The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  Mama won’t be coaxed from her bed and Grandma has forgone her meal to repack her suitcase, so only Jubilee and Pa and her conjured brother gather for dinner. Barely pecking at his food, Pa says for her to start her story wherever she wants.

  To get Ronny out of the way, she begins with being thrown on the train, and because this causes Pa to get up and pace and grow more agitated with each lap, she shrinks the middle part of her story to include only the kindness of strangers on her arrival in Louisville, the kinship she found among a few souls similarly unfortunate and the charity of those who paid her to do menial tasks.

  “You found work?”

  She considers whether it is more palatable to Pa if she says she’d lived the whole time the way she’d first started out, as a tramp, or to tell at least a portion of the truth. Even a short delay in answering causes Pa to fret, so she says, “I hired on at the Kentucky State Fair.”

  Instantly, Pa’s face shows relief. “Did you work with the livestock? Because I know they take real good care of the animals at those big fairs. They got veterinarians on hand day and night, don’t they?”

  It would be easy to go along with this, but she doesn’t want to start off her right-colored life on the wrong foot, so she says, “I know you want to know more, Pa, but it was a mostly hard time that needs to fade some, and talking about it keeps it fresh.”

  “That’s why your mama can’t talk about Levi yet.”

  So that Pa won’t be tormented thinking it was hell from beginning to end, she gets to the part she knows he’ll like best. “The fair’s where I met the doctor.” Stooped as though he’d spent his life turning over rocks to see what was under them, Dr. Fordsworth showed up one hot humid afternoon without warning, his arrival the result of a flier one of his students had shown him, and, after admitting being skeptical given the kind of operation she was a part of, he peered at her face, neck, and arms as if there weren’t a person inside her skin. Once his looking was satisfied, he behaved like a boy being given a candy apple.

  “Dr. Fordsworth is a famous doctor of the blood at the University of Louisville,” she tells Pa. “He knows more about blood than anyone else in the country.”

  Pa says, “Blood, but what about blue?”

  “Blue and blood go together.”

  She understands Pa’s bewilderment. Dr. Fordsworth had to spend a long time explaining to her the role of blood in her coloring, eventually getting out a pen and paper and drawing pictures to represent blood molecules and the enzyme he seemed partial to. Even then, it seemed far-fetched.

  “So, he knew about blue before he met you?”

  Jubilee nods. “He’d only ever known about it from books, though. Doctors know of six others who’ve been blue, and three of those were from a tribe in Alaska.”

  She might as well have said the moon. Pa asks, “Is there a name for it?”

  “Methemoglobinemia.”

  “That’s some mouthful.” Pa fetches his pencil and has her write it down. After trying three times to pronounce it, he gives up. “And he knew you had this just by looking at you?”

  Jubilee tells how the doctor first listened to her chest to rule out problems with her lungs and heart before using a syringe to fill a little glass bottle with her blood for testing. “It looked like oil.” Like it had gone off, but when she told the doctor this, he corrected her with a soft tone, using the words “enzyme deficient.” “He was back three days later to tell me my blood doesn’t have diaphorase, which is an enzyme.”

  “What’s an enzyme?”

  Jubilee knows the explanation with all the big words by heart, having studied the papers Dr. Fordsworth gave her, and to help Pa understand now, she fetches them from her suitcase. When she returns, he is pouring himself a glass of Socall’s shine. Jubilee lays the papers out on the table, and Pa squints at them. “Why don’t you read it to me.”

  Rather than start at the top, she begins with the sections she has underlined.

  “ ‘The first case of congenital methemoglobinemia was documented in 1845 by French physician Dr. Francois, whose patient presented with cyanosis in the absence of cardiac and pulmonary dysfunction. In 1932, K. Hitzenberger concluded idiopathic cyanosis to be an hereditary ailment.’ ”

  Pa interrupts. “This is about blue?”

