Blue Diary

MY GRANDMOTHER TOLD ME THAT on the day my sister was born, two blackbirds arrived at her bedroom window, and there was nothing my grandmother could do to chase them off, not even when Rosaric came home from the hospital, bundled in blankets and wailing like crazy Some people thought the birds were an omen, of good luck or bad fortune to come, no one was certain. But my father didn’t wait to find out; he took a hose from the yard and sprayed those blackbirds until they had no choice but to fly away; dripping water and feathers all the way down our street.

It is certainly bad luck that has struck Brendan Derry after his association with Rosarie. He comes by our house every day, even though my sister has told him in no uncertain terms not to bother her anymore. Brendan was working like a madman on Ethan Ford’s defense fund, but anyone could tell it wasn’t Mr. Ford he cared about; he just wanted to stay close to my sister, who was hanging around the firehouse every afternoon, stuffing envelopes and raising money and eating the free pizza Mark Derry provided for the volunteer staff “I don’t get it,” Brendan confided in me. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Nothing, you big idiot, wanted to say. She’s just moved on, the way she always does. You were never important to her, you were nothing more than a speck of dust, good-looking dust, but dust all the same. Why, by now, I wanted to tell him. she barely remembers what it was like to kiss you. Can’t you see just by looking at her that she’s managed to stop feeling? Didn’t you notice the burn marks on her arms all those times you held her tight? But when he rambles on, I nod and listen and keep my mouth shut. I even let him take me down to the bakery and buy me a plate of pie and ask me questions about my sister, but that doesn’t mean I ever tell him the truth. I surely don’t mention the fact that Collie and I have taken most of the fliers Brendan had posted on trees. That’s what we did when we went on a picnic with Gigi. We tore those fliers to pieces, and we didn’t go back to where Gigi was waiting until we were finished destroying Brendan’s hard work, only taking time out to practice our kissing, which was getting better by the day. By then we couldn’t look at Gigi any more than we could face each other.

For her part, Rosarie never took the time to notice Brendan mooning around our property; she was far too caught up in Ethan Ford’s defense fund to pay attention to some pathetic heart she’d carelessly broken. But the real question was, why this sudden interest in Ethan’s case? Why was she doing something when there was no foreseeable payback? That wasn’t the Rosarie I knew, and I knew her better than anyone. She wouldn’t scratch anybody’s back if they didn’t scratch hers twice as hard, and for twice as long a time, too. I knew something was up when Rosarie started to come out to the yard whenever Collie was around. Usually, we were too far beneath her for her to bother saying hello. Now she brought out a cold glass of lemonade for Collie, and that just wasn’t like Rosarie, to think of anyone else’s needs.

“I think what they’re doing to your father is awful,” Rosarie told him. She had a frown on her face that made a little line right between her eyes. Collie seemed unable to look away from that line or from her dark eyes. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. “After everything he’s done for this town, he should be considered a hero.”

Collie nodded gratefully and took off for his grandmother’s house. It was awful that he didn’t live on our block anymore. I hated to see the real estate agent showing the house to prospective buyers, and there was one couple in particular who kept coming back. I wanted our neighborhood to look bad and scare them away, so when my grandmother hired Warren Peck’s nephew. Kyle, to clean up our yard, I told him that we couldn’t afford his services and sent him on his way before he could cut down the hedge of black thorns on our property line that was such an eyesore. In our backyard there was one of the first apple trees in town, a Baldwin that some people say was planted by Colonel Baldwin as he rode through town in the year 1749. Every fall my father would make something called mole-cider from these apples, mixing cider and milk with eggs, but this summer the tree was failing, and I couldn’t care less. I hoped when people came to look at Collie’s house they’d peer past the fence in Mrs. Gage’s yard and when they saw the half-dead apple tree and the hedge of thorns and the black mimosas they’d decide to live somewhere else.

