I looked at that face for what felt like hours.
The grief on it. The pain. The horror. How she must have loved me. How tormented she must have felt, letting me slip away on her watch.
Guilt crept into me, too, a sick, slippery feeling.
How could I not remember someone who loved me this much? How was the only thing left of this person the faint memory of a name, a name I gave to a doll?
But mixed in with the guilt was that strange sort of elation you feel when reading about yourself. Pages and pages of newsprint, all about something scandalous that had happened to me.
What child can resist that?
So, naturally, I wasn’t listening as closely as I should have been, which is why, when Nelle pushed her way in and pointed at me, I actually jumped in my seat.
“You’re in Daddy’s office!” she cried, triumphant. “I’m gonna tell him!”
“I’ll say you’re lying,” I fired back. “You’re just a baby. He won’t believe you.”
Her narrow face creased into a frown. Christ, I’ve just realized it’s the same expression she wears ninety percent of the time now. How tragic for her.
“He will, too!” she replied, her voice shrill. “He’ll believe me over you. You’re not even my real sister.”
Every argument with Nelle reached this point eventually. It was her favorite weapon, even though the one time Mama heard her say it, Nelle had gotten a whooping with a belt, a punishment neither of us had ever received before or since.
But, apparently, even that wasn’t a deterrent.
“I’m gonna tell Daddy you said that.”
Her little face flushed, and she crossed her arms over her chest, lower lip wobbling. If she started crying, she might wake Mama up from her nap, and then we’d both be in trouble.
“Or-r-r,” I said, drawing the word out, “I won’t tell, and you won’t tell anyone I was in here.”
It was always like this with Nelle. Attack, counterattack, and then, eventually, a reminder of mutually assured destruction, and we headed back to our corners until the battle began anew over something else.
It was exhausting, frankly.
It’s still exhausting. How are two women our age still locked into such silliness? I sometimes think about asking her. Was there ever a time when we could’ve broken this pattern? Been something more than wary enemies? There must have been. Obviously, there was no chance of it after everything with Duke, but maybe before that.
Maybe that moment in Daddy’s office was our chance, and I’d missed it.
Ah, well. No use in trying to undo what’s long been done. And besides, I can admit that I could never forgive Nelle for voicing my greatest fear so often.
That I wasn’t Ruby McTavish. That I was Dora Darnell, a cuckoo in the nest, and that’s why Nelle hated me, had always hated me, wailing her head off when she was just a baby anytime I came near her. Because she knew, even then, that I wasn’t her sister.
What chance did we ever have, with something like that between us?
In any case, she slunk out of the office, and I carefully replaced the papers, picking up my doll as I went, forgetting the paper clip altogether. Although now that I think about it, I never played with that doll again after that day.
It sat there with my other toys, one eye forever half-open until I was old enough not to have toys anymore.
I wonder where it ended up.
But you didn’t ask for childhood memories, you asked for the truth! That’s what you’re saying to yourself right now, aren’t you?
Darling, I’ve given it to you.
The fear that I was not Ruby McTavish was an open wound, one Nelle knew to pour salt in and one that I, with my newspapers and my dreams I called memories, was forever trying to heal. It was a fear that I could never speak aloud myself because even as a child, I knew it would shatter something inside my family for good.
Because what would that mean?
Too many horrors to contemplate.
Even for me, even now.
Especially when there are still so many horrors to come.
-R
HOPE DIM, BUT NOT YET
EXTINGUISHED FOR
FAMILY OF BABY RUBY
Tavistock, North Carolina
When Anna Ashby McTavish was a young girl, she tells us, the only thing she ever wanted for Christmas was “ribbon candy and a sack of oranges.”
A modest wish for a girl born to one of the finest families in Wichita, Kansas, but in keeping with Mrs. McTavish’s character. This is a woman who offers reporters tea poured by her own hand rather than relying on the maids that surely people the halls of Ashby House, and whose anguish is only visible in the slight redness of her eyes, the elegant fingers reaching up to touch a delicate diamond cross around her neck as she tells us of the one wish she has for Christmas 1943.