Blue Diary

THE HEARING IS BRIEF, HELD ON A muggy day. when the sticky heat and the rain boil the dispositions of just about everyone in Monroe, including the most even-tempered citizens. Four years from now, when the referendum to overhaul the town offices and the courthouse comes up once again, people will remember this stifling day, they’ll fan themselves and think of how they longed for air-conditioning and peace of mind. No one is fillly prepared for what is to come, save Jorie, who sits behind Ethan with her head bowed, and Barney Stark, who has taken his place beside Jorie, his heavy, serious face showing nothing, though he is on alert, ready to pick up the pieces when they begin to fall. Collie, too, knows what is about to happen, but he is nowhere to be seen; he’s off by himself, watching the steady rainfall from what was once the parlor of the abandoned house where he feels so comfortable, at the far end of King George’s Road, just three miles as the crow flies from the courthouse steps, but a world away as well.

Mark Derry sits in the last row to watch the proceedings. He has worn a tie and a jacket for the occasion and is sweltering for his troubles. This morning he phoned Dana Stark to inform her he wouldn’t be back till the end of the week to finish up their new bathroom. He waited for her to take him to task, more than ready to quit the whole damned project if she did, which would leave her without a commode or a sink, but Dana had surprised him and said there was no hurry. Mark had other things on his mind. Anyone could understand that. The Howards over on Sherwood Street haven’t made a fuss either; they already know their kitchen won’t be completed until well into the fall, despite the efforts of the handyman, Swift, hired to finish installing the cabinets and lay the floor. There are, indeed, more important issues to deal with, that much is true. There are circumstances that can’t be put on hold, to be set aside and forgotten for a better day to come.

On the afternoon after Ethan was arrested, Mark had a fight in the hardware store with that harebrained Steve Messenger, wha’d started mouthing off about burning the Fords’ house to the ground. They’d had to pull Mark off Steve in the paint-and-fixtures aisle, but now Mark feels confused about his loyalty. Sitting in the courtroom, hearing Ethan referred to as Bryon Bell, Mark can’t quite believe what is happening. Perhaps it’s all a joke, a scene filmed for a TV show; perhaps at the end of the afternoon, the actors—Ethan and the judge and the lawyers included—will rise to their feet and take their bows, thanking the clutch of reporters and the Fords’ neighbors and friends for being in attendance.

For haven’t these two men, friends for the past thirteen years, been there for each other no matter what the circumstances? Haven’t they cried together over the death of Mark’s father and rejoiced at Collie’s birth, making themselves queasy with scotch and cigars? Ethan coached Mark’s son Brendan, back when Brendan was in Little League, and is the godfather to Mark and Trisha’s daughter, April. These things are real; they happened, there’s no denying that. But are they as real as the moment when Ethan stands up to enter his plea, announcing his guilt with an open, untroubled expression? Mark Derry feels a shudder pass through him as he sits there in the courthouse. He is reminded of a magician he had once seen as a child who had terrified him by bringing forth scarves and birds out of the most unexpected places, shirt-sleeves and tabletops and the upswept hair of the birthday girl’s mother. After that illusion, he’d gone home and hid beneath his bed and refused to come out for supper; for months following the party, he had half-expected to find doves on his bureau or trip over silk scarves snaking through the floorboards of his room.

Now Mark looks over at Jorie, seated beside Barney Stark. She’s motionless, wearing a dark blue dress that makes her seem plainer and older. Mark is flooded by a memory of working with Ethan on one of those big new houses that went up on the far side of the high school a few years back; they had gone into the field at lunchtime, and after sharing the picnic Jorie had carefully packed, stuffing themselves with hard-boiled eggs and ham sandwiches. with apples and chocolate cupcakes and cold bottles of beer, they had stretched out to gaze at the sky.

Mark slips out the back door immediately after Ethan states his plea, and goes directly to the Safehouse, where he orders a draft, which he drinks alone at a rear table. It’s always dark in the Safehouse, but with the rain falling so hard, it’s even gloomier than usual, thick with the damp smell of failure and alcohol. One night when they sat here, Ethan had said something that, looking back. Mark thinks, should have given him a clue. Nobody ever really knows another person, Ethan had declared as the wind rattled around the roof of the Safehouse and a sprinkling of snow began to fall. They’d had a few, and Mark remembers saying something on the order of, Bullshit. If you think I don’t know you, you’re wrong, buddy. Hell, I’d trust you with my life. Ethan had clapped Mark on the back, and as he thanked him hed gotten kind of emotional. Now Mark feels cheated; he wonders if he’s been conned. He has another beer; then he goes home, and before Trisha can stop him he takes out the piles of photograph albums she’s worked so hard to put together and begins to rip up the pages.

“Stop that right now,” Trisha demands when she comes in from the kitchen to see the shredded paper on the floor and her husband down on his knees, searching for a pair of scissors in the bottom drawer of the bureau they inherited from his grandmother. Trisha grabs the album away. For a second she has a shivery feeling. Who is this man she’s married to, who has already torn up a dozen or more photographs? And then Mark does the most unexpected thing of all—he starts to cry. Trisha sits beside him on the floor. Her face is mottled and red; she has the sense that some things will never be the same, that just knowing Ethan has somehow placed them in jeopardy.