After Collie went home, my sister began to confide in me. which took me completely by surprise. I didn’t want to hear the things she told me, but I’d been waiting so long for her to treat me like a human being, I didn’t tell her to shut up. As it turned out, she’d done such a good job for the defense fund, stuffing envelopes and going door to door, spending countless hours on the hot line, that Mr. Hart, the attorney in charge of the case, and Mark Derry, who’d started the whole fund-raising process, had brought her down to the jail to let Ethan Ford thank her in person. If my grandmother had known about this she would have surely grounded Rosarie for the rest of the summer, not that it would have done any good to try to discipline her. Something in Rosarie had changed, and it wasn’t just the way she looked that was different. She had personally raised twenty-eight thousand dollars for the cause. When she asked for help, people couldn’t seem to refuse her, despite the dark clothes she’d taken to wearing, and the fact that her face was clean of makeup. No more shorts for her, no gobby mascara and red lips. But if anything, she was more beautiful this way, with her long dark hair pulled back, leaving her heart-shaped face so exposed. People wrote out checks and then they thanked her, as if they were grateful for her presence, and her guidance, and her charity.

In some ways, though, she was the same old Rosarie, still thinking about herself She had gotten to the part she was most excited about, the thing that made her swoon. She told me that when she went to see Ethan in jail, he’d gotten down on his knees and kissed her feet, first one and then the other. She was wearing sandals, and she’d polished her toenails a pale shell pink, and she had almost fainted, except that the jailhouse floor was probably filthy, so she’d forced herself to stay conscious. She willed it with all her might. As she spoke of what had happened, she was trembling. She had a strange look on her face, the way people do when they know a tornado is about to hit, but out of loyalty or stupidity they just stay put, right there in the eye of the storm.

It was time for a defense fund meeting, but I wanted to hear the rest of the story, so I tagged along when she headed toward the center of town. This was the only activity Rosarie bothered with these days; she wouldn’t go to keg parties at the lake, she wouldn’t shop at the mall in Hamilton. Money could be better spent, she told me, than on clothes that would be out of fashion before you could turn around twice.

“That just goes to show how little you know,” Rosarie said to me as we turned onto Front Street. There were banks of black-eyed Susans on the median that ran down the center of the street, and the linden trees we passed by outside the post office smelled like allspice. It was all the same as it was every summer. It just felt different. My sister was wearing a white dress, and her black hair streamed down her back the way night spills across yards and lawns.

On the day we’d been avoiding Gigi at the lake, Collie had informed me he had decided to use his mother’s family name, Solomon. He was going to have it officially changed and everything. He told me he didn’t even want to hear the name Ford; whenever he did, he felt sick to his stomach. It seemed especially unfair that Rosarie would be so quick to forgive Collie’s father when she still was so furious at our father for getting sick and dying. I wondered if she wasn’t as smart as I’d always thought she was, and right then and there I started to worry about her, in spite of the fact that I didn’t even like her.

Rosarie was meeting Kelly Stark at the corner of Front Street and Worthington Avenue. Kelly had the longest hair of any of the Stark girls, so long she could sit on her own braid. I had often wished Kelly was my sister. She was extremely brilliant, and had won a National Merit award, and sometimes I wondered why she hung around with Rosarie instead of the group of smart girls like Gigi Lyle, who were taking summer study courses in order to be prepared for the SATs in the fall. I guess Kelly was rebelling in some way, if going to rallies for a murderer could be counted as such, or maybe she was like me and simply couldn’t say no to Rosarie.

“Hey there.” Kelly grinned when she saw us. She looped one arm through Rosarie’s and the other through mine. Kelly Stark was much more tolerant than Rosarie. She had a kind heart that would probably get her into trouble, unlike Rosarie and me. I had to believe that being mean would save us both; it was our protection and our armor, or at least it had been until Rosarie started getting involved with Ethan Ford.

