The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  Dedication

  For my parents.

  My heart. My home. Always.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One: Ruth

  Two: Ruth

  Three: Ruth

  Four: Ruth

  Five: Midnight

  Six: Ruth

  Seven: Ruth

  Eight: Midnight

  Nine: Ruth

  Ten: Ruth

  Eleven: Ruth

  Twelve: Ruth

  Thirteen: Ruth

  Fourteen: Midnight

  Fifteen: Ruth

  Sixteen: Ruth

  Seventeen: Midnight

  Eighteen: Ruth

  Nineteen: Midnight

  Twenty: Ruth

  Twenty-One: Midnight

  Twenty-Two: Ruth

  Twenty-Three: Ruth

  Twenty-Four: Midnight

  Twenty-Five: Ruth

  Twenty-Six: Ruth

  Twenty-Seven: Midnight

  Twenty-Eight: Ruth

  Twenty-Nine: Midnight

  Thirty: Ruth

  Thirty-One: Ruth

  Thirty-Two: Ruth

  Thirty-Three: Midnight

  Thirty-Four: Ruth

  Thirty-Five: Ruth

  Thirty-Six: Midnight

  Thirty-Seven: Ruth

  Thirty-Eight: Ruth

  Thirty-Nine: Ruth

  Forty: Ruth

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Ruth

  No one talked about what happened in the summer of 1997 in the house where Ruth Tuttle had grown up. In fact, there were days she remained certain she had never given birth at all. Somehow, she convinced herself that her life began when she drove away from that little shotgun house in Indiana without her baby. She had been only seventeen.

  A lie could be kind to you if you wanted it to be, if you let it. With every year that passed, it became easier to put more distance between her old life and her new one. If the titles of doctor and lawyer had signaled success back in the day, then engineer had to be the 2.0 symbol that you’d made it. And she had. With Yale University conferring her degree and lending its good name to her, there was no question. And if the proof weren’t in her pedigree, it manifested in her marriage to a PepsiCo marketing executive.

  The upcoming presidential election stirred an unusual optimism in her husband, Xavier, and he fancied himself having everything new. First, he convinced her they should buy the new town house in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Then a new Lexus LX 570 that could easily seat eight. He wasn’t just angling for more leg room, either. Sooner rather than later, he wanted a baby. It’s time. When Xavier repeated those words, Ruth stretched her lips into a smile, neglecting to mention she was already a mother, if in name only.

  On Election Night, a light snow fell outside their town house, reminding her of confetti after a sports championship. But they couldn’t get ahead of themselves. No one knew how this night would go. Pacing in their bedroom, Ruth tugged at the twists of her hair, and they detangled easily for once, loosening between her fingers, as she breathed in avocado and coconut and promise.

  “You look good, babe.” Xavier splashed cologne on his neck and popped the collar of his mustard-yellow blazer. He was one of those brothers who had the confidence to pull off risky, bold colors. She wouldn’t call him conventionally handsome, but no woman in her right mind would kick him out of bed, either. Removing a stray thread from his lapel, she pulled him closer and kissed his full lips. “You clean up pretty nicely, too, mister.”

  He smiled and they fist-bumped, something they’d been doing long before Barack and Michelle made it cool to some and subversive to others. He brushed by her quickly to answer the doorbell. “This is it. Game time.”

  In the full-length mirror, Ruth took in her tall, bony build, with her twiglike legs. After searching many boutiques, she had finally found this jewel-toned emerald-green fit-and-flare dress that gave her the illusion of curves. Her wide, luminous brown eyes caught people’s attention first, as they loomed so large on her angular face. It had taken years for her to love her own dark skin, almost the color of their shiny new walnut hardwood floors. Before she left the bedroom, she dipped her index finger in gel and smoothed a few fine baby hairs at her temple.

  Ruth could hear the booming voice of Harvey from the post office as she made her way to the living room. They’d become friends when he delivered mail at their old apartment building.

  “Am I in Obama headquarters?” he said, debuting a little two-step, finished off with a spin.