Still Mark Derry knows that a man may have good reason to mislead his wife, but never his best friend. Mark decides he needs to think over what has happened, he needs to sort things out, and all the rest of that week he takes to staying late at the Safehouse. Most nights, he closes the place down, getting a ride home from Warren Peck, let out on the corner to stumble the rest of the way down his own driveway. Mark no longer shows up for his jobs, and the three Derry boys, Sam, Christopher, and Brendan, hardly see their father these days. Even April, the Derrys’ eight-year-old daughter, notices the change, and she’s started to mouth off to her mother, refusing to bathe or to go to bed on time, when in the past she’s always been an angelic child.

It isn’t as if Mark Derry had never had a drink in his life -he likes a good time as much as the next man—but now he’s settled into drinking, as though he were falling into a soft netting that was swallowing him whole. Every time he thinks about Ethan, he has another drink, meant to clear his mind, but managing to do the opposite instead, leaving him fuzzy and far more confused. By the end of July, when Mark has lost ten pounds off his already thin frame and hasn’t been home before midnight for eight nights straight. Trisha Derry goes to see Kat Williams’s grandmother to ask what Katya might suggest to bring a wayward husband home. Katya is an unlikely friend for a woman as young as Trisha, but Trisha lost her own mother at a tender age and she’d always felt she needed some maternal counsel. When Brendan and Rosarie first started dating, Rosarie’s mother didn’t seem the least bit interested in the children’s future, but Katya always welcomed Trisha to stop in for coffee whenever she was trying to track Brendan down.

Now Trisha goes to Katya in need of good advice, the sort her mother might have given if only she’d lived longer. She lets April play in the Williamses’ yard, where nothing much grows aside from the feathery black mimosas, and she watches through the window as her daughter makes pies out of handfuls of weeds. In a surprisingly calm voice, Trisha tells Katya how her marriage has gone wrong. She has not been here since Rosarie broke Brendan’s heart. and perhaps she would feel uncomfortable returning if Katya were not so understanding. A man who drinks is a man who’s afraid of the truth in some way, and in Katya’s opinion, it is Trisha’s task to figure out what her husband is afraid of, then help him face whatever it might be straight on, with no alcohol inside him.

Trisha decides to follow Mark the very next day, to take the same path he is now on, and in so doing, understand why he’s running so fast. It’s a splendid morning when she sets out after him in her Honda. It’s already eight o‘clock, two hours later than the time Mark used to leave the house, back when their lives were normal. Trisha knows he has a job to finish at Barney Stark’s, and Josh Howard had tentatively phoned that morning to report that the handyman, Swift, had recently disappeared, leaving the Howards’ kitchen in ruins. But work is clearly not on Mark’s mind, for he heads to Kite’s Bakery on Front Street.

Trisha sits in her parked car. engine running, watching her husband get a black coffee, which he certainly could have had at home. She can see through the window that Charlotte Kite is back to work after the surgery people said she’d had over in Hamilton. Charlotte’s parents had built the place up from nothing into a chain that crisscrossed the Commonwealth, and the bakery must have felt like home to Charlotte, because another woman might not have returned to work so fast.

Trisha had heard through the grapevine that there was some sort of cancer involved, and she’d brought over flowers earlier in the week, even though she and Charlotte had never been friends. Charlotte had accepted the zinnias and lilies, cut from the Derrys’ own garden, but she hadn’t invited Trisha in. She’d insisted she was doing just fine, the same cheerful speech she gave to everyone, including Jorie, who still didn’t know the extent of her friend’s illness. But Trisha Derry was not so easy to fool. She saw how gaunt Charlotte was as she stood in the doorway of her huge house, dressed in her bathrobe with some sort of bulky pump attached under her arm. They had been a year apart in high school, and Trisha had always thought Charlotte was too sophisticated for her, as her family was among the wealthiest in town. Trisha had often whispered that Charlotte was stuck-up and full of herself, a real ice princess. Shed made jokes at Charlotte’s expense, but as she peered at Charlotte through the meshing of the screen door, Trisha thought maybe she’d been the cold one, and that’s why they’d never been friends. Perhaps she'd been the one to reject Charlotte, because Charlotte lived over in Hillcrest, just as she’d avoided Jorie because of her beauty, a singular gift that had always seemed so unfair. She’d been jealous, and jealousy always curdles. Trisha can’t help but wonder if she wasn’t paying a price for her lack of understanding and if that wasn’t the reason her loyal, dependable husband was drifting away from her.

When Mark leaves the bakery on the morning he’s being followed, he gets into his truck and drives around town in what seems to be an aimless pattern. Trailing at a safe distance behind, Trisha quickly finds herself confused, although she grew up in Monroe and knows every turn. It takes a while before she realizes that he’s heading for Maple Street. Mark stops across from the Fords’ house and sits there for so long Trisha grows concerned that he’s fallen asleep or become suddenly ill. She herself has pulled over beside a hedge of lilacs on the corner of Maple and Sherwood, a spot where the rangy shrubs protect her from sight. but after close to half an hour has passed, Trisha is growing restless. She’s wondering how long she can wait here like this, when at last Mark opens the door of his truck. Trisha gets out of her Honda as well; she edges along the lilacs, hidden by their dusty heart-shaped leaves. Her breathing is ragged, and it’s such a hot day she’s begun to sweat. In order to keep out of sight, she has no choice but to go through Mrs. Gage’s yard, even though Betty Gage, always so fanatical about her perennial beds, has been known to scare people off her property from the time Trisha herself was a little girl.

