Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain Book 1) Read online

  “Let’s talk some more about Finn,” she said.

  “Like I said, he’s impossible to find. He has the same name as some senator from Illinois. There’s a lot of stuff about that Finn Lanigan and his voting record.”

  My sister looked at me as if she were slightly impressed. “I can’t believe you actually Googled him.”

  “I’m not totally out of it.” I drank the rest of my wine and moved to pour another half glass. “I am aware of Google as it pertains to being a verb.”

  She chuckled. “What do you know about him that would give us a clue to where he is?”

  “Not much. I know where he’s from, or rather, where he spent summers as a child. His family owned a summer home in the town of Peregrine. He said they had a family business they ran out of Boise but spent summers in Peregrine with their mother.”

  “What was the business? We can Google it.”

  “He never said. When I asked him about it, he got quiet and clammed up. I’m not sure why.”

  Bliss picked up her glass of wine and took a sip, her brow furrowed. She was thinking. Great. This usually meant trouble. Sure enough. Trouble.

  “This is where you should go on your road trip. Peregrine, Idaho. Go see if you can find him.”

  I stared at her for a moment. “I can’t do that. What if I actually found him?”

  “What if?” Bliss grinned, bringing forth the Cheshire cat. She couldn’t be trusted. She wasn’t like me. She was a risk taker. An adventurer. The only thing I’d ever done out of the ordinary was my brief, sexless, three-day affair with Finn a month before my wedding. I then spent thirteen years feeling guilty about it, vowing to make up for my indiscretion by being the perfect spouse and mother. Repenting. And what had that gotten me? A cheating husband.

  “Bliss, it’s been thirteen years. He was thirty-six then. Surely he’s married.”

  “But you don’t know that. What you do know is that he had a summer home there. It wouldn’t be hard to snoop around a smaller town. Easier than trying to find him in a city like Boise. Find out if he’s married, and if he’s not, decide then if you want to approach him or not.”

  I sat for a moment. I took another sip of wine, thinking. Could I do it?

  “You have three long weeks without the kids,” said Bliss. “What better way to spend it than on an adventure? Yes, probably nothing will come of it, but who cares? Think of it as a way to take charge of your new life. Go in with a bang, so to speak.”

  “This is the kind of thing you do, not me.”

  She ignored me. She knew I’d decided to go. She knew how to decipher the truth no matter what I tried to portray on the outside. She knew I was not as I appeared. I ran deep, like the green waters of the Oregon rivers we swam in as children. Much lurked beneath the surface, whole lifetimes of still, cold water. I could tell by her Cheshire cat grin even before she raised her glass in a toast that she knew she’d won. “To the next chapter of your life. May it be filled with adventure and hot sex.”

  I rolled my eyes. But I drank to it just the same.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE NEXT MORNING I awakened to shouts of glee from my daughters. They’d discovered Aunt Bliss on the couch. I smiled, despite the fact that in a few short hours I had to say goodbye to them. Closing my eyes, wishing for another minute of numbing sleep, I stretched my legs over to the other side of the bed where the sheets were cold. But the thoughts came, all those stomach-turning thoughts of what today would be—what today was—and I was fully awake. My eyes popped open.

  I looked around the room. On the floor across from the bed, paintings were stacked against the wall, waiting to be hung. I’d unpacked my clothes yesterday, hanging them in the closet and folding them neatly into the dresser, both of which were half-empty, like a woman who wore a dress three sizes too big, roomy and misshapen. Michael was getting married today; he was taking them all to Hawaii, both the wedding and honeymoon arranged in haste just a month ago.

  Tomorrow was Lola’s eleventh birthday. The three of us celebrated together before our move, replete with a shopping trip where Lola picked out a new “wardrobe” for their Hawaii trip.

  Hawaii. Without me.

  “Guess what, Mom?” Lola said to me a month ago, while brushing her teeth before bedtime.

  “What’s that?” I asked, expecting to hear something about school or her friends.

  “Dad’s getting married to Liza.”

  “What?” Michael was getting married? Already? To Liza? He hadn’t thought to tell me himself? The pain of my abandonment felt newly fresh, as if it were the night he announced his departure. “When?”

