The Bluestockings: Chapter Sixteen
"Ruby could choose to be brave, even if that was something she hadn’t been in a long time."
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Ruby
Ruby hated hospitals, but at least she had an excuse to sleep the day away and think of nothing. The problem was she’d never been very good at either, and the intensive care unit wasn’t that restful anyway. Ruby had been poked and prodded like a test subject, sent to have a CT scan, and undergone a godforsaken psych evaluation to boot. Ruby would bet her left leg that one hadn’t gone very well, no matter how clear the brain scans. Her sharp tongue would be the death of her if nothing else.
In bed, with Marianne back home for a change of clothes and Maggie down in the cafeteria, long-dormant moments of Ruby’s life played out in front of her, conjuring painful memories of joy and sorrow from a time when she had at least lived, however sadly, instead of hiding away. Walks with Elliott beneath the emerald canopy. Writing stories in her father’s office. The gentle rhythm of her mother’s voice. Ruby imagined how different her future might have been. If only.
Then there was Eleanor Black, all earnest hope and eager excitement despite the loss of her mother and the impending loss of her family’s store. What had Ruby been thinking trying to talk to the girl? She was almost grateful now for the heart attack. She couldn’t put her burdens on that child, no matter how much relief she would find in the confession. It simply wouldn’t be right.
And Alma Gardyne. That was a name Ruby hadn’t heard in decades.
She’d almost forgotten about her father’s first real love. Alma was a blip on the radar of Ruby’s memories, but she recalled how, days before Alice disappeared, William had found her thumbing through
Alma’s journal in the library and snatched it away, furious. He was so rarely angry that it had stunned both Ruby and her mother. William only spoke of Alma to Ruby once, when she was reeling from her own broken romance, to remind her that love didn’t have to be a one-time thing. She hadn’t believed him then. It was too late for it to matter now.
There came a gentle rap on Ruby’s door. Maggie tiptoed in with a slice of chocolate cake. “Hey,” she said in a tender voice that surprised her aunt. “Can I come in?”
“You may,” Ruby replied, embarrassed by the state of her clothes and by all that had occurred since Maggie’s arrival. Her niece found a seat by the window and blinked curiously at Ruby. For the first time, there was no fire in her gaze. Only concern. It did strange things to Ruby’s heart.
“I brought you something,” Maggie said, holding up a fork and wiggling her eyebrows.
“You’re a regular maverick, child,” Ruby answered, her stomach rumbling. She patted her tangled hair. She must look dreadful. With a glance at the door, Maggie opened the plastic container and handed it to Ruby. The cake was a little dry and overly sweet, but the kindness of Maggie’s gesture made it taste as delicious as any of Marianne’s home- made desserts.
“What happened, Aunt Ruby?” Maggie asked. Ruby froze, a mouth full of cake and a throat that would hardly swallow. “Why did you do it?”
Ruby had asked herself that question a hundred times since she woke up. A shiver crept up her spine as she recalled the frigid waves rushing over her head, pushing her down, down, down. There was no logical explanation for why Ruby had walked into that water. It wasn’t her head she’d wanted to quiet. It was her heart.
“I’m so tired, Margaret,” Ruby began.
“You’ve been sleeping for two days,” Maggie interrupted.
“That’s not what I mean.”
Maggie slumped against the chair, chastised. “Oh.”
“I’m tired,” Ruby said again. “I’ve lived a lot longer than you and spent most of my life trying to hide who I am and be forgotten. I know what people think of me, what they’ve always thought about me, and I just wanted it to be over. All of it. There’s nothing left for me here, Margaret. You said so yourself.”
“That is not what I said!” Maggie protested, her cheeks flaming.
“Not in those exact words, but you implied it just the same. I’m not angry about it, either. You were right.”
“Aunt Ruby, you have a lot of people who love you and want you to be happy. Marianne, Ben, me, Eleanor...”
Ruby balked. “Eleanor? The child hardly knows me.”
“You could say the same about me,” Maggie said, crossing her arms. “But here I am.” Her niece glanced around the room, taking in the vases sent over by a dozen well-wishers, and offered her aunt a pointed look. “As much as you might not want to hear this or even believe it, I think you could say the same thing about the people of Hawthorn.”
