Blue Diary

by Alice Hoffman

  “Well, then, there you go. You have something.” James Morris lets go of her hand. “I understand you didn’t know. But that doesn’t change what happened. He’s the same man who came here that night. I know that for a fact.” James nods in the direction he once ran from, far from here, into the woods. “He’s the one.”

  Jorie drives back the way she’s come, past the fields, past the pond where the shallow water used to be so warm it turned to steam, out onto the two-lane road that will lead her to Main Street. Blackbirds follow her into town, swooping and chattering above her, casting shadows on the asphalt. After she parks at the hotel, Jorie walks back to Duke’s Diner. Although the lunch hour has come and gone, she sits at the counter and orders a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat toast and an iced tea. She’s starving , but when the sandwich arrives, she can’t eat. She keeps thinking about the brush left on the bureau, the diary without a key She sips at her iced tea, and as she does she notices Nancy, the clerk from town hall, picking up a Greek salad to go.

  “Did he talk to you?” Nancy asks.

  Jorie nods and takes a bite of her sandwich to ensure she won’t get involved in a conversation, not that such tactics will thwart a woman like Nancy Kerr, who approaches and sits on the stool next to Jorie’s.

  “Well, that’s a surprise.” Nancy lights a cigarette and pulls over the plastic ashtray on the counter. “I didn’t think he’d say more than two words to you.” Some people truly love to talk, and Nancy is clearly one of them. “What a waste of a man. I could personally name five women who would have jumped at the chance of settling down with James Morris, myself included, but he wasn’t interested. It’s like it happened yesterday as far as he’s concerned. and you can understand why.” Nancy’s face seems crumpled as she speaks about the past. “I was at school with Rachel, you know.”

  “He said you were one of her best friends.”

  “He said that?” Nancy looks pleased. “A lot of the girls in town weren’t very nice to me back then, but Rachel wasn’t like that. She didn’t care how much money you had or what you wore.” At last Nancy pauses. “I happened to overhear you talking about your husband when you were on the phone with him.” She glances around Duke’s, not particularly crowded, except for two police officers bolting down a late lunch, and a table of elderly women ordering decaf coffee and peach pie. “You might want to keep his involvement to yourself,” Nancy advises. “People around here still have strong feelings about what happened back then.”

  “It was an accident. He never meant for it to happen.”

  “Yeah, right.” Nancy blows out a stream of smoke. “Maybe it was accidental rape, too. I’ve heard that one before. His dick just climbed through the bedroom window, and he had no choice but to follow along.”

  Stung, and more than a little exhausted, Jorie leaves some money on the counter, along with her barely touched sandwich, and quickly rises from her seat.

  “Thanks for helping me out,” she tells Nancy before she walks out of the diner. What Jorie wants is to get to her hotel room and slip into bed, but there’s no escape: the town clerk follows her out, clutching her take-out order, calling for Jorie to wait up.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Nancy apologizes.

  “Why? You seemed to enjoy letting me have it. I’m simply trying to understand what happened.”

  “Well, I can show you exactly what happened.” Nancy’s boss, Arnold Darby, will probably dock her for the extra time she’s about to take, but Nancy isn’t too concerned about getting back to work. She never takes a proper lunch hour; she’s entitled to this one. “Come on.”

  It’s hot as they walk up the hill leading to the oldest section of town. The cemetery has been in this part of the village since 1790 and is ringed with hedges of sweet pepperbush and dogwoods that bloom pink and white in the spring. Rachel Morris is buried between her parents on the far side of the second hill. It’s a shady spot, one that is damp enough for the rose mallows someone has planted to thrive.

  “This is what happened. Somebody died.” Nancy’s mouth is set. She has her salad-to-go under her arm, wilted long before this trek, and the paper bag rustles. Just standing here causes a catch in her throat. She was one of those girls who would have waited for James Morris forever, if he’d even looked at her twice. She could have made him forget some of his pain, if only he’d let her, if only he’d tried, but some things aren’t destined to be, no matter how you might want them, and so she gave up and married Lonnie Kerr, who, even though they’re divorced, is a good father and a good man, despite the fact that he’s not James Morris.

