Part One
1
Ruby
If my sister hadn’t been beautiful, none of it would have happened.
Erin’s hair was blonder than mine. Her eyes were pale blue like Mom’s. Mine were ordinary blue. But everything was perfectly in proportion with her. She never had to wear a retainer like me because her teeth were straight and even. Mine were crooked. And my chin was too pointy. I was thin and bony while Erin was curvy in all the right places. My feet were too big for my body. Side on, I looked like a golf club. I didn’t smile with my mouth open for the two years I wore that retainer. One time in school, I forgot, and a senior guy said I looked like Steve Buscemi. I was really upset when I found out who he was. Mom said the curves would come and the pointy chin would go as well as the retainer. I couldn’t wait.
Everyone talked about how pretty Erin was, and then, when they noticed me, they’d hastily say something like ‘and Ruby’s freckles aresocute’.
I struggled a little at school. I was never bottom of the class. I hovered around the middle. In 1999, I was sixteen and Erin was eighteen, in her senior year. She was top of her class. We were both in Altman High. Dad would sigh before he opened my report card. He never expected it to be good. The comments from teachers said things like ‘We hope to see a more matureRuby next year’ and ‘We know that Ruby is capable. If she can memorize the entire script ofTitanic, I’m sure she’d be able for Robert Frost.’ Dad was mad about that one. I got mostly Cs with one or two Bs and an A in drama. Erin was a straight-A student. She was hoping to study English at Harvard. Her boyfriend, Milo, was in his first year at Boston College doing pre-med because he wanted to be a doctor.
Erin wrote stories, but she said I wasn’t allowed to read them. Milo said they were excellent, but he thought everything she said or did was awesome. He said she was beautiful and talented and sweet, and that was true.
My dad, Douglas Cooper, was the pastor and founder of the Holy Divine Church of the Fourth Way, and he was also an investment broker. Dad ruled the roost in our house in Fisher Hill, a respectable neighbourhood in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. He led us in prayer before meals, and Sunday was a day of observance when we were supposed to spend our time in contemplation and gratitude for what the Lord had provided. Dad’s churches had a congregation of thousands and missions in four states. He was kind, a good dad, but he was out of town a lot, away visiting his other churches, conferring with the ministers he had personally ordained and meeting with investment clients.
I think Mom preferred it that way. When I went to Laquanda or Tasha’s houses, I noticed their parents being in agreement. My mom and dad were affectionate with each other in front of us, but they argued a lot, and it had always been that way. Erin and I were used to it. In fact, it worked to our advantage. If Dad said no to something, we could always ask Mom, and fifty per cent of the time we got the right answer. We were a normal family, I guess, franks and beans or clam chowder on alternate Saturdays. Dad was a Red Sox and Patriots fan. Erin, Mom and I weren’t interested in sports.
Mom was Irish, I mean properly Irish, born in Ireland. That’swhere Erin got her name: it means ‘Ireland’. Mom’s name was Maureen. Dad got to name me, thank God, and he said I was like a precious jewel so I was Ruby. I got a better name than Erin. That was the only perk I got from my parents.
Mom had come over to America for the summer when she was a teenager and was working as a nanny in a house close to where Dad grew up in Worcester, west of Boston. I think it was a love story. He was her knight in shining armour, and he rescued her from having to go back to Ireland. That’s the way he told it. Mom would say it wasn’t quite like that. They got married young and started a family straight away. Boy, was she homesick, though. By 1999, Erin and I hadn’t been back to Ireland in four years, but Mom visited every year and spoke to Grandma once a week on a Saturday at 3 p.m.
I would eavesdrop sometimes. Mom would exclaim at various points, ‘No’ in disbelief, or ‘She didn’t’ in astonishment, when she clearly did. Grandma’s stories were then reported to us, but they concerned cousins we’d met once, or old school friends of Mom’s. They involved an unmarried girl getting pregnant, or a fight over a will, or the neighbour’s new dog. Mom missed home. The last time Erin and I had visited, it was a rainy and grey summer, but I loved Grandma. She was like the grandma you see in fairy tales. She wore her grey hair in a bun, she was softly chubby and she was always baking. She read bedtime stories and cuddled me, and even though I was probably a bit too old for that by then, I didn’t mind it. I think she preferred me to Erin. I don’t know how Mom and her brother and my grandparents had lived together in that tiny house. Grandpa had died young a year after his only son was born so I never met him. Dennis was eleven years younger than Mom. Mom and Dad’s wedding photos showed him as a young boy. She never spoke about him much. He had emigrated to Australia some years previously and I don’t think she kept in contact with him.
