Blue Diary

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY father’s death. I went out to the garage with three black candles, a lighter I had stolen from Rosarie, and a photograph of my father taken when he was so handsome and young no one would guess fate would be so cruel to him. Last year at this time the weather had been bad, muggy and overcast, but tonight you could see every star, you could spy Venus looking back down at you, like a ruby in the sky. It was such a beautiful night I found myself hoping for things no one should ever ask for. Ever since last summer, I’d had only one wish, and it burned within me until it was the only thing I felt or knew or wanted.

My father was the vice-principal of the Ella Monroe School, which is why there’s a bronze plaque with his name on it outside the building, and why my mother won’t go there anymore, not even last spring, when she was called in by the acting vice-principal. Mr. Percy. I’d had some trouble with several girls in my class who had offered their opinions about the way my father died and then weren’t pleased with my reaction. I could be pretty vicious when I had to be, more than most people might expect. But my mother refused to come in for a conference, and in the end, Mr. Percy had no recourse but to meet her at Kite’s Bakery, where they drank coffee and never got around to discussing my poor social development and the way I’d thrown certain individuals’ notebooks into the toilet.

Mr. Percy could have no more given my mother another dose of bad news than he could have slapped her in the face. After that meeting, he never called again. He understood that my mother was willing to do just about anything to bypass the school and that plaque with my father’s name on it. She would circle around to Hamilton and drive back on the service road that runs parallel to the highway, just to avoid the vicinity. She still had not ordered the memorial for my father’s grave, and we all knew why: she couldn’t bring herself to see his name written in stone. Some people believe that if you don’t open your eyes to sorrow and you don’t talk about it, you can pretend it never happened. You can go on about your business and not even notice that a year has gone by, time enough for there to be nothing left except heartbreak and bones.

When I went into the garage on the anniversary of my father’s passing, I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I wasn’t afraid, not of anything in the world beyond ours at any rate. Last summer, my father showed me every constellation in the summer sky including the rising scorpion, which stung everything in its path, man and beast alike. He showed me that courage wasn’t simple. The final weeks of his life were spent lying down, in bed or on the couch or in his hospital room. He was fading, disappearing into the white sheets and the piles of pillows. He was evaporating right before our eyes. After a while, he seemed like half of himself, but that half still loved me.

I was trying to learn how to play the recorder back then, and I spent hours practicing beside his bed. His eyes shone whenever he watched me, even though I was terrible and gave up the recorder soon afterward. I couldn’t even look at a recorder anymore, and my grandmother sent a note to the music teacher to excuse me from participating in class. I sat in the cafeteria while everyone else was practicing, covering my ears and thinking about my father, but I couldn’t go backward in time past his illness. I was having trouble remembering the person he used to be before he was sick. or even conjure up what he looked like when we used to go skating together and he would lift me up into the falling snow until we were covered with crystals and our breath turned to ice whenever we laughed out loud.

Tonight, it was hot, starry and blistering and clear as could be. Most people in town would surely turn on their air conditioners in order to get a decent night’s sleep, except for Rosarie, who believed recycled air is bad for the complexion, and Ethan Ford. because the last town referendum voted down air-conditioning the jail. Usually, the week of July Fourth in Monroe is great fun, with fireworks set off in the high school field following a cookout and a parade along Front Street, the best part of which is when the fire trucks turn their hoses on the crowd and spray everyone with water. But this year, everything was different. The firemen decided not to be in the parade, out of respect for Ethan Ford, and Collie and I didn’t bother to go. which was probably a big mistake. Instead, I convinced him to visit his father. Looking back, I realize I should have known better. Collie didn’t want to go and I could tell from his expression that he was scared when I brought up the subject. I should have let it be, but I had the idea that if Collie saw his father, his spirits would lift and he’d be back to his old self As it was. Collie was hardly talking. He had a funny look in his eye, like he didn’t believe in anything. You’d say something simple to him, such as. I’m starving or Let’s go swimming, and he’d look blank, as if he wasn’t speaking the same language anymore. Once, I saw him throw a rock at one of the reporters posted in Cindy Gleason’s driveway, and although I could easily picture myself taking such a course of action, it was the sort of thing Collie Ford would never do, at least not before this summer.

The truth was, I had my own selfish reasons for wanting Collie to see his father. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake in reporting Ethan Ford the way I had. Innocent men are punished each and every day, and I didn’t want to be the cause of someone spending the rest of his life in jail for no reason other than my own stupidity.

