* * *
“RUTHIE!”
My name is coming at me from a faraway place. I close my eyes and listen to water sloshing gently around. I start counting the birds again. One, two, three, four, four…
“Ruthie, move! They’re all over you!”
My shoulders go pink with heat; the sun is in the middle of the sky and the little black birds put on a show for me. They’re diving shadows dropping down into water, one, two, three, three, three…
“MOVE!”
Tim runs toward me, making a burst of tawny dust, and points down at my right leg.
There are red ants all over me, from my ankle to my knee. They’re cinnamon colored and frantic, crawling up and down, navigating the kneecap and the tendons and the too-long leg hair. Hundreds of little teeth sink into my skin, but I’ve been hurting for so long I hardly even notice. I’m totally disembodied. Trauma sends an invitation to go away and I accept it. I’ve left my home. My body is vacant and my soul is buried so deep under so many layers of pain and trauma, I hardly even know it’s there.
Tim looks at me. His polo shirt is soaked between the shoulder blades and has become untucked from the waistband of his khakis. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. He shows me how to swat at them, then leads me down to the edge of the shore and tells me to sit down in the shallow, cold, murmuring water. The girls stop playing and just stare at me until my mom fishes me out. The birds are all gone now.
“Come on, let’s go home now,” she gently sings.
She holds my hand and leads me back past the brick-colored dune. My brother sad-smiles at me and pushes his glasses up his nose.
Nobody knows what to do with me. We all go back to the farmhouse for dinner, my mom’s tomato pie, and I rub ointment onto the bumpy, fire-red ant bites. Ellie licks it off right away. Tim prays before we eat but I can hardly hear him. I can hardly hear anything over the thoughts that go round and round and round. Laura nudges me every few minutes.
“Ruthie, sweet girl, take a bite.”
Tim and Laura were supposed to be on vacation in North Carolina but they turned around when my mom called and told them she was going to get me. Laura wept, she’d called me so many times but I just didn’t pick up. She was worried that my mom wouldn’t make it to Nashville in time.
After dinner, she leads me to my bed, where I will lie awake all night panicking. She pulls the covers up and reads to me. The girls are outside playing and screeching again. I can hear my mom and Tim talking downstairs.
“What is she on? What did they give her?”
“Where’s Jack?”
“Lord Jesus, how do we help?”
Jack’s in Australia and I don’t know when he’s coming back. He might’ve told me or he might not have, but I can’t remember. We don’t talk on the phone anymore and both of us are thankful to have literal oceans in between us to blame the distance on. Laura recites me something from the Bible with her hands on her chest and I wonder where God is. She seems to find him in every passage, but I can’t see him anywhere.
* * *
In the morning, my mom takes me with her on errands. I’m not allowed to be alone and she doesn’t like to be alone either. She still doesn’t know what to do in a world without my daddy, so she does most of the same things every day. We go into St. Francisville for groceries and dry cleaning and to visit my daddy’s resting place. She shows me the smooth ashen stone they placed at his head, the dove that sits above his beautiful, holy name. I put my hands on it and try to feel him, but it’s just cold stone on my fingers. My mom tries to feel him too. She’s been trying to feel him ever since he left.
A little list written on old stationery is her guide through the motions of the day. She clings to it so she doesn’t have to think about him too much. We zip from place to place. She drives too slow and talks at me too much but I like being buckled in next to her because it feels safe. We roll past the places I used to play: my high school, Mr. Carter’s house, the street that leads to Hardwood, and Sonny’s Pizza. The radio station buzzes in and out. I begin to regret the funeral I gave to my childhood. I would give anything just to dig it up and jump back in.
The drugstore is the first stop—I need my prescriptions. The drugs don’t make me feel better anymore but I get sick if I don’t take them. When we left, I was almost out of my fentanyl patches and my Cymbalta and the Ambien that doesn’t work anymore.
The little door chime that used to love to jingle is old and flat. It clangs at me when I lean my shoulder into the door, and slowly, just barely, I open it wide enough to walk through. The inside of the store is too bright and too white and the music is bad. I grab for my mom’s hand and she leads me through the corridors of razor blades and two-for-one loofahs to the pharmacy counter.
“Ask him about my patch,” I beg her. “Please.”
The man in the white jacket is patient with us. My mom rifles through my purse to find the papers she needs and he raises his eyebrows up high when he reads about all the medicines. My mom obediently asks a question about the patch, keeping her voice low like he’s a drug dealer. He sighs at her and shakes his head.
“Maaaaaaaarsha!!!!!!”
Suddenly, a woman with swatches of pink lipstick on her forearm runs up to greet my mom.
“Baaaaarbara!”
They hug and gab and their jewelry jangles. They talk, not about anything important, just so that they can stretch their lonely, widowed voices out. The woman asks how the kids are doing and my mom smiles.
“Oh, you know, busy as always.”
They laugh. I’m not sure either of them knows why or cares.
“Everybody’s doing so wonderfully,” she goes on. “Tim and Laura just got back from vacation, and Lile and Libby are at the beach with Parks. They sent the older boys to camp. Annnnnd my sweet Ruthie is here with me for a little visit.”
I’m sitting in a vinyl chair next to a blood pressure cuff. She points at me and smiles. I have dog breath and I haven’t washed my hair in weeks. The right side of my mouth twitches as I try to make a smile for them and the woman pelican gulps and tries not to look too shocked.
The pharmacist hands me a paper bag filled with narcotics and tells me he can’t get the patch without an in-state prescription. I start to shake. That’s the one I need the most.
“Well,” my mom says, “we better get moving! Good to see you, Barbie.”
She leads me slowly to the door. I bump into the Ricolas on the way out and hear them topple to the floor.
“It’s okay, Ru,” she says, patting my arm.
It’s not okay, though, and people know that. When something happens in St. Francisville and people don’t know how to show up, they gossip instead. Everybody knows that Ruthie Moore is unwell and it isn’t the kind of thing you can fix with a covered dish or good pie. I’ve been here for only a day, but I can feel the news, the pity swelling across town.
My mom loves me as best she can, half-broken herself. She pretends that everything is fine and she clutches her little list, hoping that it can fix both of us. When people whisper and look, she just smiles big and says, “I love having my girl home.”
The shame swallows me in one bite.