Blue Diary

THE LAST WEEKS OF AUGUST ARE ALways a time for family reunions and blueberry pie, the season when goldenrod appears along roadsides and the lilies that bloom in daylight lose their short-lived petals as soon as moonlight begins to spill from the sky. The process is so rapid that by morning there is often nothing left of these flowers but green stalks and the yellowing tendrils of leaves, as though summer were already ending while most people were safely in bed. Charlotte Kite, however, notices what happens to the lilies at night, because she can’t sleep. She is victim to her own racing thoughts, incessant, surging terrors that keep her up at odd hours, at two and at four, so that she is awake to hear the fluttering of the sparrows when they first stir in the bushes: she listens to the quiet cooing of doves. She is already at her window when the first radiant bands of light break open the leaden blue sky of morning, a witness to the hour when the fallen petals of the lilies are curling up in the grass like bits of paper, too thin and delicate to last.

For five years or more, unbeknownst to her, renegade cells have been finding a place in Charlotte’s body. Now that she’s had the tumor removed, along with several lymph nodes, her treatment will devour the next ten months of her life. Already, she knows that win, lose, or draw, nothing will ever be the same. There is a scar under her arm that aches, and her left breast is half the size of her right, but what keeps her up at night is the realization that everything she has at this moment can be lost in an instant. She doesn’t want to waste precious time with something as prosaic as sleep. Every second is a second that belongs to her, one she understands could well be her last.

The illness and the intricacies of dealing with treatment are actually far easier to handle without Jay around. Everyone knows Jay has never been the sort of man to see anyone through hard times, though he has the best intentions. He’s called several times, which is sweet of him, always with the tentative greeting of someone who can’t stand to be around illness. Charlotte remembers that Jay often found excuses not to visit his own father at the nursing home; he has always turned away from the scene of an accident. He wants to hear good news, or nothing at all. She can’t picture Jay walking through the doors of the hospital in Hamilton, let alone being there waiting for her to snap out of the anesthesia or holding her hand while she suffers through treatment.

Charlotte has no second thoughts when she hires Barney Stark to act on her behalf in her divorce proceedings. Although she’s more than willing to give Jay whatever he asks for, Barney gently lets her know it will most probably take the best part of a year to complete the divorce, considering the complicated financial arrangements of the bakery. Well, what does that matter to Charlotte? Her treatment will take nearly as long, with radiation sandwiched between the cruel months of chemotherapy: she might as well throw in the divorce proceedings along with the rest of the mess.

“The marriage was bad timing,” Charlotte informed him. “The breakup is perfect. I hear you’re in a similar marital situation,” she’d added then, which was perhaps less than thoughtful. But how could she not know? People tend to talk in a town the size of Monroe: it’s impossible to make a move without everyone being apprised of an individual’s new address weeks before the furniture is delivered. In Barney’s case, the new address is the conference room of his office, where he’s set up a cot, and a hot plate, and one of those little refrigerators kids in college dorms fill with cans of soda and beer.

“It should have happened a while ago.” Charlotte had gotten into her car and Barney was leaning down to talk to her through the open window. He could feel his heart pounding, or maybe it was just the heat of the day that was affecting him so, and all the stress and exertion of packing up and leaving home, no matter how right the decision might be. “We just kept pretending everything was okay.”

He backed off and waved to Charlotte as she drove away His marriage would have failed sooner or later, and he would have moved out of his house even if Charlotte Kite had never existed. True, he might have waited a while longer, but that would have been a disservice to everyone involved. When it came right down to it, the worst part about the whole thing was having to tell his girls. It was a measure of how well they loved him that all three of his daughters ran off to their rooms, slamming their doors behind them, even Kelly, who was usually so even-tempered and understanding. Barney went to speak to each one individually, and assured Kelly, and then Josie, and lastly and most difficult his dear Sophie, that his love would remain constant. Though none of the girls was speaking to him, they adored him in return, and so they did him the service of listening to him as they tried to hold back their tears.

On the day he packed up his car with his belongings, Barney kissed his wife good-bye and thanked her for all that they’d been to each other, then went off to coach Little League, as he always did on Saturdays. Sophie still wasn’t speaking to him, but she accepted a ride to the field beyond the high school with an angry nod. It was a bright day, and the early evening promised to be perfect. In the distance, sunlight threaded through cumulus clouds, and the windows of the high school flashed with streaks of iridescence, now blue, now pink, now lavender. Barney’s suitcases and boxes rattled around in the back of the car, and Sophie looked over her shoulder.