  Ruth hugged his neck and picked up a tray of their signature cocktail for the evening, handing him a chocolate martini. “You think we’ll make history tonight, Harvey?”

  “I’m no betting man, now, but if we came out and voted like we were supposed to, I think it can happen.” The old Black man had yellowed eyes and a face creased with lines resembling the rings of a tree. He’d banked on retiring early, but when his wife got laid off from her job a few months ago, he’d had to delay his plans. Still, tonight, a flicker of light gleamed in Harvey’s eyes.

  It felt like they were hurtling toward inevitability, and as guests arrived, the mood in their living room became electric. But were they setting themselves up for a fall? After all, their hope rested with a man whose name reeked of improbability with its questionable linguistic roots. Barack Hussein Obama.

  She thought of Mama and Papa, her grandparents who had raised her. Even before Ruth’s mother walked away from their family, the woman hadn’t done much mothering, so her grandparents had taken care of her and her brother, Eli, since day one. She and Eli had entered the world with legacy status as living history with biblical names, the descendants of Hezekiah Tuttle, named for the king of Judah. Ruth smiled when she thought of an autoworker and a hotel maid setting up their grandchildren to be royalty from birth, and all she and Eli had to do was live up to their names.

  Her grandmother had suggested that she be named Ruth. Papa had nodded in agreement, and so that’s what her mother chose. One syllable, old school and biblical. A name that Ruth’s grandmother said would at least get her to the interview. You couldn’t tell Mama that an ethnically ambiguous name could only take you so far and couldn’t inoculate anybody from a bigot or a bullet. Still, all that old-school planning had served Ruth well in chemical engineering, where being a woman was almost as much an anomaly as her Blackness. Like Obama, she, too, had been called articulate.

  Guests jammed every square inch of the living room and kitchen, checking various television stations periodically for updated vote counts and projections. Penelope and Tess, an attorney couple who practiced intellectual property and antitrust law, respectively, brought rib tips from Lem’s on the South Side, which, through bulletproof glass, served the best barbecue in town.

  “Are your grandmother and brother doing a watch party tonight?” Tess asked. She and Ruth had met through a local Yale alumni group.

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. I’m not sure what happens in Ganton these days,” Ruth said ambivalently, going from sipping her martini to draining the glass. When people heard the name Ganton, they thought of Fernwood, the auto plant that made parts for GM cars. The factory where Papa and Eli had worked for years. The town wasn’t known for much else.

  “You better claim your people and stop trying to be bougie.” Xavier had a bad habit of dipping into every conversation. He grinned and bumped her shoulder with his.

  He had jokes, but he had no way of knowing that Ganton’s very soil was a trapdoor, a gateway to nothingness that few people climbed out of. The welc
ome sign that greeted visitors bore no warning.

  “I know this is not the child of Mrs. Shaw of Jack and Jill of America, Incorporated, talking.” Ruth made sure to enunciate each syllable in exaggerated fashion. Her imitation of Xavier’s mother irked him, and when she needed that ammunition in an argument, she used it.

  “What’s this got to do with my mama or Jack and Jill?”

  Penelope jumped in then. “I think what she’s trying to say is that if y’all had been alive in slavery times, your people would’ve been in the house.”

  By now, they had an audience and it turned into everybody’s debate. Harvey said, “See, that’s what Obama wants to do. Even it out so those of us in the field can join you in the house, Xavier.”

  Her husband’s mouth twisted at the corners, trying to stifle a laugh. “I’m telling you that we fell on hard times, too. Well, sometimes.” Xavier added that qualifier knowing how pathetic he sounded, trying to weave a poor man’s narrative from the finest silks of prosperity.

  Ruth raised an eyebrow. “Okay, tell me this. When it rained outside, did it also rain inside your house?”

  “No, but we did have that can of bacon grease on the back of the stove.”

  Everybody hollered. Ruth shook her head, laughter snatching her breath. “Seriously? That’s about being Black or maybe just country, but not poor.”

