CHAPTER 31
With five hours to go before Uretsky’s deadline, I found myself at a bar, my guts twisted and my pretended calm threatening to come undone. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t drink—I needed to keep a clear head—but after overhearing Ruby’s conversation with a man neither of us knew, I’d either order a whiskey or throttle the bastard.
It hurt me desperately, the worst kind of ache, the remorseful kind, every time I looked at Ruby. I could think only of what she was going through and of all the pain I had caused her, distress piled on top of distress. Sure, I had stolen Uretsky’s identity with the very best of intentions, but that excuse rang particularly hollow when it was Ruby who had to complete this repulsive task, not me.
Even so, I could not crumble under the oppressive weight of regret. Climbing had taught me to do the exact opposite, and those instincts are difficult to suppress. Up on the mountain, when a rope system fails or a seemingly steady rock is found to be dangerously unstable, I didn’t anguish over my predicament. Instead I acted, immediately and decisively, to ameliorate the threat. My life depended on it. The time for self-reflection came after the climbing was done. So until Ruby was safe and Winnie free, until Uretsky was no longer our black cloud, I was going to keep climbing and fighting to stay alive, and Ruby, who had never climbed a day in her life, would have to do the same.
We didn’t sleep a wink after hearing Uretsky’s demands. We were too busy putting together a contingency plan.
“What if I can’t go through with it?” Ruby asked, a thin band of tears lining the bottoms of her eyes.
I told her it was all right. I’d already come up with a way she wouldn’t have to.
We contemplated abandoning Plan A (Ruby sleeps with stranger) for my Plan B, but Ruby decided—for her mother’s sake—that she would have to bow to Uretsky’s will. The decision had to be hers and hers alone. Hadn’t my intervention already dropped enough misery on our family?
But every dangerous climb required a contingency plan, so I spent the hours before our deadline arrived putting the pieces in place for Plan B.
Just in case.
Oh, how I hoped we would use it.
We spent some time searching for an outfit Ruby could wear, only to discover the cancer had sucked so much life from her body that nothing she owned fit anymore. She sat on the floor of the closet, clothes tossed all about in a pile, crying, sobbing, really.
“You take care of this,” she said, but only when the tears allowed her to speak. “It’s so repulsive I can’t even think about it. Get me something I can wear. Just get this f*cking over with!”
I went to the Gap down the street and bought her a steel-gray satin sheath dress for about eighty bucks. In fact, I bought two, and for good reason. We would need two dresses for Plan B to work. Ruby put the dress on, looked at herself in the mirror, and said, “I’m going to burn it after this is done.”
“We’ll make a pile,” I said, in reference to the clothes from the robbery that we had yet to dispose of.
She gave me a forlorn look. We left the house and went to the bar.
Though her body was full of sickness, and her heart filled with dread, Ruby still managed to turn every head in the Red Bell Lounge, Uretsky’s chosen watering hole for this crime. I walked close by, keeping a protective and vigilant watch over my wife, even though we had agreed to act like strangers. Ruby shot me a look that forced me to back away.
“Don’t blow this,” her eyes were saying.
Every surface of the lounge, including the front of the bar, was draped in rich red velvet, the color of blood. The lounge was crowded with an eclectic clientele, which made it easy to discreetly work the room.
Ruby saw a lonely-looking guy sitting at the bar. She broke away from me and approached him with a surprising confidence. She got maybe five feet from him, stopped, and turned to look at me. Her mascara painted several black lines down her cheeks because her tears wouldn’t stop flowing.
While Ruby raced off to the bathroom to reapply her makeup, I searched the bar for anyone who might be paying extra close attention to us. Perhaps that person would be Uretsky, watching. Maybe that was why he insisted we find our “john” at the Red Bell, or maybe it was for our convenience, because this place was so close to the hotel. Then again, I had already figured out how Uretsky would verify that Ruby had gone through with it. I had figured out his plan and crafted a plan of my own.
Plan B.
Ruby came back from the bathroom, looking poised and ready to try again. Twice more she attempted to solicit a man for sex, but with each attempt she broke down. Ruby’s body simply wouldn’t allow her to betray her heart. Consensual or not, what Uretsky demanded of her made it rape by proxy. It was a knife wound to both our souls.
Instead of attracting prospects, Ruby’s tears became the ultimate repellant, an uncontrollable act of self-preservation. After the second prospect dashed out of the bar, she said, “We’ve got to go through with your plan.”
I said a silent prayer of thanks.