Drowning Ruth

“Go away!” I shouted, my voice booming across the glassy lake. “Leave me alone!”

  But you never cared what I said, did you? Not when you wanted your way. You scuffled on, your boots scratching along the snowy ice. I started back, all set to drag you home. Why should I share my island with you? But you reached me before I'd gone ten steps, and you grabbed my leg with your mittened hands to steady yourself.

  “Please take me with you, Mandy.”

  I couldn't refuse you.

  The island was better, so much better, with two. Remember the little leanto we built out there? Remember our garden, our “crops”? You wanted radishes and I thought we should have nasturtiums. We planted them both, remember?

  And remember when you were a queen? You made a crown out of honeysuckle. You painted your face with bloodroot. “Go to Suscatoon,” you said to the dragonflies, “and bring me back some salt… What's a queen name?” you asked me, your hair all draggled, your face dirty. “What should my name be, if I'm the queen?” “Imogene,” I said. I only thought of it because it rhymed, but you decided it was the prettiest name you'd ever heard. From then on, whenever we were on the island, you wanted me to call you Imogene, remember that? Queen Imogene. Do you remember?

  We would wade out into the water and splash, and when it got too deep for you, you would cling to me, your little arms around my neck, your skinny legs hooked around my middle, weightless in the buoying water. I loved that, your holding tight that way, your needing me to hold you up. You felt safe with me. You knew I would take care of you.

  But then, somehow, you began to drift away. Just a few inches at first—you would let go with your legs but keep your arms tight, or loosen your arms but keep your legs locked around me. I told you “no.” I told you to hold on tight. But you wouldn't. You began to let go altogether, a moment here, a moment there, ducking underwater and then grabbing hold of me again, dashing the water from your eyes with one hand and coughing. But I scolded you. I held tight to your smooth, slippery skin. “It's not safe,” I told you. “You stay with me.” I wouldn't let you swim away. I wouldn't let you go.

  You should've listened to me, Mattie, when I told you to go back. You should've let me alone. You and Ruth with your wailing and your crying—letting the whole world know my business—why couldn't you let me go?

  Why did you let me go, Mattie? I told you to hold on. I would never have let you go, but you made me. It was you. You made me do it. I'll never forgive you. Never!

  Wait, Mattie—I'm not angry. Don't be scared—I won't scold you. I'm laughing, see? It's all right. I didn't mean it. You can come back now, Mattie. You hear me? Come back.

  Chapter Seven

  Amanda

  All of that with Clement Owens was water under the bridge, a month gone at least, by March 1919, when I went home to start over, to start fresh with Mattie and her baby Ruth.

  The trouble was I didn't feel much better at home than I'd felt working at the hospital, and after what had happened the last time I'd come home ill, I was cautious.

  “Better not get too close,” I warned Mattie the next morning, when I staggered in from the milking after losing my breakfast behind the barn.

  Still, there was no fever and now that I was away from the hospital I was sure I'd be able to shake it.

  “It's nothing,” I snapped, when on the third or fourth day Mat-tie suggested I call Dr. Karbler. “I'm a nurse, aren't I? Don't you think I know?”

  I'd bowed out of kitchen duty and stuck to outdoor chores, despite my promises that first night, because the thought of food made me queasy and the fresh air seemed to help. On Friday, Mat-tie announced that she'd made me a treat.

  “This'll bring your appetite back,” she said, dramatically sweeping the platter of perch from the oven where she'd been keeping it warm.

  Perch had always been one of my favorite dishes, but that evening I broke into a sweat and could barely make it outside in time.

  “Too bad,” Mattie said later, feeding me crackers and cheese. “But Pickles was pleased. She ate a whole fish.” Then she giggled.

  “What?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking of the last time perch made me sick, back when I was carrying Ruth. Poor Carl. He swore he'd never go fishing again.” She smiled.

  But I couldn't smile, for Mathilda's words had caught me. After she'd left my room, I struggled to fling them off. I got up and paced. I threw open the window and thrust my head into the cold air, but the harder I tried to escape the more firmly the idea set in my brain. It was true, all right.

