Fay agreed. “Come on, Reenie, don’t you think we should hear this? Her own family?”
Ruth said nothing at all. She let her glance sweep over me as if I were a pair of rain boots or a houseplant. She seemed to be taking a break in another room, this one in her mind, a place where I couldn’t follow.
“Please,” I insisted to Fay and Claire, “I promise we’ll come right out. This is getting out of control. Let me just have one last chance to try to make sense of it. That much, I owe Felicity.”
A person doesn’t confide to a crowd. A person wants to talk to a person, or so my mother always said. Even if there are millions of people watching, and millions more who’ll hear about it later, the wildest revelations start with a conversation between two people.
I walked Claire and Fay to the exit and opened the door.
At the back of the parking lot, there was a bench with a little plaque, carefully set in the middle of a narrow horseshoe of colored stones. I was grateful that I was too far away to read the plaque, which, at a middle school, could only commemorate one of those rare, excruciating losses impossible to think about or ever forget. There came a snap of lightning, the passing sizzle of sulfur on the wind. Florida is the tropics and it rains almost every day. A storm was not far off.
Back in the sculpture room, I said to Ruth, “I have this feeling that you know everything about what happened that night with Emil Gardener.”
“Well, your feeling is wrong.”
“Ruth, come on. What did Felicity do? What did you do?”
Ruth jumped up and advanced toward me. Involuntarily, I stepped back, even though I had easily three inches of height and twenty pounds on her. “What did I do? I didn’t even know those people. I didn’t know what Felicity was getting up to. So how could I know anything about some man’s death? That’s ridiculous. I was at church. I had a special reading to do and I had to find space for two gigantic, stacked trays with ten dozen cookies each...” She hurried on with strange details about the church cat having kittens on Christmas Eve, about a broken coffee urn, about two women in their fifties in a loud argument aboutwhether Backstreet Boys or NSYNC was the better boy band. It was just as Ross had described when people are lying—or when they feel as though they’re lying, even if they’re telling the truth. There was the elaborate, unnecessary detail, the active hands, the rounded eyes.
Ruth was lying and she knew she was lying.
She grew angrier by the moment, her face flushed, her breathing speeded up, her hands opened, then clenched into fists. “I think this is enough,” she said.
“No, Ruth, it’s not.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“This goes way beyond a story. I need your help. Felicity needs your help. She needs you to tell the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth. I am trying to do the right thing.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“And of course, you would be able to tell, wouldn’t you, Reenie?” Ruth shouted. I was sure people could hear her at the end of the hall or even a floor up. A security guard would come. Maybe other teachers. That didn’t seem like a bad idea at all. “You’re so deep. You’re so perceptive. You’re so smart. Do you know that Felicity would laugh at you? I had to warn her not to be so obvious. She didn’t respect you. You were just convenient. The All-Purpose Sidekick. Miss Average.”
“What an awful thing for you to say to me, Ruth.”
“Well, here you are ruining my life, Reenie! Trying to take everything that is dear to me.”
“Isn’t Felicity dear to you?”
“Of course. What an awful, awful thing to say to me, Reenie.”
I noticed then that she was still holding that small paper cup. She followed my gaze. Then with a sigh, she poured the juice into one of the metal sinks, then tossed the cup into the wastebasket, spilling some residue on the floor.
“What was that?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just... Felicity doesn’t deserve that on top of everything else.”
The beforemath was nearly over.
I stepped out into the hall to a place where I could see Claire and Fay through a floor-to-ceiling window. The sisters huddled together on that stone bench as if they were cold. The rising breeze, news of the storm, lifted their hair. Their lives were about to change forever. So let them have this one last moment to believe that the worst that could happen had already happened. I wasn’t completely sure of what would come next but I was sure it would be something that Fay and Claire would wish they never knew. Their parents would die in due course; there would be medical scares; children would say confounding things; a close friend would reveal herself to be an epic liar; their best professional achievement might combust right in front of them. All sorts of ordinary mishaps could knock them down, but this one was not ordinary. For them, the worst that could happen had already happened. They just didn’t know about it yet. This was deeply personal for me, but it was not my own. Claire and Fay would be happy again, but never the way that it seemed they were once promised.
I took a deep breath and stepped back into the art room.
Ruth was gone.
I ran back to the door, thankfully remembering to jam my coffee cup in the opening so that it didn’t close behind me and lock us all out.
