Finding Ruby Starling

by Karen Rivers

  Dad is booking the tickets for England for the twenty-first. It’s the only date that works for his job and mine, so we’ll have to figure out how to cram all the meetings-with-your-family into only a couple of days. We’ll go again, I promise. And maybe a couple of days are enough for now.

  How’s SHORCA!? Can’t WAIT to see it. You’re so smart. I knew my daughter would be amazing. And look at you:

  You are.

  Love you more than a surprise vacation in the Hawaiian Islands during a cold snap at home,

  Mom

  P.S. Please shut off the computer and go to bed now. I know I am terrible at reinforcing bedtime, but I just read this study about how kids who don’t get enough sleep can get anxious, and we’d hate for that to happen to you.

  I’m already anxious, Mom.

  Good night!

  Love,

  Ruth

  Sometimes when I think about you and I being twins, and all that that means, from being scrunched together inside Mum and splitting cells and being really the same person, my heart starts beating strangely, maybe like yours. It feels like a bird that’s stuck on flypaper, all trapped and doomed, flapping his wings around to try to escape.

  I saw a bird stuck like that once. It was at this party that we had in the back garden, where Mum was marrying herself last year after she decided that boyfriends were never going to measure up to Dad. I know that sounds barking, but it was really lovely. She looked amazing! And so happy. But then things got weird when one of her ex-boyfriends showed up and started shouting, ‘Oi! Well, ain’t this a pretty picture? She wouldn’t marry me, would she? But marry ’erself, she will’? Fi’s dad took care of him, but the mood was ruined. Mum went inside to regroup in the bath, so Fi and I cleaned up, and that’s when we found the bird. I think I killed him by mistake when I tried to pull him free.

  The poems on your tumblr make me feel like I did when that bird died. D’you know what I mean?

  I just wanted to tell you that. I think some things are going to happen soon. I’ve done something. I’ve done something that will make Mum tell me everything, I think.

  Love,

  Ruby

  I know you probably won’t get this e, Fi, but I did what you said and Sellotaped a picture of Ruth with all her tubes and hospital things to the fridge. I hope it’s not a terrible mistake. I’m so nervous, I can hear my heart beating. It’s beating like it’s taking up the whole room, like those tribal drums they made us listen to in World Cultures, d’you remember? The ones that felt like they were beating all the way through us, from our feet all the way to our hair.

  Ruby,

  What you said about the bird and the flypaper was totes absolutely amazingly flabbergastingly poetic. You have a poetic soul, like me. Mom and Dad don’t really get poetry, so I don’t tell them that I write it. (Also, it’s private!) (And often about them!) And if they read it, they’d probably laugh by mistake or just — worse! perish the thought! — not understand it.

  ALSO, I HAVE DATES: We are coming to England on August 21. At least, we leave on the 21st, but weirdly we arrive on the 22nd at 11:35 in the morning, not that I expect you to come to London to meet us or anything. I just thought you should know!

  Write back AS SOON AS SOMETHING HAPPENS, if it happens, and also, tell me what you DID. I’m going to write another poem now. Suddenly, I feel all poemy. Like they are scrabbling around inside me, hoping to come out.

  the air is humming

  with something that’s like music

  but fainter

  music that is getting

  louder in your veins

  the trumpets that say

  something is about

  to happen

  that you can’t take

  back.

  Dear Jedgar,

  I realize you are probably abandoning our documentary about my life because you have fallen in love with Freddie Blue Anderson and are too busy to trouble yourself with my story, mine and Ruby’s. Well, fine. I’m so super mad at you for not telling me that when you went camping, she was there too, and now you love her and she loves you, except I don’t know if she does. She’s mean, in case you didn’t notice.

  And I am very hurt, Jedgar. Not because I wanted you to love me — I’m not ready for anything like that AND I have a lot going on right now anyway — but because of the movie, which was important to me. It was taking this whole weird chapter of my life and turning it into something that I could actually manage to hold on to, instead of having it flap up and away, out of my reach. It was going to do that for me. Somehow. I don’t even know how! That’s just how I felt! And now I feel betrayed by your PERFIDIOUS act!

