BLUE MIDNIGHT
TESS THOMPSON
Booktrope Editions
Seattle, WA 2014
COPYRIGHT 2014 TESS THOMPSON
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Cover Design by Greg Simanson
Edited by Jennifer Munro
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
PRINT ISBN 978-1-62015-460-1
EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-470-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014911049
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
EPILOGUE
MORE FROM TESS THOMPSON & BOOKTROPE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, thank you to my editor, Jennifer D. Munro. This is our fifth book together, which takes us into old married couple status in publishing years. Thank you for being a partnership that exceeds my expectations. Thank you to my Booktrope team: Samantha March, Katherine Sears, Ken Shear, and Heather Ludviksson. You are the best team a girl could ask for. To Greg Simanson for the cover—you nail it every time. To Susan Fye, for her peregrine falcon eyes on the final copy. Thank you to Jennifer Gilbert for generously lending her talents to our team. To Jesse James Freeman, thank you for your friendship, especially for those late night calls when I need to hear your Texas drawl on the other end of the line because nothing else will do. Marni Mann, my writer bestie, thank you for always being there during my darkest moments in this crazy book business. Thank you to my friend Eric Hansen for the ongoing music advice for both my characters and their creator. Thanks to my sassy, intelligent, and lovely reader (and new friend) Merilyn Williams for suggesting the name “Peregrine” for my fictional town. To my “Team Tess” Facebook group—thanks for the encouragement and gift of your eyes and ears. Finally, thank you to my daughters, Ella and Emerson, for being the loves of my life and the reason for everything.
For my second daughter, Emerson Blythe,
the brightest light in any room.
CHAPTER 1
I FOUND IT at the very back of my bedside table drawer, next to an old bottle of nail polish. I’d forgotten to empty the drawers in preparation for the movers that morning and was doing so now, shoving most of the neglected or forsaken contents into trash bags. But this scrap of paper, it stopped me. Shaped like a duck’s beak and wedged between the bottom of the drawer and the back panel, with just its tip exposed, it wasn’t enough, really, to indicate something of any significance. But I knew. I knew in an instant. I stood motionless, taking in every jagged detail. Then, I tugged; it came loose easily. This small slip of paper with a man’s name and number scrawled in blue ink seemed benign enough. Finn Lanigan 208-555-2004. And yet, the pulse at my neck quickened. Heat traveled from my center to every limb. I sank on molten legs to the stripped mattress. I held this scrap of paper, torn from a bar receipt, between damp fingers and stared at it like the ghost it was.
I’d tossed it years before, hadn’t I? Surely I had, in one of my moments that first year of marriage when my loyalty was resolute. Hadn’t I disposed of it when I embraced my choice? Apparently not. Here it lived. My temptation. My road not taken.
My daughters’ voices floated up the winding staircase from where they chased one another like wanton puppies in the now nearly empty 4,500 square feet of custom floors, intricate finish work, and marble countertops. I went to the window that faced the street and looked out onto our neighborhood park, empty this morning of children. Today was the first day of summer vacation and children and their mothers were sleeping late. How many hours of my life had I spent in that park, pushing my babies in swings, chasing after them as toddlers, and, when they were old enough to climb the play structures by themselves, chatting with other mothers about this milestone or that? The hours could not be calculated, of course, nor the wages lost by choosing to stay at home with my children instead of continuing my career.
The windows were open to let the fresh June air cleanse away all remnants of the scents of my family before the new owners claimed it with their own smells. Outside, the movers shouted to one another as they loaded the family room couch into the moving truck. My neighbor from two doors down walked by the truck, her eyes averted. Her manicured hands grasped the leash of her Labradoodle. She couldn’t look. It was easier to pretend the collective nightmare for almost every woman in our affluent Seattle neighborhood had not happened to someone in their circle, someone with whom they exercised, had dinner parties, and volunteered at private school. Someone they liked. A stay-at-home mom, almost forty-five, left by her husband for another woman and forced to leave her beautiful home and sought-after neighborhood. I was everyone’s worst-case scenario.
My eyes went back to the slip of paper in my hand.
If you change your mind, here’s this. Then he’d kissed me one last time under an Idaho star-scattered sky larger than any other. After the kiss I wished would last forever ended, as all good things must, I turned away, back to the life I’d agreed to, the wedding I’d committed to. It was the last kiss that ever weakened my knees, the last sky I noticed for thirteen years.
Now, Clementine, my seven-year-old, pounded up the stairs, followed by the tip-tap of her older sister Lola in her flip-flops. I shoved the slip of paper in the pocket of my shorts. I couldn’t know then why I didn’t just toss it in the garbage like I had so many memories and possessions in the weeks preceding. I know now. It was my destiny, and destinies cannot be denied.
