AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She feels like vomiting.
It is August on Shipwreck Key. Ruby is fifty. Her husband has been dead for over two years and she's begun seeing another man. Her daughters, Harlow and Athena, are grown women in their twenties now, and not the little girls of six and seven that they'd been when their father had written this entry in his journal. In 2007, Athena had been a bookish little girl with big owl eyes behind her glasses. She'd loved Harry Potter and chocolate milk and collecting those weird stuffed animals with the giant, vacant, glittery eyes. Harlow had been a loud hurricane of pink, racing through their house in D.C., singing Rihanna songs as she climbed on counters and tried to find out where her mother had hidden all the treats.
Her whole life had been about raising two little girls while her husband had traveled the world, finding himself (unapologetically, it would seem) in the arms of another woman.
And where was I at that point in our lives? Ruby asks herself, narrowing her eyes as she hugs her knees to her chest and grabs onto the brim of her straw hat to hold it in place against the gust of wind that comes off the water.The wife of a senator, sitting on committees and attending meetings. Taking lunches with the wives of other important politicians. Dressing each day with care and precision, keeping an eye on the future and on the White House. Spearheading literacy initiatives, packing school lunches, making sure that our daughters had their private school uniforms and rides to Girl Scout meetings. Not lounging in a cafe in Paris, pondering my own existential crisis and celebrating my sexual reawakening.
Ruby stands up, grabbing the edge of her pink and yellow striped beach towel and flinging it angrily as she shakes off the sand. Her late husband's journal goes flying, landing facedown. She does not care.
In her blue bikini beneath a gauzy white cover-up, Ruby is a figure of fury against the pleasing backdrop of white sandand turquoise sea. She holds her hat again as she bends over, snatching up the diary and brushing off the grains of sand. The brown leather book gets shoved into her beach bag along with the balled-up towel and a tube of sunscreen.
Ruby has been determined to use this quiet month that she has to herself to finally go through her husband's personal effects, but now she's not so sure that she can. She stalks back across the beach towards her house, high-stepping over soft drifts of sand as she holds her bag and mutters to herself.
Jack! Arguing passionately along the Seine with a gorgeous woman. My husband, walking through the cold snow to spend a hot January night with this same woman. And me, buying organic apples and readingFancy Nancybooks to our daughters after their evening baths, she thinks angrily.
Stomping up the stairs to her house, she flings open the kitchen door and drops the bag on the island. A shower--that's what she'll do. Take a shower and go to the bookstore, even though she'd planned to take the whole week off so that she could jump into these diaries. It had been her own mistake to begin reading right at the point where she knew Jack had fallen for someone else, but curiosity had gotten the best of her, and now she was stuck with his words ping-ponging around in her brain. Why couldn't she just have opened diary number one? Why start in the middle, with the hard stuff?
Ruby stands beneath the hot stream of the shower, Jack's words replaying in her mind as she lets water run over her shoulders, down the curve of her spine, and over her rounded behind. She turns her face up to the shower head and closes her eyes as her tears mix with the water.
It isn't fair. It isn't right.
She can feel a headache starting to pound in both temples as she imagines Jack sitting at a cafe with an espresso next to him, writing in that stupid journal and pondering what it means thathe woke up in the bed of a thirty-year-old woman. And she can picture herself at home, running to get her hair done before a luncheon with his political advisors. It infuriates her. Ruby turns off the shower and steps out, looking at herself as she stands before the mirror, wrapped in a white towel.
"But where were youreally?" she asks herself, looking into her own eyes. "While your husband was sleeping with a woman in another country, what wasreallygoing on with you?"
She says nothing else out loud, but Ruby knows, deep down, that the answer is much, much more complicated than "sewing badges on Girl Scout uniforms," or "planning princess-themed birthday parties."
The question might be simple, but the answer isalwaysmore complicated.
Ruby
Three weeks is plenty of time to go through Jack's private effects. It should be enough time for Ruby to open every box, go through every letter, journal, and document that Jack had meticulously saved throughout the course of his life.
