Claire said, “Of course not. That wasn’t Ruth. She doesn’t have a violent bone in her body. He crossed a line. She just wanted to scare him, I guess. I think she did scare him.”
Fay went on, “But, Clary, you didn’t hear her. Because she sounded like she meant it. Just as calm as could be. And the good reverend started to beg. ‘Ruth, I said I was sorry, I tried to apologize, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been so rough with her.’”
Fay remembered Ruth saying, very quietly, “You’ll have to go to sleep sometime.”
Claire said, “I need to see Felicity. Nothing will keep me from coming down there for the trial.”
“Oh, Clary, think of how ashamed she must be,” Fay put in.
“Not if she isn’t guilty!”
“Even if she isn’t guilty, she was a prostitute...”
I steered them back to Ruth.
“When he left, she suffered so much. She looked terrible,” Fay said. “She got so scrawny, even her Mennonite clothes,those crappy blue cotton sacks, those just hung on her. The good reverend gave her nothing. She got a part-time job at another church as a secretary.”
“Was your whole family devout? Is that how Ruth met her husband?”
They cracked up. “Not even a little!” Claire said. “We were awful. We used to sing ‘oh, holy shit’ instead of ‘oh, holy night’ at Christmas.”
The last person they expected Ruth to fall for was a fundamentalist minister. The last thing they expected her to do was to reconstruct her life as a submissive Christian wife.
“She adored him,” Claire went on. “And at first look, you know, he’s so good-looking and commanding. We felt guilty for disapproving. My parents kept saying, ‘Where did we go wrong?’ Like instead of a born-again Christian, Ruthie was a drug addict or a...” Claire stopped, turning those big amber eyes on me in grief, and I knew just what she had been about to say, which she quickly amended. “An embezzler or a shoplifter or something.”
The marriage seemed to prosper as Ruth gave birth to Jay and then to Guy. “The two boys that every Copeland sister is required to have,” Fay said now. Years unrolled, Ruth seemingly content, until it all caved in. Both sisters were horrified on one level, gratified on another, appalled at Ruth’s decline.
Fay went on, “Ruth was never strong.” Ruth had a weakened heart, consequence of a runaway case of strep she’d suffered as a child. One of the reasons Roman Wild gave for leaving her was because he insisted that they have more children. Ruth refused, sure another pregnancy might kill her. “What if she’s sick again? What if she can’t contact us? Like, she’s in a hospital someplace!”
“I just don’t buy that she’s too ashamed to show her face,” said Claire. “That is not Ruth. In every other way except with the Jesus freak, she was bold. And she was the funniest, mostinvolved mom. She would do chemistry experiments with them in the kitchen instead of making cookies.”
The police couldn’t treat her like a missing person. Ruth had given evidence of a plan; she’d resigned and withdrawn her savings from an account in her parents’ name, something the sisters had just learned. Claire said, “You know he took all the money they saved together!” They’d circulated her photo and description through organizations that help abused women and girls. Nothing.
We talked long into the night. They showed me photos of Felicity as a child, which awakened my own memories of that fragile girl who had the grit of an athletic boy. Did I miss Felicity or my innocent past? Fay allowed me to borrow the photos to copy for the story. I’d forgotten to make my reservation but, to my relief, there was plenty of space on the flight that left at nine. Just after dawn, Fay gave me hard hugs and blueberry scones, but Claire, good as her word, showed up in her Volvo station wagon with her computer bag.
“Are you taking me to the airport?” I asked, confused.
“I’m coming with you,” she told me. “The kids are covered.”
“You are? Why? It’s days and days until the trial.”
“I’m going to make it my business to see my niece in jail. If she knows I came all that way, maybe she’ll agree. Otherwise, I’ll just sit in my bed-and-breakfast inn and work. And sleep. I could use some recreational sleep. For women my age, it’s like recreational sex.”
So I canceled my reservation and we set out on the four-hour drive, which, the way Claire drove, would probably take ninety minutes.
Partly out of self-defense, so I wouldn’t know about the moment we crashed going ninety miles an hour, and partly because I was wiped out and being with someone so take-charge as Claire let me act the child, I fell asleep after about ten minutes. Shewoke me gently at the exit for Madison. She’d already arranged a room at a bed-and-breakfast. Before I left her there, Claire said, “So you and Sam, you’re, ah, friends.”
“How could you tell?” Would I someday be a mother and have psychic powers? I kissed my mom goodbye, telling her I had business in Madison and would stay with Nell for at least a couple of days. “We were. But it’s over now. I think it’s over for good.”
“Well, maybe for the best. Too combustible right now.”
I told her, “It breaks my heart.”
“This is like a movie,” Claire said when I explained more about how things had transpired between Sam and me. “I just don’t know if it’s like a good movie or one of those movies you think, ah, that could never happen in real life.”
Eight
Redheaded Woodpecker
