Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  Amanda stared at him.

  “You told me such wonderful things about this place I figured I had to come out and take a look for myself. And now I'm building my own summer house on the north side. You see, I'm already using the post office. I've got a gorgeous lot—southern exposure, nice view of the whole west end of the lake. You ought to come see it sometime. I think you'd like it. Wait till we get the walls up, though. That's when you'll really be able to get a sense of it.”

  There was a buzzing in Amanda's ears, the force of her own blood pumping in her head, she thought clinically. What could he be talking about? Suddenly, she realized it made no difference what he said, she only wanted to get away, to be away, never to have seen him, never to see him again. She took a small step forward and sideways, almost as if to suggest that she might push past him to escape.

  Her behavior puzzled Clement. They hadn't parted on such bad terms, had they? And even if they had, didn't what had come before make up for that? They'd been so delighted with each other—he remembered that vividly. He remembered her quick, bright smile and with what shy pleasure she'd allowed him to tuck her hand under his arm. She couldn't have changed that much, could she? What was the matter with her that she couldn't treat him with friendliness in a public place? And then he remembered. “Amy,” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder, “I'm very sorry about your sister.”

  She jerked her shoulder abruptly, throwing his hand off. Ducking her head, she brushed past him and almost ran out the door he still held open. She hurried down the steps with Ruth in tow, so fast that the girl's feet missed almost every stair. They flew down the street, past the parked car in which sat a woman in a peacock-green coat. They turned the corner and still raced on, did not slow, did not stop, until they reached the stables where she'd left the buggy.

  “We forgot the cocoa,” Ruth said anxiously, as Amanda plunked her onto the buggy seat. Amanda didn't answer.

  When he heard the screams coming from the house, Carl was coming up the path that ran through the woods to the lake. He broke into the best limping run he could manage up the final hill. Despite the chilly air, he was slick with sweat, and his legs were shaking and his breathing ragged by the time he burst into the house.

  In the kitchen, Ruth was wailing through chattering teeth as she struggled to climb out of her bath. Her little hands gripped the rim of the metal tub, and she pushed herself up on her toes, trying to lift her leg over the edge. It was a pitiful sight. He grabbed her up and wrapped her as well as he could in a dishtowel that hung near the sink. He held her close until she stopped crying, and then he shifted her to his hip and went to his sister-in-law, who all the time had been looking out the window, rocking slightly, holding one hand by the wrist with the other.

  “Amanda, what's going on here?”

  She turned toward him and smiled. “You see? I told you. She isn't drowned.” She reached to take Ruth from his arms, but he hesitated, held her back. “Give her to me!” she demanded, and then repeated, her voice frantic and shrill, “Give her to me!”

  And when he still wouldn't relinquish the child, she tore at his arm and pummeled the shoulder he turned toward her, howling, “Mattie is mine! Mattie is mine! Give Mattie back! Mattie is mine!”

  “Stop it! Damn it! Stop acting crazy!” He pulled Ruth away and ran up the stairs with her, slowing at the top, when it was clear Amanda wasn't following. When he came back down half an hour later, having soothed Ruth to sleep, she was no longer in the kitchen.

  He moved through the house, opening doors and quietly calling her name. “Amanda,” he whispered outside her room. When he got no answer, he hesitated, and then, tentatively, pushed the door further open and looked inside. The room was empty. Half guilty and half curious, he stepped in.

  Amanda had taken for herself the room her parents had used when they were alive. It was large enough for three windows, two on the wall that overlooked the flower garden, now just a wide strip of black mud—he'd need to cultivate that soon—and one that caught the afternoon light. All three windows were tall and so deep that the glass started below Carl's knees. It was dizzying to stand too near them. He looked at the ground below, with a sudden, terrible thought, but no, the windows were closed.

  The dresser top was prettied with a runner on which lay a silver grooming set, the back of the hairbrush monogrammed with initials he knew to be her mother's. Beside that an oval frame held a photograph of a solemn, straight-backed girl, her lap buried in a froth of christening lace from which peeked an infant's face.

