She opened the overdue notice from the library first. Kennidy had never returned a copy of Flowers for Algernon.
The next one was a mass mailing for an upcoming college fair.
That left only one, with Department of Police in the upper left-hand corner.
The motel heater kicked on across the room. She was already feeling flushed. With the heater going, it was muggy and oppressive. The moment it turned off, Ruth could feel the cold draft blowing under the door. Hot, cold. Noises. A man and a woman had just entered the room next to hers, starting to argue. Anxiety thrummed in Ruth’s veins.
Department of Police.
They were parking tickets, most likely, or a reminder of some fee unpaid or community service left unfinished. Ruth remembered Ken, during her fifteenth summer, spending weekends picking up trash. She couldn’t remember if that was linked to shoplifting or graffiti.
The letter was addressed to Kennidy McClintock or Parent/Guardian. It was postmarked three days before Kennidy’s death.
Ruth unfolded the paper inside. The words at the top read: Destruction of Evidence Notification.
. . . informed that the rape and toxicology kit dated . . .
It was only one short, impersonal paragraph. The rape kit had been collected June 5, 2013. It hadn’t been tested. It hadn’t been preserved. No one had pressed charges.
It took Ruth a moment to interpret what she was reading. Kennidy wasn’t the criminal, she was the victim. Of a crime that had gone unprosecuted.
Ruth’s mind went to that warm night when she’d driven her sister to the cabin. But it hadn’t been in June, Ruth was sure. She’d still been in school, the semester not yet finished; she’d come home only for the weekend. It had been May.
Kennidy had been angry at the man in the cabin and planned to return. Something had happened later, three or four weeks later at the very most—something Ken hadn’t expected and never would have wanted. She only wanted her stuff back.
Ruth had always criticized Kennidy for lacking self-control, but her self-control had been extraordinary. She hadn’t killed the bastard.
Ruth pushed the letter back into its envelope, hands shaking. They were her mother’s hands, minus the age spots: the same tapered fingers, the same chewed nails. They were Ken’s hands, too.
She tried to place them on the keys, but she couldn’t even type until she anchored her wrists at the keyboard’s bottom edge.
Destruction of Evidence Notification. What did that even mean?
Every county had its own rules about storage and testing of rape kits, and then there were the unintended backlogs—untested rape kits by the thousands—and out-and-out mistakes. She read about kits willfully destroyed while the statutes of limitations were still running, and about women being charged for their own kits. She read about loss and destruction of evidence even in cases where the victim was motivated to pursue prosecution. She read about overfull evidence rooms and poorly trained cops. All par for the course.
Ruth felt she should know and understand more, despite how tired she was of knowing, of searching. It was how she coped. It was a habit, one that was infuriating her at the moment because it didn’t help. Ruth didn’t want to know the system was so broken, and she didn’t want an inside view of Vorst’s brain. Her compulsion wouldn’t just ebb peacefully, though.
Kennidy had been tested at the hospital. Four or five hours of questioning and swabbing, poking and prodding, and for what?
Come on, let’s go home. Haven’t you done enough? It was too easy to imagine her mother’s plaintive voice.
Ruth let the realization take root, feeling it connect with everything else she had known and wondered. The corners of the room started to darken. But this wasn’t one of her attacks. This was just forgetting to breathe.
Oh, Ruthie.
Gwen had constantly complained, and Ruth had accepted the validity of those complaints, never once considering that Kennidy might be the one being seriously wronged with no one to protect her.
The knowledge was a large, slow-moving ship. One quick flick of the rudder wouldn’t be enough to turn it around. Go easy, Ruth told herself. Her mother—their mother—whom she had always seen as the victim in this scenario, was now a stranger to her.
A thin hiss of static started up in Ruth’s ears. Her vision fuzzed.
She stretched out one leg and put her foot on the floor: a trick to cure the drunken spins, supposedly. It didn’t work. The darkened television set looked larger now, but also farther away. Ruth changed her strategy, lifting her leg, jamming a pillow toward the foot of the bed as quickly as she could, and elevating her feet. Oxygen to the brain. This was no time to black out. No time to go anywhere else.
Ruth tried to look everywhere but the mirror. She fixed on a corporate-style painting of a blurry tulip next to the door. The bright-orange drapes, closed; the matching bedspread. Focus and breathe.
Gwen had known Kennidy had been tested after being raped.
Gwen had known Kennidy was seeing Van Vorst.
Gwen had known that Vorst wanted it all kept quiet, and that he was willing to pay.
Mom knew.
Ruth thought back to her guesses about Annie Oakley’s abusers and now understood why she felt more comfortable pointing the blame at James Rannals or even Abram Boose than at some mysterious man whose last name was literally Wolf. She’d told herself that women always kept secrets about these things.
Kennidy was not a secret keeper. Though Ruth had never known—her own sister hadn’t wanted to tell her—their mother had known.
Ruth had to change her theories, not just about Ken and about Annie, but about everything. Why did abuse continue? Not because women didn’t talk, not because they didn’t always take action. Even when they did, it wasn’t enough.
