The moment Angel saw it, she understood that her sister had died in this dress. But as she walked over to the mirror and pulled it over her head, Ruthie seemed to come alive again.
Or maybe it was Angel coming alive.
Was it in that moment, staring at her reflection, wearing the pink dress, that Angel first saw the glimmer of truth?
Or was it later, much later, when she was old enough to truly understand what her mother had done to her?
No—not to me. For me. She did it for me.
That was what she claimed on Angel’s eighteenth birthday, confronted at last with questions Angel had never dared to ask.
“I did it for you,” Mother said, “because I knew that your life would be much easier this way.”
That made no sense then. Angel didn’t understand until the marble notebook came to light, and it became clear what Father had done to Ruthie. Clear that he had built that secret compartment where either he or Mother eventually stashed the notebook and God knows what else over the years.
Angel had wondered why they didn’t just burn it. But there is no logic when it comes to Mother.
Mother, who said, when Angel was eighteen, “I did it for you.”
“But I’m not . . . I don’t feel like . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mother said firmly. “It doesn’t matter what you feel like. You are what you are.”
No, Mother. I am what you made me. You, with your twisted logic.
Years earlier, Mother had begun giving Angel special medicine every day. She brought pills home from the pharmacy in orange prescription bottles that didn’t have labels.
“You’re sick,” she told Angel, “and you have to take this medicine.”
Sick? Angel had never even been to a doctor, not ever. Mother was so paranoid about germ exposure that Angel later assumed OCD was part of her undiagnosed mental illness. But it wasn’t just germs. She worried, too, that something would happen to Angel.
“Don’t climb on that,” she’d say, or, “Walk slowly, don’t slip,” or “Careful, careful!”
She was always warning me to be careful.
Once, Angel was trying to cut an apple and the knife slipped.
“Mother . . . my hand is bleeding!”
Mother wrapped the deep cut in gauze. It didn’t stop the blood. When Father came home, he took one look at it and said, “That needs stitches.”
Mother argued against an emergency room visit. She sterilized a needle and thread, and she stitched the cut herself.
She was so desperate to keep me hidden away, to keep her secret safe.
Angel was allowed out of the house only once a week, to go to Sunday Mass. But never alone. Only with Mother and Father.
At church, Angel would sit between them and think about Ruthie, missing Ruthie desperately.
It was at Mass, too, Angel would watch the others, kids who were the same age, noticing details about them . . .
I didn’t know what they looked like under their clothes, and I didn’t know what I should look like under mine. But still . . .
I knew something wasn’t right. Mother had made sure, though, that I’d been sheltered enough not to figure out what it was.
Cut off from the outside world, Angel’s thoughts were molded by Mother, who taught daily lessons in theology, and arithmetic, and history . . .
But never biology. Sciences were conspicuously absent from the curriculum—and not merely because she was a creationist.
She didn’t want me armed with the intellectual capability to figure it out. She thought that if she controlled what I knew, what I saw, what I did every minute of every day, she could keep the truth from me forever . . .
She tried, she really did. And she nearly succeeded.
Every day, Angel dutifully swallowed the pills Mother counted out.
“When can I stop taking this medicine, Mother? I don’t feel sick.”
“That’s because it’s helping you. You need it.”
Angel took the pills month after month, year after year . . .
“You’re turning into a man now, Adrian,” Father said when Mother made him teach Angel to shave the hair that had begun growing on his lip and chin. There was fuzz on his legs, too, and under his arms, and his voice had deepened.
Father added in his scoffing way, “But you have a long, long way to go.”
Years later, relaying that comment to Dr. Ellis, Angel almost found it comical.
Almost.
“ ‘Oh, Father . . . you have no idea how far I have to go’—that’s what I should have said to him,” Angel told Dr. Ellis.
A Manhattan psychiatrist who specialized in transgender identity conflict, the doctor examined the pills Mother had been doling out—Angel had kept samples—and identified them as masculine hormone therapies, undoubtedly stolen from the pharmacy where she worked.
“As you approached adolescence,” Dr. Ellis said, “she realized that you were going to begin developing as a female. She made sure that didn’t happen. In her own twisted way—”
“Don’t tell me that she was doing it for me, Doctor.”
Dr. Ellis was silent, then suggested that it might be a good idea to try to make peace with Mother after all these years.
“What about your father?”
“He’s dead. He died of a heart attack a few years after I left.”
“Did you ever try to talk to him about your suspicions?”
“Are you kidding? He was never interested in talking to me about anything. After my sister was killed, he shut down. He lived in the house with us, but he wasn’t really there.”
“I just have a hard time believing he never guessed the truth.”
“About me?” Angel shrugged. “You didn’t live in that house with us. You didn’t see how we were. How we kept our distance from each other, how detached he was from my mother and me, especially after my sister was gone. We weren’t the kind of family that left bathroom doors unlocked or walked around half dressed . . .”
