Blue Diary

by Alice Hoffman

  Jorie is supposed to be there as well; in a way, she’s the guest of honor whose presence will surely elicit compassion and large donations, but when Mark stops by to pick her up at her mother’s house, Jorie’s not ready to leave. It’s a quarter to eight, and people have begun to gather on Front Street; Jorie should already be seated on the center chair of the dais behind the podium, but she can’t find Collie anywhere.

  “I’m sure he’ll show up,” Mark assures her, but Jorie’s not listening. She hasn’t seen Collie for the better part of the day; the later the hour has grown, the more distressed she’s become. She actually sent her niece Gigi out to look for him, scouting the field beyond the high school and the park over on Center Street, with no success. Jorie has no idea where her boy might have gone, for it isn’t like Collie to disappear without leaving a note. I Ie’s reliable and careful, or at least he had been until now. With Mark Derry there urging her to come with him, Jorie finally understands. It’s the rally. Collie doesn’t want to know about it or think about it. He doesn’t want to be in the same universe as his father.

  Jorie assures Mark that she’ll be down to the firehouse before long, and there’s nothing he can say to stop her from getting into Ethan’s truck and going off to search for Collie. She drives through the quiet streets of the old section of Monroe, looking down lanes and into backyards the way she might search for a lost dog. The sky has faded into darkness and Jorie feels cold pinpricks of worry up and down her arms. She circles around Lantern Lake, terrified she might spy something floating in the shallow waters, which thankfully are empty and glassy green. She crosses the highway, looking for a lone hitchhiker, but sights nothing except bramble bushes and row after row of those orange lilies she’s never liked. She knows that lights have been set up outside the firehouse for they crisscross the sky, but there’s no one on the streets of Monroe. People are either at home or attending the rally, depending upon their allegiance.

  It isn’t until after nine that Jorie thinks of going to their house, and when she pulls into the driveway, she can tell he’s been there. The garage door is ajar, and when Jorie goes to investigate she sees someone has been through Ethan’s tool shop. Screwdrivers and wrenches are scattered on the floor, and one of the saws is missing. Jorie has a tight feeling in her chest. She closes and locks the garage, then cuts across Mrs. Gage’s lawn. By the time she knocks on the Williamses’ door, she’s in a panic.

  “I need to talk to your granddaughter,” she says to Katya when at last the door opens. “Right now.”

  Kat is standing behind her grandmother. She’s gotten tall this summer, as tall as a woman, though she’s dressed like a little girl. Her hair is in scraggly braids, and she’s wearing jeans and a white blouse that’s a hand-me-down from her sister.

  “Is something wrong?” Katya, the grandmother, asks.

  “I just need to talk to her.” Jorie is speaking to the girl’s grandmother, but it’s Kat she’s staring at. She nods for Kat to come outside.

  “Well, it’s late,” Katya begins. She doesn’t like the expression on Jorie’s face. A desperate woman, that’s what Jorie looks like. One with very little to lose.

  “It’s okay.” Kat Williams slips out from behind her grandmother and steps onto the porch. “It’s fine,” she says as she closes the door behind her.

  “Where’s Collie?” Beneath the porch light, Jorie notices that Kat is wearing lipstick. Isn’t she too young for such things? Shouldn’t there be a few years more before she starts trying to look older than her age? “Don’t tell me you don’t know, because I can tell from your note that you seem to know everything.”

  Kat feels the heat of an accusation and she raises her chin the way she always docs when she’s cornered. “I said I was sorry.”

  “Right. That fixes everything.” Jorie sounds more spiteful than she intends. “Well, you turned my husband in, so do me a favor and do the same for my son. Where is he?”

  Kat stares back at Jorie. They are nearly the same height, which surprises them both. “How would I know? He’s hardly talking to me.”

  The lights from the fire station are like streaks of lightning in the sky. On the other side of town, Mark Derry is making an appeal to the crowd, and the cheers in response to his pleas ricochet over rooftops and chimneys.

