Blue Diary

IN THE MORNING, MEN IN JAIL WILL try to sleep their time away, dreaming of home and happiness, staving off waking for as long as possible. What they wish for is a spool of invisible thread with which to sew up their eyes; what they want more than anything are soft pillows, upon which they can rest undisturbed as time falls past them in endless waves. There is just cause for this desire for sleep: the dream is often more real than what a man might find when he opens his eyes. The dream is everything he once had, and foolishly threw away. Dinner set out on the table, the scent of summer, the woman who loves him waiting at the screen door. Awaken, and green light streams in, like fish skin, and the air is foul, overlaid by industrial-strength air-freshener that, no matter how strong, cannot erase the scent of fear. Fear, like heat, rises: it drifts up to the ceiling and when it falls down it pours out in a hot and horrible rain. A man has to train himself to sleep through such circumstances: otherwise every drop is a drop of fire from the first level of hell, wet cinders in his eyes, his heart, his lungs.

Ethan Ford is especially ill-suited to this environment. He’s a man who likes his own bed, and his life set in order. Locked up he’s unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, and he’s therefore deprived of his dreams. He can feel the enormity of what has happened inside his chest, feverish bands that encircle his ribs. His mouth is always dry. and the dryness cannot be relieved, not by water, not by ice. not by dreams of the blue ponds of his youth, spring fed and deliciously cold, so clear you could kneel down and drink right from the shore. Since the moment when he opened the front door to see Dave Meyers and the other men from the sheriff’s office standing there, Ethan has had a weightless feeling. It’s as though everything that has been holding him to earth has been cut away: all that remains are white bones and whatever wisps of cloth might cover him.

A sleepless night can last an eternity, and because of this Ethan has had plenty of time to decide what to do. He has already made up his mind by the time Barney Stark sets off for the jail promptly at eight the following morning. By then, Ethan has walked to hell and back while his neighbors have been dreaming in their comfortable beds. Hours later, he’s still burning. Touch him, and you burn along with him. Touch him, and you feel his pain.

When at last he hears someone in the hall, Ethan cranes his neck to see who’s approaching, hoping only that it’s not his wife. He will not have Jorie witness his degradation in this cell again. The mere idea is anguish to him, and he’ll do whatever he can to prevent such an occurrence or, at the very least, postpone it. Naturally, he’s relieved to find that his visitor is only Barney Stark.

“Hey,” Barney calls as Dave Meyers leads him to the cell. Usually, Frankie Links or one of the other guards would have this job, but today Dave has come in on his day off to ensure that Ethan will get proper treatment. Still this is always an awkward moment, men trying to act as though nothing unusual is occurring when one individual is locked up and the others are free. “I got us breakfast.” Barney rattles the paper bag he’s brought with him. He’s already stopped at Kite’s Bakery, where he picked up two coffees to go and a sack of sugar crullers, along with his favorite Danishes. Barney asked Jorie to meet him at nine because he needs a little time alone with Ethan to walk through some of the details Ethan will no doubt want to spare his wife. How much a trial can take out of you, for instance, if circumstances should come to that, and how damned expensive such an undertaking can be, particularly if investigators charging by the hour are needed to track down witnesses who, in the span of fifteen years, might have gotten to be just about anywhere.

Barney figures something sweet might help this information go down, hence the pastries. but that’s not the only reason he stopped at the bakery. He had hoped to see Charlotte, and although he was disappointed to find she wasn’t there, he wasn’t surprised. His guess: she’s spent the night over at Jorie’s, fielding phone calls and chasing off unwanted visitors, such as himself. Anyone can tell that’s the kind of friend Charlotte Kite is, and if there was one thing Barney respected, it was loyalty. Loyalty is the reason he’s here, for his practice doesn’t run to complicated criminal cases. Ethan and Barney may not be the best of friends, but they’ve coached baseball together and their knowledge of each other is at a deep level. Each knows how the other deals with failure, and with false hope, and with the absolute and fleeting bliss of an eleven-year-old hitting a fly ball over the fence.

Driving here, Barney had eaten one of the Danishes he’d bought at Kite’s, and he brushed the crumbs from his suit jacket as he signed in for his visit. He knows the officers on duty, he’s grown up with most of them, and he doesn’t blame them for their hang-dog expressions. It was Ethan Ford they had locked up in the holding tank, not some drunk who’d had one too many at the Safehouse and had been temporarily corralled for his own protection while he slept it off “I’m not happy about this,” Dave Meyers tells Barney as they walk down the corridor to the holding area.

