Reunion

THERESE FOWLER

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

Copyright © Therese Fowler 2008

Therese Fowler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847560247

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007287635

Version: 2018-05-29

This, my second novel, was so much a labor of love: Love for writing and for telling a story that engaged my imagination so thoroughly; love for my new profession and all the excellent people who publish my work; love for the readers whose responses to my first novel, Souvenir, have humbled me beyond words . . . To those readers I send my most heartfelt thanks.

Second novels are, they say, the hardest to write. The quandary is in deciding how similar the second book should be to the first. I decided to approach the matter much the way a singer might when selecting which songs to record for a new CD. Listeners don’t want the same song on every track, but they do need to recognize the sound as uniquely that artist’s. Consider this book my track #2, a contemporary, slightly up-tempo offering that I hope will be as captivating as readers and reviewers say the first track is.

I have to thank my lovely UK editor Maxine Hitchcock, as well as the entire HarperCollins/Avon team, for their faith in my taking this approach.Without Maxine, I would not have UK readers waiting to see whether this book measures up.

Linda Marrow,my US editor, has earned my unwavering respect, affection, and gratitude for her expert editorial guidance and overall wonderfulness.

Speaking of wonderful: my agent,Wendy Sherman, is precisely that. She and Jenny Meyer, who handles most of my foreign rights, are an author’s dream team. It’s my good fortune to be in their capable hands.

I treasure the camaraderie and support of my writing pals, who know better than anyone else the struggles that take place at the keyboard and behind the scenes.

Most of all, I treasure and thank my enthusiastic family (and not only for the unpaid publicity efforts!). My husband Andrew and our four boys get both the pleasures and the pain of living with a “creative type,” and seem to love me just the same.

For Andrew, who reminds me that things always turn out pretty much the way they’re supposed to.

Love to faults is always blind,Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d, and unconfin’d, And Breaks all chains from every mind.

William Blake

Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Prologue Part I Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Part II Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Part III Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Part IV Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Epilogue About the Author By The Same Author About the Publisher

Prologue

Her name was Harmony Blue. Harmony Blue Kucharski, not Forrester, as it ought to have been by then. Unmarried, nineteen, she lay in her narrow bed in the smallest of the rundown rental’s bedrooms. Her groans had already driven one of her housemates away, leaving only two people to tend her: the midwife, whose name at the time was Meredith Jones, and a teenage girl who wanted to be known as Bat.

“I’m looking out for you,” Bat said, sitting on the bed’s edge and holding her friend’s clammy hand.

Like all of the fledgling adults who came and went here, Bat was hardly capable of looking out for herself. But if her words had little impact—the young woman hardly cared what she said—the fact of Bat being there was real comfort in between the pains.

Harmony Blue, sweaty and exhausted, had once been described as “fetching.” She tried to remember where she’d heard it, who had used such a word … Then she had it: an old farmer in Wisconsin, five or six years earlier; she had been trying for the Miss Junior Dairy Maiden crown, despite never having been within milking distance of a cow. Entering the pageant had been her mother’s idea, a chance for the two-hundred-fifty-dollar prize. Pink and white hair ribbons, the young woman remembered; ruffles at her throat and knees; a rhinestone tiara that was lost in the next move.

She looked at Bat’s reflection in the mirrored closet door, at bony shoulder blades visible inside a black Duran Duran tour t-shirt, black hair cut asymmetrically, longer on the left and striped with one fuchsia swath behind her ear. Bat had style, identity, whereas she had neither. What she had was matted hair, a stretched-to-its-limits red sweatshirt, a swollen belly and a rounded, pallid face.

Excepting the belly and the fullness of her face, she appeared to be the same untethered person who’d taken refuge here ten months earlier—which just went to show how untrustworthy an image could be; nothing but the visible bit of an iceberg that was otherwise out of sight. She wasn’t the innocent she’d been when she got here. She was no longer quite so naïve.

She watched the mirror, saw her eyes narrow and her lips flatten as another contraction began and tightened, a cinched string yanking her entire body inward to its core. Then she was seeing nothing but the black heat of pain as Bat said, “Breathe, remember? Breathe!”

Slowly, her vision cleared, and the midwife examined her again. “Just about time to push,” Meredith said. Meredith’s face was thin but kind, and not so much older looking than her two companions’, whose desperate faith in her was all too common.

Harmony Blue panted, avoiding the midwife’s eyes and words and looking, instead, at the pink ceramic lamp on the dresser. A painted-on ballerina smiled serenely from the lamp’s rounded base. The light shining through the dusty lampshade warmed the room the same way it had warmed the bedroom where the lamp used to be. Where her sister had been too, until adulthood—such as it was—had come for each of them.

She concentrated on the faded Journey band poster on the wall above the lamp, positioned just as it had been in that other bedroom. “Don’t Stop Believin’” they urged in one of their songs, but she’d failed them, and now look at her. Pregnant not by a man she loved, not by the man she loved, but by a guy she barely knew, a guy she could not have cared less about. Pregnant and then paralyzed by the mistake, tortured, unable to decide what she wanted to do. Keep it? End it? Indecisive weeks had turned to months, leaving her with a different pair of choices—and even then she’d had trouble choosing, until Meredith helped her see which way to go.

Meredith had supported her wish to give birth at home, where she would not be judged. Meredith was a facilitator— that was the term she’d used, a facilitator for the people on the other end. There was some money involved, not that it mattered. There was always money in these situations, according to Bat, who’d found Meredith through the friend of a friend. The new parents’ offer to the girl, through some law firm, through Meredith, had been ten thousand dollars. For expenses, Meredith said. It would be a closed adoption. Anonymous. No strings. No names.

Bat squeezed her hand harder. “Why is there so much blood?”

Meredith, sitting on a stool at the end of the bed, leaned back and sighed. With her forearm, she brushed dark bangs back from her narrow face. “It’s normal. Okay now, with the next contraction, take a breath, focus, and push.”

Focus. Icy rain blew against the window just above the midwife’s head, pattering, streaking. Focus. How was she supposed to focus when her belly was going to split wide open at any second? This accidental baby … the pain was her punishment, pain like a hot iron shoved into her lower back, proving that there was no escaping stupidity. So she’d gotten her heart broken by the man she’d believed was perfect for her, so what? Other girls didn’t deal with heartbreak by running away, by joining a group of directionless misfits like the ones she was living with. Getting high. Getting pregnant.

Getting over it was what she should have done.

She was over it now, though. In her time here, she had not spoken of her past, not to Bat, not to Will—who’d gotten her pregnant, she didn’t care how much he’d denied it before he split—not to any of the people she’d met. If she revealed her heartbreak, they would see her for the fool she was. They’d reject her too, she was sure. She had not spoken of her past, and she would not.

“Deep breath,” Meredith said. “You’re almost there.”

“No,” she moaned, holding her belly. “No, I can’t.” If time would only stop for a minute, let her catch her breath, let her spend a little longer with the baby there beneath her hands. It was true that she hadn’t been sure, at first, if she’d continue the pregnancy. It was true that this baby owed its existence more to inaction than intent. Even so, they were good friends now. She’d tried to protect him—or was it her?—she’d really tried. A few more days as one entity. Maybe that would be enough.

“Push now.” The midwife’s face was lighted, eager. “Come on, here’s the head.”

She began to cry, knowing there was no stopping it, pain like a locomotive pulling, pulling the baby on to its real life, its better life. She wanted that for this child, this unintended effect of too much fun, too little thought—same as its mother had been, and its aunt. She wanted this child to have intentional parents, who would make its life everything that hers hadn’t been.

“Happy accidents” was what her mother had liked to call her and her sister, even after they had little to be happy about. When the girls reached puberty, the refrain became, “Just don’t imagine I’d be able to raise yours. We can barely afford ourselves and, though God knows I try, I am not as capable as my mother.” That would be their grandmother, Kate, who’d helped raise them. Until she died, and then they’d had to for the most part raise themselves.

“Oh my god, oh my god.” Bat leaned over to watch the baby emerging, still squeezing her friend’s hand. “Oh my god! You did it! Jesus! Check him out! It’s a boy!”

A son. Good. Everyone wanted a son. He’d be especially loved by his parents. He was from questionable stock, but the adopting parents didn’t care. It was enough for them that he be white and healthy—he was healthy, just look at him, listen to that cry!—and free of complications. Meredith had assured her that this way was best, no strings for any of them. As soon as the adoption paperwork was filed and finalized, the original birth certificate would be sealed away, accessible only by court order. She would own her future again, free and clear, as if he had never happened. No strings, no trail.

Meredith would be back later, and tomorrow, and again, if needed, in the weeks to come. Post-partum was the word she’d used. Any trouble and Harmony Blue was to call the number she’d called when her labor began, and Meredith would come. “If it isn’t an emergency, don’t go to the ER,” the midwife had said.

Bat had nodded as though she, too, was wise, and said, “Not unless you want to have to answer a lot of questions.”

She didn’t. Not any. Ever.

“Not unless she wants to wait all day,” Meredith said.

Now Meredith held the baby up, one hand beneath his buttocks, one beneath his head. “Do you want to hold him?”

“I do!” Bat said.

Harmony Blue struggled to sit upright. The pain was a shadow now, the way her belly was a shadow of what it had been just moments before. Her belly. Round but no longer bulging. A cantaloupe instead of a watermelon, and why was she thinking of fruit? Would the tiny thing, sputtering there in the midwife’s hands, that red-faced creature with blood drying on his newborn skin, would he love fruit the way she did? Would his parents one day tempt him with fresh pineapple and find he took to it like a duck to bugs? Her grandma, Kate, had always said that, like a duck to bugs.

Would he have her brown eyes, her slender fingers? Would he love to play Scrabble the way she once had? Before, in that other life that now seemed as far away as Sirius. Sirius was the brightest star, the most hopeful point of light in the sky. She had wished on it so often. Had begun, for a time, to believe she’d been heard.

“Yes, I’ll hold him,” she said. Meredith cut the umbilical cord and tied it off. She squeezed drops into the infant’s eyes, then wrapped him in a pale yellow receiving blanket and handed him into her arms. He continued to sputter, but it was a half-hearted noise, as if he knew some sound was expected but really didn’t want to make any further fuss. He’d be a good baby, she could tell already.

When the placenta was out and the contractions had subsided, stitches were put in, plastic bags filled and tied and placed in the cardboard box that Meredith had put by the door. Meredith picked up the box and left the room, saying she’d be back in a few minutes. “We’ll do the paperwork, and then … I’ll be needing to go.”

After the door closed, Bat smoothed the baby’s damp hair and traced his eyebrows with one finger. “You have to keep him. Don’t you want to keep him? God, he’s so … I don’t know. I mean, wow!”

Harmony Blue recognized the feverish look in her friend’s eyes. Speed, probably. She looked away, back to the purity, the innocence of the tiny boy in her arms. “He deserves better.”

Meredith had quizzed her on her drug use when they’d met two months ago. How often? How much? She had backed off once she realized she was pregnant, she truly had, even as she’d still felt the need to disappear from herself. “Not too much,” was the answer she’d given Meredith, “and nothing really, you know, bad.” Nothing from a needle. She’d heard of AIDS, she said—only to have Meredith look at her side ways.

“You know about AIDS, but not condoms?”

Guilty.

The baby seemed to be studying her. What did he see? Was her face, with its narrow nose and wide mouth and olive skin that tanned so quickly, being stored in his memory, so that if he saw her one day he would know? Would she know him? Not that such a meeting would happen: the adopting parents, whom she’d spoken with twice before making her decision, lived far from Chicago. They said they were West Coast people who had tried every fertility treatment medical science had to offer. They seemed caring and kind—she’d thought so even just seeing the Polaroid Meredith had given her before they’d spoken, anonymously of course. Meredith the matchmaker. To the couple, she had given two photos of Harmony Blue: a close-up and a side view—to prove she was seven months along, she supposed. At forty and forty-three, the parents-to-be were a little older than she might have chosen, all things considered—but that was why they were using a law firm, and Meredith: no agency would approve them. They had money though, so why not use it to help out a troubled young woman and fulfill their single most important dream? Their compassion and their money meant this child would never suffer for her weakness.

She whispered to him, “Never.”

They’d told her to take her time deciding—at least a day or two after the birth, so she would be sure she was making the right choice for her, and them. But, having finally made her decision, she’d told Meredith she wanted to get it over with quickly. She was strong, but not that strong.

Soon the front door opened again. She could see Meredith shake out her umbrella then pull it inside and prop it by the door. Terrible weather for a first trip out into the world, but children were resilient, her grandmother had always said so.

Wiping her shoes, Meredith reached into her trench coat’s right pocket. She crossed the front room and came into the bedroom, saying, “Where do you want me to put this?”

The envelope was so fat that a rubber band had to bind it. All twenties? The baby pushed a foot against her ribs reflexively, same as he’d done for months, only on the inside.

She shook her head. “I told you: no money.”

“And I told you, you need it. Take it.” Meredith’s eyes were sympathetic. “Consider it payment for the hard work you just did for this family. Consider it a scholarship fund.”

“Take it,” Bat said.

