Blue Diary

  What’s wrong? I said.

  I don’t like it here, he told me, and, actually, I felt a chill myself The sky was still blue, but the day was fading, and something was making a whispering noise. It was the hawthorns above us that sounded so strange, the way their leaves crackled in the heat, as if they were made of paper, and wouldn’t last another day. I started to think this visit was a bad idea; we’d definitely miss the cookout at the high school, and we probably wouldn’t get to the field in time for the fireworks either, but it was too late to turn back. Dusk was falling, and there was a violet haze hanging over the highway. When I swallowed my throat hurt, but I acted like it was the most normal thing in the world for Collie to be visiting his father in jail.

  I’ve been in there, and there’s nothing to be scared of. It was true; my grandmother and I had brought Rosarie here last month to take her road test, which she had promptly failed for the third time even though the motor vehicles clerk couldn’t take his eyes off her. They’re just some stupid office buildings, I assured Collie,

  And yet the closer I got to the county buildings, the worse I felt inside. I felt faint, the way Rosarie gets when she has her headaches. Once we were through the door, we followed the signs to the secured annex, which is what they called the jail. There were two guards there, and they told me I couldn’t go with Collie. I’d have to wait in the hall on a bench. Collie looked panicked, but he didn’t say anything when one of the officers took him down to the jail. He looked like he wanted to turn and run, but he didn’t, because that’s not the kind of person Collie is. It’s the kind of person I am, though; for two cents I would have run all the way home, and I was dizzier than ever. I felt like I’d ruined so many people’s lives, I couldn’t even keep count anymore. I couldn’t even breathe, not without feeling there was a knife in my chest.

  Out in the hallway, I put my head between my knees and when a woman from the motor vehicles department peered out of her office to ask if I was all right. I said no. I begged her for a paper bag to breathe into, because that’s what Rosarie does when she gets this way. Unfortunately, I only felt worse after breathing into the paper bag. I am usually easily embarrassed, but right then I would have stretched out on the tile floor, so paralyzed by my own actions I could no longer move; if they wanted to get rid of me, they’d have to carry me out. I guess I was thinking about the fact that my father waited until the day after July Fourth to do what he did. Even then, he was trying his best not to ruin things for us any more than he already had. But the truth was, it was worse this way. I knew that the whole time I was watching fireworks last year, dud after dud in the humid air, my father was counting the hours until he could be released.

  When Collie came back, he looked awful, He looked worse than I felt, so I got off the bench and followed him down the hall, and I didn’t say a word. Outside, it was nearly dark, but still hot. In spite of the temperature, Collie seemed frozen. He dug his hands into his pockets, and his lips were pinched and blue. It was as though he’d been trapped in a freezer the whole time I’d been sitting on the bench in the hallway trying my best to breathe. I had to stop myself from reaching out and touching him to test if he felt as cold as he looked.

  What did your father say? I asked.

  Collie glared at me and he made a strange sound in his throat, as though something was supposed to be funny, only it wasn’t. He didn’t seem like himself Not one bit. He turned away from me and wiped his eyes with the tail of his shirt. I knew I had made a big mistake in talking him into coming here, and that he might never forgive me. All the words I had inside that I could have used to tell him how sorry I was drifted away before they’d been spoken. That’s what its like when true silence comes between two people. Hot and empty and hopeless. Collie pulled the lock off his bike, and he didn’t even say good-bye; he swooped across the parking lot, then pedaled as fast as he could, only he wasn’t going in the direction of where we lived. He was going out toward the highway He was riding like a crazy person, and when he reached the fence, he sort of crashed into it, then he got up and left his bike where it was and he climbed over the fence. He jumped down into the tall grass, and two mourning doves started and flew out of the brambles, higher and higher, and then I couldn’t see Collie anymore. One minute I was watching him, and the next, he was gone.