  “ ‘Cyanosis’ is just a doctor’s roundabout way of saying ‘blue,’ and ‘hereditary’ means your black-sheep theory is not too far off the mark, but I like this part because it says the first blue person showed up almost a hundred years ago in France.”

  “And here we thought your grandma Opal was the first.” Pa runs his fingers over another underlined section. Giving blood its blue coloration in oxygen-depleted veins is methemoglobin. Methemoglobin is then changed into hemoglobin, which gives blood its red color, and what makes this change happen is diaphorase. “You can’t tell me you know what this means.”

  She turns to Dr. Fordsworth’s sketch of different size bubbles and arrows going left and right to represent how blood molecules are red when they carry oxygen and blue when they don’t, and together, she and Pa match each set of bubbles with the items listed in the caption. Pa points to the bubbles on the left. “Methemoglobin.” He looks to Jubilee to confirm, before pointing to those on the right. “Hemoglobin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Aha, diaphorase!” Pa pounds a set of ink dots. “What your blood doesn’t have.” He might as well have discovered the x on a treasure map.

  “And that’s why my blood has too much this.” She points to the bubbles labeled METHEMOGLOBIN.

  “So this Dr. Fordsworth fella brought you the cure?”

  “Not a cure, Pa.” She reads her favorite part. “ ‘In 1928, Harrop and Baron demonstrated that the introduction of methylene blue into the bloodstream of a patient with congenital methemoglobinemia caused a complete reversion of methemoglobin to hemoglobin.’ ”

  Pa stops her. “I want you to tell me this part all in English.”

  It was only four days ago that Dr. Fordsworth took a tiny glass bottle filled with blue liquid out of his black bag. The antidote, he called it. “Methylene blue is really just blue dye, and one hundred milligrams is all it should take to reverse your symptoms,” he’d said.

  “He wanted to put more blue in you?” asks Pa.

  “It seemed backward logic to me, too.” Jubilee had been warned long before she met Dr. Fordsworth that certain doctors would come around every once in a while looking to practice their medicine and perform their experiments on people like her, and suddenly she wasn’t so sure she ought to trust the man, not when he was proposing something that made no sense. “All I could think was how the blue dye was going to make me worse, so I told him I wasn’t going to go through with it.”

  Pa’s eyes are wide at this point. “But he found a way to convince you.”

  “By rolling up his own sleeve and giving himself the shot first.” That had taken her by surprise, and she watched the doctor a long while until there wasn’t any option but to take her turn. She describes how he’d cleaned her arm with alcohol before pricking it and then slowly pushed in the dye, saying the effects would occur after twenty to thirty minutes. “After twenty minutes, I looked at my arm, and it was as blue as ever.” Same blue hands, nails as though they’d been polished by coal. If it wasn’t the worst idea ever. “Suddenly, there was something not quite right about Dr. Fordsworth,” she says, recalling how flushed his cheeks were and that he looked ready to pass out. “I thought I was about to have the same terrible reaction he was having, but it turns out he was startled, is all.” She reports how she’d yelled at the doctor to tell her what was wrong with him, and in reply he’d lifted her hand to her face. She supposed it belonged to her, but she didn’t know how. Gone from it was any trace of blue. Her arms were the same way, no blue. All at once, she’d gone from twilight to dawn-colored.

  Jubilee pushes her chair back from the table, kicks off her boots, and rolls down her nylons to show
Pa her dainty feet, the color of dogwood blossoms, and the soles like the smooth bark of a yellowwood tree.

  Pa reaches for her toes and gives them a wiggle. “Earthworms!”

  She tells Pa that Dr. Fordsworth gave her the dye in pill form, explaining that the effects aren’t permanent. “After twenty-four hours or so, my system flushes out the last of the methylene blue, and I have to take another dose.”

  “So you’re still blue?”

  “That’s why it’s not a cure. I’ll have to do this every day for the rest of my life.”

  “What about when the pills run out?”

