Chapter 16 Roseate Spoonbill
Sixteen
Roseate Spoonbill
Platalea ajaja. This large, bright pink wading bird is gorgeous at a distance and bizarre up close. The roseate spoonbill is common in coastal
hats and make jewelry. That color comes from their diet, mostly shrimp and crayfish, in the same way as the color of flamingos.
These birds forage in marshes, lagoons, ponds, and saltwater wetlands, in a nearly lying-down position, their bodies just
above the water with head hanging down. The roseate spoonbill is often seen as a symbol of harmony with nature: Its population
rebounded when hunting it was banned. Spoonbills are very gregarious and interested in others of their kind: When they spot
a group of spoonbills flying overhead, they stick their necks and bills straight up into the air in a posture called sky gazing.
If I read in a novel about what happened next, I might lower my eyelids and say, Really? But if it was a news account, I wouldn’t be disdainful. I would only feel sad and sorry for the people involved, grateful
and guilty that this time, it was someone else’s problem, not mine. Except this time, it was my problem, because I’d made
it my problem. In real life, some things just crash the imagination.
It was no big deal for me to follow Ruth’s trail. It was a very short trail.
She had been living at her parents’ Florida residence, where all three sisters and their families spent vacation weeks for
their whole lives. Fay and Claire gave me turn-by-turn directions when I confided that my brain seized up when I looked at
a map. Once I was seat-belted into the rental, I drove a block or two before stopping to compose myself. I used an old therapy
trick, literally going through the motions of brushing off invisible cares with flicks of my fingertips. This time, though,
the problems weren’t just annoying mental lint but instead little imaginary flames, sucking up oxygen, getting brighter and
bigger. Nightmares are dreams too.
It wasn’t that hard.
I had no memory of a life that didn’t include Ruth, not only as someone to say hello to, like the mothers of a dozen friends,
but as someone I admired and trusted, someone I would drop by to visit even when Felicity wasn’t around, whose food I ate,
whose counsel I asked for. Parking the car on the other side of the street from the Copelands’ rambling white stucco hacienda,
I rolled down the window and, drowning in the heat, waited to see if anything moved before I even tried going to the door.
Just then, as I watched, a car backed out of the garage and Ruth got out. Leaving the trunk open, she began tossing in duffels
and totes. A little girl followed her in and out, handing Ruth a sleeping bag, then a miniature backpack.
Why was the little girl even there on a school day? Why was Ruth taking care of a kid even as she prepared to flee? I got
out and, unnoticed, crossed the street.
The little girl called, “Granny, there’s a lady here.”
I looked hard at the girl’s face. The reels on the slot machine spun: one heart, two hearts, three hearts. Alarms pounded,
bells rang, and silver dollars poured down.
“Hi,” I said to the little girl. “I’m a friend of your grandma.”
Ruth came to the door. “Reenie, just let us go,” she pleaded. “You don’t understand.”
I pretended to consider that. Finally, I said, “Well, it’s true, I don’t. So at least I’d like an explanation.” Clearly frightened,
the little girl with the wispy dark braid wrapped part of her shoulder under the hem of Ruth’s sweater. It must have been
eighty-five degrees, and Ruth, as ever, was shivering in her cardigan. Her pretty face was almost archaic, pale and fragile
as a candle, as if from a photo taken a century ago.
Ruth said, “I don’t have much time, Reenie.”
I asked, “First introduce me to this girl?”
“This is my granddaughter, Sparrow. Felicity’s little girl.”
“Felicity’s . . . what?”
“My granddaughter, Felicity’s daughter. Sparrow Copeland.”
“I never suspected this . . .”
“Well, how about that? I guess I fooled you, Reenie. Hard to fool you!” Apparently not, I thought. No wonder Felicity wouldn’t say a thing. She was protecting more than Ruth. But why . . . ?
“Who was the boy? Was he at our school?”
Ruth wrung her hands as if they were a wet cloth, another novel trope that literally happens in real life. “Not a boy. That
lawyer, Jack.”
“Jack Melodia was the father? Is the father? But that was much later!”
“He came to talk to the school assembly about business and the environment, what the law could and couldn’t do to protect
animals.”
“She was only sixteen when she met him?”
“Yes.”
“He must have been thirty years old then, or more,” I said.
I thought back to Jack, unctuously telling me that he and Felicity never had any kind of intimate relationship.
