A Slow Ruin

by Pamela Crane

  I stood up from the kitchen bar stool.

  “Come with me. I need to show you something.”

  Then I headed for the stairwell.

  “What do you need to show me?”

  And I started to climb.

  “If you’re going to go the police and confess, you need to know everything that happened that night.”

  I led Oliver up one flight of stairs, past the watchful eyes of the stained-glass couple, up a second flight, to the door I seldom opened. The creepy library. It groaned as I pushed it, releasing a waft of musty air. It wasn’t late at night, but it was black as tar inside the room. Through the darkness I saw movement, felt a presence, heard a whisper, and I clutched Oliver’s arm. My hand searched the wall for the light switch, found it, and scattered the ghosts with a click. Eddies of dust motes swirled in the dim light, and I coughed to clear my lungs.

  Still holding on to Oliver’s arm, I walked him along the bookshelves stacked with rare, priceless volumes, past the fireplace hearth where the family had been brutally murdered. In the corner sat an old chest covered in over a decade’s worth of dust. The lock had long ago rusted apart. I opened it, and inside it was filled with mementos belonging to Oliver’s ancestors. Photographs of his grandmother Olivia holding a teenage Debra’s hand. Newspaper articles about his great-grandmother Alvera’s work in the women’s rights movement, her marriage announcement, Olivia’s birth certificate, a century-old missing persons report.

  I picked up a golden-brown leather journal, oddly shiny against the dust-covered items surrounding it. I had examined it recently and suspected Vera had also, before her disappearance.

  “Check this out,” I said. “It’s your great-grandmother’s journal. I wonder if Vera found this when she was looking into Alvera for her suffrage movement project.”

  The first entry, written in Alvera’s beautiful copperplate script, dated back to February 1898. Oliver looked over my shoulder as I read aloud:

  One must never flee from one’s calling. I learned this only when it was taken from me. I visited Washington DC with dear Miss Cianfarra, a lady I have come to cherish and adore. The guilt of lying to Robert haunts me at this hour, but the calling is worth the contrition. Today I heard the inspiring words of a fellow suffragette of color, Miss Mary Church Terrell. Her message at the National American Woman Suffrage Association pierced me, gutted me, and drove a new hope within me that all women of all skin colors could fight for this cause together. Miss Terrell won me over with her words and passion. May she win over our broken world as well. A woman’s voice. A woman’s right to vote. A woman’s value. It is much more than gender or skin hue. It is about humanity and fairness.

  My life has been less than fair. As one of great wealth none would empathize with this statement of mine. But my enforced marriage has brought me nothing but grief, and I fear Robert is desperate to make me with child to tighten his grip upon me.

  A woman bears the right to be heard and seen. Yet how do we achieve the fullness of this birthright when we must remain silent and hidden? I must do the hard work of preparing a place for women’s voices of the future. I must plan. I must fight. And if necessary, I must flee in the pursuit of justice and truth, no matter the sacrifice. Even at the cost of my very own lifeblood.

  “Pretty corny stuff,” Oliver snorted with his usual cynicism.

  “Spoken like a male chauvinist pig.”

  “Hey, I’m not knocking her. I admire my great-grandma; she was a fearless woman, way ahead of her time. But her writing is kinda flowery, you gotta admit.”

  “Whatever. You just don’t recognize passionate writing when you hear it.”

  I sat the journal down and continued my search. Countless mysteries filled this chest, but only one concerned me. I rifled through the artifacts until I located the tiny wooden Russian nesting doll tucked into the back corner. I handed it to Oliver.

  “What’s this?” he asked. He opened it. “There’s nothing in here but shit.”

  “What do you mean?” I grabbed it from him, shocked to see it full of mouse droppings. “There used to be a piece of paper in this. The only link I had to Vera’s past.” The edge of the doll was chewed. “I think mice got to it.”

  “What do you mean, a link to her past? I don’t understand.”