“Maybe you can help me unpack later.” They pulled into the lot at the edge of the field to park. Barney had the team’s equipment in his overstuffed trunk, and while Sophie helped him unload the bases, he said as lightly as he could, “No matter what changes, my feelings for you never will. You’ll always be my daughter, and I’ll always love you.”

Horns honked as parents dropped off their children—the game was against the team from Essex, their fiercest opponents, and many of the parents would be staying to watch. Frankly the Bluebirds didn’t stand a chance of winning, especially now that Collie Ford had quit the team; he had such a fine, strong arm, they could always depend on him to be consistent.

They did lose the game against Essex, and that evening Sophie came back to Barney’s office, where she fell asleep on the conference room floor, curled up in a blanket, her head resting on pillows taken from the waiting room couch. Barney went into his office to phone home.

That particular woman, however, was not interested in finding another man now that Jay was gone. Charlotte certainly didn’t mind living alone, especially with Jorie bringing over dinner every night. Jorie has been cooking for Charlotte ever since her return from Maryland; as the days have passed, she’s brought over apple cobbler and pots of noodle soup and enormous pans of vegetarian lasagna until at last Charlotte’s refrigerator, large as it is, is full. When Kat Williams’s grandmother, Katya, comes calling with her goulash-and-rice dish, Charlotte thanks her, but she has to turn the food away

“You weren’t. That’s why you’ve been cooking so much. You wanted to forget. It happens to me at the bakery. I get involved with lemon-poppyseed muffins, and before I know it they’re my whole world and my biggest problem is getting them out of the oven before the edges turn brown. To hell with divorce, disease, despair. Give me the perfect lemon-poppyseed muffin, and I’ll be fine.”

Jorie has been thinking about James Morris more than she should, perhaps because she carries the blue diary wherever she goes. She tells herself it’s so Collie won’t discover the little book, but the diary is locked, and Jorie could manage to hide it in the cellar of her mother’s house, perhaps, or out in the garden shed. Or does she keep the diary with her simply because every glance at the blue binding returns her to the place where there are blackbirds and endless fields? Each time she sees it, she is reminded of how some things are never over: they stay with you until they’re a part of you, like it or not.

Jorie has been to the jail only once since her return, and she didn’t mention her trip to Holden. Maryland is a secret that might easily scald her tongue if she spoke the name of her destination aloud. Ethan had held her tight when she went to see him, so tight she could barely breathe, and he’d said, Where have you been? in a hurt voice Shed laughed and pulled away and told him it had only been a few days since she’d last been to visit. Hadn’t she the house to get ready for sale, and Collie to take care of, and her mother to help out?

I don’t give a damn about any of that, Ethan had said, and when she’d looked at him she’d understood it was true. I just want you, he’d told her, words that might have brought her pleasure before, but which now caused her not the least bit of happiness.

She had brought the diary with her to this visit; it was there, in her purse, and she wondered what Ethan would do if he noticed it. What if he searched for the papers she’d brought along from his lawyer, Fred Hart, instead of waiting for her to hand them over? Would he recognize the blue leatherette and the gold clasp? Would he drop it as though it were poison, or perhaps not even recall to whom the diary belonged? As it turned out, Ethan had waited, rather than look through her purse. He’d sat down on the edge of his cot until she handed him the papers, and he read them over carefully, which was more than Jorie had done.

The very idea of Maryland, of that deserted cottage she’d seen, perhaps, furnished with bits and pieces, of walking down the road with Collie as local people jeered, had made her recoil. Even now, when Charlotte questions her, she has a burning sensation on the tip of her tongue. Has she ever told a lie before? She doesn’t think so, but she’s party to one now; she’s kept silent, she’s hidden her trip to Holden from Ethan and that surely makes her as false as any liar.

Jorie laughs and reminds her of the results of some of those good ideas, including dying their hair black one Halloween, back when they weren’t more than thirteen. Their hair had been so damaged. Ruth Solomon had been forced to take them to a salon in Boston, for they knew that Chantel’s over in Hamilton couldn’t deal with a problem of such enormous proportions. The girls came back to town with coifs so outrageously short, they were certain they’d be laughed at by one and all, but as it turned out, the haircuts had suited them, showing off their fresh young faces. Still, that was more than twenty years ago, when they would have looked good no matter what.

