The High Season(47)
You are going down. #mayflower
“What does that mean?” Ruthie asked as Jem snatched back the phone. “Are you guys comparing ancestors? Because Duttons didn’t come over on the Mayflower. They probably waited until there were hospitals and distilleries.”
“It’s a stupid nothing thing.”
Jem’s mouth stretched in that way that happened when she was upset.
“What is it, sweetie?” Ruthie struggled to her feet.
Jem banged down a spoon. She turned away, her shoulders shaking.
“Sweetie?” Ruthie reached out to hold Jem while the smell of coffee invaded the kitchen with a promise of something normal to come if they could just get through this moment. And the next. And a few more after that.
Jem was in her arms, her cheek flushed and wet against her. “Okay,” Ruthie said. “You’ve got to tell me whatever it is.”
“They hate me, Mommy. I have no friends.”
She rocked her, her sweet, sweet girl, murder in her heart.
“I mean, I get it, they’re awful, I shouldn’t want to be friends with them.”
“Yeah.”
“But why do I still?” Jem raised her face, teary and red.
“Because you’re buying into their story, maybe. That they’re the coolest. They’re making a reality and you’re in it. What about Annie? Isn’t she your friend?”
“Yeah, she’s been cool. And there’s this new friend…”
“A boy?”
“Sort of.”
“A sort of boy?” she asked, gentle, gentle.
“A summer person. Out of my league.”
“Nothing’s out of your league. Is he nice to you?”
“He makes me laugh.” She shrugged. “It’s not important. It’s just a thing, a flirty thing, at work. He comes by sometimes. It’s just that I miss my own room. It’s like here…it’s beautiful and everything, but I’m afraid to touch anything. It’s not home.”
“You’re right,” Ruthie said. “We’ve got to stick it out this summer. But after this year, no more moving.”
“Really?”
“Just us in our house. All year long.”
“You promise?”
Ruthie set her jaw against the pain in her head. Cue sunset, cue her shaking fist. As God was her witness. “Nobody’s taking our home ever again.”
26
WHEN MIKE AND RUTHIE had heard that Mike’s great-aunt Laurel had left Mike her house on the bay in Orient, it was an occurrence so startling, so out of the blue, that it was like the scene in that old movie where a secretary sitting on the top of a double-decker bus—who was it, Jean Arthur? Irene Dunne?—suddenly had a fur coat land on her head, tossed from a Park Avenue penthouse. Giddy from their luck, blinded by the thwack of luxury goods, they didn’t stop to think that they could not afford the life that had fallen on them.
It was the fall of 2001. In New York City, Mike and Ruthie had moved back into their Tribeca loft with their baby after crowding in with friends uptown. The head of the EPA had told them they were safe. The instructions? Clean with a bucket and a mop.
Ruthie and Mike had been art majors, painters; they knew about toxic materials. They wore face masks and bought HEPA filters, but Ruthie found the ash everywhere: caked into the ridges of the Dreft plastic top, in the joints of the stroller, in the cracks, in the seams, in the hinges, in the vents. Her neighbor hadn’t evacuated and had sores that wouldn’t heal and an excruciating and recurrent case of bronchitis. Ruthie heard the dry cough everywhere, in the stores, on the streets, in the diner. They stood in the lobby, mail in their hands, and spoke in low tones of dioxin and asbestos, PCBs and heavy metals, the toxic properties of jet fuel, what happens to computers when they atomize; they did not discuss the other organic material they were no doubt inhaling, all those lives in a cloud of dust.
Then anthrax hit the news. Their friends were renting cars and driving to Westchester and New Jersey on weekends with their babies strapped into car seats, house hunting with easy, preapproved mortgages in hand and gas masks in the trunk. Ruthie lay in bed at night, feeling as though she now lived on a perilous, ashy moon.
Leave Manhattan? A year ago they would have laughed. But the house in Orient could be worth something, enough to buy something else, somewhere, one of the river towns in Westchester, maybe. Enough to get them out of one big room with Mike’s paintings stacked along a wall and the crib in the corner and the look in Mike’s eyes that Ruthie read as trapped.
They borrowed a car and headed east.
Ruthie had only met Laurel a handful of times on Laurel’s infrequent visits to the city, but that had sparked a kind of friendship. She’d liked Laurel’s sense of rigor about things. Where Mike’s father was soft and indistinct, Laurel was as bracing as a salty wave.
Laurel and Mike’s father no longer spoke, a long-ago quarrel they wouldn’t discuss, though Mike traced it to Laurel finally erupting at his father’s refusal to allow her to bring her girlfriend to Thanksgiving. He didn’t object because she was a lesbian, he insisted to Mike, it was that Laurel just wouldn’t settle down. Laurel had called out this bullshit with the contempt it deserved, and their relationship, never close, was severed. “A relief,” Laurel said tersely.