Chapter 15 Brown Pelican #3
We all subsided into stillness. Strictly speaking, that was not an inaccurate description of Felicity, especially for someone of Roman’s character—or, at least, his counterfeit character.
That sense of a storm crept up my arms and my neck like electricity.
Something else was coming. This was only the beforemath.
Ruth was saying, “At first, when she was a kid, she loved him. She thought that he would be a dad to her. She’d never had
a dad. Her birth father, if you can call him that, was from Italy and I never saw him after I found out that I was pregnant.
Roman said Felicity would turn out like me. He became obsessed with her, and he was the one . . .”
“He raped her?” Claire said.
“No! Not like that. He wanted her to be good. When she wasn’t, he forced her to leave. She was seventeen, just graduating.
She went to Madison. I helped her pack. I drove her . . .”
“What did you say to him, Ruth?” Fay asked.
“Say to him?”
“What did you say to stand up for Felicity?”
“What could I do? He was my husband. He was my pastor. I loved him. Jay and Guy were little. I had to submit . . .”
“You’re a piece of shit, Ruthie,” said Claire. “You should have defended your girl. You should have called us or Mom and Dad.”
“Mom and Dad knew,” said Ruth. “They already hated him before I found out about the other wife. I didn’t want you to know
the way he was toward her. It was all so bad . . .” Although she needed her parents and their support, Ruth had a hard time
with their opinion of Roman, until she was forced to share that opinion. Even after she found out about Faith, she would have
taken him back. She was ready to start over. For a long time, she adored him, no matter what he had done. Sometimes, she said
softly, she still adored him.
“You’re weak,” Claire said.
“Stop it,” Fay ordered Claire. “That doesn’t matter. It’s all in the past now.”
I watched Ruth watching her sisters, not meeting their eyes but studying them whenever they looked away with widened eyes,
black, nearly all pupils. Drugs? Adrenaline? When she spoke, her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.
Claire was wrong about Ruth. Ruth would indeed defend Felicity, and she would stop at nothing. Her sister had called Ruth
a “firecracker,” an unstoppable girl whose intuitive charm and intellectual might destined her for a future as more than a
high school science teacher (here, Fay would have put in hastily, “Being a science teacher isn’t nothing, but you know what
I mean”). After that future was knocked out of her hands, Ruth must have made a decision. She would not be “poor Ruth.” Her
child would not be the woebegone proof of a book-smart girl’s real-life naivete. Felicity would fulfill her own promise—and
Ruth’s. Ruth would cherish her nestling of bright plumage.
Or maybe I was being melodramatic.
Probably I was being melodramatic.
Still, that premonitory chill crept over me, that animal sense of something very wrong, the same thing I’d felt the day Felicity
was convicted.
“Go outside now. Just for a moment,” I said to Claire and Fay. “I want to talk to Ruth alone.”
Claire muttered, “Nothing doing.”
Fay agreed. “Come on, Reenie, don’t you think we should hear this? Her own family?”
Ruth said nothing at all. She let her glance sweep over me as if I were a pair of rain boots or a houseplant. She seemed to
be taking a break in another room, this one in her mind, a place where I couldn’t follow.
“Please,” I insisted to Fay and Claire, “I promise we’ll come right out. This is getting out of control. Let me just have one last chance to try to make sense of it. That much, I owe Felicity.”
A person doesn’t confide to a crowd. A person wants to talk to a person, or so my mother always said. Even if there are millions
of people watching, and millions more who’ll hear about it later, the wildest revelations start with a conversation between
two people.
I walked Claire and Fay to the exit and opened the door.
At the back of the parking lot, there was a bench with a little plaque, carefully set in the middle of a narrow horseshoe
of colored stones. I was grateful that I was too far away to read the plaque, which, at a middle school, could only commemorate
one of those rare, excruciating losses impossible to think about or ever forget. There came a snap of lightning, the passing
sizzle of sulfur on the wind. Florida is the tropics and it rains almost every day. A storm was not far off.
Back in the sculpture room, I said to Ruth, “I have this feeling that you know everything about what happened that night with
Emil Gardener.”
“Well, your feeling is wrong.”
“Ruth, come on. What did Felicity do? What did you do?”
Ruth jumped up and advanced toward me. Involuntarily, I stepped back, even though I had easily three inches of height and twenty pounds on her.
“What did I do? I didn’t even know those people.
I didn’t know what Felicity was getting up to.
So how could I know anything about some man’s death?
That’s ridiculous. I was at church. I had a special reading to do and I had to find space for two gigantic, stacked trays with ten dozen cookies each .