  An anxious pulse swept up my spine. “There’s something I never told you about that day...”

  Rolling my mind back, like a mental flip-book, I spanned days, months, years faster and faster until I stopped on the night I found newborn Vera.

  Chapter 32

  Felicity

  Fifteen years ago…

  Responsible drivers use their blinkers. Everyone knew it was the law, but not everyone followed it. I was a good little law-abiding citizen. The car whose fender I just hit, however, was not.

  The street was fairly empty for this time of day, early evening, and the sky deepened into a shade of blue-gray. The radio DJs were discussing the American Idol final four contestants this season, with sound bites from Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell, and Randy Jackson interspersed. Hard rocker Chris Daughtry was heavily favored to win the competition, a notion the DJs hotly debated. I had voted for him, so I tended to be biased. Oliver, maybe just to irritate me, was rooting for gray-haired soul-meister Taylor Hicks. I loftily informed him that buffoon didn’t have a chance in hell of winning the fifth season of Idol. Famous last words.

  I wasn’t in the mood for radio chat, so I reached down to change the station. Settled on Rihanna’s “SOS” before returning my focus to the road. I only glanced down for a moment, but that single moment was all it took for a car to swing out from the berm, right in front of me.

  I swerved onto the open shoulder to avoid a collision, but not quickly enough, as I heard the crunch of metal scraping our bumpers together. I winced as I pumped the brakes, careening to a stop.

  The car I hit pulled over in front of me, both of our vehicles idling while my brain attempted to work out what to do. I was shaken. A little scared. The sky was growing darker and the road emptier by the minute. The only car accident I’d ever been in involved me bumping an orange traffic cone during driver’s ed class, but I knew enough to assess the extent of the damage and go from there. Was it always the fault of whoever rear-ended the other car? Or did it matter that he pulled out in front of me? Visibility wasn’t ideal, so maybe it could have been both our faults—mine for not turning my headlights on, him for pulling out without checking for oncoming traffic. Or maybe it didn’t matter. Was all this for the cops to sort out?

  I grabbed my Motorola RAZR cell phone and flipped it open. Oliver had wanted to buy me the new sliding keyboard version, but why trade in a perfectly good cell phone when this one worked fine? Even if it did take forever to type a text by going first through each number, then each letter one at a time. God forbid you type past your intended letter and have to start over. It didn’t matter much, though. With limited texts and minutes, I avoided using my cell phone like the plague after my last $300 bill.

  I pressed the 9…and the screen blinked black. I held down the power button. Nothing. Why did I always forget to charge the darn thing? I was certain my charger was packed somewhere among the moving boxes and I had yet to find it.

  By now the other driver had stepped out of his car, a dark-colored beater maybe ten, fifteen years old with one busted taillight. I turned on my overhead light and rummaged through my center console, found a pen and scrap of paper, then jotted down his license plate number. In my dashboard compartment I found my insurance card, readying myself to hash out the details with this strange man.

  Walking around his car, investigating the damage, he eventually ambled toward my car with a crooked gait. His clothes were nondescript—greasy jeans, button-up shirt hanging loose, T-shirt underneath. He reached up and made a token effort to neaten his flattened crop of hat hair. Just a working stiff, I figured, dog-tired from a long day on the job. Pissed to be involved in a fe
nder-bender. But I wasn’t taking any chances as I instinctively locked all the doors with the master button.

  I checked the time. I really hoped I made it home in time for the Gilmore Girls season finale. Oliver hadn’t shut off our cable or loaded the television onto the moving truck yet because of it. The show represented the dream mother-daughter relationship that I hoped one day would be my own, but until then I’d binge on Rory and Lorelai.

  The driver was at my window now and bent down to my level. Bathed in the intermittent glow of his hazard lights, his face sported a three-day scruff—out of laziness, I figured, not trendiness. His dull eyes couldn’t seem to find a focus, darting from his car to me, to the road and back to me. When he suddenly rapped a dirty knuckle on my window, I gave a start, then nervously rolled it down only a sliver. We were completely alone, no cars, no witnesses, in the middle of a deserted road, and the sky was black as pitch.