She kissed the baby’s downy head, letting her lips linger as if to imprint herself on him. He wouldn’t remember her, not really. Thank God he wouldn’t. Except in some quiet piece of his soul, where he would know she loved him.

“Have them start a savings account, with the money.”

Meredith came over and squatted next to her. “He’ll have a savings account already. And everything else he needs. Don’t be foolish.”

“Too late.”

Meredith watched her for a moment, then sighed and put the money in her pocket. “We’ll talk about it again later. Let’s do the paperwork.”

She would not remember, in the years to come, much of what was on the forms she signed. She would remember instead the warm weight of the infant in the crook of her arm, the vision she conjured of the new parents’ joy when Meredith delivered the baby for the second time.

Meredith tucked the papers into a folder and set them aside. She asked Bat, “Do you want to go over the care instructions once more?”

“No, it’s cool, both of you can count on me.”

“All right then,” Meredith said, turning back to the girl. “Supplies are in the bag. I’ll check on you later tonight. Meanwhile, use cold packs for your breasts if needed, and Tylenol every four hours. You’ll be sore all over—”

“I know. Take him.”

Meredith reached for her free hand, held it while she said, “Now I know what you told me, and I know we’ve signed the forms, but until I leave you can still change your—”

“Take him.”

“All right then,” Meredith said, reaching for the child. “It’s a good decision. I want you to know that.”

She could only nod.

Empty. Her arms, her belly. Now, quickly, she had to empty her mind, too, or be destroyed. Teeth clenched, she watched Meredith diaper the infant, watched her wrap him in a heavier blanket and put a cap on his head, watched her put him to her shoulder, watched her grab the file and leave the room and grasp the front door’s knob. Meredith didn’t look back; she’d done this before.

The door closed, and it was over.

Part I

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

Emily Dickinson

Chapter One

Present Day

In Chicago, the snow was falling so hard that, although quite a few pedestrians saw the woman standing on the fire escape nine stories up, none were sure they recognized her. At first the woman leaned against the railing and looked down, as if calculating the odds of death from such a height. After a minute or two, though, when she hadn’t climbed the rail but had instead stepped back from it, most people who’d noticed her continued on their ways. She didn’t look ready to jump, so why keep watching? And how about this snow, they said. What the hell? It wasn’t supposed to snow like this in spring!

To the few who watched her a minute longer, it was conceivable that the woman in the black pants and white blouse could be the popular talk-show host whose show was taped inside the building. Conceivable, but unlikely. Was Blue Reynolds’ hair that long? That dark? Why would Blue be standing there motionless on the fire escape, looking up into the sky? Such a sensible, practical dynamo of a person—she certainly wasn’t the type to catch snowflakes on her tongue, as this woman now appeared to be doing. And especially not when The Blue Reynolds Show was going to start in twenty minutes. Tourists who’d hoped for last-minute tickets were right this second being turned away, the studio was full; please check the website for how to get tickets in advance.

This snow, coming two days after spring had officially begun, had the effect of bringing people throughout the city to windows and doorways—and to fire escapes, apparently. Though six to eight inches was forecasted, it was hard to begrudge snow like this, flakes so big that if you caught one on your sleeve you could see the crystalline shape of it, perfect as a newborn baby’s hand. And with tomorrow’s temperatures rising into the fifties, what snow was piling up on railings and rooftops and ledges would melt away. It would be as if this remarkable snowfall had never happened at all. Much like the sighting of Blue—if in fact it was Blue—there outside her studio building’s ninth floor.

The black steel fire escape stood out against the buff-colored limestone, an add-on when the building got transformed from bank to apartments in 1953. Now that it housed offices again, its fire escape made balconies for those lucky enough to have access along with their downtown skyline views. Like a switchback trail, the escape descended from the twelfth-story rooftop to the second floor, with landings at each floor.

The landing on which the woman stood was piled with a good three inches of snow, deep enough to close in on her ankles and soak the hem of black crepe pants. Her boots, Hugo Boss, lambskin, three-inch heels, were styled for fashion, not utility, and as she stood with her face upturned, she was vaguely aware that her feet were growing cold. Still, the pleasure of being pelted by snowflakes held her there. She could not recall the last time she’d been in, truly in, weather like this. And never alone, it seemed, and never focused, anymore, on the weather. Standing here, she had the exquisite feeling of being just one more anonymous Chicago dweller. Just a fortyish woman on a fire escape in the snow, and not Blue Reynolds at all.

This snow made her want to be a child again so that, instead of going home to a bowl of Froot Loops eaten while she reviewed reports, she would be preparing to pull on snow pants and boots and head for the lighted hillside at the park, plastic saucer sled in tow. She would return home later soaking wet, with chapped red cheeks and frozen toes and a smile that would still be on her face when she woke the next morning.

Was such a day a memory, she wondered, or a wish?

She knew the snowflakes must be wetting her just-styled hair, spotting her white silk blouse—Escada, she’d put it on not fifteen minutes earlier. These thoughts, they existed outside her somehow, far enough away that they didn’t motivate her to climb back inside her office window—even as today’s guests waited downstairs in the green room, nervous about meeting her. Even as the camera and lighting and sound and recording crews were gearing up for this last show of the week. Even as three hundred eager audience members were now taking their seats and would soon meet Marcy, Blue’s right hand; Marcy, who managed her life, who would tell them what to expect on today’s show. They wouldn’t expect a snow-wet, distracted Blue Reynolds.

Still, even when she heard someone tapping the window to get her attention, she stood there squinting up into the whitened sky. One more minute. One more.

The tapping, again.

“I know, I’m coming,” she said.

Inside, the stylists and her producer and her assistants fluttered around her, clucking like outraged hens. What are you doing, it’s practically show time! Look at that blouse! Are you sure you’re okay? No. She wasn’t okay, hadn’t been truly okay ever, that she could recall.

What expectation she saw on the faces of her studio audience when she took the stage! It wasn’t her they’d come to watch; she never lost sight of that. Because she was a regular person who argued with her mother, who cleaned hair from her shower drain so that the cleaning lady didn’t have to. She was a woman who failed to floss, who needed to clean out her purse, who paged through People at the dentist’s office, just like most of them. They were here to see the woman who, upon seeing that magazine, could then book whoever interested her and interview them on this very stage. They were here to see the woman who sometimes made the cover herself.

On today’s show were a sociologist, a high-school superintendent, a Christian minister, and three teens—one boy and two girls. One of the girls was eight months pregnant. The topic was abstinence education.

In talking with Peter, TBRS’s producer, about this show, Blue had protested his suggestion that she open with an audience poll. Getting the audience involved in hot-button issues had in the past led to a Jerry Springer-like atmosphere that she had to work hard to redirect. Peter said, yes, but think of the drama. “We want people to engage,” he said. “And not only because it’s good for ratings.” She agreed in part; engagement was the point of it all, or was supposed to be the point.

He continued, “You saw the latest numbers. We’re slipping—just a little, and obviously we’ll bring it back up, but if we lose our edge right now, we lose our contract renewal leverage.” Lower ratings also led to lower ad revenues, lower production budgets, more difficulty in booking guests who had the power to draw viewers—all of which then trickled down to lower salaries for everyone on her payroll. Lower salaries meant good people jumped onto newer, flashier, competing ships. Ultimately, she’d agreed to do the poll.

Standing at the front of the stage, she welcomed the audience. Three hundred faces of all skin tones and both genders watched her eagerly, fans from any and every place on Earth. Beyond, too, she sometimes suspected. While Marcy claimed there was an angel in every audience, Blue rather thought there was an alien, who would inevitably write in to rant about how off-base she’d been on a particular topic, even if that topic was the fifty best uses of filo.

“Let me introduce you to some typical teens,” Blue said, and the two teenage girls appeared from the wings to take their seats behind her. Indeed, both girls were typical looking, with long brown hair and eye makeup and TV-modest clothing bearing popular-brand logos. Both girls were white.

Facing the audience, she said: “Kendra and Stacey—who is eight months pregnant—are seventeen-year-olds from intact middle-class families. Their parents are professionals. Both girls are B-students, involved in extracurricular activities—” this drew a chuckle from some of the audience—“and both have made preliminary plans to attend college. The main difference in these young women’s lives is that one of them attends a high school that follows an abstinence-only curriculum, and one attends a school where teenage sexuality is considered ‘normal’ and the students are educated accordingly. Abstinence is taught as one of several possible choices.”

She stepped down from the dais and walked to the lip of the stage. “With a show of hands: which of you thinks Stacey, our pregnant teen, got the sex-is-normal message?”

About half of the audience raised hands.

“Now who thinks Kendra did?”

Most of the other hands went up, as did the volume of voices, arguments already begun.

Blue waited a beat, resisting the urge to rub her face. Looking into Camera 4, she said, “The answer, when we come back.”

She allowed the rumbling to continue during the break, hoping the audience would get it out of the way now; things were not going to get better.

Taking a seat between the girls, she looked at each of their nervous faces. “Are you hanging in there?”

Kendra shrugged. Stacey shifted in her chair and smoothed her pink maternity top. “I’m okay, I guess,” she whispered.

In a moment, they were on air again. Blue said, “With me today are Kendra and Stacey, Chicago-area teenagers who, like most of their peers, are dealing as best they can with the pressures of growing up in our increasingly sexualized culture.

“Before the break I polled the audience on which of these girls received the teen-sex-is-normal message from her school, and which was taught to abstain until marriage.” She looked at Camera 2: “Brad, give us that tight view—audience, watch the screen.”

She waited, knowing that on the screen behind her would be a close-up image of a girl’s left hand, on which there was a silver ring. Brad nodded, and Blue continued, “This is known as a purity ring, representing adherence to the abstinence ideal: a vow of chastity, a promise to wait for the right man—or woman, because some young men are wearing them too—and marriage.

“Girls, raise your hands.”

Of the four hands now displayed, three were bare of jewelry, as they’d arranged ahead of time.

The silver glinted, of course, from Stacey’s left hand.

Amidst the reactions of surprise from many in the audience, and satisfaction from others, a skinny, dark-haired woman in the middle of the room stood up and yelled, “Sinner! Hypocrite! Take off that ring!”

Stacey’s face crumpled. “It’s not wrong! I love him,” she said, then burst into tears.

And before Blue could stop herself, she did, too.

* * *

After refereeing fifteen rounds between the sociologist and the minister—had Peter chosen such a closed-minded, sanctimonious old man on purpose?—Blue escaped the set the minute they were clear. Reverend Mark Masterson, a tall, self-serious man with heavy jowls and bottle-black hair, followed her backstage.

“Just what do you think you’re going to accomplish by telling teenage girls to go ahead and have sex?”

“Was that what I said?”

“You made that child out to be a hero.”

He’d made no secret of his disdain for the facts and the statistics, which were the substance of her supposed endorsement. Blue looked at him coolly. “And you made her out to be a whore—I’m sorry, ‘whoremonger’ was your word, wasn’t it? I thought you were a minister, but apparently you’re a judge.”

He frowned down at her, his height giving him an illusion of superiority she was sure he made the most of. He said, “When I agreed to do this show, I was under the impression that you had a conscience.”

“And I was under the impression that someone who has committed to serving his community would at least attempt to do so.”

He straightened the lapels of his brown suit jacket and picked off a spot of lint. “These are children we’re talking about. They require firmness and absolutes to shut down ungodly urges. Romans chapter eight verse thirteen for example: ‘For if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.’”

“So Stacey must die? That’s a reasonable punishment.”

“Now let’s not be ridiculous. The Bible permits a certain amount of interpretation.”

Blue nodded. “So true. Excuse me.” Giving him no chance to reply, she walked away quickly, shoulders pulled back, chin up, and shut herself in her dressing room. She’d known there would be no easy consensus on such a complex issue, but just once she would have liked to have the kind of powers needed to instantly transform a person like Masterson into a hormonal, love-struck teenage girl.

Blue was pulling off her boots when Marcy joined her, looking as fresh and enthused now, at four-fifteen, as she had at eight this morning. It was more than Marcy’s white-blonde hair (“Of course it’s dyed,” she’d told a woman in the audience during a commercial break. “Nature doesn’t make this color …”), more than her flared-leg jeans and gray cashmere t-shirt. Marcy had what Blue’s mother Nancy Kucharski called “a dynamic aura,” grown even more dynamic since meeting Stephen Boyd, an industrial designer who was teaching Marcy ballroom dance. Passion created that aura, Nancy said. “It’s good for the complexion, and not bad for the rest of the body, either!” Blue had to take her word for it—and an experienced word it was.

“Good show,” Marcy said, as though things had gone just as well as the day before, when they’d hosted four champion dog breeders and four captivating puppies.

“Compared to what?” Blue stepped out of her pants and stripped off the substitute Escada blouse—there were two of everything, just in case—then put on gym gear and brown velour sweats. Or rather, a brown velour tracksuit, as they were being called again. The seventies were back, complete with Barry Manilow and Cat Stevens and Neil Diamond on the radio, which Blue didn’t mind so much. The songs were reminders of a time when she was young enough to believe she knew where she stood.

“I’m serious. Except for that little … outburst, you really kept things under control.”

