Reunion (7 page)

“Well, I was going to ask if Archer’s mistaken perception of May is a good example of dramatic irony—but I like your new topic better.”

o celebrate Mitch’s fifty-first birthday, he and Brenda joined two other couples at Mez, a new “green” Mexican restaurant Brenda wanted to try. Deirdre and Corbin he’d known since moving to Chapel Hill: she taught human genetics, he taught physics. Mitch met them at a UNC basketball game. The other pair was Tony and Gemma, both college administrators
whose friendship stretched back to a time when he was dating Angie, who’d worked with Tony in the recruiting office. The couple’s friendship was one of the few things he’d kept when he and Angie split.

Deirdre raised her margarita and said, “Here’s to Mitch. Good to see you made it another year, and that you’re making it with Brenda—oops, I didn’t mean that like it sounded!”

“To Mitch,” the group echoed.

“To making it,” Tony added.

By the third pitcher of margaritas, their dinner plates were cleared and Mitch was discussing
Lions
with much less reluctance than usual. According to some in the English department—not Brenda, but others—the idea of such a series was seditious: Literature was not
video
, for crying out loud, and never the twain should meet. Just look at what Hollywood had done to
Frankenstein
! It hardly mattered that he wasn’t attempting to adapt any of the works. They felt he would be making their world common, and that would never do.

Corbin, however, was all about demystifying the universe, especially when the tequila was doing its work on him. “I think the show’s got serious possibilities,” he said.

“It does,” Brenda agreed. “Mitch is so knowledgeable—and so popular! It never fails, his classes fill on the first day of registration.”

Gemma said, “Serious, like, he gets millions of dollars and moves to Hollywood?”

Everyone looked at Mitch, who shook his head. “Not likely.”

Corbin preferred his vision. “It’s happened.”

“To whom?” Brenda scoffed, left eyebrow raised just as it often was during faculty meetings.

“All kinds of people. Just look at all the shows where a chef or a decorator or a geographist—”

Tony snorted.
“A geographist?
What the hell’s that?”

Deirdre said, “A historicist of places—”

“These experts,” Corbin said,
“supposed
experts sometimes—
attractive
, supposed experts, right? These people get a break and then,
boom! They’re superstars—like Steve Irwin, for instance. Simon Cow-ell.” He nodded at Brenda. “It happens.”

Mitch said, “I just want to share some literary love.” Tony clinked his glass to Mitch’s.

“Seriously,” Deirdre said, “you’re wa-a-ay more attractive than Simon. I can see it.”

Brenda shook her head. “That’s not realistic. If he went into it with those kinds of expectations—”

Gemma said, “Somebody refill her glass!”

“No, come on, I’m just trying to be the voice of reason.”

“Who wants reason, for crying out loud?” Gemma stood up, nearly tipping the table. “We want fame, and money!”

The patrons around them cheered.

Corbin, laughing, said, “Okay, okay, but I don’t know that we’re winning the birthday boy enough points to score later, so … how about those Tarheels?”

Talk turned to the team’s recent performance in the ACC basketball tournament, but Mitch’s tipsy mind stayed stuck on Corbin’s last statement. Would he “score” later? Of course he wanted to, even as he was unsure how wise it was to take his revised friendship with the woman who was also his boss—more or less—to that complicated level. She was lovely, and more desirable than he’d let himself acknowledge when Craig was alive. Want was not a question. Neither did it mean, though, that they would—or should—sleep together.

Did she want to?

His questions ceased when he felt her hand on his thigh. His libido took over for his brain, making it much easier for him to later accept the birthday present that she was saying, softly, close to his ear, waited for him when they were through.

fter climbing the jet’s steps and greeting the flight crew Saturday morning, Blue took a seat in the spot she preferred, left side, just in front of the wing. The jet, customized to the most demanding celebrity standards, wasn’t hers. She could not do it, could not transform the numbers on her accounts statement into one of these sleek white and silver aircraft. They’d chartered this Gulfstream G500 for the week, a $65,000 expense. That was far less than the $50 million or so she’d pay to purchase one. How many times could they charter luxury jets before they even approached that figure? She was too tired to do the math, but surely it was many, many times. Buying one seemed wasteful—and imagine what Melody would say if she owned a Gulfstream, when Mel and Jeff still drove a ’95 Chevy pickup.

In a meeting last year, when Jim, her business manager, spoke about capital investments and appreciable assets and tax advantages of ownership, Marcy had said,
“Buy
one. What else are you going to do with the money?”

“More of what I’m doing already.” An assortment of charitable endeavors selected and implemented by Jim’s partner, who briefed her about them monthly. Trust funds awaiting her nephews on their twenty-fifth birthdays. A bottomless account for her mother—and for her sister if Melody would see past her pride to accept it.

After ten years in syndication and almost as many spent watching her finance manager diversify her holdings in a series of double-up ventures, of seeing her net worth mushroom with the energy of an atomic
blast, Blue still could not quite match the numbers to her life. She could not quite believe—even as she inhabited them—what those numbers meant in concrete terms. If she had known things could turn out like
this
, chartered jets with hand-stitched leather seats and burnished walnut tables, silk twill pants suits and everyday diamond earrings, twenty-eight full-time employees whose houses and cars and designer martinis were bought with paychecks she signed … If she could have forecasted her success the way her old WLVC-TV colleague Carl Newman forecasted the weather, she never would have given up her son.

