Ruth shrugged. She... just shrugged. Every last drop of pity I might have had for Ruth dried up.
“So, Ruth, then what happened?”
“Before or after the winter break?”
“Before.” I hit my phone with my thumb to text Claire and Fay, hoping Ruth didn’t notice. She did not notice. She was long gone into the past.
When Sheboygan became unbearable, Felicity went back to Madison.
“Did you really think she was going back to school?” I asked. Ruth didn’t answer. She turned and looked out at the backyard, where paths of white stonework were dotted with conical small trees so glossily green they appeared spray-painted. An orange tree and a grapefruit tree thrust out their heavy arms as if leaning on each other’s shoulders. “Did you?”
“Why would you think I didn’t?” Ruth nonanswered.
Of course, she was not. For Felicity, as she would later say, harlotry was a self-fulfilling prophecy. All she wanted was to fundher escape. She raked in money while Ruth and Ruth’s parents cared for Sparrow. Jack Melodia would find out, and Felicity was perversely glad that being an escort would make her really damaged goods in his eyes. She would run from past deceptions and future disasters, from Jack and Roman and her own green gullibility. Ruth suggested Florida. It was home to her. Felicity suggested Hawaii. Hawaii was much farther away. And home was a four-letter word.
She and Felicity were mother-and-daughter misogyny magnets.
Ruth had some substantial savings. But when she took money out, Roman reminded her, in this house, the man controlled the money. Ruth pleaded, she still loved him, she could forgive him, but wasn’t a mother’s duty to save her child, even the black sheep? Roman said, well, yes and no. Her duty was to him. This wasn’t a teaching of fundamentalist Christianity; it was a teaching of the Roman empire. The money would show his flock that Roman was a good man. He would repay the church with money he stole from Ruth. He’d wanted to ask her before, since she had to sign for funds to be withdrawn. It took a lot of nerve to use his wife’s lifelong savings to help his reputation after the ruin he caused by cheating on his wife. But when he prayed about it, Roman received the word that not only should he keep the money, but, if she refused to obey, he should tell Jack where Felicity and the baby were. It was his opinion that Jack had the right to the little girl in any case, and it was wicked to deceive him.
I wished my father were there, for many reasons. Among them was the joy he would take in this parable of hypocrisy.
“And then what?”
Ruth struggled to take part in the Advent festivities at Starbright Ministry. Despair was never a moral option. During a final triumphant rehearsal, another choir member said that she had prayed on it and felt she must confide in Ruth about Faith, with a capitalF, Roman’s new beloved.
Now she was fully disgraced. Despair was right there waiting.
Ruth looked at me then, her eyes all pupils, the way her sister remembered from the night she told Roman Wild that she would pour boiling water on him and kill him. Again, I experienced that chill. Something bad was about to happen.
“You’re saying you did this. How could you, Ruth?”
“Not me! It was just good luck for me that somebody else did it.”
“Ruth, you know better.”
Ruth began shrugging and nodding as if having an internal conversation with the two sides of her nature.
She looked so crazy. She was so crazy.
“Did you kill them, Ruth?”
She said softly, “What does it even matter?”
“Oh, Ruth.”
“For Felicity,” she said then. “It isn’t that hard. You can’t taste it. The old man, Emil, he used to have tea with her every time he came over. He wanted some tea, with just a little sugar, when I told him Felicity was running late. He didn’t know I was her mother. So I gave him some tea. It was like he asked for it. Felicity didn’t know until it was over.”
“Oh, Ruth. The regret...”
“Not really,” she said. “I had no choice.”
“And the other guy?”
“He threatened her after they moved the body. I heard him. If she didn’t stay with him, he would tell the police. He would tell them she did it. He said he was going to his apartment and then up to see his kids and he would come back the next day and she’d better make the right decision. Jack would have found out about the baby. The old man was going to die anyway.”
“Ruth, we’re all going to die anyway,” I said.
I felt like a crone and sounded like a teenager.
