by Karen Ellis
“Yes.”
“I want you to do something for me—I want you to let all that go.”
“Don’t worry about me, Dad.” An old refrain, taking his hand to dance the dance of their enduring complicity in believing, or wanting to believe, that you can move forward without the past dragging you back. Her skin blazes. She folds her arms across her chest to keep herself together.
The tendons on the front of his neck tighten and his eyes start to water.
“Dad, are you in pain? Do you need morphine? I’ll call the nurse.”
“Don’t need to ask for it anymore. They hooked me up this afternoon so now I just push this right here.” His finger hovers over a button attached to a wire that snakes over the bedrail. The flesh on his hand has sunken and his skin is liver-spotted where it wasn’t a week ago and Elsa suppresses an urge to cry.
After Roy hits himself up and drifts off to sleep, or wherever the drug takes him, Elsa checks her silenced phone for messages and finds a voice mail from Lex, left almost an hour ago.
“Spoke with Charlie Hendryk, the former boyfriend, and his mother. They were surprised and upset about Ruby. Charlie hasn’t seen her since Thursday at school, but that was only in passing, and they haven’t talked in weeks. Still can’t get ahold of Ruby’s best friend but I’ll keep trying.”
Lex’s tone, implying We can check that off the list now, bothers her. Part of her wishes she’d obeyed her impulse to stay for that interview, but the other part of her—sitting here with her father, whom she loves, loves, and already misses—knows she had no choice. Not really. She arranges two pillows on the large reclining chair so she can angle her attention toward Roy in case he wakes. Then she settles in with Ruby’s laptop and journal.
Ruby stored a lot of homework on her hard drive. A lot of goofy saved images. And a racy selfie: topless, she stares straight into a bathroom mirror with one arm crooked behind her head, lips parted suggestively in the manner of a lingerie ad. Then Elsa finds a photo of a teenage boy, taken the same day as Ruby’s picture. The boy, also shirtless, is tall and sinewy, wearing tight, low-cut jeans that expose his hipbones and a trail of fine hair rising from inside his pants. He stands in front of the same wall where Ruby’s photo was taken and stares into the camera with a teasing grin that peeks out from behind a cascade of long hair. She remembers what Lex said about a new boy on the scene—Paul. Scrolling through Ruby’s Facebook friends, she finds him, that hair whipping around his head as he flies on a skateboard: Paul King of the Wolfpack; age 107; residence, Jupiter. A feeling bubbles up: Ruby had an edge to her, something her parents weren’t aware of.
She closes the laptop, glances at her father—still asleep—and picks up Ruby’s journal.
In neat, rounded script, the girl vents about her parents, especially her mother, mostly hating on her mother’s curiosity about her whereabouts. And she thinks that her father drinks too much but works at convincing herself that it isn’t a problem. She lets him teach her things in some kind of workshop, and that makes him happy, but it doesn’t really interest her. She spends a lot of time with Allie, who “can be a real bitch” but is also her “best friend in the universe.” For a time, there are quite a few entries about Charlie, how “cute” and “sweet” and “nice” he is, until he morphs into someone who’s “ugly under the surface” and “secretive” and “manipulative.” Her entries about their breakup describe how she ended it, how he was hurt. And then, lately, she starts writing about the new boy. The most recent entry was on Wednesday, two days before she disappeared.
Remembering how she herself abruptly stopped writing in her diary after her mother’s death, Elsa wonders if Ruby will ever have a chance to, or choose to, fill in more pages after whatever is happening to her is over. The potential outcomes cascade through Elsa’s imagination until she closes the notebook and glances at her phone, nestled in a fold of blanket, still on silent.
Lex has called again and left another message: “We’ve been getting a lot of calls about supposed Ruby sightings but so far only from crazies. I’ll let you know if and when there’s anything of substance.” Elsa smirks to herself in the gathering twilight. The first wave of callers is always made up of the true-crime enthusiasts eager to dip into the action of someone else’s catastrophe.
