Chapter 1
Ruby
If my sister hadn’t been beautiful, none of it would have happened.
Erin’s hair was blonder than mine. Her eyes were pale blue like Mom’s.
Mine were ordinary blue. But everything was perfectly in proportion with her.
She never had to wear a retainer like me because her teeth were straight and even.
Mine were crooked. And my chin was too pointy.
I was thin and bony while Erin was curvy in all the right places.
My feet were too big for my body. Side on, I looked like a golf club.
I didn’t smile with my mouth open for the two years I wore that retainer.
One time in school, I forgot, and a senior guy said I looked like Steve Buscemi.
I was really upset when I found out who he was.
Mom said the curves would come and the pointy chin would go as well as the retainer. I couldn’t wait.
Everyone talked about how pretty Erin was, and then, when they noticed me, they’d hastily say something like ‘and Ruby’s freckles are so cute’.
I struggled a little at school. I was never bottom of the class.
I hovered around the middle. In 1999, I was sixteen and Erin was eighteen, in her senior year.
She was top of her class. We were both in Altman High.
Dad would sigh before he opened my report card.
He never expected it to be good. The comments from teachers said things like ‘We hope to see a more mature Ruby next year’ and ‘We know that Ruby is capable. If she can memorize the entire script of Titanic, I’m sure she’d be able for Robert Frost.’ Dad was mad about that one.
I got mostly Cs with one or two Bs and an A in drama.
Erin was a straight-A student. She was hoping to study English at Harvard.
Her boyfriend, Milo, was in his first year at Boston College doing pre-med because he wanted to be a doctor.
Erin wrote stories, but she said I wasn’t allowed to read them. Milo said they were excellent, but he thought everything she said or did was awesome. He said she was beautiful and talented and sweet, and that was true.
My dad, Douglas Cooper, was the pastor and founder of the Holy Divine Church of the Fourth Way, and he was also an investment broker.
Dad ruled the roost in our house in Fisher Hill, a respectable neighbourhood in Brookline, a suburb of Boston.
He led us in prayer before meals, and Sunday was a day of observance when we were supposed to spend our time in contemplation and gratitude for what the Lord had provided.
Dad’s churches had a congregation of thousands and missions in four states.
He was kind, a good dad, but he was out of town a lot, away visiting his other churches, conferring with the ministers he had personally ordained and meeting with investment clients.
I think Mom preferred it that way. When I went to Laquanda or Tasha’s houses, I noticed their parents being in agreement.
My mom and dad were affectionate with each other in front of us, but they argued a lot, and it had always been that way.
Erin and I were used to it. In fact, it worked to our advantage.
If Dad said no to something, we could always ask Mom, and fifty per cent of the time we got the right answer.
We were a normal family, I guess, franks and beans or clam chowder on alternate Saturdays.
Dad was a Red Sox and Patriots fan. Erin, Mom and I weren’t interested in sports.
Mom was Irish, I mean properly Irish, born in Ireland. That’s where Erin got her name: it means ‘Ireland’. Mom’s name was Maureen. Dad got to name me, thank God, and he said I was like a precious jewel so I was Ruby. I got a better name than Erin. That was the only perk I got from my parents.
Mom had come over to America for the summer when she was a teenager and was working as a nanny in a house close to where Dad grew up in Worcester, west of Boston.
I think it was a love story. He was her knight in shining armour, and he rescued her from having to go back to Ireland.
That’s the way he told it. Mom would say it wasn’t quite like that.
They got married young and started a family straight away.
Boy, was she homesick, though. By 1999, Erin and I hadn’t been back to Ireland in four years, but Mom visited every year and spoke to Grandma once a week on a Saturday at 3 p.m.
I would eavesdrop sometimes. Mom would exclaim at various points, ‘No’ in disbelief, or ‘She didn’t’ in astonishment, when she clearly did.
Grandma’s stories were then reported to us, but they concerned cousins we’d met once, or old school friends of Mom’s.
They involved an unmarried girl getting pregnant, or a fight over a will, or the neighbour’s new dog.