  “You know.” Jorie’s voice is quiet, but it’s sharp. “Tell me.”

  “Go left on Front Street, then head to King George’s.”

  Jorie is surprised. “To the jail?”

  “Way past. But the thing is,” Kat informs her, “you won’t find the place without me.”

  And so they walk across Mrs. Gage’s lawn together and get into Ethan’s truck. On the way through town, Jorie avoids Worthington Street and the rally and goes around on Miller Avenue. When they pass Liberty Street, Kat understands what Collie’s been up to. There, in front of the library, is the fallen apple tree, the boughs and bark tumbled across the lawn and onto the sidewalk. The sight of it fills Kat’s eyes with tears, and she has to blink hard. She cannot believe he did this without telling her.

  They turn onto King George’s Road and travel beyond the county buildings, past the courthouse and the jail, until the road becomes more rural, unlit by street lamps, and lined by old stone fences that are crumbling into dust. The night is dreamy and dark. Along the side of the road, there are banks of daylilies; the flowers look like birds that have settled down to sleep among the leaves.

  “Right here,” Kat says suddenly. “Turn.”

  Kat knows that Collie may not forgive her for leading his mother here, but what choice does she have? Sitting in the passenger scat, holding on tight while Jorie makes a wide, wild turn onto the dirt road, Kat knows that she will always feel the way she feels about Collie right now. No matter what happens, even if she gets married and has a dozen kids, even if she never says it aloud. It will always be him.

  “How did you know this was here?” Jorie wonders when the old Monroe house comes into view. She and Anne came here several times when they were kids, but she never could have found it again. She cuts the headlights and lets the truck roll closer to the house. Something flutters in the trees up above, bird or bat, it’s impossible to tell.

  “He comes here to get away from everyone,” Kat says. “Including me.”

  Jorie looks at Kat and thinks to herself, She’s only twelve. She tells Kat to stay where she is, then goes out into the warm, hazy night. As Jorie makes her way up to the house, she breathes deeply. The air carries the scent of apples and ashes, and when she goes in through what she supposes was once the side door, she picks up the scent of another human being. She can feel someone watching her.

  “Collie,” she calls. Her heart is beating too fast, perhaps because it’s even darker inside the house than it is outside among the overgrown shrubbery. There’s no response, and jorie finds herself wishing she’d brought along a flashlight. She can’t force her son to come to her; she can’t pull him by a leash or a string. If he flatly refuses to come home, Jorie’s not sure what she’ll do, but then out of the emptiness he calls back, “Go away.” Just hearing his voice makes everything bearable. She can see more clearly through the dust and the dampness of this old house.

  “I’m not mad or anything,” Jorie says. “I just came to take you home.” There are crumbly things under her feet, rotting floorboards, most probably, and she makes certain to walk toward the sound of his voice carefully, arms outstretched to catch herself in case she should fall. They haven’t talked about Ethan’s confession: they’ve avoided it thoroughly, going so far around it, all they’ve managed is to get stuck right in the middle of it.

  “Oh, yeah?” Collie says. “Where’s that?”

  He’s sitting on an old timber in what was the parlor, a large, gracious room where cider soup was served to guests on cool, crisp days. The scent of apples here is strongest. Perhaps the wooden fireplace was carved from one of the hundreds of Christmas apple trees that once grew on the property. Jorie fin
ds herself imagining what it would have been like to live in this house. What it would have felt like to look out your window and know you owned everything as far as the eye could see, trees and land, hillsides and fields.

  “And here’s another question.” Collie’s tone is harsh. “What’s my name supposed to be?”

  The moldings around the ceiling of the room have retained some of their gold leaf, so that there is a gleaming through the darkness, even in the places where the plaster has become little more than powder.

  “If our real name isn’t Ford, and I don’t want to take a murderer’s name, who am I?”