  There are red-winged blackbirds here, too, and because they defend their territory by song, the sky is filled with a riotous band of trilling. Jorie goes to the stone, then bends to run her fingers over the carvings. Beneath Rachel’s name, a message from her parents has been engraved: You are with us every day.

  Jorie can feel something cold settle around her. She is coming to a conclusion here on this hillock where the grass was so recently mowed the fresh scent brings tears to her eyes.

  “One weekend she was sleeping over at my house, and by the next week she was dead. and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it or any story they could tell themselves to make it all right.” Nancy doesn’t seem like a stranger. She seems like the kind of woman who would be a good friend. “Sometimes I think no one in this town ever felt safe again, not the way we used to.”

  They stand at the gravesite for a while longer, then walk back along the cemetery path to the main road beneath the azure-colored sky. This was the same sky Rachel had seen every day. These blackbirds had woken her each morning with song. What happened then feels so real here, whether it was yesterday or fifteen years ago or this morning. Jorie’s history is fading under the weight of the Morrises’ sorrow, disintegrating strand by strand, year by year.

  “I’ve got a boy with him.” They have gone past the black cemetery gates and have turned toward town. “Twelve years old.”

  “Well, then, you have my sympathies.” Nancy is sincere. “I don’t envy you.”

  The street they walk along is shady and cool and there’s the odor of sweet gum in the air.

  “It must be nice to live down here. There’s still so much country around.”

  “It was nicer back then. People felt so safe they used to sleep out on their lawns in the summertime. They used to leave their doors wide open, and their cars running with the keys left in the ignition. Then we wised up.”

  When they pass a cottage with a “for rent” sign in the window, Jorie stops to gaze through the small-paned windows. All the place needs are the hedges trimmed and a new coat of paint.

  “I hear the heating system is terrible,” Nancy Kerr informs Jorie. “The last tenant nearly froze to death last winter. He packed up and drove south to North Carolina with icicles in his beard.” She peeks into the bag to see if Duke remembered to put in a roll with her salad order, which, of course, he never does. “Some things look a whole lot better from a distance, and this town is probably one of them.”

  “Do you ever feel like running away?” Jorie asks.

  The full heat of the afternoon is upon them now, so they walk slowly. Surely, they’ll never see each other again, so it doesn’t hurt to be honest.

  “I don’t have anything to run from, honey. That’s the difference between me and you.”

  They shake hands when they reach the Black Horse Hotel. Under different circumstances they might have become friends, or perhaps they would have passed each other by entirely; now they will always have this walk they’ve shared, under the blue sky, up to the second hill, where Rachel Morris is buried. When Jorie goes to her room in the hotel, she takes off her clothes and lies on the bed, between the clean sheets. At last, she can cry in peace. The room is glassy with heat, and by the time Jorie is done weeping, her face is splotchy, her eyes red. She used to cry over foolish things, movies and books, stubbed toes, stories of children rescued by their mot
hers, suddenly strong beyond human limitations in the face of danger. Now she cries for herself, and she’s shocked by how much salt water there is contained within her. She could collect buckets of it, wash her clothes in it, boil a sour teary tea that could bring grief to the drinker with a single sip. She goes into the bathroom, naked, then steps into the shower and runs cold water over herself, streams of it hitting her hot, dusty skin, grateful that the racket of the faucet stops her from thinking, at least for now.

  Some things, however, are true no matter how hard you might try to block them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told. Jorie thinks about Rachel Morris’s bedroom; some doors, once they’re opened, can never be closed again, just as some trust, once it’s been lost, can never be won back. The past thirteen years feel less real to Jorie than do the last twenty-four hours. She sleeps with dreams of blackbirds and rose mallows, and when she wakes, she notices that her pillow is faintly red, as though she’s been crying blood and not tears. It’s the dust that collected on her skin, granules that remain even though she’s washed carefully.