He told me how his mother locked herself in her room at night so he wouldn’t hear her crying, but he heard her anyway and that lately he couldn’t get to sleep until the sun began to rise. When I heard how bad things were, I felt like the worst liar on earth. I felt like I was the criminal. What I’d done didn’t seem any different from pulling the switch on the train tracks, and now no one would ever know what path the Fords’ lives might have taken if I hadn’t seen him on TV and made that call. I waited for Collie to say something more, maybe to curse whoever turned his father in, but he didn’t say anything, and after a while, the moment when I might have admitted my part in his father’s arrest passed. In an instant, the opportunity to confess was gone, down the well, falling fast into unreachable waters. I thought about the way it was when you swam across Lantern Lake and tried to call to someone on the other shore, how your voice drifted up and disappeared into the treetops. how you might as well have no voice at all.

If nothing else, you’ll feel better seeing him. Wouldn’t your mother be glad if she knew he’d explained enerything to you? The real killer is probably wandering around Maryland right now knocking on people’s front doors. We could probably help, you know. We could put out fliers or something. We could do something to get him out.

I guess I was convincing, because after a while Collie said, Let’s go, and we took our bikes and went along the service road. All those orange lilies were blooming, thousands of them perched along the highway like a flock of tangerine-colored birds. It was hot and the heat whipped across our faces, and Collie let me lead the way, like he always does. We rode hard and fast, suddenly in a hurry to be somewhere. On the other side of the chain-link fence there was the highway that led to New Hampshire and Maine, and the cars speeding by threw bits of black gravel into the steamy air. I thought about all those people headed somewhere and how there were some of us who never got to where they wanted to be. I wished my father and I had driven to Maine last year and had sat on the edge of a lake to watch the stars. I wished we’d had one more day together.That’s all.

When we got to where the county offices were, near the end of King George’s Road, we left our bikes locked to a tree, since we figured if there were any criminals in Monroe. they’d probably be somewhere in this vicinity. This is where people went if they had a speeding ticket or if they’d been caught with marijuana, like Brendan Derry was last year, but it was also the place you came to if you needed a marriage license or a permit to expand the deck in your backyard. The buildings looked the same out here, the jail and the courthouse and town hall. We stood staring at the white concrete blocks, framed by hawthorns and maples and shady linden trees. You could hear the parade if you listened carefully. All those kids in my music class were playing their recorders like crazy, and the sound made me want to put my hands over my ears. Collie’s face had a funny look to it. He shaded his eyes and watched some crows cross the horizon. He was sunburned, and his hair was so blond it was almost white.

I don’t like it here, he told me, and, actually, I felt a chill myself The sky was still blue, but the day was fading, and something was making a whispering noise. It was the hawthorns above us that sounded so strange, the way their leaves crackled in the heat, as if they were made of paper, and wouldn’t last another day. I started to think this visit was a bad idea; we’d definitely miss the cookout at the high school, and we probably wouldn’t get to the field in time for the fireworks either, but it was too late to turn back. Dusk was falling, and there was a violet haze hanging over the highway. When I swallowed my throat hurt, but I acted like it was the most normal thing in the world for Collie to be visiting his father in jail.

I’ve been in there, and there’s nothing to be scared of. It was true; my grandmother and I had brought Rosarie here last month to take her road test, which she had promptly failed for the third time even though the motor vehicles clerk couldn’t take his eyes off her. They’re just some stupid office buildings, I assured Collie,

And yet the closer I got to the county buildings, the worse I felt inside. I felt faint, the way Rosarie gets when she has her headaches. Once we were through the door, we followed the signs to the secured annex, which is what they called the jail. There were two guards there, and they told me I couldn’t go with Collie. I’d have to wait in the hall on a bench. Collie looked panicked, but he didn’t say anything when one of the officers took him down to the jail. He looked like he wanted to turn and run, but he didn’t, because that’s not the kind of person Collie is. It’s the kind of person I am, though; for two cents I would have run all the way home, and I was dizzier than ever. I felt like I’d ruined so many people’s lives, I couldn’t even keep count anymore. I couldn’t even breathe, not without feeling there was a knife in my chest.

Out in the hallway, I put my head between my knees and when a woman from the motor vehicles department peered out of her office to ask if I was all right. I said no. I begged her for a paper bag to breathe into, because that’s what Rosarie does when she gets this way. Unfortunately, I only felt worse after breathing into the paper bag. I am usually easily embarrassed, but right then I would have stretched out on the tile floor, so paralyzed by my own actions I could no longer move; if they wanted to get rid of me, they’d have to carry me out. I guess I was thinking about the fact that my father waited until the day after July Fourth to do what he did. Even then, he was trying his best not to ruin things for us any more than he already had. But the truth was, it was worse this way. I knew that the whole time I was watching fireworks last year, dud after dud in the humid air, my father was counting the hours until he could be released.