From the rear of Mrs. Gage’s yard, Trisha can see through the fence. Jorie is out in her garden, trying to make the place more presentable, as Liz Howard, who runs Monroe Realty, suggested when she came by to appraise the property. Two months without Ethan working and it will be hard for Jorie to make the mortgage payments. Three, and it will be impossible. So there she is, attacking tall bunches of Queen Anne’s lace, pulling out the heads of lettuce that have gone to sced. Jorie is wearing shorts and one of her son’s tee-shirts, and from a distance she looks as beautiful as she did in high school, when Trisha had thought her too high and mighty to ever approach.

Though she’s not one to trespass, Trisha continues on through Mrs. Gage’s yard to where her husband is standing, gazing into the Fords’ garden. He has such a puzzled look on his face, and yet he doesn’t seem surprised to see Trisha step out from Mrs. Gage’s carefully weeded flower bed where the phlox are doing so well, banks of purple and fuchsia and white.

All that morning, at the bakery, as he drove through town, and now again as he stands here observing Jorie, he’s been counting the times he and Ethan had gone fishing together, the number of beers they’d enjoyed, the nights they’d spent at the Safehouse playing pool, the times they’d rushed from the fire station on emergency calls together, hoping that the blaze they hurried to didn’t affect anyone they loved. More than once, Mark had told Ethan he didn’t know if he’d done the right thing in marrying Trish. Theyd been dating since they were fifteen, and she was the one and only woman he’d ever been with. and Mark had the feeling he’d missed out on something most other men had experienced.

They had been over at the fire station the last time they talked about this. The other guys had been in the front room, watching baseball on the big-screen TV Warren Peck had donated. The day had been hot, but when Ethan started talking about love. Mark had been aware of an icy sensation across his chest. He wished he could be as sure of himself as Ethan was, and now here he stood, watching Ethan’s house nearly every day, trying to understand what had happened and thinking about his own life and the course it had taken.

He doesn’t step away when Trisha comes through Mrs. Gage’s yard to stand beside him. “Not everything makes sense,” she says, thinking about Charlotte Kite, the girl she’d always been so jealous of, how pitiful she’d looked in her bathrobe, leaning her weight against the screen door. Who would have guessed that out of all the girls at school. Trisha would be the one to find true happiness? She gets on tiptoe and leans close to her husband. The acrid smell of the soil in Jorie’s yard is in the air. “I’m so glad I have you,” Trisha whispers to Mark.

There has not been a day since when that thought hasn’t run across Mark Derry’s mind. These words have brought him comfort on the days when he’s felt like getting in his truck and driving north along the highway to look for another life, one where he didn’t have to be as responsible, one in which he loved his wife the way Ethan loved Jorie. It is only on this hot summer afternoon that Mark figures it out as he follows Trisha home. He’s started smoking again, and the cab of his truck smells like sulfur. A man could change, that’s what he decides as they drive down Sherwood Street, and Miller Avenue, and Front Street. He thinks of himself at fifteen, how he’d pledged his love to Trisha, how he’d made a life plan when he knew absolutely nothing about life. If he’d had the boy he’d once been in the truck with him right now, he’d tell him a thing or two. I led advise him to go on the road, to live out in the world before he made commitments that would tie him up until he was an old man. People make mistakes, that’s what he thinks as he pulls up behind his wife’s car in the driveway, that’s what he decides.

That evening, Mark Derry phones Kip Louis, president of the town council, as well as Hal Jordan, the county commissioner of Little League, and Warren Peck, the most senior member of the volunteer fire department. In this way the defense fund for Ethan is begun, and why shouldn’t these good people rally around him? He is their neighbor, the same man he’d been last month when they’d trusted him with their children, when he’d carried the keys to their houses in his pocket and was considered by one and all to be the most honest man in town. Mark sits in the dining room for hours on the night the defense fund is born, with the Monroe phone book open before him, and a growing list of donations. Trisha gives the children dinner, and hushes them when they’re too rowdy, sending them out to play in the fading blue dusk.

As the light grows dim, Trisha stands in the kitchen doorway, in order to watch her husband. Katya was right, and Trisha has been wise to heed her counsel. Following Mark has helped her understand the road he’s been on. In fact, she is truly impressed. As well as she knows him, she had no idea that he could string so many words together; she’s never heard him talk as much or be as passionate about anything. Already, there are plans for a rally and talk about approaching town businesses for pledges. Mark has come up with every bit of this strategy on his own. While he works, Trisha fixes him a sandwich, roast beef on rye, and places it on the table. It’s done the way he likes it, with horseradish sauce and sour pickles. Mark smiles up at her and nods his thanks as he speaks to their minister. Dr. Hardwick, about a particular Bible passage that might be the source of a suitable sermon for their congregation on the Sunday to come, given the circumstances and the fact that Ethan never walked away from a man in need.

