“Read these and then go have yourself a hell of an adventure,” said Evelyn Edge, handing Ruthie the stuffed yellow envelope.
“Maybe I’ll go to the Carlyle.”
Evelyn squinted a little, then reached out her hand and patted Ruthie on the right side of her face. “Cheeky girl,” she said.
She walked Ruthie to the door, turning the lock at the same time as she pulled on the door handle. It was a stubborn door, impossible to open if you didn’t know the trick. Ruthie’s friends never could figure it out, yet all these years later Ruthie still remembered how it was done.
“Thank you,” said Ruthie. “I’ll treasure these.”
“Wonderful of you to come by,” said Evelyn, as if she and Ruthie were old friends.
Stepping outside, Ruthie was surprised by how light it was. She glanced at her watch. It was only 3:30. The Wymberly Way house never let in enough sun. She walked to the car, eager to get home so that she could read whatever it was Naomi had written. She would share Naomi’s writing with Gabe, too. Let him “meet” her mother. And Julia. Julia would be ecstatic over the discovery. These writings of Naomi’s would be pure gold for her memoir.
Yes, Julia would be thrilled. Would eat Naomi’s words right up. Would, in fact, take Naomi’s story, her “selfish bravery,” and turn it into her own. Would cannibalize their mother’s words, would lock them in print, would say to the world, “Here. This is our mother. This is who Naomi Harrison was. Take her.”
And Ruthie wouldn’t have any choice in the matter. Julia would get to decide what to leave in and what to leave out, because Julia had a publisher and this gave Julia a power and authority that Ruthie did not have access to. This had allowed Julia to publish Ruthie’s own private history, without asking her permission. And surely Julia would not really ask Ruthie’s permission for what she might publish in the new memoir she was writing. What was it Julia had said: she couldn’t promise to take anything out but they could “discuss” anything Ruthie might have a problem with?
Well. There was nothing she could do about the fact that Julia was writing another memoir. But she could keep her mother’s journals and letters for herself. Who said she had to surrender all pertinent material? She could make sure that some things remained private. She could claim her mother’s words for her own.
Chapter Eighteen
As soon as she got into the car and pulled the door shut, she opened the large yellow envelope given to her by Evelyn Edge and slid its contents onto her lap. Two black-and-white-speckled composition notebooks fell out, along with several Polaroid pictures (including the one of her mother Ruthie had seen all of those years ago) and a white envelope, “Julia” written in blue pen across its front. She flipped through the notebooks, filled with Naomi’s perfect round cursive, the entries dated, starting with 1978. She was hoping that somewhere, caught between the pages, she would find a second envelope, this one marked: “Ruthie.”
She did not.
Overcome with what she knew was probably irrational hurt and jealousy, she raised her hands, palms open, and started talking to herself, to her mother.
“Really? Really? You leave behind one letter and it’s addressed to Julia and not me? That’s fantastic, Mom. Fantastic. It really is. Thanks. Thank you so much.”
Irrational though she was being, she was so consumed by a sense of posthumous betrayal that she started making little noises. Little snorts. Little “ha’s!” Was this some idea of a cosmic joke, that after she decided to block her sister from having access to their shared past her mother would “send” a letter Ruthie’s way, addressed to Julia?
Evelyn Edge remained at her front door, watching Ruthie talk to herself in the car. Ruthie imagined that Evelyn was probably having second thoughts about having given her the documents found inside the secret door. Or maybe she was having second thoughts about letting Ruthie into the house, into the upstairs rooms. Perhaps she was wondering whether or not Ruthie was really who she said she was, was perhaps an imposter, faking her history in order to case the joint for a future break-in. Evelyn did not budge from the door frame, even though she had said her manicurist was waiting. Probably she would stay there until Ruthie drove away.
Fuck.
Ruthie put the keys in the ignition and turned on the car, wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan. She put the clutch in reverse, backed up to the driveway’s curb, then put the car in first and drove forward, turning the wheel. Reverse, forward, turn. Reverse, forward, turn. She did this until the nose of the Volvo was pointed toward the street.