Much as I loved Grandma and a trip to Ireland, as we got older we chose to go to Bible Camp, which was way more fun than it sounded. We learned to cook and swim, and we did first aid, knitting circles, book club and singing. Not all the songs were hymns, though we weren’t allowed to sing Britney Spears – not in front of the camp leaders anyway.
Erin’s boyfriend was wicked smart. Milo had been in Altman High with us until he graduated the previous summer. Everyone wanted to be his girlfriend, but my big sister, Erin, took his attention. Slim and sandy-haired, he looked like a pale version of Bailey fromParty of Five, and he was fun too. He was from Southie. His clothing was a little shabbier than most students, but apart from that and the accent, you would never know his background. His manners were impeccable, though they didn’t come naturally. The first time he came to dinner, when Mom called out ‘Dinner’s ready’ and bid us all to sit at the table, Milo politely began to offer the bread basket around, but Dad coughed and said, ‘Let’s say grace first, yes? Maureen, will you lead us in prayer?’ Milo turned beetroot red. ‘Yes, sir, ma’am, I’m sorry, sir.’ Dad smiled reassuringly at him. Everyone closed their eyes as Dad intoned the holy words, but I sneaked a peek at Milo, and he was looking at each of us in turn. He caught me looking, jammed his eyes shut tight and then opened them again and winked at me with a grin. It was my turn to blush. He watched carefully how we used our knives and forks. Mom could have been more subtle about that. She narrated the whole table etiquette thing – ‘and now we put our napkins on our laps’ – and I knew she had learned table manners from Dad’s family, because Grandma sometimes ate with her mouth open, or ate peas from her knife, and Mom didn’t learn manners from her.
My parents grew to trust Milo, especially Mom, because he was Irish from a few generations back. Despite his good looks and physical presence, he was bookish like Erin. He adored her,and Dad even let him sleep over in the downstairs spare room on weekends or sometimes if they were studying late during the week. He was not allowed to go upstairs where Erin’s room was, next to mine. They pretended that they stayed in their respective rooms, but I knew better.
My room was in the middle of the house upstairs and separated Erin’s room at the top of the back stairs from Mom and Dad’s room at the other end of the house beside the main staircase that led down into the hall. There was a full-length mirror on the wall in my room and I spent a lot of time in front of it, waiting for my teeth to straighten with the retainer and the pointy chin to change as I got older, for the curves that Erin had. Like Snow White’s wicked stepmother, I checked the mirror impatiently several times a day, hoping for this miraculous change. One day, I got so frustrated that I banged my fist on the mirror, and it fell off the wall. The nail and the plastic thing that held the nail in place fell out too. There was now a hole in the wall. If it was a bit deeper, it would come out on Erin’s side, and I’d be able to see into her room. What did she get up to on her own? Did she have a secret diary? I’d searched her room before. Laquanda showed us her older sister’s secret diary and it was full of scandalous thoughts about what she wanted to do with boys and what she wanted boys to do to her. I got some nail scissors and tunnelled through the tiny hole until I could see straight on to the opposite wall of Erin’s bedroom. Then I scratched a bit more until the hole was about half an inch wide. The wallpaper in her room was a crazy floral pattern that she’d chosen herself. Mom said it made her dizzy. Erin would never notice a small hole in the wall.
Now I could see Erin’s bed and her vanity unit and almost her whole room. I used to spy on her now and then. I watched her removing make-up from perfectly unfreckled skin. I watched her change out of her clothes into her nightgown. I watched herin her most private moments. When I wasn’t watching, I put the mirror back against the wall, on top of a shoe box. And I put a large pink Band-Aid over the hole in my pink wallpaper. You wouldn’t spot the tape unless you were looking for it. The mirror had only hung six inches off the floor. When Mom noticed and talked about re-hanging it, I told her not to bother, that I liked being able to move the mirror around.
One morning, I woke early and saw a shadow passing under my door, but there was no sound of footsteps. I was immediately alert because I knew that Milo had stayed over the night before. I got out of bed quietly and peeled back the tape on my wall. Milo was in Erin’s room. I expected her to shout at him to get out, but they were fooling around, French kissing and more. I was mesmerized and horrified and turned on. It became a regular thing for me, to wake up early and watch them on the nights he stayed over. They never made a sound. The guest room was downstairs behind the kitchen. I don’t know how they never got caught.
Sometimes, we would all be working in the study at home, and I would examine him, taking in his fair hair, his square shoulders, his jutting chin, his strong arms. I watched how he was with Erin; how physically comfortable they were together. He would lift her up and throw her over his shoulder while she yelled at him to put her down even though she was clearly enjoying it. They sat together, pinkie fingers intertwined. They were inseparable. Mom insisted he was a good influence on Erin and it’s true that she was not slacking in the study department. We all thought how Erin was lucky to have such a supportive boyfriend.