  Jedgar Johnston, I am having a panic attack! Like, a real one! I am breathing very fast! And my heart is pounding! And it’s your fault! Tink told me. She told me that FBA and you were camping together. She told me everything. And anyway, I saw the way you were making googly eyes at her at the skate park and then I pretended it wasn’t a big deal and we’re just friends, which we are, but it’s still a big deal.

  OK.

  OK.

  I am trying to calm down. But Jedgar, you can’t just do that, go frolicking off to the beach with Freddie Blue Anderson and then avert your eyes when I come up to you. What is happening to you?

  This is all sort of my way of saying PLEASE DON’T ABANDON ME, JEDGAR. If that’s what you’re going to do.

  Ruby,

  I have insomnia sometimes, which means I can’t sleep and I toss and turn and then the blankets and sheets get so looped around me that I have to struggle free, and I wake up from funny little half sleeps breathing really fast. It’s scary. So sometimes I just write stuff down, random things, so that I don’t have to worry about why I’m breathing so fast and whether Ashley Mary Jane’s heart is doing what it needs to do.

  I woke up this time having a horrible nightmare about Freddie Blue Anderson. “Who?” you are saying. “Who is that?” Well, I will tell you. FBA is the almost-thirteen-year-old-girl equivalent of fake Christmas trees. Which means she is very pretty from a distance, but up close you realize she is of terrible quality and gratingly fakety fake fake. Her BFF is my new friend, Tink, who is funny, kind, and sweet, and it’s a complete mystery why they are friends at all. I heard FBA say once that they met in a past life, where she was an Egyptian princess and Tink was a slave who was called up to duty as the princess’s servant. Yes, she really said that! She is the worst of all the worst things you can imagine, and I’m including headless snakes that writhe around on the path in front of you while you are hiking, scaring you into running back to the car at a full sprint and refusing to get out and participate in “hiking” ever again.

  Jedgar is very vulnerable to pretty, normal girls because he has always believed he’s hideous, because he has one leg shorter than the other, and for his whole life, his brothers have been calling him Limpy. And so he is exactly the kind of boy who would want the validation of a pretty girl liking him, and even possibly not notice that she is a mean and horrible person! ZUT ALORS! I have attached a picture that I took of Jedgar this afternoon. You can just see FBA over his shoulder with her sweep of blond hair, looking perfect and horrible.

  I do not know why I’m telling you this. I don’t want Jedgar to be my boyfriend and I don’t want to kiss him and I just really want him to be normal and like he always is, just for the rest of the summer, because everything else is so topsy-turvy. Do you know what I mean?

  There’s also this other thing I’ve been meaning to tell you. Well, ASK you, really, and I haven’t and I’ve put it off and now you’ll probably be mad. It is: Would it be OK if Jedgar made a small documentary about what it’s like to find your twin on the Internet and then accidentally find the mother who abandoned you at birth? Please say yes and please don’t be mad that I didn’t ask before he started. It’s just that I didn’t quite know that he was really going to do it, and then suddenly he was working on it, and it all blurred together with SHORCA! (our animate
d short movie about a shark/orca hybrid who is not a psychotic killing machine, but rather a misunderstood and lonely being).

  I don’t know what it will look like or if he’ll even get it all done, but he’s collecting facts and one day maybe he’ll be able to figure out how to package them all up beautifully into a nice, shiny movie that has a beginning and middle and end. But I can’t think how, because mostly this seems like a beginning, and I can’t even guess how it will ever be an end.

  Love,

  Ruth

  Ruth,

  I think Jedgar looks the tiniest bit like Daniel Radcliffe when he was thirteen — not now, when he’s obviously an adult man and not suitable crush material for someone who actually IS thirteen. I can see why you could fancy him. I think he only might possibly fall into the trap of liking this FBA creature because she sounds like one of those girls who are all shiny and out there, being popular and having look-at-me hair and always jumping around and ending sentences with question marks and a toss of the head. If he does like her. And you haven’t really got any evidence that he does! Do you?

