A Different Blue

by Amy Harmon

  “I was born in Manchester, England. I have two older sisters. One sister still lives in England, as does my mother. My oldest sister, Tiffa, lives in Las Vegas, which incidently is what brought me here. I am twenty-two years old. I finished what we call college when I was fifteen, which I suppose is about the equivalent of graduating from high school very early.”

  “Wow! So you're really smart, huh?” This brilliant deduction was offered by a girl with a Marilyn Monroe voice who used glittery pens and wrote each letter of her name in a different color, surrounded by hearts and stars. I had dubbed her Sparkles.

  I snorted loudly. Wilson shot me a look, and I decided it was probably time to shut up.

  “We moved to the states when I was sixteen so I could attend university early, which is simply not done in England. My mum is English, but my dad was an American. He was a doctor and took a position at the Huntsman Cancer institute in Utah. I graduated from university when I was nineteen, and that's when I had my turning point moment. My dad died. He had wanted me to be a doctor like he was – actually four generations of men in my family have been doctors. But I was rather a mess after he died and decided to go another direction. I spent two years in Africa in the Peace Corp teaching English. I discovered I really liked teaching.”

  “You shoulda been a doctor,” Sparkles volunteered breathily. “They make more money. And you woulda looked super cute in scrubs.” She giggled into her hand.

  “Thank you, Chrissy,” Wilson sighed and shook his head in exasperation. So that was her name. It wasn't much better than Sparkles.

  “This is my first year teaching here in the states. And Bob's your uncle.” Wilson looked at his watch.” My life in two minutes. Now it's your turn. You have the remainder of the class.”

  I looked down at my paper. Wilson's life was a neat little row of events and achievements. So he was smart. That was fairly obvious. And he was nice. And he was nice-looking. And he came from a nice family. All of it . . . . . . nice. So different from my own history. Did I have a defining moment? One moment where everything changed? I had actually had a few. But there was one moment when the world spun, and when it settled, I was a different girl.

  I had been living with Cheryl for about three years, and in that time there had been no word from Jimmy. Nevada search and rescue had eventually suspended the search effort after they had been unable to find any trace of him. There was no outcry, no public awareness of his disappearance, no demands that the search continue. He was an unknown. Just one man who meant the world to one little girl.

  During that three years, I had tried my hardest not to give up on him. Not in the first weeks when my social worker told me they had to put my dog, Icas, down. Not when, week after week, there had been no sign of Jimmy. Not when Cheryl smoked incessantly in the apartment, and I had to go to school smelling bad, my hair and clothes reeking of cigarettes, friendless and clueless, awkward and strange, in my own eyes and the eyes of my classmates. I was not willing to admit that Jimmy was gone, and sheer stubborn will kept my eyes straight ahead and made me strong.

  If not for the occasional teasing, I would have really liked school. I liked being around other kids, and school lunch seemed like a daily feast after years of eating from a camp stove. I liked having more books at my disposal. My teachers said I was smart, and I worked hard, trying to catch up, knowing how proud Jimmy would be when I showed him the books I could read and the stories I had written. I wrote down all the stories he had told me, all the things that were important to him, and, therefore, important to me. And I waited.

  One day I arrived home to find my social worker waiting for me outside. She told me they had found my father. She and Cheryl both turned toward me when I approached the apartment. Cheryl was blowing huge smoke rings, and I remember marveling at her “talent” before I saw the expression on her face, the tight look around her eyes and the down-turned mouth of the social worker. And I knew. A hiker had been climbing around in a crevice, and had seen something below, wedged deep into the bottom of the crevice, and somewhat protected from the elements and the animals who would surely have scattered his remains. The rock climber thought it looked like human remains. He had called the authorities who sent in a team. Jimmy's remains were brought up a few days later. He had fallen from a significant height. Had the fall killed him, or had he been unable to climb up out of the crevice? His wallet was in the pocket of his pants, which was how they had known it was him. Mystery solved. Hope dashed.