  I would have done just about anything for Rihanna’s SOS about now.

  “Ya hit me,” he said so matter-of-fact that I was actually a bit terrified.

  “I’m sorry, but you pulled out in front of me, sir.” I added the sir to hopefully cool any rising tension.

  “Did ya call the cops?” he asked. “’Cause if we can settle this without involving the cops, I’d be mighty appreciative...” His eyes traveled down to the phone in my hand, then detoured to my insurance card in the other. “Felicity Portman.”

  Now the stranger was gathering information about me. I shouldn’t have been afraid, right? That’s what people did after a car accident—exchanged personal information. But something about him hovering there, sticking his grimy fingers in the gap of my window, shook my bones. I would have given him my bank account number just to get away from this man.

  “Whatever is easiest,” I agreed.

  “Damage looks minimal. Just a few scratches a good buffering can take care of. You wanna come look?”

  Stranger danger! My mother’s deeply ingrained childhood motto reverberated inside me.

  “I’m perfectly fine just settling this here. I have”—I pulled out my wallet stuffed with cash Oliver had handed me when he told me to buy more moving boxes and bins and anything I could find to pack stuff in—“$500 cash that should cover your repairs. Would that work?”

  Why the heck did I just tell this stranger I had five hundred bucks in cash? Worse, why did I flash the wad? Okay, brace yourself, stupid—he’s going to smash the window and then bash your brains out with a hidden tire iron any second now.

  But he didn’t.

  “That’s mighty generous of you. I’ll be honest with you ’cause ya seem nice. I don’t have insurance right now. My wife just died—that’s why I wasn’t really paying much mind when I cut you off just now. And I’m raising my kid on my own, and I fell into tough times. I was hoping to avoid the whole insurance thing, if that’s alright by you.”

  He wiped a brown tear that rolled down his cheek, streaking his filthy face. Either he was a seasoned scam artist, or he was telling the truth. By the looks of his beater car, clearly he was barely scraping by. I felt terrible for this man who lost his wife and was thrown into single parenthood. I’d never suffered—not really—and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose Oliver.

  “You know what? Here’s the $500, and I have an extra $300 I can give you too. It’s all I have, but clearly you need it more than I do. I’m really sorry about your wife.”

  “Shit happens.” He looked down at his feet. “Just seems to always happen to me.”

  I didn’t know what to say, how to console him through the metal and glass between us. Had it been a friend, I would have offered a hug. But I didn’t trust this stranger enough to step out of my safe haven. I turned my back and fished into the secret compartment of my purse for my emergency money—three hundred bucks—and added it to the five hundred. Eight hundred total—a tidy sum. I handed him the thick stack of bills through the gap in the window.

  “Thank ya for the cash. You seem like a real nice lady.” His grin betrayed a missing premolar, tobacco stains, and something else—relief, satisfaction; I couldn’t read the expression.

  “We’ve all been in tough spots.”

  “Well, you saved my life today. I better be on my way. Got a kid waiting at home for me.”

  “I hope things get better for you!” I called out to his fast retreating back. A hand shot up, waving the wad of cash.

  His brake lights blinked on and off, and spraying gravel his car sped down the road and disappeared into the gloom. I wasn’t ready to drive, my nerves weak from emotional overload. As I turned off my overhead light, I flicked on my high beams, the headlights snagging on a large object on the side of the road next to where the stranger had just been parked. It looked like a…baby carrier?

  I stepped out of the car and approached it cautiously, as if I expected it to contain something other than what was inside: a tiny infant—couldn’t have been more than a day or two old—snuggled sleepily up to a tattered stuffed toy. A velveteen rabbit, just like in the book.

  It could only be the strange man’s child, and I wondered what kind of human would abandon a baby on the road. There was no way I was returning this newborn to a monster.