Mom missed home. The last time Erin and I had visited, it was a rainy and grey summer, but I loved Grandma.
She was like the grandma you see in fairy tales.
She wore her grey hair in a bun, she was softly chubby and she was always baking.
She read bedtime stories and cuddled me, and even though I was probably a bit too old for that by then, I didn’t mind it.
I think she preferred me to Erin. I don’t know how Mom and her brother and my grandparents had lived together in that tiny house.
Grandpa had died young a year after his only son was born so I never met him.
Dennis was eleven years younger than Mom.
Mom and Dad’s wedding photos showed him as a young boy.
She never spoke about him much. He had emigrated to Australia some years previously and I don’t think she kept in contact with him.
Much as I loved Grandma and a trip to Ireland, as we got older we chose to go to Bible Camp, which was way more fun than it sounded.
We learned to cook and swim, and we did first aid, knitting circles, book club and singing.
Not all the songs were hymns, though we weren’t allowed to sing Britney Spears – not in front of the camp leaders anyway.
Erin’s boyfriend was wicked smart. Milo had been in Altman High with us until he graduated the previous summer.
Everyone wanted to be his girlfriend, but my big sister, Erin, took his attention.
Slim and sandy-haired, he looked like a pale version of Bailey from Party of Five, and he was fun too.
He was from Southie. His clothing was a little shabbier than most students, but apart from that and the accent, you would never know his background.
His manners were impeccable, though they didn’t come naturally.
The first time he came to dinner, when Mom called out ‘Dinner’s ready’ and bid us all to sit at the table, Milo politely began to offer the bread basket around, but Dad coughed and said, ‘Let’s say grace first, yes?
Maureen, will you lead us in prayer?’ Milo turned beetroot red.
‘Yes, sir, ma’am, I’m sorry, sir.’ Dad smiled reassuringly at him.
Everyone closed their eyes as Dad intoned the holy words, but I sneaked a peek at Milo, and he was looking at each of us in turn.
He caught me looking, jammed his eyes shut tight and then opened them again and winked at me with a grin.
It was my turn to blush. He watched carefully how we used our knives and forks.
Mom could have been more subtle about that.
She narrated the whole table etiquette thing – ‘and now we put our napkins on our laps’ – and I knew she had learned table manners from Dad’s family, because Grandma sometimes ate with her mouth open, or ate peas from her knife, and Mom didn’t learn manners from her.
My parents grew to trust Milo, especially Mom, because he was Irish from a few generations back.
Despite his good looks and physical presence, he was bookish like Erin.
He adored her, and Dad even let him sleep over in the downstairs spare room on weekends or sometimes if they were studying late during the week.
He was not allowed to go upstairs where Erin’s room was, next to mine.
They pretended that they stayed in their respective rooms, but I knew better.
My room was in the middle of the house upstairs and separated Erin’s room at the top of the back stairs from Mom and Dad’s room at the other end of the house beside the main staircase that led down into the hall.
There was a full-length mirror on the wall in my room and I spent a lot of time in front of it, waiting for my teeth to straighten with the retainer and the pointy chin to change as I got older, for the curves that Erin had.
Like Snow White’s wicked stepmother, I checked the mirror impatiently several times a day, hoping for this miraculous change.
One day, I got so frustrated that I banged my fist on the mirror, and it fell off the wall.
The nail and the plastic thing that held the nail in place fell out too.
There was now a hole in the wall. If it was a bit deeper, it would come out on Erin’s side, and I’d be able to see into her room.
What did she get up to on her own? Did she have a secret diary?
I’d searched her room before. Laquanda showed us her older sister’s secret diary and it was full of scandalous thoughts about what she wanted to do with boys and what she wanted boys to do to her.
I got some nail scissors and tunnelled through the tiny hole until I could see straight on to the opposite wall of Erin’s bedroom.
Then I scratched a bit more until the hole was about half an inch wide.
The wallpaper in her room was a crazy floral pattern that she’d chosen herself.
Mom said it made her dizzy. Erin would never notice a small hole in the wall.