Chapter Nineteen
Ruby retreated to her bedroom.
I’d wake up, lying on the kitchen floor, with huge chunks of my day gone. I don’t know if you can understand that kind of depression.
Mom must have been so afraid, so alone . . .
Ruby knew how it felt. It was the worst, she knew, in the middle of a long, dark night, when the man you lived with was in bed beside you. If he smelled of another woman’s perfume, that hand-span between you could feel like the North Atlantic.
She opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out her legal pad. She’d learned that it calmed her to write down her thoughts, and God knew she needed to relax.
She sat down on the bed and drew her knees up, angling the pad against her thighs, and began to write.
I’d always believed that the truth of a person was easily spotted, a line drawn in dark ink on white paper. Now, I wonder. Maybe the truth of who we are lies hidden in all those shades of gray that everyone talks about.
My mother was in a mental institution. This is her newest revelation. One of them, anyway; in truth, there have been too many to count.
Tonight, Mom painted a portrait of our family, and through her eyes I saw people I’d never imagined—a drunken, unfaithful husband and a depressed, overwhelmingly unhappy wife.
How is it that I saw none of this? Are children so sublimely oblivious to their own world?
She was right to hide this truth from me. Even now, I wish I didn’t know it.
Sometimes, knowing where we come from hurts more than we can stand.
The phone rang.
Ruby was startled by the sound. Tossing the pad aside, she leaned over and answered. “Hello?”
“Ruby?”
It was Caroline’s voice, soft and thready. Ruby immediately felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “What’s wrong?”
“Wrong? Nothing. Can’t a girl just call her little sister?”
Ruby leaned back against the headboard. Caro sounded better now; still, that feeling of wrongness lingered. “Of course. You just sounded . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Tired.”
Caro laughed. “I have two small children and a cat that pukes up ten thousand hairballs a day. I’m always tired.”
“Is it really like that, Caro? Does motherhood suck something out of you?”
Caroline was quiet for a minute. “I used to dream of going to Paris. Now I just want privacy when I use the toilet.”
“Jesus, Caro. How come we never talk about things like that?”
“There’s nothing to say.”
Ruby tried to sculpt an amorphous realization into words. “That’s not true. When we talk on the phone, it’s always about me. My career. My worthless excuse for a boyfriend. My thoughts on comedy. It’s always about me.”
“I like to live vicariously.”
Ruby knew that was a lie. The truth was, Ruby had always been selfish. She didn’t form relationships; she collected photographs of people and then cropped away the edges of anything that didn’t fit with what she wanted to see. But those edges mattered. “Are you happy, Caro?”
“Happy? Of course I’m—” Caro started to cry.
The soft, heartbreaking sound tore at Ruby’s heart. “Caro?”
“Sorry. Bad day in suburbia.”
“Just one?”
“I can’t talk about this now.”
“What’s wrong with our family that we can’t talk about anything that matters?”
“Talking doesn’t change things. Believe me. It’s better to just go on.”
“I used to think that, but I’m learning so much up here—”
“Ruby!” It was Mom’s voice. She must be standing at the bottom of the stairs, yelling up.
Ruby held the phone to her chest. “I’ll be right down. Hey, Caro,” she said, coming back to the line. “Why don’t you come up here? Spend the night.”
“Oh, I can’t. The kids—”
“Leave them with the stud muffin. It’s not like you’re stapled to the house.”
Caroline’s laughter was sharp. “Actually, that’s exactly what it’s like.”
“She’s not who we thought, Caro,” she said softly, realizing that she’d said the words before, but without truly knowing their power. “She’s the . . . gatekeeper of our memories. Who we are. You should come.”
Caroline paused, drew in a breath. “I’m afraid.”
Ruby understood. She wouldn’t have a week ago, but now she did.
“You won’t break.” She halted, thinking.
It was important that she phrase it well, that she pass on something of what she’d learned about this family of theirs.
“You think you have to hold it all in, and if you let any of it go, you’ll shatter into tiny pieces and you won’t know who you are.
But it doesn’t work that way. It’s more like .
. . opening your eyes in a room you’d expected to be dark.
You can see things, and it makes you feel stronger.
” She laughed. “God, I sound like Obi-Wan on heroin.”
“Jeez, Rube,” Caroline said, sniffling a little. “My baby sister has finally grown up.”
“And only a moment before menopause. But then, I’ve always been gifted. Top of my class, don’t forget.”
“There were ten people in your class.”
“And three of them flunked out. Come on, Caro, come up and visit us. Run on the beach with me like we used to . . . slam tequila and dance with me. Let’s see—finally—who we are.”