  I was wearing a black blouse that I’d borrowed from Rosarie because I had thought it made me look older and a little less ugly, but now the cloth felt like needles. It was prickly against my skin. I felt as if I should be burned at the stake, or banished, or cooked in hot oil. Everything I did was wrong, even when I tried to do what was right. I got on my bike and went over to the service road that trailed the highway. You couldn’t hear anything but cars over there. The sound drowned out your thoughts, and maybe that was just as well. I looked through the fence, but Collie had disappeared and all I could see was a steady stream of traffic and the green borders of grass on either side of the asphalt.

  I kicked out some of the dents in Collie’s bike, enough to allow the wheels to roll: then I walked both our bikes home, although it hurt my arms to do so. By now, stray Roman candles were being set off in backyards and along the lakeshore: the echo of celebrations rumbled across the sky. leaving trails of ashy fire. It was so hot, and I had to walk clear across town. so by the time I got home I was drenched with sweat. I stood under the sprinkler my grandmother had switched on to water the faltering perennial garden my father had planted a few years ago, back when we thought we had all the time in the world. I snapped off two of the flowers that had managed to bloom and kept them for later. I went upstairs, dripping water over the carpets, and when I got to my room I pulled off my clothes. I stared into the mirror and I didn’t even recognize my self. My arms and legs were too long, and because of the way my hips stuck out you could see my bones. I wanted to look the way I did when my father was still here, but I wasn’t that person anymore.

  I left Collie’s bike on our front lawn, but he didn’t come for it. I kept an eye out for him as I ate the dinner my grandmother had made for me, but he never showed up. I knew that Collie’s father hadn’t told him what he wanted to hear, and maybe I should have been glad that I hadn’t turned in an innocent man, but I wasn’t. I wished I could ask my sister what to do, but Rosarie was out with Brendan Derry. She had bragged that Brendan had worked overtime in order to rent a boat and take her out on the lake to watch fireworks. Poor Brendan might be having the time of his life right now, but the only thing I could think of was how when she told him it was over, he’d come here in the evenings: he’d stand on the corner of Maple and Sherwood and stare at her window, hoping for a glimpse of something he’d never have again, not that he’d had Rosarie in the first place.

  Everyone expected me to go to the fireworks with Collie, the way I always did, but when I called him his mother told me he was sick and had already gone to bed. I didn’t really care about the fireworks anyway; I was too old for them and I knew it. Still, it surprised me to find how much I hurt inside, as if I were made out of glass and pieces of me would just go on shattering until no one could put me together again.

  I went out to the garage after my grandmother had gone to bed. I didn’t have to worry that my mother might notice me sneaking around. She had started working again, back at the admitting room at Hamilton Hospital. People said she was the calmest woman you’d ever met and that she was made for the job. You could walk into the ER bleeding buckets, you could have your bones sticking through your flesh, and my mother would just ask for your insurance information and page the emergency nurse. She dealt with tragedy the way other people’s mothers cut up apple pie. Hillary Meyers experienced this firsthand when she toppled off the balance beam in gym class last year; she cracked her jaw so badly that her teeth were falling out and she had to hold up a towel in order to catch them, but she said my mother didn’t act any differently than she used to when I was in second grade and Hillary was in third and she used to come over for lunch, back when she
and I were friends.

  Try to keep the blood on the towel, dear, my mother told her. Hillary stopped panicking then; she figured her injury must not be too bad since my mother was so calm, even though her own father, the sheriff, who was used to car crashes and holdups, was sitting beside her and crying. It wasn’t until Hillary looked at her battered face in the mirror the next day that she realized how awful her injury had been. I wasn’t surprised at my mother’s response. After all, she’d appeared to be completely unruffled throughout my father’s illness. She took him to his doctors’ appointments and sat with him during his endless chemo treatments and never once let on how bad it was. She must have known from the very start there was no hope, but she never let anything negative show through, a skill she had probably perfected in the ER.