Startled by his mother’s harsh assessment of his lovesick ways, Brendan goes up to his room. The rest of the Derry children are playing kickball in the street with the Howard kids from over on the next block, and Trisha can hear them through the open window. The sky outside is tinted pink and a breeze trickles in, ruffling the curtains. Everything seems different to her on this evening, hopeful somehow. Trisha tells herself she will have to remember to bring dear Katya the lemon-poppyseed coffee cake that is her favorite, in gratitude for what is certainly some excellent advice.

“How about some coffee?” Trisha suggests to her husband between phone calls. She is proud of the fact that instead of sprawling on the couch or taking up space at the Safehouse, wallowing in the sorrow of the situation, Mark has the character to do something to rectify the mess Ethan Ford is in. Her heart is full of love. “It won’t take me a minute,” she says, and looking up at her, nodding as he dials the next number on his list, Mark Derry wonders if contrary to what he’s thought all along, perhaps he is indeed a lucky man.

Those fliers Brendan Derry printed up can be found everywhere in the next few days; black print on orange paper, they flutter around town like orange lilies, planted on lampposts and shop owners’ bulletin boards, stuck in mailboxes and on car windshields. This is the week when Jorie and Collie move over to her mother’s home on Smithfield Lane, driven off by the reporters stationed in the driveway of the Gleasons’ house across the street. The same week when Charlotte’s doctor informs her that her course of treatment will take ten full months of radiation and chemotherapy. On this day, Charlotte finds a stack of fliers left outside the bakery door and, disturbed by Ethan’s confession, she tosses them in the trash. But when Rosarie Williams sees the orange paper tucked into the mailbox, she sits on the porch and studies it carefully. She calls Kelly Stark, and the girls head to the firehouse on the night of the first rally. At least it’s something to do, and there will probably be reporters there, interested in taking their photograph. The girls stand at the edge of the surprisingly large gathering and listen to Mark Derry speak about forgiveness and compassion and before long they find themselves cheering with the rest of the crowd.

Jorie is supposed to be there as well; in a way, she’s the guest of honor whose presence will surely elicit compassion and large donations, but when Mark stops by to pick her up at her mother’s house, Jorie’s not ready to leave. It’s a quarter to eight, and people have begun to gather on Front Street; Jorie should already be seated on the center chair of the dais behind the podium, but she can’t find Collie anywhere.

“I’m sure he’ll show up,” Mark assures her, but Jorie’s not listening. She hasn’t seen Collie for the better part of the day; the later the hour has grown, the more distressed she’s become. She actually sent her niece Gigi out to look for him, scouting the field beyond the high school and the park over on Center Street, with no success. Jorie has no idea where her boy might have gone, for it isn’t like Collie to disappear without leaving a note. I Ie’s reliable and careful, or at least he had been until now. With Mark Derry there urging her to come with him, Jorie finally understands. It’s the rally. Collie doesn’t want to know about it or think about it. He doesn’t want to be in the same universe as his father.

Jorie assures Mark that she’ll be down to the firehouse before long, and there’s nothing he can say to stop her from getting into Ethan’s truck and going off to search for Collie. She drives through the quiet streets of the old section of Monroe, looking down lanes and into backyards the way she might search for a lost dog. The sky has faded into darkness and Jorie feels cold pinpricks of worry up and down her arms. She circles around Lantern Lake, terrified she might spy something floating in the shallow waters, which thankfully are empty and glassy green. She crosses the highway, looking for a lone hitchhiker, but sights nothing except bramble bushes and row after row of those orange lilies she’s never liked. She knows that lights have been set up outside the firehouse for they crisscross the sky, but there’s no one on the streets of Monroe. People are either at home or attending the rally, depending upon their allegiance.

It isn’t until after nine that Jorie thinks of going to their house, and when she pulls into the driveway, she can tell he’s been there. The garage door is ajar, and when Jorie goes to investigate she sees someone has been through Ethan’s tool shop. Screwdrivers and wrenches are scattered on the floor, and one of the saws is missing. Jorie has a tight feeling in her chest. She closes and locks the garage, then cuts across Mrs. Gage’s lawn. By the time she knocks on the Williamses’ door, she’s in a panic.

“Where’s Collie?” Beneath the porch light, Jorie notices that Kat is wearing lipstick. Isn’t she too young for such things? Shouldn’t there be a few years more before she starts trying to look older than her age? “Don’t tell me you don’t know, because I can tell from your note that you seem to know everything.”

And so they walk across Mrs. Gage’s lawn together and get into Ethan’s truck. On the way through town, Jorie avoids Worthington Street and the rally and goes around on Miller Avenue. When they pass Liberty Street, Kat understands what Collie’s been up to. There, in front of the library, is the fallen apple tree, the boughs and bark tumbled across the lawn and onto the sidewalk. The sight of it fills Kat’s eyes with tears, and she has to blink hard. She cannot believe he did this without telling her.

They turn onto King George’s Road and travel beyond the county buildings, past the courthouse and the jail, until the road becomes more rural, unlit by street lamps, and lined by old stone fences that are crumbling into dust. The night is dreamy and dark. Along the side of the road, there are banks of daylilies; the flowers look like birds that have settled down to sleep among the leaves.

