Page 37 of Things We Do in the Dark
Paris closes her eyes and focuses on her breathing until she feels her heart rate beginning to slow. She reaches for the photo Ruby sent with the letter. Scrawled on the back in faded blue ink isHumber Bay Park, Toronto, 1982. Joey’s 3rd birthday.
The greenish-tinted photo is a perfect square with rounded edges. Ruby Reyes is sitting with her daughter, Joey, at a picnic table covered with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. There’s so much food—a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Styrofoam containers filled with bright green coleslaw and macaroni salad, a large bowl of white rice, a tray of friedlumpiawith dipping sauce, and a cooler filled with cans of Tab and cream soda. There are also balloons, a birthday cake with three candles andpink icing, and a modest stack of brightly wrapped presents. Ruby’s sister and brother-in-law are in the background, laughing.
Ruby and her little girl are wearing matching yellow sundresses, each of them eating one half of a banana Popsicle, the kind you could split apart and share. They’re smiling at each other, their faces beaming with happiness in the sun. The love between mother and daughter in that moment is obvious, and it hurts Paris to look at it now. She runs a finger lightly over the little girl’s sweet face. Joey was so small in this photo, which was taken in better times.
It wasn’t like Paris planned to kill her. But neither was it an accident.
She places the photo back on the coffee table and brings the letter with her to the bathroom. Standing over the toilet, she rips it up into tiny pieces. It looks like purple confetti swirling around the bowl until it finally disappears.
Paris soaks a washcloth in cold water and presses it to her face, staring into the mirror. It was a risk not paying Ruby right after the first blackmail letter arrived. But she didn’t have the money, and asking Jimmy for it was not an option. Instead, she’d tried to fix things on her own, but her plan to retrieve the urn filled with the ashes that everyone assumes are hers did not go as she’d hoped.
If she doesn’t pay Ruby the money, all her secrets will come out.
She’s worked so hard to shed her old identity and become Paris. Most days, it feels like she’s succeeded, that she has reinvented herself. But at night, in her dreams, it’s nineteen years ago, and she’s back in Toronto, in that dingy basement apartment with the checkerboard floors, staring at the ravaged body and bloody face of the young woman who was her best friend, her eyes pleading and desperate, her voice raspy and weak.
She had begged at the end.
Please, she had whispered.Please.
Paris walks back out to the living room and picks up the photo once again. She thought she’d left this picture behind on the night of the fire, the night she stepped out of one life and into another.
She thought she’d left this photo to burn, along with the girl in the urn.
PART TWO
What a life to take, what a bond to break, I’ll be missing you
—PUFFDADDY ANDFAITHEVANS,FEATURING112
CHAPTER TEN
RUBY REYES, #METOO VICTIM, HAS BEEN GRANTED PAROLE AFTER SERVING 25 YEARS FOR MURDER
Drew Malcolm assumed the article was a joke at first, because it sounds like something written for a satire news outlet like The Onion. But it’s not a prank, it’s really happening, and the headline is so absurd that he has to read it several times before it finally sinks in.
The Ice Queen, avictim? If it wasn’t such an insult to actual #MeToo victims, Drew might have laughed. But there is nothing funny about Joey Reyes’s mother getting out of prison. And he’s so mad about it, he’s decided he’s finally going to break the vow he made to himself after he landed his first real job as a journalist, not long after Joey died.
He’s going to talk about the Ice Queen on his podcast. Ruby Reyes may be getting out of prison, but if Drew has anything at all to say about it, she will never be free. Because not only is the woman a murderer, she was an absolute horror of a mother.
Fuck that psychopathic bitch.
They arrested Ruby Reyes on a hot, sticky June night in 1992.
It was a quiet affair, even with the two police cars, the ambulance, and the woman from child protective services. The flashing rays of red andblue from the first-responder vehicles cut through the darkness, lighting up the trees in the lakeside park across the way, illuminating the dirty brick exterior of the run-down low-rise apartment building where Ruby and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Joey, lived.
The neighbors stepped out onto their balconies to see what was going on. Police vehicles in this neighborhood were common, but usually they were called because of the activities that took place in Willow Park after dark. Drug deals. Sexual transactions. Teenagers doing what teenagers do when they’re out past curfew. Fights between homeless people with nowhere else to go.
This, in comparison, was tame. Ruby didn’t protest or struggle. If anything, she seemed inconvenienced as she was led out of the building’s lobby in handcuffs, as if being arrested was a minor misunderstanding that would all be rectified soon.
“Mama,” Joey said, leaping down from the back of the ambulance where a paramedic was tending to a cut above her eyebrow. It didn’t hurt too much, but her ribs were sore, and she knew from experience that her torso would be blue and purple in the morning. She ran to Ruby and threw her arms around her waist, pressing her face into her mother’s chest. “Mama, I’m sorry.”
The social worker who was standing behind Joey removed her gently. Ruby glanced down at her daughter, the lights flashing across her face. Even in her old, stained nightgown, with her hair stringy and unwashed, Ruby was beautiful.
“Oh, Joey.” Her voice was soft, almost tender. But behind her dark eyes, there was nothing. They were two black holes, sucking in the light, sucking in everything. “What have you done?”
The officers escorting her tugged Ruby’s arm, and Joey’s mother continued on, chin up, head high, somehow managing to look magnificent despite the circumstances. One of the officers placed a hand on her head, and she sank into the back seat of the police car as gracefully as anyone could.
Deborah Jackson, the social worker assigned to the case, managed to catch Joey just as her knees buckled. Strong arms wrapped around the young girl as her whole body began to shake. It wasn’t because Joey wascold. There was a heat wave in Toronto that week, and even here by the lake at eleven at night, it was 30 degrees Celsius, with a humidity index of 37. Worse, the heat felt grimy. This part of Lake Ontario always stank in the summer, the heat trapping the smells of shit and garbage and pollution from the factories not far away.
