I SLEEP LIKE the 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.
God, how that frustrated me. So close! A year earlier, and I could’ve met her. It sounds silly, probably, but I was so sure that if I simply saw her, I would know immediately whether she was in fact my mother. Finding out that she was dead made me almost abandon the whole enterprise altogether.
But then, the very discreet—and even more expensive—detective I’d hired called to inform me that while Helen Darnell had died, her daughter, Claire, was still alive and living in Tallahassee.
Claire.
I remembered seeing the name all those years ago in Daddy’s office, thinking how pretty it was. It was even prettier to me now because Claire might be my salvation.
A side note—one rarely finds salvation in Florida.
Claire was forty-two in 1985, just three years younger than me, but she looked much older when she opened the door of her little apartment in an ugly square building surrounded by other ugly square buildings. I’d tried to dress down for the visit, knowing better than to swan in wearing Chanel, but my Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and Halston blouse were still entirely too much as I saw very clearly on Claire’s face.
She was wearing a T-shirt over cutoffs, her face bare, her hair—the same deep brown as mine, I noted—scraped back into a messy ponytail. Her expression grew wary as she stared at me from her doorway.
“Is this about Linda?” she asked.
I had no idea who Linda was, so I shook my head, sweat already sliding down my lower back, my sunglasses—which, I realized too late, were Chanel, goddamn it—fogging up in the humidity. “No, I … my name is Ruby McTavish.”
Her expression cleared then, lips curving into something that would’ve been a smile if there hadn’t been such a mean edge to it. “No,” she said. “You’re Dora Darnell. I wondered if you’d ever turn up one day.”
With that, she turned to go back into the apartment. I stood there, stunned, and she waved a hand for me to follow her. “Come on in. Sit down.”
The apartment was cool, a window unit rattling in the living room. A little girl sat on the green carpet in front of it, two Barbies in her hands. She looked to be about eight or so, her dark blond hair neatly braided, her pink overalls and clear jelly shoes meticulously clean. The whole apartment was clean, I noticed. Small and shabby, but neat as a pin.
Claire poured me a glass of sweet tea, and we sat down at the kitchen table, studying each other.
“Linda, baby? Go play in your room,” Claire called, and the girl pouted.
“It’s too hot in there.”
“Then go in my room. You can watch TV.”
Magic words, apparently, because Linda happily trotted off toward the small hallway, opening the first of three doors.
After a moment, we heard the muted blare of music, and Claire shook her head. “She’s not supposed to watch MTV, but it’s a special occasion, I guess.”
She turned her head to me. “You have kids?”
“No,” I said, my mouth dry, the tea so sweet it made my teeth ache.
Claire tapped her fingernails on the side of her glass, right over the grinning face of some cartoon character. “I didn’t think I would. Have kids. I was thirty-four when she was born. One of those things, not quite on purpose, not quite an accident.”
She flashed me a smile, and I sucked in a breath, thinking about Andrew’s portrait of me hanging at Ashby House. The smile on Claire’s face was the same as mine. “Her dad ain’t worth shit, but he was good-looking at least. So she’s got that going for her.”
“She’s a very pretty child,” I said, the words prim in my own ears, and Claire smirked, leaning back in her chair.
“When did you figure it out?” she asked, and I didn’t bother pretending to misunderstand.
“I haven’t yet. I’ve always been curious, though. I’d read the stories, and I suppose I––”
“You suppose you started to wonder if my mama wasn’t a liar?” Claire finished, and I wondered how I was already so helplessly on the back foot.
“Something like that.”
She tilted her head, looking at me for a long time before saying, “If it makes you feel better, you were pretty expensive.”
The room had felt too cold earlier, but my skin flushed hot at that, and I took another sip of my tea, my throat so tight that I nearly choked.
“I don’t know how much, exactly. The number changed a lot over the years, but the story stayed the same. Little girl missing, rich family in North Carolina. They saw her picture in the paper, Mama and Daddy, and Mama said it tore her heart up because she looked so much like you. And later she said she wished she’d never said that because if she hadn’t, Daddy might not have ever thought about it.”
She rattled the ice in her glass. “But he did. She never knew how he got in touch with your family, but your daddy sent someone down in a fancy suit to look at you, and then he came himself.”
I pictured Daddy—my daddy, with his big mustache and his Acqua di Parma and his white suits that never got dirty—sitting across a table from Jimmy Darnell, and suddenly I could see that table.
No, I couldn’t just see it. I remembered that table. One leg just a little shorter so that it always wobbled when someone leaned against it.
“His wife was beside herself, he told Daddy. Or that’s what Mama said he told Daddy anyway. Mrs. McTavish blamed herself, I think. She was the one who told Ruby to go find the nanny, to leave her alone for a little while. Said she saw her walk up the hill and out of sight, but thought the nanny was just on the other side. Only the nanny had already started packing things up and carrying them back to the car, and she didn’t know Ruby was headed her way.”
I could picture that, too. The little girl, toddling along the forest path, her eyes searching for a familiar figure, but not seeing any. Her little brain whirring, her legs carrying her deeper into the forest, thinking her nanny—Grace—must be there.
I waited for that image to have the same whiff of memory, but it didn’t. It was just my imagination. And my imagination kept going, carrying the child deeper into the forest, until there were too many trees, until she was confused and scared, sweating and whimpering, looking around for Grace, not seeing the drop ahead …
“He was afraid it was going to eat her up,” Claire continued, and my mind, still fixed on Baby Ruby, conjured up a bear now instead of a steep cliff; a mountain lion, maybe. But then I realized she meant Mama, and her guilt.
No, not my mama. Not if what Claire was saying is true.
Anna. Anna McTavish.
“Mama never would’ve let you go,” Claire said, and the air-conditioning clicked off, the room suddenly quiet. “Even after it was all agreed on and the money was stuffed under the mattress, she kept telling everyone you were hers. Nobody listened, though. Not with Daddy confessing.”