Kat knows that Collie may not forgive her for leading his mother here, but what choice does she have? Sitting in the passenger scat, holding on tight while Jorie makes a wide, wild turn onto the dirt road, Kat knows that she will always feel the way she feels about Collie right now. No matter what happens, even if she gets married and has a dozen kids, even if she never says it aloud. It will always be him.

“How did you know this was here?” Jorie wonders when the old Monroe house comes into view. She and Anne came here several times when they were kids, but she never could have found it again. She cuts the headlights and lets the truck roll closer to the house. Something flutters in the trees up above, bird or bat, it’s impossible to tell.

Jorie looks at Kat and thinks to herself, She’s only twelve. She tells Kat to stay where she is, then goes out into the warm, hazy night. As Jorie makes her way up to the house, she breathes deeply. The air carries the scent of apples and ashes, and when she goes in through what she supposes was once the side door, she picks up the scent of another human being. She can feel someone watching her.

“Collie,” she calls. Her heart is beating too fast, perhaps because it’s even darker inside the house than it is outside among the overgrown shrubbery. There’s no response, and jorie finds herself wishing she’d brought along a flashlight. She can’t force her son to come to her; she can’t pull him by a leash or a string. If he flatly refuses to come home, Jorie’s not sure what she’ll do, but then out of the emptiness he calls back, “Go away.” Just hearing his voice makes everything bearable. She can see more clearly through the dust and the dampness of this old house.

“I’m not mad or anything,” Jorie says. “I just came to take you home.” There are crumbly things under her feet, rotting floorboards, most probably, and she makes certain to walk toward the sound of his voice carefully, arms outstretched to catch herself in case she should fall. They haven’t talked about Ethan’s confession: they’ve avoided it thoroughly, going so far around it, all they’ve managed is to get stuck right in the middle of it.

He’s sitting on an old timber in what was the parlor, a large, gracious room where cider soup was served to guests on cool, crisp days. The scent of apples here is strongest. Perhaps the wooden fireplace was carved from one of the hundreds of Christmas apple trees that once grew on the property. Jorie finds herself imagining what it would have been like to live in this house. What it would have felt like to look out your window and know you owned everything as far as the eye could see, trees and land, hillsides and fields.

Jorie sees the saw then, one of Ethan’s best, ruined and sticky with sap, tossed into a dim corner. The odor of the apple tree Collie cut down clings to the saw, and to his hands, and to his clothing. He is staring at his mother, desperate for an answer. He barely looks like himself in the dark, but she knows him, perhaps better than she knows anyone in this world.

Collie sounds too old, and Jorie wonders how this has happened so suddenly. Her boy nearly a man, with opinions of his own. But perhaps this transformation would have occurred anyway; certainly it is happening to Kat Williams as well. The little girl next door who’s now as tall as Jorie is sitting on the bumper of the truck with a lit cigarette in hand.

“That’s how you found me.” Collie nods to Kat. The cigarette she smokes is one swiped from Rosarie, lit in Kat’s attempt to try to calm her nerves. As soon as she spies Jorie and Collie coming toward her in the dark, Kat drops the cigarette and stomps it out beneath her sneaker. Red sparks fly up, and she crushes them, too.

Ever since Collie took King Arthur from the library, Kat has been stealing books. She’s taken at least one a day and on some brave and crazy afternoons, she’s filled up a whole backpack. She now has novels and biographies under her mattress and in her underwear drawer. Not that she reads any of them. She doesn’t even open the covers. Still, these books make her think of her father. In his last year, Aaron Williams often checked out twenty or more books at a time, huge piles that Kat helped to carry home. This, of course, was expressly against the rules- -there was a six-book limit- -but anyone could look at Aaron Williams and know he was dying. He’d been a big, robust man before he’d taken ill, and although he was soon puffed up from steroids and chemo, it was clear that underneath it he’d become a rail of a man. No matter. If he’d wanted a hundred books, the librarian would have checked them out for him. If he’d wanted a thousand, Grace Henley would have plucked the wheelbarrow from the library’s garden shed and carted the editions along to his house.

“You told her where I was.” Collie looks straight at her and Kat feels dizzy, probably from the cigarette, although she didn’t inhale. Maybe being light-headed is what allows her to be bold, or maybe it’s the notion that the time for this may never come again; whatever the reason, when Collie moves back so Kat can step into the truck, Kat leans toward him and kisses him. She does it so quickly that they both think they have imagined what just happened as they ride home, sitting close together, pretending to listen to the radio as Jorie drives toward town.

In the morning, blue jays perch on the fallen apple tree. The trunk has been chopped in half, the ragged bark hacked through unevenly but thoroughly. Green leaves and petals drift over side-walks and lawns. Grace Henley is the first to see what’s happened. She arrives early, woken by the stifling heat of the day and her own internal alarm clock, set to five-fifteen for the past twenty years. The morning is still dark when she briskly turns onto Front Street. Grace’s eyesight is failing, so at first she imagines that what she spies is a dragon on the library lawn, coiled and fallen under the sword, and that there are pale sweet-scented scales floating above the grass, onto the roof, dusting windows and doorways and gutters alike.