  After the social worker left, I went into my room and laid on my bed. I looked around the room that I always kept tidy and impersonal. I had never considered it my room. It was Cheryl's place, and I was staying with Cheryl. I still had the snake I'd been working on the day Jimmy disappeared. I had kept the pieces that he hadn't yet sold or completed and they were pushed in the corner, collecting dust. The tools were shoved under my bed. And that was all that remained of Jimmy Echohawk's life, and all that remained of my life . . . before. Dark descended on the apartment and still I lay, staring at the ceiling and the brown water-mark that faintly resembled a lumbering elephant. I had named the water-mark Dolores and even talked to her periodically. As I stared, Dolores started to blur and grow, like one of those spongey things that expand when you put them in water. It took me a moment to realize that I was crying, that it was not Dolores who was floating away, it was me. Floating, floating, away.

  Something slid down my cheek and splattered on my arm, and I shook myself, looking down in surprise where my arms framed the page Wilson had positioned in front of me. I ducked my head and grabbed my purse, surreptitiously blotting the moisture from my face. I grabbed my compact, checking my eye makeup for tell-tale streaks. What in the hell had gotten into me?! Crying in history class? I threw my purse down and gripped my pencil, determined to be done with the assignment.

  “Once upon a time there was a little blackbird, pushed from the nest, unwanted. Discarded. Then a Hawk found her and swooped her up and carried her away, giving her a home in his nest, teaching her to fly. But one day the Hawk didn't come home, and the little bird was alone again, unwanted. She wanted to fly away.”

  I stopped writing, remembering. I waited until Cheryl left for work and then I went into the bathroom and filled the tub. I stripped off my clothes and sunk beneath the surface refusing to think about Cheryl finding me, seeing me naked. My body had started to change and show signs of maturity, and the thought of anyone seeing my privates was almost enough to make me change my mind about what I was determined to do. I forced my mind up and beyond the dumpy bathroom with the peeling paint and the dirty linoleum. I willed myself to fly away like the hawk I had seen the day Jimmy disappeared. It had come into the camp and sat on a branch of the scrubby pine just above my head. I had held my breath, watching him as he watched me. I hadn't dared move. Jimmy had told me hawks were special messengers. I had wondered what message he was bringing me. Now I knew. He was telling me Jimmy was gone. My lungs screamed, demanding that I lift my face from the bath water, but I ignored the pain. I was going to float away like the star maiden in my favorite story. I was going to drift up into the sky world and dance with the other star maidens. Maybe I would see Jimmy again.

  Suddenly, I was being pulled from the water by my hair and flopped on the bathroom floor. My back was being slapped repeatedly. I coughed and sputtered, plummeting back to the earth.

  “What the hell, kid!? You scared the shit outta me!! What are you tryin' to do? Did you fall asleep in there? Holy hell! I thought you were dead!” Cheryl's boyfriend Donnie was crouched beside me. Suddenly his eyes were everywhere, and he ceased his babbling. I drew my legs up, covering myself as I scooted to the narrow space between the toilet and the cheap vanity. He watched me go.

  “You okay?” he eased closer.

  “Get out, Donnie,” I ordered, but the coughing that wracked me weakened my demand.

  “Just tryin' to help you, kid.” Donnie was peering at the length of my wet legs, which was all he could s
ee at the moment. But he had seen it all when he pulled me from the bath water. I made myself as small as possible, my long black hair sticking to me in stringy clumps, providing little cover.

  “Come on, little girl,” Donnie cajoled. “You think I'm interested in your skinny legs? Sheee-it! You look like a little drowned bird.” He stood up and grabbed a towel and handed it to me, walking out of the bathroom with a heavy sigh, an indication of how ridiculous he thought I was. I wrapped myself in the towel but stayed pressed into the corner. I was suddenly too tired to move. I was too tired to even be afraid of Donnie.

  I thought I heard him talking to someone. Maybe he had called Cheryl. She wouldn't be pleased. They would have had to call her off the casino floor. I was forbidden to call her at work. I leaned my head against the cabinet and closed my eyes. I would just sleep here. I would wait for Donnie to leave, and then I would get back in the tub where it was warm and I could float away once more.