Sunlight is falling through the window, crisscrossing Charlotte’s pale skin with a brocade of pink and gold. Her hair is a deeper, wilder red than the strands in Rachel Morris’s brush. It’s blood-red, heartbeat-red, as close to scarlet as a natural color can be.

They look at each other and each knows the other has her own reason to feel there is only the present moment, this single instant when they are here together. Why wait for anything when the world is so cockeyed and dangerous? Why sit and stare into the mirror, too fearful of what may come to pass to make a move? Jorie gets the scissors from the kitchen and a big bath towel to drape around Charlotte’s shoulders and they traipse out to the backyard patio. The day is filled with birdsong at this hour, and Jorie is reminded of Maryland, Although no one in town knows where she went, people are well aware of how many days passed when she didn’t visit Ethan. They know she hasn’t been to the rallies supporting him, and has refused to speak with even the more sympathetic reporters, although Mark Derry has tried to set up several interviews.

The reporters who are still hanging around town have given up on Jorie as a newsworthy subject, focusing their attentions elsewhere, setting up outside the courthouse. Friends and neighbors are the ones who are watching her. There are actually some people, the sort who are easily amused and start drinking at the Safehouse at an early hour, who have begun to take bets on whether or not the Fords’ marriage will last. A few weeks ago, most everyone in town would have guessed that Jorie would stand by her husband, but currently the odds are only sixty-forty, and that just goes to show nothing’s a sure thing. These people would not understand that Jorie has set out to see Ethan on most days since her return from Maryland. She had fully intended to get there again, but she continually ends up turning off onto the road to the lake instead. She has spent countless hours watching dragonflies hover over the water. She has thrown smooth gray stones until her arms ache. On each of these days, she has carried Rachel Morris’s diary with her. Every time she reaches for her car keys or her comb, it’s there to remind her of all she observed when James let her into the house, when he walked with her across the fields, when he held his head in his hands and cried.

This is the reason why every night, after the household is asleep, Jorie goes to her mother’s kitchen. She stands over pots of boiling water in the half-light, she has patience for sauces that take hours to concoct and doesn’t turn away from peach pies, with their tricky lattice crust. Charlotte is right; Jorie never thinks when she’s at work, but she can’t spend her whole life in front of a stove, and whenever she does allow her mind to wander, it’s James Morris who comes to her, James counting out the days of his life all alone. When this happens, Jorie feels a cold, white anger for the man who’s done this to him, who’s stolen both his future and his past, and because that someone is her husband, she is trapped in the strange, high province of grief, a most hazardous and empty location, a place she never in her life expected to be.

“Are we really going to do this?” Charlotte asks once they’ve gone outside with the towel and the scissors and an extremely radical haircut in mind. Charlotte has always been the fearless one, the one who dragged Jorie along on vacations or made her hike through the woods, who had insisted they learn how to ski and to skate, who acted on impulse, who had daring to spare, but today Charlotte’s voice wavers. She washed her hair earlier that morning: the shampoo she used was scented with vanilla, and the aroma saddens her. She hadn’t known she had so much vanity about something as unessential as hair. She hadn’t expected to take it so hard.

There is honeysuckle planted in tubs out here, and the hollyhocks are in full bloom, huge saucerlike flowers weighing down their stalks. As soon as the sparrows perching upon the wooden fence notice the hair that begins to pile up on the patio after Jorie’s clipping begins in earnest, they flutter near, chirping and waiting for a chance to dart closer still, and steal a strand or two.

“If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right,” Charlotte says once her hair begins to fall. It’s only hair, after all. It’s not her soul that’s being shorn, not her heart ripped out from within, not her blood, her bones, her even white teeth. “Make it short.”

“Me,” Charlotte says simply, and Jorie knows she’s not talking about the haircut. She’s talking about driving herself over to the hospital in Hamilton at the end of the week, taking the elevator up to the second floor and making polite conversation while the nurse hooks up the IV that will fill her with the poison intended to make her well. She’s talking about her life on the line, with hair or without it, with luck or without it, with hope or with none at all.

“God, no, I’m sorry.” Charlotte wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Ugh. I hate making a scene.” Charlotte is not the sort of person who breaks down easily, and her chances for recovery are quite good. The real problem is that the strategy she has previously used to get through her life is being blown to pieces, minute by minute, day by day. Denial has always served her well; it’s gotten her through her parents’ deaths and an extremely unsatisfying marriage, but here, in her own yard, a veil has suddenly been lifted. It as if Charlotte has never seen anything before. She’s been blindfolded, and now all the glory and the sorrow before her is blinding. She blinks back tears, but that doesn’t help. Her eyes are still burning.

