Reunion (8 page)

Blue would wake up and, as she padded through her Chicago apartment, think of a dark-haired little boy waiting for the school bus with a Power Rangers lunchbox clasped in pudgy fingers. She would open the curtains of her New York City flat, and imagine a gangly boy hauling hockey gear into an ice arena for early morning ice time. She would sit on a stool as a stylist readied her for a
Vanity Fair
photo shoot, and see a teenager, hair falling into his eyes, choosing jeans and a Hollister sweater for senior pictures.

This morning she thought of a young man with slender hands and long eyelashes, still asleep in a posh private college dorm. With the life his parents had provided him, the care, the education, he could be at Princeton or Harvard or Notre Dame. In a coincidence too ironic to want to consider, he could this moment be across town at Northwestern University.

Northwestern, where Mitch Forrester had been teaching when she met him. If her son had been Mitch’s son, if her wishes on Sirius had been granted … well, everything would be different, wouldn’t it? She would still be Harmony Blue Kucharski—or perhaps she’d have taken Mitch’s name; she’d practiced writing it both ways during those few short months when she’d seen her wishes edge tantalizingly close to reality. And instead of touring the Hemingway Home in Key West in front of a camera crew as she would do on Friday, she might have toured it with Mitch, whose aim it had been to become the preeminent Hemingway scholar. Mitch, who in effect had chosen to take refuge from the turmoil in his life with a dead literary idol, rather than a living young woman who idolized
him.
Well, it was his choice to make; it would be interesting to know if he thought it was the right one.

At the sound of Marcy’s “Good morning,” Blue looked up to see her, puffy-eyed and yawning, as she sat down in the seat opposite Blue. Stephen, so tall that his messy black hair brushed the aircraft’s ceiling,
was right behind her. He took the seat across the aisle from Marcy and reached for her hand. Both of them looked sleepy, tousled, as if they’d climbed out of bed and straight into Marcy’s limo. Of limos, black Lincoln Town Cars with full-time drivers, they had four: one each for Blue, Marcy, and Peter, and one kept at-large, for ferrying guests.

Blue would have preferred not to witness Marcy and Stephen’s bed-head coziness. But she smiled as though she found them adorable. “Morning. Looks like good weather for travel.”

“Do they have coffee ready?” Stephen asked, stroking one arm of his seat with his free hand. “Nice leather. I’m desperate for some caffeine.”

Marcy was nodding in agreement. “Vanilla-double-espresso-whipped, now
that
would be fab-u-lous,” she said. She rubbed her face and pulled back her hair. “But holy Christ, it would be so much easier to just pop a pill.”

Blue flagged the flight attendant who waited in the galley pretending not to stare. “Easier,” Blue agreed, “but not as tasty.”

“Lower calorie, though,” Marcy sighed. “And fast-acting, which I could use. Peter called me at five fifteen, insisting I log on to YouTube.”

“You—?” Blue started, then she knew. “The bit with Stacey and me, the tears, right?”

Marcy nodded. “It’s viral. You know how it goes. Peter sounded like he could use a tranquilizer.”

“Vultures,” Blue muttered.

The attendant came over and Blue requested coffee while Stephen stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle. He said, “Speaking of pills, last night Marcy was telling me all about the good old days.”

Blue shot Marcy a look of disapproval.

“We were doing tequila teasers,” Marcy said, her half-smile an apology. “A little practice, you know, for Duval Street. I told Stephen how we roomed together in our little house, and maybe got a bit wild a time or two. Nothing serious,” she said. Blue caught her look of assurance and relaxed a little.

“Oh, well, that’s true. We did have a wild time or two.” Or fifty. If
she could recall those early months’ adventures, she might be able to count them. “You know how kids are when they first leave home.” Naïve. Stubborn. Self-destructive—those were Blue’s personal adjectives. Not that she was about to say so, and Marcy had better not, either.

Stephen, apparently, was chatty in the morning even without the benefit of caffeine. He asked Blue, “So why did you change your name?”

“Do you know what my mother named me?”

“Yeah,
Harmony
Blue … Kucharski?”

“There you have it,” she said.

It had been years since anyone aside from her mother had brought up the name change, a change made legal so long ago that neither the media nor the public thought to question it. Her given name was not so awful, despite how she’d felt about it when she had to explain it to yet another teacher, principal, classmate. Back then, she’d been embarrassed to admit she’d gotten the name because her mother liked the anemone,
harmony blue.
Later, during what she and Marcy now referred to as “the recovery period” when she’d set her sights on working at WLVC, they’d agreed it just wasn’t a name for television.

Stephen said, “It’s cool, isn’t it? You’re Harmony and your sister’s Melody. Harmony and Melody. You should’ve been singers, or songwriters.”

“Now why didn’t I ever think of that?”

“Marcy says your mother is a trip.”

“Marcy ought to know.” She took most of Nancy Kucharski’s calls. The two women were as close as blood relatives. Closer, probably; they didn’t share any baggage.

Marcy said, “It’s a flower. Blue’s named after a flower.”

A sturdy, pale blue-to-violet flower that had grown in the shade garden of her grandmother Kate Kucharski’s postage-stamp yard. That was the way Kate had described it to Blue,
postage-stamp.
Near that garden, Blue’s mother, the adolescent Nancy Kucharski, daydreamed away her summer evenings—until she started meeting boys who had cars. And, at some point, a particular boy whose name began with
L.
Taking advantage
of her mother’s overindulgent parenting style, young Nancy had launched her dating life at fifteen and, except for two pauses to gestate and deliver two daughters, had never stopped since.

The story Blue had liked to hear when she was young began not with teenage Nancy but with baby Harmony Blue, being delivered to the little house by a stork, Kate always said, which Blue had imagined as a white-feathered version of Big Bird. But the little house was too small; soon they moved to a bigger place, an apartment with three bedrooms. The stork brought Melody there.

