Читать книгу Reunion - Therese Fowler - Страница 14
ОглавлениеAfter 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.
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, she 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 seatbelt 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 it. 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 their anger. 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 were 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 who knew who she’d become and what she’d done first, none stood to gain anything by saying so. While self-protection was certainly not the reason she’d kept Marcy close all these years, 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?
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 had 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 US 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.”
She’d 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 fourteen, 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 like she was simple. “Work with me here, Blue.”
After 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 I guess. 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.
There’d been a lot of waiting during her childhood, mostly waiting for her mother’s return—from a date, from a new-town-scouting trip, from a dead-end job. Melody, passive and untroubled, watched a lot of TV, entertained by Mork and Mindy or Remington Steel or Moonlighting. Blue, anxious, distractible, had better luck with books.
Without the interruption of commercials or the finite images of someone else’s interpretation of a story, she could more easily fit herself into the romance or drama unfolding inside a book’s cover. She filled empty hours, when her homework was done and the paper plates from dinner were cleared from the coffee table, with stories of clever women who won over reluctant bachelors. Women who defied parents or society in order to follow their hearts—inevitably to romance, and often to fame and wealth. Or women who traveled to exotic places in astonishing jets and were greeted by mayors who were glad to do their bidding. What a glamorous life, and so far removed from reality that she never thought to jump the chasm between her vicarious thrills and the methodical plotting that living such a life would require.
No, what she’d planned for was far more predictable and achievable: when she and Melody were both out of school, she would use what she earned working for Lynn Forrester to put herself through college and become a high-school English teacher. She’d assign her students the books she was growing to love under Mr Forrester’s guidance: books about Mark Twain’s river life, Willa Cather’s prairies, and of course the battlefields and savannahs and islands that featured in Hemingway’s troubled imagination. At eighteen she hardly understood the causes of Hemingway’s torments, but she had an instinctive feel for the tragedies in his stories. What is tragedy, though, at eighteen? It’s romance, and it was romance that had been fixed in her mind that fall after she met Mitch. Romance, and a steadfast determination that, whatever she did, she would not allow her life to turn out like her mother’s.
That, at least, had gone as planned.