Barney shrugs and hands the bakery bag to Dave. “Knock yourself out.” Barney knows that Dave can never get enough to eat. yet, unfair as it may seem, he’s as lean as poor Barney is heavy. As soon as Dave leaves them alone, Barney lets Ethan know that even though his practice is primarily family and estate law, the least he can do is get the ball rolling. He can access the court documents, including the Maryland demand for extradition. Barney is talking about the intricacies of the law, a subject he loves, listing the steps they’ll have to take to fight the transfer south, when he notices Ethan isn’t listening. Distracted, Ethan appears to be studying the shadows of the bars that fall across the linoleum floor. The kind of disinterest he’s displaying is never a good sign. Either he’s confused, or he’s given up, or, worst of all, he simply doesn’t care about his own fate.

Ethan’s face is unshaven and his black hair looks blue in the shadows. Remembering the coffee Barney brought him, Ethan picks up the cup. His hands shake as he removes the lid. He’s aware that Barney is trying to help, but he can’t focus on that now. “I’ve got to talk to Jorie first.”

“You’ve got to help me with something.” Ethan gulps his coffee, hot as it is. What difference does it make, since he’s burning anyway. He’s got the pent-up demeanor of a man who’s got to have his way. at least when it comes to the matter he wishes to discuss. “I can’t have her see me in here.”

By now, Ethan has drained the coffee and is tearing the cardboard cup apart. He does it systematically. so that the pieces are all the same size. Barney doesn’t like this either. Some people become really quiet when they’re confined, but others get wired: you can see how keyed up they are and how it might be possible that they would do almost anything in order to escape: punch a police officer, bolt and run, grab an old friend and put an arm to his throat, threatening to break his windpipe with a single move. Ethan has turned out to be the wired kind, and innocent or not, this sort of behavior will not put him in good standing with anyone.

Barney calls to Dave Meyers and explains that Ethan would like to speak to Jorie privately: This isn’t an unreasonable request, and of course the sheriff agrees. Dave’s got two children, a seventh-grade girl named Hillary, and Jesse, an athletic boy who’s just finishing up sixth grade, in the same class as Ethan’s son and Barney’s daughter. As a matter of fact. Jesse Meyers is on their Little League team. He’s a good kid, with a lot of power in his arm, and they’ll probably turn to him more and more often this season. Ethan is the one who practiced with Jesse all last year, and as a result, Jesse’s pitching has greatly improved. From Dave’s rueful expression, it’s clear that he knows about the extra effort Ethan has put in with his son.

“I’ll bet.” Ethan is quick to let Dave off the hook, and why shouldn’t he be? These two men have worked together many times, most often when both the police and fire departments are called in to oversee an accident on the interstate. Last month, they had been part of a team that had worked for hours to free a teenaged driver from a pickup that had become a burning pile of scrap. Once the kid had been taken to Hamiiton Hospital, they’d gone off together to the Safehouse. having quickly agreed it was not just their right to get drunk, it was their duty.

“Take your time,” Dave tells Ethan now He goes to the window and raises the shade in an attempt to make the room a little less gloomy. As he does, he remembers how blistered Ethan’s hands had been that night at the Safehouse when they shared a few drinks. Ethan had grabbed onto the hot metal door of the kid’s truck without a thought for himself during the rescue, and hours later he still hadn’t noticed how badly he’d been burned. “Take as much time as you want,” Dave tells him, and although he’s the sort of man who hates to break the rules, Dave’s surely not about to pay heed to the twenty-minute visitation limit. Not when it comes to Ethan.

“Thanks.” Ethan runs a hand through his hair. He blinks in the stream of sunlight that pours into the dingy office. There’s still a whole world out beyond the confines of the block of county offices, including an old field of meadowsweet crisscrossed by crumbling stone walls. Anyone can see how much Ethan Ford wishes he were there: if only he could walk through the wild grass and wait in the sunlight for his wife to arrive. In thirteen years, they’ve hardly spent a night apart. Other men might yearn for such things, for freedom and solitude, but not Ethan. He cannot begin to imagine how he will ever manage to sleep without her.

“If there was something I could do to stop this, I would,” Dave Meyers mutters before he goes. Once a guilt-ridden man starts talking, he can never seem to hush, and this is the case with Dave, who has never been particularly well suited for his job. The rules and regulations are one thing, but the personal heartbreak is something else entirely. “They’re hoping to take him back to Maryland by the end of the week,” he tells Barney.