“Many families don’t do that. But still—”
“No, I’m sure of it. To his dying day, he thought I was his son. That was what my mother told him from the moment I was born. It was what she’d told everybody, including Ruthie. Why would anyone doubt it? She delivered me at home, alone. She never filed any paperwork; I never went to school. I’m sure she was the only one who ever changed my diapers or bathed me. As far as most of the world was concerned, I didn’t exist. And the few who knew I did exist believed I was a boy. Even I believed it. I thought I was Adrian.”
“You were Adrian,” Dr. Ellis said. “And now . . .”
Now I’m Angel.
At eighteen, it was too late to reverse some of the changes the hormonal drugs had caused—the hair growth, the deepened voice. Angel was never going to be the most feminine girl in town, but she made an effort to embrace her feminine side; to act like a woman, dress like a woman, speak like a woman . . .
She made a fresh start in New York, waitressing and working retail. She couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan but she found a nice little apartment way out on Long Island, near the beach. She kept to herself mostly.
For a long time—a decade, maybe more—she managed to keep the past at bay. But some things aren’t meant to stay buried forever.
Oh, Ruthie . . .
Memories seeped to the surface when Angel least expected it; fury exploded out of nowhere like lava from a dormant volcano. She found herself doing crazy things—lashing out at strangers, hurling glassware against the wall, tailgating the car in front of her on the Long Island Expressway, muttering to herself . . .
Finally, she found her way to Dr. Ellis.
She thought he might be able to help, and he did, to a certain extent. He helped her to sort out the truth and understand what had happened.
/> “You have to grieve and accept loss. You were robbed of your childhood, and robbed of your self-identity, Angel.”
Dr. Ellis helped her grasp that she had been a victim, and that it was all right to feel anger.
The great irony: Dr. Ellis thought confronting her past would help Angel find closure and peace at last.
Maybe it would have, once Mother and Father were both dead, if they had been the only ones to blame for losing Ruthie.
Angel made the first trip back to Buffalo on a whim. She got into the car and started driving one day, and the next thing she knew, she was parked in front of the house on Lilac Street.
After all those years of trying to suppress grief, Angel was overwhelmed by it the moment she set foot in the house. Memories of Ruthie were everywhere.
That was when she realized that her pain wasn’t just about losing her childhood and her self-identity. It was about losing the one person who ever cared: Ruthie.
Punishing Mother for her role in it was cathartic.
Now the healing can begin, Angel thought, leaving the old woman dead in her chair and driving back to New York. She told Dr. Ellis that Mother had died of natural causes, and that she would soon be returning to her hometown to settle the estate.
Dr. Ellis wanted her to work through her emotions first.
“You can’t just walk into that house unprepared to be bombarded with difficult emotions,” Dr. Ellis said, unaware that Angel had already done exactly that.
That summer Angel felt prepared to venture up to Buffalo to take one last look at the house before listing it.
“But I’m not going there as me. The Realtor is expecting my parents’ son, Adrian,” Angel told the doctor, “and that’s who I’m going to be. Anything else would be too complicated.”
Dr. Ellis didn’t approve and so, Angel decided, to hell with Dr. Ellis.
For the first time in years, Angel became Adrian again, with short hair, a man’s clothing, a masculine stride.
The ghosts of the past were waiting to greet him in the house even before Sandra Lutz handed over the notebook, thus opening the door to a truth far more complicated than Angel had ever imagined.
Now vengeance could begin in earnest.
Now she could live in that house and let the memories come at her, even the traumatic and ghoulish ones.
The freezer. The cellar . . .
Oh, Ruthie.
Now she was a woman again:
Sister Linda.
It could have gone any number of ways, though, in the beginning. She only knew she had to become a part of their world again one way or another; had to get close to Debbie Quattrone and Mike Morino and Genevieve Bonafacio. Close to their children.
No one ever suspected that old Sister Helen, the part-time social worker at Sacred Sisters, hadn’t fallen down that flight of stairs, but had been pushed. No one ever bothered to double-check the impressive credentials for “Sister Linda” when she applied for the abruptly vacated job. No one had been suspicious that she’d provided just a mail-drop address.
But if they had checked, and hadn’t hired me, I’d have found another way in. I’d have found another way to live right under their noses, watching their children, pulling strings and watching my puppets dance . . .
Now it’s almost over.
Now, at last, there can be closure.
Angel reaches into a bottom file drawer, back, back, back behind the papers and folders. Her fingers close around the other precious keepsake she brought with her when she left her parents’ house on her eighteenth birthday.
She pulls out the wooden frame that holds a charcoal drawing depicting a mother and son.
That’s what Angel always saw, anyway, looking at it.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
The signature in the corner reads Ruth Ann Bell, but she’d written a different message on the back of the paper.
For my little Christmas Angel with love from your big sister Ruthie, 12/25/85
Angel looks at the picture for a long time before carefully tucking it back into the drawer for safekeeping until this is all over.
