Dream of the Blue Room Read Free Page A

the man who saves her once more each month by taking the C train down to Chelsea to meet her. I know she was beautiful once, before the accident, because Dave showed me a picture she had given him. I can’t help but wonder how many times the woman’s hand has touched Dave’s thigh in the intimate way that Graham’s just touched my own, how many times Dave has imagined what it would be like to do something more with this woman, to kiss her, or even take her to bed. But for all he may have thought of it, envisioned it, desired it, I want to believe he has not done so.
    “It’s not postcards,” I say, feeling suddenly intimate, ready to confess.
    “Pardon?”
    “In the tin. Not postcards.”
    “I figured as much. You’ve been holding on to that thing like it’s filled with diamonds.”
    “Kind of a long story.”
    “We’ve got two weeks.”
    So I begin to tell him about Amanda Ruth. I tell him about the ashes, how her mother came to me with the tin a few days after the funeral and said, “Amanda Ruth always wanted to see China. You’re the only person I know who might actually go there.” Amanda Ruth never knew the name of the village where her father was born, only that it was somewhere along the Yangtze.
    “I plan to scatter her ashes at the Three Gorges,” I explain. “I think that’s where she’d want to be.”
    I wait for Graham’s face to betray some mild amusement, some hint of disdain at this sentimental plan, but he just nods and says, “Makes sense to me.” Encouraged, I tell him things I’ve told no one but Dave, things I haven’t spoken of in years. I tell him about those long days on Demopolis River in Alabama, the way Amanda Ruth would steam big pots of rice and we’d eat with chopsticks out of small porcelain bowls we found at the flea market. How we stashed five-pound bags of rice in the closet of Amanda Ruth’s bedroom, because Mr. Lee threw away any he found in the pantry. Peasant food, he called it.
    I tell him about the photograph in the newspaper fourteen years ago. Alone in my old bedroom, home for Christmas vacation from Hunter College, I studied the photo with a magnifying glass, searching for answers. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and her neck was wrapped in a long pale scarf. Were it not for the strange angle of her leg, the stiffness of her pose, and the impossible tangle of her hair across the asphalt, one might even have surmised that it was just a photograph of a sleeping girl. “College Girl Slain,” the headline read. The town’s first murder mystery.
    When I’m finished with my story, I feel emptied out, slightly cheapened. “I haven’t talked about her this much in years. I didn’t do her justice.”
    “Try,” Graham says. “What did she look like?”
    “Long dark hair. Slender, but curvy. I wonder what she’d look like now.” I try to picture her, aged by many years, with little lines starting to form around her eyes; but in my mind Amanda Ruth is always seventeen, diving into Demopolis River, her bathing suit startlingly blue against the earthy brown of the river. Or she is a newspaper photo in black and white, laid out like a sleeping mannequin behind the skating rink. In the close-ups the police showed me during the interrogation, Amanda Ruth’s lips were parted, as if she had something to say but never got around to it.
    Suddenly the moon disappears. For a moment there are no other boats in sight, and I feel as if we’re alone in the dark dead center of the universe. Moments later a barge comes into view, the Red Victoria bellows out a warning, and the moon reappears, a faint orange hole in the black sky.
    “Your turn,” I say. “Tell me something.”
    “How about a poem?”
    “By whom?”
    “The twentieth-century Chinese poet Ping Hsin:
       Bright moon—
       All grief, sorrow, loneliness completed—
       Fields of silver light—
       Who, on the other side of the brook
       Blows a surging flute?”
    “That’s