  She tells Pa she has a three-month supply, and a prescription any druggist can fill, even a country one.

  “But surely they cost a lot of money.” Something along the order of a piece of fertile land, Pa must be thinking.

  “A hundred costs about the same as a tube of toothpaste. It’s just dye, Pa.”

  Pa sits down and skims the pages again, and after a while, he says, “If only your brother were alive for this.”

  And there is the empty place that right-colored skin won’t ever cover.

  * * *

  After washing and putting away the dishes, Pa says for her to put her boots on and go with him on a walk, because he wants to show her what helped him get through, and as soon as they turn off the main path for the lesser trail, she knows they’re headed for her aviary. Among all those city people, there had been no defense against the loneliness at night, so to comfort herself, Jubilee would spread out her arms on the cold sheet of her bench-bed and catch a thermal that took her over the tops of the buildings and across the never-ending streets to the timbered hills, where she’d glide through the trees and drop down to her aviary. During those first few visits, her birds would flap around on their perches and wonder why she wasn’t setting seed out for them and why she wasn’t mending their hurts. In later visits, there were fewer birds, and one night she returned and found only empty cages. This she can’t face now, so she asks Pa if it can wait.

  “Come on,” he insists.

  As they near the shed, Pa has to prompt her to go first.

  She throws open the door, and instead of finding a place of neglect, she sees cages filled with birds. None of the occupants does she recognize save one.

  “Thomas!” she cries, opening the lid, and immediately he climbs onto her hand. “You’re fat! How are you ever going to fly with that belly?”

  She sinks to the floor, making a nest for him with her skirt, and whistles and coos at the others.

  “You’ve kept it going for me!”

  “This was the one place I could feel close to you. I’d come here every day, and we’d talk about you, wouldn’t we, boys? This fella here”—he gestures at Thomas—“he even flew a few missions to look for you. He always knew you’d come back.”

  Pa introduces the others, telling how he found them and what names he’s given them. “When word gets out that you’re back, the place is going to be overrun. We’ll likely have to build on.”

  Jubilee puts out fresh water and a few bonus scoops of sunflower seeds, and suddenly Havens’s presence grows strong. She recalls how he behaved when he was taking pictures of her, like someone who was being told a story and didn’t want it to end. If there was harm for her when he took those pictures, there was some kind of harm for him when he quit. And now she is made right, and tomorrow she will be made right again, and every day after that, and what kind of background might he set her against now? When she gets back to the house and Pa is out in the field, she’ll look for the black-and-white pictures Havens left behind—the ones of the family, the ones of Thomas and her other birds, and the one she’d taken of him.

  HAVENS

  For once, Havens wakes up decisive instead of how he has for the last few months, filled with the same restlessness that used to plague him as a teenager languishing in this very same bed. He cannot spend one more day trying to settle the question of whether or not to return to Chance. He will go to her. He will tell her he took care of the photograph and killed the story. He will tell her other things, that he can’t stop thinking about her, the hills, the people he met, the northern flicker, the foxes, even that creepy spider tree, which must be filled now with moths. What he won’t tell her is that he lost his job and got evicted from the boarding house for not paying his rent and that he’s had to move back to Dayton to live with his parents in his boyhood home. Nor will he mention that he hasn’t touched his camera in weeks. He has tried taking photographs since leaving Chance, but he’ll no sooner set up his Graflex than the light will be wrong, or if it is a tolerable light, his hand will start to shake, or his interest will be diverted. Each of his landscapes and still-life pictures is underexposed or overexposed or blurred or lacking a focal point, nothing at all compared to the photographs he took of her or the natural world to which she belongs.