  We’re going to visit our friends at the hospital today, she’d announce, as if they were going to the market or the flower shop, when the truth of the matter was, my father couldn’t breathe anymore, he couldn’t eat or talk to us or even open his eyes in the glare of the sunlight.

  Don’t be noisy, Pop’s sleeping, my mother would tell us, and we’d be assured that our father was resting, gathering his strength. For the longest time, I thought everything was improving because of the tone of my mother’s voice, I trusted her completely. Then one day I opened the door to their room when she said he was napping, and I saw him lying there, eyes open, lost in pain, and I knew not to believe her anymore.

  My mother and Rosarie had been out shopping at the mall in Hamilton, and so Rosarie was the one who opened the garage door when they got home. You could hear her screaming no matter where you were. My grandmother and I were unpacking boxes in the attic, and my grandmother cut off the tip of her little finger with the sharp paring knife she’d been using to slice through masking tape. Collie told me he was in his yard helping his mother in the garden, and when he heard the sound of Rosarie’s cry; he knew someone had died. He stood by the blueberry bushes and hoped it wasn’t me. Now it’s his mother who stands in the garden every night. I can see her from my window up on the second floor. I can look out and watch her crying and know it’s my fault.

  Making that phone call is just one mistake in a long line of errors. I should have known better than to talk Collie into seeing his father. I should have known my father was dying. You wouldn’t even guess anyone was buried where my father is; there’s no marker, only an unbroken square of grass and a border of lilies. My mother insisted on these lilies after my father died, and it was the one and only time I’ve ever seen her have a fight with a stranger. She informed the people at the cemetery that she wanted a border put in, and she didn’t care how much it cost. But it wasn’t so easily done. We were advised that the families of the other individuals interred in that area would have to agree to the planting, and that was when my mother lost it. She told the funeral director to go to hell. She hoped that one day someone he loved would be denied one final bit of respect and then he would know how it felt to be left with nothing. My mother sat down in the dirt where my father had been buried and she cried so many tears I sometimes think the lilies that grow there now arose from her sorrow, and that the petals last no more than a day because they also must fall, like her tears.

  I brought along everything I needed for the anniversary when I climbed out Rosarie’s window. Up above, the sky exploded with color. The earth was shaking every time fireworks went off at the field, and black ribbons of dust fell across rooftops. I had several strands of hair and an envelope full of nail clippings with me and the two flowers I’d picked earlier that my father had tended. I had looked through the boxes in my mother’s bedroom closet until I found my father’s hairbrush, and a photograph that was taken so long ago my father didn’t look much older than Rosarie.

  It was still so hot that the concrete path across our yard burned my bare feet; june bugs drifted through the air. I took a deep breath before I slipped inside the garage. I didn’t turn on the light and after I closed the door I went directly to the place where it happened. I lit the black candles and set out all the ingredients I brought with me: the strands of my father’s hair taken from his hairbrush twisted together with mine, the nail cuttings, the watch I took from his night table drawer, the photograph from when he was young. I wasn’t certain that I could bring my father back to me. but at least I could hear his voice. I imagined him as hard as I could. I thought about us standing on the porch gazing at stars and remembered how he looked sleeping in his bed, with his blankets as white as snow. I still didn’t want to believe that a person’s whole life could change in an instant, in the time it took to walk out to the garage.

  All of a sudden, something seemed to be happening. I could hear the scrape of wood as the door was pushed back. I hadn’t expected to have any success until after midnight, when July Fourth became the fifth, and the anniversary officially began, but it was happening now. I closed my eyes and tried to steady myself, but my heart was racing. Are you here? I said. My voice sounded strange. It was thick and hot, the way it was on the day he died. I heard somebody coming toward me, and I hoped I hadn’t upset the natural order of things, calling to my father the way I had, and then I realized I didn’t care what I upset. I just wanted my father back. I wanted him now.

