Reunion (19 page)

The idea of leaving here for Key West appealed like the prospect of a whisky shot sometimes did, something quick to steady the nerves. Neither Chicago in very early spring nor his mother at any time of year held great appeal. The islands, though? The islands had captured a piece of his soul in the four years he’d lived there. Every return since then was a reunion.

He sat down on a footstool. Island life in the Keys. It wasn’t quite what the tourists saw. Or rather, it was that, but it was that and so much more. Yes, sand and sunshine, coconut palms and gentle turquoise waves. Women in skimpy sundresses. Impetuous tattoos of rainbows or hibiscus or the skull and crossbones. Sunburned scalp as seen through cornrows. Drunken sex with strangers—even for him, once.

Excepting that mistake, for him Keys life was a less hedonistic morning paddle among the mangroves, where he might find a snowy white heron standing in sea grass, plucking breakfast out of the shallows. It was wahoo or tarpon or bonefish filleted under the watchful eyes of pelicans. It was a dive to a reef teeming with ocean life, or a visit with Christ of the Abyss, who refused to answer the questions Julian brought to the barnacle-encrusted shrine.

He knew you had to stay longer than a few days or a week in order to see past the glossy brochures about swimming with dolphins, to go deeper than the gay PrideFest celebration, nightlife on Duval Street and the sights from the Conch Tour Train. You had to stand on a painted wooden porch watching tropical storms roll across the Atlantic from West Africa, feeling the wind-lashed rain. To really know Keys life, you had to be on a first-name basis with the weaver who sat, every evening, at the intersection of Caroline and Whitehead. You had to inhabit the rhythms of tides and sun and storms, and listen to the ghosts whispering from behind the banyan trees.

Who was this Blue Reynolds, that she thought she could stop by his grandparents’ house and upend everyone’s plans with her insider advice?
Was her standard—and by extension the standards of all the TV-show production types—so low that she really thought they had a better chance with a quickie effort now, as opposed to a quality product later? If so, he shouldn’t be surprised. Reality TV shows were his answer incarnate.

So many people in such a hurry over things that mattered so little …

Julian saw one of the translators coming toward him, and slipped the BlackBerry back into its customary pocket. He’d go to Key West next weekend, he’d make it work. If
Lions
morphed into a broad collaboration, God knew when—or whether—he would have another opportunity to spend time with his father. He’d shoot the pilot and show Blue Reynolds how things
should
be done. His father would see that he was equally capable of making a Darfur documentary or a bit of literary infotainment about an author who, like so many of the people Julian had known in the Keys, really just wanted a good drink and to be left more or less alone.

riday afternoon in Key West was the middle of Friday night by Julian’s internal clock. He longed to be horizontal. The sunlight trickling through the palms overhead felt soft but somehow unreal, unreal as the scene before him.

He understood organized chaos, but usually the people milling about him (in this case, on the sidewalk in front of Hemingway’s house) were not dressed in expensive cruisewear, in name-brand flip-flops, in golf shirts that cost more than some Afghans earned in a year. They did not usually have bright smiles and wide-brimmed hats, three-hundred-dollar sunglasses, careless sunburn, careless lives. They did not often speak English and take pictures of celebrities with cameras that rivaled some of his—all of which were locked away in his grandparents’ car for the moment. He missed the customary weight of having one hanging from his neck.

Somewhere nearby, frangipani was blooming; he breathed deeply and got, too, the scent of warm coconut. Someone had been sensible enough to put on sunscreen.

The rugged brick wall enclosing the compound was too tall for most people to see over. A dozen or so resourceful tourists had brought milk crates or folding chairs or bicycles—propped against the wall—to stand on. A pack of others pressed together at the wall’s entrance. Lynn was there now, talking to a big man who stood behind a makeshift metal gate. Her straw hat was as wide as her shoulders and banded by a sleek satin ribbon of deep violet. She certainly didn’t lack presence.