Blue shook her head, still embarrassed. “I don’t know what that was about.”

“Empathy, maybe.”

“Is Peter having a fit?”

“He’s too busy working on a spin strategy. Stacey’s still a mess though, poor thing.”

“I suspect she’s going to need therapy.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I just didn’t get any.”

Marcy reached behind Blue to straighten her hood. “Speaking of misguided youths, your mother called. She’s not coming to the Keys with us after all; she says she met someone and he wants her all to himself this weekend.”

“Someone named Calvin,” Blue said, more curious than surprised. “She apprised me the other day. He owns a bookstore—not the ‘adult’ type, a real one, but that’s all I know. Did she tell you anything about him?”

“Only that they’ll be by your place for drinks at eight tonight. She said to tell you don’t worry, they won’t stay long.”

Calvin was Nancy Kucharski’s third “boyfriend” since New Year’s. He’d been there at her mother’s place when Blue called last Monday night. The call had been brief, with Calvin waiting and Joni Mitchell crooning loudly in the background. Blue had a strong suspicion that Joni wasn’t her mother’s only throwback indulgence; the last time she’d visited her mother’s apartment, the place had smelled vaguely of marijuana.

Her mother hadn’t waited for the seventies retro movement to catch up with her; she’d continued to march as its poster child these three decades since. Her hair, left alone to evolve to a natural silver-gray, was past her shoulders and often braided. Her favorite earrings were small silver peace signs. She wore vegetable-dyed t-shirts to work in her organic rooftop garden, and she had recently pierced her nose. Probably she’d been smoking pot all along—maybe even grew it, organic and therefore wholesome—and where Blue was concerned was simply following their mutual and long-established policy of Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

Marcy dropped a manila folder onto the countertop in front of Blue. “This has your itinerary and Peter’s final notes for next week. With spring break in progress, we’re sure to have some great crowds. Oh, the first scuba class is set for Sunday at nine. I know you said you’re not planning to dive, but I think you should. Key West has some of the best reefs in the northern hemisphere and you can’t see them if you don’t do the course.”

Blue removed her makeup with pre-soaked pads—the sort of single-use product her mother hated—while skimming the itinerary. They’d leave Chicago early tomorrow, arriving in Key West at about ten. The whole crew would stay at the Ocean Key Resort, where, for her, a spacious oceanfront suite would make a nice home-away-from-home for the week.

She said, “I’m afraid I’ll get the bends,” a cover for the truth, that she was a lousy swimmer.

“Do you even know what the bends is?”

“Hey,” Blue said, still reading, “now that my mom has bailed, why don’t you bunk with me in my suite? It’s two bedrooms. We can stay up late watching Owen Wilson DVDs. I was so embarrassed when we had him on last time and I had to admit I hadn’t seen Shanghai Noon.”

“I would … but I invited Stephen along, and …”

“Say no more,” Blue said, closing the folder.

“Besides, you should really get out some, while we’re there. I hear the nightlife is crazy good.”

“Sure. I’ll just hang out in bars and, I don’t know, take home whoever’s willing.”

“If you did a little more of that, then—”

“Then what?” Her own answers: Then she might have had multiple fatherless children, as her mother did. A career of cleaning motel rooms and checking groceries and selling fruit baskets by phone every holiday season.

Then she wouldn’t be cloistered in this building, in this life.

Marcy said, “Nothing, forget it. You should just have more fun, that’s all. Life is short, and you’ve paid your dues.”

Blue leaned over and took longer than she needed to tie her sneakers. “So, I’m off to the gym. Guess I’ll see you—and Stephen—at Midway, six forty-five a.m. sharp.”

“Blue?”

She sat up. “Yeah?”

“What were you doing out there, on the fire escape?”

“The fire escape?” She looked out the window. The snow was still falling with vigor.

“Yeah,” Marcy said, “you know, that steel thing, used for egress in the event of an emergency. Was there some emergency I should know about?”

“Branford called.” The private detective she’d had on retainer for almost four years now.

“And?”

“And he has a lead. I don’t have any details yet.” She looked at Marcy and saw her at nineteen, saw her as Bat, heard her saying even back then, days and weeks afterward, that it wasn’t too late to find the child. She could change her mind, she could track him down.

Now Marcy said, “Ah.” That was all there was to say, so many fruitless years into the search.

“So, see you at sunrise.”

Chapter Two

Inside Blue’s apartment was the life she’d been living for ten years, or seasons, as she’d learned to call them. Ten seasons of ratings pressures and growing competition, the challenge of keeping a laser-sharp focus on what daytime audiences want, but trying to do it on her terms. “Style and Substance,” was the headline of her recent Elle interview. That was the goal. Sometimes they achieved it.

Ten seasons of expanding success. The apartment’s structural remodel had come after season two, and the color scheme back then … what had it been? Pale blue and lavender with light woods? Or was that the following incarnation? She could no longer recall. Only that the décor had been updated four times—every two years, the way some people traded up vehicles. The apartment needed to be current, Marcy said, because Blue sometimes entertained there. Marcy handled it all just the way she handled most of the other details of Blue’s life. Saint Marcy, Blue often called her, and Marcy would say, “Ha! Not after the life I’ve led.”

It was all talk, though, had always been all talk with her. The worst Marcy had done was what they were all doing that year they’d shared the dilapidated house. Taking on new names—Blue had tried out Skye, after the heroine of a book she’d read, but became Bubble when her belly began to round—inventing themselves, dabbling with drugs, with sex (though she’d quit both when her periods quit) … and while some people might consider them Hell-bound for their behaviors, Blue wasn’t convinced. She and Marcy and their various housemates had been young, rudderless, sure of their invincibility and the idea that they had so much time ahead of them that they could waste it freely, using homemade bongs and listening to Prince. So much time that even the biggest of mistakes would sooner or later melt away and be forgotten, like tonight’s snow after tomorrow’s sun.

The apartment was newly decorated in what Blue thought of as Twenty-first Century Lodge style. Though the work was completed weeks ago, the scent of fresh paint and new wool rugs persisted, in a pleasant, low-key way. The place looked marvelous, all warm woods and natural stone and leafy plants throughout the wide-open space. Marvelous and unused. Marvelous and bereft. An Architectural Digest spread, after the magazine’s crew had gone.

In her bathroom she pulled off the elastic that bound her hair. Highlighted chestnut, her stylist called the color, with hints of honey and cinnamon, as if her head were a pastry. Wholesome was the word the media often used to describe her, suggesting that somehow her nut-honey-cinnamon hair and her long-legged tomboyish build explained her success. They’d changed their tune a bit when she made it onto the Forbes Top 50 list. Now she was wholesome and driven, wholesome and savvy, wholesome and well connected and well dressed.

Style and substance, how surprising, how unusual!

A woman who made her living on TV did not, strictly speaking, have to be attractive to succeed, but if she wasn’t, the media loved to say so. Hence the hour she’d just spent at the gym, an hour for which she paid a ridiculous amount of money in order to get exclusive time with Jeremy. An effective hour, though, repeated five times each week (up from the three that used to do the trick); she was in top physical form. If while doing stretches, crunches, leg lifts, she sometimes thought of Jeremy’s sculpted body making better use of hers, where was the harm in that?

Her bathroom’s new wallpaper, an amber grass-textured weave, kept bringing to mind a Hemingway story—not one of the novels they would be promoting on the show next week, but another, about Mount Kilimanjaro and a couple waiting for rescue at a nearby camp. The short story, a tale of regret, had been a favorite of Mitch Forrester’s … and Mitch had been a favorite of hers.

As she washed her face she recalled Mitch reading her the story one evening early in their short-lived relationship. He’d been pensive—something to do with his ex-wife and the difficulty he was having in getting to see his son. “There are only so many chances to get things right,” he’d said, but she hadn’t understood very well at the time. She’d been barely nineteen, sure that life was a broad and endless series of chances. After all, didn’t they live in the land of opportunity, where success in business, in life, in love, was no accident of birth but could be made? Wasn’t Mitch in charge of his own destiny? What was there to regret at his age, twenty-seven? He could have a new wife. (Her.) He could have new children. (Hers.) For two promising months she had done a very effective job of ignoring anything that contradicted her vision, and then he’d set her straight. And then … then, he’d set her free.

Less easy to ignore, these days, were the lines in her forehead and the tiny sunbursts spreading, now, from the corners of her eyes. Her softening jawline. Thinner lips. Less easy to ignore was her makeup artist’s insistence that the miracle of Botox was her salvation. Easier, though, if she quit looking in the mirror. She pressed the light switch and left the room.

She now had the whole sixth floor of this historic art deco building. An entire floor was more space than she needed, by far—as if that mattered; what did need have to do with her life anymore? Here it was just her and Peep, her tabby Maine Coon cat. He slept most of the time, and she was gone most of the time, so their pairing worked out well. With the apartment’s lights still off, the falling snow looked like a shimmering veil outside the east-facing windows. In daytime, that view included Lake Michigan as seen between downtown’s towers. Out the north side was a view of slightly lesser buildings, one of which housed the studio. The apartment was swept and dusted and vacuumed weekly, the floors polished monthly—and before and after every cocktail party. The refrigerator was stocked, the wine bottles circulated, all by a Marcy-directed staff that Blue never saw.

She went barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen on marble floors the color of bitter chocolate. Why colors seemed so often to be named for food she wasn’t sure. Her kitchen cabinets were crème brûlée, and her granite countertop was confetti orzo. The wall color throughout all the main rooms was something to do with squash: pale summer squash? Light butternut purée? Whatever. She wasn’t Martha Stewart.

There was time, yet, for Froot Loops before her mother and Calvin arrived. She poured a bowl and ate it standing at the counter, Peep lurking at her ankles until she put the milk dregs down for him to finish. Ten ’til eight. She had better put some socks on; her toenails were ragged, and who knew what kind of garbage this Calvin guy might decide to report to Perez or TMZ?

She could hear her mother’s voice chastising, her, telling her to relax already. Right, relax. Re-lax. “Chill,” she said, heading back down the hallway. That her mother wanted to introduce this latest companion suggested he was, in Nancy’s estimation, higher caliber than most. Even so, after years of exposure to the public’s appetite for gossip—guilty, herself, of spreading it now and then—Blue preferred to be overly cautious. Live by the sword, die by it.

Calvin K., as he was introduced to Blue, was in every visible way her mother’s counterpart. Silver hair, pierced ears, rangy and kind looking. According to her mother’s earlier account, they’d met at the co-op on Lake Park one Saturday morning, buying organic vegetables. Calvin had an endearing passion for rutabaga.

“Calvin, meet my oldest, Harmony Blue—or just Blue, if she prefers.”

“She prefers,” Blue said. “Is it Calvin Kay, K-a-y?” She’d need to know in order to have him checked out. Her practice of getting background checks on her mother’s companions was another of the subjects neither of them spoke of, or not to one another at any rate.

“No, it’s the letter K, for K-r-z-y-z-e-w-s-k-i,” he spelled it out, then told her it was pronounced sha-sheff-ski. “It’s Polish. Ya’d think someone would anglicize it, but there you go.”

“Well,” she said, taking her mother’s coat, and his, “Good to meet you, Calvin K.”

“Hard to beat ‘Kucharski,’ huh?” her mother said.

Which was why Blue had chosen Reynolds.

Though Calvin’s accent had already answered her next question, she needed something with which to make conversation. She did not, after all, know a single thing about rutabaga. She said, “Are you a Chicago native?”

“Nah, Winnebago. I came here in ninety-seven, I guess it was, to run a bookstore in Hyde Park—my brother’s. He had colon cancer.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is he—?”

“Gone? Yeah. Saw that special you did on it, though. I appreciate that.”

Her mother, hair down, wearing a form-fitting Impressionist print top and jeans, told Blue, “We watched the show today. Calvin’s been a fan for years. What was with the tears? Do you have a cold?”

“A cold?” Blue closed the closet door and led them into the living room. “No, I’m not sick.”

“When you were little, I would always know when you were coming down with something because your emotions would be all over the map. Could be early menopause—are your periods irregular? Are you having hot flashes?”

“No! Really Mom, it’s nothing,” she lied. “I’m tired is all. Hey, I have some of that red wine you like; can I pour you a glass? Calvin?”

After they’d settled onto the L-shaped sectional, Blue listened while her mother brought her up to date on her sister Melody’s latest. For as intertwined as their lives had been as children, she and Mel had a tenuous connection as adults. Blue relied on their mother to keep her current about Mel, while Mel had their mother and the tabloids to keep her updated on Blue, either of which she seemed willing to regard as reasonably authoritative. The question now was whether their mother or the media would be first to alert Mel to her on-air outburst.

Currently, Blue’s mother was saying, Mel and her husband Jeff were leasing out two hundred tillable acres of their central Wisconsin farm to Green Giant and, using the rent income, had just bought themselves an RV. With their sons both grown and out of the house for the first time, they were planning to spend the coming summer touring the country, one KOA campground after another until they’d crossed off all twenty-nine of their sightseeing goals. “They’ve never traveled; Jeff refuses to fly.”

“So they’re gonna knock ’em all out at once, eh? Carpe diem,” Calvin said.