  He slips his hand under his pillow and pulls out the only picture he has of her, the black-and-white he’d slipped in his shirt pocket while they were in the cellar together. Now he holds it like a card in a winning hand. There is just enough morning light to make out the place on her collarbone where he had put his finger and made her shiver, the crook of her arm where she allowed him to put his hand when they walked back from the aviary, her eyes that draw him in. Her mouth! He turns the image facedown and rests it on his chest. Despite what everyone believes about photographs, they do not preserve memories; they cause them to degrade. With the mind so focused on one split-second image, the hundred moments that led to it as well as the afterglow moments that followed become blurry. Study a photograph too much, and it will obliterate smell, touch, hearts beating double-time.

  Havens imagines his hand slipping under her blouse, skimming the pale sky of her belly, rounding her waist to the small of her back, drawing her close to him. Being in her presence was to have a thick callus peeled off his senses, and nothing can compensate for his longing to be with her. Though he has tried to let her go, he can’t keep from trying to resuscitate every memory of her and making up fictitious ones, too.

  Havens throws aside the covers—why not go today?—but before he is even fully upright, the nagging voice of reason starts chipping away at his resolve. She did not meet him at the shack for a reason. As much as he’d like to believe she’d been detained by her parents, he can’t shake free the likelihood that she’d changed her mind and signaled him with her absence that he was to move on as she was preparing to do.

  But should he not go to her, even if to be chased away?

  After dressing, he heads to the kitchen and stops short in the hallway when he hears his mother complaining to someone, the neighbor next door, he guesses. “He just sits around and mopes all day, and it’s been going on for months, ever since he moved back home. He doesn’t even try to improve his situation. It was like this when he was a youngster. If you ask me, that business about the photograph has become an excuse not to go out. I never did care for that camera, and I told his father that. I knew he wasn’t ever going to make any money off it, for one thing. I told him flat-out, ‘What gal’s going to go out with you if you’re broke all the time?’ but did he listen to me? And then, you know, his marriage didn’t go well, and after that, he just stuck his head behind that thing day and night, but now he won’t touch it.”

  Why would his mother be telling the neighbor all this?

  “I’ll say this, though, he sure is lucky to have someone like you care about him, and drive all the way up from Cincinnati.”

  Betty? The realization has an anesthetizing effect.

  “Is that you, Clayton?” his mother calls. “Clayton?”

  Glaciers move quicker than he does.

  “Well, here he is now. Don’t just stand there, Clayton, for heaven’s sake.”

  While Betty stands and makes a presentation of herself, Havens mumbles his greeting and reaches out his hand without knowing quite what to do with it.

  Betty doesn’t feel good in his arms. She h
as the feel of utility, like a bureau where you park your loose change. Her kiss misses and lands on his chin. Despite this, she sighs a little.

  “Hello, Clayton.”

  “This is a—I wasn’t sure you even—how are you?” The last time he saw Betty was two days after his visit to the offices of Look magazine. She’d taken the breakup well, he thought, and hadn’t pressed him for details.

  “Your mother was just saying you needed some cheering up.”

  Havens slides his hands into his pockets and assumes what he hopes is an expression of contentment. “I don’t know why.”

  Turning to Betty, his mother asks, “Did you read what they printed about him in the newspaper?”

  “Mother, please, it’s been months. Can we not bring it up every five minutes?”

  Huffing, his mother pretends to make her way to the kitchen, but is likely headed only as far as behind the door.

  “It must have been very upsetting for you,” Betty commiserates. “For everyone in your family.”

  Havens wishes she would quit looking at him with such pity. “It could’ve been worse. The article ran on page eight.”

  “I read they took back the Pulitzer.”

  Why would that matter to him? Nor did it matter that Pomeroy had given a lengthy statement to the press about how regrettable the FSA found his actions, which were in no way to be a reflection of the government’s dedication to portraying hardworking and honest families across the country. Oddly, the only sympathetic voice had been that of the so-called orphan boy’s mother, who was quoted as saying she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “It’s not as if there aren’t poor hungry children about.” Only the last line of the article mentioned plans to pull off another unspecified hoax for similar gain, and no one has asked him about this until now.