“RUBY! Can you hear me?”
It was Mom’s voice again. This time she was yelling at the top of her lungs.
Ruby accepted defeat. “I gotta go. I love you, big sis.”
“You sound like the big sister now,” Caroline answered, “and I’m proud of you, Rube. And jealous. God . . . Bye.”
Ruby hung up, then hurried downstairs. “Good God, is there a fire in the—”
She skidded to a stop in the kitchen.
Dean was standing there, holding a bouquet of Shasta daisies wrapped in tinfoil.
“Oh,” Ruby said, feeling heat climb into her face.
Mom stood beside the table, grinning. “You have a visitor,” she said in a perfect sorority-housemother voice.
Ruby took stock of herself: She hadn’t brushed her teeth yet and she was still in her pajamas—an old Megadeath T-shirt and fuzzy pink kneesocks. If she were lucky—and she couldn’t be—the oak floorboards would simply open up and swallow her.
Dean stepped forward and handed her the flowers. “Do you still like daisies?”
She nodded.
He closed the gap between them. “We need to talk.” His voice dropped; its quiet timbre matched the soft pleading in his eyes. “Please.”
The way he said it made her shiver. “Okay.”
They stood there, staring at each other. Finally, Mom thumped toward them and gently tugged the flowers out of Ruby’s hand.
“I’ll put them in water,” she said.
Ruby turned to her. It felt as if she’d just stumbled into a weird Bradys-gone-wild episode. Then she realized that moms were supposed to say things like that.
“Thanks, Mom.” Ruby turned to Dean. “So, where are we going?”
He grinned. “Just wear a bathing suit under your clothes. Oh . . . and tennis shoes. I’ll meet you outside.” He gave her another quick smile, then kissed her mother on the cheek and headed outside.
Ruby could hear his footsteps crunching through the gravel behind the house. She looked at her mother. “Did you organize this?”
“Of course not.”
“This is not a good idea.”
“Ruby Elizabeth Bridge, you don’t have the sense God gave a banana slug. Now get upstairs and get dressed. If you’re too damned scared to go out with your first love, then try remembering that he used to be your best friend, too.”
She couldn’t think of anything brilliant to say, so she left the room. Upstairs, she stood in front of her opened suitcase, staring down at the clothing she’d brought.
A bathing suit. Yeah, right.
Had she noticed when she packed that everything was black?
Or did she always dress this way? Every T-shirt said something—MEGADEATH, UCLA brUINS, PLANET HOLLYWOOD.
Her personal favorite was a white T-shirt with a cartoon drawing of a plumber bent over a broken toilet.
His low-slung pants revealed a huge part of his ass. The punch line was: Say no to crack.
Hardly the right choice for a visit with your first love . . .
Finally, at the very bottom of the suitcase, she found a plain, peach-colored tank top and a pair of frayed cutoffs.
She didn’t bother with socks, just brushed her teeth, slicked her hair back (thank God Mom had cut it), grabbed her sunglasses, and raced back downstairs.
Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, doing a crossword puzzle and sipping tea as if this were an ordinary morning. “Have a nice time,” she said, not looking up.
“Bye.” Ruby went outside. The first thing she noticed was the sweet scent of the roses and the salty tang of the sea. Baking kelp and hot rocks gave the air a faintly scorched, metallic smell.
She headed down the porch and skipped around to the side of the house.
There stood Dean, just outside the picket fence, with a bicycle on either side of him.
She stopped. “You’ve obviously confused me with a woman who likes to sweat.”
He handed her a bike helmet. It was pink and had a Barbie decal on the forehead. She crossed her arms. “That is definitely not gonna happen.”
He smiled. “Too old to ride a bike, Rube? Or too out of shape?”
Damn him. He knew she couldn’t refuse a challenge. She grabbed the handlebars and yanked the bike around. “I haven’t ridden a bike since . . .” She stumbled over the memories. “In a long time.”
His smile faded. He was remembering it, too, the day she’d asked him out for a bike ride . . . and broken his heart.
She stared at him for a minute more, trying to read his mind. It was closed to her. “Okay,” she said at last. “Lead on.”
He jumped on his bike and pedaled on ahead of her. She wanted to watch him, maybe ride alongside, but frankly, she was terrified that she was going to do a face-plant on the gravel driveway and end up as a medical episode on the Discovery channel.
He turned at the end of the driveway and headed uphill.
Ruby tried to keep up. By the top of the street, her pores had turned into geysers. Her vision was blurred by sweat; she could have been pedaling underwater for all she could see.
And it was hot.
Really, really hot.