  “A month from now—the day before my birthday. Isn’t that cool? He said we’re flying to Hawaii the day after the wedding and it’ll be part of my birthday celebration. It’s a way for us to bond as a new family.”

  I was certain that when he booked the wedding date he hadn’t remembered that the next day was Lola’s birthday. But Lola did not know this. She thought it was purposeful—a symbol of how the marriage so near her birthday would bring the new blended family together. I kept quiet on the subject, pretending to be happy for them all, knowing this was the best reaction for my children.

  Now, I heard them bounding up the stairs toward my room. They both jumped onto my bed.

  “I can’t believe Aunt Bliss came without us even knowing it while we were sleeping and everything,” said Clementine. “That’s so weird.”

  I laughed. “She’s tricky that way.”

  “I’m so excited,” said Lola, bouncing. Then, seeming momentarily ashamed, knowing her father’s new marriage would be hard for me, added, “For Hawaii, I mean.”

  I looked over at Clementine. She was quiet suddenly, which was unusual for my chatter-girl. She pulled strips of nail polish off her fingernails with her thumbnail. “Are you excited, too, Clemmie?” I asked.

  Clementine shook her head, no, two big tears spilling from her eyes. “It’s not that I don’t like her, it’s just that I don’t want everything to change again.” She paused, swiping at her cheeks, leaving a fleck of pink nail polish under her left eye.

  I pulled Clementine on my lap. She wrapped her arms around my neck. I rested my chin on her head, smelling her hair—my favorite scent in the world. “Don’t worry. We’ll all adjust. People do, you know, get used to new things. It’s the only constant, change. Have you ever heard that before?”

  She shook her head, no, and buried her wet face in my neck for a moment before looking up at me. “Can we have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner when we get home?”

  I smiled. “Of course.”

  “Liza’s a vegetarian, Mommy. She made us spaghetti without meatballs and it wasn’t the same,” said Clementine. “Plus, she used this sauce from a health food store and it tasked like someone’s dirty sock.”

  “What?” I wriggled my eyebrows. “Like dirty socks?”

  She giggled and put her head on my shoulder. “No one’s as good a cook as you, anyway.”

  “Every child thinks their mother’s cooking is the best,” I said. But I was ridiculously pleased to hear this small vow of loyalty.

  “Daddy’s a vegetarian now too,” said Lola, as if she’d heard my thoughts.

  Michael a vegetarian? The man who wanted steak five days a week? “Good for him,” I said out loud.

  “He told me it’s making him lean and trim.” Lola smiled. “He’s worried about looking older than Liza, which he shouldn’t worry about. He looks very young for his age.”

  At this point in conversations, the effort to keep from rolling my eyes is akin to lifting my own body weight over my head. Since the day Michael left me last May, Lola had become generous about him, always assuming the best rather than the worst, always making excuses for his lack of interest in them and his diminished capacity for affection. She had rose-colored glasses of an adoring daughter for the first time in their relationship. This was the largest surprise of all for me in a long list of outcomes after our m
arriage ended. Their relationship from the time she was a small baby had been like two bulls locking horns, but all that was different now. Like everything else.

  As if she knew my thoughts, Lola knelt at my feet, her hazel eyes sincere. “He said Liza doesn’t expect to replace you but to be a positive influence and addition in our lives.”

  A positive influence and addition? Oh, for God’s sake she’s reading another self-help book, I thought. I kept it to myself; any negativity about their father was hurtful to the children. Anyway, I would only sound bitter and wry—two qualities I tried desperately to avoid, especially in front of my children, not only for their sake but for mine as well. As I had for months and months now, I kept it all inside, even as the black bitterness that lived at the bottom of my stomach wanted to spew forth. No, I would not give into the temptation to let loose all the sarcastic and snide comments that my sister would say I was entitled to. No, I wanted Lola and Clementine to see a woman handling difficulty with grace and class. Whenever I felt at a loss as to what to do, I thought of my heroine, Audrey Hepburn. “What would A.H. do?” I asked myself each time. She certainly wouldn’t speak ill of her ex-husband in front of her children, no matter that he deserved it.

