Speak to Me of Home

Chapter Twenty-Three

Palisades, New York, 1999

New Jersey, 1991

When the kids were really small and Thomas was still alive, Ruth occasionally googled Arthur Rodríguez. Not because she wished she had married him instead, and not even because she harbored any harmless fantasies about him, but because she was a frazzled young mother who remembered that she had once loved someone other than her husband, and because the internet was there. This was the first time in human history that an unwashed mother in stained sweatpants with clammy armpits could engage in a kind of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure experience while nursing her child in the middle of the night. She could sit in the glider beside the crib at three in the morning, and she could latch a baby onto her breast, and she could open Facebook and flip the pages back, just a chapter or two, to where she had made one choice. And imagine, just for a few minutes, what her life might be like if she’d made the other.

Arthur was not as handsome as Ruth remembered, which made sense, as they were both older now, but she was startled when she clicked through his older photographs to realize that, even during the years when she’d known him, perhaps his dimples hadn’t been as deep as she’d recalled. Perhaps his chocolate-drop eyes were just some regular brown eyes that she’d romanticized in their degree of meltiness because she’d been young and naive and susceptible to infatuation. Arthur Rodríguez was moderately good-looking, but his wife was very pretty, and he gazed at her adoringly in photographs, which made him seem more attractive again. But then he also appeared to have a model car collection he was weirdly proud of, which brought her back to square one. Ruth studied the small Porsches and Mustangs and Corvettes with her mouth hanging slightly open and tried to reconcile her bewilderment. Had she dodged an Arthur-shaped bullet? No, this was endearing, she decided.

Arthur and his wife had a baby of their own, so perhaps his wife was also sitting in a rocking chair somewhere, nursing that baby, and scrolling idly through Facebook, feeling baffled by old boyfriends. Ruth knew that her life would not have been better with Arthur, and not only because he was maybe less dreamy than she’d made him out to be, and also not only because a different husband wouldn’t change the fact that she would still have stained sweatpants and clammy armpits and a baby who needed feeding at three in the morning. But mostly because her life could not have been better with anyone than it was with Thomas. Because, despite the fact that he pretended to be inept at packing the diaper bag so she always had to do it, despite the way he left a heap of crumbs beside the toaster every single morning, and despite the fact that he’d been the safer, more logical choice, he was also, in the end, the choice her heart had made, and was still making. She loved him. She loved this life, even when she fell asleep in the glider and woke up to find her nipple shriveled by cold air, and her milk-drunk baby fast asleep with his mouth open.

In college, after they finally, finally met on that autumn afternoon at Gus’s Pro Photo in Wodsley, Ruth didn’t start dating Arthur Rodríguez right away. They were friends first, and initially, the thrill of being his friend was almost more than Ruth could handle all by itself. Then they became best friends, the kind of friends that can only happen in college. They started hanging out together every day, shopping together, eating their meals together.

Once their friendship was fully established, she stopped being unceasingly distracted by his hotness, so they began studying not-quite-together, but near each other. He was studious, which Ruth found contagious. In between chapters and essays, he would tell her about the girls he liked, even though he didn’t like any of them enough to turn the plural into the singular, and Ruth would tell him about Thomas, how cute and interesting he was, how hard they laughed when they were together, and how refreshing it was that they enjoyed each other so much without rushing headlong into a commitment.

Thomas was three years older than them, which at that age seemed like an enormous gap. He was independent, never jealous, entirely self-possessed. Thomas was in graduate school, and didn’t have time for nonsense. Thomas had a car and a paid internship and seemed like a man of the world, despite the fact that he still, on occasion and despite Ruth’s influence, showed up with his T-shirt tucked into his jeans.

“So are you guys, like, boyfriend and girlfriend now or what?” Arthur asked.

They were sitting across the room from each other in the study lounge in Arthur’s dorm because the one in Ruth’s dorm was always full of girls who did handstands and push-ups and jumping jacks while they quizzed one another out loud. This lounge was usually empty except for Arthur and Ruth, so they spread out. They each took a whole table and bench to themselves, and when Ruth needed a break, she would lie down on the bench. When she yawned, she could do so very loudly without disturbing anyone but him.