  The bell rang. I threw my pencil down gratefully and grabbed my purse, abandoning the assignment as if it were burning me.

  “Just leave your papers on your desks. I'll collect them!” Wilson called, avoiding having thirty pages shoved at him simultaneously.

  He picked up the remaining papers quietly and halted when he came to the desk where I was sitting. I watched him read the line I added. He looked up at me, a question in his face.

  “You haven't written very much.”

  “There isn't much to tell.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.” Wilson looked back down at the paper and studied what I'd written. “What you've written sounds almost like a….a legend or something. It makes me think of your name when I read it. Did you do that intentionally?”

  “Echohawk was the name of the man who raised me. I'm not sure what my name is.”

  I thought the bold statement would make him back off. Make him uncomfortable. I stared him down and waited for him to respond or dismiss me.

  “My first name is Darcy.”

  Laughter sputtered from my chest at the randomness of his response, and he smiled with me, the ice broken between us.

  “I hate it. So everyone just calls me Wilson . . . except for my mother and my sisters. Sometimes I think not knowing what my name is would be a blessing.”

  I relaxed a little, leaning back in my desk. “So why did she name you Darcy? Sounds pretty Malibu Barbie to me.” It was Wilson's turn to snort.

  “My mother loves classic literature. She's extremely old-fashioned. Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy is her favorite.”

  I knew very little about classic literature, so I just waited.

  “Look, Miss Echohawk –”

  “Ugh! Stop that!” I groaned. “My name is Blue. You sound like an old man with a little bow-tie when you talk like that! I am nineteen, maybe twenty. You aren't that much older than me so . . . just . . . stop!”

  “What do you mean, maybe twenty?” Wilson raised a questioning eye brow.

  “Well . . . I don't exactly know when I was born – so I suppose I could be twenty already.” Jimmy and I had celebrated my birthday every year on the anniversary of the day my mother abandoned me. He was pretty certain I was around two years old at the time. But he had no way of knowing how old I actually was. When I'd finally been enrolled in school they had put me in the grade below my estimated age because I had so much catching up to do.

  “You . . . don't know what your name is . . . and you don't know when you were born?” Wilson's eyes were wide, almost disbelieving.

  “Makes writing the personal history a little challenging, doesn't it?” I sneered, angry all over again.

  Wilson seemed completely stunned, and I felt a surge of power that I had taken him off his high horse.

  “Yes . . . I guess it does,” he whispered.

  I pushed past him and headed for the door. When I was halfway down the hall, I tossed a look back over my shoulder. Wilson stood in the doorway to his classroom, his hands shoved into his pockets, watching me walk away.

  Chapter Four

  I didn't go to school until I was approximately ten years old. Jimmy Echohawk didn't stay in one place long enough for school to be an option. I had no birth certificate, no immunization record, no permanent address. And he was afraid, though I hadn't known that then.

  He had done his best for me, in the only way he knew how. When I was still small, he fashioned several toys from the scraps of wood he had left over from his projects. Some of my very earliest memories were watching him work. It fascinated me, the way the wood would wrinkle and curl as he would chisel away. He always seemed to know what the end result would be, as if he could see what lay beneath the layers of bark, as if the wood was guiding him, guiding his hands in smooth strokes. And when he did stop, he would sit beside me, staring at the unfinished sculpture, gazing for long periods of time, as if the work were continuing in his head, in a place I was no longer privy to observe. He made a living selling his carvings and sculptures to tourist shops and even a few upscale galleries featuring local artists and southwestern art. He had cultivated a relationship with several shop owners throughout the West, and we would travel between shops, eking out a meager existence from the money he made. It wasn't much. But I was never hungry, I was never cold, and I don't remember ever being really unhappy.

  I didn't know any different, so I wasn't especially lonely, and I had been brought up in silence, so I felt no need to fill it the few times I was left alone. There were times when Jimmy would leave for several hours, as if he needed respite from the restraints parenthood had placed upon him. But he always came back. Until the day he didn't.