. .” She hurried on with strange details about the church cat having kittens on Christmas Eve, about a broken coffee urn, about two women in their fifties in a loud argument about whether Backstreet Boys or NSYNC was the better boy band.
It was just as Ross had described when people are lying—or when they feel as though they’re lying, even if they’re telling the truth.
There was the elaborate, unnecessary detail, the active hands, the rounded eyes.
Ruth was lying and she knew she was lying.
She grew angrier by the moment, her face flushed, her breathing speeded up, her hands opened, then clenched into fists. “I
think this is enough,” she said.
“No, Ruth, it’s not.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“This goes way beyond a story. I need your help. Felicity needs your help. She needs you to tell the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth. I am trying to do the right thing.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“And of course, you would be able to tell, wouldn’t you, Reenie?” Ruth shouted. I was sure people could hear her at the end
of the hall or even a floor up. A security guard would come. Maybe other teachers. That didn’t seem like a bad idea at all.
“You’re so deep. You’re so perceptive. You’re so smart. Do you know that Felicity would laugh at you? I had to warn her not
to be so obvious. She didn’t respect you. You were just convenient. The All-Purpose Sidekick. Miss Average.”
“What an awful thing for you to say to me, Ruth.”
“Well, here you are ruining my life, Reenie! Trying to take everything that is dear to me.”
“Isn’t Felicity dear to you?”
“Of course. What an awful, awful thing to say to me, Reenie.”
I noticed then that she was still holding that small paper cup. She followed my gaze. Then with a sigh, she poured the juice
into one of the metal sinks, then tossed the cup into the wastebasket, spilling some residue on the floor.
“What was that?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just . . . Felicity doesn’t deserve that on top of everything else.”
The beforemath was nearly over.
I stepped out into the hall to a place where I could see Claire and Fay through a floor-to-ceiling window. The sisters huddled
together on that stone bench as if they were cold. The rising breeze, news of the storm, lifted their hair. Their lives were
about to change forever. So let them have this one last moment to believe that the worst that could happen had already happened.
I wasn’t completely sure of what would come next but I was sure it would be something that Fay and Claire would wish they
never knew. Their parents would die in due course; there would be medical scares; children would say confounding things; a
close friend would reveal herself to be an epic liar; their best professional achievement might combust right in front of
them. All sorts of ordinary mishaps could knock them down, but this one was not ordinary. For them, the worst that could happen
had already happened. They just didn’t know about it yet. This was deeply personal for me, but it was not my own. Claire and
Fay would be happy again, but never the way that it seemed they were once promised.
I took a deep breath and stepped back into the art room.
Ruth was gone.
I ran back to the door, thankfully remembering to jam my coffee cup in the opening so that it didn’t close behind me and lock
us all out.
“Where did she go?” I called to Fay and Claire. Claire held out both palms. Did she mean she didn’t know where Ruth had gone
or that she hadn’t even seen Ruth? I jogged over to them. “Did you see where Ruth went?”
“Ruth left?” Fay said with a gasp. “See? We should have been in there.”
“You’re probably right.” We circled the room, like nincompoops, opening the supply closets to see if she was hiding in one of them. “Where would she go?”
“To her house,” Claire said. “Or to that restaurant. Although I can’t imagine her having the appetite for a Cobb salad after
all this. She’s trying to get rid of us. Maybe she’ll really take off. Like gone. This time for good.”
But even Ruth didn’t have superpowers. She couldn’t simply disappear. She would need her clothing. Her medicines. Her passport.
And she’d worked at this school for quite a while. Would she just take off without a word? She absolutely would. There was
no sense trying to think about this as if the customary rules applied. The only rules were the ones Ruth was making up as
she went along. I feared for the traffic cop who might try to pull Ruth over for speeding.
“Tell me how to get there,” I said.
“We’re all going this time, Reenie,” Fay said firmly.
“But what if she comes back, Fay? She left all her stuff here, her backpack, her books . . .”
“Her phone,” Claire said, emptying the backpack on a lab table and inspecting the contents.
“I’ll call you the minute I find her, if I find her.”
I glanced at the big gray aluminum trash can, at the paper cup in it and the residue. Bending to pick it up, I thought better
of it.
“Don’t touch that cup, you guys. Tell somebody to come and clean up the juice and then put the mop and cup and stuff in some
big trash bag or something, okay?”
“Could there be something in it?” Claire asked.
“She acted like there was.”
I grabbed the keys and looked up at the clock. It was high noon. Of course it was.