It’s true that Charlotte has always been identified with her auburn hair, but it’s hardly her best feature, which, in point of fact, is her dark, intelligent eyes. She went through surgery with no complaints, and yet Charlotte Kite, who has always prided herself on her tough, resilient nature, cries throughout her haircut.

When Jorie is done, she gently towels away stray snippets and runs a soft brush through what’s left. The length is the same as Collie’s, boyish and sweet, but before long, Charlotte may have to take a razor to get rid of even that. In the yellow August light Jorie realizes they both look much older. What did she think? That they’d be girls forever? That nothing truly bad would ever befall them if they just kept to the right path?

As the sky deepens and the clouds begin to blush with mauve shadows, Jorie goes to fetch a pitcher of warm water and some shampoo. When she comes back, she washes Charlotte’s hair there on the patio, beneath the pink sky, while dozens of sparrows gratefully wind bits of red hair into their nests. Afterward, Jorie gets them dinner, which she brings outside so they can picnic on the grass. There’s the roast chicken she’s brought today, along with some eggplant casserole Trisha Derry delivered earlier in the week. Once the chemo treatments begin, Charlotte won’t be able to keep anything down other than bread and butter and apple-sauce, but at the moment, she’s ravenous. She eats until she feels she will burst. There is no one to try to impress anymore, not even herself. She has already decided she will not look at her own reflection, at least not for a while. If she’s alive and well next summer, then she’ll buy a full-length mirror to hang in the hallway She’ll stare at herself night and day.

“What do you know.” Jorie grins as she peers at the street where a car has come to park. They’re finishing supper, which is delicious, and drinking tall glasses of lemonade sweetened with cherry juice, exactly the way they used to like it when they were girls. “Is that Barney Stark?”

Sitting in his parked car, Barney looks startled. For a moment it seems as though he may bolt, turn the key in the ignition and drive out of Hillcrest as fast as he can, back to the safety of his office and the haze of indecision he’s been living in these past years. Instead, he gets out of his car and comes around the path.

“Isn’t that nice, to be compared to a hill of coal,” Charlotte counters. All the same, she’s oddly moved. Since she owns the bakery, no one has ever thought to bring her dessert before. “Ah,” she says upon opening the box. “Chocolate confession cake. My favorite.”

Barney sits down in the grass. He’s sweating too much, so he takes off his jacket, then loosens his tie. He’s somewhat embarrassed in Jorie’s presence, for there’s a part of him that feels he’s let the Fords down by not handling Ethan’s case personally. In order to tell her anything even slightly resembling good news, he’d have to lie to her, and that’s not within Barney’s capabilities.

“Fred Hart seems to be doing a great job,” he says instead, hoping this opinion will comfort Jorie. “He thinks he can prove Ethan is a changed man, and he’s got half the town willing to vouch for him. They’ve already raised close to fifty thousand dollars, and that’s certainly a vote of confidence.”

When Charlotte comes back with a plate piled high with chicken and eggplant, along with some dessert dishes and silver-ware, Jorie takes the opportunity to say her good-byes. She tells them she’s tired, she jokes that since she’s moved back home, her mother has taken to staying up, waiting by the window until Jorie is safely through the front door, but they both know she’s exhausted from keeping up a facade of good cheer. Cover up grief and it grinds away at you, from the inside out. It makes you run for dark corners and empty rooms, heartsick and mute, despising your own company

It’s time for dessert, so Barney takes the serving knife Charlotte’s brought him and cuts two large slices of cake. People say this rich concoction can force a person to admit almost anything, if he eats enough of it. Well, Barney’s never been afraid of the truth. Truth is his business, he’s not going to turn away from it now, no matter how high the price. Dana was not especially surprised when he told her he was moving out; if anything, she seemed relieved, particularly when Barney assured her that she and the girls wouldn’t have to change their lifestyle even though he would no longer be living in the house on Evergreen. Since then, he’s been keeping up with the girls, spending as much time with them as he can. He’s come for dinner the last two nights, much more pleasant events than what they’d all come to expect, and he knows exactly where his daughters are this evening. Kelly is out with Rosarie Williams, at one of those damned fund-raisers for Ethan, held in Hamilton this time. Josie is at her dance class, and Sophie, his dearest, his baby, is up in her room, writing in her journal, trying her best to deal with how angry she is.