“That has to be an old text,” Jen tells her husband and daughter, her heart pounding wildly in her chest. “Nicki is . . . Nicki isn’t sending texts.”
“But it’s from today!” Emma points to the date and time stamp. “See? It was sent this morning!”
“Someone must have Nicki’s phone,” Frankie says logically, hovering nearby with Jen’s parents.
“I’m calling the number.” Thad holds out his hand. “Give me the phone.”
“No, Dad, don’t use Carley’s phone to call,” Emma tells him. “Use yours.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to show you guys something on her Peeps page, remember? And this is the only way I can log in, if she’s saved her password on her phone. Here, can I . . .” She holds out her hand for the phone.
“Wait—what’s Nicki’s number?” Thad asks, his own phone in hand and finger poised to dial.
Jen shrugs helplessly. “I don’t even know how to find it. All it shows is Nicki’s name.”
“You have to go into the contacts file. Here . . .” Emma takes the phone from her and presses a few buttons.
Then she begins reading off a number, with Thad dialing it as she goes.
“Six-three-one . . .”
“Wait, he needs the area code, doesn’t he?”
“That is the area code, Mom.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. See?” Emma shows them the ten-digit number, which does, indeed begin with a parenthetical 631.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Jen says. “It should be 716, or maybe 585. Thad, can you do a Web search from your phone for the 631 area code?”
He does. “It’s Long Island.”
“Long Island!” Jen’s father shakes his head. “That can’t be right. Nicki lived here in Buffalo.”
“We know that, Aldo!” Jen’s mother swats his arm. “Shh!”
Alarmed, and not even sure why, exactly, Jen clutches Thad’s arm. “Call that number,” she says. “I don’t like this at all.”
I’m going to die. Oh God, I’m going to die.
Crying makes it even harder for Carley to swallow and breathe around the gag in her mouth, but she can’t help it. She wants desperately to cry, to scream for help; she wants . . .
I want my mommy.
Oh God. I’m going to die without telling her that I love her. I should have said it this morning when I had the chance, but I didn’t. I thought I could always say it later, but . . .
Time is running out.
She’s going to come back and kill me.
Any second now, that door is going to open and she’s going to shoot me.
Why didn’t she do it right away?
She’d been muttering to herself as she tied Carley’s arms. Something about having to set the stage.
For what?
Someone will find me. Someone will figure out where I am and save me . . .
When Mom and Dad realize she’s gone, they’ll go snooping into her computer files, and they’ll see—
No, they won’t.
The computer is here.
No wonder “Angel”—Sister Linda—had her bring it to the school.
Still, someone else might come along. Johnny—he must have changed the signboard today. Maybe he’ll open the storage closet door and—
Yes. That would be a welcome miracle. Johnny coming along and saving her.
Remembering all those scary movies she used to watch with Nicki at sleepovers, she thinks about how Nicki used to cover her fear by scoffing at the helpless female characters.
“Come on,” she’d say, “no one would ever just wait around for someone to
save her, or for the bad guy to come back and kill her. She’d at least try to get away.”
But in those movies, no one ever got away. The bad guy would pounce, and there would be blood, and Nicki would run out of the room shrieking, and . . .
And Carley would shout after her that it wasn’t real, and call her a wimp.
Now who’s the wimp, Carls?
Now who’s waiting around, helpless, not even trying to get away?
Who’s counting on a miracle to save her?
Carley struggles against the bonds, struggling to wrench them from her wrists and ankles. The ropes burn her flesh, and her body aches, but if she can just pull hard enough . . .
You can do it, Carls, Nicki’s voice seems to say. Come on. You have to try.
Managing to get to her feet, she feels around the tiny closet with her bound hands, wiggling her fingers against the shelves, trying to find an edge that might be sharp enough to saw through ropes.
No. They’re too tight and there’s nothing in the closet but smooth surfaces: buckets and broom handles, paint cans and bottles of cleaning supplies.
Carley closes her eyes again and does the only thing, besides crying and exhausting herself in a futile effort to escape, that she can possibly do.
She prays.
Entry from the marble notebook
Sunday, March 16, 1986
Dear Mother and Father:
After all these months of keeping this journal hidden underneath my mattress, I’m leaving it out in the open for you to find after I’m gone.
I snuck out of my room last night to go to a dance at school. I did it because I had been invited by the boy I thought I loved, the boy who sent me flowers.
He told me to meet him there, and I did. I walked into that crowded gym wearing the pink dress he wanted me to wear and the corsage he sent me, and I didn’t see him anywhere. The room was full of couples, and everyone was staring at me and whispering about me and I didn’t know what to do. I really thought he was going to walk in any minute and everything would be okay.
But he didn’t.
Only one person talked to me. It was Debbie Quattrone, the cheerleader.
“Waiting for someone, Ruthie?” she asked.
The Good Sister Page 33