“You got a ride with a stranger?”
“Who happens to work for the Boston Globe. He asked me my opinion about Ethan Ford’s arrest. Everything I said will be in the paper tomorrow.”
“Who cares about what you have to say?”
“Well, he sure did. And he took my photo. He said to look for it on the Metro page. I just wish my hair hadn’t been wet.”
I had always thought my sister had no opinions, other than ones that had to do w ith herself It must have been the photograph that had convinced her to talk to the reporter, the notion that everyone in town would be gazing at her face white they had their morning coffee.
“I told them an innocent man had been locked up and that the American system of justice needed to be completely overhauled.”
She was serious. “You know nothing about the American system of justice,” I reminded her. I would have laughed if I hadn’t then recalled the look on Collie’s face after he’d seen his father. For no reason I started thinking about the mirror in the Fords’ front room and how gray the glass was, like a take with no bottom, a river with no shore.
“The point is, I’m going to be in the newspaper.” My sister could not have been more pleased with herself “So whether or not I know what I’m talking about doesn’t really make a difference, does it?”
I had always thought my sister was the smart one: now I had to rethink my assessment. “Everything makes a difference.”
“Oh, yeah?” Rosarie blew cigarette smoke upward, into the rafters, and the air turned blue. She eyed the ingredients I’d spread out on the concrete. “Well, tell me what difference this crap is supposed to make.”
“Its to call him back.” I admitted.
I thought Rosarie would laugh, I thought she’d tell me I was an idiot and needed to be locked up and not released until I was a functioning adult, but instead she just said, “Watch this.” She held her hand above one of the candles. She kept it there for longer than I would have thought possible. The flame flickered and spit and turned the center of her palm a sooty charcoal color, but she didn’t flinch. Maybe she was right. Maybe she didn’t feel pain.
“I have news for you,” Rosarie informed me once she’d taken her hand out of the fire. Anyone else would have been crying ; they would have been searching for some salve or a pail of cool water. “He’s not ever coming back. Kat. You know that, right?”
Maybe it was the fact that she said my name, something she almost never did, or the superior expression on her face, but I just got mad then. I reached over, even though the candles singed my sleeves, and before I could stop myself, I slapped her.
Rosarie gasped and put a hand to her reddened check. Even I couldn’t believe what I’d done. Rosarie sat on her heels, too shocked to hit me back.
“Why did you do that?”
I shook my head. In all honesty, I didn’t know. I expected my sister to pull my hair the way she usually did when she wanted to hurt me, but instead she came around and sat next to me while I finished crying. Then she waited while I gathered up my worthless ingredients and tossed everything in the trash. I blew out the candles and threw them away, too. We pulled open the sliding door that no one had used since my father died, and when we did, nothing unusual happened. It was just like every other garage door in town. We could smell cut grass even though no one had mowed our lawn all summer. We could see the moon. There on the lawn were the two bikes I’d walked home from the county offices. Rosarie had a last cigarette while I brought Collie’s bike into the garage, just to make sure no one stole it. If I lost one more thing in my life. I’d probably disappear myself.
I propped Collie’s bike up against the wall, then went back to stand beside Rosarie. I was thinking about Collie, about how good he was and how fixed his mouth had looked when he rode away from me toward the highway, as if he didn’t want me in his life anymore.
“Do you think anyone ever winds up with the first person they fall in love with?” I asked my sister.
“You’d better hope not. Look at Mom and Dad. Childhood sweethearts.” Rosarie shook her head, and I could smell the smoke and the lake water in her hair. “What a mistake.”
“They were happy.”
“Operative word?” My sister shimmered in her wet clothes and her face was pale. “Were.”
“How many times have you been in love?”
I had never dared to ask a question like this before, but tonight Rosarie seemed to have forgotten who she was talking to.
