Reunion

“I’m serious. Except for that little … outburst, you really kept things under control.”

Blue shook her head, still embarrassed. “I don’t know what that was about.”

“Empathy, maybe.”

“Is Peter having a fit?”

“He’s too busy working on a spin strategy. Stacey’s still a mess though, poor thing.”

“I suspect she’s going to need therapy.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I just didn’t get any.”

Marcy reached behind Blue to straighten her hood. “Speaking of misguided youths, your mother called. She’s not coming to the Keys with us after all; she says she met someone and he wants her all to himself this weekend.”

“Someone named Calvin,” Blue said, more curious than surprised. “She apprised me the other day. He owns a bookstore—not the ‘adult’ type, a real one, but that’s all I know. Did she tell you anything about him?”

“Only that they’ll be by your place for drinks at eight tonight. She said to tell you don’t worry, they won’t stay long.”

Calvin was Nancy Kucharski’s third “boyfriend” since New Year’s. He’d been there at her mother’s place when Blue called last Monday night. The call had been brief, with Calvin waiting and Joni Mitchell crooning loudly in the background. Blue had a strong suspicion that Joni wasn’t her mother’s only throwback indulgence; the last time she’d visited her mother’s apartment, the place had smelled vaguely of marijuana.

Her mother hadn’t waited for the seventies retro movement to catch up with her; she’d continued to march as its poster child these three decades since. Her hair, left alone to evolve to a natural silver-gray, was past her shoulders and often braided. Her favorite earrings were small silver peace signs. She wore vegetable-dyed t-shirts to work in her organic rooftop garden, and she had recently pierced her nose. Probably she’d been smoking pot all along—maybe even grew it, organic and therefore wholesome—and where Blue was concerned was simply following their mutual and long-established policy of Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

Marcy dropped a manila folder onto the countertop in front of Blue. “This has your itinerary and Peter’s final notes for next week. With spring break in progress, we’re sure to have some great crowds. Oh, the first scuba class is set for Sunday at nine. I know you said you’re not planning to dive, but I think you should. Key West has some of the best reefs in the northern hemisphere and you can’t see them if you don’t do the course.”

Blue removed her makeup with pre-soaked pads—the sort of single-use product her mother hated—while skimming the itinerary. They’d leave Chicago early tomorrow, arriving in Key West at about ten. The whole crew would stay at the Ocean Key Resort, where, for her, a spacious oceanfront suite would make a nice home-away-from-home for the week.

She said, “I’m afraid I’ll get the bends,” a cover for the truth, that she was a lousy swimmer.

“Do you even know what the bends is?”

“Hey,” Blue said, still reading, “now that my mom has bailed, why don’t you bunk with me in my suite? It’s two bedrooms. We can stay up late watching Owen Wilson DVDs. I was so embarrassed when we had him on last time and I had to admit I hadn’t seen Shanghai Noon.”

“I would … but I invited Stephen along, and …”

“Say no more,” Blue said, closing the folder.

“Besides, you should really get out some, while we’re there. I hear the nightlife is crazy good.”

“Sure. I’ll just hang out in bars and, I don’t know, take home whoever’s willing.”

“If you did a little more of that, then—”

“Then what?” Her own answers: Then she might have had multiple fatherless children, as her mother did. A career of cleaning motel rooms and checking groceries and selling fruit baskets by phone every holiday season.

Then she wouldn’t be cloistered in this building, in this life.

Marcy said, “Nothing, forget it. You should just have more fun, that’s all. Life is short, and you’ve paid your dues.”

Blue leaned over and took longer than she needed to tie her sneakers. “So, I’m off to the gym. Guess I’ll see you—and Stephen—at Midway, six forty-five a.m. sharp.”

“Blue?”

She sat up. “Yeah?”

“What were you doing out there, on the fire escape?”

“The fire escape?” She looked out the window. The snow was still falling with vigor.

“Yeah,” Marcy said, “you know, that steel thing, used for egress in the event of an emergency. Was there some emergency I should know about?”

“Branford called.” The private detective she’d had on retainer for almost four years now.

“And?”

“And he has a lead. I don’t have any details yet.” She looked at Marcy and saw her at nineteen, saw her as Bat, heard her saying even back then, days and weeks afterward, that it wasn’t too late to find the child. She could change her mind, she could track him down.

Now Marcy said, “Ah.” That was all there was to say, so many fruitless years into the search.

“So, see you at sunrise.”

Chapter Two (#u16723e4b-046e-5242-b128-b579a8e9c660)

Inside Blue’s apartment was the life she’d been living for ten years, or seasons, as she’d learned to call them. Ten seasons of ratings pressures and growing competition, the challenge of keeping a laser-sharp focus on what daytimeaudiences want, but trying to do it on her terms. “Style and Substance,” was the headline of her recent Elle interview. That was the goal. Sometimes they achieved it.