In the evenings, when her mother was out and Melody was already asleep, Blue had urged her grandmother to tell her again about the home she’d been brought to as a newborn. When Grandma Kate described the yard of that house that way,
postage-stamp
, young Blue imagined a million little squares pasted down where grass would have been. A broad, level, gymnasium-sized spread of stamps, some of them as exotic as the ones that appeared on her mother’s airmail envelopes. The ones from “guys” who wrote from wherever the U.S. Army had assigned them after something called a draft. Germany. The Philippines. Vietnam. Was one of those guys her father? Was the
L
from Cambodia the
L
tattooed on her mother’s hip? Did that explain the absence of a man in their home, when almost all the homes around them had mothers and
fathers
, not grandmothers?

“Don’t you worry about that father stuff,” her mother told her once, face close to the mirror while she darkened the mole on her right cheekbone, a mole matching the one that had just appeared on Blue’s five-year-old cheek. The
L
was covered that night by brown polyester bell-bottoms and a cheap gold-colored hip chain that draped low. Her mother rumpled her hair. “You two are my precious little gifts from God.”

Blue had tried to believe that being a stork-delivered package straight from heaven made her superior to other children, children whose fifties-era ranch homes looked just like the one they moved into next, but whose families inside those homes did not. Those were common children. Normal children, who had normal families. What she
knew, though, was that they were what she would never be, never have. What use in hoping otherwise? What use in puzzling over a black tattoo that was covered up almost all the time?

She’d made a valiant effort to be like her mother, like Mel. Nothing fazed them. Mel’s first tattoo, done when Mel was sixteen, was a wreath of words around her upper arm that read “Frankie Say Relax.” Blue had been as impressed with the act as with the sentiment. If Mel could be so bold, why couldn’t she? At the library, she paged through books with tattoo designs and slogans. She drew one on her ankle in permanent marker, a vine with heart-shaped leaves, then hid her work beneath her sock until the ink wore off. The truth of it was that when she was alone she sometimes still hummed “When You Wish Upon a Star,” and waited for all things to right themselves, the way they surely would.

Voices from up near the cockpit told Blue that Peter and his wife had arrived. “Are we on schedule?” she heard him asking. She imagined him holding a stopwatch and waiting to tell the pilot,
Go!
If she was lucky, he would stay up there; she had no desire to hear him fret aloud about tears and ratings and ridicule.

The flight attendant brought coffee in stoneware mugs, delivered from a cloth-draped tray. “What else can I bring you? We’ll be wheels up in about five minutes.”

“I don’t know,” Marcy said. “Blue, do you want anything?”

“No.” Or nothing that could be stocked on board, at any rate.

Janelle and Peter joined them in the cabin. “Did Marcy tell you?” Peter said. His round face was flushed and he was rubbing the top of his balding head, his habit when stressed. “YouTube,
Perez—
we cut it from our time-delayed broadcasts but it doesn’t matter, it’s everywhere. We’re telling everyone that your dog died yesterday morning, okay?”

“I don’t even have a dog.”

Peter looked at her as if she was simple. “Work with me here, Blue.”

fter cruising over what from Blue’s east-facing view looked like an infinite expanse of ocean, the Gulfstream bumped through clear but turbulent
air and landed at the Key West airport, three hours ahead of when the crew would arrive via commercial airline. That airline provided
TBRS
with free freight and free airfare for the equipment and its users, for which Blue would thank them at the beginning and end of each broadcast in the week to come. That was how it was done. Endless back-scratching—so much that sometimes her back was raw from it.

“Jesus, there’s nothing
to
this place,” Stephen said, looking out his window as the jet taxied toward the terminal.

Blue leaned to look and saw a long stretch of shell-pink building that could pass for a warehouse except for the presence of two small jets and a gaggle of single-engine aircraft tethered close by. She said, “What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know, something like Honolulu, maybe. Something that doesn’t look like we’re going to have to unload our own gear.”

“God forbid,” Peter said from his seat behind Blue. “We wouldn’t want to overwork
our guests.”

Blue told Stephen, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Yes, the airport was small, nondescript, but what was not to like? A thousand feet past the terminal was the Atlantic Ocean, sea green and gleaming, brilliant in the midday sun. Plus, there were palm trees; she’d always thought palm trees worth any amount of trouble, even unloading one’s own bags from the belly of a multimillion-dollar chartered jet.

A contingent of Key West folk was waiting to greet Blue as she descended the plane’s steps into the midday heat. A stout man of about forty came forward, his flowered shirt’s buttons straining such that it was obvious he’d bought the shirt fifteen or more pounds ago. Several photographers circled them, jockeying for position.

The mayor extended his hand. “Welcome to the Conch Republic!”

“Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Blue said, remembering his face from her prep file, but forgetting his name. It wouldn’t matter, Mr. Mayor always worked—or Ms. Mayor, as the case sometimes was. “It’s so thoughtful of you to take time out from your full schedule to meet our plane.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble. I speak for everyone here when I say we are delighted
to have
The Blue Reynolds Show
in town. Whatever I can do to make your stay more enjoyable, you just let me know. Anything. I mean it. That’s a promise.”

Blue smiled her public smile, clearly delighting the man, who beamed in return. She said, “Yes, I will, I’ll let you know.”

Outside the terminal a few minutes later, Peter stood at the curb where a battered, empty Toyota was idling in spite of the no parking signs. He said, “Do you think the mayor could find out where our limo might be?”

Marcy took out her phone. “I’m sure I stored the number in here … they must just be running late …”

Blue stepped away from the group and leaned against a pole to wait, letting the heat and the salt smell of the air be her real welcome. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and savored the illusion of invisibility she’d once believed in when she was small.