Boose, Rannals, Wolf, Vorst. Whatever. Ruth wanted to see even one of these fuckers pay the price for what he’d done.
On that ride home from the hospital, even if Gwen had opted for silence, Kennidy would have broken down and told her everything. She would have cried. She would have shouted his name.
After Gwen agreed to buy the house, Kennidy would never have wanted to be part of it. She would have wanted to live as far from her Wolf as possible. Tension between mother and daughter must have hung heavy over them, unspoken, all summer. It would have become intolerable in the fall when school started up again. When Kennidy stepped out of the world in October, there wasn’t even a note, not that Ruth knew of. Maybe this notice of evidence destruction was the note.
Kennidy had received the letter but not opened it, possibly the very day she killed herself. Ruth imagined her sister leaving it on the kitchen counter for their mother to see: You open it. It’s your receipt, isn’t it? You can show it to him: proof of compliance. No cops. End of story. You sold your own daughter out.
Ruth knew that parents sold out their children all the time. It was in practically every history book. Annie Oakley’s mother had. Abraham Lincoln’s father had. Billie Holiday, pimped out by her own mother. The lovely French ballerinas painted by Degas? Made available to male ballet patrons, as their parents knew they would be.
So much that was beautiful in the world—innocent loveliness, haunting song, virtuosic skill, intellectual brilliance—was mixed up with cruelty and the most egregious breaches of trust. Some people flourished despite what they suffered. Others did not.
32
Ruth
Scott answered on the second ring. “Are you all right?”
Ruth had felt strong while dialing, but the moment she heard his voice, she broke down.
“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Let me take this in another room.”
She caught her breath between sobs. “You’re not alone.”
“No. We were watching a movie. It’s okay. Just tell me what’s going on.”
Ruth could pictur
e the moment: Margot on the couch, movie paused, half-empty plates, two beer bottles. The life she would have lived. Obsession had stolen that possibility from her. Ruth now knew that this obsession had a purpose, but she couldn’t let her distress about Kennidy obscure the path forward.
She explained the daybook codes and the even more damning evidence-destruction letter. “Now I understand why Gwen was able to buy the house so cheap and why Ken went into a tailspin . . . And I know who it was, Scott. He’s still at the school. We’ve got to do something about it.”
“Wait a minute. Stay calm. The only thing you know for sure—the only thing you think you know—is that your sister was dating someone named V. And that’s just based on scribbled notes.”
“V isn’t a common letter, Scott. And it came right after several notations for Coach V. All the other names dropped away: the other boys, her other girlfriends, too—everything else.”
Scott was silent at the other end of the line.
Ruth said, “The other day, I saw Vorst wearing a Toronto Blue Jays jacket. The one with the blue bird and a little red maple leaf, for Canada, obviously.”
“Yes, that’s where the Blue Jays are from. Everyone but you knows that.”
She ignored the taunt. “How many people have anything with that logo in our town?”
“A few dozen?”
“It reminded me. I saw a pennant like that years ago, at the cabin I went to with Kennidy.”
“I’m lost now.”
“That’s not all. Reece told me Vorst is known as a predator. The kids at school talk about it. Reece knows it. He’s been getting away with this for years.”
“Well . . .”
“Don’t do this to me, Scott.” Her sinuses were filling, and her throat hurt both from crying and trying to hold in those tears. “It’s exactly what I did to her. What my mother did to her.”
“Bad things happened to Ken, and they didn’t happen to you. It’s normal to feel guilt about that. Do you think that’s where this overreaction is coming from?”
“Overreaction?”
“You sound a little hysterical.”
That word. A century later, and so little had changed. She exhaled slowly. “As for the guilt, you were the one who always thought guilt was pointless. I do feel guilt, but what I’m trying to focus on here is responsibility. It’s only fair to Ken to find out what really happened. To be a witness and get some kind of justice, even though it’s too late. It’s even more important to keep an eye on Vorst, and to think about other students he might be—”
“Stay calm, Ruth.”
He’d said that to her twice now. Now that she thought about it, during their two years together, he’d often told her to stay calm, which had always enraged her more.
“It’s on us to make sure he’s not harming other kids, Scott. Please don’t let me down.”
“We’ll talk.”
“Talk?”
“After I ask around discreetly.”
“Inform the principal, at a minimum. Reports, even casual ones, have an effect.”
“So does gossip.”
“But maybe gossip has a function, when people’s stories line up. Sometimes gossip needs to be looked into.”
“I hear you.”
“Stop using your faculty-meeting voice. Please don’t be detached about this.”
“You’re going to tell me what voice to use? Ruth, I’m trying to help here.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I take that back. I just can’t . . .”
“Let me find a way. I don’t want to start slandering a good man based on some confused codes in a teenager’s journal from half a decade ago.”
“Okay,” she said. She wasn’t sobbing any more, but she still wasn’t satisfied. “Thank you, Scott. But please, don’t put it off.”
Let it out.
But she couldn’t.
She washed her face. She looked in the mirror. Nothing was right anymore.
Ten minutes after hanging up with Scott, Ruth called Joe again, who answered from his home office. It was late, but he was awake and would be for several more hours. He never got any writing done unless the kids were asleep. “What’s up?”
