I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(43)
“Look,” he said, finally, “I’m coming anyway. I have the ticket, right? And I don’t need to come in the morning. I’ll check into my hotel, and you can call me whenever you’re finished with whatever you’re doing. Or whenever you have a break in your busyness. Tomorrow night, even; it doesn’t matter how late. Okay?”
“Zach, coming is just not a good idea.”
“Why? You can’t squeeze me in? What if it were Hildy? You’d probably drop everything if it were Hildy. Can’t you do that for me?”
“I can’t. I couldn’t if it were Hildy or anyone. Because I’m not home right now.”
“You’re away? Like for a few days or something?”
“Yes, I’m away.”
“On vacation?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Sort of? What is that supposed to mean?” With each word, his voice rose in both volume and pitch. I held the phone a couple of inches away from my ear. “Where the hell are you, Clare?”
No way in the world was I telling him.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m just away for a while.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You’re saying you won’t tell me where you are?”
“I really just need some time by myself.”
“Bullshit,” he spat. “If you were alone, you’d say where you are. Who is he?”
So much for letting go of anger.
“I’m not with anyone, Zach.”
“God, it’s not Dev. Tell me it’s not goddamn Dev.”
“I think I should go now.”
“Seriously, Clare? Your high school boyfriend? That’s your rebound guy? You know that’s pathetic, right?”
“I’m hanging up now, Zach. Please don’t call me again.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do!”
He was shouting. Zach’s shouting had always shaken me; there was a note of something wild in it that reverberated all up and down my internal fault lines. But not this time. This time, without saying good-bye or a single other word to him, I hung up, then went to my phone settings, turned off vibrate, put the phone down on the table, fluffed my pillow into just the right shape, and went to sleep.
After breakfast that morning, in a small locked box under the sink in the kitchen, I found the ledgers. It’s how the world works sometimes I guess: you spill your coffee, go searching for a sponge, and find a mystery instead.
There were two of them, one leather bound and official looking, the other just a regular black-and-white marbled-cover composition book, the kind with which, I must admit, I have harbored a lifelong obsession. (Jokingly but also not, Dev used to give me one, along with a box of Ticonderoga pencils, every Christmas, and the sight of the two together—a perfect pairing if ever there was one—never failed to satisfy completely a little part of my soul.) Both ledgers were full of the same almost typewriter-like printing I’d found on the back of Edith’s photographs, so clean and precise that, even though the blue ink was faded, I could read every word. Sitting at the kitchen table in a pool of brilliant morning sun, being careful to keep my coffee at a safe distance from the ledgers, I dug in.
I started with the leather one, which turned out to be a list of the people who had stayed at Blue Sky House, their names—including the names and ages of each child, if there were any, and, in the case of a few entries, the name of the family’s dog with its breed noted in parentheses, which made me adore Edith even more—the dates they’d stayed, and their home addresses. Most came from Delaware or from neighboring states, but a handful lived in places as far-flung as Ohio, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. At the tail end of most of the entries, she’d written what seemed to be reminders to herself, things like Youngest child cannot eat eggs, Fond of watermelon, Tea instead of coffee, Afraid of the dark; needs a night-light, and Smokes dreadful cigars but thankfully only outside; put ashtrays on the screen porch, evidently preparing for the possibility that the lodgers would return. I treasured the bits of Edith’s personality that shone through: the plain, clear printing, not a curlicue in sight; the meticulous entries, every one with the same format, no cross-outs or misspellings (the woman even spelled dachshund right on the very first try, a feat I never pull off myself), every comma in place; her thoughtful, almost tender documentation of her guests’ loves and fears and allergies; and, above all, the hope, on page after page, that they would all come back someday.
The ledger’s brown silk ribbon still marked the page with the final entry, the last guest: November 15–17, 1956; Betty Brownmiller; 715 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Early bedtime, hot milk. All the remaining pages were blank, and I wondered, a little sadly, if Edith had known when she wrote those words that Betty would be the last guest ever to stay at Blue Sky House.
Except that what I’d learn from the last page of the next ledger is that she wasn’t the last guest.
Even before I got to that page, I’d started calling it “the shadow ledger.” The shadow ledger and the daylight ledger are what the two became inside my head. The shadow ledger’s entries were made in Edith’s same, now familiar printing and carefully dated, but that’s where the similarities between the two ended. Where the daylight ledger was clear and direct and businesslike, the shadow ledger was cryptic and oblique and intimate; where the daylight ledger was complete, the shadow ledger left almost everything—everything practical—out. No last names, no addresses. I even heard the words of them differently as I read: the daylight ledger spoke in Edith’s voice, crisp and bell-like; the shadow ledger whispered.