Blue Diary (22 page)

The details of what happened in Maryland so many years ago have been printed up not just in the
Globe
and the
Herald,
but in the
Monroe Gazette
as well, there for anyone to read. All Ruth can hope for is that Collie hasn't seen any of it, especially the part about the girl only being fifteen. That's the part Ruth has to put out of her own mind, each and every day.

“It will be easier than you think to stand by him.” Ruth has lowered her voice so it is nearly all breath. She's thinking about her husband, the way she felt when he walked out and the way she felt when he came back home, sick and ashamed of himself. “You'll do it because you have to. You'll do it for Collie.”

But this is exactly the reason Jorie has been so uncertain and angry, on behalf of Collie. “I'm different than you are. I don't know what I feel.”

“Well, you had better decide,” Ruth tells her. She takes her daughter's hand for a brief moment. “Otherwise, honey, you will surely drown.”

Jorie looks at her mother, surprised; it's precisely what she's been feeling, that sense of being pulled down into the coldest and deepest of waters, bottomless and deep, a thousand times darker than Lantern Lake ever was even on the shortest, most miserable day of the year.

Ruth hushes Gigi and Anne as they come by, on their way upstairs. Jorie waits, then turns off the lights when everyone else has gone up. She leans against the wall. She knows every inch of this house, even in the dark. She'd been standing in this very hallway when she told her mother she'd met the man she planned to marry. It was here that her mother threw her arms around her and wished her only happiness from that day forward. Jorie goes into the living room, unhampered by the dark. She eases Collie into lying down and covers him with a light quilt. He has decided to take the last name of Solomon, her family name, and if the truth be told, Jorie, too, has been thinking of herself that way, as the person she was before she was Jorie Ford.

Ordinarily, she would have shooed Mister off the couch, but tonight she lets the dog stay beside Collie. She goes on, to the sun porch where her father slept when he was ill, after he came home with his tail between his legs. Ruth has made up a cot, but she didn't have time to hang the curtains she'd sewn when the porch was last used as a bedroom. Moonlight falls into the room and spills across the wooden floorboards. Dan Solomon had left Ruth for another woman, but in the end, he found his way back; he asked to be taken in after an absence of more than ten years, and Ruth couldn't deny him, even though her daughters thought she was crazy.

He
was
my husband, Ruth said, and there was no arguing that. She nursed him through his cancer as though he'd never hurt her, and if she's ever regretted the choices she's made, she's never mentioned it aloud. Jorie, however, had been far more wary when her father returned. The first time she saw him again after so many years apart, she thought she'd want to strike him, that's how angry she was at what he'd done to their family. But he was so very changed, by illness and regret, that she'd hugged him instead, although what she feels about him she still can't quite make out.

Jorie sits cross-legged on the cot where her father slept during his illness. It seems as though a lifetime has passed since she's last lived in this house. She thinks of Ethan, who would be lying on his cot at this very moment, staring at the ceiling of his cell. a bumpy plaster that was painted pale green. He always told her he couldn't sleep right without her, and on those few occasions when they'd been separated—a fishing trip for him, a three-day weekend in Puerto Rico for her when Charlotte's marriage was in its final last-gasp stages—Ethan told her he'd slept in a chair. A bed without her was not worth getting into, that's what he'd said, and sleep was a foreign country without her hand to hold.

Well, she can't sleep either, and it isn't because they're apart. She's kept awake by moonlight, and perhaps it's the glint of that silver light that makes Jorie go to what had long ago been her father's bookshelf. She takes down a leather-bound atlas and props up the book on her father's old desk, where he had faithfully paid the bills each month when she and Anne were little, before he went away. Now there are pots of begonias and curly ferns on the desk, but still there is room enough to open to the map of Maryland and trace the route she plans to take. She wants to see for herself what sort of place can make a man turn and run so fast and so hard that he'd lose himself as he traveled, with pieces of his history falling like leaves, until he was empty enough to be brand-new, like a man dropped to earth from the farthest reaches of the moon, with silver light running through his veins, where there should have been blood.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, THE FIELDS IN this part of Maryland were yellow, burned and discolored by a season of unusual heat, but now, in the first week of August, they are sweet and green, rich with corn and soybeans and millet. Out here on the Eastern Shore, two hours from Baltimore and half an hour past the Bay Bridge, the old roads buckle in the summertime. Late in the afternoon, when the air becomes cooler, a person can smell the tide upon approaching the marshes past Blackwater. When Jorie stops for gas, she stands beside the rented car in the fading light and tries to get her bearings. The landscape is one she's not accustomed to, with bits of extreme beauty peeking out from between asphalt and billboards. Beyond the gas station, for instance, lies a stretch of wild rice, golden and blooming riotously in the damp, brackish soil.

I could move to this place right now and nobody would know who I was and what I was leaving behind,
Jorie thinks to herself as she pays the attendant and gets a Pepsi from the soda machine. She holds the ice-cold can to her forehead and blinks in the sharp light.
I could tell people anything
I wanted to, and
whatever I
told
them,
that
would
be
the
truth
as far as
they
were concerned. Whoever
I
said I was, well
then,
that's who
I
'd be.