“Those American Indians who saw the distant future—did any of them think they could change it?”
“Yes, they believed change was possible and that prophecy wasn’t failproof prediction. But I don’t have a ready-made story of a specific personal disaster averted, if that’s what you’re asking for.”
“But in general?”
“Well, I’d say if a lot of Indians could have seen the future and easily changed it, North America would have a million more brown faces today. And one less Kevin Costner movie.”
“I’m serious, Joe.”
“Me too.”
At least he was listening. Joe could joke or argue or grow quiet, but he always listened without judgment or a time limit.
“How about traveling to the past? Do they talk about that?”
“Time travel? Not in so many words. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t.” Classic Joe, no absolutes and no surprise at the turn their chat had taken. “I imagine if they had special skills—visions, ways of traveling through time in either direction—they would have used them.”
“You’d think they would have done something to avoid a genocide.”
His pitch dropped. “Blaming the victims, are we?”
“It’s not that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. I’m just saying, they could have tried—”
“You don’t know they didn’t. But geez, Ruth, where would a person even start? It’s not like what happened to Native Americans boiled down to one person’s mistake on one bad day. It involved millions of people, probably billions of individual actions. Genocide is stage IV cancer. You can’t come in when the patient’s being systemically assaulted and make a few cuts here and there and expect everything to change.”
“Sitting Bull knew he was going to die.”
“That’s right. So he went home for it. Back to the rez.”
“Other people could have stopped it.”
“Other people tried. Didn’t need time travel to do it. Sometimes you can’t change things.”
“What do you think about destiny, Joe?”
“Wow, easy questions tonight. Okay.” She heard the squeak of an office chair as he leaned back. “Like the God-given right to expand west and wipe out people and spread capitalism?”
“Not manifest destiny. Just destiny. Fate.”
“That sounds like a colonizer’s word to me. Justification more than cosmology.”
“But what about changing things?”
“In the past again, you mean. Fantasy. Time travel.”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds iffy. Grandfather paradox, butterfly effect. I don’t know the physics. I just know Terminator and Looper and Superman. You remember the late-’70s Superman when he flew around the world and made it spin backward to go back in time and save Lois Lane? I rented that in the sixth grade. Man, I fell hard for Lois Lane . . .”
Ruth didn’t mean to tune out, but she kept seeing her mother, imagining how she would spend a typical Saturday night: television set on, half-folded laundry on the couch, a mug of whiskey at her side that she would pretend was only soda. No one was ever fooled. Ruth pictured her sister in her own bedroom. She pictured the door, covered with stickers that wouldn’t come off, even though at seventeen, Kennidy no longer liked unicorns or the Rugrats. How would Ruth even get to that place, that moment, if she wanted to? She hadn’t been there at the time. She was in grad school in Iowa, many miles away.
Ruth tuned back in just in time to hear Joe say, “Why are you thinking about all this? Is it personal?”
“Academic.”
“Really?”
&
nbsp; “Cultural criticism.”
“Well, then. I’d say Americans are obsessed with time travel to the past because they—we—feel guilty, and for good reason. People can’t get enough of those time-travel movies: go back and catch the criminal; go back and stop the murder. It’s a lot easier than going back to stop slavery, the Holocaust and the slaughter of some ninety million or so indigenous peoples, but the impulse comes from the same place. We’re a nation awakening slowly to the truth of the bad things that’ve been done and wishing there were more reset buttons. Me personally, I don’t believe in reset buttons.”
Ruth thought of Sitting Bull’s own words in the letter Nieman had first sent to Joe. The future and the past are our two most difficult battles. They are not battles we are always meant to win.
These lofty phrases annoyed her now, just as they had frustrated Annie.
Ruth thought, Fuck “not meant to win.” Fuck destiny.
Ruth thought of a young Annie Oakley, stalking through the tall grass, rifle held close to her chest, self-reliant, fearless.
“I have to go, Joe.”
“Ruth, you don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m totally myself.”
Joe was right about one thing: it was justification. The view of the colonist, the missionary, the killer, the rapist: that whatever happened was meant to be so.
“Ruth?”
“I’m fine, Joe. More than fine.”
“All right. If you say so.”
Then she was alone again in the motel room. Its blandness was a balm: at least she wasn’t at home, looking out the window at the dark evergreen trees, brown grass speckled with frost, and beyond, to the house of that man—Van Vorst, his stooped silhouette passing within sight of her kitchen window.
But this sterile space also left her feeling untethered, unbound by both place and time, mind spinning.
The more she thought about the past in all its guises—Annie, Sitting Bull, the Wolves, Kennidy—the less she was focusing on Scott, the vision, and anyone else who would be affected by whatever happened. If it happened.
She wished, yet another time and with an even more intense longing, for a tranquilizer. If she were home, she would have been scrabbling through drawers, pulling up couch cushions. She could have sworn there were still three Xanax left in her apothecary drawers in the bathroom. She could even see them: the dark wood, the long white bars. Perhaps she had taken them after all. On and off for two years she had taken an uncountable number of pills.
Annie and the Wolves Page 24