  I'd tried to pretend otherwise. I'd told myself it was only worry or grief or loneliness that was making me dizzy and tired and sick. But I hardly needed to be a nurse to realize that something more solid than unhappiness was growing inside of me.

  I'd tried to return to the way things were, but it was no use. Coming home couldn't change me back into the girl I'd once been.

  All I could think to do was run away again. I packed my bag and sat on the edge of my bed, one hand pressed against my abdomen, and thought about where I could go to get away from this thing.

  There were places, I knew, where the sisters took you in until it was over, even if you weren't Catholic. I'd heard about another nurse going to one of those places and now I shuddered at the shame and scorn I'd felt for her. Frieda, her name was. Maybe that's what I'd call myself.

  I'd go there. The sisters would teach me how to pray. Maybe I'd stay on afterward, become a nun. But they probably didn't let you do that. Thinking that I could never become a nun, I started to cry. It was a silly thing to cry about—I didn't even want to be a nun. Still, I burrowed my head into the pillow and sobbed. Then I lay for a long time with my face on the wet pillowcase. At least Mama and Papa wouldn't know, I thought. At least they were safe from my shame.

  I drew my feet up on the bed without taking off my shoes. Downstairs, Mathilda was playing the piano and singing “Hello, my baby. Hello, my honey. Hello, my ragtime girl.” Now and then a discordant note rang out and I knew Ruth was on her lap, her little palms patting the keys, because once I had sat on my mother's lap in just that way. I was so tired suddenly, so tired I decided that I could spend one more night at home. No one knew the truth. No one was likely to know it for months. I could afford a little sleep.

  Mama always went into the back room when she felt one of her spells coming on. She drew the curtains and lay on the daybed, turning her face to the wall and squeezing a pillow over her ears to keep the cicadas' hum and the birds' songs out. My father would close her door.

  “You see how it hurts her when you don't act right,” he would say to me. “Now be good and quiet.” And then he would leave the house.

  I tried to be good and quiet. I went up to my room and played with my doll or looked at my picture book, but after a while I always got scared, thinking of my mother in that dark room, all by herself, thinking she might be crying, thinking she might be dead, thinking she might have gone away. So I crept downstairs and carefully, silently turned the knob and pushed open the door a crack, just to see, just to make sure.

  And, of course, she was always there, her back to the room, her head buried. Except the one time she wasn't.

  The daybed was empty. The blanket that usually covered her shoulders was crumpled on the floor. The room was small, but I ran across it and dropped to the floor to look under the furniture. No, she was gone.

  I searched then, the bedrooms, the kitchen cupboards, the wardrobe, the pantry. I asked the hired girl who was wringing out clothes on the back porch. “Where's my mama, Gert?”

  “She's gotta be somewheres. Maybe she went to town.”

  Gert didn't know Mama the way I did. Mama wouldn't go to town sick. She wouldn't go without telling me.

  I tried to open the trapdoor that led to the attic. I thought of how goblins and witches might have snatched her away. I thought of how she would be calling to me, frightened, her arms stretching for me from a place I couldn't see. I thought finally of a likely
place—the outhouse—but she wasn't there either. I walked through the barn, calling her, checking all the stalls.

  Finally, running back to the house, I noticed that the cellar door was open. I stepped slowly down into the damp darkness, keeping my shoulder tight against the wall so I wouldn't pitch off the open side of the stairs. At the bottom, I found her, sitting on the dirt floor, her forehead pressed against the sweating stone.

  She turned to me then, her face strangely white in the dimness. But she wasn't my mother. She mocked me. “Mama! Mama!” she said, making fun of the way I'd been calling her. Then she rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Please. Keep that intolerable child quiet,” she said.

  I didn't know what child she meant. It wasn't until years later that I realized she meant me.

  When I woke the next morning, I knew where I wanted to run to, a place where no one need ever know, no one except Mattie.