Jorie gets directions and heads out. It's been a long while since she's been anywhere on her own, and she has a nervous, prickly sensation up and down her spine. What would happen if she never returned? Anne is the only one who knows where she is, a necessity in case of an emergency. But Anne is disorganized and may already have lost the sheet of paper with the vitals written down- - time of departure, time of arrival, the name of the town that is Jorie's destination. With no husband and no child to accompany her, Jorie feels oddly light, as if she could float away through the open car windows; the breeze catches her pale hair so that it flies everywhere and is quickly tangled into knots. She thinks warmly of the vacations she and Charlotte used to take when they were young, always staying at third-rate motels, whether on the shore in Rhode Island or up in Maine, weeks when they ate fast food, and stayed up all night, and had a ridiculously wonderful time. It astonishes Jorie to think of how young they were, how hopeful and free. Amazing where your life can deposit you before you know it. One, two, three, and you're on a completely different road than the one you'd always expected to be on at this point in your life. There is no compass when such things happen, no rules and no maps to guide you, and no one who cares if the sun is glaring or if the asphalt is melting beneath your tires.

As Jorie drives on, loblolly pines edge the road and cast shadows across the thickening air. She turns on the radio for company, but the southern twang of the voices and the chords of a sorrowful country song only serve to sharpen her loneliness. At the turnoff to Holden there's a stretch of cordgrass that is nearly eight feet tall, and Jorie can hear the call of birds from within the reeds. As she gets closer to town, she can't help but wonder if Ethan had driven down this very same road fifteen years ago, and if, as he'd passed by the marshes, he'd noticed the wild cherry and sweet gum trees.

Although she's exhausted from traveling, Jorie finds the Black Horse Hotel easily enough: it's the only hotel in town, far less busy than the Econo Lodge she passed before she stopped for gas. The building is framed by tall white pillars and there is a set of gray stone steps, swept clean every morning. Inside, the lobby is cool without benefit of air-conditioning. There's a restaurant that looks decent, and a bar called the Horseshoe. The woman behind the desk is pretty and lively, the sort of woman Ethan might have dated if he'd stayed in this town instead of traveling north to New England, instead of running as fast as he could.

“You look like you need a good night's rest,” the desk clerk says cheerfully as Jorie signs in.

Jorie feels a little guilty about using Anne's credit card, but with Ethan no longer working and so many bills to pay, she is frighteningly low on funds. With unexpected generosity, Anne had shoved the MasterCard into Jorie's hands. Go on and
enjoy
it, Anne had told her as she left for the airport.
Trent will be the one paying the bill, so
honey,
live large.
They'd laughed as they'd imagined Trent's distress upon seeing the charges, but as Jorie signs her sister's name on the register, she wonders if she isn't committing some punishable offense. Perhaps this simple act would be considered forgery or grand larceny; still, it's the only way she can pay the bill, so from now on she is Anne Lyle. In truth, she's more comfortable under the cloak of her sister's identity. It's as though she has discarded herself somewhere between Baltimore and the Bay Bridge, and has become the sort of woman who uses falsified ID and spends nights alone in a hotel, the sort of woman whose husband is sitting in a jail cell hundreds of miles away with no idea of where she is and when she'll be home.

Her room is nice and clean, with a down quilt on the bed and a hand-hooked rug ringed with flowers, which covers most of the wide, pine floorboards. Sheer curtains frame a view of town hall across the street, a brick building fronted by glossy magnolias. There's air-conditioning up here, but Jorie doesn't bother with it. She opens the window and breathes deeply: she wants to know what it feels like to be in Holden in the summertime. The damp scent of evening falling, the heavy August air, the song of the red-winged blackbirds, alighting in the fields around town by the thousands, to feed on wild rice and fight for their territory.

After she's settled in, Jorie orders room service, choosing a house salad with vinaigrette dressing along with a steak sandwich and fries. Once the food arrives, she finds she's ravenous. And she's equally tired; soon after she's caten, she falls asleep on the bed in her clothes, shoes still on, desperate for rest, even though the sky is still light in the farthest corners and the hour isn't much later than nine. On this night, Jorie dreams that Ethan is with her, beside her in the hotel bed, his face close to hers. He is so handsome that she is blinded, and for an instant she's unable to make out her own husband's features. He leans closer, and although she cannot really see him, she can feel his warm breath, as well as the catch in her stomach as her desire for him rises, the way it always does when he's near.

Who
did you think I
was?
he whispers to Jorie in her dream.

He gets out of bed and walks to the window. He moves the filmy curtains aside, then turns back to smile at her. She wants him so completely she's tied up in knots, yet when she tries to speak, she finds she cannot say one word, nor can she leave her bed and go to him. She can only watch as he steps beyond the curtains and casts himself out the window, like a bird who has longed to be free, disappearing from view so quickly that when Jorie finally struggles from the tangled bedsheets to look for him, there is nothing to see in the hot, pallid air. Anything a man might leave behind, footprints and fingerprints alike, have vanished, and the clothes he wore have unraveled into a pile of white cotton thread.

Jorie awakens the following morning with a terrible headache. Her feet hurt from sleeping in her shoes, her mouth is parched, and she rises from bed with her dream still around her, a foggy halo that nags at her. She showers and dresses, then phones her mother's house, as she'd told Anne she would, to check in on Collie. Collie's fine. or so Anne says, and Jorie will just have to take her sister's word for it, since Collie himself won't come to the phone. He's too tired, he's still half asleep, he has nothing to say. No matter how Anne tries, he cannot be convinced or cajoled into speaking to his mother, and this isn't like Collie.

“He's so angry,” Jorie says.

“So is every twelve-year-old boy.” Anne tells her. “At least yours has a right to be angry. Stop worrying about Collie. Gigi's going to take him and that strange little girlfriend of his down to the lake. They can cool off and eat the picnic lunch I'm sending along with them- -peanut butter, pickles, and pink lemonade. Remember? We used to think it was a sure cure for just about everything.”