Dream of the Blue Room A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

• ISBN13: 9780553386547
• ISBN10: 0553386549
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-16
• Publisher: Bantam

Summary

Jenny and Amanda Ruth were best friends in a small Alabama town until eighteen-years-old Amanda Ruth was murdered. Now, fourteen years later, Jenny has traveled with her husband to China to scatter Amanda Ruth's ashes and finally fulfill her friend's dream of visiting her Chinese father's homeland. It's also, Jenny hopes, an opportunity to repair her own troubled marriage. But as she journeys through a foreign landscape, the guilty secrets of Jenny's past rise up and her life will be inexorably altered. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog ("Highly recommended [for fans of] authors like Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard" -Library Journal, starred review) and No One You Know ("Luminous . . . will keep you thinking long after the last page has been turned"-Family Circle), Michelle Richmond's stunning novel captivates with its depiction of the powerful intimacies of marriage, friendship, and family that shape our paths and the bonds of home that buoy us-wherever home may be.

Author Biography

Michelle Richmond is the author of The Year of Fog, Dream of the Blue Room, and the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.

Excerpts

Chapter One




In the dream Amanda Ruth is not dead, she is only sleeping. We are lying under a sycamore tree beside a rugged mountain path. The grass around us is littered with the pits of fruits we have eaten: peaches and figs, plums and nectarines. Her fingers are still wet from our feast. In the cool mountain light, they glisten. So elegantly she sleeps, one leg bent slightly beneath her, one arm flung wide on the grass.

I slide the strap of her sundress off her smooth brown shoulder. She does not stir. All down the front of her dress are small blue buttons. I undo them one by one, careful not to wake her. A fine rain begins to fall. I feel her fingers in my hair and discover that she is awake, smiling, watching me.

"You look different," I say. "Older."

"Yes. Thirty-two, now."

"But I thought you had died."

"Died?" she says. "What do you mean?"

I tell her never-mind. I tell her it was only a dream. She asks me to describe it. I say, "You were dead. You'd been dead for a long time. I missed you terribly. I went to China to find you."

"No," she says. "You went to China to lose me."

"That's right. To let go of you. But now it doesn't matter."

The wind rustles the tree above us; raindrops are slapping the leaves, the sound getting increasingly louder. Soon, the drops will work their way down through the branches and begin to fall on us.

"You went to China?"

"Yes."

"And what did you see?"

"Well," I close my eyes, trying to remember, trying to come up with some answer, some truth that will satisfy her.

"Was it wonderful?"

"Yes," I want to say. I want to tell her that China is everything she dreamt it would be, a strange but familiar place. I want to tell her that I finally lived up to my promise, and we have been to the center of the earth together. But then the rain stops, the mountains disappear, and Amanda Ruth is gone.

Chapter Two


The shellac is smooth beneath my fingers, rising slightly over the photos, a random Braille I know by heart. Amanda Ruth would have laughed at it, her mother's lack of good taste, the collage of photographs she carefully cut and arranged on the round cookie tin: Amanda Ruth as a baby, wrapped in her proud father's arms; Amanda Ruth in her majorette's costume with gold piping at the shoulders; Amanda Ruth sitting on the narrow bed in her dorm room at Montevallo. I hold the tin in my lap and recline on a deck chair. Its metal seat is wet from the spray.

My husband, Dave, is down in our cabin sleeping. He does the sleeping for both of us. I do the staying awake. I am an insomniac of the old order. I spend long nights waiting for my mind to snap shut, mornings bent over the coffeepot, hands shaking from exhaustion and caffeine. I haven't slept since we left New York two days ago.

It is five past midnight. Muddled voices drift up from the lounge. Lights glimmer along the riverbank. There is the cool dark drift of the Yangtze, the smell of something not quite clean. I feel a welcome heaviness approaching, a soft weight pushing against my eyes. I dream of water, a white body drifting naked upon it. I extend my arm and bring the body toward me, look into the round wet face of Amanda Ruth. She opens her eyes, takes my hand and stands; we are on land now, walking, the jagged pebbles of the riverbank cutting into our bare feet. Amanda Ruth is eager to show me something. We walk for many hours, coming at last upon the mouth of a cave. The entrance to the cave is thick with growing things.

When I wake, it feels as though I have slept for a long time. I lift my watch to catch the moonlight, scan its small silver face.

"Twelve forty-five," a voice says. Startled, I turn to see a man sitting a couple of feet away. He is long and slim and gray-headed, with a broad, handsome face and thick eyebrows. He looks to be in his early fifties, alt

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Excerpted from Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond
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