Ten seasons of expanding success. The apartment’s structural remodel had come after season two, and the color scheme back then … what had it been? Pale blue and lavender with light woods? Or was that the following incarnation? She could no longer recall. Only that the décor had been updated four times—every two years, the way some people traded up vehicles. The apartment needed to be current, Marcy said, because Blue sometimes entertained there. Marcy handled it all just the way she handled most of the other details of Blue’s life. Saint Marcy, Blue often called her, and Marcy would say, “Ha! Not after the life I’ve led.”

It was all talk, though, had always been all talk with her. The worst Marcy had done was what they were all doing that year they’d shared the dilapidated house. Taking on new names—Blue had tried out Skye, after the heroine of a book she’d read, but became Bubble when her belly began to round—inventing themselves, dabbling with drugs, with sex (though she’d quit both when her periods quit) … and while some people might consider them Hell-bound for their behaviors, Blue wasn’t convinced. She and Marcy and their various housemates had been young, rudderless, sure of their invincibility and the idea that they had so much time ahead of them that they could waste it freely, using homemade bongs and listening to Prince. So much time that even the biggest of mistakes would sooner or later melt away and be forgotten, like tonight’s snow after tomorrow’s sun.

The apartment was newly decorated in what Blue thought of as Twenty-first Century Lodge style. Though the work was completed weeks ago, the scent of fresh paint and new wool rugs persisted, in a pleasant, low-key way. The place looked marvelous, all warm woods and natural stone and leafy plants throughout the wide-open space. Marvelous and unused. Marvelous and bereft. An ArchitecturalDigest spread, after the magazine’s crew had gone.

In her bathroom she pulled off the elastic that bound her hair. Highlighted chestnut, her stylist called the color, withhints of honey and cinnamon, as if her head were a pastry. Wholesome was the word the media often used to describe her, suggesting that somehow her nut-honey-cinnamon hair and her long-legged tomboyish build explained her success. They’d changed their tune a bit when she made it onto the Forbes Top 50 list. Now she was wholesome and driven, wholesome and savvy, wholesome and well connected and well dressed.

Style and substance, how surprising, how unusual!

A woman who made her living on TV did not, strictly speaking, have to be attractive to succeed, but if she wasn’t, the media loved to say so. Hence the hour she’d just spent at the gym, an hour for which she paid a ridiculous amount of money in order to get exclusive time with Jeremy. An effective hour, though, repeated five times each week (up from the three that used to do the trick); she was in top physical form. If while doing stretches, crunches, leg lifts, she sometimes thought of Jeremy’s sculpted body making better use of hers, where was the harm in that?

Her bathroom’s new wallpaper, an amber grass-textured weave, kept bringing to mind a Hemingway story—not one of the novels they would be promoting on the show next week, but another, about Mount Kilimanjaro and a couple waiting for rescue at a nearby camp. The short story, a tale of regret, had been a favorite of Mitch Forrester’s … and Mitch had been a favorite of hers.

As she washed her face she recalled Mitch reading her the story one evening early in their short-lived relationship. He’d been pensive—something to do with his ex-wife and the difficulty he was having in getting to see his son. “There are only so many chances to get things right,” he’d said, but she hadn’t understood very well at the time. She’d been barely nineteen, sure that life was a broad and endless series of chances. After all, didn’t they live in the land of opportunity, where success in business, in life, in love, was no accident of birth but could be made? Wasn’t Mitch in charge of his own destiny? What was there to regret at his age, twenty-seven? He could have a new wife. (Her.) He could have new children. (Hers.) For two promising months she had done a very effective job of ignoring anything that contradicted her vision, and then he’d set her straight. And then … then, he’d set her free.

Less easy to ignore, these days, were the lines in her forehead and the tiny sunbursts spreading, now, from the corners of her eyes. Her softening jawline. Thinner lips. Less easy to ignore was her makeup artist’s insistence that the miracle of Botox was her salvation. Easier, though, if she quit looking in the mirror. She pressed the light switch and left the room.

She now had the whole sixth floor of this historic art deco building. An entire floor was more space than she needed, by far—as if that mattered; what did need have to do with her life anymore? Here it was just her and Peep, her tabby Maine Coon cat. He slept most of the time, and she was gone most of the time, so their pairing worked out well. With the apartment’s lights still off, the falling snow looked like a shimmering veil outside the east-facing windows. In daytime, that view included Lake Michigan as seen between downtown’s towers. Out the north side was a view of slightly lesser buildings, one of which housed the studio. The apartment was swept and dusted and vacuumed weekly, the floors polished monthly—and before and after every cocktail party. The refrigerator was stocked, the wine bottles circulated, all by a Marcy-directed staff that Blue never saw.

She went barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen on marble floors the color of bitter chocolate. Why colors seemed so often to be named for food she wasn’t sure. Her kitchen cabinets were crème brûlée, and her granite countertop was confetti orzo. The wall color throughout all the main rooms was something to do with squash: pale summer squash? Light butternut purée? Whatever. She wasn’t Martha Stewart.