When the librarian realizes what has been felled, the hateful fruit tree that has been the bane of her existence each autumn with its bushels of rotten fruit and its pools of deep shade, she decides that some prayers are indeed answered in ways no one ever would have begun to imagine. Grace takes off her shoes and climbs skyward, and she’s still there, comfortable as a jay herself, when the first of the children arrive to practice for the yearly talent show scheduled to take place after supper. Grace allows the children to climb to their hearts’ content, never mind that their hands will be tacky with sap and that the bits of bark are sure to give them splinters. She insists that the town crew wait on the sidewalk with their saws and all their stern warnings that someone could easily break a leg, leaving the town open to a negligence suit. Grace Henley lets the children play until every petal has been shaken loose and the grass has turned white as snow.

People who disdain Grace Henley as a bookworm who desires nothing more than peace and quiet and a good cup of tea are doing her a disservice and fooling themselves as well. Books should never be judged by their covers, and Grace happens to know quite a lot about the people in this town. She knows, for instance, that Collie is the one who chopped down the tree, not that she would ever let on. Just last summer, Ethan Ford had been hired to replace the rickety steps leading to the stacks on the second floor, and Collie had often come to assist him. Grace had enjoyed watching them work together, and had been delighted to find that rather than running over to the Dairy Queen at lunch time, the way most people would have, they sat and had their noon break beneath the apple tree. They brought along Thermoses of lemonade, and sandwiches wrapped in foil, and thick wedges of angel food cake.

Grace Henley recalls how the boy had held planks of wood steady as Ethan sawed through them; how serious his expression had been, how much it meant to him to be of use to his father, whom he clearly admired. Hearing of Ethan’s past, Grace feels betrayed, not for her own sake, but for the sake of the children in town, and most especially for Collie. She doesn’t blame him one bit for needing to cut something down. She’s observed the look on his face when he sits in the reading room, half-hidden behind the fish tank. She’s noticed the hurt and the frustration there. Although Grace has refused to discuss Ethan Ford’s guilt or innocence with any library patrons wishing to gossip, privately she feels quite pleased that during the last town referendum, she voted against air-conditioning the jail. She thinks it’s just fine for Ethan Ford to sit in his cell and sweat.

Grace Henley is not the only one who’s pleased with the current turn of events. Jorie’s sister, Anne Solomon Lyle, is somewhat surprised to find herself back home at the age of forty, but even more amazed to discover she’s not unhappy with her situation. After more than twenty years of moving around from town to town, following her husband across most of New England and half the Southwest, she has a settled feeling at last. As it turns out, everything she was running away from is a comfort to her now. Most people in Monroe would guess Anne must consider herself to be a failure coming home at this stage, divorced with no man in sight, dragging Gigi back to the house she herself couldn’t wait to escape when she eloped with Trent right after their senior year in high school, two smitten fools who didn’t know the first thing about real life.

Regardless of other people’s judgments, the concerned How are you? that always seems to greet her in the market and at the bank, Anne actually feels better than she has in ages. The truth is, she’s never lived anywhere where the summer air is as sweet as it is in Monroe. It’s only recently that she’s realized the reason for this scent is that her mother keeps flowering jasmine in the yard. Because jasmine cannot tolerate a Massachusetts winter, Ruth always brings the pots inside at the first sign of a chill, ensuring that the glassed-in porch is always fragrant, no matter what the weather outside.

Anne’s daughter, Gigi, will be going into her junior year at the high school in September, and thankfully she’s not in with the crowd that includes Rosarie Williams. How Anne ever wound up with a daughter like Gigi is proof that there are indeed miracles on earth. Whereas Anne was lazy and self-centered as a teenager, Gigi is thoughtful and a hard worker; she helps her grandmother around the house, made honor roll last spring even though they moved to Monroe midyear, and is currently a volunteer counselor at the library summer program. This evening, Gigi is responsible for organizing the talent show. Although her grandmother has gone to root her on, Anne worked all day at the country club up in Hillerest, where she has recently begun a position as part-time hostess in the restaurant, and she’s opted out. Her feet are killing her, and she doesn’t have the patience for a bunch of kids singing songs and juggling.

Anne has to be pleasant at work, no matter how rude a customer might be, and maybe that’s the reason she likes to be alone in the evenings. She had thought she’d miss Trent like crazy, but as it turns out, she loves being by herself. She would like Trent to see her for one single instant. If only her happy face would bubble up in a bowl of chili as he ate lunch, or reveal itself in a glass of beer the way fortunes appear in crystal balls, just so he’d know how wrong he’d been. She’s doing just fine without him, thank you very much. For the first time ever, she’s at peace with the world.

The one recent development that really gets to Anne, as selfish a sentiment as it may be, is the fact that Jorie has moved home. Naturally, Anne feels bad for her sister, but they had settled down to such a perfect routine before Jorie came back, and now that’s all shot to hell. Although Anne would not admit this to anyone, she’s enjoyed being at the center of her mother’s world. It’s true she’s never been especially generous, never had any big-sister urges to protect or to guide. She wouldn’t know how to help Jorie if she tried, and thankfully she’s never been asked to.

