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.”
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 daytime audiences 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 Architectural Digest 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, with hints 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