  “I’ll admit my people may have had a little money, but I didn’t.” Xavier slid his arm around her shoulders and winked. “When I begged for a G.I. Joe as a kid, they made it real clear I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. I lived in their house rent-free and my lease could be up with a quickness and without notice.”

  “They were teaching you a sense of responsibility. That’s good parenting, babe, not poverty.” The rest of the crowd laughed or added their own hard-luck tales to the buoyant mood.

  This game of who had been worse off crowned no victors, and to be fair, Ruth hadn’t been mayonnaise-sandwich-eating poor growing up, but they often missed that five-day grace period for their lease payments on the house.

  “Hush, y’all, c’mon! They’re about to make a projection,” Xavier yelled.

  Huddled in front of the television, Ruth and her friends watched the red and blue colors of the electoral map fill in, their collective breaths held. Xavier, gripping a miniature American flag, crouched close to the screen like he did right before the buzzer sounded at the end of a close Chicago Bulls game (during the lean years, mind you, not the Jordan glory days).

  She felt Tess’s fingers dig into her shoulders when television anchors finally pronounced Barack Hussein Obama the forty-fourth president of the United States.

  Her whole life, Ruth hadn’t dared to believe this could happen, and she almost forgot to breathe. A picture of the little house where she grew up in Ganton came to mind, its low ceilings and narrow hallways. Mama at the kitchen table counting money on the first of the month. Papa’s body quivering underneath his plant uniform as he tried to walk straight in the early days of his illness. Maybe, just maybe, everything they’d all been through had been for this. To get here, to this moment. To this man with the funny name. To this day in history.

  Xavier whooped and gave her a ball-drop, New Year’s Eve–style kiss. The town house vibrated with their jubilation. Guests lifted their glasses and their voices in a toast to their own manifest destiny. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Harvey, who was usually the loudest in any room, rocking quietly in a chair with his folded hands pressed against his lips.

  Then they rolled up the living room rug to do stepper sets and slides, with Xavier break-dancing like he was thirteen instead of thirty-two.

  Somehow, she needed to store every part of this moment, burn it into her being, so it would still be real when she lived it again as memory. She wanted to scoop up this feeling, bottle it, and tighten the cap so none could seep out, ever. But at the same time, her instincts told her to share it. So, she opened the windows to give the neighborhood a contact high.

  Keeping it old school, the Gap Band’s “Outstanding” blasted from the speakers and they took turns strutting down the Soul Train line. Xavier’s breath warmed Ruth’s neck, and from behind, he wrapped his arms around her waist, and they rocked gently to the beat. With his wife at home, Harvey managed to slide into a dance sandwich between Penelope and Tess, who always humored the old man. Their feet felt light and their chests, too, the weight of wait your turn, not so fast, and never having lifted, at least for one night.

  Ruth and Xavier ate and danced until the sun poked through the blinds, bathing their town house in a groggy afterglow, spotlighting barbecue-stained plates and her high-heeled shoes slung in a corner of the room. In the early hours of the morning, Ruth lay on the love seat, the high still buzzing in her head, Xavier’s face inches from hers. She stared at his profile and ran her forefinger down his long nose to his lips, past his chin to his pronounced Adam’s apple. His skin tone reminded her of the rich Mississippi soil where Mama was born, with flecks of red and yellow just under the surface.

  He was prone to faking sleep, and it wasn’t until she blew a noisemaker gently in his ear that his lips moved.

  “You think our kid could be president someday?” His voice had turned rusty from all the celebrating.

  This was the first time Xavier had spoken of anything as tangible as an occupation for their not-yet-born, imaginary child. In the morning sun, the thought of babies unmoored her. “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. We have plenty of time to map out that kid’s future.” He lifted one eyebrow. “What I do know, though, is now that we got a Black president, I’m taking chitlins to the office today.” After a few seconds of silence, he laughed, and she did, too, their heads falling back like dominoes from the force of it. Maybe she laughed a bit too hard in relief that he was no longer talking about children.

