I'll Be Your Blue Sky by Santos Marisa de los

Author:Santos, Marisa de los
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mam
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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