Olivia parked, then threw on her jeans jacket over her nightgown. Feeling like an overgrown Nancy Drew, she found herself thinking about Winnie again. Winnie would be strangely pleased by the fact that barefoot, Olivia was snooping around college fraternities this early in the morning, wearing her white cotton nightgown and the same jeans jacket she had owned since college. Underwear as outerwear, Olivia thought again. Maybe these kids would find her amazingly hip. Maybe they would hand Ruby over to her without a fight.
It was the same at every house—and there were more than Olivia had thought, a dozen or more, all big and white, with Greek letters hanging on their fronts. No one, none of the sleepy-eyed, musty-smelling boys who leaned in the doorways, staring out at her, had heard of a Ben or a Ruby. One said there was a Ben there, but he was not from New York and did not work at a camp upstate; in fact, he lived in Westerly—another seaside town right in Rhode Island—and worked with his father at the boatyard. All of the boys were sorry they couldn’t help. Some offered her a soda; it had gotten very hot and they could see how Olivia was sweating in the heavy jeans jacket. One offered her a yearbook to look at. Happy to step into the cool basement, she accepted. But she did not know whom she was actually looking for. None of the faces meant anything to her.
This boy, the one who showed her the yearbook, worried that somehow drugs were involved. He told her that a fraternity had been kicked off campus for dealing drugs. The boy’s face, smooth and tanned and so young, almost broke Olivia’s heart. His fraternity, he told Olivia earnestly, was a good one. They sang at a nursing home at Christmastime. They cleaned up the beaches at season’s end. Good kids, he insisted.
“Why do you need these folks?” he asked finally, finished with his pitch.
At first, Olivia considered lying: Ruby was her daughter. She had run away and her family wanted her back. But Olivia was too hot and angry and weary to shape the lie convincingly. Besides, the boy’s innocence disturbed her. Standing there with him, Olivia could not reach far enough back to remember herself this way—open and innocent. Trusting. She actually started to hate the boy for all those qualities he possessed that she had lost.
He grew impatient, glancing over his shoulder into the cool darkness of the fraternity house.
“So,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot in an annoying hop.
Olivia told him everything. About her great love story and their City Hall wedding, about how she’d sent him off that morning so she could sleep and how he’d died, that her best friend had eloped and Ruby had robbed her. She told him about the answering-machine tape, how that was gone now, too.
His eyes, a muddy blue, opened wide with surprise. He could not believe that life could be so bad, that husbands could be killed jogging, that a young girl could rob the woman who had taken her in. For a moment, Olivia was sorry she’d told him the truth; she felt like she had taken something from him, too, robbed him. But then, as she handed the heavy yearbook back to him, she was glad she’d told him. Maybe he wouldn’t be so foolish to think that life would always be beer parties and cramming for tests and trying to get laid. He knew something important now.
She wished him luck, then walked away quickly from the look that spread across his young innocent face. It could be a look of horror at what happened to her. But Olivia was afraid it was something else, something worse. She was afraid that the boy pitied her, a woman in her nightgown whose husband was dead, who had been robbed by a girl she’d been stupid enough to trust.
“It will make you forget your troubles for a while,” her sister, Amy, had promised. “Reading takes your mind off things.” If Olivia still wrote everyone’s advice on her thigh, Amy’s would take up a lot of room. “Book clubs feed your mind and soul,” Amy’d said. The she reminded Olivia of how in second grade she had read every Nancy Drew book, in order, right up to The Mystery of the Ninety-Nine Steps. It was true that until David died, Olivia read a book a week. Good books, the kind the New York Times reviewed. And that since then, she’d read nothing except true-crime paperbacks, savoring the grisly details of mutilated bodies hidden in cellars and the tricks killers used to lure their victims into their cars.
When Olivia climbed the wooden stairs to Amy’s condo that night, she was sure that nothing was worse than a book club that consisted of Amy, who used to boast that the last book she’d read was To Kill a Mockingbird back in ninth grade, and three other divorced women. Nothing except getting robbed by a fucking juvenile delinquent, which was the term Olivia had settled on by the time she’d returned home that afternoon.