“I don’t know,” Ruth said. “I feel like Thomas is pretty serious about me.” She propped her elbows on the tabletop and focused her gaze on the paper clip she was mutilating. “But we haven’t really talked about it. And I don’t know if I’m ready for all that.”

“You think he is?”

Ruth shrugged. “I mean, he is older. Seems like his partying days are behind him.”

Arthur gave her a skeptical look. “Let’s be honest, Ruth, do we think this guy ever had partying days?”

Ruth laughed. “Maybe not.”

“Yeah.”

“Do people still ask each other to be boyfriend and girlfriend?” Ruth said. “Is that a thing, to have a big conversation about it? Or is it just assumed?”

Arthur shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Do any of the girls you date ever ask to be your girlfriend?” she said.

“Hell no,” he said. “But obviously I discourage that kind of behavior anyway.”

Ruth laughed. “But maybe one of them could sneak-attack you and blurt it out when you’re unprepared.”

“Nah, I’m not that desirable,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

When Ruth laughed harder than she meant to, he grinned at her with his dimples and his teeth.

“Besides, it’s super easy to make a girl stop talking as soon as she says something you don’t want to hear,” Arthur said, clicking the button on his ballpoint pen.

“Oh, really.” She sat up from the bench where she’d been stretched out.

“Yeah.” Click click. “You just put your mouth on her mouth.”

Ruth held herself very still because if she controlled her breathing, then maybe her face wouldn’t flush, and if her face didn’t flush, maybe he wouldn’t see whose mouths she accidentally pictured when he said your mouth on her mouth . She could feel her heartbeat at the base of her throat.

“Good God, you’re a mess, man,” she croaked out with a laugh.

“It’s true,” Arthur sighed. “I’m glad at least one of us has our shit together in the romance department. Even if he’s not your boyfriend.”

She smiled, thinking infinitely safer thoughts of funny, kind, smitten Thomas, who stared at her so intensely it sometimes made her eyes water, who always seemed to be aware of her grief, even when Ruth didn’t say Titi Lola’s name out loud. Thomas, who believed his attendance at weekly mass was in no way incompatible with his dazzling catalog of curse words. Sure, that’s just being Irish , he would say, and Ruth wondered what liberation it must be, to know with such conviction that you could attribute your eccentricities to a single, uncomplicated origin.

“Would you ever want to move back there?” she’d asked Thomas on their fourth date, and his face had gone uncharacteristically still while he composed the breath to explain to her why, no, he would never move back to Ireland. That was the night he told her that his mother had died when he was twelve, and his father had more or less ceased to function as a parent around the same time. So Thomas had already had this life in mind for a decade or more: a faraway place, a solid education, a beautiful girl, a future less bleak than the past.

Ruth had suppressed her impulse to cry when Thomas shared all of this, but it was a battle not easily won. The result was an immediately deepened intimacy between them, a new lens through which Ruth now considered Thomas perhaps the most compelling person she’d ever met. She admired the way he carried his sadness, neither burying it nor indulging it. He lived well with his grief and turned himself toward happiness as a daily practice. On the days when Lola’s absence tormented her, when Ruth walked through the hours with the creaking fragility of a glass figurine, she strived to be more like Thomas, to carry herself like he did, to live happily within the limitations of her sorrow. On those days, he made her laugh, he made her pepperoni pizza from scratch, he gave her the gift of his quiet presence as a barrier against loneliness. Ruth fell for him by inches and hours and, on some days, by galloping light-years. The only time she wasn’t thinking about him was when she was thinking about Arthur.

“I mean, I guess Thomas might be my boyfriend.” She shrugged, warming to the idea. She was playing with her highlighters now, standing them up like a colorful army, arranging them in rainbow order. “You wanna meet him?” she asked.

