“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.
“You’re not a very good packer,” she observed. “You’re disorganized.”
“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.”
Sophie grimaced as though she’d heard it before. “I thought you loved Mom, too.”
“Well, I do, but this is something different.”
“She told us there’s probably another woman, that’s why you’re leaving so suddenly.”
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.
“To be honest, there is someone I’ve always cared about, but I don’t think she knows I’m alive, so she can’t really count as another woman.”
“Puppy love,” Sophie said. “That’s what that is.”
“Except that I’m about to hit forty, and I still feel the same way.”
Sophie thought this over. “Then you’re just stupid.” She looked at her father closely; she’d wanted to hurt him, but once she did it hadn’t felt as good as she’d imagined it would. Sophie looked away, but she took her father’s hand.
“You think we have a chance at winning?” Barney said, grateful beyond words that his daughter had reached for him. The bus from Essex had pulled into the lot, and they could hear the rival team chanting, gearing up for the game.
“Nope.” Sophie was a sweet, honest girl. She dropped her guard; standing there beside her father, she seemed far too young to understand why happiness could be so difficult to find. “Do you think I could move in with you?”
“I think you can spend as much time as your mother allows.”
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.
“She’s asleep and I don’t have the heart to wake her,” he whispered to Dana.
Dana would be the first to admit how they’d grown apart; why they hadn’t even slept in the same room for over a year, but now she seemed regretful. “If you want to come back, it’s fine. For the girls’ sake,” she added.
“You told her there was another woman.”
“Well, isn’t there? Come clean, Mr. Detecto, you know there is.”
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
“I think I went crazy,” Jorie says, staring into the huge Sub-Zero fridge when she visits her friend on a gorgeous August evening, toting a roast chicken that is still warm. “Did I really cook all this?”
“You definitely went crazy.” Charlotte is at the counter, sipping from a large, steamy cup of green tea.
“What was I thinking?”
“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.”
“Is that why I did this?”
“You know it is. It’s so you don’t have to think about whatever you found in Maryland. Have you talked to Ethan about what it was like?”
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.
He’s looking for a place for you and Collie, Ethan had said.
Jorie hadn’t understood. But we’re at my mother’s house, she reminded him.
In Maryland, he’d said to her then. So you can be with me during the trial.
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.
“I don’t want to talk to him about Maryland. Jorie tells Charlotte.
“Then talk to me.”
“Absolutely not. You don’t need to know what it was like there.”
Charlotte smiles. “I already know how bad it was just by looking at you.”
“You always know everything.” Jorie’s tone is more mournful than she intends. “What would I do without you?”
“You’d live.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.” Jorie shivers at the very thought, and she turns away so that Charlotte can’t read how much she fears the possibility of this loss.
“Well, you would.” Charlotte is as stubborn as she is honest. “People go on.”
“It would never be the same without you. I don’t even want any friends if they’re not you.”
“I always was the one with the good ideas,” Charlotte allows.
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.
“Well, it’s going to be short again,” Charlotte says. “I’m probably going to lose it. And even if I don’t, it will be thin. They said it will break every time I use a brush. ”
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.
“Let just do it,” Jorie says. “Let’s cut it really short. Like it used to be.”
“Now?”
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.
Jorie sets up a lawn chair and dusts off the seat with a towel. “Madame,” she says to Charlotte, “sit your ass down.”
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.”
“I am making it short.”
“Shorter,” Charlotte demands.
Jorie puts her hands on her hips and laughs. “Who’s doing this? You or me?”
“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.
Jorie puts the scissors down, then kneels to embrace her friend.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
The sparrows take this opportunity to light on the patio while Charlotte Kite cries in her friend’s arms.
“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.
“I have half your head done,” Jorie says. “You’d better let me finish.”
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.
“Keep cutting, she insists when Jorie hesitates, scissors held aloft. ”Don’t pay any attention to me.”
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?
“Tell me it’s not over,” Charlotte says to her friend.
Above them, the clouds are clotted and the sky is feverish with mosquitoes and heat. They have both already lived more than twice the time Rachel Morris had on earth. In that regard, they are lucky.