His grandfather spotted a friend who watched the commotion from across the street. “There’s Carlos—you remember, we play chess on Tuesdays? I’ll be right back.”

“Sure thing,” Julian said, waving to Carlos. He went to a middle-aged woman who stood on a folding chair. The backs of her legs were painfully red. “Can I take a quick look?” he asked. “Just for a minute, I swear. My dad’s in there.”

She stepped down and Julian took her place, looking where the rest of the crowd did: at the front of the two-story tan box of a house, where lime-green shutters and a black wrought-iron balcony made a backdrop for his father, who stood before the cameras talking animatedly about the house’s history. Blue Reynolds, in a rose and white floral dress and crocheted white cardigan that begged to be photographed—it was the texture, the lightly tanned skin in the gaps—watched his father with rapt attention.

And snagged his own.

Seeing her in the flesh, in three living, breathing dimensions, he understood why his father had wanted to alter his plan. Even from fifty feet away, she was magnetic. What was it? Her trim curves, wavy hair, broad smile, intelligent eyes—they
were
intelligent, he had to admit—were not traits she alone owned. She was built like many women he knew; some he’d known very well, in fact. And yet there was something more going on with her … Something he felt in his belly, and lower. Something he knew already he would need to ignore. Even if she weren’t older (eight years? nine?), even if she hadn’t once dated his father, she was no prospect for a guy like him. Her reach extended far outside their bit of shared history and in-common hometown—where, of
course, she was revered as though she were Chicago’s own Olympic goddess. Watching her, he could smell her influence like a scent overlaying the coconut and frangipani.

“Wait another minute or two, they’re about to take a break,” Lynn was whispering from near his elbow, “and then you can go say hello.”

She and Daniel—or he should say
Ken
, for the moment at least—had brought him here to
The Blue Reynolds Show on Location in Key West!
directly from the airport. Ken wasn’t sympathetic to his lack of sleep or the six flights in his recent history,
six
, not all of them smooth, that got him here to this last inhabited island in the string of Keys. Astronauts, Ken said, had to do a lot more on a lot less. “Take Apollo 13, for one vivid and personal example,” he said, and proceeded to recount how long he and Lovell and the rest had gone without sleep so that they could save not just the lives of three excellent men but also NASA’s reputation and its congressional allowance. “Aw, quit yer whining,” is what Ken said, with an affectionate slap on the back.

Although this alter ego of Daniel’s expressed the same opinions Daniel held, Julian preferred the original, preferred “Daniel one-point-oh,” as Lynn often referred to him. Julian didn’t have a past with Ken Mattingly Ken wasn’t the life preserver he’d clung to in those first months after his mother was admitted at old Northwestern Memorial. How many nights had he sat in the den next to his grandfather, fiercely glad to be there and not in Chapel Hill, while at the same time fiercely wounded by what seemed his dad’s indifference to his having chosen to stay in Key West? Daniel, maybe sensing this, had filled his head with trivia about the islands and the currents, about pirates and developers—who were in many cases one and the same.

Though eighteen years had passed, he recalled too well the day he’d come home from baseball practice and found his mother sitting on the tub’s edge in her underwear and bra. The water was running and she held her wrists above the stream, letting her blood course down into it.

The police had been kind to him despite his angry fear, a supportive female officer sitting silently beside him in the ER until his grandparents arrived, followed an hour later by his father. The man had seemed a
stranger to him, and responsible, somehow, for the razor blade and the blood.

Two days of discussion and debate among the adults had followed. The outcome:
Mom needs some help.
No shit.
She’ll be in the hospital for a while. I’m teaching, so we think maybe you should go to Key West for the rest of the summer, then see how things are.
It wasn’t until November, however, that his father said, “You’re welcome to come live with me …” leaving the next word, “but,” unsaid, yet Julian had heard it. Screw that.

Had it really been there?

