Chapter Six #2
That observation put Ruby back on solid ground. “And who’s fault is that? I’m not the one who walked out.”
He stared down at her, gave her the kind of look she’d seen time and time again in her life.
Oh, good, she thought, now I’m disappointing total strangers.
“No, you’re not,” he said evenly, “and you’re not sixteen anymore, either.”
Ruby should have rented a bigger car. Like maybe a Hummer or a Winnebago.
This minivan was too small for her and Nora. They were trapped in side-by-side front seats. With the windows rolled up, there seemed to be no air left to breathe, and nothing to do but talk.
Ruby cranked up the radio.
Celine Dion’s pure, vibrant voice filled the car, something about love coming to those who believed.
“Do you think you could turn that down?” Nora said. “I’m getting a headache.”
Ruby’s gaze flicked sideways. Nora looked tired; her skin, normally pale, now appeared to have the translucence of bone china.
Tiny blue veins webbed the sunken flesh at her temples.
She turned to Ruby and attempted a smile, but in truth, her mouth barely trembled before she closed her eyes and leaned against the window.
Fragile.
Ruby couldn’t wrap her arms around that thought.
It was too alien from her own experience.
Her mother had always been made of steel.
Even as a young girl, Ruby had known her mother’s strength.
The other kids in her class were afraid of their fathers when report cards came out.
Not the Bridge girls. They lived in fear of disappointing their mother.
Not that she ever punished them particularly, or yelled or screamed. No, it was worse than that.
I’m disappointed in you, Ruby Elizabeth . . . life isn’t kind to women who take the easy road.
Ruby had never known what the easy road was, exactly, or where it led, but she knew it was a bad thing. Almost as bad as “fooling yourself”—another thing Nora wouldn’t abide.
The truth doesn’t go away just because you shut your eyes had been another of her mother’s favorite sayings.
Of course, those had been the “before” days. Afterward, no one in the family cared much about disappointing Nora Bridge. In fact, Ruby had gone out of her way to do just that.
“Ruby? The music?”
Ruby snapped the radio off. The metronomic whoosh-thump, whoosh-thump of the windshield wipers filled the sudden silence.
Only a few miles from downtown Seattle, the gray city gave way to a sprawling collection of squat, flat-topped strip malls.
A few miles more and they were in farming land.
Rolling, tree-shrouded hills and lush green pastures fanned out on either side of the freeway.
The white ice-cream dome of Mount Baker sat on a layer of fog above the flat farmland.
Ruby actually sped up as they drove through the sleepy town of Mount Vernon; she was afraid her mother would say something intimate, like Remember how we used to bicycle through the tulip fields at festival time?
But when she glanced sideways, she saw that Nora was asleep.
Ruby breathed a sigh of relief and eased off the accelerator. It felt good to drive the rest of the way without wondering if she was being watched.
At Anacortes, the tiny seaside town perched at the water’s edge, she bought a one-way ferry ticket and pulled into line. It was still early in the tourist season; two weeks from now the wait for this ferry could well be five hours.
Less than a half hour later, a ferry docked, sounded its mournful horn, and unloaded its cargo of cars and bikes and walk-on passengers.
Then, an orange-vested attendant directed Ruby’s car to the bow, where she parked and set the emergency brake.
First car in lane two, a primo spot. The gaping, oval mouth of the ferry was a giant, glassless window that framed the view.
The Sound was rainy-day flat, studded by the ceaseless rain into a sheet of hammered tin. Watery gray skies melted into the sea, the line between them a smudge of charcoal, thin as eyeliner. Puppy-faced gray seals crawled over one another to find a comfortable perch on the swaying red harbor buoy.
Ruby got out of the car and went upstairs. After buying a latte at the lunch counter, she walked out onto the deck.
No one was out here now. The rain had diminished to little more than a heavy mist. Moisture beaded the handrails and slickened the decks.
A long, single blast of the boat’s horn announced their departure.
Ruby slid her fingers along the wet handrail, holding on, shivering at a sudden burst of cold. A few brave seagulls hung in the air in front of her, wings outstretched, motionless, riding a current of air. They cawed loudly, begging for scraps.