  Michael, who had mocked me during our marriage for reading parenting books, now brimmed with platitudes siphoned from his thirty-year-old fiancée. According to Lola, Liza read a lot of books about how to be a good stepmother. Given the number of Liza quotes I had to endure, parroted back from the innocent mouth of my eleven-year-old, it would seem Michael’s nubile bride had a voracious appetite for self-improvement. Perhaps not stealing other women’s husbands might have been a better choice than buying out the self-help aisle at Barnes and Noble, but who am I to say?

  With that thought, Lola paraphrased a quote from one of Liza’s latest reads, an Americanized version of eastern philosophy. “Liza told me that living in the moment, Mom, frees you from all guilt, worry, and pain.”

  “Is that right?” All that focus about whether we were happy or not sounded like western thinking to me but again I kept quiet. Perhaps Buddha had been correct in saying that “life was suffering.” It certainly felt this way to me. I kept that to myself as well.

  Lola continued, “Dad says you’d be a lot happier if you lived in the present instead of the past and the future.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Now off to the shower for both of you.”

  “Do I have to shower with Clemmie, Mom?”

  “Yes. And help her wash her hair.”

  They both sighed but didn’t fight me. Their excitement about the trip had rendered them more cooperative than usual.

  As they ran down the stairs to their bathroom, I kept myself from crying so they wouldn’t see me, but the power of those boiling tears behind my eyes was enough to make my head explode like a pot of water set too high on the burner. After I heard the shower running, I went to my bathroom and sat on the cold tiles with my back against the tub, releasing those god-awful, hot, pitiful tears silently. I wrapped my arms around my knees and cried harder, hating myself for giving Michael one more ounce of my bodily fluids. I hated him. I loathed him, even as I knew it did no good for either of us. He didn’t care one iota about my tears or my pain. No, he was probably getting a man manicure at this very moment so his hands looked good in the wedding photos. They were probably having couples mani-pedis in some spa while I succumbed to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor.

  I knew his comment about me was accurate. I felt stuck in the past and tormented by the future, which made me feel alone, more so than I’d ever felt in my life. Everyone had moved forward, it seemed, but me. My daughters quoted their new stepmother. Michael adored his new wife. I remained isolated, turning to dust on the bathroom floor. During these moments of misery that I’m ashamed to admit to, I imagined one day all that would be left of me was the indentation in the floor from all my weeping. These tearful moments were truly something the indelible yet graceful Ms. Hepburn would never have allowed herself to do. But, alas, I was still me—self-indulgent and weak, with my hair that needed washing and my fuzzy socks and frumpy pajamas. I was nothing like the slender, pixie-cut, ballet-flat wearing Audrey Hepburn, who would have been out saving orphans instead of weeping and wallowing in the wasted waterworks of self-absorption.

  After I was cried out, I lingered on the floor, thinking. No, I was no Audrey Hepburn, but I had to give myself a little grace. I’d gotten through, which was the best I could do. Since the marriage announcement, I’d continued forth, as we so often do in this challenging life. I made it through wedding plans and flower girl and junior bridesmaid dress fittings and shopping for new bathing suits for their trip to Hawaii. I would, somehow, get through their time away. This was not really the question, because that’s what we do, women like us, tough if not as graceful as Ms. Hepburn, with our weeping on the bathroom floor. We get through. If we need a few hidden moments of hot tears, who can blame us? Because at the end, we pick ourselves up off the floor, get in the shower, and wash our hair.

  The sounds of my little girls’ voices pulled me from my brooding. “Mom, we’re clean and shiny.”

  “Good. Get dressed. I’ll be right out,” I called back to them as I rose to my feet. This is the way, too, you see. Our children can yank us from self-pity and remorse and regret because they need us, which is bigger than all the rest.

  And just like that, I smiled as the smell of coffee drifted up from downstairs. Knowing Bliss, she’d gotten up hours ago to begin working and had consumed half a pot of coffee. She made it strong and drank it black—no nonsense for my Bliss. Then I was grateful, filled with love for her and my girls. The ache in my chest subsided. You are blessed, I told myself. So very blessed.