“Too many times. And every one has been a big disappointment.” Rosarie seemed softer than usual. She had already crossed Brendan Derry off her list, and after spending half the night alone in his rented rowboat, he surely knew he was history. All the same, having her photograph in the newspaper wouldn’t begin to satisfy my sister. Even being beautiful wasn’t enough for her. “Nobody loves me the way I want to be loved.”
But I knew that someone had loved us both so much he hadn’t wanted us to see him suffer. He had loved us completely, as much as a man could love anyone, and what had it brought us? Nothing but sorrow and emptiness and heartache. By then, my sister must have completely forgotten who I was, because she draped her arm around me. We stood there together, like people who didn’t hate each other, grateful for the dark. We’d both missed the fireworks and everything else, so we looked up at the constellations my father had taught us a few summers ago, when there were record sightings of meteor showers. Back then, we brought blankets out to the grass and stayed out past midnight, each of us trying to be the first to see Antares, the red heart of Scorpio.
“Make a wish,” Rosarie said as we stared at the stars, but I’d already made mine and it hadn’t come true.
“No, you,” I told her.
Rosarie smiled thoughtfully. “All right,” she said.
She really was the most beautiful girl on earth, especially on this night. Youd never even guess she had all those burns on her arm or that she was trying so hard to feel something. She closed her eyes and her breathing settled, and I could tell she was also wishing for something she would never have, and that no matter how beautiful she was, she wasn’t any different than me.
The Labyrinth
COLLIE FORD IS AMONG THOSE FEW individuals in town who have chosen to ignore July despite its many temptations, the fine, cloudless mornings and lazy, expectant afternoons. There will always be those contrary residents who abhor good weather and couldn’t care less about the buttery sunlight, or the cicadas calling from the hedges, or the long days that wash blue and bluer still as the day turns into evening. Hannah Phillips, for instance, who runs the coffee shop, has a sun allergy that keeps her inside even on her afternoons off, and when she does venture out, she’s always well protected by a baseball hat and a long-sleeved shirt, no matter how high the temperature. Alarmed by how dizzy she becomes during the heat of the day, Mrs. Gage gardens only in the mornings. Mark Derry hasn’t had a moment of free time all month, especially now that he’s taken it upon himself to make sure Ethan’s jobs are completed, hiring a jack-of-all-trades named Swift from over in Hamilton to finish up the carpentry. As a boy, Mark lived for summers; he was a champion swimmer, but lately he can’t remember what it feels like to dive into the cool waters of Lantern Lake. He’s jealous of his son Brendan, and the rest of the teenaged boys in town, who are ready and willing to tempt fate by jumping in headfirst from atop the highest rocks, ignoring their parents warnings of how easy it would be to drown in these waters before anyone heard their panicked cries for help. Bill Shannon, the postman, who has always prided himself on facing any sort of weather, from the stormy to the sizzling hot, has been warned by his doctor about the high risk of skin cancer for mail carriers, and nowadays Bill has taken to hiding from the sun at noon, making himself comfortable on one of the benches across from the coffee shop, reading the newspaper and figuring that people in town will just have to wait for their mail delivery until the cooler part of the day.
Collie Ford is among this gro
up who’s been searching out dark, empty places. He’s been avoiding people with nearly the same alacrity as the voles in his mother’s garden dodge the traps set out among the strawberries. Collie has been spending much of his time at the library on Liberty Avenue. In the old building built of stone and ruddy bricks, a July afternoon spent curled up in one of the leather armchairs in the reading room is no different from a steely February evening. Most often, Collie stations himself behind the periodicals rack, where the librarian, Grace Henley, has placed a huge fish tank on display. As Collie watches the gills of the angelfish moving in and out, he wishes he were underwater as well, so deep no one would ever find him. He wishes he were a thousand miles from Monroe, Massachusetts, a place he has quickly come to despise. He could not be far enough away, mile upon mile, league upon league. What he wouldn’t give to be walking on the moon right now, running on its pale, cruel surface, stones in his pockets and in his shoes, stone heart and lungs and limbs.