  Carl wanted to slide one of the dresser drawers open, but he didn't dare. She'd know if he'd touched anything; he was sure of it. He looked quickly over his shoulder toward the door, but the house was quiet.

  At first, thinking she'd gone off to calm herself, he didn't worry much and tried to go on with the afternoon. He cleaned the tub and mopped the water off the floor. He played with Ruth when she woke up. He did the evening milking. It was hard, though, to keep his mind on these things when she still didn't come back. Where was she? Finally, at dusk, he asked Rudy to watch Ruth and went to look for her.

  He searched the barn, the chicken coop, and the root cellar hurriedly, holding his lantern high in the corners. He knocked on the door of the outhouse. He hoped but didn't truly expect to find her in any of these reasonable places, but he needed to feel he was looking thoroughly, systematically, and it made sense to start with the nearest, sanest possibilities. At last, with expectant dread, he started for the lake.

  It was cold, cold enough to make Carl wish he'd worn gloves, and he passed the lantern from hand to hand often as he walked, pressing the free one into his pocket. Halfway, he began to run as well as he could over the dark and knotted ground, groping his way down the same path he'd hurried up that afternoon.

  Finally he broke from the trees, and the lake, which had only days before shed the last ragged scraps of the winter's ice, rippled wide and black before him. And yes, unbelievable though it seemed, there Amanda was, almost as he'd imagined her as he rushed through the woods. She wasn't floating, though, but standing up to her shoulders in the water, her head a silhouette in the white spill of moonlight. He splashed in without stopping to lay down the lantern, so that when he reached her he had to fling it into the water to grab hold of her with both hands. He dragged her back toward the land, maintaining his own footing on the bottom with difficulty, especially since in the numbingly cold water he couldn't feel his feet and could barely sense his legs. How long had she been standing there? What had she meant to do?

  “Amanda! What're you doing? What're you doing?” he repeated over and over idiotically.

  She gave no answer, but neither did she resist him. By the time they reached shallow water, he realized he'd been carrying her and would have to continue. She either couldn't or wouldn't support her own weight.

  “She's obviously hypothermic,” the doctor said, “and I'm sure there's frostbite in the feet and fingers, but I think she'll be all right that way.” He looked significantly at Carl. “It's her mind that worries me.”

  “Yes,” Carl said, nodding energetically, relieved the doctor had noticed. “There's something wrong with her, isn't there?”

  The doctor recommended St. Michael's. “A little rest,” he assured Carl, “will do her good.”

  Chapter Four

  In April 1920, when Ruth was four, her Aunt Mandy went away.

  “It doesn't surprise me one bit,” they said. On Cottonwood Drive and Maple Avenue, in the dry goods store and at the butcher, in the bank, in the tavern turned tearoom and in the post office they all agreed that there had always been something a little funny about Amanda, even as a girl.

  “That time I brought that great big dish of potato salad over,” Mrs. Alberti said to Mrs. Zinda over coffee. “This was years ago, of course, back when Lucy was getting ready to have that darling Mattie. Well, Amanda came to the door—she must have been only seven or eight, just a little bit of a thing then. I was going to ta
ke my potato salad to the kitchen, look in on Lucy, you know, but that girl took my dish right out of my hands. It was so heavy the bones in her spindly wrists were standing out, and ‘Thank you very much,' she says, and with one foot pushes the door closed, right in my face. Isn't that the limit? I don't know that I ever did get my dish back. It was the nice square one. You know, with the lid. I think you've got one like it.”

  “You remember the way she was when Lucy and Henry got sick the other year,” Trina Eschinger said. “Throwing her own sister out with that tiny baby. And then running off like that when the old folks died.”

  Yes, Amanda had always been funny. This didn't surprise them one bit.

  Amanda

  If only I could have kept her small and close, but no, she wouldn't stay in that dark, secret place. She forced her way out, for all the world to see, and then look what happened.

  It is you and then it isn't you—that's the trouble with a baby. And it keeps on and keeps on, growing and growing, monstrous. There's nothing you can do. You are no match for it. But that comes later.