Ruby peered over at the colorful bouquets and felt a twinge of something rise in her throat. Eleanor had made the same claim. “People just want to look nice, but it’s too hard for me to forget everything that’s happened.”
“I don’t mean to be a jerk or anything, Aunt Ruby,” Maggie said, a note of hesitation in her lowered voice, “but your mom died a long, long time ago.”
Ruby sighed and rubbed her temples. She wanted to do this, but she was so scared. Each time she’d told the truth in the past, it had earned her nothing but confusion, scorn, and loneliness. That’s what Ruby couldn’t forget. Alice’s disappearance was still painful, but it was the emptiness she’d left behind that Ruby had struggled with most.
“You’re not wrong, Margaret,” she answered after a long beat. “And you’re not right, either.”
Maggie’s brows came together as she tilted her head to look at Ruby. She was so young, so determined to believe that every problem could be solved with a bit of courage and logic. Ruby didn’t want to dispel that notion for her niece. Margaret had her own heartbreak to live with back at home.
Still, as she took in the girl’s curious gaze, Ruby wondered if perhaps Maggie would be the first person who would finally be able to hear the truth.
Ruby sat back against the headboard and took a long gulp of water from the tumbler on her bedside table. She could do this. No one was going to try and put her away this time. She was too old for that, anyhow. “I have something I’d like to tell you. The truth has never served me well before, but if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for a few minutes, then—“ Ruby swallowed. She was actually going to tell this story. Share the truth with her thirteen-year-old niece, of all people. She had finally lost her mind. “Then I will.”
Maggie sat up, prim and proper, and nodded vigorously. “I can do that.”
“Very well,” Ruby replied, feigning a calm she didn’t feel. “It’s about the day my mother left me on that beach.”
Maggie shifted forward in her seat, eyes glued to Ruby’s face. “The day your mom...?”
Ruby gave a single nod. “I’m sure your mother and cousins have filled you in with whatever details they’ve gathered over the years, but even their tales are riddled with guesswork. It’s time I set the record straight.”
“Alice drowned, and you sort of never got over it,” Maggie replied without judgment. “But you didn’t see it happen, right? That’s what Mom told me.”
Ruby grunted. “That’s one way of putting it. I was found screaming, utterly hysterical, by a couple walking near the lighthouse. The police even had to restrain me after I bit one of them.”
Maggie started to giggle but coughed when she took in Ruby’s raised eyebrows. “Seems like a pretty normal response for a child who had just watched her mother drown."
It would seem so, but that hadn’t been the case for Ruby. “Be that as it may,” she continued softly, “I gave a statement to the police once I was able, and it made its way through this little town like wildfire. My words were nonsensical. Parents feared that I might be a danger to their children, and a child who frightens people quickly becomes an isolated child.”
“‘Frightens people'?” Maggie scoffed, one eyebrow cocked in disbelief. “You were, like, five.”
Ruby clenched her jaw. “Age doesn’t matter to one’s peers.”
“Were you bullied at school?”
“Worse,” Ruby sighed. “I was rejected completely. No one would speak to me unless it was with taunts or jeers, and eventually, I just became invisible. Later, I grew into quite the beauty, and people sort of forgot to think of me as crazy once they approved of how I looked. Everyone loves a beauty queen, especially after the war when women were expected to be more ornamental than they had been before. But that only lasted so long, as you might expect.” She gestured to her frail body and smirked.
“What about my grandfather and your sister? Did they have friends?”
Ruby smiled at the thought of her siblings. “Oh, they didn’t share my fate. As the children of a wealthy man and his actual wife, they were welcomed in all the ways I hadn’t been. My mother was respected in Hawthorn during the few short years she lived here, but I was the bastard child. After she was gone, I lacked her protection. Ironic, considering she was the reason I needed protection in the first place.”
Maggie scooted off the chair and sat on the bed at Ruby’s feet. “What about your dad? He was the richest guy in town! He should have told people to leave you alone.”
“Oh, he did,” Ruby said. “More than I even knew until the end of his life. But he was a busy man and a single father for some time. He didn’t see much of my suffering.”
“Or he didn’t want to see it,” Maggie added in a grim voice.
“Perhaps,” Ruby admitted. “In his defense, I shut him out for a long time. It made me angry that no one seemed to believe my version of what happened. Father was safe for me in all the physical ways that mattered, but I viewed him as unsafe for me emotionally, even years after the fact. I regret that now.”