“Nope.” Arthur surprised her by answering quickly. “No thanks, no need to go that far.”

She tried knocking the highlighters down like dominoes, but only the first two fell. “Why not?”

“Do I want to meet the dude who’s romancing my girl?” he said.

My girl . Again, she tried the trick of stillness. And again, she felt confident it didn’t work. But for once, she did not say anything goofy or regrettable. She did not pretend to engross herself in some other task in order to divert him to an exit ramp. And in fact, beneath the tension, she recognized a new feeling: irritation with Arthur, because she did not want to imperil the giddy possibility of Thomas on the whim of this dimpled boy. She had no interest in belonging to a cadre of besotted girls. Ruth had to figure this out, to disarm it, whatever it was. She looked at her friend evenly, and Arthur met her gaze across the span of the quiet room. There was one empty table between them, and Ruth refused to indulge the image of herself sprawled across that table, flat on her back. She knew what his skin felt like now because she had touched him in the various ways best friends touch each other. She had grabbed his elbow, slung an arm around his shoulder, hugged him. He’d given her a piggyback one time when she wore new shoes and got a blister on her heel. Once, she’d run her hand along the soft fuzz at the back of his head after a haircut. Velvet.

So she already knew what his body felt like in these ways, and there was no need to imagine the feel of his shoulder blades beneath her hands as well. No good reason to do it. But he called her my girl and then looked straight at her with those chocolate-drop eyes, and the air in the room was absolutely dripping with it. She didn’t imagine it. She knew he felt it too.

Ruth held perfectly still until it passed.

The plan for Arthur to help Ruth practice her Spanish never came to fruition because Ruth was too ashamed of the decrepit state of her first language. At the beginning, he tried speaking to her in Spanish, but she always answered in English, and sometimes he even had to repeat himself slowly when she didn’t understand, and then before they knew it, their English habits were entrenched and there was no going back. He invited her, often and enthusiastically, to come with him to Boricua House events, but Ruth always declined for two reasons: One, she didn’t need it. All the yearning she’d experienced before, to meet people who understood this part of her, had been satisfied by Arthur. And two, she was terrified. She and Arthur had only known each other seven weeks, and already he was the best friend she’d ever had outside her family. Better than Jennifer and Kathy put together. Better than Jenny, even. Ruth was terrified that if Arthur observed her in that Boricua House environment, he’d identify something fraudulent, whatever it was those girls had seen the first day she’d tried to walk in there seeking friendship. He would change his mind about her.

When they were alone together, Ruth didn’t worry about any of that. When they shared stories about their families and childhoods, there was an exhilarating shorthand between them, feelings no one else except Benny had ever understood. All her life, Ruth had been searching for the means to articulate her experiences, and now she didn’t need to. With Arthur, she could rest and know that he understood. She didn’t mind the desert-island quality of their friendship. Ruth was accustomed to some degree of isolation.

Now it was week eight of their friendship, the week before Thanksgiving break when Mama would come visit her on campus and take Ruth out for Thanksgiving dinner to a local Spanish restaurant and then announce over the pumpkin flan that, in the wake of Lola’s death, she’d finally done what she should’ve done years ago: she’d put the St. Louis house on the market. But now with Lola gone, Mama couldn’t bear the thought of going back to Puerto Rico alone, not even with Benny there, so she was looking at property here in New Jersey instead, in nearby Montclair. This eventuality thrilled Ruth, though she was loath to admit this to Mama, who, Ruth now realized, was definitely and pathetically her best friend in the world besides Arthur. Well, during that week eight, Arthur invited her to the Boricua House annual dance. Perhaps invited was not the right word.

“You’re coming with me,” he said. “Period.”

“I don’t have anything to wear,” she tried.

“You don’t have to get dressed up, it’s not like that. You can wear jeans, Timberlands, whatever you want. And they’ll have a DJ and some dope food and it’s so fun . It will be awesome.”

They were walking across the quad on a Sunday afternoon when he said this. The dance was two days from now, the night before the break. The sky was lodged above them, the color of slate, the color of autumn. Ruth felt like crying.