  And even if he does, it won’t last. We are (almost) thirteen. Nothing lasts when you are thirteen. Actually, I’m coming to think that nothing lasts at all. People die and leave you, or they just leave you anyway. Ask Mum. She’ll tell you. And anyway, when FBA ditches him, he’ll be back to being your normal friend. You might just have to wait it out.

  I’m getting pretty good at waiting things out.

  Like right now, I’m waiting for Mum to go into the kitchen.

  See, the thing that I did to get Mum to talk was to stick that pic that you sent of you as a baby onto the fridge. Only when she came home last night, after we celebrated the unveiling of the statue, she went straight to bed and didn’t go in the kitchen, and then this morning, she left again without seeing it. She’s taking the train into London to meet with the bank, which she does every time she finishes a project and gets paid. She doesn’t know that she’s holding our fate bunched up in her hands, and instead is just breezily carrying on with things like everything is normal!

  I feel as if I’ve let you down. It’s not many more days now until you come here and I still haven’t told her anything. I still haven’t done my bit.

  I don’t know what to think, really, about Jedgar making a movie. Do you think he’ll actually do it? I don’t know if I’d want that. What if other people see it? Sometimes I don’t want to be seen, not that much.

  I’m not angry, though. It’s not like that.

  Ruby

  Dear Nan,

  I have made the most terrible, awful, horrid mistake. I can’t write it here because I’ll just have to write it all over again to Ruth. And I don’t much want you to know, actually. I do, but I don’t.

  I just saw a prism on the glass where the sun was coming in at an angle and it was like there was a rainbow puddle of light pooling on the floor by the door. That was probably you, wasn’t it? Saying, ‘What on earth were you thinking, you ridiculous girl’?

  I’m sorry.

  Love,

  Ruby

  I’m writing this to both of you, even though you don’t know each other, just because you’ll both want to know and I don’t want to type it all twice. I have a migraine that’s so huge it’s like there is an entire elephant sitting on my head, squeezing my brain into a squidge of jelly.

  Mum came home and saw the picture.

  When I heard her heels clip-clopping into the kitchen, my heart started beating so fast I thought it would burst right there in my chest, like that little bird’s did when I tried to peel him off the flypaper.

  Then she screamed like she’d just seen an axe murderer. I ran into the room, and by the time I got there, she was crumpled in a heap on the floor, heaving with sobs and clutching the printout so hard that it was ruined.

  ‘Where did you get this, Ruby’? she kept gasping, between sobs. Then she was sick in the sink.

  I said, ‘What happened? What is it’? Which made it seem like I didn’t know what it was and hadn’t put it there myself in the first place. Which is awful, really the worst thing. But I couldn’t own up! It was too much!

  Then after wailing on the floor for quite some time, Mum got up and said, ‘Right, then’. And she briskly rang 999 and asked for the POLICE. She said she was reporting a Breaking and Entering. ‘Nothing is stolen’, she said. ‘I don’t think. Though I haven’t actually looked’. I could tell by the way she said it that the person on the other end of the phone was confused. So was I!

  As it happens, your dad was on duty, Fi. We live in a pretty small village, Ruth, so basically he’s always on duty, and if it’s something particularly troubling, he calls in the real police from the city. He came racing over on his scooter and asked a lot of questions. I couldn’t hear them because Mum barricaded the door and shouted at me to go away, so I took a drinking glass and held it up against the wall — which magnifies the sound, as you know — and I still couldn’t hear anything, but what I did hear was:

  Twins

  Adopted

  Dead

  ‘What else could I do’? (This part I heard because she shouted it about a dozen times. Or more!)

  And then I heard your dad, Fi, and he just said, ‘There, there’, over and over again. I could tell he felt helpless, but mostly because that’s how he usually is when people cry. He gets overwhelmed, right? Maybe all men are like that, hopeless when women sob. Anyway, he must have made a call because next thing I knew, the ambulance was there and Mum was being given something to calm her down. It took ages for them all to go away. Fi, your dad kept wanting me to go home with him. But I knew I had to stay with Mum. She couldn’t be alone! And I knew I had to tell her that it was me, after all. It wasn’t a break-in.