Maggie chewed on her bottom lip, the question in her eyes evident. “What did happen on the beach that day, Aunt Ruby?”
Ruby humphed with an affectionate pat on her niece’s hand. Maggie’s black-painted nails were bitten down to the quick. She tried to hide them away in the sleeves of her sweatshirt, but Ruby held them fast. “I know our time together was rocky at first,” Ruby answered, pivoting. “But I have to say: I’m glad you’re here, child.”
Maggie laughed in disbelief. “You’re only saying that because you’re recovering from a near-death experience. You’ll go back to being annoyed at me by the end of the week.”
Despite herself, Ruby chuckled. “You and I have a lot more in common than I suspected we would, Maggie.”
Her niece beamed. “That’s the first time you’ve called me that.”
“People change,” Ruby said. Another glance at all the flowers she’d received was a good reminder. “There are many painful reasons why I am the way I am, most of them self-inflicted. It’s hard to let go when you’ve been carrying bitterness and regret like a shield your entire adult life.”
“You can tell me, Aunt Ruby. I’m a pro at this kind of stuff.”
“Oh, are you?” Ruby chuckled. “Had much experience with the secrets of the past?”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.”
Ruby shook her head to try and clear the voice of her most critical self as it shouted about her wasted life. There was still time to figure this out, still time to make it right, once and for all. Ruby could choose to be brave, even if that was something she hadn’t been in a long time.
“My mother used to read to me as a girl,” she said with a small smile. “Those are my strongest memories of her. She always had a book on hand, thanks to my father’s extensive library, and we often sat outside together with a novel. Mother didn’t believe in limiting my access to books, even ones I couldn’t yet comprehend. One of the first stories she ever told me was about the man she was married to before she came to Hawthorn, before my father was in the picture. She told me that he was a good man, smart and kind and tender, and that she missed him all the time."
“Wait—” Maggie interrupted.
Ruby shushed her with a finger. “Not right now. Be patient.” After a deep breath, Ruby continued. “I remember being confused that my mother had a life before me. Father told me she was often withdrawn and sad. It was sometimes hard for her to be present with me because she was still grieving the loss of her first husband. One day, when I was five, around Christmas, Mother asked me if I wanted to go to Tybee for a picnic. I was happy to go anywhere she wanted to take me. That afternoon, we packed some clothes, a few books, and blankets and left for a day at the beach.” Ruby paused, seeing that Maggie had gone rigid. She knew what came next. Everyone did.
“After we ate, she showed me how to find shark teeth among the broken shells in the surf. Then we sat down to read one of my favorite books, The Secret Garden. I loved the idea of a hidden place full of magic, just waiting to be discovered. But I fell asleep not long after. When I woke up, Mother asked if I wanted to look for more shark teeth. It was such fun at first. We ran around and played at the water’s edge, giggling.”
At this, Ruby had to stop. She closed her eyes and let out a strangled cry, her throat aching from the effort it took to hold back her tears. Maggie’s face was wide open, almost afraid, as she listened to Ruby’s words. “I still remember how her hand felt in mine. Warm and soft. Safe. But then it was gone. She was gone.” Tears splashed onto Ruby’s blanket, and she scrubbed at them with her finger, surprised by the intensity of her emotions. Maggie shuddered—whether from the cold, dry air in the hospital or the story, she wasn’t sure—and moved up to the bed next to Ruby. The warmth of her arm on Ruby’s was a small comfort.
“What happened?” she asked, her eyes bright with unshed tears of her own.
“She disappeared,” Ruby replied in a whisper. This was the part she hadn’t spoken aloud since she was a teenager, the words that had made her a pariah in her community until she was grown up and broken-hearted enough to make herself one. “I need you to understand me, Margaret.” Gripping her niece’s fingers, Ruby trembled. “She didn’t just walk into the water like I did, though that would have been horrible enough on its own. She didn’t drown.” Here, Ruby paused and eyed Maggie carefully. “She vanished.”
Maggie stiffened as she stared, dumbfounded, at her aunt. “Vanished? Like a ghost?”
“You could say that, although she was very much alive until that moment, I can assure you. At first, I thought she was playing some sort of game with me, but I realized soon enough that she wasn’t. Mother was simply there one moment, holding my hand, and then she was gone."