“Of course I am.” Barney grins his big, wide grin, the one that shows his teeth and which was, unbeknownst to him, the reason the kids in school always laughed at him and called him a hyena. Well, he has laughed his way up to Evergreen Drive and that enormous house of his, and now those same kids who’d abused him so mercilessly are the first to phone Barney the minute their own kids get busted with marijuana or slapped with a drunk-driving charge. He’s the one they come to when there’s a nasty divorce or an estate hearing, or when they simply want someone trustworthy they can talk to. “I save people for a living, Ethan. That’s what I do.”

Jorie’s car pulls into the parking lot, and as soon as Ethan spies his wife, he’s no longer paying attention to Barney. He tucks in his shirt and rubs one hand over his dark growth of beard. He’s a man in love, and he wants to look his best. He wants these few moments alone with Jorie before things get any worse.

Barney is pleased that Charlotte understands exactly what she needs to do to protect Jorie. He thinks about what an idiot Jay Smith was, as far back as in school. Everyone in town knew he was fooling around except for Charlotte, and there were several times when Barney came close to writing her a note, something gentle, yet honest. But Barney never knew how driven he was by self-interest, and in the end, he decided that the outcome of Charlotte and Jay’s marriage was in the hands of fate.

“Twenty-four hours?” Jorie looks even more distraught when she hears what Barney had assumed would be good news. Twenty-four hours of absence between Barney and his wife, Dana, is a matter of course. There are times when they meet in their own living room and Barney realizes they haven’t spoken in days, and the worst part is, neither seems to care.

Jorie has been anticipating this moment, but now that it’s here, she finds she’s afraid. The hallway seems perilous: the distance she must travel suddenly appears vast. What will she discover when she opens the door? Perhaps Ethan has changed overnight, grown sharp teeth, perhaps, or claws. Surely her fears are the product of a terrible night, for like her husband, Jorie has barely slept. She only closed her eyes for a fitful moment or two, and even then she dreamed of shadows, blue shapes shifting across her own garden, swooping down at her, darting so close she could see their eyes, cold and indifferent and dark.

She takes one last step, then opens the door to Dave’s office. Instantly, she knows its all right. He is still the same Ethan, her dear husband, the love of her life. Jorie rushes to him and collapses against him, and Barney reaches to close the door, allowing them the privacy they so rightly deserve.

“Jorie,” Ethan says once she’s in his arms. The word sounds like a prayer and, indeed, it is her name that has allowed him to get through his night of hell. He has walked through the fire with her name on his lips; he has drunk of it and found sustenance in it, until at last he was carried to the other side of the black river. He has contemplated this moment, re-envisioned it again and again, and now at last he’s in it. He’s already started kissing her, slowly and softly at first, and then desperate, earth-shattering kisses that make her sob. Baby, he says, I don’t want you to cry But that’s what she’s doing, she can’t stop herself, seeing him like this, falsely accused and stolen from their lives.

Ethan brings Jorie to Dave’s old leather couch and pulls her onto his lap. He cannot let her go. But time is vanishing; they can’t hold on to it, or stop it, or bargain for more. They gaze at each other, their yearning for each other and for the lives they’ve led until now is so painful, they can barely look at each other. Jorie rests her head against her husband’s chest and listens to his heart. The rhythm is racing, but then it has always seemed to her that Ethan’s heartbeat was faster than any other man’s. He has the stamina of two men, the good looks of three, the heart of at least half a dozen. Sometimes when she watches him sleep, Jorie feels that he may indeed be an angel. drawn to earth by her selfish needs and desires. Perhaps she’s trapped him here beside her, to sleep in her bed, and cat her dinners, and go off to work. when he was meant to be elsewhere. True love, after all, could bind a man where he didn’t belong. It could wrap him in cords that were all but impossible to break.

It is then that Jorie notices what grows directly outside Dave Meyers window. There is a row of orange lilies, all facing cast, drawn to the strength of the sun. Blood lilies, Jorie thinks. She gets up and goes to the window, drawn there just as certainly as the lilies are drawn to the sun. Outside. there are dozens of blue jays, picking through the damp grass. She thinks about how surprised she was when Collie told her that a jay’s feathers had no blue pigment. and she blinks at the riotous blue blur as the birds take flight. There are fields of wild lavender beyond the sheriff’s station, and the birds are always attracted to the purple blooms. It’s the time of year when fledglings are especially susceptible to hawks, but they come to feast in the fields anyway. Jorie turns away from the world outside; she lowers the window shade and welcomes the darkness. Her universe is contained within this room. Fair skies and blue jays no longer concern her. Not anymore.