“I can’t get over how differently you and Mel turned out,” her mother went on. “No way can I see you in an RV—or on a farm, for that matter.” She told Calvin, “She’s never been one to settle for what’s ordinary.”

Blue shook her head. “That’s not true.”

“No?”

“No.” She craved ordinary. Grocery shopping. An afternoon in the park with a blanket and a book. “If you mean my career, you know that a lot of my success is owed to luck.”

Calvin chuckled. “A pretty good run of luck, then.”

“You laugh, but I’m sincere. I started out as a production assistant. I never saw myself hosting a talk show; I wanted to do the news.” If she threw herself into her work as though it was a life raft, if she appeared to be far more dedicated than her cohorts, that was only because she’d used work to fill the empty spaces that others filled with spouses or children, with bar-hopping or hobbies or sports.

In her defense she added, “I had Froot Loops for dinner.”

“You just made my point,” her mother laughed. “How many times have you been there, to the farm?”

“I don’t know—three?” She knew exactly. Each exhausting visit had seen her treading the narrow line between tolerance and envy. In spite of Blue’s support of her sister’s choices and admiration for everything Mel and Jeff had accomplished, Mel was still inclined to defensiveness. It seemed her every sentence began with a version of, “I know it isn’t as glamorous as your life, but …” Blue hadn’t been there in years. She’d wanted to attend the boys’ high-school graduation ceremonies but Mel insisted her presence would detract from the events. “No offense, but we just don’t want it to turn into Blue Reynolds Day.” The sad thing was, Blue couldn’t fight the logic. She’d sent each boy a generous check and invited them to visit her at will.

“You know,” her mother said, “we should all get together soon. Then Calvin can see for himself what I mean.” She turned to Calvin. “My girls don’t think alike, and they don’t look a bit alike, either. Melody’s taller, kind of stocky, with wide blue eyes and a little bit of a cleft chin. She’s been blonde since she was a toddler.”

“My oldest son’s my ex-wife’s spitting image—well, bigger nose and more facial hair now, ya know—while my daughter’s me to a tee. Could be true for yours—one like you, one like their dad.”

“Not that we’d know if that was the case,” Blue said. She hadn’t meant to sound bitter but the words, once out, had an edge. “We don’t know anything about him.”

Her mother looked at her over the top of her wine glass, then finished her sip and said, “For your own good—and what difference would it make if I’d told you every detail? He was gone even when he was in this world, no practical use to me and none to either of you.”

Which Blue was sure was true, but she had been there on those long Sunday afternoons when her mother played Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” over and over again on the console stereo. Watching her mother towel off after a shower, she’d stared at the black script “L” on her mother’s right hip and wondered, Lou? Leonard? Larry? Lance? The absent presence of L in their lives had gnawed at them all.

“I did the best I could with you; God knows I wasn’t very sensible in my younger years.”

Calvin said, “Who is? All I got to show for my early adulthood is five years’ experience driving a fuel-oil truck, and a perfect memory of the words to every Crosby, Stills and Nash song there was at the time.”

Her mother started singing “Teach Your Children” and Calvin joined in. Blue shook her head, but a part of her, a reluctant, soft part that she liked to forget she had, was captivated. That her mother sang well was no surprise; her singing had always been the cue that Blue and Mel could ask for bubblegum money or, later, new jeans. The surprise was in how her mother and Calvin harmonized so well, and with such obvious mutual pleasure, and in exactly the manner Blue had wished for as a child when she’d watched The Sound of Music and imagined that for her mother there could be an add-on father. Their Maria would be a long-haired, soft-souled, Peter Fonda sort of guy.

If the likes of Calvin had come along back then, everything would have turned out so differently … There would be no past to hide away, no lost son to track down.

Branford has a lead.

But she could not think about that right now.

“Something to eat?” she asked, heading to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

Through the kitchen window Blue saw that the snow was slowing and, out against the dark horizon, whole floors of lights still glowed in the skyscrapers that separated her from the vast black of Lake Michigan. Who was working this late? Who, like her, had little reason not to work any and all hours, or was so disconnected from those reasons that getting home at nine o’clock, ten, had become par?

She refilled wine glasses and brought out another bottle, along with cheese, bread, olives. Her mother was in the middle of a tale from Blue’s childhood.

“Now this would’ve been around the time Mom died,” she was saying, “so who knows what those girls were thinking, we were all such a mess, but I came home from work—was it the laundry, then? No, no, I remember, I was cleaning houses in this snotty part of Milwaukee, for women who filled their days getting their poodles groomed. Anyway, I finally got home and there were the girls, in the kitchen, very serious-looking, water and flour and paper towels spread everywhere.”

Blue remembered too; she’d been ten, Melody nine. A spring evening shortly after they’d moved to Jackson Park, on the south side of Milwaukee, when Mel, on a let’s-test-the-new-kid dare, had climbed their new school’s flagpole just after school let out. She was already near the top when Blue came outside—not that Blue’s protests would have stopped her—knees wrapped around the pole, one arm waving to the growing crowd of kids below. Blue’s mouth was just opening to yell, “Be careful!” when Mel lost her grip and fell backwards, skimming partway down the pole and then landing hard on her right side. The school nurse—Blue couldn’t recall her name or even quite what she looked like—thought the arm was probably broken. But when she failed to reach anyone at Nancy’s work number, she had reluctantly let Blue persuade her to take Mel home.

Blue remembered how grown up she’d felt, how capable, standing there somberly in front of the nurse, Mel equally somber, not even crying. If Mel had been hysterical, the nurse would never have let them leave. But faced with two little girls who swore their mother was going to be home soon, was probably on her way that minute and that was why the nurse couldn’t reach her, the nurse let them go. “You tell your mother Melody needs to see a doctor today,” the nurse had said, making Blue promise.

“I was thinking that Mel’s arm was broken,” Blue said now, “so I was making a cast.”

“Oh, the two of you,” her mother laughed, “with wet flour clumped in your hair and Melody practically mummi-fied.”

“Cute kids,” Calvin said. “Resourceful.”

And Mel’s arm was broken, and needed surgery, and their mother had been forced to take a second job to pay off the hospital bills.

“Resourceful—oh, you don’t know the half of it!” her mother said, pouring herself another glass of wine. “There was one year when Miss Harmony Blue here was so determined that I should have a cake for my birthday that she took Mom’s old car while I was gone—oh my God, she couldn’t have been fourteen—so that she could get the cake mix and be back home in time to surprise me with it already made, frosted, everything.”

This was after they’d moved to Homewood, outside Chicago, where a friend had offered her mother a job at a florist’s—a good fit, finally, for her mother’s earthiness, but their apartment had no grocery store in close walking distance. Blue had driven that car, a worthless Chevelle with rusting, busted-out floorboards, quite a few times before she was licensed to drive. To buy peanut butter and saltines when there was nothing left in the house to eat. To track down her sister, times when Mel failed to come straight home from school.

Once, during her senior year, she’d driven all the way into the city in the middle of the night to rescue her mother from a parking deck where the “good” car, a ’77 Ford LTD, had broken down. To rescue her from a date, downtown, with a man who had turned out to be “too corporate” for her mother’s tastes. That time was in the dead of winter and the Chevelle’s heater didn’t work; she’d driven hunched over the steering wheel, shivering, wiping the windshield every few minutes to keep it clear. Wishing her mother had not missed the last train. Vowing she would not live this way forever. At a stoplight she’d waited, peering out the side window into the vast black sky. There was Orion’s belt and there, there was Sirius, and she had said, “Please get me out of here.”

And it had been the very next day—she would take this as a sign—when her high-school English teacher, Mr Forrester, told her that his wife was looking for someone to work for her part time. Receptionist for a commercial realty office, where she’d have time to keep up with her homework. The pay was half again what she’d been making cleaning cages at a pet store—and then there was the added benefit of potentially more chances to see Mr Forrester’s handsome English professor son: Mitch, whom she had first seen when he visited their class in October to encourage them to pursue liberal arts degrees when they all went off to college. He had to know that fewer than a third of them would go to college at all, and those who went would go mostly on scholarship, choosing professions such as accounting and engineering—practical, good-paying occupations that would free them from repeating their parents’ worries about how to pay the gas bill and still buy groceries. Liberal arts degrees were for people who could afford to be idealists. An hour in Mitch’s presence that October and she’d decided that, affordable or not, she wanted to be one. She took the job.

Calvin checked his watch. “We got a nine-fifteen reservation,” he said. “Point me to the restroom, and then, Nancy, we better scoot.”

As soon as he was down the hall, her mother leaned close to say, “He’s The One.” She was nodding as she said it, eyes bright.

Too much wine. “You’ve known him for a week,” Blue said.

“Almost three, actually. Doesn’t matter. When you know, you know.”

“I know you’re being brash.” She, Blue, had been brash a time or two, so she knew what it looked like, how it sounded. She had imagined, once, that she knew.

Her mother stood and stared down at her. “Harmony Blue, I did not get to fifty-nine years of age by being completely stupid.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Blue got up and began gathering the plates and glasses. “Just, think about it. The money—”

“Your money, is that what you mean? He’s not seeing me because my daughter’s rich and has generously padded my own accounts.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“He has his own money—and a little thing called integrity.” She held up her hand to stop Blue’s protest. “Yes, I know, some of the others were lacking. Irrelevant. I was sowing my oats.”

For four decades in all. A lot of oats in Nancy Kucharski’s bag. “Fine,” Blue said, going into the kitchen. “Still, these things take time to play out. You need to see how you feel about him after you’ve been together a year or two—”

“How old am I?” her mother demanded.

Blue set the dishes in the sink and turned. “Mom.”

“How old am I?”

“Fifty-nine,” Blue sighed.

“How many of my friends have died in the past ten years?”

“I don’t know … three?”

Her mother held up six fingers. “Cancer, cancer, stroke, drunk driver, cancer, heart disease. Now tell me I should suspend my judgment for a year or two.”

“You’re as healthy as I am.”

“Today.” She kissed Blue’s cheek and left her standing in the kitchen.

Calvin joined Blue while her mother took a turn in the bathroom. “I’m glad to get to meet you,” he said, and when he smiled there was no evident avarice, only the refreshing sense that, in his eyes, she was equally Blue Reynolds and Nancy’s daughter, or perhaps even more the latter. His pale gray-blue eyes made her think of huskies, those reliable sled dogs of the Inuit. She wanted to like him. So much as she knew him she did like him. He could sing. He owned a bookstore. He paid her mother more attention than he paid her. If her usual discreet inquiry into this man’s background proved out, well, that would be a start.

What a strange concept: her mother in love after all these years.

“All right then,” her mother called, heading for the foyer. “Have a good trip to the Keys. Watch out for pirates.”

“And sharks,” Calvin said, as he and Blue joined her.

“And I love you,” her mother added, kissing her forehead.

Blue watched the elevator doors close after them with tears welling—envy? longing? She wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to think about it. By the time she was back inside her apartment she had willed the tears away.

Chapter Three

Outside Mitch Forrester’s Chapel Hill office window, the trees were a green haze of new leaves, the only real color on this gray, rainy morning. Spring weather had a solid hold on North Carolina, as was evident by the number of students who’d been showing up to class in shorts and flip-flops this last week before spring break. It was scheduled late this year, so they were more than ready. Today would be a mess of dripping plastic ponchos and wet umbrellas, slick floors and poorly attended classes.

An oak tree’s branches brushed his second-floor window. He’d been startled more than once by scratching sounds, nights he’d sat here on an old slip-covered couch reading journals or grading essays, nights when he’d thought all was calm outside. Shut away in the English department, he’d be unaware of the storm rolling in until the wind began rising, the trees swaying like so many lithe dancers in one of those troupes his ex-wife Angie had liked dragging him to see. Now he saw the rain stream off the tiny narrow leaves without paying it much attention, as what he was hearing on the telephone preoccupied him.

“Let me see if I understand correctly,” he said, returning to his desk. It was piled with scholarly books whose pages had long since yellowed, books with cracked spines and worn corners, and opinions, within their pages, that were hardly credited anymore. By contrast, Dr Seuss’s The Sleep Book was face-up with a note stuck to the front, reminding him to bring it for this afternoon’s tutoring session with a third-grader named Chris; after hearing Mitch’s story of how his son Julian had loved the book when he was a boy, Chris had grudgingly agreed to try reading it himself. A potted purple orchid with a name Mitch could never remember sat atop four copies of his most recent publication, a slim book that considered the role of women in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. The legendary author hadn’t been too successful with women, a problem Mitch unfortunately shared.

He said, “I’ll need some sort of filming permit from the city along with whatever I arrange directly with you folks there at the Hemingway Home, yes?”

The man on the other end of the phone call, a volunteer with a gravelly voice, said yes, he believed so. However, he said, September was thick into hurricane season and if Mitch came then, he was taking his chances.

“I know—my parents live there in Key West. But I appreciate your advice. Unfortunately, I’m working against a number of factors, one of which is my, er, crew’s availability, and my own. I only have the fall semester to pull this project together. As I said, I’ll be down tomorrow and hope to start getting things in order. Can you give me the name of the person to contact about permits?” When he had the information jotted in his date book, he thanked the man and hung up.