Her mind flashes to a memory of the day her mother died. She can still see the gaggle of strangers who showed up on their lawn, waiting for—what? Insider information? As if anyone would let a bunch of rubberneckers be privy to what went on in a family, behind closed doors.
A spot just below her knee itches fiercely. Unwitnessed by her sleeping father, she reaches under her pants leg and scratches her skin, hard.
4
You don’t bother flattening yourself out under the covers; there’s no point pretending you aren’t here. You listen to the pounding footsteps like a herd of elephants coming at you even though it’s just one powerful woman taking the stairs in thumping, room-rattling leaps and bounds. The bed vibrates. Across the room, you hear something fall with a sharp slap on your desk (later, when it’s over, you’ll find the orange L of your homemade ELSA sign on top of your math workbook). No light seeps into the dark cavern of under-covers, and you imagine stars, lots and lots of pinpoint stars like you’re lying in an open field at night, cool air bathing your skin, eyes wide to a universe speckled with million-mile-distant stars and the sky, this sky, belongs to you alone. You can soak in the beautiful distance and it will never, ever touch you. You are safe, out in the open, chilly and alone and happy.
Your sister isn’t home from her friend’s house yet.
Your father is still at work.
They don’t know this is happening to you.
The footsteps thunder and shake closer and louder and you press your hands between your face and the covers to make some breathing space. You open your eyes. You see a sheet tangled with a blanket. You close your eyes and you see the sky.
You manage to keep your eyes closed when the covers are ripped off—whoosh!—creating a breeze. But still, you sweat. You hear her but don’t see her because you don’t want to look.
You hate her face when she gets like this, like a stretched-out Halloween mask.
She scares you when she gets like this.
You shouldn’t have been so horrible, saying what you said, making her need to do this: “Why should I always be the one to take out the garbage? Tara’s younger, it should be her job. At least sometimes.”
When will you learn?
Your sky shatters at the first whack of leather on skin. Your leg blazes hot and you pull your knees under your clenched jaw and ball yourself up and roll toward the wall. Heat slices your back, your shoulder.
You are grateful; it’s just the belt, not the buckle this time.
Finally you do what she needs you to do; you obey and roll into position, butt-up. She whacks in groups of five. Two groups for a total of ten. The first few whacks don’t count because you weren’t in position, so it was your fault because you did it wrong. You did it wrong and so she taught you a lesson but apparently you are unteachable because you never seem to learn.
Her breathing slows. She stands by the side of your bed. You know she wants you to look at her and tell her that you’re sorry and you love her because now she’s starting to feel bad but you won’t do it. Your eyes stay shut and you wait and wait and finally she goes away, quietly, all calm after her storm.
When you feel it’s safe, you pull your covers back up and over, re-creating your universe, and you open your eyes but in the aftermath your vision is blurry from crying and you can’t conjure up any worthwhile distractions.
And so you wait; it’s what you always do. For your sister to get home. For your father to get home. And then, later, over dinner, you will talk about your days but neither you nor your mother will mention this because it’s unspeakable. There are no words.
5
Elsa, restless while Roy is lost to sleep, puts down Ruby’s journal and steps into the hallwa
y to return Lex’s call. The girl’s voice is stuck in her head now, her chatty jottings, her video self going suddenly blank.
“Anything?” she asks him.
“Just what I told you in my message.”
“The girl, Allie—you talked to her?”
“I’ve been trying, trust me. I went by her house and no one was home, I’ve been calling, texting…nothing.”
Regret flares as Elsa wonders if, had she stayed, they would have found Allie, talked to her, plucked out the important detail, located Ruby, brought her home safely, closed the case. If she hadn’t left him to handle this without her, they wouldn’t be having this frustrating conversation in which nothing has advanced since they reviewed the case that morning.
“The kid’s elusive.” Lex’s words interrupt her magical thinking that her presence would have made a significant difference—as if some potent combination of mastery and best intentions could summon girls out of thin air. “But I’m not giving up.”
