12
I hadn’t heard much from Ruby in months, until one day in October 2005 Dad told me she’d had a nervous breakdown. She had jumped into a river, like Mrs Kelly.
I told Dad about Ruby’s drinking, and I saw him get upset again. ‘She gets that from your mother’s side. Your mom’s brother was an alcoholic too.’ He decided to go to Dublin because, he said, Mom was clearly not able to manage her daughter.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘she’s an adult, she doesn’t have to do what you or Mom say any more.’
Dad wouldn’t listen. ‘She’s still my daughter, Erin. My feelings for my children don’t disappear when they reach a magic age.’
I’d had one more letter from Margie.
The DNA was planted. Your dad knew the D.A. They were together in a photo.
What did she mean about Dad and the District Attorney and the DNA? Didn’t she know that it was impossible to just ‘plant’ DNA inside of a woman?
Dad flew out that night, leaving me feeling guilty. I couldn’t afford the time, but the truth is I didn’t want to go. I called Ruby after a few days, and she said the whole jumping in the river was a misunderstanding. She said she’d been practising because part of her course was circus performance. She was not terribly coherent. I suspected she was drunk again. I got mad with her and told hershe needed to go to rehab. She was training to be an actress, and could be convincing, but I was not easily fooled these days.
‘We’re not all as prissy as you, Erin,’ she said. ‘Some of us like to let our hair down and have some fun.’
‘Right? Nearly drowning, was that fun?’
I didn’t know whether she was trying to commit suicide or not. I do know that she didn’t give a damn about how it affected anyone else in the family. I was still traumatized by the events of 1999. I’m not sure if she was. I didn’t go visit. Dad came back worried about Ruby. He had found an expensive private rehab place even though she insisted that she wasn’t an alcoholic. Mom admitted that she had spoken to Ruby after some of her jewellery had gone missing. She suspected that Ruby was on drugs as well. She often stayed out all night. She went through her monthly allowance in a week and regularly asked Mom and Grandma for more money.
I didn’t want anything to do with her when I heard that. I could hardly reconcile my memory of my cute little sister with this wild stranger. If she got so drunk that she fell into a river and didn’t see how serious her problem was, I could not help her. I knew that was mean of me, knowing what I did about the source of her trauma.
Five weeks later, Ruby left rehab after just ten days. She was a lost cause. Where had my innocent sister gone?
13
Ruby
An hour with Dr ‘Call me Amber’ Hardwicke was way more than an hour. She asked me why I had tried to take my life. She had a referral letter from the hospital in her hands.
‘That was a misunderstanding. I was trying to walk along the bridge and fell in.’
She looked at me and then back at her notes. ‘At six thirty a.m., by yourself, Ruby?’
‘Yes, I’d had a few drinks.’
She sat back and let my words echo around the room.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘more than a few. I was on a bender.’
‘Do you accept that you are an addict?’
‘Of course, that’s why I’m here,’ I lied.
‘Good for you, that’s the first step. You have no control over your drinking. Isn’t that true?’
I was still shaking. God, how long was this day going to be? Dr Amber said my shaking was a sign of withdrawal. She gave me a tablet, Ativan, and told me I would get one per day for a week to quell the worst of the symptoms. I was so grateful, I could have wept. ‘I want to get better.’
Throughout the rest of the hour, I agreed with everything she said, and asked her to help me recover.
‘You know, Ruby, I’ve seen hundreds of addicts come through these doors, and I’d say probably twenty per cent went straight backinto active addiction and died well before their time, and then forty per cent stayed clean and sober for ten years or more, but it still got them in the end. If I was to guess, I’d put you in their category. I’m not here to argue with you, but if you don’t tell the truth in the privacy of these walls, you won’t recover, and you will either die or end up on the streets or in prison. And then there’s the forty per cent who thrive in sobriety. That’s the percentage you should aim for. There is no point in telling me what you think I want to hear.’
Scaremongering. And if twenty per cent of their clients died after attending this place, what was the point?
‘You are lucky, you know, that you have people who care for you,’ she continued. ‘A lot of our clients are alone in the world because they have alienated everyone in their family and friendship circle. They think they have nobody to live for. Who do you have to live for, Ruby?’