  I was so happy those months with Mama on the davenport, all mine, waiting for Mathilda to come. Tucked under her arm, I listened to her read and waited for the tap tap tap of Blind Pew and the light fairy laughter of Cowslip and Parsley. She could do all the voices. We dressed my doll Suzanna for the ball in a fold of Mama's shawl—Mama knew all the most interesting places a doll could go and what she would say when she got there. Sometimes we studied the photograph of my brother Randolph, who'd died of diphtheria just after I was born and would never be more than three years old. The picture was taken before he was buried and Mama had hired an artist to paint open eyes over his closed ones, but they didn't look the same as his real ones, she told me. Other times she played the piano and we sang as loud as we could, so Rudy and Papa could hear us down in the meadow.

  Every day then, when I left for school, Mama was on the davenport in the front room. I knelt beside her so she could fix my unruly hair in its tight braids. When I came home again, she was there still, just as I knew she'd be. Her arms would be open, and she would be waiting for me to bend close, to brush her hair, to draw a tiny heart with ink on her arm, to bet with her which marble I would hit. She would be waiting for me to draw the paper clothes that she would then cut out for my paper dolls, waiting for me to get us milk and brown sugar sandwiches from the kitchen. Every bit of her was there, just waiting for me.

  They tried to come in, those women with their rhubarb and their kuchens and their potato salads. They wanted her too. But I wouldn't let them. She was mine, all mine.

  “Did you hear Amanda Starkey's in the bin?” Ramona Mueller asked, the next time Clement Owens stopped in.

  “The bin?”

  “You know, St. Michael's Sanatorium. You seemed to be acquainted, so I thought you'd want to know.” She looked at him expectantly, ready for questions, but he disappointed her.

  “That's too bad,” was all he said as he took his pile of envelopes from her hands.

  The news troubled Clement. He wished the postmistress had kept it to herself. Although, why should he care, after all? He had nothing to do with Amanda now. He stood near his car, slitting the envelopes open with a pocketknife—an inferior one, since he'd lost the good one with the silver monogrammed case.

  Had the craziness been there, underneath the neat nurse's uniform, all along? She'd seemed so transparent, with her heart on her sleeve, with her quick blush and easy laugh. She'd been amazed by the simplest things: a glass of champagne, a bunch of violets. And all the while she'd been hiding craziness. She had shown herself to him as one thing, and now she turned out to be another. He cranked the car and got in, slamming the door hard behind him. Well, she wasn't going to get him to feel sorry for her this way.

  He sat for a moment, listening to the soothing rumble of the engine. After all, it must have been hard for her. All those deaths, the parents, then the sister. Anyone might crack.

  Amanda

  I see I haven't said enough. I thought I might omit this part, let it settle silently into the muck where it belongs, but it seems that isn't possible. People want to hear everything, don't they? Spy every strap and pin and hem. It's not enough for them to run a finger along the scar or even to see the knife slice the skin, they must hear the blade purring against the whetstone. All right, then, if that's the way it has to be.

  We met because Private Buckle was delirious. Poor Private Buckle—he'd not even got over there yet, had only reached Camp Grant when the Army discovered a limp and shipped him home. But a fever had stopped him before he'd gone a hundred miles. So here he was at the hospital, delirious, thrashing his arms and kicking his legs, whipping his head back and forth against the pillow and saying terrible things.

  I was having an awful time with him. I'd get a compress on his forehead and he'd tear it off. I'd get his arms settled, and his legs would start up.

  Obviously, I was busy, so I didn't see the man until he was standing on the other side of Private Buckle's bed, holding the patient's feet quiet, while I struggled with his head. The man's skin had a red cast to it, almost as if he had more blood than his body could hold, and his hands around Private Buckle's ankles were very large and steady. He smiled at me reassuringly and somehow, working his way slowly up from the feet, moving his hands in little circles and talking softly, he managed to soothe Private Buckle, almost to hypnotize him.

  “There we go,” he said when the private lay barely twitching beneath the sheet, the compress firmly on his forehead, his breathing calm and his heart rate steady.