“Well, it sounds like you’re doing what you can. Call me the minute anything changes, okay? Otherwise let’s touch base first thing in the morning.”
Back in the room with her sleeping father, Elsa tries not to answer that familiar hankering after control, or Control with a big C, in which she stops bad things from happening by pulling the covers up over herself and seeing something better than what is actually there—a gentle starry sky instead of an angry mother. Or by other means that have presented themselves as useful over the years. One in particular.
She sinks into the middle-of-the-night hospital quiet and stops resisting. Her hand finds her Swiss Army knife, settled in its place at the bottom of her bag, and together the old friends retreat to the bathroom. She strips to her underwear and bra. Beneath the harsh fluorescent overhead, barefoot on the sticky tile floor, she places the folded-up knife on the edge of the sink—a temptation to defy—turns away from the mirror, and begins.
She scratches every neon-pulsing scar on her legs, hips, stomach, arms. The pictograms of her failures heat to the hard edges of her fingernails, the crude blade-drawn outlines of sometimes something—a closed eye with lashes, a bird able to fly away, a marble capable of rolling away unseen, the number 7 because she once thought it lucky—and often nothing, just scratches, cuts tallied on her skin. She’s a patchwork quilt by now. It has ruined her love life; she can’t date, and when she tries, it’s invariably a disaster. She’s been sober for years, chaste, untouched by anything sharp enough to rupture skin (if you don’t count scratching), but it doesn’t matter. The scars are always there, a web of permanent reminders. And sometimes her skin hurts, hurts, and other times the scars burn for attention. Elsa’s skin calls to her the way a drink calls to an alcoholic, promising relief, delivering shame.
The crude reckoning on her thigh, her first-ever cut, produces a drop of blood and, mortified, she stops. No. She won’t. She gets dressed, whisks the unopened knife back into her bag, and stores it in a drawer of her father’s nightstand, out of easy reach. She lies on the reclining chair, arms by her sides, and takes deep breaths as the heat evaporates off her skin. Eventually she falls asleep and dreams of a girl, herself, Ruby: emerging out of a fog, almost graspable, and then fading to nothing.
Monday
6
I can’t wait until you’re older and you can do the driving,” Elsa says, but Mel, staring out the passenger window as they travel back to the city, appears to have her mind on other things. Summer school, maybe; the unfairness of being ripped away from her grandfather’s sickbed for something as inane as a math class. Glancing at her niece, Elsa is struck by how much Mel resembles Ruby Haverstock: the oval face, dark brows, and milky-blue eyes. Mel’s hair is longer and straighter than Ruby’s, which waves to the bottom of her neck.
Morning advances in quick swipes of speeding highway. Elsa does her best to ignore her guilt for leaving her father. But with no credible sign of Ruby, the media-monster has burgeoned overnight into a voracious enterprise, and she needs to get back. She needs to focus on locating the missing girl, something she has always been good at, and she needs to divert herself from her preoccupation with the sold house, and she needs to outrun the nagging sense of things slipping away from her. She’d frightened herself last night, almost naked in the hospital bathroom with her favorite blade so close; she frightened herself and now she needs to get back to work. Work is the ballast that has always righted her when her equilibrium starts to slide. Work, and the right now. Holding a tight focus on the needs of a child is the best medicine Elsa has ever found for her inner restlessness, better than scratching an itch—obliterating it. At least she’s looking, she reminds herself, knowing that sometimes no one does.
Mel sucks down the last of her smoothie and squeezes the oversize plastic cup into the car’s holder. She picks up the blueberry muffin she’s held nestled in her lap and peels off the paper, surprising Elsa with a delayed answer: “You can’t wait? I can’t wait until I’m really free.”
That makes Elsa smile. “You know, they say freedom’s a state of mind.”
“It’s gonna be fucking amazing when I turn eighteen!” Laughing, Mel kicks the underside of the dashboard. “Sorry I cursed.”
