliged him by opening the door and taking out the milk jug. “You, at least, are consistent. I, on the other hand, have been under the misimpression that I had a clue about life and my own best interests.”

She couldn’t have a romantic relationship with Mitch, a man who inspired in her, at most, sisterly affection. “That’s the first part,” she told Peep.

“The second part…” The second part made her swallow hard. It was a feeling like she’d had that night when she was sitting at the stoplight in the Chevelle, shivering with the cold, looking at the sky and wishing her life were different.

he’s something to see, isn’t she?”

Julian, foot poised to climb inside an armored vehicle called Golan, had a sense that the “she” in question was not, this time, part of the armored fleet he’d been photographing for the past week or so (along with other static objects, like sandbags, and stones), having been restricted to the base and then given nothing better to do.

He turned around to see who the sergeant meant. Heat rising from the macadam made the entire landscape seem to undulate. He spotted Lieutenant Davies leaving the motor pool office. Julian used the front of his T-shirt to wipe sweat from his neck and ears. “Oh, yeah. Very attractive woman.”

The sergeant, who went by the name Sims, poked Julian in the thigh. “Take a picture. Your camera might make it back in one piece even if you don’t.”

Sims was joking the same way the other soldiers he’d met all did. Gallows humor, to deflect the intensity of a truth that was not too far removed from reality. Julian raised his camera and looked at Lieutenant Davies once again. Her long neck. Her dimpled smile. “Is she attached to anyone?”

Julian swung around and sighted Sims in his viewer. The guy’s face was smooth and brown as melted chocolate. Angular. Great bone structure.

Sims tried to ignore the camera but his vulnerable smile betrayed
him. “Lieutenant Davies sticks to the fraternization rules, far as I know. I guess she could date another officer, but who’d want to?”

“Right,” Julian said, taking one picture, two pictures, before Sims put on a more practiced stern look and began stowing his gear.

He could ask her directly—assuming he got the chance, when they returned from their three days at wherever they were going. They gave him no information up front, a security precaution in case he was overcome by the urge to broadcast the mission details from his BlackBerry or laptop. Photojournalists, and journalists in general, did not rate highly here, considered to be slightly more trustworthy than the local hires whose agendas were similarly opaque.

Maybe he should ask her. It wasn’t like he had any sane, sensible reason not to.

He and Sims climbed into the Golan. Sims said, “You take the center row, passenger side.”

“What, do you guys have assigned seats or something?”

“We have habits, yeah—but this is for your safety. It’s SOP for us to put journalists far enough from the driver to be less of an inadvertent target for snipers, far enough from the wheels that you don’t take the full blast of an IED.”

SOP. Standard operating procedure. IED. Improvised Explosive Device. Sobering didn’t begin to describe the effect of this seat assignment on his mood. That they all approached these things so matter-of-factly told him everything.

Today was Thursday; he’d been here for eleven of the sixty days he’d planned, and without having documented a single mission yet, he was ready to go home.

While he waited, he took out his BlackBerry and tried again to access his email. He hadn’t been able to stay connected for more than a few seconds since sending the bee-eater photos last week. If not for knowing that no one he’d asked was having any better luck, he’d think he had jinxed the device.

“What’s the deal with service out here? Is it ever reliable?”

Sims watched him. “It’s hit and miss, man, be it phones, women, or insurgents. Welcome to our way of life.”

“And I thought scorpions would be my only problem.”

“You ain’t seen a firefight yet.”

“Mm,” Julian agreed, still trying to connect. “But at least you don’t get surprised by a firefight when you’re putting on your boots.”

“Not usually,” Sims said.

Nine hours later, Julian was sure the most serious danger in this mission was boredom. They’d bumped along rutted streets in three nearly abandoned villages so far; his most interesting photo was of a dirty white dog, apparently stranded atop a flat-roofed house. They didn’t stop.