Reunion (11 page)

“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 injured pair had made it to a spot about a half-mile from the Red Cross camp, where Julian and the medic found the father missing most of one leg and surely half his blood supply as a result. The man was propped against a log, barely breathing, pulse thready—but he was savable, thanks to his son’s lamp-cord tourniquet and willingness to carry him who knew how far to get help.

The son had searched, found, saved, and carried, and then when he could carry no more, crawled for help. Julian had heard the words in the rhythm of his footsteps as the group made their way back to camp in the too-still night:
Searched, found, saved, carried, crawled… searched, found, saved, carried, crawled…
Would he have done as much for his own father? He wasn’t sure.

After getting back, he’d gone to the medical tent with his camera and taken photos of the son sitting at the father’s bedside, giving blood, and having his cheek stitched on the spot because he wouldn’t leave his father again.

When Julian finally got his rum, he used it to ease his shame.

When several months later his father asked if he was interested in shooting the
Literary Lions
pilot—maybe the entire series, depending—he saw the opportunity for what it was: a bridge.

He agreed to work for expenses only, to have his pay deferred until
Lions
sold, if it did; not an ideal set-up, but in this case, the working conditions were stellar: he’d get to spend time in Key West, rooming, as he’d done in his high school years, in Lynn and Daniel’s guesthouse. He’d get to do a different kind of filmmaking, stretch his professional muscles a bit. And see what waited across that bridge. He was nearly thirty-three; it was time.

About the “old flame” Daniel had just mentioned, Julian said, “So who is it?” just as his grandmother got on the phone.

“Hello, sweetheart! I expected to hear from you earlier. Isn’t it getting awfully late there?”

“I’m at a wedding reception. I just stepped outside for a minute to let you know I haven’t been eaten by sandworms.”

Daniel said, “The old flame is Blue Reynolds.”

“My father knows Blue Reynolds?” The name and reputation were familiar, though he couldn’t say he’d bothered to watch any of her shows even when he had access to a TV, which wasn’t often. Best he could tell, she and her daytime TV kin represented everything that was wrong with Western culture.

His grandfather was explaining, “He knew her back when she was hardly more than a kid. They had a thing. We thought it might get serious.”

“Really?” This was news … or was it? Hadn’t his mother once just about gone over the edge about his dad’s supposedly shameless affair with a teenager? “How old was I?” he asked.

“Oh, nine or ten, I guess,” Daniel said. “I wonder if he still likes her.”

Lynn scoffed. “Honey, even taking Brenda out of the equation, that was more than two decades ago.”

“So? I
loved you
two decades ago, and I still love you today. Think of it, J,” Daniel said, his tone reminiscent of times when they’d be out kayaking through the mangrove islands and Daniel would get to talking about how pirates had hidden treasure among the tangled roots. “Your dad could pair up with a famous celebrity.”

“Julian’s using international minutes,” Lynn said. “Now, Julian, when will we see you next?”

“September. I have ten days left here, then I’ll be in Chicago briefly before Iraq—gotta stop in, water my plants before I go again.”

“Good thing you don’t have a cat,” Daniel said.

“Why would I need one when you’ve got six?”

“Four,” Lynn said. “Say, do you want to talk to your dad? He’s just gone out to the car but I can grab him.”

“Nah, I have to run. I’m on duty—wedding photographer.”

“I’ll bet that makes a nice change.”

“You know it.”

Daniel said, “So I’ll keep you updated on the Blue Reynolds business,” and Lynn began chiding him about whose business he was supposed to mind.

Time to get off the phone. “Listen, I love you guys. Send more brownies any time the whim strikes—just send ’em to Chicago, okay?”

“I expect the whim will strike soon,” his grandmother said. “We love you, too. Be careful.”

“I always am.”

He ended the call, holding his phone to his mouth for a moment before dropping it back into his pocket.

Out ahead of him, bright security lights lit the admin compound, the collection of tents for sleeping, for showering, for treating the walking wounded and the sick. There was little activity at the moment; the clinic
was closed and almost everyone except essential staff was gathered in the tent behind him. But in ten hours, the clinic tent would be surrounded again by a line of misery. Women and children, mostly, whose needs would overwhelm the available resources before noon.
This
was life in the world today; he could not get excited on his father’s behalf, especially over someone as superficial as Blue Reynolds.

A shout of “Hey, where’s our photographer?” brought him back to the present.

“Right here,” he said, stepping back inside. “Who’s got a smile for me?”

ater, Julian lay on his cot, the drone of power generators all there was to hear now that the party had ended. He could hardly remember a night in recent months when a diesel engine wasn’t singing his lullaby. Rarely, though, did he have to hold on to his cot’s frame to keep it from spinning—well, seeming to spin. Those champagne cocktails Noor kept pushing on him had a surprising kick.

