Bright Young Women(114)
“We intend to keep the recording only long enough to have a copy made for my client,” I tell her. “She is willing to return the original to you.”
Rebecca lets the pages of the affidavit float to the ground. She folds her body over the storage box, resting her cheek on its hard angles as if it’s a pillow. She is taking deep, noisy yoga breaths, whimpering a little on the exhale.
“You have our word that we will return the original to you,” I assure her.
“Well, I don’t want it.” Rebecca weeps petulantly. “Not once she has it too.” She looks up at me, snot-nosed and furious. “I knew Ruth since we were three years old. I knew her.”
“Our goal is to stay out of the courts with this,” I say in the curated tone I use in highly emotional mediations several days a week, “but the only way to do that, and to ensure your husband does not find out about your relationship with his sister, is if you are willing to cooperate.”
“I’m giving it to you,” Rebecca snarls. “Okay? It’s just—” She is holding on to that box like it is a raft in the middle of the Atlantic. “It’s like there’s never been any room for how I feel. The only time I don’t have to hide how much I miss her is when I’m down here.” She gestures. Here, this basement where Allen’s old Atari still sits on the cabinet with the chipped corners, all the remnants of the life she never really wanted packed up and put away, no longer sparking joy, if they ever did in the first place. I am blazing with contempt for Rebecca. You had your chance, I think, to make room for yourself, but you were too much of a coward.
And I might have been too, were it not for Tina. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have become a lawyer even if The Defendant had blundered into a different sorority house that night, but it would have been a passionless practice, something I did to try and connect with my father because I had no real connection with myself. Instead, I have lived the last forty-three years with purpose, not in spite of what happened in the early-morning hours of January 15, 1978, but because of it.
It is only fair that I take from Rebecca what rightfully belongs to the person who helped me live so well with my pain.
* * *
Rebecca lives in one of those neighborhoods with an active Nextdoor community, people who get dogs just to have an excuse to patrol the neighborhood a few times a day and post about it online. God, I sound paranoid, Tina said with forced, nervous laughter. Before she dropped me off at Rebecca’s curb, she pointed out the nearby convenience store where she would wait for me. She was worried about Rebecca spotting her and doing something crazy, like ripping out the reel with her teeth.
When I approach the QuikTrip parking lot, Tina is sitting in the driver’s seat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed. For a moment, I am sure she is dead, that the ping-ponging worry over which way this will go has triggered a massive heart event. I rap a knuckle on her window lightly, not wanting to give her one of those if she is in fact only meditating.
Tina’s shoulders draw up with an exhale, so I know she’s alive, even though she’s too scared to open her eyes. I start nodding so that yes is the first thing she sees. Yes, I got it. Yes, it’s over.
She finally looks at me through the driver’s-side window and nods back stoically. It’s when I go around the back of the car that she makes the sound. It’s something that comes through her two front teeth, vicious and devoted, a sound that’s been trapped inside her since the Carter administration, older than Tickle Me Elmo and Snapple iced tea. I climb in next to her, crying because one of my greatest fears in life was that she might never be free of it, and now she is and and in my own way, so am I.
RUTH
Issaquah
July 14, 1974
Seattle’s evening news anchors had placed a bet live on air about the size of the crowds expected at Lake Sammamish on Sunday. The woman with the dyed red hair said no way they’d top thirty thousand, and as I coasted past the park’s painted wood sign, I thought about how she would have to pay up on Monday.
Cars were parked so close together that whole families had to exit the vehicles through the hatchbacks. There was a banner welcoming the Seattle Police Department to its annual summer picnic, another advertising twenty-five-cent pints from a local brewery, live music, free ice cream. Dogs chased flying Frisbees; in the distance, sailboats lazily punctured the horizon. Tina could be anywhere, but I decided to start with Tibbetts Beach, by the softball field. It tended to be quieter over there, drawing groups of high school burnouts and, by extension, fewer children, but on that day, there was no logic to the crowd. The burnouts were passing joints next to toddlers playing with their buckets and pails. No one complained and no one threatened to call the police; everyone was just happy to have found a spot.
At Sunset Beach, I was so hot and uncomfortable I couldn’t take it anymore. I dropped my bike and stripped off the navy shift dress; underneath I wore Tina’s black bikini. A group of teenage girls agreed to watch my things while I took a dip.
The lake was warm and oily with tanning lotion, but I walked out deeper and deeper, until the moss-green water disguised my own limbs from me, and then I held my nose and dunked my head. Underwater, I laughed in wonder. There is nothing in the world like knowing you did exactly the right thing. I would reenact it all for Tina when I found her. How I finally stood up to my mother and, in doing so, had honored my father’s memory more than I ever could have sitting silent and sweating in his memorial garden while people got up and lied about who he was. Tina would hang on every word, and she might even beg me to tell it again.