Page 89 of Head Under Water

Mom sighs and stands, moving to the kettle just as it starts to whistle. Across the house, the front door opens, and Cory and Richie make their way inside.

My hope deflates.

My fingers curl into fists as I wait to see if she’s going to change her mind, if we’ve just lost our chance to finally learn the truth.

“Put Richie in the bath, Cory,” Mom says, voice flat, focus tuned entirely to the kettle. “And then come join us. ’Cause I’m only talking about this once.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

PRESENT DAY

By the time Cory has put Richie in the bathtub, my nerves are fraying. Mom just keeps avoiding my eyes, pacing and murmuring to herself. I’m terrified of what she’s going to tell us, terrified of what I don’t yet know.

When Cory finally joins us, we’re each given mugs of tea, and Mom takes her seat across from us.

“So,” she says, the word a simple, heavy sentence. “The truth is… Well, where do I even start? Ruth, Margie, and I met in college. You guys know that.” She balances her hand on the table. “Okay. Margie and I were friends right away, but with Ruth, it took longer. She was married, you know. So she didn’t go to a lot of the parties. She’d already had a kid. She was settled. We were…” Her brows rise. “Not.”

The clock on the wall across the room chimes.

Once.

Twice.

Nine times.

We have to wait them out before she continues.

It’s late, and I’m tired, and I have no idea where this story is going.

“Anyway, when Ruth learned we were from Clinton, she wanted to know all about it. Her husband was from here, and once they graduated, she told us she'd be moving home with him. Ruth was from a real city. Boston. It might as well have been Atlantis to us. Moving to the middle of nowhere wasn’t exactly something that excited her, but I think—I hope—knowing she had friends here made it easier.”

Mom’s quiet for a while, lost in thought. “We never really talked about Ruth’s marriage. It seemed pretty obvious from the beginning she wasn’t happy. She got pregnant toward the end of freshman year at Havenport, and well, her parents were traditional. They expected her to marry before the baby came, to settle down and focus on her family. When Ruth was with us, it was like she finally got to relax. But…” There’s a long sigh. “I know she loved him. Her husband. And her son. She loved them more than we ever realized. Even up until the end, she didn’t talk about them. It was too hard.”

I’ve always known Ruth was married once, in theory, but it feels like an entirely different version of the woman I knew. In my mind, she was always the single and free one in the trifecta. She divorced before we were born, and though we’d heard the moms mention that she had a child—a son—once or twice, all we understood was that he was much older than us and gone. An abstract concept more than a living, breathing person. I guess I never questioned why Ruth never saw him or talked about him. Maybe I should have.

“Why didn’t she see them anymore?” I hold my mug between my hands, the warmth heating my palms. “What happened?”

The weight of this conversation hangs in the air, along with the scrape of ceramic on the table and the sound of Richie’s bathwater running from down the hall.

“The divorce was brutal. It broke her, took everything she had. She wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping. For months. She fought for custody until she ran out of money, and in the end, she decided if she couldn’t have full custody, she didn’t want any custody at all. She wanted her son to be somewhere stable, and he was still young enough, I guess she thought it’d be better for him to… Well, there’s no easy way to say this, but she thought he might forget her if she just walked away then, thought he wouldn’t have to miss her. I know in my heart she thought she was doing what was best for the boy.” She levels us with a heavy stare. “Even if it’s hard to understand.”

It’s impossible to know how to react to this, to absorb a hard truth about someone you once considered infallible. To accept that she was human too.

“So that’s why you’re saying she was sad?” Will asks. “Because she felt guilty? Or…because she missed them?”

Mom weighs the question behind twisted lips and searching eyes. “Yes. I think a part of her struggled with losing them every single day, even when we never saw it. Ruth was complicated. Impulsive. Closed off. But she was still our Ruth.” Her gaze flicks over each of us, pausing to take in our faces briefly. “And she loved you all. You…filled a hole for her. You meant more than she could ever have told you.” She squeezes her eyes closed, shakes her head gently. “A few days before Ruth died, she met with her son. He reached out, and she wasn’t sure, but Margie and I pushed her to see him.” Tears fill her eyes again, glimmering in the harsh, overhead light.

My chest tightens. Next to me, Will’s jaw is a hard line, fingers clenching and unclenching around his mug. Cory’s eyes flick to his hands, pale against the wood grain of the table.

Everything we thought we knew about Ruth, about our lives, is unraveling, piece by piece.

“So, wait, was it him in the blue truck?” I ask as the thought strikes. “Is that why you didn’t want to talk about it?”

“No,” Mom says with a shake of her head. “They met in town for lunch. He never came here. But what we didn’t know was that he had just found out the truth about the divorce. That was why he wanted to see her, to tell her that…” Mom’s lips quiver, and she smooths her hands flat on the table in front of her. She steels herself, staring at the wall between Will and me. “His father had an affair. He fell for someone else, and he left Ruth so they could be together.” She drops her chin forward. “Ruth never knew.”

The air in the room vanishes. Will drops his head forward.

“And it killed her,” Mom says, her voice breaking. “She wasn’t… She couldn’t…” She stands abruptly, moving away from the table to dry her eyes.