  Jorie sees the saw then, one of Ethan’s best, ruined and sticky with sap, tossed into a dim corner. The odor of the apple tree Collie cut down clings to the saw, and to his hands, and to his clothing. He is staring at his mother, desperate for an answer. He barely looks like himself in the dark, but she knows him, perhaps better than she knows anyone in this world.

  “You’re still the same person.” Jorie is surprised to find she continues to have faith in someone. She still believes in who her son is and who he will be. “Even if he’s not.”

  Collie thinks this over as he follows her out of the old house. They go through the front door without bothering to collect Ethan’s saw. Instead, they leave it in the parlor, where the wood is so rotted one heavy footstep can cause an individual to fall right through.

  “I’m not going to use his name,” Collie says once they’re outside.

  “You might want to think about it.” It’s warm outside, but Jorie wraps her arms around herself as though she’s cold.

  “I already have.”

  Collie sounds too old, and Jorie wonders how this has happened so suddenly. Her boy nearly a man, with opinions of his own. But perhaps this transformation would have occurred anyway; certainly it is happening to Kat Williams as well. The little girl next door who’s now as tall as Jorie is sitting on the bumper of the truck with a lit cigarette in hand.

  “That’s how you found me.” Collie nods to Kat. The cigarette she smokes is one swiped from Rosarie, lit in Kat’s attempt to try to calm her nerves. As soon as she spies Jorie and Collie coming toward her in the dark, Kat drops the cigarette and stomps it out beneath her sneaker. Red sparks fly up, and she crushes them, too.

  Ever since Collie took King Arthur from the library, Kat has been stealing books. She’s taken at least one a day and on some brave and crazy afternoons, she’s filled up a whole backpack. She now has novels and biographies under her mattress and in her underwear drawer. Not that she reads any of them. She doesn’t even open the covers. Still, these books make her think of her father. In his last year, Aaron Williams often checked out twenty or more books at a time, huge piles that Kat helped to carry home. This, of course, was expressly against the rules- -there was a six-book limit- -but anyone could look at Aaron Williams and know he was dying. He’d been a big, robust man before he’d taken ill, and although he was soon puffed up from steroids and chemo, it was clear that underneath it he’d become a rail of a man. No matter. If he’d wanted a hundred books, the librarian would have checked them out for him. If he’d wanted a thousand, Grace Henley would have plucked the wheelbarrow from the library’s garden shed and carted the editions along to his house.

  “You cut down the tree,” Kat whispers as Collie comes near. Jorie has gone around to the driver’s side of the truck, and they only have a moment out of her sight.

  “You told her where I was.” Collie looks straight at her and Kat feels dizzy, probably from the cigarette, although she didn’t inhale. Maybe being light-headed is what allows her to be bold, or maybe it’s the notion that the time for this may never come again; whatever the reason, when Collie moves back so Kat can step into the truck, Kat leans toward him and kisses him. She does it so quickly that they both think they have imagined what just happened as they ride home, sitting close together, pretending to listen to the radio as Jorie drives toward town.

  In the morning, blue jays perch on the fallen apple tree. The trunk has been chopped in half, the ragged bark hacked through unevenly but thoroughly. Green leaves and petals drift over side-walks and lawns. Grace Henley is the first to see what’s happened. She arrives early, woken by the stifling heat of the day and her own internal alarm clock, set to five-fifteen for the past twenty years. The morning is still dark when she briskly turns onto Front Street. Grace’s eyesight is failing, so at first she imagines that what she spies is a dragon on the library lawn, coiled and fallen under the sword, and that there are pale sweet-scented scales floating above the grass, onto the roof, dusting windows and doorways and gutters alike.

