I came to the next piece of mail, showing a return address in Fort Lauderdale, directed to the care of Mrs. Pamela Armstrong. How odd, I thought. Armstrong was Brian’s last name. It was like a window into the impending future, and in a flash I saw the next ten years of my life with Brian, in a Florida kitchen, preparing an after-school snack for the kids who were coming through the door and calling out to me at that very moment.
“Hello?” came a tentative voice from the back of the house. My sisters had arrived.
“In the kitchen!” I hollered, slipping a butter knife under the gold-embossed seal and removing the typed letter on official government letterhead. “Dear Mrs. Armstrong,” it read. “We regret to inform you—”
“Smells good in here!”
“It’s freezing. Let’s get the heat on!”
“Look at this!” Whoever said that had discovered the snuggery of sleeping bags in the rec room.
The heat kicked on with a clang, and a Pavlovian sweat beaded my upper lip. I was still flushed from my hot shower, and the document in my hands had taken on the degree of tinder. The victims’ assistance committee had reviewed our claim and found us “ineligible for financial restitution due to a sexual relationship exclusion in the eligibility requirements, foreclosing recovery for claimants found to contribute to their own injuries.” They sent along their deepest sympathies for our terrible ordeal, but it was their elected duty to protect the program. The rules were the rules.
RUTH
Issaquah
Winter 1974
It’s unbelievable,” Tina was still saying once we’d landed back in Seattle and gotten into her Cadillac. “How could she just disappear into thin air like that?” I had filled her in on my conversation with Gail in the elevator.
“It’s what happened to the University of Washington student earlier this year,” I recalled. “The one who read the ski reports. She went into her room, and in the morning she wasn’t in her bed, and no one has seen her since.”
Tina and I drove along in mournful contemplation, thinking about the impossibility and the possibility of something like that happening to us.
“You know,” Tina said bashfully as she exited the highway and braked for the stop sign at the bottom of the off-ramp, “you’re always welcome to come stay with me for a while. I would be grateful to you, really. Being in that big house all alone? I’m feeling spooked.” She saw my mouth tighten and insisted, “You’d be doing me a huge favor, Ruth. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I just figured I’d put it out there.”
She was doing that rich-person thing again, begging me to take pity on her by accepting all her charities. The clothes, the trip, a six-bedroom mansion in which to crash. Yet there I was, wearing her clothes, having returned from her trip. It was a very effective ploy.
“Thank you,” I told her, and I did mean it, “but my mom really needs my help right now.”
Tina took her time turning onto my street, in case I changed my mind mid–tire rotation. Quietly, she asked, “With what?”
The question threw me. I had to rack my brain for a satisfying answer, and all I could come up with was “Stuff around the house.”
“I see,” Tina said in a tone that conveyed the opposite of seeing.
“Cleaning. Cooking. Paying bills,” I added, beefing up my role. “My dad used to do all that for her. She’d be a wreck on her own.”
“My mom was pretty depressed when I left home too,” Tina said. “I mean, when I really left. Like never-coming-back left. But you know what?” She pulled into my driveway, and we sat facing the small rambler I called home. The headlights of the Cadillac illuminated the stains on the aluminum siding that I’d been meaning to scrub off all winter.
“What?” I asked finally, because Tina had turned to look at me, waiting for me to engage.
“She’s fine, Ruth. She survived it.”
For a moment we tracked the silhouette of my mother in a window, puttering around the kitchen.
“She’ll be okay too,” Tina said.
* * *
“I’m back!” I shouted, and held my breath. My mother would have heard the car in the driveway and the front door close behind me, but I had learned long ago to announce myself when I entered the house. I was good at gauging my mother’s mood based on the tenor of her response, and I preferred to step into her arena prepared.
“In here,” came my mother’s barely audible reply. She was angry with me, but she didn’t have any reason to be, meaning she would have to find one. I walked into the kitchen knowing it would end brutally.