Tonight, Anne pours herself a glass of white wine and grabs a bag of potato chips. She has decided she will tie one on, all by herself. She’ll celebrate being alive without Trent around to tell her what a mess she’s making of everything and how inconsequential a human being she is. Anne is on the lawn, stretched out on a chaise, the open bottle of wine beside her, a mild buzz just beginning, when she spies her sister coming down the street. Earlier, Jorie had gone to her house on Maple Street; she really had no choice. A couple relocating from Framingham have put a bid in on the house, and it’s a fair one, more than generous considering that the address has recently been in the news, which often turns buyers away.

Liz Howard had phoned to inform Jorie that offers like this weren’t made every day, not for the house of a self-confessed murderer. Liz had gone so far as to come and pick her up, and Jorie, who’d been napping, had thrown a light raincoat on over her pajamas. Shed stood there in her own backyard while Liz and the couple from Framingham went over the house’s flaws and its strong points. In the end, Jorie had told them she needed to think things over, and she’d left Liz there in the garden and set off on her way back to her mother’s house.

Anne is startled to see her sister walking down the middle of the road, following the white line that glows in the dark, her concentration as focused as if she were on a balance beam. Anne had assumed that Jorie, always better at everything, would also be a better mother; she took for granted that Jorie’s absence here suggested she had gone to the library talent show along with Collie and Gigi and Ruth. But instead, here she is, barefoot, hair streaming silver.

Jorie has, indeed, been spending more and more time in bed. She failed to go to the jail today because she was sleeping and then she neglected to attend a meeting at Mark Derry’s house to discuss the direction the defense fund should take, dozing dreamlessly, not realizing her mistake until Mark called, concerned. Lately, she’s been remembering that as a child she’d been afraid of the dark. She had to leave every light on in her room at night and had been especially frightened of the spaces in the closet and beneath the bed. Before she goes to sleep she once again checks those places with a flashlight, just to reassure herself that she’s safe, at least for the time being.

It’s unusual for the sisters to be sitting outside together, for them to be talking at all. Jorie and Anne have always been at odds, vying for their mother’s affections; they’ve been so distant that Jorie hadn’t even known anything was wrong with Anne’s marriage until Anne and Gigi arrived with their suitcases in March. Funny how they enjoy being out on the lawn together on this evening; they don’t have to speak to each other if they don’t want to, they don’t have to pretend to be polite. No traffic goes by. No dogs bark in the distance, out where there are still orchards and fields.

Both sisters can hear mosquitoes drifting past, as well as the echo of traffic from the highway. With four years between them, they were never close; Anne was already gone by the time Jorie was in high school, and they’ve been as good as strangers ever since. Now they look at the stars. Jorie can spy Polaris, the only star she knows for certain, high and bright in the sky. She thinks about devotion and betrayal and about how young she had been on the night when she met him. Had she been happy all this time, or had she been fooling herself? Inside the house, their mother’s dog, Mister, howls when a siren begins to wail on the other side of town, and the sound raises goose bumps on Jorie’s arms. She knows this signal, long and low, a summons to each volunteer firefighter: Call ín, come home.

There are so many stars in the sky, but neither sister has ever bothered to try to learn what they are. Tonight, they regret not knowing their names. A car turns the corner and through the dark Jorie and Anne recognize their mother’s Toyota, ten years old and badly in need of an oil change, as Anne well knows because the last time she borrowed it, the car had huffed and puffed its way up Horsetail Hill to the country club.

Once the Toyota has parked, Collie is the first to get out. He goes around and opens Gigi’s door, since she has the leftover sheet cake in her lap from the party that followed the talent show. He’s a gentleman even at twelve; with his whole world falling in around him, he still remembers what he’s been taught.

Collie goes by without a word, hightailing it into the house, where the dog is waiting for him. In the past, Collie always loved to play with Mister, for the pug will dance on its toes if offered pretzels or chips, but tonight Collie slinks into the living room and switches on the TV Ruth perches on the arm of a chaise. From here they can see shadows in the living room and a blue. flickering light.

“Three people got stage fright, and Noah Peck told some jokes that were in such bad taste his grandmother pulled him off the stage.” Gigi sighs. She’s something of a perfectionist, although she’s already learning that perfection isn’t one bit easier to find in Monroe than it was in any of the other towns where they’ve lived. “Collie just didn’t want to be there. Its not like anyone said anything mean to him, but I guess he knew what everyone was thinking.”

Inside, Jorie finds Collie watching TV in the dark with Mister curled up beside him on the couch. Funny how the entire time the girls were growing up, Ruth refused to let them get a dog, but since Anne and Jorie moved out, she’s had a series of pugs, the most recent of which is her beloved Mister, who sleeps in Ruth’s bed and dines on boiled chicken and rice on Sunday afternoons.

“Look at Mister—he really is crazy about you.” The dog has rested its head on Collie’s knee, but as soon as Jorie brings it to his attention. Collie moves his leg. “Maybe we should get a dog,” Jorie suggests. She has the desperate edge of a parent who wants her child to be a child once more. “Maybe we should go look for one this weekend.”

