Blue Lady

That winter, when we lit the first fire in our new house, the smoke that filled the room was a soft bluish-grey, the color of my mother’s eyes. Don’t worry, my father said, waving his arms, just a problem with the flue. But as we stacked our books on the shelves, shoved furniture into corners with our hips, and arranged our photographs on the end tables, everywhere we touched the walls, a blue streak appeared. Not a problem, my father said. Cheap paint. He piled us in the car to go to Home Depot.

To paint the walls, our mother dressed us in smocks, old blue dress shirts that buttoned up to our necks and hung past our knees. We rolled the house white again, as white as the clouds snagged in the branches of our trees. The morning after we finished the living room, my sister saw the lady in the blue dress. She stood over my sister’s bed, hands where her hips should be, telling her it was a snow day, she could sleep in. Don’t you know a dream when you have one? My father yelled from the bottom of the stairs. My mother climbed under the covers with my sister, telling her it was okay, sometimes the things we saw in dreams were real enough.

When we whined that the yard was too cold to play, our mother gave us a big box of crayons to play with in our room. The next morning, I saw the blue lady sitting at my desk, reading the names of the blues—Pacific Blue, Cerulean, Denim, Aquamarine, Periwinkle, Wild Blue Yonder. That afternoon, my sister and I drew lakes and oceans and reefs and bright blue skies. We drew so many that when our mother taped them to our refrigerator it looked like a waterfall.

By spring, my father had started keeping a container of white paint in the kitchen because scrapes on the baseboards and doorframes always revealed slashes of slate blue. He accused us of being clumsy, banging into walls, but my mother said it was the blue lady roaming the house at night. My father yelled for us to stop it! We giggled into our sleeves even though the clouds in Mother’s eyes turned to rainy day blue.

When the moss on our house’s roof turned teal to turquoise, my father stood on a ladder pouring vinegar on the shingles. My sister and I said it was the blue lady at work again. My father shook the empty bottle and said we’d all gone mad. My mother stretched her arms into a sweatshirt the color of robins’ eggs. She got in the car and drove away as my father threw clumps of blue moss into the yard.

When our front door broke off its hinges, we clapped our hands and said, Can our new door be blue? My father grunted and said, blue is for boys! Aren’t you supposed be obsessed with Barbie? But we loved blue more and more. We decorated our rooms in powder blue and turquoise. We begged our mother to buy us jeans in every shade of blue. We ate blueberries by the fistful. At school we tucked our chins into navy turtlenecks, stretching them up over our noses to darken the blue of our eyes. Even our mother had started wearing blue eyeliner and painting her toenails French blue. And every night, we waited for the blue lady to appear.

In May, my mother discovered a single sapphire blue dinner plate under the rafters in the attic. It’s the blue lady’s! My sister and I squealed. My mother washed the plate so clean we could see our reflection, and when we insisted that we put it at the dinner table, my father said, That’s enough! My mother slid her own dinner onto the blue plate and went to eat by herself in the den. This whole household has gone crazy, my father said, but we felt sorry that he had never seen the blue lady because just the night before, we had seen her sorting through the laundry, holding up lost blue socks, telling us how important it was to hold on to things.

By July, the white paint in the house had given way to the blue, deepening every day from baby to sky to azure. The pattern in the rug grew bluer by the day, and the ice in our ice trays turned the blue of old glaciers. Even our mother grew bluer and bluer, the veins in her hands and arms stood out, and the irises of her eyes lost their haze of grey. Sometimes her lips seemed strangled, oxygen-deprived after we had heard her muttering, talking to the blue lady behind closed doors. Our father redoubled his efforts, painting the walls white again, coats so thick the moldings disappeared, the corners grew round, and my sister and I began to worry. Who was the blue lady, anyway? We asked the neighbor: Had the woman who lived here before worn a blue dress? Did anyone remember? But no one did. No one remembered a blue lady. The neighborhood was changing, they said. No one remembered anyone from before at all.

As summer ended, our father began to rip off the siding of the house, saying something had to be rotting underneath, but the old wooden shingles under the white vinyl were the soft cornflower blue of the blue lady’s dress. Our mother laughed, singing, It’s ours, it’s ours, it’s our house after all, and as my father drove away, she told us we could start over and paint it, inside and out, in the colors of our own choosing, lime greens, sunflower yellows, ballerina pinks, eggplant purples, and, of course, a rainbow of blues and indigos—all the colors that sang songs to our hearts and brought life back to our mother’s cheeks.

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