Blue Light Hours

Blue Light Hours

Blue Light Hours

A Novel

Bruna

Dantas

Lobato

Black Cat

New York

Copyright © 2024 by Bruna Dantas Lobato

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

This book was set in 12-pt. Berling by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: October 2024

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-6377-6

eISBN 978-0-8021-6393-6

Black Cat

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

Para a minha mãe e minha irmã

And for us foreigners

DAUGHTER

1.

I arrived on campus in the middle of the night and dragged my suitcases up the stairs. Though I’d traveled nearly thirty hours from Brazil to get to this remote town in Vermont, I was too excited about all there was to go to sleep. Until morning I wandered through the carpeted halls of my new house, known on campus as the milk carton because of its modern shape and single white gable. I read everyone’s names on the colorful tags taped to the doors, visited the sparkling bathrooms with huge mirrors, tried every cabinet door, and opened the empty fridge in the kitchen downstairs, which smelled new, like food had never been in it.

The rooms in my suite had identical matching pine furniture: a desk, a dresser, a bed, and a chair that rocked back slightly and scuffed the golden hardwood floor. When my suitemates arrived a week later, they covered their rooms with colorful bedspreads, folders, coasters, stickers, and soon they looked very different, one soft with throw pillows and tapestries on the walls, the other hard with crystals and handmade pottery. The scratched hardwood floors disappeared under shag rugs. They both had fridges, microwaves, electric kettles, whiteboards filled with notes hanging on the door, photos in frames and knickknacks on every surface, bits of home they’d brought with them or purchased online. Their rooms looked full of themselves, brimming with patterns, shapes, mementos from their lives.

My own room remained woodsy, with pine in- and outside the large window that looked onto a soccer field lined with trees. In my bags, I’d only been able to bring my journals, my favorite books, my clothes, small bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and a mini bar of soap to get me through the first few days. My mother gave me the red first aid kit she used to keep in her car with pain relievers and Band-Aids, and I stuffed it in my backpack, prepared to brave the world, even if it hurt me.

Even though I had a full-ride scholarship and would work twenty hours a week at the campus mailroom, I couldn’t afford to buy anything that wasn’t immediately useful, only essential things to get me started from the stores listed on my international student orientation packet, Walgreens and AT&T and Walmart one town over: composition notebooks, towels, a hamper, a cheap phone with a keyboard that slid out from under the screen. Besides plain white bedsheets and a pillow, the only thing I bought for the room was a desk lamp: dark blue, with an adjustable neck, a bit of color standing out against all the shades of beige. When my mom called me on Skype from our apartment on the outskirts of Natal, that’s what she saw. The light of that lamp, warm, always shining on me. Later, when it got cold and dark, when the whole sky filled with snow and the white walls of the room went bluish, I cherished that warmth, which I could feel in my skin when I left it on for too long.

At first, we spoke every day, then three or four times a week once classes picked up and I had homework to do. I made my bed, pushed the dirty dishes left on the windowsill into a corner, and put away the clothes draped on the back of my chair ahead of our calls. I turned on my lamp, warm, and sat under the shelter of the lampshade. On my computer, I checked my own image on Photo Booth to make sure that the circles under my eyes didn’t appear too deep, that there was nothing out of place in the background. Then on Skype, through our slow internet connections, my mother asked me what I was up to.

I showed her my new bedsheets, my blank notebooks, my new pens.

You have so much ahead of you, my mother said.

The sun was setting in Natal and cast a sepia tone over her living room.

Enjoy the heat for me, I said.

On the other days, when I didn’t stay in my room as much, I sent her pictures of myself out in the world: holding a basket of apples under an apple tree with my new friend Safia, trying on a puffer coat at the Goodwill, doing my English lit reading outside the library, and letting my legs dangle from the pier on the pond. I smiled in all the pictures. The campus looked beautiful in the fall, red and gold foliage everywhere. When I stepped on the crunchy leaves outside, I nearly forgot all the things I missed.

I nearly forgot, but never fully. Safia handed me her phone so I could take pictures of her for her parents in Pakistan. She smiled with the Green Mountains in the background. I handed her mine so she could do the same for me.

I posed, one hand on my hip, the other keeping my hair from blowing in my face.

Then we sat on a bed of leaves under a maple tree to study each other’s photos, how different we looked in our new clothes and boots in this golden place.

Two dorks in glasses and knockoff UGGs, I said, and she laughed.

Trust me, our parents will love this, Safia said. The knee-length coats, the bright colors, the mountains. It’s exactly how they imagine it.

You look like you’re walking on a yellow brick road, I said.

She said, You look like you live in a postcard.

* * *

During my first couple of weeks on campus, I kept a record of my new experiences in a notebook. Foods I ate for the first time, things I’d never seen before, phrases I didn’t know, words I couldn’t yet pronounce. Hegemony, facetious, Worcestershire. A red barn converted into an academic building, large cups of coffee with straws, blue eggs in a bird’s nest, a deer tick, I was told, crawling up my leg. I carried the notebook in my pocket and scribbled on it unabashedly during class, meals, conversations with friends, in the hopes it would help me capture something about this place. I’d have a fuller picture than what I could show someone through a camera, which would help me remember it later, and would also help me share it with my mother.

But when I read my little notebook, it turned out it mostly contained things like Chipmunks aren’t a cartoon invention! (Why no word for them in Portuguese?), next to a full page listing types of trees: spruce, cedar, cypress, dozens of firs. I stashed it in one of my desk drawers and never opened it again, disappointed it was both too insufficient and too exhaustive. On the one hand, no place could be reduced to a catalogue of foods, plants, rooms. On the other, there were too many things to name, and everything needed a shape, a texture, a color. I understood then that I’d never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw, that I would need as much time for telling as I would need for living.

Still, I tried. I described to her what it felt like to walk through thick fog, to wear wool around my neck, to eat honey barbecue sauce on ribs.

Do you promise me? she asked. Do you promise you’ll come back in one piece?

* * *

Before I realized how long I had been here, it snowed for the first time. I woke up and the soccer field outside my window had disappeared under hills of white powder, blowing in the wind like sand dunes. It was October. The sky was an impenetrable gray, the clouds too thick for sunlight to pierce through. I put on my puffer jacket and ran outside. Snowflakes fell on my hair and coat, tiny intricate stars, and dissolved in my hands when I touched them. I grabbed a handful of snow off a car’s windshield, hoping to turn it into a ball, and it fell through my fingers, shapeless, weightless, numbing. Water seeped through my boots and socks and my toes started to go stiff. I headed back inside, giddy despite the cold, and my glasses fogged up.

I called my mother to show her the snow softly falling outside.

It’s snowing! I screamed.

She found it soothing, though it was maybe too light to appear on camera.

That’s the soccer field, I said, pointing out the window.