“Until we settle down somewhere, we’re living here. Mister could help us train the new dog,” Jorie prattles, but she stops when she sees the way Collie is looking at her. He wants to know the truth, and he doesn’t want to know anything. He’s tied up in knots, and those knots are only going to get tighter. Already, it’s changed him; Jorie can see it in the way he holds himself, by the way his hands are curled into fists and by his hooded expression.

Jorie goes to the linen closet in the front hall for a blanket and sheets, and meets up with her mother in the hallway. Ruth has just tidied the kitchen and she stops to peer into what had been her living room until Collie took up residence. She shakes her head. “I don’t like what’s going on here,” she says. Collie has fallen asleep in his clothes, with Mister there beside him. “A boy that age should have his own room. Maybe you put the house on the market too quickly. You still don’t have all the facts. You’ve got to just wait and see.”

In the dim light, Jorie notices that her mother looks older. Ruth Solomon is dealing with this, too; it’s her son-in-law sitting in the jail, not two miles from here. Every time Ruth ventures out to the market or the bakery, every time she walks out to get her mail or retrieve her newspaper, she invariably meets one or another of her neighbors, asking her how she feels about the charges against Ethan. Tonight at the library, for instance, Margaret Peck had leaned over during the finale, while the younger children, including her grandson Noah, were singing “All You Need Is Love,” to ask if Ruth had heard a defense fund had been started for Ethan. For a minute, Ruth was relieved. Defense funds were started for innocent men. But then Margaret had said, Guilty or not, I guess you plan to stand by him. Well, that was no comfort to Ruth. Judge not lest you be judged, she’d said to Margaret, but by then the children were taking their bows and Margaret Peck had turned away to applaud.

The details of what happened in Maryland so many years ago have been printed up not just in the Globe and the Herald, but in the Monroe Gazette as well, there for anyone to read. All Ruth can hope for is that Collie hasn’t seen any of it, especially the part about the girl only being fifteen. That’s the part Ruth has to put out of her own mind, each and every day.

“It will be easier than you think to stand by him.” Ruth has lowered her voice so it is nearly all breath. She’s thinking about her husband, the way she felt when he walked out and the way she felt when he came back home, sick and ashamed of himself. “You’ll do it because you have to. You’ll do it for Collie.”

Ruth hushes Gigi and Anne as they come by, on their way upstairs. Jorie waits, then turns off the lights when everyone else has gone up. She leans against the wall. She knows every inch of this house, even in the dark. She’d been standing in this very hallway when she told her mother she’d met the man she planned to marry. It was here that her mother threw her arms around her and wished her only happiness from that day forward. Jorie goes into the living room, unhampered by the dark. She eases Collie into lying down and covers him with a light quilt. He has decided to take the last name of Solomon, her family name, and if the truth be told, Jorie, too, has been thinking of herself that way, as the person she was before she was Jorie Ford.

Ordinarily, she would have shooed Mister off the couch, but tonight she lets the dog stay beside Collie. She goes on, to the sun porch where her father slept when he was ill, after he came home with his tail between his legs. Ruth has made up a cot, but she didn’t have time to hang the curtains she’d sewn when the porch was last used as a bedroom. Moonlight falls into the room and spills across the wooden floorboards. Dan Solomon had left Ruth for another woman, but in the end, he found his way back; he asked to be taken in after an absence of more than ten years, and Ruth couldn’t deny him, even though her daughters thought she was crazy.

He was my husband, Ruth said, and there was no arguing that. She nursed him through his cancer as though he’d never hurt her, and if she’s ever regretted the choices she’s made, she’s never mentioned it aloud. Jorie, however, had been far more wary when her father returned. The first time she saw him again after so many years apart, she thought she’d want to strike him, that’s how angry she was at what he’d done to their family. But he was so very changed, by illness and regret, that she’d hugged him instead, although what she feels about him she still can’t quite make out.

Jorie sits cross-legged on the cot where her father slept during his illness. It seems as though a lifetime has passed since she’s last lived in this house. She thinks of Ethan, who would be lying on his cot at this very moment, staring at the ceiling of his cell. a bumpy plaster that was painted pale green. He always told her he couldn’t sleep right withour her, and on those few occasions when they’d been separated—a fishing trip for him, a three-day weekend in Puerto Rico for her when Charlotte’s marriage was in its final last-gasp stages—Ethan told her he’d slept in a chair. A bed without her was not worth getting into, that’s what he’d said, and sleep was a foreign country without her hand to hold.

Well, she can’t sleep either, and it isn’t because they’re apart. She’s kept awake by moonlight, and perhaps it’s the glint of that silver light that makes Jorie go to what had long ago been her father’s bookshelf. She takes down a leather-bound atlas and props up the book on her father’s old desk, where he had faithfully paid the bills each month when she and Anne were little, before he went away. Now there are pots of begonias and curly ferns on the desk, but still there is room enough to open to the map of Maryland and trace the route she plans to take. She wants to see for herself what sort of place can make a man turn and run so fast and so hard that he’d lose himself as he traveled, with pieces of his history falling like leaves, until he was empty enough to be brand-new, like a man dropped to earth from the farthest reaches of the moon, with silver light running through his veins, where there should have been blood.