And so Barney thinks about the truth, now that he has the time and opportunity to do so. He is glad to be in Charlotte Kite’s backyard, that is the truth. Glad to be watching the dusk settle in between the twisted apple trees on the hillside behind her house, to be here eating chocolate cake with the scent of strong coffee and honeysuckle in the air.

And what does Charlotte make of this large, quiet man in her backyard? When he gazes at her, she can tell he hasn’t noticed that her hair is different. He is looking at something else entirely He’s looking inside her. That’s when Charlotte realizes what’s going on here. Jorie was right. Charlotte is surprised it’s taken her so long to figure out why Barney Stark is always around.

“I’m not in the market for a boyfriend if that’s why you’ve been following me,” she says matter-of-factly, between bites of cake. In two weeks, chocolate will make her queasy, but right now she can’t get enough of it. People say that eating chocolate can bring on a rush much like falling in love. It makes a heart beat too fast and stimulates far-fetched ideas. “And even if I was interested, I have cancer, you know.”

Barney cuts himself another piece of cake. In his line of business, he has learned that there were no guaranteed outcomes and no certainties, good, bad, or indifferent, that a man could depend upon. At seventeen, he never would have been able to imagine having chocolate cake with Charlotte Kite in her backyard. He wouldn’t have dared to dream such a thing. Now he puts his feet up on a chair and gazes up at the sky.

Charlotte gazes up as well. She can feel pinpricks of starlight in her eyes. She shakes her head and blinks, then gives her attention back to her half-eaten slice of chocolate cake because what seems to be occurring is too crazy for her to contemplate. “Does your wife know where you are?” she asks.

Barney hadn’t intended to be so forward, so maybe that chocolate confession cake has indeed done its work. Every once in a while, a man realizes what he wants more than anything, and that’s what’s happened to Barney Maybe the lies that were the foundation of Ethan Ford’s marriage have shone a light on Barney’s own duplicity in pretending he could be happy with any woman other than Charlotte. At any rate, if he’s going to act, he’d better not put it off Barney Stark stops gazing at stars. He believes Charlotte Kite to be the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, with or without her hair, and that is why at this ridiculous and terrifying point in their lives, he finally tells her so.

As it turns out, Barney is the one who picks up Charlotte Kite and drives her to her first chemotherapy appointment. Once they’re inside the hospital in Hamilton, Charlotte turns to him and says, “Thanks for the ride. You can go home now,” but Barney acts as though she hasn’t spoken. He seems to have the ability to see inside her, and he tells her what she probably already knows-he’s not going anywhere. He waits in the hall while she checks in, then accompanies her into the oncology unit, where she’s settled into a comfortable chair. Once the IV is slipped into Charlotte’s vein, Barney checks to make certain she’ll be given the right cocktail of drugs, comparing the label on the IV bags to the medications written down in her chart.

“No person in their right mind is going to hang around here,” Charlotte insists once she’s been given her antinausea medicine and the drip is begun in earnest. She has a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, a combination of nausea and fear. “Run,” she tells Barney. “Run for your life.”

“What’s that supposed to be?” Charlotte’s face is chalky. her dark eyes shut against the sheer reality of the room around them. Barney Stark, who has the ability to read almost anyone, can certainly see the terror there. But he acts as though it’s not the least bit unusual to be making his intentions clear while poison is filling Charlotte’s veins. He acts as though they had all the time in the world.

Charlotte’s eyes have been closed tight: when she hears his voice she peers over at what he’s brought along. “Sports Illustrated?” She laughs, and Barney believes it is the most wonderful sound he’s ever heard. Up and down the room, people are hidden behind drawn curtains, each with their own particular illness, their own agony, and here they are falling in love.

The nurse brings ginger ale and crackers, which Charlotte gratefully accepts. She notices the way Barney is watching her. She has no idea what on earth she’s done to deserve a man like this, especially at this time in her life, when it is absurd to think such things are possible. Barney smiles at her and in that smile Charlotte sees everything he thinks and feels; Barney’s deepest self opens to her, his past and his future and this instant in time. All her life, Charlotte has been chasing after things that were beyond her reach. In spite of everything she’s already lost, and everything she has yet to lose, she’s here today, in a sunny room, on an August afternoon, sick to her stomach and afraid for her life, but wanting, perhaps for the very first time, to be exactly where she is.

“Go on, then.” Charlotte closes her eyes the way a diver might when leaping from the highest ledge. At last she knows how it feels to take a chance when everything in the world is at stake, breathless and heedless and desperate for more. “Read to me,” she says.