“I don’t know how to salsa,” Ruth said. She did, but only with Mama, only barefoot on Titi Lola’s balcony in Luquillo, a memory that brought her ever closer to tears.

“I’ll teach you,” Arthur said.

She stopped abruptly and sat down on a passing bench. She was wearing a light jacket and her backpack because they were headed to the library to return some books. He sat down beside her and they both leaned their elbows on their knees.

“I get that you’re nervous.” His voice was soft, coaxing. “Help me understand.”

She shivered, even though it wasn’t cold. She felt like a recalcitrant child, but there was no way she could say the words that were beginning to form in her mind. They felt hazy, as if they were spelled out in a scattering of seeds, and she might make the choice just to blow across them and send them flying. I’ve never had a Puerto Rican friend before . I don’t know how to do community. I don’t know who I am outside my family. Troubling realizations all. She was embarrassed.

“You’re worried about, what, about getting rejected?”

That was partly it.

“You worried you won’t fit in?” he prompted.

It was both a salve and an irritation, the way he so often knew her thoughts before she said them, her feelings before she felt them.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Give yourself a chance.” He nudged her knee with his knee.

“Did I ever tell you about the first time I went in there? The only time I went in there?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “That sucks, it does. I’m sorry that happened to you. But you can’t let one bad experience ruin the opportunity to be part of something so amazing, something you’ve never had before.”

She tucked her lips inside her mouth and rubbed them against each other. She sat up straighter and blew out a big breath as a happy couple strolled past them holding hands.

“I don’t know, I guess nobody wants to be rejected twice, right?”

“Yeah, but that was just one girl,” he said.

“It was two girls. The only two girls who were there.”

“Okay, two girls. But still. It wasn’t everybody.”

“It was literally everybody who was there that day! And they called me blanquita .”

A word Papamío had once called her in affection, now a slur. It was a word that described a thing about herself that was both true and not true, and that Ruth was powerless to affect in any case: her whiteness. Ruth hadn’t changed, but the value of that word had, the world had, and Ruth felt the pointed end of it where it lodged in her skin, the color of which was arguably white and arguably not white, depending on who you asked. No one ever asked Ruth herself.

“That was horrible,” he said. “So don’t let them win. Show ’em who you are.”

“Who am I, though?” She reached for a laugh.

“You have to come,” he said. “It’ll be great, you’ll see. You’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. You’ll be so pissed you let one mean girl rob two years from you.”

“Two mean girls,” she said, but when she looked at him, she knew he’d won. He bumped his shoulder against hers and then tucked her whole body under his arm. “It’s gonna be so fun!”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said.

“I am.” He grinned.

Maybe it would be fine.

Ruth would never be able to say for certain whether it was the same girl who had (not) greeted her that day at the (un)welcome desk, because more than two years had elapsed, and in any case, Ruth had done her level best to eradicate the details of that memory from her brain. It’s possible the girl at the dance just inspired such an identical feeling in Ruth that she had conflated them into one awful person. But in any case, the moment Arthur held open the door for her and she walked through it into the party room the Boricua House had reserved in the student union, there she stood, not ten feet away, giving Ruth a whole up-and-down swoop of eternal judgment. Ruth froze, of course, certain she’d made a mistake in coming here. But Arthur moved in behind her, put his hand on the small of her back.

“Gimme a sec,” he whispered.

And then Arthur stepped past her, between Ruth and the girl. And her beloved Arthur hugged this loathsome person, who was still glaring at Ruth over his shoulder. Arthur whispered something in the girl’s ear, and then all the shapes of her face melted in Ruth’s direction. Arthur took the girl by the hand and pulled her over to Ruth.

“Ruth, meet Danielle,” he said. “Danielle, this is my best friend, Ruth.”

And despite everything, Ruth felt proud when he said best friend. She stuck her hand out to Danielle, but Danielle shocked her by stepping right past the outstretched hand and embracing her instead. “So nice to meet you, finally!” Danielle squealed. “I’m so glad you came, it’s going to be such a fun night!”

