just asked the boy again. Tickled him until he spit it out, or been content to stumble forward in darkness. Ha! As if there were any chance that he could keep anything important from her. From Ruth, who knew him better than she knew the nose on her own face. She creaked forward the last few paces until she had a clear view of the river beach. And then she steadied herself on the trunk of a tree that branched sideways before it climbed skyward.
Well. There was her answer.
Ruth slung the satchel from her weary shoulders and eased herself to the ground. The hot August sun baked a sweetness from the dust and pine duff, and a smile yawned across her face. Wide. Gap-toothed and sloppy and quivering and out of her control, and right behind it a clutch of unattended tears shoved and scrambled their way forward.
He was down there, all right. His blond mop shone in the sun and his plaster cast stiffened his leg straight out in front of him while he reclined on the sand, his arms bent sharply at the elbows to cradle his head. Pitched beside him like a loyal dog was a cheap nylon tent, blaze orange, staked and saddlebacked, its snout pointing toward the water. And coming out of the river was a girl. Skinny-dipped and dripping wet and headed right toward him.
Not all people were born into happiness, like Ruth was. Not all people grew up cherished and honored, as she had. Not everybody—not many at all, really—had the luck (what else could you call it? the undeserved blessing) to find the person who made them more. More themselves. More all right in themselves. Through what they shared. But Ruth was lucky. From that very first day, she had Elizabeth.
Not that Elizabeth knew it, then. Elizabeth thought this baby-faced girl—this teenager—on the library steps was no more than a distraction. Well, a sweet distraction. A confection. A surprisingly complex confection, a much richer-than-anticipated dessert, in fact a meal in herself, really, a nutritious, energizing, luscious, yes—and Ruth had her then, and for the rest of Elizabeth’s life Ruth made sure she never went hungry.
This girl down in the river, climbing out of the river, swaying loose-limbed toward Wrecker—she might not be his Elizabeth, but Ruth was certain he had found a girl who was willing to entertain the possibility. The possibility of him. And what more could she wish for him than that? To have the chance to be seen, to be known—he was built for this, this boy, this blessing, this gift, this kid saturated with love. He’d been the apple of someone’s eye. And then he’d been dealt a blow so severe he might have been made cruel by it. All these years Ruth had watched to see which way he would turn and there were times she’d held her heart in her throat, watching his anger explode. He wanted to blow up the world. He wanted to knock it all down, reduce it to smithereens, and he could—with his fists, with a word, with each choice. It was for him to decide. He could throw himself into the sea as she had done. There was no choice but that, really—to throw himself in, into life, and see what became of him.
A peal of laughter sprang up from below and Ruth closed her eyes, yielded them their privacy. With her eyes closed her heart fluttered—a large leap and several smaller ones—and she was flooded without warning with Elizabeth: the color of her skin, the daredevil glint in her eye, her devotion to books and to justice and to Ruth, the way the sunlight fell across her hair when she slept in Sunday mornings. Ruth could hardly bear it. The feel of Lizzie’s hands on Ruth’s hips, coming up behind her at the bathroom sink as she brushed her teeth. The mash of lips, the taste of spearmint and blood where tooth grazed lip. The urgent drop to the rug. The furious reach and grope—still to want, after so many years, to want so fiercely what you deeply have—and then the wave that arched her from the floor and left her sweaty, gasping, newborn.
Ruth waited for her breath to still.
When Elizabeth died Ruth did as she’d desired: she let the funeral men take Lizzie’s body away and deliver her ashes in return. And just as Elizabeth had asked, Ruth had packed them gently in the old car they shared, set