  She poked his side. “You are ridiculous. You better leave your chitterlings at home,” she said, emphasizing each syllable for effect. “At least until the man takes the oath of office. Don’t mess around and get your Black butt fired now.”

  They stayed like that for hours, giggling softly and smiling at everything and nothing, wrapped in each other’s arms, hungover with hope.

  Two

  Ruth

  Days later, Ruth lay stretched out on the cold leather table of her gynecologist’s office with a paper sheet on her lap, legs dangled over the edge. She didn’t want to be here, but they’d made the appointment months ago. This day had been so far into the future that she’d almost forgotten about it.

  “You know I came prepared. Just call me the iron man,” Xavier said, unfurling a paper bag and pulling out a banana, a can of cashews, and a bottle of iron supplements.

  She laughed. “Silly. You know I can’t eat all that before Dr. Joshi comes in.”

  Knowing she was having her IUD removed that day, she had already eaten beans, spinach, and a baked potato for lunch. Several of the health blogs she followed revealed stories of women who bled heavily, some for as long as ten months, after the removal of their IUDs due to hormonal imbalances. A last-minute iron intake may have been futile, but she had to try.

  Xavier couldn’t be still and kept flipping the window shades, looking out onto the street, a goofy grin on his face. Flashes of sunlight made her shield her eyes. She half expected him to open the window and shout the news that they were one step closer to being able to get pregnant.

  She forced herself to picture the life Xavier imagined for them—their new home filled with babies. A family needed to be rooted somewhere to flourish. It wasn’t impossible to see them raising a child in Bronzeville, even with the errant gunshot ringing in the distance. Living near a few blasts from bullets conferred a certain street credibility, proving you hadn’t completely sold out. Overgrown weeds in empty lots dotted her community, but the seeds of new Black-owned businesses sprouted, too. Somehow, Black p
eople had reengineered gentrification there—rehabbing houses, stimulating the economy, and turning the place into their own mecca. The neighborhood reminded her of herself, a process of tearing down and building back up, making something out of nothing. The baby she’d have with Xavier one day could be her something.

  “You’re in good hands already, I see.” Dr. Ranya Joshi, a slight Indian woman, entered the exam room. Her movements were small, too, and Ruth had been relieved when she first saw her gynecologist’s tiny, delicate hands.

  “Okay, Doc, how soon can we get pregnant? We’re ready to make some babies.” Xavier rubbed his hands together like he was starting a fire between them.

  “Look, let’s just get this over with. We can talk about fertility at my next appointment,” Ruth said. All this talk of babies still left her as cold on the inside as this table felt on her bare back.

  Dr. Joshi laughed and opened her arms as if she were presenting them with a gift. “Well, you should both know there’s nothing to worry about. The IUD is like any other form of contraception. Once you stop using it, you can very well conceive on your first cycle.”

  Ruth lay back and her slender fingers pressed on her flat belly. She pictured it swollen and taut the way it had been once. Back then, her body had resembled a string bean smuggling a basketball under its shirt.

  She shivered at the memory. Her nakedness on the table made her feel like a slab of meat, a specimen to be studied and talked about, and she crossed her arms over her flowered gown, drawing her knees up to her chest. She thought back to when she was seventeen, with Mama and Eli looking down on her half-naked body in the bed, their faces tight with worry, urging her to push.

  Every sensation seemed magnified now. Xavier’s hand squeezing hers. Then the speculum, hard and cold, entering her vagina. The tensing of her muscles. She had felt secure for years knowing the IUD was inside her. A shield protecting her from another pregnancy she wasn’t ready for.

  It was funny how on paper you could feel prepared for something, yet on the inside you felt anything but. Xavier had recently been promoted to vice president at PepsiCo, and she worked as a chemical engineer at a consumer-packaged-goods company. Their financial adviser had assured them their investment portfolio was on track. And now that they’d bought a town house, they could build equity and take advantage of tax deductions. Almost every box had been checked, and the only task left incomplete was to grow their family.