Why would I ever have accepted that bullshit, knowing, as I did through Sam and through Lily, what he might be capable of doing to keep what was his?
Handsome, charming, powerful Jack, who could easily dazzle a girl with no experience of men, even a smart girl, especially one who never knew her own father.
Jack, who seemed to care about the defenseless creatures in the way that Felicity did, who owned Ophelia, where Felicity went to work.
How simple it would have been for him to manipulate her, when she was like a puzzle with missing key pieces in the center.
“Did she start seeing him before she graduated high school?”
“She did but there was no . . . you know . . . ”
“Sex,” I said. “Until she was eighteen and in Madison.” Felicity’s manifest lack of interest in any high school boy, her periodic
“birding” trips—all explained now.
Jack had taken Felicity everywhere, buying her the best binoculars and cameras (all of which she passed off to me as loaners).
While most of the birdwatching that Jack did was watching one particular human bird in a bikini or a pair of ratty denim cutoffs
and a man’s shirt, he did care about wildlife of the animal variety. “Did he take her to other states? She was a minor, that
would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”
“He took her to other states and other countries,” Ruth said. “First it was to the Everglades. Then Hawaii. Then Peru.”
“How could he do that without her parent’s permission?”
“Oh, she had my permission! I signed every slip, every health form, everything! She told me that it was a special extension program through the university and a great privilege for her, all expenses paid, and to some degree, it was, it was wonderful for her. And what could I do for her? I was dealing with my own grief. It sounded too good to be true and it was but . . . I wanted to believe that she would have at least those good memories from that time?” Ruth curled her lip, explaining how her sisters would be oh-so-shocked by this, Fay especially because she was so perfect.
Fay would be saying how negligent Ruth was.
“But I bet that Fay doesn’t even know the names of Cole’s art teacher and his science teacher. I bet when she gets forms that
say the kids are going on an overnight field trip to a Twins game and to the public museum, she doesn’t call the police. She
just signs the forms. And Fay would say that she would have been suspicious.” With a neatly compact mother gesture, Ruth tucked
some loose tendrils back into Sparrow’s braid.
“I’m clearly not in Fay’s league,” Ruth said.
“But you had to know something was up.”
Ruth looked down at her hands. She had wanted to believe it, so she did. And yet, how could Ruth have seen this level of duplicity
and manipulation as anything but grooming? When Felicity left for Madison, she walked straight into Jack’s velvet trap. No
longer dazzled by him, Felicity later told her mother that she knew it was already probably over by then and thought she could
end things any time she wanted—yet another example of Felicity’s belief that people meant the things they said, because she
did.
Ruth let slip the big backpack she’d hoisted onto one of her frail shoulders. Her lips were pale. She seemed to be reminding
herself to breathe.
I said, “Ruth, we’d better go inside. I don’t think this is good for you.” And what I was thinking was here was the real Maleficent,
not the cartoon one from Disney World, but a woman who saw the world in the same way—divided into people who got in her way
and people who didn’t. Ruth certainly hated my guts by then, although I presumed she wouldn’t do anything to me because of
Felicity’s love for me. As I would learn, she had no particular feeling for Emil Gardener or Cary Church, but they really,
really got in her way.
We stepped into a cool, vast white-and-yellow kitchen, like the immaculate set for a cooking show on TV.
Ruth gave me iced tea from a pitcher in the fridge.
I waited as Sparrow took her first sip from the same batch, then drank a little of my own.
I was so thirsty that I could have downed six glasses of it; heat and adrenaline had done their work.
As she talked, Ruth cruised back and forth along the marble countertop, drumming her fingers as if playing a keyboard. Jack,
she told me, was attentive and gentle at first, but quickly began to shorten Felicity’s chain. She danced at Ophelia because
Jack wanted her to, because it was a kink for him to see other men lusting after her. Her growing friendships with the other
women didn’t please him nearly as much. And so, the moment she was finished with work, he whisked her out of the club and
back to his apartment, or, occasionally, to her dorm. Felicity still managed to find a kind of friendship with Lily and with
Archangel . . . but there would be no college-girl life for her, no pizza at the Union, no sunbathing on the quad, no study
group at the library, no football games, no silly social media photographs, no crop tops, no new friends or old ones, not
even me.
No youth for Felicity at all.