CHAPTER 2
I CARRIED THE SLIP of paper in various pockets for three days. Sometimes, between moments supervising the movers as they placed the remaining furniture into my new townhome, or helping my daughters unpack their rooms, I reached in and touched the ragged paper edges with my thumb. At night I put it in the now empty bedside table drawer on a pattern in the wood that, depending on the angle, looked like either the state of Oklahoma or a unicorn.
On the third day, after dinner and a glass of wine, when my daughters were tucked into their beds, I took it from the drawer where it rested on Oklahoma’s panhandle and held it up to the light, as if I could find more than numbers. I had a notion for a fanciful moment that it was a poem of some kind, perhaps Robert Frost and my road not taken. Or, Mary Oliver and her question of my one wild and precious life written in miniature, perhaps with magic invisible ink I could not see before, but no
w, after all that had passed, after all the ways in which I’d had to say goodbye, I could decipher it in the yellow light of a summer evening.
But the slip of paper was still only his name and number, written in his upright, perfectly readable print. After a moment, my heart beating faster than it should and my T-shirt clinging to the perspiration of uneasy skin, I dialed the number. It rang several times before a woman answered. She had a pleasant, professional-sounding voice, like she answered phones for a living. I couldn’t speak at first, the words stuck in my stomach of a hundred beating wings. “Hello, is this the phone for Finn Lanigan?” I asked, finally, after what felt like minutes. He was married. Of course he was married. It had been thirteen years. What did I expect?
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I believe it used to be, though. I’ve had this number for two years and I still get calls for him.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to bother you then.”
“No worries. I hope you find him.”
After I hung up, I sat on the edge of the bed, just as I had three days before when I’d first found the slip of paper. Well, that’s it, I told myself. I have no way to find him. This was my answer. Anyway, it was ridiculous to think a man I’d known such a short time would even remember me. He probably didn’t hang onto ghosts and stolen moments. Not like I did.
I went downstairs and washed the dinner dishes in my new kitchen, gazing at the mountains of the Cascades. Green, without snow this time of year except for a few patches at the very top. My townhome, although half the size of my former house, had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, plus a powder room off the great room. Made by a respected builder, this new home had high ceilings and a state-of-the-art kitchen. Furthermore, much to my delight, we dwelled on a quiet street, with no yard maintenance or many other chores to worry over. I wanted everything to be as simple and easy as possible now that I was alone.
After the dishes were clean and put away, I went into the living room and stood near the gas fireplace, staring down at the final box from the move. The top flaps caved inward from years of neglect. I’d packed this box thirteen years ago, in 2001, the week before I married Michael, and it had remained, unopened, all this time in the back of my clothes closet, behind a winter coat I no longer wore.
I kneeled next to it, running my finger over the label scrawled on the side of the box. “Photography equipment.” I’ll pull it all out the minute we’re settled into our new house, I told myself then. But, like so many things I stifled after marrying Michael, it remained boxed, as did I.
I tore the tape from the top of the box and opened it. Inside was my old Nikon, along with supplies for developing film in a darkroom. I picked up my camera, running my fingers over its familiar curves and edges. I lifted it to my face and sniffed. It smelled of nothing. And nothing has a smell, believe it or not.
I pulled it all out of the box, stacking each piece neatly by the fireplace: trays, photo paper, toner. I stared at the stack of my past. What should I do with it? Leave it for now, I decided. I turned away, feeling like I left a dear friend in peril, and went to the window, my breath rapid like during a run. I took in deep breaths for a moment with my eyes closed. Just breathe, I told myself. It will all be fine in the end.
I opened my eyes. I could see from this window the top of the public elementary school my children would attend in September. Suddenly, Michael had decided it wasn’t important to have the children in private school. Knowing this, I’d set out to find a suburb with good schools for our new home. I’d found Snoqualmie, a new development thirty minutes east of Seattle. The realtor assured me it was a family neighborhood. “Your girls will just love it here,” she said. “And just three blocks from the school.”
“We can walk to school,” I told the girls earlier that night before I put them to bed, in another attempt to make this new life of ours sound wonderful. “Won’t that be fun?”
“When it’s not raining,” said Lola, rolling her eyes. She did this now that she was almost eleven—eye rolls, refusals of hugs in public, and a general disdain for anything I wore. “Which is hardly ever. And I won’t know anyone so it’s not like anything matters anyway.”
I ignored her comment but I wanted to cry. No matter how I told myself that children were resilient, I felt the pang of guilt and regret coupled with anger toward Michael. “It’ll be a new beginning. A fresh start,” I said. Their sets of hazel eyes filled with tears, like I’d killed their puppy, and then turned away from me in silence.
