Little Deaths(95)
Only occasionally does she allow herself to think about the past. About the kids: the Christmases they had; the feel of Cindy’s hair under her fingers as she braided it; the way Frankie stuck his tongue between his front teeth when he practiced writing his name in shaky letters.
And lately, prompted by thoughts of her parole hearing, snippets of the trial keep cutting in around the edges. Thinking about the trial gets her thinking about Devlin: the way he looked at her on that first morning in her apartment. His broad figure on the witness stand, that deep measured voice echoing across the courtroom. Most of all she thinks about his heavy-lidded eyes staring into hers across countless tables in countless bare and ugly rooms.
One interview with him keeps coming into sharp focus. And now, with time to puzzle it out, she keeps going back to one accusation. To one particular detail that doesn’t add up.
She can’t stop worrying at these loose threads—pulling and pulling and waiting for the whole thing to unravel. Until one morning she wakes—and there it is, clear as day. Suddenly, she knows.
So she writes a note and encloses a visiting order, and she waits.
She has been in this room, or one very like it, a hundred times before. Has sat on the same hard chairs and faced the same visitors across the same tables. Her lawyers. Her mother. Gina.
Lou only visited once, the week after the trial ended.
“I need to think of my business, baby,” he told her. “You know that. I have to think how things might look to my clients.”
She said nothing.
“Everything has to be squeaky-clean. You understand.”
She said nothing, just watched his face as he fell silent. As he turned away. And then as he stood by the door and called for the guard and left without looking back, taking his money for Scott’s retainer with him.
Gina was the only one who could shrug off the prison, take Ruth back into the world for a while. She didn’t talk much about appeals or the courts or the sentence, but she made her laugh about the past.
It’s the smell of this place Ruth hates most. At the beginning, she volunteered for cleaning duty, knowing she’d rather smell bleach and soap than be in the kitchens all day. And the library is better still: the quiet, the smell of old paper. But no matter how hard she tries, she can’t get the oniony stink of too many people living too close together out of her head.
Gina helped block it all out. And then one day she told her that she wouldn’t be able to come anymore either.
“Mick got a job. A good one.”
“Yeah? That’s great, G.”
“It’s in Orange County. It’s a real good opportunity.”
Her words rushed over one another like a river: her excitement, her need to get the news out. To purge herself.
“Well, Orange County’s not so far.”
Gina smiled sadly.
“It’s Orange County in California, honey. I didn’t even know there was more than one. Strange, huh? He got a job all the way out there and he asked me to go with him. He’s even talking marriage.”
She took Ruth’s limp hand in her own strong one.
“I feel like it’s my last chance. If I don’t go . . . well, what am I going to do?”
Her eyes begged for understanding. Ruth tried to smile back. Told her to go. It’s what she’d do herself if she could: run far away where no one knows her.
So now it’s just her new attorney from the public defender’s office and her mother, and her mother’s mouth set in the same thin line, and her mother’s hands raw with penance and prayers.
Every month Ruth looks past her visitors to the same white-tiled walls, scratched with initials and curses and promises. But Frank, sitting opposite her today, seems to suck everything out of the room. His size means that he fills the small space and somehow she can’t see the tiles or the table or the guard—just his familiar, solid figure. And as she sits down opposite him, memories rise like bubbles: each one a complete story of their past. She remembers him singing along to Buddy Holly on the car radio. She doesn’t know when or where they were headed, but she knows there was rain on the windows, that his fingers tapped the wheel and that he sang falsetto just to make her laugh.
She remembers the way he sprawled in his seat in class, legs stretched out, hands in his pockets. She sat behind him in study hall for two years and she can still conjure up a picture of how he looked at fifteen. The line of his jaw. The way his hair curled against his temple. The mole on his neck that was the first detail she noticed about him.
And she remembers their wedding night and how serious he was, how determined that this would be done right. The smell of him as she woke up next to him for the first time. The warmth and the solidness of him that she still reaches for, before she’s fully awake. After all these years.
She adjusts her chair and gives herself a moment to get used to him again. Because she can now. She’s grown into the habit of not caring what other people think or feel, because there’s nothing left to lose. And so only when she’s ready does she raise her eyes to his.
“Frank.”
He smiles at her. The same slow smile that made her heart skip when she was seventeen and irritated the hell out of her by the time she was twenty-four.
“Ruthie. How you been?”
“Oh, you know.”
He nods as though she’s said something interesting. “You look good.”