Ruth’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. Arthur elbowed her in the ribs, and then her voice emerged.

“Yes,” she struggled to say. “Nice to meet you too.”

“Any requests for the DJ?” She raised her eyebrows and grinned.

“Nah, not yet,” Arthur said.

“Ruth?” Danielle grasped both of Ruth’s hands in hers. She squeezed them, and Ruth didn’t know how to disentangle herself from the dubious clutch of Danielle’s sudden affections, but she felt certain the DJ question was a test. So she allowed a long moment to pass while she flipped through Mama’s entire record collection in her mind.

“Anything by Willie Colón.”

“Girl, yes!” Danielle said. But when she added “?Wepa!” Ruth couldn’t say why, but she felt sure the girl was making fun of her.

Danielle spun away, headed across the dance floor to the DJ booth, and Ruth leaned in to Arthur’s ear. “What did you say to her?”

He stood up straight and looked her in the face. “What do you mean?” All innocent.

“When we walked in,” Ruth said. “She was giving me such a dirty look, and then you talked to her, and all of a sudden she’s my best friend.”

Arthur laughed at Ruth’s air quotes around best friend .

“I just told her you were all right,” he said.

She looked closely at his face. “That’s it?”

“And I told her you’re Puerto Rican.”

“Ah,” Ruth said, but it rankled her, that Arthur had to vouch for her, had to present her bona fides. And it rankled her that, before Danielle knew she was Puerto Rican, she’d been so determined to make her feel unwelcome. And it had worked. Ruth had felt it down the back of her neck.

“Listen, these girls are sweethearts,” he said. “I’ve known them all since freshman year. But they’re protective, you know?”

The disco ball was spinning colors across the dance floor, and Ruth followed the lights with her eyes.

“What do you mean protective ? Like, of you?”

“No, I mean. Yeah, maybe. But more, they’re just protective of each other, you know? Of this community.”

This community where I don’t belong , Ruth thought.

“You’ll understand when you get to know them.”

“But how is anyone supposed to get to know them ,” (air quotes again) “if that’s their standard greeting?”

Ruth and Arthur were skirting the dance floor while they talked, and now they had arrived at the drinks table, where Arthur snagged a plastic cup for each of them filled with something bright pink with a scent of artificial fruit.

“You have to understand where they’re coming from. Most of them grew up here, they’re from New Jersey or New York, right? And they’re tight. It’s a tight community. But a lot of them have never even been to Puerto Rico. They’re a hundred percent Puerto Rican, both parents, all four grandparents, whatever.” He sipped from his little red straw. “To people here in New Jersey? They’re Puerto Rican. But then Danielle went down there for the first time last summer, to Ponce, and stayed with her Mom’s cousin and her whole big-ass family, and she expected a warm welcome, like she was going to have a transformative homecoming experience or some shit.”

“And?”

“And she got there and they treated her like garbage. They made fun of her accent. They told her Nuyoricans are a whole different breed.”

“Oh.” Ruth looked across the dance floor to where Danielle was stretched up on tiptoe, shouting up to the DJ, and her heart softened. But not enough.

So we are the same , Ruth thought. How unexpected. There should be a kinship between them, but instead, there was this. Ruth found that the new information, and the empathy it opened in her, made her feel even more annoyed on the back end.

“So then she should understand what it’s like!” Ruth said.

“You’re right, she should,” Arthur said.

“And she should be nicer.”

“A hundred percent.”

Ruth bored her eyes into his, but she did not ask why he chose to be friends with such a bitch (it was 1991, and she still used the word bitch then, to describe girls who were mean to her) because she knew how that sounded, and after all, she was not Arthur’s girlfriend. In fact, she might even be Thomas’s. Ruth was swamped with longing for Thomas in that moment. The safe, simple way he adored her. The uncomplicated lines of their romance. There was nothing muddy between them, nothing that sounded a note of fear or loss. With Thomas, she was just happy. Herself.