A new beginning. I told myself the same thing again and again. It was over a year now since Michael left and I’d survived, one moment at a time. June now, in a few days my husband, my ex-husband (I had to remind myself of his new title frequently), would marry the woman he left me for. Then, he and his new wife and my children would spend three weeks in Hawaii. It would be the longest I’d ever been away from my girls.
Michael hired a savvy and cutthroat attorney from his firm who wore down my attorney with paperwork and details to the point where the bills grew so high I knew the best thing to do was agree to the settlement, even though my attorney thought we could do better. But how will I pay you, Mr. High-Priced Attorney? I thought when he tried to convince me to continue to fight. So, we agreed and signed papers and I was free. We sold the house; I made a healthy lump sum from which to buy the townhome, plus spousal support for five years in addition to the mandatory child support. I would be fine financially for the next few years if I was frugal. Regardless, I needed a job of some kind—not so much for the near future but for the long lens view of my life. I needed something to carry me into old age. The likelihood of a woman in her mid-forties (albeit well-preserved through rigorous exercise and eating habits, along with occasional visits to the Botox nurse) getting remarried had a similar statistical probability as getting hit by lightning. I read this somewhere when I was still married. The article had gone on to say the largest number of people living in poverty in America were divorcées. I’d thought, oh, those poor women. How unfair life was to women, even in the modern world in America. And now here I was—a statistic.
In the middle of that thought, the phone rang. I jumped. It rang infrequently these days. The welcoming sound of a friend’s call, along with the ring of the doorbell, had disappeared, replaced with silence only I could hear.
The smart phone window displayed the name Bliss Heywood. Bliss. My little sister.
Blythe and Bliss. How poorly we were named. The definitions for bliss in the dictionary were: complete happiness or spiritual joy, of which my sister had neither. She did little besides work, and the only thing she seemed to worship was American capitalism. And me? Well, the definition for blithe was cheerful and carefree, casual. I’d never been casual or carefree about anything in my life, ever.
On the contrary, I was pragmatic and serious, even staid. I believed in what I could touch, see, taste, and hear, suspicious even of smell, the most nebulous of the senses. My interest in framing and capturing the known in a physical way had inspired my interest in photography when I was a teenager. Capturing the tangible truth through the lens of my camera became my obsession. Whatever was unseen, anything proposed instead of known, believed as opposed to proven, held no interest for me. It was a rebellion, not purposely chosen, but there nonetheless, against my mother’s unrelenting belief in the spirit, the mystery, the mystics.
Bliss had set up my phone to have “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie play whenever she called. Apparently she thought this was amusing; she couldn’t stop chuckling as she taught me how to program it last Christmas. The latest version of the iPhone was my Christmas present from her. “To bring you into the latest decade,” she said when I opened it. At first it seemed large and complicated compared to the flip phone I’d had for years, which I was perfectly happy with. After all, whom would I call when I was out driving around? Why would I need the Internet with me at all times? And texting? Wasn’t that something kids did when they were supposed to be focusing on their driving? B
ut now I couldn’t think of how I’d lived without it.
I took a deep breath and answered.
CHAPTER 3
“HEY, SISTER SUE.” We always greeted one another this way. I don’t know why or even when it started but it remained a steady in an otherwise unsteady life.
“Sister Sue. How you doing?” she asked. Bliss spoke in a clipped and precise manner, as if she had another call waiting, regardless if you conversed in person or over the phone. She rarely raised the low timbre of her voice above a pleasant speaking tone, which suited her well in business because it seemed as if she were never ruffled. Talking with her often gave me the sensation of chasing her in an open field, out of breath, with aching calves.
“Good. I finished unpacking. The walls need some color but all in good time, right?”
“Of course you’re unpacked. You’ve been there three days already. I mean, why put off ‘til today what you did yesterday?” We both laughed, knowing our need for order was a quality we shared. It was an answer to the chaos and untidiness of the world our mother provided, according to my therapist. “But seriously, how you doing?” she asked. When it came to emotional conversations, one could hear the strain in her voice as she tried to be sensitive; it sounded like a politician apologizing to the media for his affair while his wife stood quietly by his side.
“The kids leave tomorrow.” Even to myself I sounded desolate.
“Who in God’s name takes children on their honeymoon?” She sounded comfortable now—anger and disdain were better than kind and sensitive. Since the divorce, she was tense and acerbic whenever she spoke of Michael, similar to the tone of voice she used when the subject of our mother came up, which wasn’t often. I spoke to my mother occasionally but my sister refused to have anything to do with her. Years ago she cut all communication with our mother, saying she no longer chose to engage the crazy. Bliss was like that—she could sever ties and not look back. On more than one occasion I wished I could do the same.
Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain Book 1) Page 1
