Guiding Light
“When I need to get home, you’re my guiding light.” Guiding Light. Foy Vance, Irish singer-songwriter.
Two years ago, on my birthday, I woke to a text from Cliff wishing me a happy day. It was the first birthday wish of the day and the one that made my heart soar. We’d only been out a handful of times before I had to leave town for a week to teach a dialogue class at the Southern Oregon Writers Conference. I loved every minute of the conference, but the gentle man I’d left behind was never far from my thoughts.
While I was away, he started reading “Blue Midnight“.
“Start with that one,” I answered, when he asked what to read first. “It’s the closest to my own story of any of my novels.”
In it, our heroine, 45-year-old Blythe Heywood, is rebuilding her life after divorce. When the book opens, her husband is remarrying and has taken their young daughters to Hawaii for the ceremony. With three weeks alone, she decides to travel to Idaho to look up an old boyfriend. What she finds is not at all what she expects.
Just like me.
I knew from the second date, when he kissed me for the first time, that I would fall in love with him. I didn’t know if he would feel the same way. Regardless, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t work out for some reason. In those days, I had a lot of bad dating data to back up that hypothesis. What I’d learned, mostly, is that men leave, no matter how interested they are in the beginning.
I was wrong, of course, as evidenced by the sparkling diamond on my hand as I write this. Then, however, I dared not even hope for a good outcome.
When I arrived at the conference, I realized I needed a passage from “Blue Midnight“, as all the presenters were given a few minutes to read out loud from one of their works during the evening festivities. I mentioned to Cliff, via text, that I was trying to decide which passage to read. He sent back a detailed note with several suggestions, including the paragraph and page number of an example of “great alliteration”.
He had me at alliteration.
I smiled at my phone as this dangerous thing called hope crept into my heart. Could he be the one? Could he surprise me?
Spoiler alert. He did surprise me. He was the one. He is. He is everything. My home. My love. My guiding light.
I had another birthday last week. This year I woke next to my husband. No text needed for a birthday wish. Like my character, Blythe, in “Blue Midnight“, the hero fell in love with me, alliteration and all.
I get how lucky and blessed I am, all of which makes me want to celebrate. Since I’m on a diet, I had to find a way to make merriment without food or wine (bummer) so I decided to give away free copies of “Blue Midnight” all week instead. We always hope to catch new readers with these free promotions, so feel free to share the news with anyone you think might like a second-chance love story. Click here for your ebook copy.
Below is the passage from “Blue Midnight” I chose to read that February night two years ago. I can’t remember if it was one Cliff suggested or not, but let’s say for story’s sake that is was. It’s much more romantic that way.
Cheers.
**
The door closed behind me. It was late but I didn’t feel tired. Instead I felt a yearning for the fresh air, hoping it might clear my mind and break the spell that seemed to fall over me whenever I was around Kevan. Using the stone pathway, I headed toward the lake. I could see quite well with the light from the patio in combination with the sliver of moon and dashing of stars spread across the sky. I ambled along the path, careful not to slip on the uneven stones. The moon and stars reflected on the water, like thousands of perfectly shaped diamonds. A trio of crickets played a symphony with the soft sound of water lapping against the shore. I sat on the wooden bench and slipped my feet out of my flip-flops to dangle my toes in the grass. Far away, I heard the high-pitched hoot of an owl. I’d always thought of the sound as lonely, imagining the solitary nocturnal bird in his hollow tree, but here in this place with the silver moon in an almost purple sky, it felt right. I thought of my girls, then, as I did so often during times of solitude. Missing them crept into the space in my chest tattooed with their names.
When Lola was a toddler she developed a fear of the dark every time Michael was out of town, which was a lot in those years. She would cry so pitifully that I always relented and curled up next to her on her narrow bed until she fell asleep, usually waking in the middle of the night disoriented, my mouth dry and with no sense of how much time had passed. Lola had yellow curls in those days and while she drifted off to sleep, and often for minutes thereafter, I played with them, twirling the lock of coiled gold that fell across her forehead around my finger again and again. The baby powder and strawberry scent of her filled every empty space I’d known for so long. Her gentle breathing and occasionally the house creaking or a car driving by broke the night of its silence. I breathed it in, knowing this exact child was the one I was meant to have. But even then, at those precise moments, I understood how fleeting it all was, how quickly she would become a girl and then a woman who held a child of her own. I tried to hold onto the moment, there in the blue of night with her baby smell in my nose and the silken threads of her hair between my fingers, but as all mothers know, it was never a possibility. Time passes, no matter how much we yearn for the present to remain the future. Because now it was later, the future, and I was here under a night sky with a sliver of silver moon, chasing ghosts, while my little daughter was thousands of miles away on a beach somewhere with her father’s new wife. I was not there to make sure she wore her sunscreen or protect her from jellyfish or riptides or her father’s thoughtlessness. No, I was here in the midnight blue of letting go.