  We lived mostly in the warmer climates – Arizona, Nevada, Southern Utah and parts of California. It just made life easier. But that day was so hot. Jimmy had left early in the morning with a few words that he would be back later on. He had left on foot, leaving the truck to bake beside the trailer. We had a dog he called Icas, which is the Pawnee word for turtle. Icas was slow and blind and slept most of the time, so the name was fitting. Icas got to go with Jimmy that morning, which I was hurt and bothered by. Usually we were both left behind, although Icas had seemed reluctant to go, and Jimmy had to whistle for him twice. I tried to stay busy, as busy as a ten or eleven-year-old girl can without video games or cable or a soul to talk to or play with. I had my own projects, and Jimmy was generous with his tools.

  I spent the morning sanding a small branch I had fashioned into the curving, sinuous likeness of a snake. Jimmy had told me it was good enough that he thought he could sell it. That was a first for me, and I worked diligently in the shade of the ragged canopy that stretched ten feet from the camper door, providing blessed shade in the 110 degree heat. We were camped at the base of Mount Charleston, just to the west of Las Vegas. Jimmy had wanted more Mountain Mahogany, a scrubby evergreen tree that looked nothing like the rich dark wood most people associated with mahogany. Wood from the Mountain Mahogany was reddish-brown in color and hard, like most of the wood Jimmy worked with when he was sculpting.

  The day dragged on. I was used to being alone, but I was afraid that day. Night came and Jimmy didn't return. I opened some re fried beans, heated them up on the little stove in the camper, and spread them on some tortillas we had made the day before. I made myself eat because it was something to do, but I found myself crying and swallowing my food in great gulps because my nose was clogged and I couldn't breath and chew at the same time.

  There had been one other time when Jimmy stayed away all night. He had come home acting strange and stumbling around. He had fallen into his bed and had slept the day away. I had thought he was sick and had put a cold rag on his head, only to have him push me away, telling me he was fine, just drunk. I didn't know what drunk meant. I asked him when he finally woke up. He was embarrassed, and he apologized, telling me that alcohol made men mean and women cheap.

  I thought about what he said for a long time.

  “Can it make women mean too?” I asked Jimmy out of the blue.
/>   “Huh?” he had grunted, not understanding.

  “Alcohol. You said it makes men mean and women cheap. Can it make women mean too?” I didn't know what cheap meant, but I knew what it meant to be mean and wondered if alcohol had been part of my mom's problem.

  “Sure. Mean and cheap both.” Jimmy nodded.

  I was comforted by that thought. I had assumed that my mom had left me and Jimmy because I had done something wrong. Maybe I had cried too much or wanted things she couldn't give me. But maybe she drank alcohol and it made her mean. If alcohol made her mean, then maybe it wasn't me after all.

  I fell asleep that night, but I slept fitfully listening even as I drifted off, trying not to cry, telling myself it was alcohol again, although I didn't believe it. I awoke the next morning, the heat seeping into the camp trailer pulling me from dreams where I wasn't alone. I shot up, shoving my feet into my flip-flops and stumbling out into the blinding sunshine. I ran around our camp site, looking for any indication that Jimmy had returned while I'd slept.

  “Jimmy!” I shrieked. “Jimmy!” I knew he hadn't come back, but I comforted myself with calling for him and looking in outrageous places where he couldn't possibly be. A muffled whine had me running around the camper in jubilation, expecting to see Jimmy and Icas approaching from the direction they had headed the day before. Instead, I saw Icas, still several yards off, limping, his head hung low, his tongue practically dragging in the dirt. There was no sign of Jimmy. I ran to him and scooped him up in my arms, blubbering my gratitude that he was here. I wasn't a big girl, and I staggered a little beneath his weight, but I wasn't about to let him go. I laid him down awkwardly in the shade of the canopy and ran for his bowl, splashing lukewarm water into his dish and urging him to drink. He lifted his head and tried to drink from a prone position. He managed to splash a little water into his mouth but did not drink with the gusto one would expect from a dog so clearly in need of water. He tried to stand, but now that he was down he couldn't seem to find the strength to rise to his feet. I tried to support him as he attempted to drink again.