When Collie came back, he looked awful, He looked worse than I felt, so I got off the bench and followed him down the hall, and I didn’t say a word. Outside, it was nearly dark, but still hot. In spite of the temperature, Collie seemed frozen. He dug his hands into his pockets, and his lips were pinched and blue. It was as though he’d been trapped in a freezer the whole time I’d been sitting on the bench in the hallway trying my best to breathe. I had to stop myself from reaching out and touching him to test if he felt as cold as he looked.

Collie glared at me and he made a strange sound in his throat, as though something was supposed to be funny, only it wasn’t. He didn’t seem like himself Not one bit. He turned away from me and wiped his eyes with the tail of his shirt. I knew I had made a big mistake in talking him into coming here, and that he might never forgive me. All the words I had inside that I could have used to tell him how sorry I was drifted away before they’d been spoken. That’s what its like when true silence comes between two people. Hot and empty and hopeless. Collie pulled the lock off his bike, and he didn’t even say good-bye; he swooped across the parking lot, then pedaled as fast as he could, only he wasn’t going in the direction of where we lived. He was going out toward the highway He was riding like a crazy person, and when he reached the fence, he sort of crashed into it, then he got up and left his bike where it was and he climbed over the fence. He jumped down into the tall grass, and two mourning doves started and flew out of the brambles, higher and higher, and then I couldn’t see Collie anymore. One minute I was watching him, and the next, he was gone.

I was wearing a black blouse that I’d borrowed from Rosarie because I had thought it made me look older and a little less ugly, but now the cloth felt like needles. It was prickly against my skin. I felt as if I should be burned at the stake, or banished, or cooked in hot oil. Everything I did was wrong, even when I tried to do what was right. I got on my bike and went over to the service road that trailed the highway. You couldn’t hear anything but cars over there. The sound drowned out your thoughts, and maybe that was just as well. I looked through the fence, but Collie had disappeared and all I could see was a steady stream of traffic and the green borders of grass on either side of the asphalt.

I kicked out some of the dents in Collie’s bike, enough to allow the wheels to roll: then I walked both our bikes home, although it hurt my arms to do so. By now, stray Roman candles were being set off in backyards and along the lakeshore: the echo of celebrations rumbled across the sky. leaving trails of ashy fire. It was so hot, and I had to walk clear across town. so by the time I got home I was drenched with sweat. I stood under the sprinkler my grandmother had switched on to water the faltering perennial garden my father had planted a few years ago, back when we thought we had all the time in the world. I snapped off two of the flowers that had managed to bloom and kept them for later. I went upstairs, dripping water over the carpets, and when I got to my room I pulled off my clothes. I stared into the mirror and I didn’t even recognize my self. My arms and legs were too long, and because of the way my hips stuck out you could see my bones. I wanted to look the way I did when my father was still here, but I wasn’t that person anymore.

I left Collie’s bike on our front lawn, but he didn’t come for it. I kept an eye out for him as I ate the dinner my grandmother had made for me, but he never showed up. I knew that Collie’s father hadn’t told him what he wanted to hear, and maybe I should have been glad that I hadn’t turned in an innocent man, but I wasn’t. I wished I could ask my sister what to do, but Rosarie was out with Brendan Derry. She had bragged that Brendan had worked overtime in order to rent a boat and take her out on the lake to watch fireworks. Poor Brendan might be having the time of his life right now, but the only thing I could think of was how when she told him it was over, he’d come here in the evenings: he’d stand on the corner of Maple and Sherwood and stare at her window, hoping for a glimpse of something he’d never have again, not that he’d had Rosarie in the first place.

Everyone expected me to go to the fireworks with Collie, the way I always did, but when I called him his mother told me he was sick and had already gone to bed. I didn’t really care about the fireworks anyway; I was too old for them and I knew it. Still, it surprised me to find how much I hurt inside, as if I were made out of glass and pieces of me would just go on shattering until no one could put me together again.