  “Are you a new doctor?” I asked.

  “A doctor? Oh, no.” He laughed. Just then Dr. Nichols came onto the ward.

  Seeing the director made me nervous. We'd never explicitly been told not to let strangers handle patients, but I was pretty sure the hospital wouldn't encourage it. Dr. Nichols was smiling, however. He clapped the man on the back.

  “What brings you here today, Owens?” he asked, and they shook hands and went off together.

  Later that afternoon, while I was drinking my coffee and eating an anise cookie in the cafeteria, the man appeared again.

  “This,” he announced, setting a brown box on my table, “will revolutionize medicine.” He pulled a chair out and swung it around, so he could sit on it backward, resting his elbows on the cane back.

  “What is it?” Clearly I was supposed to ask.

  “It's a vacuum box. You put your instruments in here, your scalpels and scissors and needles and what have you.” He dropped my spoon into the box. “Then seal it up like this.” He worked a lever that looked like the latch on a pickle jar. “And then activate the vacuum for thirty seconds.” He flipped a switch and a tiny red light on the top lit up. “That's how you know it's on. And then, when you take your instruments out again, they're perfectly sterilized.”

  “Wouldn't a good scrub or some alcohol work just as well?” I took my spoon back and wiped it with my napkin.

  “You have to understand the science. You see, when the air molecules are removed, the germs just can't stick to the metal. The effect lasts much longer than if they'd been wiped off with alcohol—we've proven it—and there's no danger of recontamination with a dirty cloth.” He was so certain, so enthusiastic, he seemed almost like a child.

  “So are we going to start using those here?”

  “Oh, you know, they have to do all sorts of tests, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.” He stroked the top of the box fondly.

  “I'm afraid I didn't get your name this morning,” I said finally. “Is it Owen?”

  “It's Owens, the last name is. Clement is my given name.”

  I gave my own name then and held out my hand, which he shook rather too vigorously.

  He offered to get me a second cup of coffee, but while he was at the counter, I realized my break had ended five minutes before. No time to make apologies, I told myself. As I hurried out the door, I saw him arranging a whole platef
ul of cookies, ladies' fingers and lemon icebox and more anise. It seemed that we would probably never meet again.

  We met because of Private Buckle and then I killed my parents. Had I mentioned that? No, I thought I hadn't. Of course, I didn't mean to kill them, but in a case of death, how much does intent really matter?

  I killed them because I felt a little fatigued and suffered from a slight, persistent cough. Thinking I was overworked and hadn't been getting enough sleep, I went home for a short visit, just a few days to relax in the country while the sweet corn and the raspberries were ripe. From the city I brought fancy ribbon, two boxes of chocolate, and a deadly gift from Private Buckle. I gave the influenza to my mother, who gave it to my father, or maybe it was the other way around.

  When I saw the fever on my mother's cheeks, I made Mathilda take Ruthie to the island, although for all I knew it was already too late.

  “But it's so lonely there,” she said.

  “Better lonely than dead,” I told her. It was important to be efficient, to be blunt. “Think of Ruthie.”

  I was a good nurse, as I've said, and I brought all of my training to bear. I followed the doctor's orders to the letter, even though I needed no instructions; I knew the course. I forced spoonfuls of honeyed tea and chicken broth between their lips to give them strength. I dosed them with quinine at eight, at twelve, at four, at eight again, day and night. I opened the windows in their room for fresh air. I tucked the quilts tightly around them to make them sweat. I changed the linens twice a day, more often when the blood from their noses began to stain the pillow slips.

  “Mathilda?” my mother said as I bathed her face with a warm cloth.

  I assured her she would see Mathilda later, when she was better.

  “Where's Mattie?” my father demanded, throwing the blankets to the floor.

  I tried to explain about contagion, about how she was safe with Ruth, about how they would see her once they recovered. But they were delirious with fever. They refused to understand. “Mathilda,” they called. “Mattie!” Finally, when their skins had turned pale blue for lack of air, I pretended.