  I was still dressed from the night before, still wearing my shoes, in fact, and I clomped downstairs and built a fire in the stove. I began to make French toast, turning my face away when it came time to crack the sickening egg. Mattie loved French toast.

  “Better?” she yawned, sinking into her chair at the table. Mattie was always slow to wake.

  “Much.” I flipped the toast. I did feel better and for a moment I allowed myself to hope that I might have been wrong in my thinking the night before. But then I saw the remains of the perch in the cat's bowl and gagged.

  “Listen, Mattie,” I said, sitting beside her and pushing the sugar bowl away, so that I could lean close. “I was thinking we might want to move to the island for the summer, you and me and Ruthie. The fields are rented anyway. Rudy can take care of the animals. Why should we stay?” When she didn't answer, I pressed on. “It'll be fun. Like taking a trip. Just you and me and Ruthie.”

  “Oh, no, Amanda. It's too cold.” She cut the corner off of her toast.

  “No, it's not. Or at least it'll only be cold for a few more weeks. It's already April. And think how easy it'll be to move things over on the ice.”

  “On the ice! Amanda, what are you thinking? The ice must be rotten now. We'll go through.”

  “No, we won't. The spring's been so cold. I'm sure it's good. I'd check it first, of course. I'd make sure.” And if I went through, well, so much the better, I thought bitterly.

  “Mandy, you have no idea how bleak and cold that island is this time of year. It's all right for an hour in the afternoon, when you want a place to skate to, but not to live on day after day, night after night. You forget, I've done it. I know what it's like. I thought I'd go crazy some of those days.”

  “That's right, you have done it, haven't you? You've had a chance. Where's my chance, I'd like to know? Who was it that found that island, after all? You and Carl would never have had such a cozy little spot if it hadn't been for me.”

  I worked every angle, while Mattie chewed nervously on the ends of her hair. It was difficult to change her mind, but I knew I could do it if I tried hard enough. I was the elder, after all. I knew better.

  Rudy didn't like it either.

  “You two girls out there alone,” he clucked, shaking his head. “No good.”

  “But there'll be three of us,” I teased. I knew how to handle Rudy. “We'll have Ruthie.” I chose not to remind him that I, for one, could hardly be called a girl anymore.

  This time, though, he frowned. “You know what I mean, Manda. You could freeze—it's not all that warm yet. You could burn the house down.”

  “We could do those things here too, Rudy,” Mathilda said. Although I'd barely convinced her to go along with my plan, this new attitude didn't surprise me. Mathilda was always more inclined to do something when you argued for the opposite.

  I reminded him that one of us would check in every few days, and if he was worried, all he needed to do was come out for a visit. I was pretty sure he'd never do this. Rudy was the wait-and-see type. Flames would have to be shooting from the island before he'd decide he'd better have a look. Oh, I knew everyone so well. Everyone except myself and now this other one I carried in me.

  “We'll wave every day at noon,” Mathilda said.

  It took us only two days to organize ourselves, to pack and arrange with the grocer and the butcher to deliver food to the locker on our tiny beach as soon as the ice was out. We'd go to the farm, at least Mattie would, for butter and eggs and milk. And soon we'd plant our own vegetables.

  Rudy kept bringing more things in from the barn and adding them to the pile—lanterns and wrenches and oil. “This'll come in handy. You'll see.”

  And Mathilda kept piling on the books. “Just three more,” she pleaded when I claimed the sled was getting too heavy.

  We were forgetting essential items, but we were only going a mile—it would always be easy to come back. At least it would be easy for Mathilda.

  And so it was easy for her to go. It was a game to her, hardly different from when we were young and went to the island for relief from our real lives at home. But for me it was serious. I would be different when I came back. If I ever did come back.

  We set off in the morning, so as to take as much advantage of the light as we could. The sky was gray, the snow old and frozen hard. It was the kind of day that makes you fear that God, distracted by finer things, has forgotten you. But Ruth had no such worry. She went before the sled, carrying an icicle like a torch, pushing her feet purposefully into the crunching snow, and announcing herself to the world in high-pitched, dissonant notes.

