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“It’s not fucking worth it, Jules! How many times do I have to say it?”
I have never raised my voice to her since the day we met. I’ve hardly ever yelled at anyone, and now my words seem to echo around the cavernous hallway as she lifts her eyes to mine, her expression turning stony.
“Fine,” she says, moving past me. “Fine. Let them have it all. We’ll go back to the rental, and you’ll go back to teaching, and they can live the sweet life because two hundred years ago, their ancestors did a thing and ours didn’t. Got it.”
“Jules,” I say, all the fight gone out of me now, but she just keeps moving up the stairs, and I watch her go, eventually hearing the distant slam of our bedroom door.
Sighing, I trudge up the stairs, too, but instead of making the turn to our room, I go down the other hallway, almost without thinking.
I’m at Ruby’s room before I quite realize it, and when I push open the door, that familiar scent hits me. Lavender and cedar, still preserved just as I remember it, like everything else in this bedroom.
Her dressing table, her tiny watercolor paintings that she’d bought at a yard sale and proclaimed “delightful,” plopping them down alongside a genuine Degas sketch in a silver frame.
The Belgian lace bedspread that scratched the back of my legs when I’d sit in here after soccer practice. She always insisted I come in and tell her about my day.
I sink heavily onto the bed now, setting the champagne bottle on the nightstand with a thunk before dropping my head into my hands.
The real reason I can’t stay and fight is because I got lucky tonight. If I leave now, if I cut every string tying me to my past, I might be okay. But if I stay here, if I go toe to toe with Nelle and Ben and Libby, those strings are only going to get tighter and tighter until they finally choke me.
And I can never tell Jules why.
I look back to the champagne, but then I think of something else, sliding open Ruby’s nightstand drawer.
I expect it to be empty, but her things are still there. Reading glasses, an oldReader’s Digest, a pot of lip balm.
And her pills.
She had dozens of them, all kept in a little silver pillbox, and I close my hand around it now.
Even in the darkness, I know the shape of the one I’m after.
I’ve never taken anything to help me sleep, figuring I deserved whatever bad dreams or sleepless nights I got, but tonight, I want oblivion.
A bitter white square under my tongue, a swig from the bottle, and I curl up on Ruby’s bed, still in Ben’s suit, only my shoes kicked off, and let the blackness take me.
ISLEEP LIKEthe dead, waking up in the gray light of dawn, my head stuffed with cotton, my mouth dry, and it takes me a second to become aware that something is happening outside.
I hear running feet, a slammed door, and I sit up, trying to blink away the fog, wishing I hadn’t taken the damn pill in the first place.
I’ve just managed to sit up when there’s a sound that pierces that haze like a bullet, sending me shooting to my feet even as the room spins dizzily around me.
It’s Jules.
Screaming.
From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish
March 30, 2013
Now, where were we?
Ah, yes. My biggest secret. The family shame.
All of that.
The Darnells had not had an easy time of it since 1944, the year I was reunited with my family, and Jimmy Darnell was shot trying to escape the local jail. His wife, the woman who claimed she was my mother, had moved away from Alabama shortly after, and had gone back to her maiden name.
It took some doing before I was able to track her down. When I did, it was only to discover that she’d died in 1984.