Although she was busy putting Brendan down, Rosarie had the look that she always had whenever she was falling in love with somebody. Her face was flushed and her eyes were blacker than ink. the sure signs of her devotion. I watched Kelly and Rosarie walk right past Brendan Derry, and then I knew who my sister had fallen for. It turned my stomach to realize she was thinking about Ethan Ford that way, after what he’d done. I should have known Rosarie wouldn’t have given up so much of her time for a civic cause. There was always self-interest when it came to Rosarie, the selfish beat of her own cold heart.

The sheriff and two of his men had agreed to bring Ethan Ford, or whatever he was calling himself, to speak at tonight’s meeting. When he came walking along the sidewalk flanked by the officers, no one had to tell me what Rosarie was doing here or why she was wearing her favorite dress. I saw him wave to Rosarie, and I saw the expression on her face when she waved back, and even I could understand how somebody could make a mistake and think she was in love with him. Mr. Ford’s dark hair had been cropped close and he’d lost weight, but he was still the handsomest man in town. You could tell just by looking at him that he’d been caged and that he wanted his freedom. One look and it was obvious that there would always be women ready to fall in love with him. They’d believe in his innocence because he believed in it. His faith would give him power over them, and those women wouldn’t know what hit them. His smile would run them down just as surely as if he were a freight train, and it didn’t matter how smart Rosarie thought she was, she’d probably give up whatever he asked just to be near him.

For days afterward I tried to think of what I could do to show Rosarie that she was making a mistake. I was spending most of my time in the backyard, wearing my old bathing suit and running the hose over my head when I got too hot. By that time, I had stolen thirty-seven books from the library, thirty-eight including the one Collie had taken. It was like I was addicted to stealing, or to not getting caught, or something. I was getting good at it; I could do it in a roomful of people and they’d never even know I’d slipped the history of the Nile under my shirt or that I’d dropped a volume of poems into my backpack. But for some reason, all those books made me sad, too.

I thought I’d have to beg Rosarie to listen to me, but on Saturday morning my sister put on her bathing suit and came to lie out in the sun beside me. She was going to the jail that afternoon, so I guess she wanted to look good, as if she didn’t look great no matter what she did.

“You’re surprisingly stupid,” I told her. I was reading a book of Russian fairy tales that I’d stolen from the children’s reading room the day before and wishing I was more like Baba Yaga, the old woman whose house ran around on chicken’s legs. You could bet that Baba Yaga didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She might have been mean, she might have been hideous, but she didn’t cry herself to sleep at night.

“Really? Well, his wife didn’t even come to the rally. She hardly ever visits him in jail.” Rosarie turned to me then; she smelled sweeter than usual, and I wondered if she’d given up smoking. I wondered if she was still burning herself to try to feel something, or if Ethan Ford was like a match. “A person in his situation needs someone who will stand by him and see him every single day.”

“I said, shut up!” Rosarie pulled my hair, but she didn’t deny it. “You think you’re so smart,” she went on, “but you don’t know anything. You think Dad was so high and mighty because he killed himself and supposedly spared us so much pain, but he was just taking the easy way out. Ethan Ford has lived a perfect life, he’s actually saved people. And he’s not the only one in this world who ever made a mistake.”

I looked at my sister and thought of how she must have felt the night she found our father. She had begged my mother to take her to the mall in Hamilton, she’d had a fit if you really want to know, and because of that our father had gotten the chance to be alone when my grandmother and I went up to unpack in the attic. I supposed you could see that as a mistake if you looked at it in a certain way You might think you have to pay for such an oversight for the rest of your life.

That night, when everyone was asleep, I went into the garage and lit a candle and begged my father to forgive Rosarie for her unkind words. She knows not what she says, I told him. Or what she does, either, when it comes right down to it. Our father was the sort of man who thought things over carefully and weighed his words before he spoke. He must have measured the length of the days he had left against the sorrow he would have caused us with each of those days. It didn’t really matter what Rosarie thought. Everything our father did, he did out of love. I’m sure of that. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that he would have showed true conviction if he’d forced himself to go on living. That might be true for somebody else, but it wasn’t true for him.