Ethan has been watching Jorie carefully. With every move she makes he can feel how time is coursing past them, shaking the floors and the ceilings, rattling their world. He can’t get enough of Jorie, he can’t let her go, and yet he’s afraid that may be exactly what he’s about to do. When Jorie turns back to Ethan there’s something in his eyes she doesn’t recognize. Then, all at once, she knows what it is. It’s fear. It’s the one thing she doesn’t want to see. Everything looks blue in these moments: the walls, and Ethan’s face. and the shadows that are cast upon them both, blue as hyacinths, lasting as heaven.

“People are going to say a lot of things about me,” Ethan tells his wife, as if this weren’t occurring already. Down at the Safehouse and at the bakery, in the schoolyard and in the streets, his name has been repeated so often it has become an incantation, calling the bees from the fields, until there is a buzzing sound drifting over town, a low rumble that informs every word that is spoken aloud.

“How bad could it be?” Jorie sounds lighthearted. but that’s not the way she feels inside. Fear is contagious. It doubles within minutes, it grows in places where there’s never been any doubt before. “Are they going to tell me that you have another wife down in Maryland? That you want a divorce?”

Ethan gazes at his wife with gratitude and with sorrow. He never wants to stop looking at her. Jorie can feel his desire, on her face and her shoulders, in her blood and her bones, how much he longs for her. How many women have that, after all? They were destined to be together. Otherwise he wouldn’t even be in New England: he’d be a good two thousand miles from here. Although. in truth, he wasn’t on his way to New Hampshire the night he met her, as he’s always told her. There was no job, and no friend up in Portsmouth. These were lies he made up on the spot. He told Jorie what he thought she wanted to hear, but that doesn’t mean anything he said was true. In fact. he was headed for Las Vegas on the night they’d met, for he’d gotten it into his head that a man could start fresh there. He’d be one of thousands of individuals who’d made mistakes and could still manage to roll through town with no past and nothing to prove.

He’d spent quite a white working on the Cape, making good money, and at last he’d had enough to drive out west. At any rate. that had been his intention, but the thought of the desert had made him thirsty, and he’d pulled off the highway at the exit past the hundred-mile marker, where there is always a wreath tied to the fence in memory of Jeannie and Lindsay, those ill-fated high school girls who’d been such good friends of Jorie and Charlotte’s. He skirted town on the twisting back roads, driving aimlessly until he saw the neon sign for the Safehouse. It was a sleety, bleak night, and the new truck he’d bought when the job on the Cape was through skidded on the bumps of King George’s Road, but he kept driving fast. He needed a drink and he needed it badly; it was as if the Nevada sun was already striking his windshield, and maybe that was why he was so parched.

He figured one last stop in this godforsaken Commonwealth wouldn’t kill him. He hated Massachusetts, the dark frozen months, the cross, melancholy citizens. He’d grown up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where the well water was a thousand times sweeter, the land was green and gentle, and everything that fell from the sky wasn’t intended to destroy man and beast alike. He rolled down his window and let the sleet come in sideways, and he told Massachusetts to go to hell; he’d be gone by morning, headed toward sunshine and hope. Still, he had his overpowering thirst, so he parked in the lot of the Safehouse and went on in before he even knew the name of the town in which he’d arrived. He strolled up to the bar and ordered a beer, and while he waited for the bartender to slide the foamy glass toward him, he turned to the right, and that’s when he saw her, her golden hair shining, pure sunlight in the blue shadows of the roadhouse.

He knew that if he didn’t walk away right then, just forget about the beer and his terrible thirst, he might not walk away at all. He had a decision to make in an instant, or else he could easily find himself trapped in some no-name Massachusetts town where November was one of the foulest months on the planet, with ribbons of ice and lead-blue nights and a gloom that spread out from Front Street to the highway, where the handful of pink roses Ethan had spied had been tied to the fence in memorium of the high school girls who had died.

When she’d laughed, he’d stood there at her mercy, unable and unwilling to turn away Her hair was honey-colored and long, and her eyes were a clear, startling blue that could stop a man in his tracks. Ethan could tell she was feeling the same thing he was from the way she was staring back at him and from the color that rose in her cheeks. She wasn’t shy or cool, and she didn’t play games. The friend who was with her, Charlotte Kite, tugged at her sleeve and tried to get her to join some old high school pals and play a round of darts, but Jorie paid her no mind.

