Chapter 46
BY THE TIME STACI AND I MET, RUTH GRAHAM WAS HAVING TROUBLE walking and talking. Soon after that she was bedbound, scarcely able to move, and it was difficult understanding what she said.
I played Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, and she closed her eyes to listen.
It was our music. It had been since those days forever ago when I was writing her biography.
Speaking was laborious for her, and I did most of the talking, reflecting on all she’d done for me. Such a journey we’d had together.
“How does it make you feel knowing that the only two nonfiction books I’ve written are about you and Jack the Ripper?” I asked.
“I drove you to murder,” she managed to quip.
“Good and evil,” I replied. “I’ve met the extreme versions of both.”
I reminded her of my mom showing up on her doorstep when I was nine. I told Ruth that whenever I saw her around the neighborhood, she was always so kind. She paid attention to me for no discernible reason.
“Why me?” I asked. “How did I get to be so lucky?”
“You were always special,” she said in her faltering, fractured way.
I knew she wasn’t long for this world, and as I held her hand, it was so hot it was damp with sweat. That hadn’t happened before. Typically, her hand was cool. It was as if her circuitry could no longer manage the powerful energy of her spirit. She was melting her insulation.
Late afternoon Staci and I needed to return to the airport in Asheville. I felt terrible leaving Ruth, sorry we lived so far apart.
“I’ve got to go,” I told her.
“I wish you could be here every day,” she managed to say.
“I wish I could too. But I’ll be back before you know it.”
As I said this, I remembered a day twenty-five years earlier when I was on the mountaintop doing research for her biography.
I’d been at the Billy Graham office collecting photocopies of Ruth’s correspondence.
When I was driven back to the house she was nowhere to be seen, and I found a note on my bed.
“Patsy, I’ll be back soon,” it said in her distinctive handwriting.
I felt a strong premonition that someday I’d remember that note when she wasn’t here anymore.
It seemed like a promise of something much bigger than her returning from running an errand.
I sat down in front of the window, looking out at the Swannanoa Valley and the mountains beyond just as I had that scary day when I was nine.
Ruth’s health dramatically deteriorated after that last visit, and it wasn’t possible for me to see her again.
She died at home on June 14, 2007, four days after her eighty-seventh birthday.
Billy would last for another eleven years, both buried at his library in Charlotte. Since then, I often feel her presence.
I have inexplicable things happen that seem like a message. Finding her untouched letter in the book of Chaucer’s poems. Or a business card from the hotel where we stayed during our visit in Monte Carlo. Also, dreams of showing up at her house and she’s there even though I know she isn’t anymore.
After Staci’s and my beloved bulldog Tram died in 2015, I dreamed Ruth appeared to me and seemed carved out of light.
She was laughing and petting Tram, cupping his face in her hands, his stumpy tail wagging.
I woke up with a start, certain she’d just visited me from the Other Side, offering comfort.
As weird as it might sound, I feel her around me.
Not all the time, but when I do it’s palpable.
It seems she’ll do something to get my attention.
Often, it’s playful. Even mischievous. People would say that’s magical thinking on my part.
But it isn’t. Just because we can’t understand something doesn’t make it false.
Not long after my dream about Ruth and Tram, my novel Chaos came out, and it was aptly named.
Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, and my book tour was dismal, all attention on politics.
I was frustrated and fed up, deciding to quit Scarpetta.
I felt it was time to do something else.
It seemed I didn’t have much left to say, and the characters didn’t either.
I didn’t like the way the world was changing, most of all storytelling.
The TV sensations CSI and NCIS had dented my enthusiasm about forensics.
I found it hugely insulting when strangers asked me if shows like that were where I got my ideas.
I couldn’t stop missing the old days of bookstores on every corner, and signings with endless lines of fans.
After 9/11 people didn’t show up to public gatherings like they once did.
Then there was the insidious but inevitable fallout from online sales.
Publishing had become more impersonal. Gone were the days of lavish dinners, parties, expensive gifts, and full-page ads in The New York Times.
Reading was on a steady decline, and most authors, including me, didn’t feel celebrated anymore.
I’d gone from nobody wanting what I wrote to becoming one of the best in the world as a crime novelist. It wouldn’t last long.
Being on top never does, but we don’t figure that out until after the fact.
Others come along, and trends change, the public no longer as intrigued by forensics.
There was a glut of shows featuring it (not necessarily accurately).
By the end of 2015, I realized I needed to reinvent myself.
Scarpetta wasn’t the only thing I was able to write.
Maybe I could find other stories to tell.
For a year I worked on ideas for TV shows and films. One day while I was meeting with producers in London, someone mentioned that there was talk about creating a female James Bond.
Would I be interested in writing such a thing?
Absolutely, and I started wondering about the protagonist, deciding she works for NASA.
I remembered touring NASA’s Langley Research Center in 2001.
The identical twin scientists Christine and Celeste Belcastro had invited me because they were Scarpetta fans.
Since then, Celeste had died from cancer, but I reconnected with Christine.
In 2017, I returned to NASA Langley in Hampton, Virginia.
I thought it would be fascinating to write about a young female genius who works there, as do both of her parents.
A cyber investigator and scientist, she’s being groomed for rocketing to space as part of a secret program she knows nothing about.
For a while I was in talks with Harry Potter producer David Heyman about an eventual film.
I was hopeful I could try my hand at the screenplay.
But that wasn’t what the powers to be in my career wanted.
made a substantial offer for me to write two space thrillers.
Once again, I was back to books. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get away from them.
I began spending time at NASA Langley, its campus going back to the days of the Wright brothers.
I was visiting other NASA facilities and hanging out with astronauts while researching Quantum (2019) and Spin (2020).
