Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(54)

After hesitating for a second, I push the door open.

The bedroom is small with one bright window, illuminating tiny dust particles that float across the room. Posters of classic French films from the sixties hang on the wall, their yellowed edges curling up and inward. A ceramic ashtray shaped like a mermaid sits directly on the mattress, filled with cashed joints and the black dregs of weed.

That’s when I see the pill bottles—thirty at least, neatly stacked on a mirrored tray next to the bed with the exception of one bottle, which lies on its side, empty. On the nightstand, draped over a water-damaged copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, an oxygen mask lies coiled like a snake.

“Ruth?” My voice comes out a squeak, then I find it again. “Ruth!”

The house is empty, but she’s still everywhere. She must be out grocery shopping, or buying fertilizer, but even as I’m telling myself this, I know. I just know, somehow, and I have no idea how I could’ve been so clueless this entire time.

I bolt out of the house, hearing the screen door slam and bounce a few times behind me, and vault over the flowers. I think this is what disassociation is—seeing through a shaky camera, hearing your own heavy breathing like a heroine in a horror movie. I hurtle up the apartment stairs two at a time.

“Dawn!”

She appears from around the corner in her uniform, wrapping up her hair under the headband she uses when she cleans.

“Is everything okay?” she asks, alarmed.

“It’s Ruth, she’s not home, she’s always home at this time, and I went in—” I double over gasping, sinking with dread like an anchor. “We need to call the hospital. Something’s really wrong, the door was unlocked, and—I think I’m gonna faint.”

“Sit down and breathe. Okay? Are you listening? We’re gonna figure this out.”

Intellectually, I want to brush her aside and call every hospital in Central Jersey immediately. But the dizziness overtakes me, blurring my vision and forcing me to plop down on the floor. Dawn grabs her cell phone.

She speaks brusquely to someone on the phone for an indeterminate amount of time, then calls someone else and speaks to them too. The whole time I try to breathe, to stay calm.

Dawn turns to me, holding her iPhone slightly away from her, and says, “They took her to Robert Wood Johnson. I’m calling them now.”

I stumble to my feet and lurch for the door, still seeing everything through a weird fish-eye lens of panic, my own hand looking odd as it reaches for the knob. Dawn holds out her hand to stop me and listens to the voice on the other end.

“Yes, she came in—no, we’re not blood relatives, but my daughter is very—I see,” Dawn murmurs, her face almost immediately becoming a subdued mask so that I know exactly what she’s going to tell me when she hangs up the phone. It’ll be any minute now, and that will make it real. All I can really do is wait and hope I’m wrong. Dawn scribbles down another number on the back of an unopened bill, hangs up, and calls that one. After I don’t know how long, maybe ten minutes, she finally hangs up.

“Scarlett, she’s gone.”

“Like . . . what do you mean?”

“They took her to the hospital last night. She wasn’t alone; she had a friend with her named Sally. Do you know her?”

I shake my head, beyond guilty. I didn’t even know Ruth had any other friends.

“I just spoke to her. She told me Ruth had been very sick for a very long time.”

“I mean, she was really old, but she seemed totally—”

“She had breast cancer for years. When it came back this time, it was terminal, and she decided to stop treatment. She passed away early this morning.”

I feel myself just stupidly shaking my head.

“Why would she do that?” I whisper.

“I didn’t ask.”

“She called me a bunch of times the other night. I didn’t pick up.” I pull up her name on my cell phone’s missed-call list. “See? Look!”

There she is, RUTH, at seven thirty-two P.M., eight oh three P.M., and nine twenty P.M. For some reason, that is when I actually feel it, the fact of it undeniably hitting every part of me at once, like an ice-bucket challenge. Ruth is dead, just punching me in the stomach and casually walking away.

“Oh my God. I had no idea,” I hear myself say. “Oh my God. How did I not see it?”

“Scar, listen, baby. Can you just listen? Scarlett.”

I can’t, though. I let myself tumble back down on the floor and start to cry, these weird gulpy shock-tears, like how kids cry right after they fall down.

“From the way her friend made it sound, Ruth was in control, and she decided how she wanted it to go.”

Her words remind me of the way parents tell their kids about a dog they just put down. She was really old, so we brought her to a farm where she can run and play. It doesn’t make up for anything that really happened; it’s just a nicer way to frame the truth.

“There was nothing anybody could have done,” Dawn says, trying to reassure me, but it just makes me feel worse, because Ruth was dying and I wasted so much of her time talking about a stupid boy.

I surprise myself by becoming furious with Ruth—a fury that almost feels like an anxiety attack. If she’d deigned to talk to a doctor for a single hour out of the zillions of hours I talked her ear off about Gideon, she might still be alive. For all the time she wasted with me, shooting the shit and smoking weed, she couldn’t go to the hospital for forty minutes and thoroughly discuss her options? The rational part of my brain knows I have no right to be angry at her, and I should even be proud of her, but I’m so mad that she didn’t tell me.