  When I opened my eyes. I felt dizzy. In some strange way. I felt a shudder of hope, as though I were a true believer. I wanted a world without end, a new order of things in which my father could walk through the door of our garage even though I knew he was gone. I wanted him to tell me his pain was nothing more than a memory and that all he wanted was for me to be happy, but that’s not what I got. It was my sister who’d come into the garage, and now she stared at me as though I’d lost my mind.

  “Hey, dumb bunny.” My sister sat across from me on the floor. Candlelight glimmered over her face. “Are you trying to burn the place down? Or are you just trying to prove that you should be locked up for your own good?”

  I still had the chills even though it hadn’t been my father who’d appeared to me. I had almost felt him near. I’d almost heard his voice. The candles flickered, and I felt a sharp ache in my chest.

  “I thought you were at the lake with Brendan.” I sounded guilty and breathless, as if I’d been caught doing something unforgivable.

  “I was, until he bored me to death. I decided I’d rather drown then spend another minute with him.”

  I realized that my sister was dripping wet. She told me she had jumped out of the rowboat and had swum to shore: she’d laughed as Brendan called out for her across Lantern Lake, not caring how he humiliated himself.

  “It’s a good thing I got back here.” Rosarie wrung out her dark hair, and green drops of water fell dangerously close to the lighted candles. The fire hissed and smelled like the lake where my father and I liked to skate as soon as the ice was thick enough. We’d wait for November, and rejoice over December; we’d long for January on hot nights like this one. “What exactly is it you think you’re doing?” my sister asked.

  “None of your business. And even if I did tell you, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “You poor. pathetic creature.” My sister shook her head. “Of course I understand. You’re celebrating the anniversary of your father’s suicide. That is sick. Do you know that? That is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.”

  “Why don’t you go away and never come back?” I could feel the aching in my chest get even sharper, but I didn’t care. “Then everyone would be happy.”

  When I started crying, Rosarie didn’t say anything. I bent my head, hoping she wouldn’t see, but my shoulders were shaking, and she knew what I was doing. What difference did it make if she teased me for being so stupid? What I wanted, I could never have, and after a while I didn’t care what my sister saw. I just cried.

  “I once read about a woman who lost this man she loved, and she tried to bring him back by sewing his bones together. You know where she wound up?” Rosarie said knowingly. Even her eyebrows were beautifu
l, arched and black like crows. “The nuthouse.”

  I guessed she was referring to the psychiatric hospital out past the lake. I’d never really thought about people being there, trapped behind the stone walls. I wondered how they felt on hot nights like this one. I wondered if they’d lost people, too.

  Before I could say anything, Rosarie took a cigarette from her purse and lit up. After she exhaled a plume of smoke, she put the hot match to her skin and looked at me, defiant. Even through my tears I could see the red mark she was making was only one of many There was a long line of burns up and down the inside of her arm, in the place where the skin was most sensitive.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” she said to me, “I don’t get hurt.”

  “Maybe you’re the nut case.” I ventured. Who smokes after her father dies of cancer? Who puts hot matches on her flesh and laughs when you call her names, the way my sister was doing? “What made you come in here any way? I thought it was too creepy for you.”

  “ It’s not so bad.” Rosarie looked around with her big dark eyes. “For a death trap.”

  Everything about her was sharp on the outside. Her fingernails, which she’d painted cherry red. Her perfect, white teeth. Most of the time she was fearless, but the one thing that had scared Rosarie all this year was the garage. If somebody needed something, furniture polish, for instance, or a screwdriver to fix the storm door, and they wanted Rosarie to go get it, they could forget about it. My mother was the very same way. Throughout the winter, our car had been left in the driveway, and every time it snowed we’d had to dig it out; sometimes it would take hours, but Rosarie and my mother didn’t seem to care. Nothing could force them to open the garage door. Now Rosarie seemed to have gotten over her fear, and she looked even more smug than usual.

  “I got a ride home from the lake with a reporter,” she told me. “Once I got away from Brendan. She shivered at the mention of his name. ”Can you believe that Brendan actually thought I was going to run off and marry him?”