She made a left onto Wymberly Way, no longer paying attention to the houses she passed. She could hardly pay attention to drive. She was crying in earnest now, driving and crying—just like the name of that band Julia used to listen to, the one that sang “Straight to Hell,” which became a sort of anthem for fraternity boys all over the South.
Music. She needed music. Or voices. Something else, anything else, besides this terrible anger she felt, this anger that exceeded all proportions. She switched on the radio. The station was programmed to 90.1, NPR, just like her mother used to listen to. Well, good. Maybe the calm, rational voices of public radio would soothe her.
Only the voices weren’t soothing. They were talking of a plane crash, a plane that just crashed, moments ago. US Airways Flight 1549 had left New York’s LaGuardia Airport en route to Charlotte, North Carolina, when both engines went out. It was thought to be a flock of birds that killed the engines, but no one yet was certain. There had been an emergency landing. On the Hudson River. And somehow, the pilot landed the plane smoothly—as smoothly as possible—on top of the water. Witnesses said it looked as if the landing was intentional. The plane did not break up into pieces, or tailspin, or flip. So far there were no known fatalities. People were calling it a miracle.
Ruthie began to sob. Never before had she heard of a plane crash with a happy ending. She could not keep driving. She could not keep listening to this story while trying to drive. And how could she turn it off? There were passengers waiting on the wings of the plane. It was only twenty-two degrees in New York. She had to see what would happen to them.
She was back on Peachtree Battle Avenue, that long stretch of road that cut a curvy line between some of the great lawns of Buckhead, each topped with a distinguished manor. The road that she drove on when she was only thirteen, on the day of her parents’ memorial service, when Julia let her take the wheel. What if the plane crash her parents were in had ended with a miracle? Until the exact moment of his death, her father was probably expecting just that. Hadn’t he experienced a miracle forty-two years earlier, when he had sailed out of his mother’s lap and through the front window of their Ford Custom Deluxe sedan? The medics had pushed the bloody baby out of the way, presuming him dead. But he had lived. Had thrived even though the doctors predicted that if—if—he were to make it he would be permanently brain damaged.
Phil had told Ruthie and Julia that his aunt paid no attention to the doctors. She knew he was a child of God, saved for a reason. She held him and loved him for the first two years after his mother’s death, while his daddy was in Korea, fighting in the war. She picked out the pieces of glass that rose from deep within Phil’s skull and surfaced on the flat spot of his head, the spot where he hit the windshield, where his hair would from then on grow in a strange cowlick, until it stopped growing there at all. At night his aunt would pick out that glass, ever so delicately, while humming hymns.
And he had survived. Not only survived but thrived. Always an excellent student, he was named valedictorian of his senior class. Was voted “Best Boy Citizen” by the Union City Press for his oration “I Speak for Democracy.”
And the 155 people, the passengers and crew who were on US Airways Flight 1549, it sounded as if they were going to make it, too. The radio announced that a commuter ferry had already made its way to the starboard wing. Those standing there, shivering in the twenty-two-degree weather, were being pulled aboard, were
being draped with the coats and sweaters of the paying ferry passengers. And more ferries were on the way; more help was to come.
At the traffic light Ruthie turned left onto Northside Drive. Saw Memorial Park to her right. She turned onto Wesley, one of the streets bordering the park. She could not keep driving. She was too overcome. How angry she felt at Julia on the day of the funeral, when she had refused to entertain the notion that maybe there was life after death, that maybe Ruthie would see her parents again, even if it were in some unknowable form. On that day she had needed her sister to acknowledge the possibility of heaven.
At twenty-eight Ruthie no longer had much faith in an afterlife, though she still held on to a stubborn faith in some sort of God. If Gabe had remained a Jew she would have converted, been a Jew with him. Officially joined the tribe of Robert and Dara and Schwartzy, who were her tribe already, who constituted her family as much as anyone. Joined a faith that held the story of Jacob wrestling with God as a supreme example of engagement with the divine. A faith that would allow her to wrestle with God, too.