  Jorie has slept so deeply she hadn’t heard anyone outside her room in the hallway of the Black Horse Hotel. She doesn’t find the package James Morris leaves for her until she’s about to go down for breakfast before driving back to the airport in Baltimore. By then, Jorie has nearly made up her mind; she has the bellman carry her bag downstairs, then goes back to sit on the edge of the bed. She opens the envelope neatly tied with brown string and brings forth Rachel’s diary. It’s still locked; Rachel’s privacy has been preserved since the summer when she died. She would have been a junior in high school that next year if Bryon Bell had never come to town, if he’d just kept driving north, if he hadn’t been so damn thirsty and the heat hadn’t been so brutal, if he hadn’t seen her red hair through the window of the market.

  Jorie looks at the bottom of the envelope and finds the note James Morris scrawled on the back of a hardware store receipt last night as he stood in the hallway while she dreamed of blackbirds.

  Take this with you. So you’ll remember who she was.

  James placed the package so gently against the door, Jorie hadn’t heard a thing. On this, her last morning in Maryland, she feels the tenderness of his message, as well as the strength. People pity James Morris, but Jorie finds she respects him. He is one man who knows exactly what’s inside his heart, and he refuses to pretend otherwise. What he told her was true. He will never move forward, and he’ll never forgive. He’s honest, simple as that, and this has become the trait that Jorie finds most admirable.

  When she leaves the hotel, Jorie stands out in the parking lot to take a last look at Holden. Although it’s not yet nine, the heat is already rising off the blacktop in transparent waves. Jorie can feel the sun on her back as she packs Rachel’s diary into her suitcase before driving back to the airport. She has the suitcase right under her seat as the plane taxis out across the runway, for as it turns out, the flight to Massachusetts isn’t the least bit crowded. Jorie leans against the headrest and closes her eyes during takeoff As they hurtle into the milky blue air, awash with cloud and sun, she can no longer tell the difference between east and west. But there’s one direction of which she has no doubt, and one thing she knows for certain: she is not about to forget.

  Nightshade

  MY GRANDMOTHER TOLD ME THAT on the day my sister was born, two blackbirds arrived at her bedroom window, and there was nothing my grandmother could do to chase them off, not even when Rosaric came home from the hospital, bundled in blankets and wailing like crazy Some people thought the birds were an omen, of good luck or bad fortune to come, no one was certain. But my father didn’t wait to find out; he took a hose from the yard and sprayed those blackbirds until they had no choice but to fly away; dripping water and feathers all the way down our street.

  It is certainly bad luck that has struck Brendan Derry after his association with Rosarie. He comes by our house every day, even though my sister has told him in no uncertain terms not to bother her anymore. Brendan was working like a madman on Ethan Ford’s defense fund, but anyone could tell it wasn’t Mr. Ford he cared about; he just wanted to stay close to my sister, who was hanging around the firehouse every afternoon, stuffing envelopes and raising money and eating the free pizza Mark Derry provided for the volunteer staff “I don’t get it,” Brendan confided in me. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  Nothing, you big idiot, wanted to say. She’s just moved on, the way she always does. You were never important to her, you were nothing more than a speck of dust, good-looking dust, but dust all the same. Why, by now, I wanted to tell him. she barely remembers what it was like to kiss you. Can’t you see just by looking at her that she’s managed to stop feeling? Didn’t you notice the burn marks on her arms all those times you held her tight? But when he rambles on, I nod and listen and keep my mouth shut. I even let him take me down to the bakery and buy me a plate of pie and ask me questions about my sister, but that doesn’t mean I ever tell him the truth. I surely don’t mention the fact that Collie and I have taken most of the fliers Brendan had posted on trees. That’s what we did when we went on a picnic with Gigi. We tore those fliers to pieces, and we didn’t go back to where Gigi was waiting until we were finished destroying Brendan’s hard work, only taking time out to practice our kissing, which was getting better by the day. By then we couldn’t look at Gigi any more than we could face each other.