Go on without me, she’d told Charlotte, and Ethan knew there and then that she was the one. All his life he’d been closed up, like a locked door, like a cellar, and here it was at last, in the place where he’d least expected to find it, the key to everything he’d ever wanted, shining and golden. True love had appeared in front of him, in a roadhouse resembling scores he’d already passed by. He understood immediately that he would never leave this town again; no matter what its name might be, this was his address from this day on.

He peered through the knot of customers, strangers he couldn’t care less about. A mass of faces, that’s what they were to him, people he never wished to know. They were throwing darts and whooping it up, and although they were nearly the same age he was, they seemed ridiculously young to him. He might have looked good, a handsome well-built man in his twenties, but he was a hundred years old on this night, with shoes worn down from traveling, and only the last bits of cinder left for a soul. He gazed at this beautiful, innocent girl before him and he was well aware of how much he wanted her. All the same, he gave her one last chance to walk away Your friends look like they’re havingfun. You should probably go join them, he told her, though it pained him to speak this sentiment aloud.

Jorie hadn’t bothered to look behind her to see those young men and women she’d grown up with. She met his gaze instead. They’re not havingfun. She had moved closer to him, and he’d had to lean close in order to hear what she had to say over the noise of the place. They just look like they are.

For thirteen years he has lived in Massachusetts, the place he despises more than any other. He has tolerated a steel-blue sea that is so cold in July it can freeze a man’s blood. He has put up with snowstorms and ice in December, with Augusts so muggy the humidity forces dogs to take shelter beneath the drooping, dusty hollyhocks, where they pant in the heat. In Maryland, hollyhocks lasted long into autumn, skies were blue until Christmas, and when snow fell it was soft and tender, coating both hedges and fields. Throughout the years, he has risen every morning and gone to work no matter the weather or the circumstance; he has mended fences and cleared the old oaks from the woods behind the high school so that the ball field could be added. He has brought turkeys down to the senior center on Thanksgiving and has walked through fire for his neighbors without a thought to his own safety, so that among the other volunteers at the firehouse he is known for his own brand of wild bravery. He has cried at the birth of his boy, he’s given thanks to God, he’s walked the leather off his shoes at night when he goes out to ramble through the neighborhood after Jorie is asleep and at peace with the world. He has wished on stars and on his child’s life, but nothing takes the past away, he knows that now. The past stays with a man, sticking to his heels like glue, invisible and heartbreaking and unavoidable, threaded to the future, just as surely as day is sewn to night.

Later, when darkness has fallen and his neighbors are out on their porches, gazing at the starry sky, thankful for the lives they lead, he will be in a cell that measures twelve by fourteen feet. He will be sitting on the edge of the hard bed with the harsh taste of regret rising in his throat. He can feel his loneliness already, so it is doubly painful when he takes his wife in his arms. He is a passionate man, but never before has he given her everything in one kiss, completely and utterly, his heart, his life, his soul. As for Jorie, she loves him in a way she never imagined possible. She would be here in his place, if such a bargain were possible. If allowed, she would never view the doves in her garden or spoon ice cream into a bowl on a summer day; she would never see her son’s face again if that’s what it took to keep her husband safe.

Dave Meyers opens the door to politely remind them that Ethan’s time is up. Ethan begs for five more minutes, and because Dave is a decent man, he gives in to this last request. It’s all the time Ethan has to spit out the words that have been caught in his throat like a bone, and perhaps that’s just as well. Every year it has been harder to keep the words down; they have twisted into a fish-hook that has served to keep him silent and bleeding at the very same time.

Jorie looks at her husband, afraid for what is to come when he goes down before her, on bended knee. All at once she knows that they are only at the beginning of their sorrow. Her beautiful hair is knotted, and her face has no color. She vows that nothing he can tell her will make a difference; nothing will change the way she feels inside. He needn’t explain anything, he needn’t speak, but Ethan has to get these words out or he’ll bleed to death. He tells her the truth, and the way he sees it, the truth is a simple thing: he is not the same man anymore. Yes, that’s his name on the warrant from Maryland, the one he was born and raised with, but if he were to drive by his younger self, hitchhiking on the road beside fields of red clover. he’d pass that boy right by. He wouldn’t recognize that selfish individual who thought he was entitled to anything he wanted, who whistled as he walked through fields of lettuce and soybeans and corn on the night he killed a girl, stopping only to change his clothes and to gather a handful of strawberries, which were so ripe and so delicious every bite only served to remind him of how good it was to be alive.