  When the librarian realizes what has been felled, the hateful fruit tree that has been the bane of her existence each autumn with its bushels of rotten fruit and its pools of deep shade, she decides that some prayers are indeed answered in ways no one ever would have begun to imagine. Grace takes off her shoes and climbs skyward, and she’s still there, comfortable as a jay herself, when the first of the children arrive to practice for the yearly talent show scheduled to take place after supper. Grace allows the children to climb to their hearts’ content, never mind that their hands will be tacky with sap and that the bits of bark are sure to give them splinters. She insists that the town crew wait on the sidewalk with their saws and all their stern warnings that someone could easily break a leg, leaving the town open to a negligence suit. Grace Henley lets the children play until every petal has been shaken loose and the grass has turned white as snow.

  People who disdain Grace Henley as a bookworm who desires nothing more than peace and quiet and a good cup of tea are doing her a disservice and fooling themselves as well. Books should never be judged by their covers, and Grace happens to know quite a lot about the people in this town. She knows, for instance, that Collie is the one who chopped down the tree, not that she would ever let on. Just last summer, Ethan Ford had been hired to replace the rickety steps leading to the stacks on the second floor, and Collie had often come to assist him. Grace had enjoyed watching them work together, and had been delighted to find that rather than running over to the Dairy Queen at lunch time, the way most people would have, they sat and had their noon break beneath the apple tree. They brought along Thermoses of lemonade, and sandwiches wrapped in foil, and thick wedges of angel food cake.

  Grace Henley recalls how the boy had held planks of wood steady as Ethan sawed through them; how serious his expression had been, how much it meant to him to be of use to his father, whom he clearly admired. Hearing of Ethan’s past, Grace feels betrayed, not for her own sake, but for the sake of the children in town, and most especially for Collie. She doesn’t blame him one bit for needing to cut something down. She’s observed the look on his face when he sits in the reading room, half-hidden behind the fish tank. She’s noticed the hurt and the frustration there. Although Grace has refused to discuss Ethan Ford’s guilt or innocence with any library patrons wishing to gossip, privately she feels quite pleased that during the last town referendum, she voted against air-conditioning the jail. She thinks it’s just fine for Ethan Ford to sit in his cell and sweat.

  Grace Henley is not the only one who’s pleased with the current turn of events. Jorie’s sister, Anne Solomon Lyle, is somewhat surprised to find herself back home at the age of forty, but even more amazed to discover she’s not unhappy with her situation. After more than twenty years of moving around from town to town, following her husband across most of New England and half the Southwest, she has a settled feeling at last. As it turns out, everything she was running away from is a comfort to her now. Most people in Monroe would guess Anne must consider herself to be a failure coming home at this stage, divorced with no man in sight, dragging Gigi back to the house she herself couldn’t wait to escape when she eloped with Trent right after their senior year in high school, two smitten fools who didn’t know the first thing about real life.

  Regardless of other people’s judgments, the concerned How are you? tha
t always seems to greet her in the market and at the bank, Anne actually feels better than she has in ages. The truth is, she’s never lived anywhere where the summer air is as sweet as it is in Monroe. It’s only recently that she’s realized the reason for this scent is that her mother keeps flowering jasmine in the yard. Because jasmine cannot tolerate a Massachusetts winter, Ruth always brings the pots inside at the first sign of a chill, ensuring that the glassed-in porch is always fragrant, no matter what the weather outside.

  Anne’s daughter, Gigi, will be going into her junior year at the high school in September, and thankfully she’s not in with the crowd that includes Rosarie Williams. How Anne ever wound up with a daughter like Gigi is proof that there are indeed miracles on earth. Whereas Anne was lazy and self-centered as a teenager, Gigi is thoughtful and a hard worker; she helps her grandmother around the house, made honor roll last spring even though they moved to Monroe midyear, and is currently a volunteer counselor at the library summer program. This evening, Gigi is responsible for organizing the talent show. Although her grandmother has gone to root her on, Anne worked all day at the country club up in Hillerest, where she has recently begun a position as part-time hostess in the restaurant, and she’s opted out. Her feet are killing her, and she doesn’t have the patience for a bunch of kids singing songs and juggling.