Little Deaths(53)

She studied it for a moment then she pointed at a guy in the middle, the one Ruth seemed to be looking at.

“Yeah, that’s him. That’s Johnny. You took that on the first day, right? Poor Ruth. That sonofabitch is taking her to see her dead baby girl and suddenly, she sees a guy she knows, a guy who tells her he loves her. Only instead of taking care of her, he turns out to be working for that bastard.”

She shook her head and handed the photo back like it was dirty.

Pete took it, slid it back into the bundle, still thinking. There was something else about Johnny Salcito, something important. Then he remembered what Devlin had told him: Salcito was the guy who’d called Ruth at two a.m. the day the kids went missing.

There was a sudden flare of music from outside. Gina got up and pulled the drapes, shut the noise out. Turned the radio on.

Without looking at Pete, she said, “It’s the World’s Fair. That’s the carousel. It’s there every day. Been there all through the summer. I sat in here, that day, the day the kids . . . and it kept playing. Over and over. I can’t listen to it now.”

She took another cigarette with trembling fingers and Pete lit it for her.

“The kids were always talking about the World’s Fair, see. They wanted to go, and Ruth said she would take them in the fall. It would be cooler for them to be outside all day then, walking around, and it was going to be . . . their birthdays are . . . were both in October. It was going to be their birthday treat. And they never got to go. They never got to . . .”

Her eyes filled with tears and she let them sit. Stared through them at nothing, remembering.

“Christ. Ruth has to listen to that every day. And Christmas. I keep worrying about fucking Christmas. The stores and the decorations, the lights. Kids in the street and in the stores talking about Santa Claus and presents. Jesus. Imagine that. I keep picturing it—all those reminders that it’s coming and they’re . . . they’ll never have Christmas again.”

She sniffed and shook her head and looked at him, and Pete blurted out the first question that came to mind.

“How did you and Ruth become friends?”

Gina got up to fetch a tissue, blew her nose hard. “It happened that first night, really. The first night we talked. She asked if I wanted to come in for a drink. I think she surprised both of us when she said that, she seemed like kind of a private person. But I thought, you know, she asked, I should go in.

“The kids were in bed by then—I didn’t meet them that night. But Frank was there for a little while. He didn’t like me.”

“How could you tell?”

“He sat in the kitchen until his shift started, and he turned up the game on the radio when we were laughing. I asked Ruth if I should go, if we were bothering him. She said not to mind him, that he was a rude asshole and he had no manners. She said he only liked women who were like his mother.”

“His mother?”

“Yeah. She said, ‘Frank’s ideal woman is his damned mother. Pastel suits, always watching her weight, and spending every afternoon at St. Joseph’s, polishing candlesticks and waiting on Father Michael.’ Ruth hated her. Hated her spending time with the kids, hated Frank visiting her.”

“Why?”

“Competition. Competition for Frank, for the kids. She knew his mother would always come first for him. It drove her crazy.”

“She really trusted you, huh? She told you everything.”

Gina shrugged but smiled like she was pleased, and Pete knew he could ask the questions he wouldn’t have dared ask before.

“Was she a jealous person?”

“No. Not really. She just had a problem with Frank’s mother. I mean, Johnny’s married. And Lou. She didn’t care about that, long as they made her feel good. But she didn’t have a lot of girlfriends. No one she was really close to. I think she found men more straightforward.”

“But she liked you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, she did. We had some good times. She used to say that when she was with me, she felt like she hadn’t felt in years. Before the kids. Before Frank.”

She fell silent and Pete drank his cooling coffee. He imagined Ruth as a teenager: coming home in the early hours, climbing through her bedroom window. He saw her leaning out into the blue night air, her heart still beating to a distant music. Waiting for her life to start.

And then he thought of himself at fifteen, sixteen, sitting at his desk by the window, homework discarded, gazing out at endless summer evenings and neat sun-bleached lawns, wondering about other small towns, cities, places he’d never go, people he’d never meet. He remembered the overwhelming need to escape. And the fear that he wouldn’t make it, that he’d wake up at forty and find himself with a job at the mill and a wife he couldn’t talk to.

He’d kindled that fear until it burst into a flame that led him through extra-credit classes, through dozens of rejection letters, through a scene with his parents: his mother’s tears, his father’s disappointment, anger concealing his pain. Finally it led him onto a Greyhound out of Iowa.

Maybe he and Ruth weren’t so different.


A voice on the radio announced the one o’clock news. Gina got up, turned it off, and put a record on. Something soft with guitars. Turned it down low. Came and sat back down and lit a cigarette. Poured another drink. Nodded her head in time to the music.