Such a Quiet Place: A Novel(38)

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THE NEIGHBORS HAD STARTED emerging again. Whitney, sitting cross-legged on the top porch step, smiling at the phone in her lap; Tina, pushing her dad in his wheelchair with her mother beside her, waving to someone out of my sight. There had been a shift; a return to normal.

People could get used to any change. All we needed was time.



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THERE WAS A PHONE ringing somewhere in the house. Muffled, but with a high-pitched generic ringtone, coming from upstairs.

Ruby’s phone.

I carried my files from work upstairs but went straight to her room first. Her phone sat on the edge of her bed, facedown. I flipped it over before I could talk my way out of it, wondering who might be calling her.

An ID flashed on the screen—BB, a name she had added to her contacts. It took me only a second to work it out: Blair Bowman. It had to be. The lawyer whose name I’d seen on the television screen. The phone stopped ringing, now showing the message 5 Missed Calls.

The phone chimed once in my hand as I was staring at the display. A text this time, from the same caller: We need to talk. Pls call me back ASAP.

Definitely the lawyer, who couldn’t be bothered with the extra milliseconds needed to type out the word please.

A door opened downstairs, footsteps heading across the foyer. I dropped the phone back on her bed, hoped I got the positioning right, and rushed out of her room. I was just passing the top of the stairs, files still in hand, when Ruby started up in her new jogging shoes.

“That was quick,” I said.

Her steps slowed as she approached, a sheen of sweat over her exposed arms, the top of her chest. “What are you doing?” she asked, looking at the files.

“Work,” I said. “Grabbing my laptop.” Like I needed to account for any movement in my own house. And then, like I could beat her to it, save myself with a piece of the truth: “Hey, I heard a phone ringing. You just missed it.”

She stepped to the side, pacing through the loft. I could see the muscles in her calves, in her upper arms. The tendons in the back of her neck. “Probably spam,” she said. “I think I was given a phone number that must’ve recently belonged to someone else.”

I wanted to tell her, No, it was the lawyer. I wanted to hear what she had to say. But there was no way to do that without giving myself away.

She pulled one leg back into a stretch. “I barely made it around the block. It’s too hot to run,” she said. She started to laugh. “But Mac, my God. He acted like…”

I waited, hanging on her every word. Desperate to know what she saw, what she knew.

She wiped her face with the bottom of her green tank top. “You know,” she said, “he came to see me once.”

I shook my head slowly before finding my voice. “No, I didn’t know that.” I wondered if it was before or after the day he’d shown up in my kitchen, telling me about Ruby’s call.

More than that, I didn’t like where the conversation was going—the guilt that had lodged deep inside and was being dragged to the surface. I hadn’t gone to see Ruby. Not once. Cutting her out after the trial as someone who had existed and then no longer did. How easy it had been for the rest of us.

“I guess he wanted to make clear that we were over. Just in case I wasn’t sure,” she said.

I tried to picture it, Mac sitting on the other side of some plastic shield or maybe across a table—I didn’t know how it had gone. Ruby crying. Or not crying. Narrowing her eyes at him. Laughing at the situation, at his cowardice.

But no, I was the coward. Mac had been brave, had gone to see her where I had not. I had read him all wrong, pegged him as someone who avoided adult responsibility, when really, he’d been the only one to do what the situation called for.

“Now I look at him and I don’t remember what I saw in him,” Ruby continued. She smiled to herself. “Well, I do remember.” A single high-pitched laugh. “I remember, anyway, when I was too young for him. God, I loved the chase. Loved it because I knew he was always looking at me, even when he wasn’t supposed to.”

I flinched. Ruby hadn’t been a kid when they’d met. She’d been nineteen or twenty. Too young for him, yes, but not that young. From my perspective, he’d barely tolerated her back then. I wasn’t sure which of us was misremembering.

“Something about those Seaver boys, huh?” she asked. She gave me a look halfway between a grin and a wince. I didn’t know what she was implying. “They love them around here, those boys who never seem to fully grow up. Not the girls, though. Not people like me.”

She was right. Hitting on exactly how the neighbors here viewed her. Maybe it was because Ruby had been in college when we met her. She’d walked dogs and brought in our mail, come home late or not at all, owned roller skates and laughed loudly, spoken more from impulse than from tact. Maybe it was because her father never seemed to have a handle on her himself, always asking if we’d seen her.

“How’s your dad?” I asked her. As if she needed a reminder that she had somewhere else to go. Somewhere else to be now that she’d gotten what she’d come for. One of those missed calls, of course, could’ve come from him.

Her expression darkened, her eyes narrowing on the edge of mean before her gaze flicked away. “He died,” she said. “I thought you knew that.”