  Finally, they left. Mum slumped over in the old chair that used to belong to Nan. It smells dreadful, like fish and cigarettes, which is specially odd because Nan didn’t smoke and she was allergic to seafood. Mum hates that chair, but we kept it because I cried when she said she was going to chuck it now that Nan was gone.

  ‘Mum’, I said, ‘I’m sorry. It was me. I did it. I put that picture on the fridge’.

  She turned as white as a ghost. She kept trying to talk and couldn’t.

  Finally, she said, ‘Oh, Ruby’.

  I felt a bit braver then, and I said, ‘This has gone on long enough. You obviously had twin daughters and gave one away because she had a manky heart. And you assumed she died? Well, she didn’t. Her name is Ruth and she lives in America. She found me on the Internet and we’ve been talking online for yonks. So tell me everything that happened’.

  ‘She found you on the Internet’? she said, faintly, like her voice was coming from very far away. ‘People do that’?

  Then she said, ‘She’s alive? Really’? And she sort of smiled, then she started crying again, really hard. A snotty, awful kind of crying. I didn’t know what to do, so I went and sat on the arm of her chair and patted her head, like she was the child and I was the mum. And I said things like, ‘It’s OK’ and ‘I’m sorry’, even though I haven’t anything to be sorry for and it isn’t really OK.

  My heart was racing so fast, I thought it might just fly out of my chest and out the open window into the night. My legs were shaking. I felt awful. For her. For me. For all of us.

  Then she just said, ‘I … I … I … didn’t even know you had the Internet. Well, I suppose I did. I must pay for it, right’? She waved her hand vaguely towards the desk where all the bills are stacked up. ‘I didn’t know the Internet did that, anyway’. Then she said again, ‘She’s alive’? Then, ‘She can’t be’. And ‘She isn’t’.

  Then she just said, ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I didn’t know. I … I … I …’

  She said ‘I’ a whole bunch of times over and over again, and then just like your dad did when you told him, Ruth, she touched her face, like she was checking to make sure it was still there.

  Then she started over. ‘I can’t bel
ieve this’, she said. ‘I feel like I’m having a really strange dream. But it isn’t one’! She stood up and then she sank back into the chair. She was smiling in a really peculiar way and murmuring your name, ‘Ruth, Ruth, Ruth’. She said it like she was tasting something new and incredible. Ruth, Ruth, Ruth.

  Then she tried again. ‘It’s just that Nan told me that she’d died. She said she’d died. She swore that she’d died’.

  Then she got out of the chair and held her hands up to the ceiling and she shouted, ‘YOU SAID SHE’D DIED’!

  Then she started to cry again, an inside-out kind of cry. I was crying too. I didn’t know what to do! It was scary and awful and so sad. I felt like all my insides were being torn out of me like pages of a book, then crumpled up and lit on fire. Mum was walking round but she got dizzy. She kept tilting into the walls, kind of blindly, crying and saying, ‘Ruth’. It went on for a long time. Ages and ages. It felt like forever, like we were there for days with her crying ‘RUTH’ and me saying, helplessly, ‘It’s OK, Mum. Breathe, Mum. It’s OK’.

  Finally, she sat down, but she kept saying, ‘What’s happening to me now? What is this? You know, Nan wouldn’t let me hold her. Nan said, “Don’t do that” when I reached for her. Nan …’ I wanted her to stop saying that, about Nan, so I said ‘SHHHHHH’. And she looked surprised, and she stopped talking. Her eyes were closing. I remembered that when the ambulance was here, they gave her a pill that made her sleepy.

  It was really like she was a baby, then. I had to hold her hands and pull her to her bed, and then tucked her up. I kissed her on the forehead, like a mum would. And I told her that it was OK, that she could tell me tomorrow, but she was already asleep.

  What happens now?