Her dressing table, her tiny watercolor paintings that she’d bought at a yard sale and proclaimed “delightful,” plopping them down alongside a genuine Degas sketch in a silver frame.
The Belgian lace bedspread that scratched the back of my legs when I’d sit in here after soccer practice. She always insisted I come in and tell her about my day.
I sink heavily onto the bed now, setting the champagne bottle on the nightstand with a thunk before dropping my head into my hands.
The real reason I can’t stay and fight is because I got lucky tonight. If I leave now, if I cut every string tying me to my past, I might be okay. But if I stay here, if I go toe to toe with Nelle and Ben and Libby, those strings are only going to get tighter and tighter until they finally choke me.
And I can never tell Jules why.
I look back to the champagne, but then I think of something else, sliding open Ruby’s nightstand drawer.
I expect it to be empty, but her things are still there. Reading glasses, an old Reader’s Digest, a pot of lip balm.
And her pills.
She had dozens of them, all kept in a little silver pillbox, and I close my hand around it now.
Even in the darkness, I know the shape of the one I’m after.
I’ve never taken anything to help me sleep, figuring I deserved whatever bad dreams or sleepless nights I got, but tonight, I want oblivion.
A bitter white square under my tongue, a swig from the bottle, and I curl up on Ruby’s bed, still in Ben’s suit, only my shoes kicked off, and let the blackness take me.
* * *
I SLEEP LIKE the dead, waking up in the gray light of dawn, my head stuffed with cotton, my mouth dry, and it takes me a second to become aware that something is happening outside.
I hear running feet, a slammed door, and I sit up, trying to blink away the fog, wishing I hadn’t taken the damn pill in the first place.
I’ve just managed to sit up when there’s a sound that pierces that haze like a bullet, sending me shooting to my feet even as the room spins dizzily around me.
It’s Jules.
Screaming.
From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish
March 30, 2013
Now, where were we?
Ah, yes. My biggest secret. The family shame.
All of that.
The Darnells had not had an easy time of it since 1944, the year I was reunited with my family, and Jimmy Darnell was shot trying to escape the local jail. His wife, the woman who claimed she was my mother, had moved away from Alabama shortly after, and had gone back to her maiden name.
It took some doing before I was able to track her down. When I did, it was only to discover that she’d died in 1984.
God, how that frustrated me. So close! A year earlier, and I could’ve met her. It sounds silly, probably, but I was so sure that if I simply saw her, I would know immediately whether she was in fact my mother. Finding out that she was dead made me almost abandon the whole enterprise altogether.
But then, the very discreet—and even more expensive—detective I’d hired called to inform me that while Helen Darnell had died, her daughter, Claire, was still alive and living in Tallahassee.
Claire.
I remembered seeing the name all those years ago in Daddy’s office, thinking how pretty it was. It was even prettier to me now because Claire might be my salvation.
A side note—one rarely finds salvation in Florida.
Claire was forty-two in 1985, just three years younger than me, but she looked much older when she opened the door of her little apartment in an ugly square building surrounded by other ugly square buildings. I’d tried to dress down for the visit, knowing better than to swan in wearing Chanel, but my Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and Halston blouse were still entirely too much as I saw very clearly on Claire’s face.
She was wearing a T-shirt over cutoffs, her face bare, her hair—the same deep brown as mine, I noted—scraped back into a messy ponytail. Her expression grew wary as she stared at me from her doorway.
“Is this about Linda?” she asked.
I had no idea who Linda was, so I shook my head, sweat already sliding down my lower back, my sunglasses—which, I realized too late, were Chanel, goddamn it—fogging up in the humidity. “No, I … my name is Ruby McTavish.”
Her expression cleared then, lips curving into something that would’ve been a smile if there hadn’t been such a mean edge to it. “No,” she said. “You’re Dora Darnell. I wondered if you’d ever turn up one day.”
With that, she turned to go back into the apartment. I stood there, stunned, and she waved a hand for me to follow her. “Come on in. Sit down.”