Literary Lions, his under-construction biopic series about classic American authors, had seemed uncomplicated when he’d first come up with the concept, which he envisioned as ideal for public television. The money he might earn was likely to be modest—but as a tenured professor, he was doing fine. And as Julian had reminded him recently, he already had a lot more of everything—time, money, security, opportunity—than most of the world’s citizens. Mitch had admitted this was true, and said, “Now do we sing a chorus of ‘We Are The World’?” It was a nervous tic of a joke, he knew it even as the words left his mouth. Julian had been generous about it, though, saying, “Sure, Dad—you start.”

Mitch propped his feet on his desk and leaned back. His old leather chair squealed with the motion, testifying that, secure as a professor’s job was, there were no luxuries in the academe. If he could make Lions fly—the image made him chuckle—he would reward himself with a new chair.

That “if ” was a big one, however, and “uncomplicated” was proving to be a bit enthusiastic. To begin with, writing the script for the first episode, the “pilot,” as it was called, had been more challenging than he’d anticipated. He’d imagined it as something like prepping a lecture for twenty students. However, a few torturous nights of script writing had proven that a low-stakes lecture was nothing like crafting an entertaining and informative hour-long program for a million viewers, all armed with remote controls. Okay, maybe a million was a little zealous, to start. Thousands, though—surely he could count on thousands.

The script was coming along.

Overcoming his anxiety about inviting Julian to direct and film the pilot had been difficult too. He’d had to face the fourteen-year-wide chasm in their relationship, which had been only minimally bridged when they were together at the hospital in Miami last fall after Mitch’s father had a stroke.

Without the usual buffer of his parents and an occasion like Christmas or graduation, it had been hard to know how to greet Julian. He’d wanted to hug him, something he hadn’t done since Julian was a pre-adolescent, but sensed the desire wasn’t mutual. He patted his shoulder instead.

“Dad’s going to be all right,” he said, “but it’s good that you could get here.” Julian had been at the beginning of his Afghanistan assignment then. “How are things?”

“Busy. You?”

“Oh, fine—busy.” He searched for something more to say as the silence dragged out. Then, inspired, he’d blurted, “Hey, one of my grad students is a portrait photographer on the side.”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you’d find that interesting. A lit major who’s also a photographer.” He knew he was trying too hard, knew his eagerness would be plain on his face. He was one of those people whose expressions translated every thought, every emotion as it happened.

But Julian wasn’t looking at him. “Sure, interesting,” he’d said.

“So … are you getting a lot of work?”

Julian nodded. “Too much.”

Julian was making a name for himself documenting human tragedies, people who were victims of governments, of bureaucracy and neglect. That day, Mitch had stood there next to his mature, experienced, world-traveler son and for the first time felt just slightly lesser in comparison. A strange feeling—chagrin and pride and envy, none of which had any place in a Miami hospital ICU ward when a man they loved was lying ill a dozen feet away—and yet there it was.

“Good that you could get here,” he’d said again.

Before he found the nerve to call Julian a few weeks later, to ask for his help with Lions, he’d tried to anticipate all possible objections. There was Julian’s lack of interest in the subject matter—Hemingway, Julian had declared once during a Thanksgiving dinner at Mitch’s parents’ home, was too depressing. And Faulkner, God, spare him from ever reading Faulkner again! Even back then, as a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old, Julian hadn’t wanted to read about problems, he’d wanted to read about solutions.

Then there was the lack of funds from which to pay Julian very much beyond basic expenses, and his fear that his low-pay offer could be interpreted as disregard for the value of Julian’s skills, given how Mitch had so steadfastly resisted Julian’s photojournalism career choice. In Mitch’s limited experience, Julian was an emotional minefield and, while he didn’t blame him for it—blamed himself, in fact, he also didn’t relish treading there with no detector.

So when Mitch finally did place the call, he did it after two shots of whisky, then rushed through his pitch, making the project sound as appealing as possible, braced for resistance, for disdain. That he’d gotten neither was still difficult to believe.

He was both anxious and eager to see Julian, to spend some quality time with him, as the saying went these days. He was both anxious and eager to get the project underway, to open people’s eyes to the joy and value of literature. But … suppose Lions didn’t ultimately win the interest of PBS. Suppose he invested so much—his time, his money, his ego—only to see the door slammed in his face.

He stood up and went again to the window. There were worse things than rejection, worse things than disappointment. But he’d had enough of both.

A knock on his open door startled him, and as he swiveled toward the door, he stumbled slightly and reached for the bookcase for balance.

“Mitch!”

“I’m fine,” he said, holding off Brenda McCallum with a raised hand. “You surprised me is all.”

“You looked—”

“No, really, I’m fine. See?” He did a few soft-shoe steps on the bright Cuban rug to prove he was not about to end up as her husband had last April, in this very office. Craig McCallum, fellow professor, best friend and biking buddy, had suffered a brain aneurysm and died on Mitch’s small sofa while they’d all waited helplessly for the paramedics to arrive. Today was Mitch’s fifty-first birthday; Craig had been just fifty.

Brenda continued to watch him. “I saw your door was still open. Aren’t you running late?”

“Yes, but they won’t start without me,” he joked, and gathered the books he needed for the morning’s ENG 620: The Twentieth-Century Novel. His fifteen graduate students, if they were all in attendance, would be seated around the conference table, most with their noses buried in The Age of Innocence because they’d failed to read all, or any, of what was to be discussed today. His late arrival would not be troubling.

Brenda was frowning at him. “What’s going on? You look funny.”

“Thanks for that vote of confidence.”

“You know what I mean. Odd.”

“Really, nothing at all. Just lost in thought. I’ve been on the phone with a guy in Key West, about how to shoot part of the Lions pilot there at the Home and Museum. I’ll fill you in later.” He squeezed her shoulder and nodded for her to precede him to the door.

She took his hand. “Mitch …”

“Why don’t we get lunch when I’m done?” he said, letting her keep hold for a moment longer. “I’m in the mood for barbecue, how about you?”

In part because he was so distracted, he devised an exercise for his students that would take most of the class period. While they sat in groups of three or four outlining literary elements in the novel and discussing possible intentions, he stood at the podium thinking about Brenda. Things were warming up between them, certainly. If he was ambivalent, well, that was to be expected. She was not only Craig’s widow; she was the head of the English department. As his friend Tony had put it, if Mitch wasn’t careful, Brenda could easily have his balls in a sling.

Better, maybe, to think about Hemingway.

After thirty years of teaching, Mitch knew his ideas about literature weren’t going to change the world. Oh sure, he’d managed to impress his colleagues a time or two or three, he’d won teaching awards, he’d set at least a dozen students on the path to respected literary scholarship. He’d also faced down a handful of annoyed students over the years who demanded to know what the point of it was. Who cared about evaluating whether Hemingway’s prose was more effective than Faulkner’s? What difference did it make that Hemingway had a tough time as a soldier, that even with the respect and awards—a Nobel for literature, for God’s sake, plus the devotion of a forgiving wife (or four), he’d pointed a shotgun at his head and killed himself? What about what was happening to ordinary soldiers now, friends of theirs, in Iraq in the nineties, in Afghanistan and Iraq again today?

He’d nodded his agreement. He’d said, yes, my son feels this way too. There was no convincing some people—or he was not persuasive enough to convince them—that they would find their positions right there in the texts if they just gave the books a chance. Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner—they had it all: passion, romance, existential questions, the human condition imbued in every story. “Give it a chance,” he’d say. “Give me a break,” was the answer he usually got. Or, what Julian had said that day some fourteen years ago: “Get a life. That’s what I’m going to do.”

But what Julian hadn’t understood then was that not everyone was interested in, or equipped to travel, his chosen path, either. Some people were spotlights, some were reflectors. The world needed both. Yes, he’d pushed Julian too hard at the time, he saw that later. He’d been too passionate, too single-minded, hadn’t recognized that Julian was so much like him—and still was. Just not in the ways he had wanted him to be.

Well, he’d mellowed. Which didn’t mean he was any less passionate about literature’s relevance. Literary Lions grew from his urge to demonstrate that relevance in a new way … and, if he was fully honest, demonstrate his own relevance as well. Since Craig’s sudden death, he’d gone around feeling as though he had one foot in the grave. What was his legacy, other than a collection of articles, a couple of books read by approximately fourteen people, two failed marriages, and a strained relationship with his only son? With Lions, he hoped to rectify the past and revise his outlook for the future.

A future that appeared to want Brenda in it in ways he’d hardly imagined.

“Dr Forrester? Dr Forrester?” A student’s voice penetrated, finally.

“Sorry—you caught me daydreaming about, um, spending spring break in Key West,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I was going to ask if Archer’s mistaken perception of May is a good example of dramatic irony—but I like your new topic better.”

To celebrate Mitch’s fifty-first birthday, he and Brenda joined two other couples at Mez, a new “green” Mexican restaurant Brenda wanted to try. Deirdre and Corbin he’d known since moving to Chapel Hill: she taught human genetics; he taught physics. Mitch met them at a UNC basketball game. The other pair was Tony and Gemma, both college administrators whose friendship stretched back to a time when he was dating Angie, who’d worked with Tony in the recruiting office. The couple’s friendship was one of the few things he’d kept when he and Angie split.

Deirdre raised her margarita and said, “Here’s to Mitch. Good to see you made it another year, and that you’re making it with Brenda—oops, I didn’t mean that like it sounded!”

“To Mitch,” the group echoed.

“To making it,” Tony added.

By the third pitcher of margaritas, their dinner plates were cleared and Mitch was discussing Lions with much less reluctance than usual. According to some in the English department, the idea of such a series was seditious—literature was not video, for crying out loud, and never the twain should meet. Just look at what Hollywood had done to Frankenstein! It hardly mattered that he wasn’t attempting to adapt any of the works. They felt he would be making their world common, and that would never do.

Corbin, however, was all about demystifying the universe, especially when the tequila was doing its work on him. “I think the show’s got serious possibilities,” he said.

Gemma said, “Serious, like, he gets millions of dollars and moves to Hollywood?”

Everyone looked at Mitch, who shook his head. “Not likely.”

Corbin preferred his vision. “It’s happened.”

“To whom?” Brenda scoffed, left eyebrow raised just as it often was during faculty meetings.

“All kinds of people. Just look at all the shows where a chef or a decorator or a geographist—”

Tony snorted. “A geographist? What the hell’s that?”

Deirdre said, “A historicist of places—”

“These experts,” Corbin said, “supposed experts sometimes—attractive, supposed experts, right? These people get a break and then, boom! They’re superstars—like Steve Irwin, for instance. Simon Cowell.” He nodded at Brenda. “It happens.”

Mitch said, “I just want to share some literary love.” Tony clinked his glass to Mitch’s.

“Seriously,” Deirdre said, “you’re wa-a-ay more attractive than Simon. I can see it.”

Brenda shook her head. “That’s not realistic. If he went into it with those kinds of expectations—”

Gemma said, “Somebody refill her glass!”

“No, come on, I’m just trying to be the voice of reason.”

“Who wants reason, for crying out loud?” Gemma stood up, nearly tipping the table. “We want fame, and money!”

The patrons around them cheered.

Corbin, laughing, said, “Okay, okay, but I don’t know that we’re winning the birthday boy enough points to score later, so … how about those Tarheels?”

Talk turned to the team’s recent performance in the ACC basketball tournament, but Mitch’s tipsy mind stayed stuck on Corbin’s last statement. Would he “score” later? Of course he wanted to, even as he was unsure how wise it was to take his revised friendship with the woman who was also his boss—more or less—to that complicated level. She was lovely, and more desirable than he’d let himself acknowledge when Craig was alive. Want was not a question. Neither did it mean, though, that they would—or should—sleep together.

Did she want to?

His questions ceased when he felt her hand on his thigh. His libido took over for his brain, making it much easier for him to later accept the birthday present that she was saying, softly, close to his ear, waited for him when they were through.

Chapter Four

After climbing the jet’s steps and greeting the flight crew Saturday morning, Blue took a seat in the spot she preferred, left side, just in front of the wing. The jet, customized to the most demanding celebrity standards, wasn’t hers. She could not do it, could not transform the numbers on her accounts statement into one of these sleek white and silver aircraft. They’d chartered this Gulfstream G500 for the week, a $65,000 expense. That was far less than the $50 million or so she’d pay to purchase one. How many times could they charter luxury jets before they even approached that figure? She was too tired to do the math, but surely it was many, many times. Buying one seemed wasteful—and imagine what Melody would say if she owned a Gulfstream, when Mel and Jeff still drove a ’95 Chevy pickup.

In a meeting last year, when Jim, her business manager, spoke about capital investments and appreciable assets and tax advantages of ownership, Marcy had said, “Buy one. What else are you going to do with the money?”

“More of what I’m doing already.” An assortment of charitable endeavors selected and implemented by Jim’s partner, who briefed her about them monthly.