Collie doesn’t want to talk to anyone, but when he looks out the window, tall and arched with bubbly green glass fixed within the sashes, he spies Kat Williams. He can tell Kat is waiting for him; she’s sitting with her back up against the oldest apple tree in the village, a rare Westfield Seek-No-Further, which always blooms months after all the other trees in town and has grown on this spot since 1790, planted a hundred years before the corner-stones of the library were set down. These Westfield apples are tough-skinned, good for nothing other than the most humble of pies, and every October, rotten fruit rains down upon the library’s lawn, much to the librarian’s dismay. Local boys use the cores to pelt one another, and many of the old windows have been broken by such hijinks, the green glass splintering into thousands of pieces. Grace Henley always places the offending applescruff on display atop her desk. along with a jar used to collect funds for a new window, which is why the light streaming into the stacks is clear and sharp on some afternoons, and at other times gauzy and dense, as if water were pouring in through the windows, siphoned from the muddy bottom of Lantern Lake.
Collie has been thumbing through an old edition of The Boy’s King Arthur, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, but now, seeing Kat on the lawn, his reverie is shattered. It doesn’t matter that Kat has always been his one true friend. He doesn’t want a friend anymore, that’s the problem. He wants his aloneness; he wears it like armor. He used to pride himself on his honesty, but something inside him has changed. Instead of returning the book to the shelf, Collie slides it up the front of his shirt, like a common thief The spine of the book feels cool against him. The pages whisper as he holds the book close to his chest, right to the place where it hurts most of all, the place, he imagines, where his heart used to be.
Luckily for Collie, he left his bike by the back door of the library; he can slip away unnoticed. He shoots outside, then gets on his bike and pedals fast, the heat waves slapping against him, the sharp sunlight nearly blinding him. He’d had to go into Kat’s garage to get his bike this morning, and that hadn’t been easy. He’d held his breath, run in, grabbed it, and run back into the sunlight: but as it turns out, the damage he did to the wheels makes the bike wobble uncertainly and the metal rims dig into the front tire. Still, the bike allows him to round the corner before Kat can look up, her view obscured by the last of the pink-tinged blossoms on the apple tree. As he races down Liberty Street, Collie has the strangest thought: he will cut down that apple tree. The idea comes to him all at once, and as it does, it seems as though he was predestined for this singular act of destruction. He can hear the tree falling inside his mind. He can imagine how the bark will shudder, how the splinters will pierce his hands. For some reason, this venture seems as right to him as it is wrong. It feels like the only thing that can clear away the facts that are stuck in his head, the words his father said that won’t leave him alone, no matter how hard he tries not to think.
Collie’s chest has been hurting ever since his father confessed to him: the heaviness that has settled inside burns and makes him want to run away to someplace frozen and blue, but it also makes him want to chop something down to its roots. Even if he tried to be the person he was before he went to see his father, it would be impossible. That person is gone. As Collie rides his bike through town, he isn’t thinking about fishing at the lake or playing baseball with his team, the way he might have been only a few weeks earlier. He is thinking of his mother. locked in her bedroom, convinced he can’t hear her crying. He thinks of the reporter who chased him this morning after he retrieved his bike from Kats house and took off for the library
I just want to talk to you, the reporter had shouted as he tried to keep up with Collie. Hey, you little shit, Collie had heard called out behind him as he’d ridden farther and farther away. Slow down.
He has been in flight ever since, and now as he avoids Kat Williams and swoops down Mayflower Street, taking the curb at top speed, Collie feels, for one brief moment, as though he is soaring through the sweet blue air. He hits the asphalt with a thud, then turns onto the dirt path that leads behind the high school in the direction of King George’s Road. If he hadn’t stopped to look out at the field, Kat never would have been able to catch up with him. The bike she’s riding used to belong to Rosarie, until Rosarie announced it was too interior for her to bother with. Kat. on the other hand, enjoys the bike, perhaps because she’d been with her father when he bought it. It had taken almost two hours before he’d finally settled on something he hoped Rosarie would like, but Rosarie hadn’t been particularly pleased with his choice. Three speeds? was her only comment.