“I think she might have a little thing for me,” Arthur confessed then, above the increasing volume of El Gran Combo.

“Well, of course she does,” Ruth said, sipping from her own skinny red straw.

Perhaps the reason for the animosity had nothing to do with anything else, Ruth thought. Wouldn’t that be refreshing, if it was just the obvious thing? Ruth had arrived with the cutest boy on campus. Of course she’d find all manner of weaponry aimed in her direction.

“So then, if you want me to make friends with them,” she said, “maybe all you need to do is let them know I’m not their competition.” It was impossible not to notice the way various girls pretended not to glance at him from different corners of the room.

“Yeah. Good point,” he said, finishing his drink.

Except later that night, on the way back to Ruth’s dorm room, after he’d danced with her all night, and of course he was a great dancer (which reminded Ruth that in fact she could salsa, rather well actually, not to mention merengue, samba, and bachata), Arthur hit the emergency stop button in the elevator in her building. And then he backed her against the wall, and when he pressed his body against hers, and all the scent of him lit her up like a torch, and his tongue tasted like a maraschino cherry, it was exactly like Ruth had always known it would be.

She wasn’t proud of the way it all happened, but Ruth told herself that she and Thomas had no agreement to be exclusive, even though she knew with relative certainty that he wasn’t seeing anyone else, and that he likely believed she wasn’t either. Ruth didn’t want to stop seeing Thomas, even as her relationship with Arthur intensified, even as he suggested that she break it off with her other man. Arthur was cool about it. He didn’t make demands. But even then, some quiet corner of her mind was whispering that maybe she loved Arthur for all the little gaps in her that he filled up, all the longed-for answers he provided, and because he was incredibly hot. And maybe that wasn’t enough of a reason to really fall in love with a person.

Still, her feelings for Arthur were explosive, so it surprised her how tightly she clung to Thomas. The notion of breaking up with him made her feel sick with a low-grade panic; her every instinct was to cleave to him. Even as she fell in love with Arthur bit by bit, she realized in horror that she was also already in love with Thomas. More than a bit. And none of that had anything to do with similar childhoods or simple lust. Thomas could deliver her to hysterical laughter without uttering a single word. She felt smarter and safer and less worried whenever she was with him. When she was ready, Ruth knew she could reveal every unattractive piece of herself to Thomas, and those flaws would only endear her to him. Thomas hadn’t yet said I love you , but Ruth already knew that he did, and what’s more, she knew it was a feeling so deep and true that it could survive the ordeal of her future vulnerability. But she wasn’t ready.

On the last Friday night in January, Ruth, who had definitely used the word slut before to describe girls in similar predicaments, feigned a headache and opted to stay home alone, rather than going out with either Thomas or Arthur. She bought a phone card in the student union and, from her dorm room, called Benny at home in San Juan. He’d gone back three and a half years ago, and if Ruth had any initial misgivings about her brother returning to Puerto Rico, the final remnants of those reservations had been dispelled during the week of Lola’s funeral. Benny knew where he belonged, and he’d made it happen. Everything about him had expanded and settled once he took his place back home in San Juan, so Ruth’s envy was overshadowed by admiration.

“How are Mamamía and Papamío doing?” she asked.

The silence on the long-distance phone line was never really silent. It crackled and hummed.

“Ah,” Benny exhaled. “You know. Bien y bien mal.” Good and terrible. “Mamamía keeps a smile on her face, food on the table. But she used to hum when she ironed Papamío’s shirts.”

Ruth wished she could take some further measure of their suffering and fold it into her own, distribute the collective load of their grief so it might weigh evenly across all of their shoulders. She felt tears gathering in her throat, but they felt selfish, so she washed them down with a sip of tea.

“You still dating that girl Pamela?” she changed the subject.

“Yeah,” he said. “Ruthie, she’s really great.”

She smiled.

“What about you?” he asked.