  Glancing around, still no cars. Still no witnesses. I picked up the car seat by the handle and hefted it back to my car. It was heavier than I thought, and I wondered if hauling this around was what created mom strength. After clipping it into the seat belt as best I could without the base, I sat in the driver’s seat deliberating. I had never found a baby before—well, duh! The situation was surreal, like something that happened only in the movies. Should I take it to the police station and turn it in? Should I bring it home and feed it and change it first, just to make sure it was cared for? A lot of shoulds ran through my mind, but just because I should didn’t mean I would.

  I pocketed the scrap of paper with the license plate number, half tempted to tear it up as if it never existed. Then I put my blinker on like a good little law-abiding citizen as I headed home with my new stolen baby.

  Chapter 33

  Felicity

  Fifteen years ago…

  The FOR SALE sign jutting out from my front yard glowed against the dark as I drove up the street way too slowly. The whole trip home I was petrified of getting into an accident with my precious cargo. The housing market was a mess, but not as big of a mess as what I’d just made of my life as I pulled into my driveaway with my newborn baby girl. Yes, it was a she! I had checked, of course.

  Outside in the yard, Oliver, Cody, Debra, and Joe were loading boxes into the moving truck. I hadn’t planned to share my kidnapping escapade with the whole family, but they’d all find out sooner than later. It wasn’t exactly easy to hide a living, breathing baby from in-laws you saw weekly.

  Pulling up the driveway, my brain raced with a million scenarios:

  Take the baby to the police.

  The baby will end up in foster care anyway.

  What if there’s no other family?

  What if there is other family?

  I had answers to every possible question, every possible challenge, as if I’d been preparing for this debate my entire life. I wanted this baby. Needed this baby like I needed air. Oliver and I had been trying for years, every month making pregnancy test manufacturers rich when I was barely a day late. And every month I kept tissue manufacturers in business with the tears when it displayed that mocking negative symbol.

  Oliver’s dream was to become CEO of the marketing agency he worked for. Mine was to become a mother. It’s why I quit college and got married so young, because a career paled beside the joys and, yes, the sorrows of being a mom. And here that dream was, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a car seat waiting for me.

  We had the means to support a family. And if the strange man had someone else to care for the baby, he would have certainly passed her off to them, not left her on the side of the road. Th
e answer was as clear as the star-spangled night sky. This was my destiny, to become this girl’s mother.

  I stepped out of the car, then opened the back door. I unclipped the car seat and hefted it out, resting the handle on my forearm. It felt so good to be lugging this exquisite burden around, using muscles I hadn’t known existed before. I carried her past the scratches on my fender and up the walkway with a proud motherly stride.

  Across the lawn Oliver was calling it a night, inviting everyone inside for drinks before heading home, thanking them for all their help. As I approached, a questioning silence settled over everyone as all heads turned. Oliver broke the spell.

  “Felicity, what are you carrying?”

  “It’s a car seat.”

  “Please tell me there’s not a baby in there.”

  I turned the car seat toward him, showing off the pink-faced and chubby infant, sleeping peacefully. I smiled at her perfection. Oliver didn’t.

  “We’ll talk about this inside,” he said, his voice verging on frantic.

  I stepped into our naked house, the family following me, and in the dim living room light, Oliver looked at me with so many questions I couldn’t read them all. I set down the car seat and touched my pocket where the scrap of paper with the license plate number crinkled beneath the denim. I had two choices—to tell the truth, or to lie.

  The only real choice was to lie. Because Oliver could never handle the burden of truth. The truth would have required I turn the baby over to children’s services or suffer the guilt of keeping her illegally. Oliver, like I used to be before tonight, was a law-abiding blinker-using citizen. So I took the burden upon myself. Lie, it was.

  “Before you panic, I found her on the side of the road.”

  “You know you can’t keep her, right?” Joe rarely chimed in with unsolicited advice, which caught me off-guard.