Which is why she gets so nervous when, after he’s been there only a few weeks, one afternoon he hands her an envelope addressed to Bessie. At first she doesn’t think anything of it, just says, “Sure, I’ll mail this,” and slides it into her purse. It’s a good reminder to pay her rent, and she fishes her checkbook out of her dresser drawer, makes out a check at the kitchen table, and stamps it. Today the old lady she’ll be looking after lives on the other side of town.
She’s in her car, driving on the highway, when the letter starts to bother her from inside her purse. Something about the way he looked, his eyes darting away as he handed it to her. She’s tried to ask him before what he’s doing here, and he’s been vague—he just needed a change, something new. Now she realizes he’s never really answered. And then the simple fact that he’s never given her a letter for Bessie before. It’s not so unusual that he wouldn’t mail an envelope himself. He’s holding down a job, but things like the laundry, bills, basic planning he still seems to need someone to take care of. She minds less than she’d have imagined she would. It’s nice to be needed.
But the letter. Something’s wrong; she just knows it is.
She pulls over into a gas station, telling herself it’s nothing, telling herself she’s being silly. The letter in her hands, the engine still idling in park, she pauses. She doesn’t read other people’s mail. Never. She’s not a nosy person. And she needs to get to work.
She slits the letter open with her forefinger. She can tape it up before she mails it to Bessie, and Bessie will never know Ricky wasn’t the one to tape it. Inside is a single sheet of loose-leaf with Ricky’s cramped handwriting that she recognizes from the grocery notes he leaves her. I’m sorry, I know this will hurt you and Dad but I just couldn’t do it anymore.
The drive back to her apartment is half an hour but she does it in twenty, never mind the speed limit. At every red light she prays under her breath and her head fills with awful pictures of what she’ll come home to.
But when she opens the door, her heart thudding with what she might find, he’s still alive. He’s still alive. Standing at the kitchen counter, clutching the telephone with one hand, the other holding her butcher knife to his wrist.
*
“I didn’t want to tell you,” he says later. This is after she’s made him hang up the phone and after she’s taken the knife, all the knives, into her bedroom and after she’s made him get in the car and come to work with her at the old lady’s house; she didn’t trust him to be alone. I see him as he sits in the lady’s easy chair, flipping through her Sewing Circle magazines, her Bible. I see Ruth as she watches him peer at the Bible, his finger pressed to the page and his mouth hanging open as he sounds the words. Every time Ruth goes from the lady’s bedroom into the kitchen to refill a glass of water, or get her dinner, or carry the sheets into the laundry room after the lady has soiled herself, Ruth must find herself checking up on him. Just checking that he’s still there, really. That he’s all right. Now they’re back at the kitchen table, two cups of coffee he’s made growing cold in front of them, Ricky staring down at the table hangdog-style instead of looking at her. “I like little boys,” he says. “I try hard not to, but—sexually.”
She swallows. Her feeling in this moment must be peculiar. Like a vacuum opens up in the air around her, like someone’s hit a pause button deep inside. What he’s saying isn’t possible.
“I didn’t want you to know,” he continues.
It’s not that she recovers herself, and not only that she doesn’t know what to say. She can do nothing with his words but take them in. She must make the decision even before she realizes she’s making one: she isn’t going to ask him if he’s done anything. She isn’t. She doesn’t want to know.
Instead, she gets up and crosses around the table. She leans over him and gathers his bony shoulders in her arms, hugging him awkwardly. “Shh, it’s all right, Ricky.” It’s the first time they’ve touched.
The next morning, she wakes before the alarm, her mind racing. He needs help. He should talk to someone. She knows without asking that he doesn’t have health insurance. And she doesn’t have money to spare. But there are charity hospitals, and if she calls enough times, she’ll get him an appointment. She’ll get him help.
TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 1994
Prosecutor: Now, you took him down to the hospital. And were you with him when he was speaking to the therapist?
Witness: No.
Prosecutor: So you wouldn’t have known that he told the therapist that he called the police himself that morning [he held the knife], to let them know where he was. Or that he told the therapist he’d planned to pull a knife on them.
Defense attorney: Your Honor, we need to approach the bench.
[Conference]
Defense attorney: She doesn’t know about this. So I don’t know how she could respond to it.
Prosecutor: You see, that’s one of the problems with letting all this hearsay testimony in. Obviously he’s given a different story to somebody else. And if I’m not allowed to bring that out, then the jury gets the wrong impression about what was going on there that day. I mean, she’s given her opinion that she believed he was going to commit suicide in her kitchen.
For the next month or so—later she won’t be able to say exactly how long—she drives him to the charity hospital once a week for therapy. They don’t talk about why he’s going. She just takes him.