  For her part, Rosarie never took the time to notice Brendan mooning around our property; she was far too caught up in Ethan Ford’s defense fund to pay attention to some pathetic heart she’d carelessly broken. But the real question was, why this sudden interest in Ethan’s case? Why was she doing something when there was no foreseeable payback? That wasn’t the Rosarie I knew, and I knew her better than anyone. She wouldn’t scratch anybody’s back if they didn’t scratch hers twice as hard, and for twice as long a time, too. I knew something was up when Rosarie started to come out to the yard whenever Collie was around. Usually, we were too far beneath her for her to bother saying hello. Now she brought out a cold glass of lemonade for Collie, and that just wasn’t like Rosarie, to think of anyone else’s needs.

  “What about me?” I said, but there was nothing she wanted from me, so I was ignored and left thirsty. She smiled at Collie so brightly that he looked a little stunned in the glare of her attentions.

  “I think what they’re doing to your father is awful,” Rosarie told him. She had a frown on her face that made a little line right between her eyes. Collie seemed unable to look away from that line or from her dark eyes. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. “After everything he’s done for this town, he should be considered a hero.”

  Collie finally broke away from her gaze and stared at me, panicked, like a fish on a hook.

  “It’s late,” I said. I knew how he felt about his father and I wished Rosarie would just leave him alone, but she wasn’t about to do that, so I had to save him. “Your mother will be worried about you if you’re not home soon.”

  Collie nodded gratefully and took off for his grandmother’s house. It was awful that he didn’t live on our block anymore. I hated to see the real estate agent showing the house to prospective buyers, and there was one couple in particular who kept coming back. I wanted our neighborhood to look bad and scare them away, so when my grandmother hired Warren Peck’s nephew. Kyle, to clean up our yard, I told him that we couldn’t afford his services and sent him on his way before he could cut down the hedge of black thorns on our property line that was such an eyesore. In our backyard there was one of the first apple trees in town, a Baldwin that some people say was planted by Colonel Baldwin as he rode through town in the year 1749. Every fall my father would make something called mole-cider from these apples, mixing cider and milk with eggs, but this summer the tree was failing, and I couldn’t care less. I hoped when people came to look at Collie’s house they’d peer past the fence in Mrs. Gage’s yard and whe
n they saw the half-dead apple tree and the hedge of thorns and the black mimosas they’d decide to live somewhere else.

  After Collie went home, my sister began to confide in me. which took me completely by surprise. I didn’t want to hear the things she told me, but I’d been waiting so long for her to treat me like a human being, I didn’t tell her to shut up. As it turned out, she’d done such a good job for the defense fund, stuffing envelopes and going door to door, spending countless hours on the hot line, that Mr. Hart, the attorney in charge of the case, and Mark Derry, who’d started the whole fund-raising process, had brought her down to the jail to let Ethan Ford thank her in person. If my grandmother had known about this she would have surely grounded Rosarie for the rest of the summer, not that it would have done any good to try to discipline her. Something in Rosarie had changed, and it wasn’t just the way she looked that was different. She had personally raised twenty-eight thousand dollars for the cause. When she asked for help, people couldn’t seem to refuse her, despite the dark clothes she’d taken to wearing, and the fact that her face was clean of makeup. No more shorts for her, no gobby mascara and red lips. But if anything, she was more beautiful this way, with her long dark hair pulled back, leaving her heart-shaped face so exposed. People wrote out checks and then they thanked her, as if they were grateful for her presence, and her guidance, and her charity.

  In some ways, though, she was the same old Rosarie, still thinking about herself She had gotten to the part she was most excited about, the thing that made her swoon. She told me that when she went to see Ethan in jail, he’d gotten down on his knees and kissed her feet, first one and then the other. She was wearing sandals, and she’d polished her toenails a pale shell pink, and she had almost fainted, except that the jailhouse floor was probably filthy, so she’d forced herself to stay conscious. She willed it with all her might. As she spoke of what had happened, she was trembling. She had a strange look on her face, the way people do when they know a tornado is about to hit, but out of loyalty or stupidity they just stay put, right there in the eye of the storm.