The reason she's chosen August to do this is precisely because she has three weeks of solitude. Both Athena and Harlow are traveling (Athena to the U.K. for a visit with Marigold Pim's son Elijah; Harlow to Canada to camp in the wilderness with a few friends), and Dexter North has told her that he's going to be locked in on editing the work they've done thus far on the book he's writing about Jack. So with nothing other than her friends on the island and the bookstore to keep her busy, Ruby has set aside the time to finally wade through Jack's writings.
A poly-sci major, Jack had taken to writing like a fish to water. At the tender age of twelve, he'd started writing in a diary and saving every letter he ever received. Ruby knew about this over the course of their marriage, naturally, but she had never been overly curious about it. For her, writing could be a deeply revelatory and cathartic process, or it could simply be a way todocument the passage of time and the way a person spent their days. When he was president, Ruby had always assumed that Jack simply wanted to capture how he spent his time, the people he met, the important things he'd needed to ponder, and what his time in the Oval Office was like. Had he been writing for the benefit of future generations? In Ruby's mind, the answer was always no, and therefore she hadn’t been terribly interested in the journals. She'd honestly never given too much thought to his daily scratchings as he sat up in their bed at night shirtless, the blankets pulled up to his waist, reading glasses on his nose. When he'd finished, he'd open the drawer next to the bed and slide his current diary inside, closing it as he folded his glasses and set them on the nightstand.
But he'd always written gorgeous letters, and Ruby had been the recipient of many of them over the years. She knows that--aside from a mind for politics--Jack had a heart for poetry and prose. She'd read some of his college papers and admired his writing style, but now to be confronted with boxes and boxes of journals filled with ink-covered pages, she isn't sure she has the heart or the stomach to truly dig in.
Ruby stands up from her spot on the living room floor and puts her hands on both hips. She surveys the sea of boxes that she's carried into the room, each numbered with the date that they were packed and sealed. If she lines them up along the brick hearth of the unlit fireplace, she'll have a row of boxes dating from 1974 up until the month of Jack's death. In each taped and labeled box she knows she'll find letters and diaries that correspond to those dates, but as to what she'll find in each of those journals, who could even guess? What might twelve-year-old Jack Hudson have written about in 1973--Watergate? The oil embargo? Or, more likely, his favorite episodes ofM*A*S*Hand the name of the girl he had a crush on in his homeroom class?
Ruby stretches her back and her hips pop loudly. She's still fit at fifty and has no problem crouching and bending to move and open boxes, but sitting on the floor for long periods of time leads her to get up from the ground with an audible groan of complaint.
She stands in the middle of the room and looks around, overcome with the magnitude of the project and with the potential emotions it's all about to unlock. She'd felt ready for this as the summer wore on, but now that she's standing here, surveying the remnants of her husband's entire life in boxes, she isn't so sure.
Instead of sitting or going back to the diaries, she walks into the kitchen and takes a can of Diet Coke from the refrigerator before unlocking her phone and opening her contacts list.
"Hi, Helen," Ruby says when Helen Pullman answers. Helen, Jack's former Chief of Staff during his time in the White House, is one of Ruby's favorite people in Washington D.C.--not to mention in the world. "Are you busy?"
"Too busy for you? Never," Helen says with a smile in her voice. "Long time no talk, sweetheart." Helen, who is over sixty-five (though she doesn't like to admit quite how much over), has been both a confidante and an advisor to Ruby for as long as Ruby can recall.
"I'm sorry about that," Ruby says. She's sent Helen email updates and the odd text, but the two women haven't actually spoken in a few months. "Life's been busy."
Helen gives a great, hearty guffaw. "Oh? Life on Scallywag Rock has been keeping you on your toes?"
Ruby smiles. "Shipwreck Key," she says, though Helen clearly knows this. "And actually, yes--kind of. I've been..." She trails off here, sipping her Diet Coke. "I've been seeing--"
"Dexter North," Helen says plainly. "Honey, everyone knows that."