“Oh my God,” Maggie whispered, her hand pressed against her mouth. Her blue eyes reflected the horror Ruby still felt when she remembered that terrible moment.
“I started screaming for her over and over, running back and forth, searching, sobbing. I finally grew so exhausted at the police station that I just gave up and passed out in my father’s arms.”
“Then you told them what happened,” Maggie confirmed. “And no one believed you.”
Ruby gave a single nod. “Yes. They assumed my mother had drowned and began searching for her body. It wasn’t until long after my father died that I learned the woman they discovered weeks later was some unknown person who had either drowned by accident or taken her own life.”
Maggie gasped. “But...so...she’s the one buried in your mother’s grave?”
Again, Ruby nodded. Maggie shook her head in disbelief. “I was looking through some old financial documents on the estate and found a ledger that listed a large payment to Sheriff Jim Arwen, dated the same day that body was found. On the page next to it was one word: Alice. The police claimed the woman was my mother because she was found wearing her engagement ring on a necklace, so when I discovered the ledger, I lost it. I even went to the pastor. He’s the sheriff’s grandson, but he had no idea what I was talking about. I think I scared him to death, to be quite honest, but I was just so angry to find out the depth of my father’s deception.”
“What a crazy thing to do,” Maggie said, chewing on her nail. At Ruby’s narrowed eyes, she added, “Not you, obvs. Faking Alice’s death.”
“He was desperate to offer me some kind of peace,” Ruby added. “I assume Father gave the sheriff my mother’s necklace when they found that poor woman and then paid the man a whole lot of money to keep it all quiet.”
“You must have doubted it was her all along, though, didn’t you?”
Ruby pursed her lips together in a flat line. “Truth be told, I was so confused and in such horrible shock from losing my mother that I found every way possible to avoid the subject. Father tried to talk to me about it for years, but I was being mistreated so badly by my peers that I refused.” Ruby looked down at the finger on her right hand where she’d worn her engagement ring. The tender, wrinkled skin there was already cracked and irritated from being exposed to the dry, wintry air. “When I finally did open up to someone, it was to a man I loved. His name was Elliot Russell, and he worked for my father. We got engaged in my twenties.”
“Gasp!” Maggie said, lips curling. “Was he cute?”
Ruby laughed through sniffles. “I thought he was beautiful. After he proposed, I gathered up the courage to talk to him about my mother. He’d heard rumors by that point, of course. Everyone had. But he’d never actually heard them from me.” Ruby sighed. “Elliot was a good man. He was smart, funny, and kind, even though he was older and had a tendency to treat me like a child. But when I stood firm by my claim that Mother had disappeared, he went to my father and tried to have me enrolled in an outpatient program for severe mental health disorders.”
Maggie’s mouth fell open, eyes flickering with righteous anger. “He did not.”
“It’s what men did in those days, my dear. It’s what husbands did. When I confronted Elliot about it, he begged me to go and get help. I felt so betrayed that I ended our engagement right then. We were both pretty destroyed by it, but Elliot moved on eventually.” Ruby’s voice took on a bitter tone as she spoke these words.
“And you never did,” Maggie finished for her.
“I fell out of love with him, but I’ve held my anger close to my chest ever since. Not just about what he did but about many other things, as well.”
Maggie slumped as though she were exhausted by all she’d learned. It exhausted Ruby to tell it, but she still had more to say. “I tell you all of this to lay the foundation for what I need to say next. And, somehow, it’s even more unlikely than the story I’ve already told you. But it’s the truth, I promise you. All of it.”
“I will believe anything at this point, Aunt Ruby,” Maggie said. “Besides, you’re not the only person in Hawthorn whose mom has vanished without a trace. The same thing happened to Eleanor.”
Ruby’s throat tightened. “She told you, then?”
“Why didn’t you?” Maggie argued. “I put my big ol’ foot in my mouth a few times before she told me, too, so thanks for that.”
“It was her story to tell, Margaret.”
“Maggie.”
Ruby ignored her niece’s frosty tone. “Well, it’s a good thing you’ve made the connection between Eleanor’s story and my own, no matter how you got there.”
“And why is that?” Maggie crossed her arms.
“Because,” Ruby replied. “What I have to say next is something Eleanor needs to hear, too.