“Curse away, I don’t care. And, listen, if you’re going to be free, you’ve got to learn not to apologize.”
“Good advice. Please tell my mom.” She begins to pluck out the blueberries with her chipped multicolored manicure, collecting them in the muffin paper.
“I thought you liked blueberries.”
“Saving the best for last.”
They laugh, and Elsa drives, and soon the city announces itself along a looming corridor of graffitied buildings, impatient traffic, and ill-tended roads. Meanwhile, Elsa’s thoughts can’t stop returning to Ruby, especially now, being with a girl about the same age.
She asks her niece, “Have you ever considered running away?”
“You think I should?” Mel’s tone half alarmed, half intrigued.
“No! What I mean is, why do you think a teenager, someone without any obvious major problems, might want to run away?”
“Are you talking about that missing girl from Queens? I saw something about it on TV last night at the hotel. If you think she ran away, why’d you put out an Amber Alert? Isn’t that for when someone’s kidnapped?” Mel pops the remaining piece of muffin into her mouth.
“What makes you think I’m working that case?”
“Because it’s New York City and you’re, you know, always working that case.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I guess most kids probably run away because of their parents.” A squirm in Mel’s voice, as if that should be obvious. “Parents can be pretty judgmental, if you haven’t noticed. Anyway, Auntie Elsa, did it ever occur to you that sometimes people run to something? Not away.”
“Good point.” Elsa is well aware that it’s quite possible, even probable, that Ruby is up to something her parents don’t know about.
“The news showed a picture of her,” Mel says. “She looked nice.”
“Looks.”
“What are the odds of someone who’s kidnapped actually getting found? I mean, alive.”
The question startles Elsa. The real answer is bad, but she isn’t about to recite the ugly statistics to Mel: The first hour is crucial, and after three days it’s reasonable to give up hope. But there are always exceptions. “We try not to assume the worst, because we know that sometimes people just walk away from their lives, especially older teenagers and adults.”
She waits for Mel to say something along the lines of Bullshit! But she doesn’t. Instead, she lifts her muffin paper and funnels the mound of blueberries into her mouth.
“So,” Elsa says, “I’m going to have to work today. Okay if I drop you at my apartment?”
“Not sure what I’ll do by myself in Brooklyn all day. Could I just go home for now and meet up with you later at your place? I have your keys.”
“Cool.”
They pull up in front of Tara’s building on Eighty-Seventh Street and the doorman scoots out to open the car door for Mel.
“Hi, José!”
“Hiya, chiquita.”
Mel grabs her knapsack from the backseat, blows Elsa a kiss, and heads into the building. Sitting at the curb, Elsa waits until every last bare-legged, shiny-haired, eager-eyed inch of her niece is out of sight before dialing her phone.
“I’m back in town,” she says to Lex by way of greeting. “Any developments?”
“Nothing. How was the hospital?”
“I’ve been thinking”—avoiding the question—“that I’d like to talk to Charlie Hendryk myself.”
A pulse of hesitation—Lex has already interviewed the kid, and no one appreciates the suggestion that his work needs to be redone—before he answers with “Good idea.” Capitulating to her seniority, she assumes, or maybe just his way of welcoming her back.
She says, “Could you find out where he is right now? I’m going to make a quick run downtown to my office, then I’ll be in touch.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
She knows, though—first in her gut and then in her mind—that she won’t be going directly to Federal Plaza. Another investigation calls; another kind of itch.
Before she even arrives at the house, her car windows open to the warm summer air, she hears the sounds of pounding. Cracking. Breaking. A din of radio music beneath men’s voices.
A pickup truck is parked in the driveway and the front door is open. Windows, wide, bleeding sound.
Elsa pulls up at the curb and sees someone, two people, maybe three, moving through the upstairs of the family house. A voice. A crash. A cloud of dust as a wall presumably comes down inside. It appears that the demo has moved to the second floor, and she feels a twist like rough-edged metal turning in her stomach.