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An eighteenth birthday present from Ruby. There’s an inscription on the back, one I haven’t looked at in years, but remember all the same.
For Camden. Time Brings All Things to Pass.
And as I drive away from the new life that I’d built for myself, heading back toward my past, I wonder if those words were supposed to be an encouragement or a warning.
Or a threat.
From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish
March 12, 2013
Well, darling, here we are.
You asked for me to tell you the truth, all of it, the glorious and golden, the ugly and unvarnished. I think you wanted me to tell it to you all at once, the last time we spoke. I could see how disappointed you were when I told you that it would take time. I’m seventy-three, for goodness’ sake, and I’ve lived an eventful life. Too eventful, honestly. And anyway, this isn’t the kind of thing you chat about over coffee. Something like this, it needs an old-fashioned touch, a bit of formality (I can see you rolling your eyes already, and if you were in front of me, I’d slap your hand for it).
After you read these letters, you’ll probably think I’m a mad old fool for putting any of this in writing, but I’ve found that writing things down makes them real. Firms up details. Allows less room for… eliding, let us say. (If you don’t know what that word means, then I’m clearly overpaying for your education.)
And to be honest—that’s what you’re after, yes?—I don’t care anymore. If people find these and read them and finally know the truth of everything, it no longer matters to me. I know my end is coming—soon for some, I suppose, but right on time for me. And if you can’t tell the truth at the end of it all, then what, I ask, is the fucking point?
I’ve never written that word before. I’ve hardly ever said it. I know I got on you about crass language, but now I see why people use it. How satisfying! This experiment is already going so well!
You wanted to know mostly about the men, I think. The pile of dead husbands, “Mrs. Kill-more,” all of that. And we’ll get there, I promise.
I also promise to skip the non-interesting bits. My school years, the business, most anything to do with Nelle (although she will make an appearance in this letter, I’m afraid, but sadly for Nelle, the only times in her life when she has ever been interesting are the times she was being a nasty little bitch, and the story I’m going to tell involves one of those times).
But before I can get to all of that, we have to talk about my tragic disappearance and miraculous rescue.
You can read the newspaper articles about the whole saga. They’re all saved in the top right-hand drawer of my desk. Or you can go on the internet. Libby tells me there’s an entire entry about it on some online encyclopedia.
And yes, yes, I know we’ve already covered some of this, but only the facts. How I vanished on a family picnic when I was just three, how I was found months and months later living with the Darnells in Alabama. How Mrs. Darnell insisted that I was not Ruby McTavish at all, but her own child, Dora, and how Mr. Darnell eventually confessed that while in North Carolina on a construction job (for my own father, as luck would have it), he had gotten drunk on a Sunday afternoon and wandered into the woods. How he had seen me alone, a miscommunication between my nanny and my mother meaning that both women thought the other was watching me. How he had thought of his wife, Helen, and the child just my age who had died only a month or so before.How easy it had been to scoop me up, carry me to his truck parked on some back logging road, and spirit me away to his family’s shack in Alabama. A replacement for the child his wife so mourned.
Of course, I remember none of this.
Or rather, I remember fragments that I’m not sure are actually memories. I read the stories so many times, you see, and envisioned so much of it that I can’t be sure if something is a memory or a conjured-up image.
A dream.
That’s why I spent so much time in my father’s office as a child.
He kept all the newspaper clippings there, in the very same drawer I mentioned earlier.
I learned that by accident one afternoon in 1950, when I was just ten years old. I’d had a doll, one of those fancy ones with the eyes that opened and closed and silky blond hair, her lips strawberry pink, and her cheeks dotted with painted-on freckles.
I’d gotten her when I was seven or eight, for Christmas or a birthday, I can’t remember which. What I can remember is Nelle howling that her doll hadbrownhair and mine hadyellowhair, and that was unfair since Nelle herself was a blonde and I was a brunette. I had been worried that my parents might make me trade dolls with Nelle, and I had sat there, only a little bitty thing, thinking,If they do, I will throw this doll into the fire. I will burn it before I let Nelle have it.
I meant it, too. The image of that beautiful doll melting and folding in on itself, the yellow hair sparking, the pink paint of the lips bubbling and cracking, was far less painful than picturing the doll, whole and complete and perfect, in Nelle’s arms.
Do all children think like this? I’ve never spent much time with children other than the ones either born into or brought into this family, so I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s all perfectly normal, and not some quirk of either my DNA or the very essence that seems to emanate from the walls of Ashby House. But at the time—and hell, who am I kidding, even now—it seemed that there must be something uniquely wrong withme.
In any case, Mama didn’t ask me to trade, and Nelle was eventually consoled with an extra piece of cake or some other sop, and the doll was mine. I had named her “Grace,” but when I said the name, something had passed over Mama’s face, an ugly look like someone had suddenly hit her.
“I don’t like that name,” she’d said sharply. “What about Kitty?”
I thought Kitty was a stupid name, but Mama so rarely paid any attention to me that I’d readily agreed even as I’d known that in my head, I would still call her Grace.
And it was Grace’s fault I was in Daddy’s office that hot summer afternoon.
One of her eyes had gotten stuck, half-opened, half-closed. There was something about that half-mast gaze that reminded me of Mama when she had her headaches. That’s what we called them then, although of course now I know that Mama drank too much, which meant that she was perpetually either intoxicated or dealing with the aftermath.
