Reunion (42 page)

Julian. How was he managing the media chaos? He’d had wounds to lick already; she hated that she’d made it all worse. She hated the idea that he might hate her for it. She hated not knowing for certain how he was doing or where he was.

A hotel clerk spotted her passing the desk. “Ms. Reynolds! Welcome, uh, back. May I—”

“Thanks, I’m all set.” She continued into the hallway leading to the elevators. It charmed her every time she was here. Some brilliant designer had created a tunnel of white lattice, with wide-striped blue and yellow fabric hanging overhead like a circus tent. The elevator’s doors were blue on top, yellow on the bottom, with white herons in the center of each side’s upper section and pineapples below. They opened, and she stepped into a chamber of mirrors.

“Good evening,” she practiced, speaking to her reflection. “It’s wonderful to see you!” And, “I’m doing well, thank you. Never better, in fact. Tell me, how are you?”

On the door of the Hot Tin Roof restaurant was a subtle placard,
Dining Room Closed for Private Party.
Inside, she was greeted by a handsome Latino man who bowed and extended his arm toward the warmly
lit room, where calypso music and the breeze coming in off the ocean set the mood just so.

Mel saw her first. “Harmony Blue … What a week—it’s good to see you in the flesh.” Mel hugged her, then stood back to study her. “Eh, not too much worse for the wear.”

“So you won’t disown me, then?” Blue tried to sound light-hearted.

“Is that an option?” Mel joked, then grew serious, saying, “At first I kept thinking, Why didn’t she ever
tell
me? I wasn’t exactly there for you, though, I know that.”

“It’s done,” Blue said.

“Guess what?” Mel said, brightening. “Jeff did it—he flew. He’s over there—” she pointed. “He said your courage shamed him into doing it.”

Quitting had not been so courageous. She’d done it only after she was in free fall anyway. She’d done it knowing that the rest of her life was so well-funded that, even if she never earned another dime in salary, she could live lavishly every day.
Every day.
And even then she would have spent only a fraction of what was there.

The thing she was most afraid of doing was so much riskier than quitting her job and so much harder to accomplish. Unlike Jeff with his flight to Key West, she couldn’t buy a ticket to Julian.

Her mother saw her with Melody and came over, pulling Calvin with her. “My girls.” She kissed Blue and took both daughters’ hands in hers. “How wonderful is this?”

“Quite wonderful,” Blue said. Everyone looked beautiful, the room was beautiful—polished wood, palm-shaped light fixtures, lush palm murals on the ceiling; everything was so perfect-seeming that Blue tried to dismiss the odd feeling of being in the wrong place.

For more than an hour she mingled with the other guests, fielding questions and working, always, to steer the conversation back to the occasion if it got too far off-track. “Tell me how you and Calvin got acquainted,” she’d say, or, “I did a show, once, on tattoos, but I’ve never seen anything as elaborate as yours. Did it hurt?” “The dress my mother’s wearing tomorrow is vintage—you should ask her about it.”

She’d thought she would tell her mother her snorkel story during dinner. She waited until they were seated together at a white-clothed table. The story would be an entertaining tale to anyone listening in, and at the same time a way of telling her mother,
I did it, Mom, I got out, I took a risk, I lived.
Since talking with Mel earlier, however, the message felt like a false one. Here were Calvin and her mother, bold in their love and sure in their belief that when it was real, you didn’t wait. Seeing them sitting at this table, radiant, assured, delighted, she understood that love was always the riskiest proposition—and promised the biggest payoff.

As the salads were being served, she leaned close to her mother and said, “There’s something I have to do.”

“What is it, what’s wrong?”

“I’ll explain later.” She left the table, left the restaurant, took the elevator downstairs, walked back through the lobby and out into the busy plaza, and stopped to get her bearings.

Duval was packed with weekend revelers, so she took Front, intending to weave her way up to the Forresters’ house in the hope of finding Julian still there.

She took her shoes off at the corner of Simonton. Ahead on the right was the little shop she’d visited on her first day here, the bird shop. She should see if there was something small she could bring him, a
gesture
, her grandmother had called such gifts. Gestures would, she’d told Blue and Mel, help them make new friends.

Blue recalled being at a tiny IGA grocery store once, where the selection of inexpensive children’s gifts was slim, and boring. She’d wanted to skip it and leave, but her grandmother urged her on.

Gestures show that you have the person in your thoughts, that you like them.

Don’t they know that, if I’m there?

If you never presume, you won’t ever be mistaken.

Tonight she wanted very much to be clear.

The shop was open, the wind chimes ringing on the softly lit porch. A group of women was leaving as she was coming in. They paused, but
she continued inside. If she waited on every person who waffled, deciding whether or not to speak to her, she’d spend a great deal of time waiting—and she’d done too much of that already.