After ten years in syndication and almost as many spent watching her finance manager diversify her holdings in a series of double-up ventures, of seeing her net worth mushroom with the energy of an atomic blast, she still could not quite match the numbers to her life. She could not quite believe—even as she inhabited them—what those numbers meant in concrete terms. If she had known things could turn out like this, chartered jets with hand-stitched leather seats and burnished walnut tables; silk twill pants suits and everyday diamond earrings; twenty-eight full-time employees whose houses and cars and designer martinis were bought with paychecks she signed … If she could have forecasted her success the way her old WLVC-TV colleague Carl Newman forecasted the weather, she never would have given up her son.

—Or so she liked to think, when the truth was that she wouldn’t have stepped onto even the first rung of this ladder if she’d had a child. The whole idea of working as a television journalist was about avoiding Harmony Blue Kucharski by keeping her attention on anyone, on everyone, else. If she had not given up her son, an uneducated single mother with little support and no prospects is what she would have been. Worse off than her mother at nineteen, the child worse off than the child she’d been.

Yet the doubts persisted. How could she really know what her life with a child would have been like? She had never even tried—but why would she have chosen to try when she’d known that her mother couldn’t help her out? Why get attached to a child whose life you could only ruin? In that hand-to-mouth life there would be no time to love the child properly, and all that would come of it would be a kid who hated her and hated his life, she’d been sure of it.

But what if … what if she had gotten hooked up with the social services she now knew would have given her—them—options? Someone could have directed her, surely would have, if she’d been brave enough to expose her foolishness to someone who, unlike the midwife, had no directed agenda. If she had not been too embarrassed, too proud to go looking for unbiased help.

Well, even if she had, she’d still have been a lower-class single mother whose good intentions simply could not come close to providing what that upper-class adoptive home could. Did. Love by itself was not enough to make everything come out happily, she didn’t care what all those feel-good movies claimed. She’d loved her son—loved him so much that she had sacrificed her relationship with him. It was the right thing to do.

She was pretty sure.

She snapped her seatbelt closed. Stupid conundrum, why couldn’t she let it alone?

Sometimes, when the heartache and guilt overwhelmed her, she pared off a piece for her mother, whose own questionable decisions had led to hers, and for Mitch, because if he’d hung on to her there would have been no other man, no accidental son. Still, the remaining portion was too large to swallow; she could only cover it with a pretty napkin and act as if it didn’t exist.

She would not be able to keep it covered, though, if the ravenous media sniffed it out—which could happen only if one of the few people involved decided to capitalize on it. This was the fear that dogged her in her quiet moments, had been dogging her ever since she’d contracted to do TBRS, the fear that had grown in proportion to her success.

If she’d had that ability to see into her future and to feel the way the guilt, the fear would bind her, she would have announced her history at her first employment interview. I’m not proud of myself, she might have said, but I may as well tell you … Except that there had been no benefit to telling; all the benefit lay in keeping the truth of who she was and how she lived out of sight, where it couldn’t affect the way people perceived her. She’d been using the strategy all her life.

The risk now, after having long ago established a child-free bio, was in being outed as a liar and a hypocrite. Her most ardent fans, the ones who watched her every day, who knew her so intimately (they thought), would feel betrayed—and, to paraphrase an old saying, hell hath no fury like a fan scorned. Especially these days, when the Internet gave anyone with access to a computer a giant-size megaphone with which to vent their anger. Others would delight in ridiculing her. Her competition would pounce on the opportunity to knock her out of first place—or worse. The show would suffer, maybe even fail, and then what? Who would she be if she were not Blue?

Only a court order could expose her son’s original birth certificate, and until her son had come of age a little more than three years ago, only his adoptive parents could seek such an order—and if any of them did, she would know about it when it happened. That was the law. She would receive notice, allowing her to protest or protect or defend. Of the few people who knew who she’d become and what she’d done first, none stood to gain anything by saying so. While self-protection was certainly not the reason she’d kept Marcy close all these years, she did rest more easily having her in sight, and happy.

The law that protected her was the same law that protected her son’s identity. Hence her hiring of Branford, whose job it was to find another route to the answer—not so that she could make contact, necessarily; just so she could know. That it was proving so difficult for Branford to find the midwife, the answer-keeper, was sometimes disheartening, sometimes reassuring, depending on which emotional lens she happened to be looking through when she let the thoughts idle in her mind.

She looked out the jet’s window, where six-inch-deep snow glowed pale pink as the sun approached the horizon, delineating the taxiways and runways, which were wet but clear. The day’s first commercial flights were already stacked up down the field, and the steady rumble of morning traffic noise was punctuated every few minutes by the roar of jets lifting off for New York and Minneapolis, St. Louis and San Diego, Raleigh, Denver, Las Vegas, Seattle. One of those jets, full of morning business commuters and eager vacationers, might, in a few hours, be landing in a city close to where her son would be waking up.

She’d played this imaginary game so many times over the years. At first she had imagined a snuggly infant in a soft blue sleeper, held in the arms of a woman who looked out her window upon San Francisco Bay. Then it was a toddler in footed pajamas, and Puget Sound. The parents and the midwife, Meredith, had said West Coast but, over time, Blue realized this was a generic descriptor; the family might as easily be in Sacramento or Olympia or Salt Lake City. And who could say whether they’d moved since then—or whether they’d truly been there to begin with?

Blue would wake up and, as she padded through her Chicago apartment, think of a dark-haired little boy waiting for the school bus with a Power Rangers lunchbox clasped in pudgy fingers. She would open the curtains of her New York City flat, and imagine a gangly boy hauling hockey gear into an ice arena for early morning ice time. She would sit on a stool as a stylist readied her for a Vanity Fair photo shoot, and see a teenager, hair falling into his eyes, choosing jeans and a Hollister sweater for senior pictures.

This morning she thought of a young man with slender hands and long eyelashes, still asleep in a posh private college dorm. With the life his parents had provided him, the care, the education, he could be at Princeton or Harvard or Notre Dame. In a coincidence too ironic to want to consider, he could this moment be across town at Northwestern University.

Northwestern; where Mitch Forrester had been teaching when she had met him. If her son had been Mitch’s son, if her wishes on Sirius had been granted … well, everything would be different, wouldn’t it? She would still be Harmony Blue Kucharski—or perhaps she’d have taken Mitch’s name; she’d practiced writing it both ways during those few short months when she’d seen her wishes edge tantalizingly close to reality. And instead of touring the Hemingway Home in Key West in front of a camera crew as she would do on Friday, she might have toured it with Mitch, whose aim it had been to become the preeminent Hemingway scholar. Mitch, who in effect had chosen to take refuge from the turmoil in his life with a dead literary idol, rather than a living young woman who idolized him. Well, it was his choice to make; it would be interesting to know if he thought it was the right one.

At the sound of Marcy’s “Good morning,” Blue looked up to see her, puffy-eyed and yawning, as she sat down in the seat opposite Blue. Stephen, so tall that his messy black hair brushed the aircraft’s ceiling, was right behind her. He took the seat across the aisle from Marcy and reached for her hand. Both of them looked sleepy, tousled, as if they’d climbed out of bed and straight into Marcy’s limo. Of limos, black Lincoln Town Cars with full-time drivers, they had four: one each for Blue, Marcy, and Peter, and one kept at large, for ferrying guests.

Blue would have preferred not to witness Marcy and Stephen’s bed-head coziness. But she smiled as though she found them adorable. “Morning. Looks like good weather for travel.”

“Do they have coffee ready?” Stephen asked, stroking one arm of his seat with his free hand. “Nice leather. I’m desperate for some caffeine.”

Marcy was nodding in agreement. “Vanilla-double-espresso-whipped, now that would be fab-u-lous,” she said. She rubbed her face and pulled back her hair. “But, holy Christ, it would be so much easier to just pop a pill.”

Blue flagged the flight attendant who waited in the galley pretending not to stare. “Easier,” Blue agreed, “but not as tasty.”

“Lower calorie, though,” Marcy sighed. “And fast-acting, which I could use. Peter called me at five-fifteen, insisting I log on to YouTube.”

“You—?” Blue started, then she knew. “The bit with Stacey and me, the tears, right?”

Marcy nodded. “It’s viral. You know how it goes. Peter sounded like he could use a tranquilizer.”

“Vultures,” Blue muttered.

The attendant came over and Blue requested coffee while Stephen stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle. He said, “Speaking of pills, last night Marcy was telling me all about the good old days.”

Blue shot Marcy a look of disapproval.

“We were doing tequila teasers,” Marcy said, her half-smile an apology. “A little practice, you know, for Duval Street. I told Stephen how we roomed together in our little house, and maybe got a bit wild a time or two. Nothing serious,” she said. Blue caught her look of assurance and relaxed a little.

“Oh, well, that’s true. We did have a wild time or two.” Or fifty. If she could recall those early months’ adventures she might be able to count them. “You know how kids are when they first leave home.” Naïve. Stubborn. Self-destructive—those were Blue’s personal adjectives. Not that she was about to say so, and Marcy had better not, either.

Stephen, apparently, was chatty in the morning even without the benefit of caffeine. He asked Blue, “So why did you change your name?”

“Do you know what my mother named me?”

“Yeah, Harmony Blue … Kucharski?”

“There you have it,” she said.

It had been years since anyone aside from her mother had brought up the name change, a change made legal so long ago that neither the media nor the public thought to question it. Her given name was not so awful, despite how she’d felt about it when she had to explain it to yet another teacher, principal, classmate. Back then, she’d been embarrassed to admit she’d gotten the name because her mother liked the anemone, harmony blue. Later, during what she and Marcy now referred to as “the recovery period” when she’d set her sights on working at WLVC, they’d agreed it just wasn’t a name for television.

Stephen said, “It’s cool, isn’t it? You’re Harmony and your sister’s Melody. Harmony and Melody. You should’ve been singers, or songwriters.”

“Now why didn’t I ever think of that?”

“Marcy says your mother is a trip.”

“Marcy ought to know.” She took most of Nancy Kucharski’s calls. The two women were as close as blood relatives. Closer, probably: they didn’t share any baggage.

Marcy said, “It’s a flower. Blue’s named after a flower.”

A sturdy, pale blue-to-violet flower that had grown in the shade garden of her grandmother Kate Kucharski’s postage-stamp yard. That was the way Kate had described it to Blue, postage-stamp. Near that garden, Blue’s mother, the adolescent Nancy Kucharski, daydreamed away her summer evenings—until she started meeting boys who had cars. And, at some point, a particular boy whose name began with L. Taking advantage of her mother’s overindulgent parenting style, young Nancy had launched her dating life at fifteen and, except for two pauses to gestate and deliver two daughters, had never stopped since.

The story Blue had liked to hear when she was young began not with teenage Nancy but with baby Harmony Blue, being delivered to the little house by a stork, Kate always said, which Blue had imagined as a white-feathered version of Big Bird. But the little house was too small; soon they moved to a bigger place, an apartment with three bedrooms. The stork brought Melody there.

In the evenings, when her mother was out and Melody was already asleep, Blue had urged her grandmother to tell her again about the home she’d been brought to as a newborn. When Grandma Kate described the yard of that house that way, postage-stamp, young Blue imagined a million little squares pasted down where grass would have been. A broad, level, gymnasium-sized spread of stamps, some of them as exotic as the ones that appeared on her mother’s airmail envelopes. The ones from “guys” who wrote from wherever the US Army had assigned them after something called a draft. Germany. The Philippines. Vietnam. Was one of those guys her father? Was the L from Cambodia the L tattooed on her mother’s hip? Did that explain the absence of a man in their home, when almost all the homes around them had mothers and fathers, not grandmothers?

“Don’t you worry about that father stuff,” her mother told her once, face close to the mirror while she darkened the mole on her right cheekbone, a mole matching the one that had just appeared on Blue’s five-year-old cheek. The L was covered that night by brown polyester bell-bottoms and a cheap gold-colored hip chain that draped low. Her mother rumpled her hair. “You two are my precious little gifts from God.”

She’d tried to believe that being a stork-delivered package straight from heaven made her superior to other children, children whose fifties-era ranch homes looked just like the one they moved into next, but whose families inside those homes did not. Those were common children. Normal children, who had normal families. What she knew, though, was that they were what she would never be, never have. What use in hoping otherwise? What use in puzzling over a black tattoo that was covered up almost all the time?

She’d made a valiant effort to be like her mother, like Mel. Nothing fazed them. Mel’s first tattoo, done when Mel was fourteen, was a wreath of words around her upper arm that read “Frankie Say Relax.” Blue had been as impressed with the act as with the sentiment. If Mel could be so bold, why couldn’t she? At the library, she paged through books with tattoo designs and slogans. She drew one on her ankle in permanent marker, a vine with heart-shaped leaves, then hid her work beneath her sock until the ink wore off. The truth of it was that when she was alone she sometimes still hummed, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” and waited for all things to right themselves, the way they surely would.

Voices from up near the cockpit told Blue that Peter and his wife had arrived. “Are we on schedule?” she heard him asking. She imagined him holding a stopwatch and waiting to tell the pilot, Go! If she was lucky he would stay up there; she had no desire to hear him fret aloud about tears and ratings and ridicule.

The flight attendant brought coffee in stoneware mugs, delivered from a cloth-draped tray. “What else can I bring you? We’ll be wheels up in about five minutes.”

