I asked, “First introduce me to this girl?”
“This is my granddaughter, Sparrow. Felicity’s little girl.”
“Felicity’s... what?”
“My granddaughter, Felicity’s daughter. Sparrow Copeland.”
“I never suspected this...”
“Well, how about that? I guess I fooled you, Reenie. Hard to fool you!”Apparently not, I thought. No wonder Felicity wouldn’t say a thing. She was protecting more than Ruth. But why...?
“Who was the boy? Was he at our school?”
Ruth wrung her hands as if they were a wet cloth, another novel trope that literally happens in real life. “Not a boy. That lawyer, Jack.”
“Jack Melodia was the father? Is the father? But that was much later!”
“He came to talk to the school assembly about business and the environment, what the law could and couldn’t do to protect animals.”
“She was only sixteen when she met him?”
“Yes.”
“He must have been thirty years old then, or more,” I said. I thought back to Jack, unctuously telling me that he and Felicity never had any kind of intimate relationship. Why would I everhave accepted that bullshit, knowing, as I did through Sam and through Lily, what he might be capable of doing to keep what was his? Handsome, charming, powerful Jack, who could easily dazzle a girl with no experience of men, even a smart girl, especially one who never knew her own father. Jack, who seemed to care about the defenseless creatures in the way that Felicity did, who owned Ophelia, where Felicity went to work. How simple it would have been for him to manipulate her, when she was like a puzzle with missing key pieces in the center. “Did she start seeing him before she graduated high school?”
“She did but there was no... you know... ”
“Sex,” I said. “Until she was eighteen and in Madison.” Felicity’s manifest lack of interest in any high school boy, her periodic “birding” trips—all explained now.
Jack had taken Felicity everywhere, buying her the best binoculars and cameras (all of which she passed off to me as loaners). While most of the birdwatching that Jack did was watching one particular human bird in a bikini or a pair of ratty denim cutoffs and a man’s shirt, he did care about wildlife of the animal variety. “Did he take her to other states? She was a minor, that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”
“He took her to other states and other countries,” Ruth said. “First it was to the Everglades. Then Hawaii. Then Peru.”
“How could he do that without her parent’s permission?”
“Oh, she had my permission! I signed every slip, every health form, everything! She told me that it was a special extension program through the university and a great privilege for her, all expenses paid, and to some degree, it was, it was wonderful for her. And what could I do for her? I was dealing with my own grief. It sounded too good to be true and it was but... I wanted to believe that she would have at least those good memories from that time?” Ruth curled her lip, explaining how hersisters would be oh-so-shocked by this, Fay especially because she was so perfect. Fay would be saying how negligent Ruth was.
“But I bet that Fay doesn’t even know the names of Cole’s art teacher and his science teacher. I bet when she gets forms that say the kids are going on an overnight field trip to a Twins game and to the public museum, she doesn’t call the police. She just signs the forms. And Fay would say that she would have been suspicious.” With a neatly compact mother gesture, Ruth tucked some loose tendrils back into Sparrow’s braid.
“I’m clearly not in Fay’s league,” Ruth said.
“But you had to know something was up.”
Ruth looked down at her hands. She had wanted to believe it, so she did. And yet, how could Ruth have seen this level of duplicity and manipulation as anything but grooming? When Felicity left for Madison, she walked straight into Jack’s velvet trap. No longer dazzled by him, Felicity later told her mother that she knew it was already probably over by then and thought she could end things any time she wanted—yet another example of Felicity’s belief that people meant the things they said, because she did.
Ruth let slip the big backpack she’d hoisted onto one of her frail shoulders. Her lips were pale. She seemed to be reminding herself to breathe.
I said, “Ruth, we’d better go inside. I don’t think this is good for you.” And what I was thinking was here was the real Maleficent, not the cartoon one from Disney World, but a woman who saw the world in the same way—divided into people who got in her way and people who didn’t. Ruth certainly hated my guts by then, although I presumed she wouldn’t do anything to me because of Felicity’s love for me. As I would learn, she had no particular feeling for Emil Gardener or Cary Church, but they really, really got in her way.
We stepped into a cool, vast white-and-yellow kitchen, like the immaculate set for a cooking show on TV. Ruth gave me iced tea from a pitcher in the fridge. I waited as Sparrow took her first sip from the same batch, then drank a little of my own. I was so thirsty that I could have downed six glasses of it; heat and adrenaline had done their work.
As she talked, Ruth cruised back and forth along the marble countertop, drumming her fingers as if playing a keyboard. Jack, she told me, was attentive and gentle at first, but quickly began to shorten Felicity’s chain. She danced at Ophelia because Jack wanted her to, because it was a kink for him to see other men lusting after her. Her growing friendships with the other women didn’t please him nearly as much. And so, the moment she was finished with work, he whisked her out of the club and back to his apartment, or, occasionally, to her dorm. Felicity still managed to find a kind of friendship with Lily and with Archangel... but there would be no college-girl life for her, no pizza at the Union, no sunbathing on the quad, no study group at the library, no football games, no silly social media photographs, no crop tops, no new friends or old ones, not even me.
No youth for Felicity at all.
She might as well have been a newlywed Seventh Day Adventist. If she wanted to study in her dorm room, Jack might let her go or he might lock her in his apartment and leave, sometimes with nothing in the refrigerator except a jar of pickles and a can of 7UP. If she didn’t want to have sex, he would hold her down and rape her. If he got mad, he threw away her textbooks and she had to apologize before he would purchase new ones. He came to her classes and physically pulled her out, pretending to be her father. She ran away but the police brought her back. When she tried to be firm and say that she was too young for this kind of exclusive relationship, Jack told her she had two choices—his way or no way.
Ruth stopped and gripped the lip of the countertop. “Andthen, well, you can guess. At first she didn’t even want to confirm the pregnancy. She played these fairy-tale mental games with herself about stress, although it was her young, healthy body sending signals.”