Kat, on the other hand, likes the way this bike chugs along. A person got to really see things if she wasn’t racing through life. As she rounds the corner onto Mayflower, for instance, Kat notices there are cosmos in several of the yards, tall stalks of purple flowers abuzz with honeybees. As she approaches the high school, she sees a boy watching a baseball game. On closer inspection, that boy turns out to be Collie, and the sight of him makes Kat aware of her own pulse drumming in her ears. She pulls up next to Collie and leans forward, hooking her fingers though the meshing of the fence. She knows he’s been avoiding her, so she doesn’t look at him. She is trying her best not to scare him away. “Isn’t that your team?” she asks mildly.
It is indeed the Bluebirds out in the field, down by a landslide in the fifth inning. Kat herself is not a team player. The only sport she could ever manage is ice skating, and this winter she couldn’t even bring herself to do that. Every time she went down to the lake, she thought she saw her father, over by the bench where there were always oatmeal cookies and hot chocolate, where fathers knelt beside their children to help lace up skates.
On this hot and gorgeous July day, the Bluebirds are being staughtered by the Braves from Hamilton: they haven’t scored a single run. Perhaps the loss is unavoidable; though not showy. Collie has always been the most consistent player on the team. His father has spent thousands of hours with him on this very field, throwing ground balls and curve balls, but those hours are evaporating into shining and unrecognizable bits of time. Collie has already decided: he’s never playing baseball again.
Kat appraises the Bluebirds. “They sure could use you. They’re terrible.”
“I don’t care if they win or not.”
“Did you see my sister’s picture in the newspaper?” Kat asks. “I don’t understand why anyone would be interested in her opinion, but she looked great.”
“I care even less about that than I do about baseball.”
Collie can feel the sun on his head, his neck, his arms. He can smell grass and the rich, damp scent of the field. If his father was coaching today, he and Collie would be coming up with a strategy to turn the game around. Swing to the right, his father would say, or Hit short and surprise them. Collie thinks about King Arthur and how he tried so hard to be a good man, and how he’d been betrayed: how in the end, he had failed at everything he had tried to accomplish. Somewhere inside himself. Collie knows that he’s taken
the book from the library shelf to make sure no one else will be able to read this story; no one should be fooled into believing in a kind of honor that doesn’t exist, not then and certainly not now.
Kat turns to tell Collie that the Bluebirds don’t seem to know the first thing about winning, and when she does she sees that he’s crying.
“Baseball is stupid, anyway.” Kat’s heart is pounding, and she has a metallic taste in her mouth. “Everything is stupid when you really think about it. People get up every day and they act like whatever they do is so important, but they’re all just going to die in the end, so none of it matters.”
“Shut up. Kat.” Collie blinks and looks out over the field. He has broad shoulders and is a truly fast runner; he’s a natural athlete, but now he seems folded up on himself
As Kat Williams studies her friend, her pure, cold heart is breaking for him. People who are good are at risk, that’s what she’s figured out. She knows that Collie’s father told him something that is too terrible to talk about. She has the feeling that people who’ve done what Ethan Ford did are sent away for a very long time. They don’t come back until they can walk past a mirror and their reflection can be seen once again.
“Let’s go swimming.” Kat wants Collie to say yes so much her throat hurts. She wants to go backward in time, to the hour before she made that phone call. She wishes they were still eleven, or perhaps even ten. Rosarie has informed her that by the time seventh grade is over, Collie will no longer be her best friend. You’re crazy, Kat told her sister, but Rosarie only smiled, sure of herself as could be. Wait and see. He’ll be wanting somethíng more from you then.
Maybe it’s thinking about what Rosarie said that gives Kat an idea of how she might bring Collie back to her. She swallows hard. Once she says it, she knows there’ll be no returning to who they used to be.
Blue Diary Page 10