“I don’t know,” Marcy said. “Blue, do you want anything?”

“No.” Or nothing that could be stocked on board, at any rate.

Janelle and Peter joined them in the cabin. “Did Marcy tell you?” Peter said. His round face was flushed and he was rubbing the top of his balding head, his habit when stressed. “YouTube, Perez—we cut it from our time-delayed broadcasts but it doesn’t matter, it’s everywhere. We’re telling everyone that your dog died yesterday morning, okay?”

“I don’t even have a dog.”

Peter looked at her like she was simple. “Work with me here, Blue.”

After cruising over what from Blue’s east-facing view looked like an infinite expanse of ocean, the Gulfstream bumped through clear but turbulent air and landed at the Key West airport, three hours ahead of when the crew would arrive via commercial airline. That airline provided TBRS with free freight and free airfare for the equipment and its users, for which Blue would thank them at the beginning and end of each broadcast in the week to come. That was how it was done. Endless back-scratching—so much that sometimes her back was raw from it.

“Jesus, there’s nothing to this place,” Stephen said, looking out his window as the jet taxied toward the terminal.

Blue leaned to look and saw a long stretch of shell-pink building that could pass for a warehouse except for the presence of two small jets and a gaggle of single-engine aircraft tethered close by. She said, “What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know, something like Honolulu I guess. Something that doesn’t look like we’re going to have to unload our own gear.”

“God forbid,” Peter said from his seat behind Blue. “We wouldn’t want to overwork our guests.”

Blue told Stephen, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Yes, the airport was small, nondescript, but what was not to like? A thousand feet past the terminal was the Atlantic Ocean, sea green and gleaming, brilliant in the midday sun. Plus, there were palm trees; she’d always thought palm trees worth any amount of trouble, even unloading one’s own bags from the belly of a multimillion-dollar chartered jet.

A contingent of Key West folk was waiting to greet Blue as she descended the plane’s steps into the midday heat. A stout man of about forty came forward, his flowered shirt’s buttons straining such that it was obvious he’d bought the shirt fifteen or more pounds ago. Several photographers circled them, jockeying for position.

The mayor extended his hand. “Welcome to the Conch Republic!”

“Thank you, Mr Mayor,” Blue said, remembering his face from her prep file, but forgetting his name. It wouldn’t matter, Mr Mayor always worked—or Ms Mayor, as the case sometimes was. “It’s so thoughtful of you to take time out from your full schedule to meet our plane.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble. I speak for everyone here when I say we are delighted to have The Blue Reynolds Show in town. Whatever I can do to make your stay more enjoyable, you just let me know. Anything. I mean it. That’s a promise.”

Blue smiled her public smile, clearly delighting the man, who beamed in return. She said, “Yes, I will, I’ll let you know.”

Outside the terminal a few minutes later, Peter stood at the curb, where a battered, empty Toyota was idling in spite of the No Parking signs. He said, “Do you think the mayor could find out where our limo might be?”

Marcy took out her phone. “I’m sure I stored the number in here … they must just be running late …”

Blue stepped away from the group and leaned against a pole to wait, letting the heat and the salt smell of the air be her real welcome. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and savored the illusion of invisibility she’d once believed in when she was small.

There’d been a lot of waiting during her childhood, mostly waiting for her mother’s return—from a date, from a new-town-scouting trip, from a dead-end job. Melody, passive and untroubled, watched a lot of TV, entertained by Mork and Mindy or Remington Steel or Moonlighting. Blue, anxious, distractible, had better luck with books.

Without the interruption of commercials or the finite images of someone else’s interpretation of a story, she could more easily fit herself into the romance or drama unfolding inside a book’s cover. She filled empty hours, when her homework was done and the paper plates from dinner were cleared from the coffee table, with stories of clever women who won over reluctant bachelors. Women who defied parents or society in order to follow their hearts—inevitably to romance, and often to fame and wealth. Or women who traveled to exotic places in astonishing jets and were greeted by mayors who were glad to do their bidding. What a glamorous life, and so far removed from reality that she never thought to jump the chasm between her vicarious thrills and the methodical plotting that living such a life would require.

No, what she’d planned for was far more predictable and achievable: when she and Melody were both out of school, she would use what she earned working for Lynn Forrester to put herself through college and become a high-school English teacher. She’d assign her students the books she was growing to love under Mr Forrester’s guidance: books about Mark Twain’s river life, Willa Cather’s prairies, and of course the battlefields and savannahs and islands that featured in Hemingway’s troubled imagination. At eighteen she hardly understood the causes of Hemingway’s torments, but she had an instinctive feel for the tragedies in his stories. What is tragedy, though, at eighteen? It’s romance, and it was romance that had been fixed in her mind that fall after she met Mitch. Romance, and a steadfast determination that, whatever she did, she would not allow her life to turn out like her mother’s.

That, at least, had gone as planned.

Chapter Five

Mitch sat on a bar stool in his parents’ kitchen, looking at the shopping list his mother, Lynn, had just handed him.

5lb potatoes

5lb shrimp

8 lobster tails

Lemons

Romaine

Tomatoes, onion

Cornmeal

Butter (unsalted)

2 Key Lime pies—Blond Giraffe

“A person could gain ten pounds just reading this list,” he said. “There are only four of us, you know.”

His mother, who’d begun rearranging things in her overstocked freezer, leaned around the door to squint at him critically. “I think you’d better stop at two or three pounds. You’re officially over fifty now, and you know, the older you are, the stickier those pounds get.”

“Tough to stop when I’m around enablers like you,” he said. “You want me to buy two pies and also show restraint?”

“We need two,” she said, going back to her task. “While you all were in the pool, I invited the girls from next door.”

“The girls” would be the new neighbors, Kira and Lori, whom he’d met soon after arriving this morning and who had wasted no time in telling him how they’d met each other (at Fantasy Fest) and, thanks to some very savvy stock sales on Lori’s part, could now afford to call the place home. They’d also wanted to know everything about him. The things his mother hadn’t already told them, that is. Things she said she didn’t know. For example, how serious were he and his traveling companion, Brenda? She looked like such a nice woman, they said, from the glimpse they’d gotten through the flowering hedgerow. Was she really a professor of Victorian literature? “Indeed,” he’d answered. “And she just published a wonderful book on Lewis Carroll—Duke University Press, you should pick it up.” They’d looked at one another with suppressed laughter in their eyes. “No, seriously,” he’d said, “it’s really good.”

“I was wondering,” he asked his mother, “why did you tell them about Brenda?”

“Oh, you know how it goes. We hang out in the kitchen, we make a pot of tea, we chat, things come up. They were curious. We’re all curious.”

“Hmm.” In fact Mitch, too, was curious. He’d known Brenda for sixteen years, but there was no telling what would happen now that they’d gone ahead and dipped their toes into more intimate waters. Well, a little more than their toes, which was going to take some getting used to. The only reason he’d told his parents was as forewarning that Brenda, who they’d known was joining him for this visit, would now also be sharing his room.

Not once, while she was his best friend’s wife, had he coveted Craig’s nights with her. Not once had he mentally undressed her, let alone imagined more—though he had certainly noticed her curves and the appealing play of freckles on her skin, the times he’d seen her in a swimsuit. Taken more notice after he and Angie split, true. He’d noticed every attractive woman at that time, the start of a six-year stretch of single life dotted with oases of relationships with women who were more reluctant to get involved than to get busy, as the saying went. Younger women, mostly, but not all. Call him old fashioned, but he liked to truly know a woman before they took their clothes off together.

He was proud of having made only one embarrassing, clichéd midlife mistake: last year, with a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who was also his teaching assistant; an aspiring writer (they were all aspiring writers) whose quiet demeanor belied the specific and vivid tell-alls she posted on her web log, or rather blog—he was still playing catch-up on the evolving vocabulary. Her good judgment was lacking, true, but at least her writing was skillful: she’d written a post that said he was “sufficiently endowed, and capable with all the tools in his toolkit,” which, revealing as it was, was still nice to know, and he was also “tender, really; a credit to his gender.” His colleagues had enough ammunition with which to ridicule him, they didn’t need purple prose too.

Brenda had not, however, been any kind of prospect until she was suddenly widowed. Their new closeness might owe more to shared grief than shared passion … except, after last night it was clear the passion wasn’t lacking, not in the least. Was she just using him as a stand-in? Was she going to wake up tomorrow morning, or maybe Sunday, or next week, and realize he was only superficially like Craig?

Fine time to worry about that now.

He scooted his stool back and stood up. “So then,” he said, folding the list and putting it into his pants pocket, “the girls are joining us for dinner. Anyone else?”

“No—oh, except they’re bringing the baby, so you better pick up some Cheerios, and some apple juice, too.”

He smiled. “Mom, I think they’ll have the baby’s needs covered.”

“Probably, but you never know.”

Mitch’s father came into the kitchen, having changed his swim trunks for plaid shorts in red tones, which he’d paired with a blue tropical-print shirt. His crew-cut white hair was spiked and shining with hair gel. “What don’t you know?”

“More like what you don’t know,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “About matching.”

“And what you don’t know, about style and attitude. Let’s hit the road.”

Mitch looked down at his white golf shirt. It was boring. “Soon as Brenda’s changed,” he said.

His father sat down at the table. “Right, right, Brenda. How about you two?”

Mitch shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes.”

“I understand that,” his father said. “I hear it from the damn doctor all the time.” About the progress he was making, and was expected to make, recovering from his stroke. He was doing well, tackling the challenges of speech and motor control with determination born of stubbornness.

So yes, his father was doing well; the remaining challenge was in how they were all supposed to deal with what the neurologist could only describe as “crossed wires”—the highly technical term used to explain how it was that his father now and then slipped into another man’s persona. And not just any man: astronaut Ken Mattingly, whom his father had known as a teenager while living in Miami in the 1950s and whose career he’d followed ever since. The delusions were disconcerting, to say the least. One minute his father was Daniel Forrester and then, with no outward sign, he was the astronaut, only with Daniel’s memories conflated with what Daniel must imagine Mattingly’s life had been. Mitch found it maddening—he never knew who he’d get when he called—but his mother was actually entertained. “Gives me a little variety,” she’d said.

“Listen,” she said now, closing the freezer. “Get the lobster and shrimp from Rusty’s, over on Stock Island—Daniel, you can direct him—and you know what? Forget buying cornmeal, just bring home some of their conch fritters.”

She stood with her hands on her generous hips, surveying the kitchen as though looking for something that had just snuck away under her nose—the most iconic image he had of her, dating as far back as he could remember. Then she said, “Oh! Dad told you about The Blue Reynolds Show being in town this coming week, yes?”

Did his pulse jump a little with those words? If Blue Reynolds remembered him at all, it would be for things he wished he could take back. He said, “No; he must have forgotten.”

“I did forget, damn it!” His father slapped the tabletop. “But how about that, eh Mitch? The one you let get away.”

Brenda’s footsteps were audible as she came down the hall from the guest room they were sharing. The same one he’d shared with Angie. It didn’t matter that he was now fifty-one and twice divorced, he still felt awkward about rooming with a new girlfriend in his parents’ home. That they had known Brenda for a decade and a half was no help; they knew her as Craig’s wife, now widow. She was his colleague who taught works by the Brontës and Dickens and Carroll, not a woman he slept with. Did any of them feel as weird about this as he did?

Brenda stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. Her short auburn hair was dry, and she was wearing a summery black knit dress with a neckline that plunged a little farther than was usual for her. “Who did you let get away?”

“Blue Reynolds,” he said, attempting to sound casual, as though he also had Kate Capshaw and Kim Basinger in his past. “Only she wasn’t Blue Reynolds back then.”

“You dated Blue Reynolds? When?” She couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d told her he had moonlighted as a porn star. So much for sounding casual.

He repositioned a mango atop a bowl filled with fruit. “It’s not a big deal—and it was a long time ago.”

“Twenty-two years,” his father said.

Mitch was stunned. “You can remember that?”

His father shrugged.

“Blue Reynolds, really?” Brenda said as Mitch took his parents’ car keys off the hook near the counter. “You never told us—or me, at any rate, that you knew her.”

“It never came up.” Even Craig hadn’t known. “Shall we?” he asked, holding up the keys.

He hoped Brenda didn’t think he’d hidden the information deliberately. In truth, he’d never thought his short relationship with Harmony Blue, as she was called back then, was worth divulging to anyone, especially since she’d become Blue. What point was there? Sure, it would make great cocktail party fodder, but he’d be barraged with questions he either didn’t enjoy answering or had no answers for.

They had been young—or she had; too young for the complexities of his life at the time. He should’ve known better than to keep dropping by his mother’s office over that first winter, ostensibly to lend a hand with some rearranging and remodeling of the office space. There was something innately compelling about Blue, though, even back then. She was somehow both tough and vulnerable, somehow experienced and innocent, and lord, she was pretty. Their nine-year age difference was not so huge. He was not Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, for God’s sake.