Lush green islands dotted the tinfoil sea, their carved granite coastlines a stark contrast to the flat silver water.
Polished red madrona trees slanted out from the shore, their roots clinging tenaciously to a thin layer of topsoil.
Houses were scattered here and there but, for the most part, the islands looked empty.
She closed her eyes, breathing in the salty, familiar sea air. In eighth grade, she’d started taking the ferry to school at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island; memories of high school were inextricably linked with this boat . . .
She and Dean had always stood together at just this spot, right at the bow, even when it was raining.
Dean.
It was strange that she hadn’t thought of him right away.
Well, perhaps not so strange. It had been more than a decade since she’d seen him, and still it hurt to remember him.
After her mother had left, Ruby hadn’t thought it was possible to hurt more. Dean had taught her that the human heart always made room for pain.
She still thought of him now and then. Sometimes, when she woke in the middle of a hot, lonely night and found that her cheeks were slicked and wet, she knew she’d been dreaming of him.
She knew from Caroline (who knew from Nora) that he’d followed in his mother’s footsteps after all, that he was running the empire now. Ruby had always known that he would.
At last, the ferry turned toward Summer Island. The horn sounded, and the captain came on the loudspeaker, urging passengers to return to their vehicles.
Ruby raced downstairs and jumped into the minivan.
The captain cut the engine and the boat drifted toward the rickety black dock. A weatherbeaten sign—it had been old when Ruby was a child—hung at a cockeyed angle from the nearest piling. It read SUMMER ISLAND WELCOMES YOU.
A woman walked out of the closet-size terminal building and stood watching the ferry float toward her.
She was wearing a floor-length brown dress with neither collar nor cuffs.
An ornate silver crucifix hung from a thick chain around her neck.
Waving at the few walk-on passengers clustered at the bow’s railing, she dragged a tattered, wrist-thick length of rope across the dock and tied the boat down.
“Oh, Lord,” Nora said, blinking awake, “is that Sister Helen?”
Ruby couldn’t believe it herself. The nuns had always run the ferry traffic on Summer Island, but it was still a shock to see that nothing had changed. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
Nora sighed. It was a tired sound, as if maybe she wondered if changelessness were a good thing. Or maybe, like Ruby, she had just realized how it would feel to be here again, at the site of so much heartache.
Ruby drove off the ferry, past the post office and general store.
What struck her first was the total lack of meaningful change.
She felt as if she’d just taken a boat ride back in time.
Here, on Summer Island, it was still 1985.
If she turned on the radio, it would probably be Cyndi Lauper or Rick Springfield . . .
This was why she’d stayed away.
The road turned, climbed up a short hill, then flowed down into a rolling green valley.
To her left, the land was a Monet painting, all golden grass and green trees and washed-out silvery skies.
To her right lay Bottleneck Bay, and beyond that was the forested green hump of Shaw Island.
Weathered gray fishing boats sat keeled on the pebbly beach, forgotten by their owners more than a generation ago.
A few sleek sailboats—mostly owned by the few Californians brave enough to purchase a summer home on this too-quiet island where drinking water was never guaranteed and power came and went with the wind—bobbed idly in the gently swelling sea.
There were only a few farmhouses visible from the road. The island boasted five thousand acres, but only one hundred year-round residents. Even in the summer, when mainlanders swarmed to their island vacation homes, Summer Island had fewer than three hundred residents.
It was as different from California as a place could be. Here, hip-hop was the way a rabbit moved, and a drive-by meant stopping to say hello to your neighbor on your way to town.
Nora looked out the rain-dappled window. Her head made a thumping sound as she rested it against the glass. The lines around her mouth were deeply etched, heavy enough to weigh her lips into a frown. “When I first came here . . . no, that doesn’t matter now . . .”
Ruby approached the beach road. Instead of turning, she eased her foot off the gas and coasted to a stop. Her mother’s half sentence had implied . . . secrets . . . things unspoken, and Ruby didn’t like it.
Fifteen years, Dr. Allbright had said. He’d been treating Nora for fifteen years . . . yet none of them had known it.
“What were you going to say?”
Nora’s laughter was a fluttery thing, a bit of spun sugar. “Nothing.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. Why had she even bothered? “Whatever.”