Oh God. Why couldn’t Julia have given her the hope of heaven when she was only thirteen and had just lost her parents? Why did her sister insist that—at most—Phil and Naomi were cosmic dust gathering in some distant galaxy, cosmic dust that might one day become a minuscule part of a star?
Ruthie had parked the car, but the engine was still on. The voices on the radio were still talking about the crash. And why shouldn’t they? One hundred and fifty-five people should have died, and yet they had not. Instead they were veritably walking on water: standing on the wings of that plane, floating on evacuation rafts, swimming away from the downed jet, bright yellow life jackets hugging their necks.
The voices on the radio were calling the pilot, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, a hero. What if a hero had been flying the tiny plane that her parents had strapped themselves into in order to have a grand adventure over the Grand Canyon? Would it have made any difference?
She couldn’t think about that. She turned the key in the ignition, turned the car off. The radio went silent.
She wondered if those people who nearly died in the crash would grow to see themselves as invulnerable, the way her father did after being pushed aside for dead as a baby. Or perhaps they would have the opposite reaction. Perhaps those 155 survivors would live the rest of their lives cognizant of that thin, thin line separating the living from the dead.
She stuffed the speckled notebooks and the letter to Julia back into the yellow envelope, which she pushed inside her purse. Taking her purse with her, she stepped out of the car. Closed the door. She would walk across the dewy grass and make her way to the swings, where she and Julia had gone after her parents’ funeral. She would read her mother’s letter to her sister, though she would not be the first one to do so. Evelyn Edge had already broken the seal on the envelope. Evelyn Edge got to it first. She would read her mother’s black-and-white-speckled notebooks, which with their dated pages surely were journals.
Funny, Naomi never spoke of keeping a journal. Perhaps it was a habit she kept under wraps. Or maybe she wrote in them only during that time when she was leaving Matt for Phil, when she destroyed her reputation among her friends in Virden, her family in Union City. Naomi once told Ruthie that when she left Matt her own father thought she was out of her mind. Thought she was crazy. “If he could have put me in a mental hospital without further damaging his reputation, he would have,” she had said.
Ruthie reached the swings. They were empty, which seemed strange, considering it was the middle of a Thursday afternoon. Well, maybe the media was right. Maybe kids no longer played outdoors. Maybe they were all being raised by videos, starting with Baby Einstein and going from there. She sat on one of the U-shaped swings, made of black rubber, with chains on the side to hold on to. She remembered Julia telling her that if she swung too high she would flip over the bar and fall to the ground.
She used to believe all of Julia’s stories.
She pulled her mother’s letter from the envelope with the broken seal. Unfolded it. Saw her mother’s handwriting, round and pretty, though the words were more tightly squeezed together than her normal script, as if Naomi had been writing while agitated, or in a hurry.
November 5, 1978
Dear Julia,
I don’t know if you will ever be able to forgive me for what I am doing, taking you away from your father when you are just a little girl. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully forgive myself. But I suppose what I’m hoping is that by writing this letter I can at least try to explain what was going on inside of me during this tumultuous time in my—in both of our lives.
Probably you will never read this. Dr. Zachery told me that was okay. When I first left Matt, Mother and Daddy insisted that I go see a psychiatrist. I think they were hoping he could give me electroshock treatments, zap me back into sanity. Instead Dr. Zachery gave me the book I’m OK—You’re OK. Told me it was time to discover my “inner adult.” Told me to start writing things down. Told me to write to you. Pretend you were grown and old enough to understand how a person can simultaneously love her child, love her child fiercely, while doing something that will, irrevocably, damage her.
Ruthie’s cell phone began to ring from inside her purse. She ignored it.
If you ever do read this letter, I hope that you will be grown (my little girl, a woman!) and well past the age I was—only twenty—when I married Matt. I hope you will be able to recognize how very young I was. And on top of that, I was a young twenty, immature. Take the fact that the only alcohol I had ever tasted was in vanilla extract. I was that good of a girl. I had signed a temperance pledge at United Methodist, and I was not one to break the rules. So even though all of my sorority sisters at Meredith College would drink beer or a cocktail at fraternity parties, I stuck with ginger ale.
