The Winter People(44)

Ruthie


“What are you even looking for?” Buzz asked.

“I’m not sure exactly,” Ruthie told him.

It was just past eight, and they were back at home. Ruthie was tearing through bookcases, drawers, and shelves while Fawn and Buzz watched from the kitchen table, where they’d set themselves up with his laptop. Buzz was teaching Fawn how to play an alien-hunting game. Fawn was a quick learner and was using the arrow keys to guide her own spacecraft through the galaxy, shooting lasers with the SHIFT key.

“Oops! No, Fawn, the green aliens are the good guys. You don’t want to shoot them. They’re our allies. There’s a red one—blast it!”

Ruthie gave Buzz a warm smile. “Thank you,” Ruthie mouthed, and Buzz smiled back. She meant it. He’d taken the day off of work to drive her to Connecticut, and now here he was, still hanging out with them, entertaining Fawn.

Ruthie found the family’s one photo album and several shoeboxes full of pictures, and brought them all back to the table.

“Hit F6 and you go to hyperspace,” Buzz said.

“What’s hyperspace?” Fawn asked.

“It’s where you go really fast. You can outrun just about anything.”

Ruthie flipped through the album, which began with baby pictures of Fawn, then moved forward: Fawn’s first steps, first tricycle, first lost tooth. Mom and Dad were there, too, along with Ruthie, but clearly Fawn was the star of the show. She flipped back to the first page, showing Mom and Dad each holding Fawn as a newborn. She had a red, scrunched face, and her big wise-owl eyes were wide open, taking everything in. And there, in the bottom corner, was Ruthie—a scowling twelve-year-old with one of her mother’s famously bad home haircuts.

The only people in the photos were the four of them. Mom and Dad had no living relatives, so there was no grandma’s house to go to on Thanksgiving, no cousins to fight with at Christmas.

Ruthie dumped out the shoeboxes.

“Are you looking for pictures of the O’Rourkes?” Buzz asked, looking up from the computer. Fawn kept her eyes on the screen, fingers punching keys.

Ruthie didn’t answer. She flipped through photo after photo, pulling many of them from the drugstore envelopes they’d never been taken out of, passing over one blurry shot after another, passing badly framed pictures where the tops of the girls’ heads had been cut off. Here were the girls in front of misshapen Christmas trees, playing in the snow, digging in the garden, holding chickens. And some of a younger Ruthie: Here she was at ten, wearing a baseball cap on her first camping trip with Mom and Dad. Modeling a matching set of sweaters with Mom at fourteen. The two of them looked so odd together—Ruthie tall and skinny with dark hair and eyes, her mother short and round with bright-blue eyes and tangled gray hair. Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she’d begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even—people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets—was made up of a combination of these elements.

“Isn’t it amazing to think of, Ruthie?” he’d asked.

Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling—even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that.

Ruthie shuffled back through to the earliest photo of herself she could find: standing in the driveway, holding a green stuffed bear. She guessed she was about three in the photo. It was taken in the driveway one spring. There were still clumps of snow clinging to the grass, but Ruthie could see crocuses poking through. She was wearing a stiff-looking dress and a little peacoat, her hair in two neat pigtails.

She remembered the bear suddenly: Piney Boy. He went everywhere with her. What happened to that old bear? Most of her stuffed animals had been passed down to Fawn, but she hadn’t seen Piney in ages. Suddenly she missed the stupid bear so much her eyes began to water.

“Buzz?” she said, clearing her throat and rubbing hard at her eyes. “Would you say there are more pictures of you or your sister?”

He seemed puzzled by the question. “Um, Sophie, definitely. She was the first kid, you know. They got pictures of everything she did—like, every thing—including her first poop in the big-girl potty. By the time I came along, things like the first poop weren’t quite as exciting. There are pictures of me, sure, but not half as many as they took of Sophie.”

Ruthie nodded. That’s exactly what she’d been thinking.

“Where are your baby pictures?” Fawn asked, looking as owl-eyed as ever as she studied her sister over the top of the computer.

“There aren’t any,” Ruthie admitted.

Fawn bit her lip. “Oh,” she said, the word a disappointed sigh. She went back to looking at the screen, but didn’t seem to be playing anymore.

“Maybe they’re just in a different place,” Buzz suggested.

Ruthie shook her head. “I’ve never seen any. Once in a while, especially when I was younger, I’d ask, and Mom always said, ‘Oh, we’ve got pictures around here somewhere,’ but I never saw one. This photo of me with the bear is the earliest I can find. I’m guessing I’m maybe three years old here.”

Ruthie glanced back down at the picture. She was smiling happily into the camera, her right arm wrapped around the bear. Her coat and dress looked clean and new. She longed to travel back in time, to sit down with that little girl and ask for her story. “What do you remember?” she would ask. “Where have you been up until now?”