I went out to the garage after my grandmother had gone to bed. I didn’t have to worry that my mother might notice me sneaking around. She had started working again, back at the admitting room at Hamilton Hospital. People said she was the calmest woman you’d ever met and that she was made for the job. You could walk into the ER bleeding buckets, you could have your bones sticking through your flesh, and my mother would just ask for your insurance information and page the emergency nurse. She dealt with tragedy the way other people’s mothers cut up apple pie. Hillary Meyers experienced this firsthand when she toppled off the balance beam in gym class last year; she cracked her jaw so badly that her teeth were falling out and she had to hold up a towel in order to catch them, but she said my mother didn’t act any differently than she used to when I was in second grade and Hillary was in third and she used to come over for lunch, back when she and I were friends.

Try to keep the blood on the towel, dear, my mother told her. Hillary stopped panicking then; she figured her injury must not be too bad since my mother was so calm, even though her own father, the sheriff, who was used to car crashes and holdups, was sitting beside her and crying. It wasn’t until Hillary looked at her battered face in the mirror the next day that she realized how awful her injury had been. I wasn’t surprised at my mother’s response. After all, she’d appeared to be completely unruffled throughout my father’s illness. She took him to his doctors’ appointments and sat with him during his endless chemo treatments and never once let on how bad it was. She must have known from the very start there was no hope, but she never let anything negative show through, a skill she had probably perfected in the ER.

Don’t be noisy, Pop’s sleeping, my mother would tell us, and we’d be assured that our father was resting, gathering his strength. For the longest time, I thought everything was improving because of the tone of my mother’s voice, I trusted her completely. Then one day I opened the door to their room when she said he was napping, and I saw him lying there, eyes open, lost in pain, and I knew not to believe her anymore.

My mother and Rosarie had been out shopping at the mall in Hamilton, and so Rosarie was the one who opened the garage door when they got home. You could hear her screaming no matter where you were. My grandmother and I were unpacking boxes in the attic, and my grandmother cut off the tip of her little finger with the sharp paring knife she’d been using to slice through masking tape. Collie told me he was in his yard helping his mother in the garden, and when he heard the sound of Rosarie’s cry; he knew someone had died. He stood by the blueberry bushes and hoped it wasn’t me. Now it’s his mother who stands in the garden every night. I can see her from my window up on the second floor. I can look out and watch her crying and know it’s my fault.

Making that phone call is just one mistake in a long line of errors. I should have known better than to talk Collie into seeing his father. I should have known my father was dying. You wouldn’t even guess anyone was buried where my father is; there’s no marker, only an unbroken square of grass and a border of lilies. My mother insisted on these lilies after my father died, and it was the one and only time I’ve ever seen her have a fight with a stranger. She informed the people at the cemetery that she wanted a border put in, and she didn’t care how much it cost. But it wasn’t so easily done. We were advised that the families of the other individuals interred in that area would have to agree to the planting, and that was when my mother lost it. She told the funeral director to go to hell. She hoped that one day someone he loved would be denied one final bit of respect and then he would know how it felt to be left with nothing. My mother sat down in the dirt where my father had been buried and she cried so many tears I sometimes think the lilies that grow there now arose from her sorrow, and that the petals last no more than a day because they also must fall, like her tears.

I brought along everything I needed for the anniversary when I climbed out Rosarie’s window. Up above, the sky exploded with color. The earth was shaking every time fireworks went off at the field, and black ribbons of dust fell across rooftops. I had several strands of hair and an envelope full of nail clippings with me and the two flowers I’d picked earlier that my father had tended. I had looked through the boxes in my mother’s bedroom closet until I found my father’s hairbrush, and a photograph that was taken so long ago my father didn’t look much older than Rosarie.

It was still so hot that the concrete path across our yard burned my bare feet; june bugs drifted through the air. I took a deep breath before I slipped inside the garage. I didn’t turn on the light and after I closed the door I went directly to the place where it happened. I lit the black candles and set out all the ingredients I brought with me: the strands of my father’s hair taken from his hairbrush twisted together with mine, the nail cuttings, the watch I took from his night table drawer, the photograph from when he was young. I wasn’t certain that I could bring my father back to me. but at least I could hear his voice. I imagined him as hard as I could. I thought about us standing on the porch gazing at stars and remembered how he looked sleeping in his bed, with his blankets as white as snow. I still didn’t want to believe that a person’s whole life could change in an instant, in the time it took to walk out to the garage.

All of a sudden, something seemed to be happening. I could hear the scrape of wood as the door was pushed back. I hadn’t expected to have any success until after midnight, when July Fourth became the fifth, and the anniversary officially began, but it was happening now. I closed my eyes and tried to steady myself, but my heart was racing. Are you here? I said. My voice sounded strange. It was thick and hot, the way it was on the day he died. I heard somebody coming toward me, and I hoped I hadn’t upset the natural order of things, calling to my father the way I had, and then I realized I didn’t care what I upset. I just wanted my father back. I wanted him now.