They didn’t do well, distribution a massive problem because anything published by was (and still is) boycotted by book chains, independent stores, and bestseller lists.
I knew that upfront because my second Jack the Ripper book published by wasn’t carried by a single store, no mainstream media so much as reviewing it.
But I didn’t think that would happen with novels, considering how many I’d sold through traditional stores. I figured Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and others would come around. But I was wrong in my assumptions. You can’t find Quantum and Spin anywhere except online. It’s illogical and unfair.
When the Covid-19 pandemic started in 2020, my mother was living in a retirement home in Charlotte, and it wasn’t possible to visit.
She’d suffered a stroke and was unable to communicate or walk.
The most she could do was lift one hand, then the other, as if resorting to a cryptic sign language.
Like so many people during that dark time she was a silent and invisible victim, having no visitors for more than a year.
During that interval she lost more than forty pounds.
She had to be fed with a plastic spoon that she often bit in half.
I have no idea what she was aware of, and in the summer of 2023, Staci and I flew to Charlotte to see her for the last time.
We gathered around her bed with my brother Jim, his wife, Mary, my nephews and niece Jimmy, Owen, and Hailey.
My younger brother, John, had been to see her days before Staci and I got there, and for him to return was overwhelming, I suspect. It was an incredibly sad and painful time. Playing Mom’s favorite hymns on a boombox, we held her hand and reminisced about our Montreat days.
I painted scenes of pristine snows and fall leaves blazing beneath a sapphire blue sky. I reminded her of tapioca pudding with maraschino cherries, and her famous “perfume pie” made with Cool Whip and Jell-O mix.
“And you loved Pepperidge Farm’s coconut cake and would sneak to the store to buy one. Sometimes eating the whole thing,” I said as if divulging a long-held secret. “That was your drug of choice when you were at your wits’ end.”
Jim and I joked about our shenanigans and squabbles.
“Remember this, Mom…?”
“Remember that…?
“Remember the time…?”
“Such a beautiful house you built for us,” we’d say. “And how brave of you to move us to Montreat. What a wonderful place for kids to grow up. Baseball, tennis, swimming, and walking anywhere we wanted without being unsafe…”
Her eyes were barely open, registering nothing, and she didn’t move. But I sensed she knew we were there. I felt it the instant Staci and I had walked into her room. Day in and day out we sat by Mom’s bed watching her float further out of reach on a cloud of morphine.
One afternoon when the attendants were turning her over, her eyes flew open wide and were as blue as the summer sky.
I’m convinced that’s when her spirit left her body.
She died on July 25, three days after her ninety-sixth birthday, and I talked to her as I removed the oxygen cannula from her nose.
“You won’t be needing that anymore,” I told her. “You’re in such a better place now, Mom. And we’ll see you there when it’s our turn.”
It didn’t seem real as I collected framed photographs and other items while she lay on the bed.
I thought about cultures that believe the spirit hovers around the body for twenty-four hours after death.
I continued talking to Mom as I packed up her belongings, removing her many paintings from the walls, heartbroken by the familiar fragrance of the Coty face powder she’d been wearing since I was a child.
She’d written her will decades earlier, and I was startled to discover she’d left me her big leatherbound King James Bible.
I suppose she figured I needed it more than my brothers, and keep it on my desk.
Tucked between its worn pages is an ancient list I’d made of cell phone “speed dial” numbers for my brothers and me.
I found a tiny vibrant green feather that appears to be down from a peacock.
“Lord teach me that you are all I need before I come to the place where you’re all I have,” she’d noted in a margin on April 14, 1991.
“Nothing is very important compared with ‘afterward’ (heaven),” she’d jotted.
Whatever heaven is, I trust she’s there in a state of perfect harmony.
It’s what she’d always wanted, homesick like someone visiting from another planet.
I can’t go to western North Carolina without seeing her in the butterflies, the mountains, and the foliage she loved.
I feel her in the cool, clean breeze and the tiniest perfect flower that would have caught her artist’s eye.
I miss her laughter and the outrageous things she’d say, not realizing everyone could hear her.
Before her stroke she told me how proud she was of my accomplishments.
She couldn’t read my scary books but knew people who loved them, and she thanked me for helping to take care of her.
Missing her after she was gone made me realize how much I’d missed her all along.
As was true of my father, she couldn’t connect with people, not even her own children.
She was compromised, her emotional volatility like a compass needle spinning.
I never knew which way it would point, and often it was in the wrong direction.
What she perceived often wasn’t true, and that limited her ability to really know anyone, including me.
When I overhear Staci talking to her own mother, I marvel over that kind of closeness, wondering if Mom ever had it with anyone.
I suspect she didn’t. I’ll always wonder what she was like before she met my father.
I doubt she was normal. Depression runs in her family, and her early traumas took their toll.
For someone so feisty she was fragile and easily victimized.
Emotionally, she was a child, and my father was her nemesis.
I think he broke her, and she broke him back.
My brothers and I were caught in their clashes but not the reason for them.
Our mother and father couldn’t help much of what they did even when it seemed deliberate.
I don’t know how anybody is a parent. I can’t think of anything harder and suspect I wouldn’t have been a good one.
My childhood may not have been ideal, but I can’t think of anyone’s that is.
It would surprise a lot of people to know that I wouldn’t trade my parents for anyone.
They were exceptional in many ways, and I appreciate the gifts I got from them.
I wouldn’t be who I am had I grown up differently.
If I’d had the so-called perfect family, I don’t think I would have tried so hard to make something of myself.
I might not have been lonely enough to sing like Ruth’s canary.
I wouldn’t have found the need to create an imaginary universe.
I regret not having more insight when I was younger.
I was too busy feeling hurt and frightened to understand that damage creates damage.
Every one of us is guilty of it. That’s the circle of life nobody wants to sing about.