A Blue-cheeked Bee-eater would be the perfect gift for Julian, connecting them in a way that would always please her, regardless of what did, or didn’t, come afterward. She scanned the first display cases and, not seeing one, went around a tall shelf toward the back corner of the shop, to find the artist or a clerk.

She found two people, one who looked as startled as she was.

“Julian.
You’re … here.”

“
You’re
here,” he said.

They stared at each other until the shop owner, the artist, said, “I thought you’d be back.”

She looked at the artist. “Because you said my Bunting needed …” She stopped, suddenly spooked.
A partner.
“Julian, do you have a few minutes to talk?”

He followed her outside and said, “Are you okay? I saw the
Time
article. That was nicely done.” He looked worried but also pleased, which made it easier for her to answer.

“I came here to find you a gift, an apology.”

“None needed,” he said. “I came here to find you a housewarming gift.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “I thought you might be staying awhile.”

The moon was full and rising, white and clear against the blackest star-filled sky. “It really is glitter-strewn,” Blue said, staring upward. She made a quick wish for fortitude. “I read that,
glitter-strewn sky
, in a guidebook.” Looking at him again, she thought he was the more compelling sight. She said, “Do you want to walk? Let’s walk.”

They walked along Simonton in silence. On any other night with any other man, she would have waited for some overt sign that what she wanted to say was going to be well-received. Tonight, with him, she felt impatient and powerless at the same time, pulled again to the edge of the abyss. The idea was not so frightening, though, as it had once been. She
recalled the wish she’d made from the balcony of her hotel suite not so long before:
Ease.

She stopped walking. “So be it,” she said. “I’ll do it right here.”

Julian stopped too. “You really don’t need to apologize. It must have been hellish for you, but I think you’re handling it—”

“That’s not it,” she said, looking up at him.

“No? Then what—”

“I never imagined I’d be standing here, holding my shoes, saying … I mean, my plan originally was, you know, to get you a
gesture
, a bird—a Bee-eater. And if you were there at Daniel and Lynn’s house, I was going to give it to you and say, ‘I’m really sorry you got pulled into the mud with me.’ And then, before I lost my nerve—because I’m not good at this kind of thing at all—I was going to tell you—even if your grandparents could hear me—I was going to say something that probably would have come out all hokey, like, ‘I can’t stop
thinking
about you,’ or, ‘I wish there was some way you could feel like I do.’” Hearing herself, she stopped abruptly. There were limits to how ridiculous she would let herself be.

Silence.

She ventured a look at his face. He was staring at her. He said, “Like you do?”

She could only nod.

He held onto the fence beside them for balance and took off one shoe, then the other. This was so unexpected that she had to laugh. “What are you doing?”

With his shoes in his hand, he said, “It’s been a long week, hasn’t it?” His expression was thoughtful. Sympathetic. A man like him would have a lot of experience in putting off love-struck women.

“The longest,” she said, her voice thick with emotion she wanted so much to suppress.

He said, “Blue? That email I sent you, from Iraq, that was more than an apology. It was me saying—or trying to say, ‘She’ll know the truth so that, if I die tonight, at least I’ll have said what needs saying.’ Which
is my still not very clear way of saying, well, of saying … I don’t, I
can’t
, think of anyone but you.”

“You don’t?”

He shook his head. “And I’m pretty sure I feel like you do.”

“You do?”

He dropped his shoes, then took hers and dropped them as well.

She said, “Are you going to kiss me? Because if you feel like I feel, you’d kiss me, quick.”

He did; a tender, testing kiss that encouraged a soft, deep one, and then he folded her into his arms.

n any other night, with any other man, she would have invited the man to her place for only drinks and conversation. She would do the balance-sheet calculations, pluses and minuses, and consider the possibility of getting together again, when her schedule was clear, maybe. She might call her mother—as she had just done—to say all was well and they’d speak soon.

She would not do what she was doing with Julian: walk past the lone remaining photographer with her arm wrapped around Julian’s waist; leave the lights off after they’d come inside; push him against the wall and kiss him until she was breathless and he was, and then kiss him like that again.

It was not her style to pull a man into her bedroom and take his clothes off him as if unwrapping a fragile gift. There was nothing fragile about him. He was the vision from her dream, made real, made warm, made panting softly when she slid her hands over his bare chest, his waist, the expanse of his back. He was a man who, when she found his appendectomy scar and traced it with her tongue, found every way to return the favor.

She would not have made love with naked passion and abandon, but she did now.

And she would, she hoped, again; maybe before the night was through.

hoever had built her house must have been an early riser, a person who didn’t want to waste one moment of the day; the sun, now higher than the garden walls but lower than the trees, poured through the eastern windows and set the bedroom ablaze with color. With Julian still sleeping beside her, Blue sat in the light with her eyes closed, absorbing it, until it was swallowed up by the trees.