  I turned on the shower and inspected myself in the mirror while the water warmed. I’d lost ten pounds since the day Michael had announced he was leaving. For the first time since the children were born, I could look at my body without cringing. The divorce diet, I told friends when they asked what I’d done to lose the weight. Between running and Zumba and weightlifting, I was in the best shape of my life, the only thing I could count as a victory in the last year. Yet, as I looked in the mirror, I saw the body of a forty-five-year-old woman who had given birth twice and breastfed two hungry babies. The flesh on my upper arms was loose over my rekindled muscle; my stomach harbored layers of skin, at least one roll for each child; my breasts were lower and speckled with stretch marks. This was the body of someone’s wife, the mother of his children, the woman he was to grow old with. But I’d been abandoned for the new model and I would grow old alone. The thought of the girls’ two little suitcases waiting in the hall almost undid me once again. Don’t start with all that, I told myself. Just get in the shower and wash your hair, you big whiner.

  I let the warm water wash over me, cleansing me of the remnants of my bout with the bathroom floor. I washed my hair.

  After dressing, I went downstairs. The girls were next to Bliss on the couch, both of them talking at once while brushing their wet hair, the sheets and blankets knotted around the three of them like a complex tying of a precious package.

  Clementine looked up at me. “Mommy! What’s for breakfast?”

  “There’s nothing to eat but coffee,” said Bliss. “And we’re all starving.”

  “I tried to think of something to make but there’s no cereal,” said Lola.

  I glanced at the clock. It was almost nine. Michael’s sister would be here in an hour and a half.

  “Coffee cake?” I asked, pointing at Bliss. “Aunt Bliss can fetch it from Starbucks for us?”

  “Jeez, that’s just like I’m at my house. You’re supposed to cook for me when I’m here,” said Bliss, pretending to pout.

  I stifled a smile and motioned for the girls to go upstairs so I could dry their hair. If I had to let them go, at least they would be properly combed and frocked.

  ***

  At exactly 10:30 the doorbell rang. Michael’s siste
r, Betsy, was morbidly on time, always had been, one of the few qualities we shared. She stood on the stoop and smiled shyly when I opened the door. Her hair, wiry and frizzy, cut in the shape of a mushroom, had turned almost completely white since the last time I saw her. She had gained weight, too, especially around her middle, which was currently clad in black spandex pants and a yellow T-shirt, so that I could think of nothing but Clementine’s bumblebee costume from last Halloween.

  I yelled to the girls to say goodbye to their Aunt Bliss and then brought the suitcases out to the porch. “How are you?” I asked, feeling awkward. We’d been friends when I was married to Michael but now we no longer spoke. This is the way of divorce, of course. But the loss of a friend is still there, no matter the circumstance.

  “Jet-lagged. They stuck me with fetching the children. No one else to do it, apparently, but the spinster aunt. The rest of the women are at the spa getting wrapped in seaweed or spun sugar or some other concoction meant for eating. Not that I mind. You know I love these girls and I’d rather look after them than sniff eucalyptus spray and drink chamomile tea with Michael’s teenage bride and her sixteen best friends.” Betsy picked up the children’s suitcases and stood looking at me, shifting her weight from one foot to the other so that her hair moved back and forth like one of those bobble heads from the Mariners’ baseball games. “Oh, Blythe, this Liza. She pretends to have feminist ideals and all this granola and recycling diatribe and organic this and organic that but she’s no more than a granola-eating husband-seeker.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You always did have a way with words.” I paused, fighting tears. “Look after the kids today, won’t you?”

  “You know I will.”

  The girls came out, their hair glimmering in the sunshine. I knelt down and held out my arms. They both came into them at once. I took in a deep breath but it did nothing to lessen the sharp pain in my chest. I smelled the tops of their heads and then held them both at arm’s length. They looked so much like Bliss and I looked as children—thick, honey-colored hair and hazel eyes shaped like almonds that turned green on occasion, depending on what we wore. The Heywood genes must be strong, as we all looked like my father and his mother. Clementine looked up at me, her eyes suddenly frightened. “Mommy, I don’t want to go.” Her bottom lip trembled.