While living here as a teen, he could hardly set out from the house with his grandfather without getting a history lesson. Even today, Ken wanted to talk about how World War I aviators trained at the nearby Navy base, terrorizing the residents with their daredevil antics much the way he, Ken, had, he said, in his early days at NAS Pensacola. Yes, it was Ken’s story, but it was a story just the same.

About his dad, Julian now asked, “How’d he get on the show?”

Lynn said, “It’s the funniest thing; on Wednesday night, I guess it was, we were all eating at A&B, and they decided he should be the tour guide for today’s show. Thought having an actual scholar would give the piece dimension, I think Peter said.”

“Peter?”

“Her producer.”

Her
being Blue, obviously. And hadn’t they all gotten awfully friendly in a short space of time?

A sleek black cat lounged on the path near his father’s feet, tail whipping against the ground in an irregular rhythm, as if to show who was truly in charge here. If Daniel had his facts straight, more than ten thousand travelers visited Hemingway’s island home every year to see where “the iconic alcoholic,” as Daniel liked to call him, had written
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, as well as opened his home to polydactyl cats like this fellow. Julian admired the cats, six-toed and normal alike, and in some limited ways he admired Hemingway. The stories held up, he’d give them that. How could he not admire the work when he was named for one of Hemingway’s characters? A minor one, from “The Snows of Mount
Kilimanjaro,” but legendary. A Hemingway nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is what came of being born to an English professor who was himself an English teacher’s son.

He watched Blue turn to face one of the cameras and say, “When we come back: We go inside Papa’s house, and reveal the truth about what he went through while living here in this island paradise.”

She held the camera’s eye until a technician called, “We’re clear.”

“Come on.” Lynn grabbed Julian’s hand and pulled him down from the chair, then led him past the metal temp fence.

“Look what I’ve got,” she said, striding over the snaking cables without a thought. Julian kept his eyes on her feet until they’d cleared the hazards without incident, then looked up to find they were almost nose-to-nose with his father and Blue.

Quickly, Julian extended his hand to shake his dad’s, heading off any possibility of an embrace. “Good to see you,” he said, and then was immediately sorry to be so stiff.

“And you,” his dad said warmly. “Here, meet Blue Reynolds. Blue, my son Julian.” He actually sounded proud.

Up close, Blue practically hummed with energy. “Hi, Julian, I’m very glad to meet you,” she said. Her dark eyes were wide, sincere, welcoming. She had a slightly raised mole on her cheekbone that might or might not have been made flesh-toned by makeup. A pretty woman, but not a knockout. Not, looking only at the powdered, lipsticked surface,
that
remarkable, really.

Right.

He shook her extended hand. A firm clasp. Strong. Woman in a man’s world and all that. “Yeah,” he said, wanting to keep hold of her hand.
Fool.
“Same here.”

Lynn patted Blue on the arm. “I just wanted him to say hello. We’ll get out of your way now.”

Blue smiled at him, her eyes curious and somehow vulnerable. His stomach dropped, a strange and not altogether pleasant sensation in the way it was a betrayal of his better judgment. She looked away, saying, “All right. Will you two be joining us when we’ve wrapped things up
here? Mitch, you and Brenda are going down to Mallory Square with some of the crew, to start with, yes?”

“We are. She hasn’t seen the spectacle yet.”

“Right,” Blue said, “and then some of us are going to grab dinner and drinks someplace where we won’t be mobbed.”

“Join us,” his father said.

His grandmother answered for both of them: “I can’t, but I’m sure Julian will.” Then she grabbed his hand to lead him back to where the crowd waited.

He would have given a different answer, but in an odd, probably masochistic way, he didn’t mind.

What he’d intended to do, needed to do, was sleep. Sleep, however, was a need he was accustomed to ignoring. It was obvious that if he wanted to get any time with his father in the next forty-eight hours, he would have to do what Alec had advised him at the beginning of their first assignment together in Bosnia: “As you’ll learn quick enough, you have to go along to get along.” He’d figured it out, trial and error, losing only the one finger in all these years, instead of his life. A lot to be said for that.