Winter Loon(75)

“Try to get some sleep. And we’ll help you. You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”

I kissed her and wished we could drive off together and never look back.

“Talk to you tomorrow.”

Ruby was sunk into Gip’s recliner. The lines in her face were so deep her skinfolds cast shadows in the lamplight. She put her head back on the cushion. “His was always nicer than mine,” she said, kicking off her shoes.

“You want to talk about what happened?” I asked.

Ruby seemed to wait until her eyes adjusted to the past. She sucked on her cigarette like it was fresh air, staring off into the middle distance, muttering “yup, yup,” and shaking her head. She mashed the cigarette in an amber glass ashtray.

“Take that tablecloth off them boxes in the corner and bring me the one at the bottom,” she said.

I set aside two smaller boxes and recognized right away the happy cartoon tomatoes dancing on the side of the last. “What is this, Ruby?”

“Just open it, for Christ’s sake,” she said, rocking back and forth, back and forth.

“You told me Gip threw this stuff out,” I said.

“Thought he did. Apparently he kept a few things for himself. I told you, he was soft about her that way,” she said. “She knew he favored her.”

I pulled out a photo album and opened it delicately, like it was made of spun sugar. There were pictures of my mother as a little girl, some with Gip and Ruby. There was my mother in a sailor shirt sitting on top of a pony. There she was, holding me when I was a baby. There was my dad and me—I couldn’t have been more than two—spooning on a couch, both of us asleep. There was a picture of me holding a kitten. “It’s Elizabeth,” I whispered. “Why wouldn’t you leave this out?”

“Yeah, well, at first I thought Gip had tossed it all, like I told you. Turns out he saved this one box of things. I found him rummaging around in it, sobbing like a baby. I didn’t want him pining like a pup over her. His grief never felt right to me.”

I took out my mother’s keepsakes one by one: a sparkling rock that used to sit on her bedside table, a jewelry box with only a spinning spring where a ballerina used to be, a half-empty bottle of Love’s Fresh Lemon perfume.

“So it was Gip you were keeping this from? Not me?”

“You ever see that scar across Gip’s belly?”

“Yeah. So?”

“He told me he got sliced at the feed store. I got to thinking about it, seeing that hunting knife again. I think that was around the time that knife went missing from my panty drawer. I was mad we got a bill for the stitches. Thought work ought to pay since he said it happened there. She sassed him about it, hands on her hips, mouthing off. You know, ‘Yeah, why isn’t work paying for it, huh?’ I talked to him that way, he’d have kicked my teeth in. Maybe I know why now. Maybe it was her that opened him up.”

“You think that’s why that knife was there? That she attacked him?”

“If she’d been truthful with me, I might could have helped.”

I could see the knife in her hand, how it might lash across that hard belly. I could see the blood on her sheet. “Maybe she thought you couldn’t do anything to stop him.”

“Well, I stopped him tonight now, didn’t I?” She looked right at me and I saw it there in her eyes. She was satisfied.

“You said it was an accident. But it wasn’t an accident, was it? You did it on purpose.”

“Not what I set out to do. He was out in the street. He could barely stand up. I suppose that’s what he was like stumbling into Val’s room, like my brothers stumbled up on me. And I’ll tell you what. He knew exactly what hit him. He knew it was me.”

I sat down on the coffee table and let my head rest in my hands, picturing Gip in the headlights, seeing Ruby’s face coming at him over the hood of his own car.

“No brakes?”

“Nope. Not even a tap. It was like I had the rapture in me. Don’t remember deciding to do anything. Happened, is all.”

The calmer she was, the more I quaked. The house was dead quiet but for the ringing in my ears. The shock of her confession kept me turning the album pages. There was a series of pictures of my mother walking along the snowy river bottom I knew so well. Most of them were of her walking away; in one she was glancing over her shoulder for one last look. I flipped the page and saw myself and my father with Topeka. Trampled grass, manure from the racetrack, the hay bale perimeter of the midway, my father’s arms over my shoulders, his chest behind my head—I could feel it, smell it all, like some part of that boy was still inside me and that summer never really ended after all. The full moon over the midway was the same one over Bright Lake that could see everything. That moon knew where my father was, but I didn’t. If Ruby was right, Gip had lurked at his daughter’s bedroom door, waiting for the opportunity to turn the knob. My father had simply disappeared, the lesser of two evils. Gloom surrounded me like an old shed, gray and rickety and rotted. “Fathers should love their children right,” I said. “Families shouldn’t be like this one.”

“Let me see that,” Ruby said, sticking out her hand.

I lifted it from the brittle page and gave it to her. “I’d kind of forgotten what he even looked like,” she said. “You’re more and more like him every day. Here. You can have all of it. No reason for me to keep it now.”