Home was officially his apartment in South Chicago, not too far from where his mother was living—alone, still, and that seemed unlikely to change. How long since he’d spent a night in his own place, where the night sounds were of toilets flushing, of babies squalling, of couples arguing—or
not
arguing, the way Noor and Alec would be
not arguing
right now, alone together in her small tent at the edge of the compound.

He stopped in at his apartment two or three times a year, ran the faucets, washed the windows. There were no plants (he’d been joking with his grandparents) and no pets. Nothing live or dependent, which usually felt like a good truth but right now made him sad. Too much champagne.

The apartment was his property, free and clear—had been his mother’s parents’ home when they were living—and though people were forever telling him he should rent it out, he liked knowing it was always there waiting for him just as he’d left it. It anchored him, the way his Key West room had done throughout his teen years. If not for Daniel
and Lynn and their willingness to take him in, who knew in what direction his life would have gone? He had been an angry kid, a confused, resentful one. If not for their patient support, the cot he was sleeping on now could be a metal one in a prison cell.

Images of the just-finished party played in his mind. The happy couple. Erica and Cameron and Laticia and T.C. and Brandy (especially Brandy) in a kind of bump-and-grind conga line. He should’ve joined them. Maybe if he had, he’d be holding on to Brandy now instead of the cot frame. Maybe they, too, would be
not arguing
as the generators droned on. They’d be oblivious to the noise and the heat and the knowledge of how hard they would work tomorrow, in as good a way as he’d ever found.

rom a Key West guidebook Blue found, left behind on a stool at the hotel’s Sunset Pier restaurant where she was seated for lunch Saturday, came an entrancing description …

She’d like to see that glitter-strewn sky. Maybe tonight she’d slip out and judge for herself. When had she last seen the stars? Chicago’s lights, New York’s, London’s, all attempted to steal the glitter for themselves. The cities’ lights pretended to be the equivalent of the heavens, keeping everyone’s eyes on their earthbound attractions. Trendy shops, restaurants, theaters, clubs, posh high-rises, light-strewn bridges, fountains, statues, all winking,
Look at me! Why look upward when it’s all right here?
If her hotel’s compound wasn’t too lighted, she might even have a good night-sky view from her patio, which in daylight gave her the most astonishing outlook over water so ridiculously turquoise that it was as if Walt
Disney had concocted it. From where she was sitting now, near the end of the pier, at a lime-green table beneath a teal-colored umbrella holding a violet menu, the entire turquoise landscape—waterscape, rather—was like the crowning touch in a digitally enhanced movie scene.

A sleepy-looking waitress, who Blue could tell didn’t recognize her behind sunglasses and with her hair pulled up, led Peter, Janelle, Marcy, and Stephen to the table. Blue slid the book into her bag, but not before Peter noticed it.

He said, “I hope you’re studying up for Monday’s show.”

Marcy sat down at Blue’s left and picked up a fuchsia menu. Janelle’s was lime green. Marcy said, “Or maybe she’s reading
Find A New Producer in Only Twenty-four Hours!”

The waitress pulled a fifth stool over to the table and said she’d be back for their drink orders. Blue waited until she was gone, then said to Peter, “Okay, bring it on: What do you want to know?”

“Size of the island.”

“Eight square miles.”

“Length of the Keys string.”

“One hundred thirty miles, give or take.”

“Date of secession?”

“What, you mean the Conch Republic business? I don’t know … 1984?”

“Eighty-
two
,⃜ Peter said. “Ha!”

Marcy rolled her eyes. “All right kids, let’s move on to the really important business, that being, are there daiquiris on this menu?”

Peter said, “We just got here, and already you’re partying?”

“I’m on vacation.”

“You are
not
on vacation. If memory serves, you have to liaise with that nice mayor at three o’clock. He’s put off bowling so he can encourage you to spend even more of the show’s money while we’re here.”

“Yes,” Marcy said, reading the menu, “and to that end, I’ll pay the eight dollars for a daiquiri. I might even have two.”

Janelle, long inured to what Marcy called Peter’s
short-man attitude
, asked Blue what her afternoon plans were.

Blue said, “I’ll be reviewing my Key West factoids.” For two hours after lunch, she did just that, sitting on her suite’s ocean-front balcony with a docked cruise ship in sight and Peter’s extensive notes on her lap. History, legends, dates, names … when she was sure her eyes would cross and stay that way if she read another dry word, she put aside the folder and picked up the guidebook again.

y four o’clock, street life had slowed to a strolling pace—even a napping pace for a few unselfconscious fellows. Venturing out from the hotel, Blue saw one man propped against a shadowed alleyway wall, another in the shade of bougainvillea that was thick with red flowers. Even with the late-afternoon languor, she was on the lookout for people who were themselves on the lookout. People well aware that you never knew when a celebrity would show up in a place like this. As a case in point, when Blue was chatting with the hotel clerk before setting out, the clerk reported that guests had seen Gloria Estefan, Leo DiCaprio, and one of the Hilton girls just in the past week. With colleges and universities all over the United States on spring break, the celebrity watchers would be thick, the clerk said.