I wasn’t one of the cool girls in school. I trained hard to be a cheerleader but never got picked. My friends included Laquanda Rice, Tasha Danziger and Janet De Vere Kennedy (yes, she was one ofthoseKennedys, a third cousin or something). I guess we were cliquey, but we’d been friends since kindergarten. We didn’t deliberately exclude anyone from our group. None of ushad boyfriends and we wore our virginity as a badge of honour. It didn’t stop us talking about sex, though. We all knew the mechanics of how it worked from sex ed classes, but we talked endlessly about how it would feel. Janet said it might be like having Pop Rocks down there, but I thought it had to be better than that. The faces Erin and Milo made didn’t look like the ones you made when eating Pop Rocks, from what I could see through the hole in my bedroom wall.
Erin said we were obsessed. But we weren’t the ones with boyfriends in our bedrooms. I was ashamed to think my sister was one of the girls who was nearly doing sex. I didn’t dare tell anyone. My friends and I talked about saving ourselves for our wedding day. We were going to marry pop stars. We were all to be each other’s bridesmaids. We prayed for the souls of the girls who we knew were having sex. We went to Dad’s church together. We had taken a pledge there to be virgins until we were twenty-one years old, but we thought we’d be married by then. We had posters of our dream boys on our walls – all the Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, Will Smith and Leonardo di Caprio.
At sixteen years of age, I wanted to be an actress. Laquanda said I would have to go to LA for that, but I guess I was more of a homebird than I thought. California seemed far away, and besides, I wanted to be a Broadway star rather than a film actress. Film actors, especially women, were often naked on camera. There was less nudity on stage. Tasha said there was no money in acting and that for every Broadway star there were thousands of bit-part actors. It didn’t matter in the end. I never made it on to Broadway. Maybe things would have been different if it hadn’t been for Milo Kelly.
It was 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, 15 September 1999, when he called at the house. I had come home from school on my own with a stomach ache and Mom had gone out somewhere withErin. The pain wasn’t so bad. I told him that Erin wasn’t home but that he could come inside and wait. He wondered when they’d be back, but I didn’t know. He said he’d wait a while. That wasn’t unusual. He spent a lot of time hanging around waiting for Erin. I offered him a coffee, and he accepted. I didn’t even like coffee, but it seemed grown up to be sitting with Milo and sipping coffee. This time I sat beside him on the sofa. He was more chatty than usual, asked me about school and my friends. He was teasing me about wanting to be an actress. He reached out to tickle me – ‘You want to be inDawson’s Creek. You want to kiss Pacey Witter’ – and then he grabbed me around the middle and the mood turned dark in a split second. What happened next comes back to me in glimpses, like a series of photographs or glitchy radio static. The sound of my shirt ripping. My panties dropping to the floor. Staring at the vase on the sideboard, hearing my voice yelling, ‘No, no, no.’
Dad found me wrapped in a blanket on the sofa when he came home. I wasn’t crying yet. He was alarmed to see me like that and asked me what had happened. When I told him, in a robotic monotone, he called the police. He said I was in shock and made me drink a glass of brandy.
I was taken downtown, examined and swabbed and photographed, tested for pregnancy and all sorts of diseases including AIDS. They looked at the bruises on my inner thighs that were caused by Milo’s thumbs digging into me, the marks on my wrists caused by his closed right hand, the cut on my head from where I’d banged it off the table trying to get away from him. These sounds and images were scrambled in my mind. I made my statement and answered the graphic questions. The lady police officer and the nurse said I had done excellently, as if I had scored an A on some exam paper.
Dad had called Mom from the police station. Mom and Erin were at home when I got back after midnight, and then all hellbroke loose. I often wondered if it could have been dealt with in a different way. If Milo had admitted it, everything would have been simpler.
Over the next week, Erin was hysterical and then that turned to anger. I was sickened that she believed him over me. She had known him for just over a year, and she had known me all my life. But she was adamant I’d made it up and it hurt almost as much as the incident with Milo. She had trusted him completely, but I remember overhearing some friend of Mom’s saying, ‘Well, what can you expect from a boy from Southie? I certainly wouldn’t have let him in my home.’ I knew that was wrong. It wasn’t Mom’s fault for welcoming him into our house, and it wasn’t because he was from South Boston, but I was too distraught to defend her. Everyone said I shouldn’t feel guilty. But I shouldn’t have sat beside him. I shouldn’t have laughed when he began to tickle me.
2
Erin