Julia, at that time in my life I didn’t know how to be anything but a good girl. Ever since my sister Linda got pregnant at sixteen—when I was only thirteen—I had been making up for her transgression. I made A’s. I went to church and MYF every week. I never stayed out past curfew. I did not drink. I did not smoke.
It’s funny. I was so good at saying no to things that ultimately did not matter—whether or not I drank a Tom Collins, whether or not my miniskirt was more than three inches above the knee. Yet I was horrible at saying no when the answer had real consequences. Like when Matt proposed.—
Her cell phone rang again. God! It was probably Gabe, home from White Oaks and wanting to know where she was. She ignored the ring, kept reading.
In truth he and I never should have even dated. He’s a good person, Julia, and a wonderful father, kind and loyal and sweet. But as long as I said that initial “yes” to him, to being with him, he never said no to me. Never. If I were to say the sky was green, he’d say, “Yes, it looks pretty green today.”
We were a bad match. Dr. Zachery said that in my own quiet way, I dominated him. I was so frustrated with his passivity that I would be mean just to let my frustration out. And he would show me—by a look, a sigh, a drop of the shoulders—how wounded he was. Wounded. He was always so wounded.
But he would never say anything to openly rebuke me. Would let me do anything I wanted, as long as I didn’t leave him. And you have to remember, sweetheart, this was long before we were married and—
For the third time Ruthie’s reading was interrupted by the phone ringing. Jesus. Why was Gabe so pushy? But then it occurred to her that it could be Chef A.J. from the restaurant. Though technically it was her day off and technically she was a pastry chef and not a “hot” chef, Ruthie was expected to fill in for last-minute emergencies. And Chef A.J. had been run-down these past few days. Which probably helped explain his parade of pissy Post-it notes. What if he was sick and desperately needed Ruthie? Answering the phone was the last thing she wanted to do, but she was scared of A.J.’s wrath. And really, who but A.J.—or, god, Big Steve—would have the audacity to call three
times in a row?
Grabbing the phone out of the side pocket of her purse, she flipped it open without even looking at the caller’s number.
“This is Ruthie,” she said, using her “professional” voice.
“Oh god. I’m so glad you finally answered. It’s me.”
Julia. It was Julia, though she did not quite sound like herself. She sounded sad, and full of wonder.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Um, kind of. I’m sitting in a swing at Memorial Park.”
“The park we used to run around?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you there?”
She would not tell her sister about visiting Wymberly Way. She would not.
“I was visiting a friend who lives in the neighborhood.”
“Are you with her now?”
“No. I’m by myself.”
“Ruthie, you’re not going to believe this, but I was just in a plane crash. I was just in a plane that crashed. We landed in the Hudson River. We were supposed to die. I was supposed to die. But I didn’t . . .”
The hair stood on Ruthie’s arms and a thousand tiny bumps popped up on her skin. “You were on the US Air flight, that just crashed?”
Julia drew in her breath. “My god, how do you know?”
“Oh my god, Julia. I heard about it on the radio, when I was driving over here. Are you hurt? Are you at the hospital?” She imagined Julia on a stretcher, bandaged, broken.
“I’m fine. Whatever that means. I was sitting right by the wing. I was one of the first out. I stood on the wing, pushed up against all the others, and then a commuter ferry came and there was a ladder off its side and one by one we climbed aboard. A few people who were more badly hurt had to be pulled onto the boat, but they got on. Someone threw a coat over me. I was only wet up to my knees, but I was shaking, shivering. We all were. It was so cold. They took us to Pier 79. There was a triage unit waiting. I think they were expecting a lot worse. All I really needed was dry socks, another blanket. I wasn’t cut; nothing was broken. Not even my cell phone. It was in my jacket pocket. It’s completely intact.”
A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Page 32