When I opened my eyes. I felt dizzy. In some strange way. I felt a shudder of hope, as though I were a true believer. I wanted a world without end, a new order of things in which my father could walk through the door of our garage even though I knew he was gone. I wanted him to tell me his pain was nothing more than a memory and that all he wanted was for me to be happy, but that’s not what I got. It was my sister who’d come into the garage, and now she stared at me as though I’d lost my mind.

“It’s a good thing I got back here.” Rosarie wrung out her dark hair, and green drops of water fell dangerously close to the lighted candles. The fire hissed and smelled like the lake where my father and I liked to skate as soon as the ice was thick enough. We’d wait for November, and rejoice over December; we’d long for January on hot nights like this one. “What exactly is it you think you’re doing?” my sister asked.

Before I could say anything, Rosarie took a cigarette from her purse and lit up. After she exhaled a plume of smoke, she put the hot match to her skin and looked at me, defiant. Even through my tears I could see the red mark she was making was only one of many There was a long line of burns up and down the inside of her arm, in the place where the skin was most sensitive.

Everything about her was sharp on the outside. Her fingernails, which she’d painted cherry red. Her perfect, white teeth. Most of the time she was fearless, but the one thing that had scared Rosarie all this year was the garage. If somebody needed something, furniture polish, for instance, or a screwdriver to fix the storm door, and they wanted Rosarie to go get it, they could forget about it. My mother was the very same way. Throughout the winter, our car had been left in the driveway, and every time it snowed we’d had to dig it out; sometimes it would take hours, but Rosarie and my mother didn’t seem to care. Nothing could force them to open the garage door. Now Rosarie seemed to have gotten over her fear, and she looked even more smug than usual.

She was serious. “You know nothing about the American system of justice,” I reminded her. I would have laughed if I hadn’t then recalled the look on Collie’s face after he’d seen his father. For no reason I started thinking about the mirror in the Fords’ front room and how gray the glass was, like a take with no bottom, a river with no shore.

I thought Rosarie would laugh, I thought she’d tell me I was an idiot and needed to be locked up and not released until I was a functioning adult, but instead she just said, “Watch this.” She held her hand above one of the candles. She kept it there for longer than I would have thought possible. The flame flickered and spit and turned the center of her palm a sooty charcoal color, but she didn’t flinch. Maybe she was right. Maybe she didn’t feel pain.

I shook my head. In all honesty, I didn’t know. I expected my sister to pull my hair the way she usually did when she wanted to hurt me, but instead she came around and sat next to me while I finished crying. Then she waited while I gathered up my worthless ingredients and tossed everything in the trash. I blew out the candles and threw them away, too. We pulled open the sliding door that no one had used since my father died, and when we did, nothing unusual happened. It was just like every other garage door in town. We could smell cut grass even though no one had mowed our lawn all summer. We could see the moon. There on the lawn were the two bikes I’d walked home from the county offices. Rosarie had a last cigarette while I brought Collie’s bike into the garage, just to make sure no one stole it. If I lost one more thing in my life. I’d probably disappear myself.

“Too many times. And every one has been a big disappointment.” Rosarie seemed softer than usual. She had already crossed Brendan Derry off her list, and after spending half the night alone in his rented rowboat, he surely knew he was history. All the same, having her photograph in the newspaper wouldn’t begin to satisfy my sister. Even being beautiful wasn’t enough for her. “Nobody loves me the way I want to be loved.”

But I knew that someone had loved us both so much he hadn’t wanted us to see him suffer. He had loved us completely, as much as a man could love anyone, and what had it brought us? Nothing but sorrow and emptiness and heartache. By then, my sister must have completely forgotten who I was, because she draped her arm around me. We stood there together, like people who didn’t hate each other, grateful for the dark. We’d both missed the fireworks and everything else, so we looked up at the constellations my father had taught us a few summers ago, when there were record sightings of meteor showers. Back then, we brought blankets out to the grass and stayed out past midnight, each of us trying to be the first to see Antares, the red heart of Scorpio.

She really was the most beautiful girl on earth, especially on this night. Youd never even guess she had all those burns on her arm or that she was trying so hard to feel something. She closed her eyes and her breathing settled, and I could tell she was also wishing for something she would never have, and that no matter how beautiful she was, she wasn’t any different than me.