  “Wait a minute,” I said when we got to the edge of the lake. “I have to test the ice.” I put my hand on Mathilda's sleeve to hold her back.

  It had been a cold March, but still it was late in the season, and there had been days of thaw—Mattie had been right to worry about the state of the ice. I scanned the center of the lake for the telltale dark streaks of open water. All was flat and white. I climbed over the heave at the shoreline and shuffled forward slowly, barely lifting my feet. The surface was ugly, grainy, made of snow that had melted to slush and then refrozen in the recent snap.

  I raised one foot high and stamped. The lake didn't protest. No groans or squeaks, no terrifying crack. I made my way forward over deeper water, walking heavily now, bouncing to bring the full force of my weight down on the ice. I imagined falling through, me and the other one, sinking through that cold water to the bottom.

  “Wait, Aunt Mandy! Wait for us!” Ruth's voice piped from the shore.

  I turned and waved to them. Mathilda stood small and still, wrapped in a hooded maroon cloak that had belonged to our mother. It made me shiver to think how loyal she was, ready to do what I asked, trusting it would be all right as long as I said so. Ruth, brilliant in her bright red coat, was pulling hard on her mother's mittened hand, letting her head and shoulders hang precariously over the ground. She knew her mother would never let her go.

  I didn't think, then, that my baby could be like that someday. I didn't think, really, about my baby at all. I concentrated solely on getting us to the island. It seemed the only thing that I could do.

  We set Ruth on the sled, and Mathilda balanced her and the load while I pulled. The closer we got to the island, the smoother the ice became, until finally the sled began to overtake me. I stopped pulling and grabbed onto the side opposite Mattie, and we let it drag us both forward almost more quickly than we could find our footing. I nearly fell, and then Mattie almost went down and then I again, while we whizzed along, slipping and laughing, all three just children out for an afternoon's slide.

  The island was ringed with a jagged collar the ice had pushed up in its aggressive expansion, as if it were trying to climb onto the land. We had to circle twice before finding a spot low and gently pitched enough for Mattie to scramble over and help Ruth and me after her. We left our sled of supplies on the ice and went to see how the house had fared closed up for so long.

  The house, painted a soft gray with green trim, looked in the summer as if it had g
rown there, but in winter it stood out among the bare black trees. We opened the door to musty wood and chilly motionless air. Maybe Rudy was right, I thought. Maybe we couldn't live here, two women all alone.

  “We'll have to get this going first thing,” Mattie said, opening the door of the wood stove.

  Mattie and Carl had lived just fine on the island in the cold, I reminded myself. Mattie knew what she was doing. We would get through this last little bit of wintry weather, and then it would be spring.

  “I'll get some wood,” I said.

  Crossing my arms over my tender breasts, I stood for a moment on the porch steps, surveying the vast, flat whiteness that was the lake and the crosshatched black that marked the shoreline. Through the trees, I could see the roof of the Tullys' barn. In an hour or two people would be lighting their lamps and their windows would shine among the trees like eyes, staring at us, exposed here on the ice. Maybe there was no hiding here. Maybe this place was a mistake.

  But by summer, I assured myself, piling wood into the curve of my arm, it would be different. By summer the island would be shrouded in leaves, and I could keep my business to myself with no one the wiser.

  Ruth

  Aunt Mandy had a mouth at the bottom of her thumb.

  “What's this?” I asked her. My finger petted the white circle on her tan skin.

  We were sitting in the big green chair, me squeezed between the arm and her, because that is how we liked to sit.

  “This is from your mama,” Aunt Mandy said. “She gave this to me, so I would remember to listen to her.”

  “What does she say?” ‘Never leave Ruthie.' That's what she says. ‘Never leave Ruth.'

  Aunt Mandy didn't mind my mama. She did leave me. But then she came back.

  One morning in May, when Amanda had been home from St. Michael's for about a month, and the sun was dewing the grass outside in a way that promised summer, Carl and Ruth sat at the kitchen table waiting for their breakfasts.