She took another sip of her tea and tried to gather courage. She’d expected him to ask, she’d walked him into the question precisely so she could confess, but now that the moment was here, she was filled with shame, which, again, felt selfish. So she took one deep breath in and then told her brother everything. She spared no reprehensible detail, and Benny didn’t flinch.

“That sounds really hard, Ruth,” he said, without a glimmer of judgment.

His compassion made her feel even guiltier. “I have to figure this out,” she said. “I feel horrible.” There was some security in knowing her confessor was so far away.

“But you’re so young,” Benny said kindly. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not like you’re married. Being heartbroken is part of growing up, think of it that way. Maybe you’re just ushering these guys through a rite of passage.”

Ruth snorted. “I’m sure they’ll be enormously grateful.”

“Well, they should be.”

“Maybe you should come visit,” she said. “And you can pick for me.”

“Hey, that sounds super appealing, but no thanks.” He laughed.

The lightness between them was not enough to temper the tide of Ruth’s misery. She started to cry. She knew this was ridiculous, but she wanted Benny to understand that the situation was causing her real anguish.

“But how can I be in love with two people at once?” she asked.

“Well, you can’t be,” Benny said.

But she knew with every certainty and for the first time in her life that her big brother was wrong.

“There’s only one of them you can’t live without,” he said. “Which one is it?”

It was both.

“I don’t know,” she said wretchedly.

“Then maybe you’re not really in love with either of them.”

He was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Benny was quiet for a long moment then, and Ruth noticed that her tears were flowing so freely her pillow was soaked beneath her. The headache she’d faked earlier was now real, her sinuses corked from all the crying.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.

“You know what I think?” Benny said.

“Hmm.”

“I think the reason this is so hard is that it feels like you have to choose between the two halves of yourself.”

Ruth frowned in her bed beneath the covers. She wanted to reject this theory outright, but she couldn’t.

“You think you’re going to marry one of these guys?”

Ruth didn’t answer. She didn’t deserve to marry either of them. And besides, she was twenty years old, in love with the whole world. Marriage seemed an insane prospect altogether.

“So, let’s say one day you marry one of these guys,” Benny said. “Then you’re going to have Latino babies or you’re going to have Irish babies. So maybe it feels like this is your last chance to be one thing or the other.”

She opened her mouth to say it wasn’t that simple. There were arguments to be made here. She closed her mouth again without making them.

“Think about it. Is it just a coincidence you got yourself tangled up in this mess right after Lola died?”

Ruth sat up in her bed and reached for the box of tissues on her nightstand. She blew her nose.

“Maybe you feel like you’ve just lost this huge connection, this major part of yourself,” Benny said. “So now there’s even more at stake, and you have to choose.”

She could feel her ribs quavering beneath her skin.

“It would be totally understandable if you felt like that, but it’s not true, Ruth. It’s a grief-illusion.”

She flopped back on her pillow and tossed her spent tissue on the floor. “I don’t think it’s the whole story. But maybe that’s part of it. I never thought about it like that before.”

“Well, it’s hard to psychoanalyze yourself when you’re in the middle of it,” he said. “Plus, who has time for self-reflection when you have ten boyfriends?”

“Oh my God, Benny, stop!”

He laughed. “They’re both lucky, that’s the main thing.”

She smiled. “I wish you could meet them. They’re so different.”

“Okay, so then does one of them make you happier?”

Maybe? Ruth shook her head.

“Is it easier to be yourself around one of them?”

Thomas.

This was the first easy answer. Still, she didn’t say it out loud because even as it came to her, simply and quickly, she was aware that there was some hypocrisy in the answer. She hadn’t told Thomas everything; Arthur knew. And of course there was also the fact that, although the relationship with Arthur was more capricious, Ruth liked the ways he stretched her. So she didn’t feel exactly like the person she wanted to be when she was with him, so what? She still liked the person she wanted to be when they were together. And there was a thrill in the striving she wasn’t quite ready to relinquish.

“You just have to be honest with everybody involved,” Benny said. “Starting with yourself.”