—Or so she liked to think, when the truth was that she wouldn’t have stepped onto even the first rung of this ladder if she’d had a child. The whole idea of working as a television journalist was about avoiding
Harmony Blue Kucharski
by keeping her attention on anyone, on
everyone
, else. If she had not given up her son, an uneducated single mother with little support and no prospects is what she would have been. Worse off than her mother at nineteen, the child worse off than the child
she’d
been.

Yet the doubts persisted. How could she really know what her life with a child would have been like? She had never even tried—but, why would she have chosen to try when she’d known that her mother couldn’t help her out? Why get attached to a child whose life you could only ruin? In that hand-to-mouth life there would be no time to love the child properly, and all that would come of it would be a kid who hated her and hated his life, she’d been sure of it.

But what if… what if she had gotten hooked up with the social services she now knew would have given her—them—options? Someone could have directed her, surely
would
have, if she’d been brave enough to expose her foolishness to someone who, unlike the midwife, had no directed agenda. If she had not been too embarrassed, too proud to go looking for unbiased help.

Well even if she had, she’d still have been a lower-class single mother whose good intentions simply could not come close to providing what that upper-class adoptive home could. Did. Love by itself was not enough to make everything come out happily, she didn’t care what all
those feel-good movies claimed. She’d loved her son—loved him so much that she had sacrificed her relationship with him. It was the right thing to do.

She was pretty sure.

She snapped her seat belt closed. Stupid conundrum, why couldn’t she let it alone?

Sometimes, when the heartache and guilt overwhelmed her, she pared off a piece for her mother, whose own questionable decisions had led to hers, and for Mitch, because if he’d hung on to her there would have been no other man, no accidental son. Still, the remaining portion was too large to swallow; she could only cover it with a pretty napkin and act as if it didn’t exist.

She would not be able to keep it covered, though, if the ravenous media sniffed it out—which could happen only if one of the few people involved decided to capitalize on insider knowledge. This was the fear that dogged her in her quiet moments, had been dogging her ever since she’d contracted to do
TBRS
, the fear that had grown in proportion to her success.

If she’d had that ability to see into her future and to feel the way the guilt, the fear would bind her, she would have announced her history at her first employment interview.
I’m not proud of myself
, she might have said,
but I may as well tell you …
Except that there had been no benefit to telling; all the benefit lay in keeping the truth of who she was and how she lived out of sight, where it couldn’t affect the way people perceived her. She’d been using the strategy all her life.

The risk now, after having long ago established a child-free bio, was in being outed as a liar and a hypocrite. Her most ardent fans, the ones who watched her every day, who knew her so intimately (they thought), would feel betrayed—and to paraphrase an old saying, hell hath no fury like a fan scorned. Especially these days, when the Internet gave anyone with access to a computer a giant-size megaphone with which to vent. Others would delight in ridiculing her. Her competition would pounce on the opportunity to knock her out of first place—or worse. The show
would suffer, maybe even fail, and then what? Who would she be if she was not
Blue?

Only a court order could expose her son’s original birth certificate, and until her son had come of age a little more than three years ago, only his adoptive parents could seek such an order—and if any of them did, she would know about it when it happened. That was the law. She would receive notice, allowing her to protest or protect or defend. Of the few people in her past who might know both who she’d become and what she’d done first, only Meredith and Marcy were credible. Meredith, she hoped, would continue to put ethics ahead of self-interest, as she’d presumably been doing all this time. And Marcy? Well, self-protection was certainly not the reason Blue had kept Marcy close all these years, but she did rest more easily having her in sight, and happy.

The law that protected her was the same law that protected her son’s identity. Hence her hiring of Branford, whose job it was to find another route to the answer—not so that she could make contact, necessarily; just so she could
know.
That it was proving so difficult for Branford to find the midwife, the answer-keeper, was sometimes disheartening, sometimes reassuring, depending on which emotional lens she happened to be looking through when she let the thoughts idle in her mind.

She looked out the jet’s window, where six-inch-deep snow glowed pale pink as the sun approached the horizon, delineating the taxiways and runways, which were wet but clear. The day’s first commercial flights were already stacked up down the field, and the steady rumble of morning traffic noise was punctuated every few minutes by the roar of jets lifting off for New York and Minneapolis, St. Louis and San Diego, Raleigh, Denver, Las Vegas, Seattle. One of those jets, full of morning business commuters and eager vacationers, might, in a few hours, be landing in a city close to where her son would be waking up.

She’d played this imaginary game so many times over the years. At first she had imagined a snuggly infant in a soft blue sleeper, held in the arms of a woman who looked out her window upon San Francisco Bay. Then it was a toddler in footed pajamas, and Puget Sound. The parents
and the midwife, Meredith, had said west
coast
but, over time, Blue realized this was a generic descriptor; the family might as easily be in Sacramento or Olympia or Salt Lake City. And who could say whether they’d moved since then—or whether they’d truly been there to begin with?