Some people needed saving, and I was beginning to realize that Rosarie was among them. That night I stayed awake, thinking of how I could set things right. Before I fell asleep I made a vow that I would complete three good deeds. I would choose the tasks that were the hardest for me, the way people always do before setting off on a quest. If it was easy, it was worthless, even I knew that. There were so many things that were hard for me, I could have had a ten-page list, but it came down to this: I would return the stolen books to the library; I would see to it that a stone was put up at my father’s grave: and I would make certain to protect Rosarie, even if that meant protecting her from herself

There was no law against taking care of the easiest task first, so I brought the books out to the garage, a few at a time, and piled them into an old wagon. I waited until dark before going down to the library, dragging the wagon behind me. It was the time in August when the crickets start going crazy, and in spite of the heat and how many sprinklers were switched on, anyone could tell it was the end of the summer. I started thinking about the things Collie and I had done together, and how I’d never felt like I needed another friend when he was around, and how Rosarie had said it would all change. I’d probably gone ahead and brought that change on myself when I kissed him out at the old house. He looked at me in a different way now, like he was trying to figure me out and having no luck whatsoever.

As I walked through town, I was worried about what excuse I could give if somebody stopped me and questioned me about the wagon of books, but a bomb might as well have dropped for all the people I ran into. Even though I’ve lived in Monroe my whole life long, I started thinking maybe someday I should move somewhere where there are people on the street after nine o’clock. It was so quiet you could hear the air make a pinging sound, and the linden leaves rustled like paper.

I went past Hannah’s without anyone seeing me; even Brendan Derry, who was at a window seat, sorrowfully drinking coffee and writing some sappy poetry for Rosarie, failed to notice when I went by. Kite’s Bakery was closing early these days, and there were no rallies going on at the firehouse, and the stores on Front Street were shut down for the night. I figured I was in luck. I felt so sure of myself I started to whistle, or maybe it was fear that made me do that, I don’t know. All I know is that when I turned onto Liberty and saw the library. I got a shaky feeling. Maybe I was thinking about my father, and how nice Grace Henley had been to let him take out so many books when he was sick, or maybe I just didn’t like the dark. I left the wagon beside some honeysuckle vines, but when I took the first bunch of books up to the library. I felt kind of exposed without the old apple tree to hide behind.

I slipped every book through the return slot, even though the edition of King Arthur was so thick I had to push, hard, until it fell with a clump on top of the others, just inside the door. That was when I glanced up and saw Miss Henley watching through the window. We looked at each other, and I felt like crying because instead of opening the door and screaming at me, she smiled. She’d known all along that I was stealing those books, she just never said anything.

I turned and ran. I grabbed the wagon and pulled it behind me so that it banged into my legs and left bruises. I ran so fast I thought my lungs would break apart, but I kept going long after I was past Front Street. I thought about the people in my life who were good, people who weren’t the least bit like me, the kind of individuals who never accused you of anything, even when they were well aware of all you’d done. I had overheard Grace Henley talking to Margaret Peck, who volunteered at the library, when Mrs. Peck brought up the subject of the books that seemed to be disappearing from the shelves. As it turned out, Grace Henley hadn’t been worried. I heard her say that in her experience, missing books often returned, sometimes after weeks or months, occasionally, after years; sooner or later, they usually came back, as if they’d returned of their own accord, drawn back to the library like sheep to the barn.

When I got home, I stood outside, trying to catch my breath. At this hour, everyone I loved was sleeping or already gone. I stood there for a long time and thought about my father and how no matter where I lived or how far I went. I would always think about him. I hadn’t known that before, not really, but I knew it now, It would be harder to get to sleep tonight without all those books hidden around my room, but as far as I could tell, it wouldn’t be impossible.