Ugh . Benny’s benevolence aside, Ruth hated herself a little bit. That was some honesty to start with.

“I love you, Benny,” she said before they hung up the phone that night. She was sure she had said that to him before, but she couldn’t remember when. “You’re a good big brother.”

“I really am,” he agreed. And then, “Yo también te quiero.”

And she cried all over again, starting from scratch.

In time, Ruth would come clean to Thomas. She’d explain how and when things with Arthur had shifted. Thomas would try to stop her midway through. He’d tell her that whatever he suspected, he didn’t actually want to know, but she would need to unburden herself. And when she did, Thomas would break up with her and leave her bereft but certain, finally, in the way she hadn’t been during those many months when she’d been torn between the two men she eventually came to think of as the two loves of her life. (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Greater and lesser Antilles. Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Mama and Dad.)

Eventually, Ruth would manage to convince Thomas against all hope to take her back. She would do this by taking full responsibility, explaining the theoretical pitfalls of her grief and bisected psychology without making excuses, and then by being incredibly patient while he made her wait. She spent idiotic portions of her paychecks from Gus’s Pro Photo to buy him flowers every week he wasn’t speaking to her. She left them on his doormat or the hood of his car or stuffed into his mailbox without a note. Until finally, after eleven weeks, eleven bouquets, when she showed up at his apartment on a Thursday afternoon with a fistful of purple tulips, he opened the door, and he let her in. Ruth would love Thomas madly, and for the rest of his life, for giving her that second chance.

She would break it off with Arthur, of course, tenderly, but without much sorrow. Even their rousing, bounteous friendship had to go. Arthur would bow out sadly but gracefully, only to reappear with some regularity and try to change her mind, once with a ring, on bended knee. She would briefly imagine herself as Ruth Rodríguez. Of course she would, and the idea would cause her to flush with heat. But then she’d remember the intense heartache of her previous entanglement, and she’d know beyond all doubt that she was supposed to be Ruth Hayes. Not Rodríguez. Hayes.

But her faltering indecision had lasted far too long.

After she and Thomas were married, Arthur mostly stayed away. Eventually, with the exception of those middle-of-the-night internet searches, she seldom even thought of him anymore. When she did, she marveled at herself, couldn’t imagine how she’d ever behaved so appallingly. In time (and The Bachelor notwithstanding), she almost believed what Benny had told her, that being in love with two people at once was an impossibility, nothing more than a grief-illusion.

It didn’t matter anymore anyway. Arthur had played an important role in Ruth’s life. He’d emboldened her to reconcile San Juan Ruth with Missouri Ruth and East Coast Ruth, to merge all three of her disconnected selves into one authentic, self-assured person. He taught her to find friendship in unexpected places, without preconceptions or embarrassment or worry. He ushered her across a threshold she’d failed to traverse alone, and on the far side, she discovered a new way of moving through the world that did not involve hiding anything. Arthur had been her first of many Puerto Rican friends. Her first of many mixed-race friends. He’d been her first real friend. So yes, it had been painful to let him go.

But then they all grew up, Ruth and her not-quite-dueling boyfriends. Whatever had happened in their lives before marriage and children was lightness and folly when compared to the heft and scent of her baby in the crook of one arm. One at a time, her children were born and made a mockery of Ruth’s forgotten heartache. From this vantage point, it seemed ludicrous that she had ever contemplated these future babies with any kind of scrutiny or torment, as if anything about them mattered more than their perfect existence, as if these three babies weren’t exactly the three babies she was destined to have and to mother, no matter what.

And then thirteen years into their family, Thomas died.

After that, Ruth never googled Arthur Rodríguez again.

At her midnight laptop, on the night her eighteen-year-old daughter announced she was moving to San Juan, for the first time in many years, Ruth considered it. What would be the harm in a little escapism, a trip to the other side? She opened Instagram, opened the search function, and typed his name. Her pinky finger hovered over the return key. One second passed. Two. Three.

She swatted the laptop closed.