If he’d been teaching during the summer session, that year after she finished high school, or if Renee, his first wife, hadn’t hauled Julian off to Maine for two months, he’d have been too busy to notice her. As it was, he’d gone from the intensity—or more like the insanity—of juggling a teaching load of three classes, his research, Renee’s demands and fits of jealousy, and erratic fatherhood, to the yawning expanse of days as wide open as the rolling farmland outside the suburbs where he sometimes rode his bike. Harmony Blue Kucharski, with her love of reading and Scrabble, had been a welcome distraction that summer. She was the subject of pleasant daydreams during the little down time he had in fall. By winter, he’d convinced himself that she was old enough to become something more.

He didn’t want to discuss, with Brenda or anyone, how he’d led Blue on—with respectable intentions, but still—and then broken her heart. And he didn’t want to discuss the domestic drama that led him to break things off. He didn’t want to talk about how he’d waited until his U-haul was packed and he was leaving for North Carolina before he stopped by Blue’s house, to apologize for being so harsh with her at the end. His coldness had been an act, to discourage any hope that they would get back together. He felt awful when her mother reported that she was gone. “She needed her own space,” Nancy Kucharski had said, shrugging. He knew this was right; she did need her own space, some separation from everyone who had relied on her too much.

So he’d moved on. That’s what you do when you’re powerless to fix what’s broken. You bury yourself in your work. You focus on your goals. You eventually find another woman who you think is right for you, and try not to be conflicted when the one you let get away shows up several years later on your living-room television every afternoon, transfixing your second wife—along with almost every other life-form free at that hour. You move on, because if you don’t, you end up like Renee—tormented, pessimistic, alone. You end up with no career, dependent on others to give you your worth.

He’d had things to do with his life then, and still did. A wise man would right now put aside all thoughts of that girl of the past in favor of thinking about the woman of his present. With any luck, they’d be able to get his Lions business accomplished without further mention of that past. The island might be small, but a celebrity and her entourage should be enough of a spectacle that he could see them coming and avoid them entirely.

Chapter Six

Julian Forrester’s BlackBerry buzzed in his pocket, reminding him he was due to phone his grandparents, but he ignored it and kept his attention on his two good friends who stood, hands joined, at the center of what was ordinarily the mess tent. Through his camera’s viewer, he studied the pair. They looked something alike: both had short black hair, both were lean, both had skin darkened by a sun that seemed to shine more harshly on the kinds of people they served—except on this evening, when that same sun, heavy now on the western horizon, was lighting their faces so beautifully it was as if their marriage really was being sanctioned by God. They gazed at each other as though they shared a delightful secret. He pressed the shutter release, capturing their look if not their thoughts.

“Wow,” Brandy whispered, close to Julian’s ear. Her warm breath gave him a shiver. “They are so in love.”

Love. He’d seen the look on other faces: mothers in Darfur whose children were finally getting a nutritious meal; fathers, as they watched a child finally grown strong enough to kick a soccer ball across a dusty yard … That made sense to him. What Alec and Noor had, though, was for the most part beyond him. If not for his grandparents’ enduring, happy marriage of fifty-four years, he wasn’t sure he would buy it at all.

A minister, his camouflage uniform somehow neatly pressed despite the heat, spoke sincerely about the obligations Julian’s friends now faced. Trust, intimacy, and devotion, every day, forever. What an incredible ideal. Who could meet such obligations, especially these days? He approved of trying—ask anyone, they’d say he was willing to give most things a try. Fried caterpillar. Lamb’s brains. Cliff diving in Croatia in the dark. Marriage, however, was almost certain to have a much worse and more enduring outcome than any of those stunts; he would leave that to the truly courageous.

He focused the Nikon, pressed the button as Alec pulled Noor close, pressed it as Noor tipped her face upward, pressed it as Alec’s lips met hers, pressed it as the kiss became two wide smiles and the couple turned to face the crowd.

The forty or so guests inside the tent applauded. It was done. Noor and Alec were now a single entity where before they had just been a great guy and a smart woman who did the kind of stuff he did: ramble around the planet trying, in their meager ways, to undo the undoable. What little they did manage to accomplish—provide water and food and medical care and sanitation, give the people a presence, a face, a voice—had to be enough.

Today his efforts were being made in Afghanistan, just as they had been for the last seven months, while tent camps for refugees continued to multiply and spread across the south desert like a plague. Before here he’d worked in Bangladesh, Malawi, Croatia, Darfur, Mississippi, Indonesia, Bosnia … all beginning with Chechnya in early 1995. His history was a blur of turbulent flights and iffy food, desperate children and chaos. He felt like thirty-two going on sixty.

His collection of photos and video and the documentaries he’d shot all preserved the stories that had begun to merge in his memory. One tent camp after another. One starving family, one mother dead of AIDS, one village torched, one empty-eyed girl working as a sex slave, one boy with hands lost to a machete—his memory was overflowing with the atrocities he’d documented with a succession of cameras that had, so far, seemed to protect him from any serious harm. He’d gone to sleep hungry countless nights. He’d been shot at, he’d been cursed—literally, if not effectively. In Bosnia three years back, a disgruntled Mafia type had cut off his left hand’s little finger and threatened his thumb if he didn’t leave Sarajevo that day (which, as soon as he was bandaged, he did). That was the worst of it for him, though. He was lucky.

Interspersed with all that were moments like the ones now unfolding in this tent. Weddings, and births; lives begun and lives saved; hope restored. Events like these kept him going. A person could be only so skeptical when they’d witnessed the expressions he was seeing on his friends’ faces right now. He didn’t, however, hold out much hope of wearing such expressions himself. Just before he’d packed out from his previous assignment, in Kabul, his now-ex-girlfriend announced that he was “congenitally incapable of permanent connection.” He hadn’t told her much about his parents, so she had no idea how accurate a statement that was.

The wind kicked up, flapping the tent’s walls and roof, blowing in the fine grit no one much noticed anymore, though it was murder on his camera equipment. He spent nearly as much time huddled over his stuff, cleaning it with tiny brushes and ear swabs, as he did putting it to use.

Alec walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Can you believe she actually went through with the wedding?”

“Hell, if I was a woman, I would’ve locked you down myself a long time ago—so yeah, I can believe it.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Alec said. “What does she see in me?”

“A lot of what you see in her, but with a mustache.”

Alec laughed. “And speaking of facial hair …”

“I know,” Julian said, rubbing his beard. “I needed to shave three months ago.”

“And a haircut wouldn’t have hurt, in honor of your best friend’s wedding day.”

“Love me or leave me,” Julian said.

As Noor joined them Alec said, “I’m afraid it’s gonna be both.”

“What will be both?”

“Loving Julian, and leaving him—it’s what we have to do as soon as the sun comes up again.” He kissed Noor, looking at her in a way that made Julian’s belly feel empty. Alec turned back to Julian and said, “But you’re still planning to ship out soon, right?”

Julian nodded. “Back to Chicago for a couple weeks, then I’m doing that troop embed in Iraq—should be interesting,” he said, “assuming they don’t stick me with a bunch of paper pushers. This administration …” He sighed. “It’s harder to get access, you know? I was born in the wrong era—I should’ve been working in ’Nam.”

Alec said, “With that hair and the way you worship Hendrix, you’d fit right in. Hey, so maybe you’ll join us again after Iraq?”

“Not that I wouldn’t like to, but I’m doing the thing with my dad.” Noor tilted her head, a question. He explained, “Shooting the pilot episode of a biopic series, which he hopes he can sell for television. He wants to be a TV star.”

“Me too,” she said, smiling.

“Nah, you’re too beautiful for that,” he told her. “And too smart.”

“And you’re too sweet. But seriously, if I could get on TV and get people motivated to sacrifice a little of their Starbucks money for the greater good, trust me, I would.”

Alec said, “So hurry up and become a star, what are you waiting for?”

They were joined by more friends, and then the dancing started, with music coming from an old boom box they’d bought at a Gereshk market. Julian stood off to the side and snapped more photographs while couples stood pressed together, shuffling their feet on the gritty plywood floor. For this first dance Alec and Noor had chosen the Nickel-back ballad, “If Everyone Cared.”

Julian hummed along as he aimed his camera at one swaying couple, then the next, then the next.

Love, tolerance, salvation – it was a theme song for the bunch of them, wasn’t it? A little somber, maybe—better, though, than the usual Shania Twain selection you often got at this kind of thing.

The minister walked over and put a beer in Julian’s hand. “Good party,” he said. He was not much older than Julian—mid-thirties, an Army officer assigned to the camp nearby. “Did I hear right, they’re honeymooning in Africa someplace?”

Julian nodded. “Noor’s going to save some elephants for a change.”

“Me, I’d head for someplace wet. Hawaii would be good, but I’ll take anything with a coastline.”

“I hear you. My grandparents, they live in Key West. It’s great. I’ll be there in September.” The thought was a trigger, reminding him that he was due to call.

He and his grandparents had an unusual relationship. He’d seen little of them when he was very young; his mother had been possessive of him, and bitter about the divorce. Often he’d overheard her talking about Daniel and Lynn, her tone derisive or wounded, depending. When he’d thought of them, it was in her manner—they were either your grandparents, very formal, not at all the familiar Grandma and Grandpa his mother’s parents were to him—or they were Daniel and Lynn. He’d been imprinted like a duckling, so that even as he got older and his father wrested back some control, when he saw them they were still Daniel and Lynn.

Over the past several years, his contact with everyone outside his daily circle had become sporadic—until his grandfather had a stroke. It was eerie how in the space of a few words (Honey, listen, I don’t want to alarm you, but Daniel’s in ICU …) his world had been frozen in place. With different, unluckier words, it would have been altered forever. Funny how he’d witnessed just these kinds of disruptions to other people’s lives for so many years, never fully appreciating how impactful they could be until he’d gotten that call. Now he made sure to talk with his grandparents regularly, and with his mother. She had nightmares if she didn’t hear from him, she said. She had nightmares anyway.

He took his BlackBerry from his pocket, saying, “Excuse me just a minute,” before stepping out into the cooling night. With laughter and music spilling out behind him, he called his grandparents.

“Hi, it’s Julian,” he said when his grandfather answered.

“Oh, you just caught me on my way out—good timing! How’s our boy? Steering clear of scorpions, I hope?”

“So far, so good.”

“Let me get your grandmother. Lynn!” he called. “She’s chopping … something. We’ve got your dad here, and Brenda. And the neighbors coming over for dinner later. A regular fiesta.”

Julian imagined his grandfather was dressed for one. “Is Brenda the woman from his department?”

“Yep. They’re definitely simpatico now.”

“Oh? That’s good. I guess.”

“I guess, too. He’ll get it right sooner or later. Maybe sooner. Here’s something interesting: an old flame of his is in town this week.”

“That so?” Julian had no idea who this might refer to. The specifics of his father’s life and his father’s history were even now hardly real to him. They were reports; they were anecdotes about a man whose identity had once been so confusing to him that he’d had to stop caring. Was Dr Mitch Forrester, PhD, the callous skirt-chasing liar of his mother Renee’s recollection? Was he the ardent tries-too-hard sometime-father of his own? Maybe he really was the well-meaning but overwhelmed nice guy his grandparents had spoken of in voices thick with sympathy. Back then, he’d had no way of telling who was right.

The reports and anecdotes he’d heard in more recent years had for a very long time been sufficient. Was his dad alive, healthy, still teaching literature? Good enough. Remarried, divorced again, what difference? He, Julian, had gotten busy living life while his dad was apparently treading water. He, Julian, had been experiencing the world his father accessed only through TV and books and newspapers. Who had time to read when there were lives to be saved? Or if not saved, documented, and that was something.

Admittedly this had been a skewed attitude, aggressive, defensive, and he’d gotten his upbraiding for it in Bangladesh last year, one night after he’d just spent eighteen hours documenting the Cyclone Sidr damage for Newsweek.

Image after image, thousands of frames of devastation, a few of which would be used so that the folks at home could say, Aw, that’s awful, then turn on the TV and cry over some lost-dog story. After he finally finished, he’d tried to sleep, but the day replayed in his mind in a continuous loop. He was aware, not for the first time, that it was getting harder to believe in the value of his work. There was no end to suffering, no end to disaster. His efforts were the equivalent of a cup of water thrown on a forest fire.

He’d gotten up and gone in search of rum. Rounding the corner of the mess tent, he stumbled when a hand tried to grasp his leg.

“Please,” he heard from the shadows. He turned to see a thin man struggling to stand, arms wrapped around his middle—broken ribs, most likely. The man stepped into the security light’s circle and Julian saw a gash in his cheekbone, blood and dirt thick on his skin and in his hair.

“Please,” the man said again, this time pointing.

“What is it?” Julian asked. No comprehension. He tried one of the few Bengali expressions he knew. “Kemom achhen?” How are you. A feeble effort when the answer was apparent.

“Please,” the man urged.

Julian went for an interpreter, a flashlight, and a medic. The man’s father, he soon learned, had gone missing in the storm, and the son had just located him after days of searching through soggy rubble. The pair had made it to a spot about a half-mile from the Red Cross camp, where they found the father missing most of one leg and surely half his blood supply as a result. He was propped against a log, barely breathing, pulse thready—but he was savable, thanks to the son’s lamp-cord tourniquet and willingness to carry him who knew how far to get help.

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