CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
To Fae, from Ellie
September 2001
Dear Fae,
I’m leaving Rockwell soon. I wanted to tell you that I was so sorry. I’ve thought of Ruby every single day for five years. You are the only mother I’ve ever really known. The only woman—person—who encouraged me, took care of me. But did you love me?
I was jealous of Ruby. It wasn’t fair that she got you, and Stuart, and also got to be beautiful. When you would parade Ruby around town like she was a show horse, people would constantly remark on her strawberry-blonde soup-can curls, soft and shiny. The spots of pink on her cheeks and her full red lips. Mrs. Jinny asked once if Ruby was wearing lipstick. For God’s sake, she was five.
I loved that you would pick me up at the little brown house and take me shopping. When Ruby was old enough to go, she would slide a little hand into mine and her skin felt squishy, like a puffy marshmallow. You’d introduce us as “Ellie and my daughter, Ruby.” I didn’t have a title.
I’d pretend to be your daughter, but everyone knew the truth. I was no one’s child. I was motherless. My own mama was a ghost—I’d only met her a few times. Daddy said she was on drugs. Whenever I saw her, her breath smelled sour like garbage. She had stringy hair and skinny arms and a brown tooth on the side. You were warm and smelled like cookies.
Mama hadn’t been back for a long time. Most of the time I couldn’t remember her face.
I tried so hard not to love you, in case you didn’t love me back. I knew you didn’t have to. I tried to do all the right things. You called me a “mother’s helper,” and I liked to make you happy. I liked to wash dishes, fold laundry, play with Ruby. A mother’s helper seemed like a better title than nothing.
For a while, I pretended Ruby and I were sisters. She was cute and funny. And I felt lucky to spend every weekend in a magical castle. I know I begged you to let me sleep over. I could tell that you didn’t want to say yes as much as you did. Maybe I was too loud or too hard or something else? I don’t know. I saw how you looked at Stuart and then would say my name, Ellie, like a little sigh.
You put me in the room next to Ruby’s. There was a door between our rooms. I could sneak in there at night and we could play or talk. It felt like I had a real family, sometimes. Except on Sunday night, I would go back to the little brown house and Daddy would be passed out on the sofa and sometimes the lights wouldn’t work and I had to make myself butter sandwiches in the dark and I knew the castle was warm and there would be music and maybe cookies and spaghetti. I would just get so mad! I’m sorry.
I wanted to move to the castle with you and Stuart in the worst way. But you had Ruby now and you were a family. You left me in the little brown house.
I saw the bed on TV first. A commercial for Kmart. It was a canopy—pink and purple swirls of flowing fabric all around the bed like for a princess. I showed Daddy and he laughed. My mattress was on the floor, he said. Where would he hang that? I hated him so much! I asked for the bed for Christmas, even writing Santa letters (I was ten, I knew Santa wasn’t real). On Christmas morning, nothing was there. Daddy bought me a sweater.
In the spring, after the snow melted, you came down to the little brown house and picked me up again. It was just you and we had the whole car ride back up the mountain together. You asked about school and soccer and my friends and we talked the whole time. I felt like I had a week’s worth of news just bursting out of me. You laughed in all the right places and I never wanted to leave the truck.
We pulled in the windy driveway and the castle was lit up from the inside and I knew it would smell like spaghetti and there would be music playing on the radio and Stuart would pull a quarter out of my ear and we would laugh and maybe play Rummikub later.
Inside, there was nothing on the stove and nothing playing on the transistor radio in the kitchen.
“Come on!” you said excitedly, motioning for me to follow. “I want to show you what Stuart built Ruby.”
I always felt a little stabbing pain right in my heart when you talked about Ruby. Your eyes would go all shiny and sparkly. I knew if I wasn’t nice to Ruby, I wouldn’t be invited back. I tried to make my own smile big and excited like yours.
You hop-skipped up all the winding steps to the second floor and led me down the long hallway to Ruby’s room and when you flung open the door, Stuart stood in the middle, his face cracked open from smiling, holding his toolbox in one hand and a hammer in the other.
Inside the room stood the most beautiful bed I had ever seen. It had a beautiful ring of pink and yellow flowers above it and hanging from the ring was a white canopy that went all the way to the floor and puddled at your feet. It was just like the bed from television. The material was see through but still silky and made for a princess.
Everything inside me hurt and I thought I was going to cry and I absolutely did not want to do that so I said the only thing I could think of.
“I think it’s ugly.”
And you closed your eyes and sighed my name, Ellie, and you and Stuart left and went downstairs talking softly, probably about me, and I was so mad I started to cry. I knew I disappointed you and you would never, ever, ever love me. Not now, not in the future. That maybe you felt sorry for me, the way I feel sorry for stray cats and homeless people but I don’t love them.
You didn’t love me.
You didn’t love me.
I don’t remember what I did, I just remember how I felt. How it pulsed like a drumbeat in my head. How I wanted to rip the whole thing down from the ceiling and feel the tug of the material in my hands as it came apart. I don’t remember doing it, I swear.
I remember Ruby screaming at me. “I hate you! What are you doing? Mommy!”
I wanted her to shut up. I knew I’d done something awful.
I didn’t think, didn’t plan it.
The windows in the castle were tall—almost to the floor—with glass panes that opened outward like a storybook mansion. It had been warm for April, so they were opened to let in the soft evening breeze.
Later, I would say Ruby got tangled in the net. That I tried to catch her and that’s why it was ripped. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember exactly how it happened.
One second, Ruby was screaming. The next, she was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Now
Hannah sat in Aunt Fae’s Volkswagen on Main Street, debating where to go next. On one hand, if she went back up to Brackenhill, she had the whole night ahead of her. She could go sit at Pinker’s. She could go to Wyatt’s.
Her thoughts zinged around like Ping-Pong balls. She cruised Main Street twice. The teenagers would start coming out, walking up and down the main drag. Visiting Jinny just to say hi.
Buck, who owned the hardware store, and Bo, who lived upstairs, had already set up lawn chairs on the front stoop, and Buck flipped the store sign to closed, as they’d done every summer night since Hannah was a kid. Hannah could hear the hiss-pop of a Bud Light from across the street. She turned off Main Street and headed down toward West.
Hannah rubbed the letter between her index finger and thumb. She felt drawn to the little brown house, to Warren. To see where Ellie had grown up, the misery she’d lived in. What had compelled her to push a child? Hannah felt sick.