Page 52 of The Family Plot
For a moment, I want to laugh. The notion is so absurd: fifteen-year-old Ruby planning a permanent future with Andy, picking out kids’ names, writing them down like ingredients for a recipe. But the moment passes quickly, and the next one wallops me—thinking of children with Andy’s crinkly eyes, his cowlick he could never keep down. Would his kids have crouched in credenzas, making mischief in the dark? Would they have felt, just a little bit, like mine? The possibilities are a dull blade, taking too long to slice me open.
“That’s when he really freaked out,” Ruby says. She sets the embroidery back onto the tissue paper. “He was like, ‘Family? You thinkIcan start a family?’ He said it proved how much I didn’t know about him. Or where he came from. Howunnaturalyour family is—”
I tense at that: Andy’s word in her mouth.
“—how any kid of his was bound to be unnatural, too. He went on and on like that: ‘Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?’ Which was so stupid. So insulting. Like I’m supposed to believe he’s, like, a vampire or something.”
“Vampire?” I repeat.
Ruby shrugs. “That’s what he was acting like. Like he was some evil creature destined to do bad things. I mean, what kind of thing is that to say? ‘Who knows what’s in my blood?’?”
She’s right. It’s an odd, almost eerie concern, one I never heard him express.
“He’d talk all the time about us leaving this place, and then the second I tell him I love him, he’s not sure he can build a life with me? What else had we been doing all those months, if not planning for a future together?”
She hangs her head, her voice so quiet, so fragile, I have to lean in to hear her.
“Anyway, I ran off after that, taking his stupid present back home.But I grabbed the key first, like I told you—because that was the infuriating thing. He was yelling at me, refusing to let me love him, and the whole time, he was only half there. The other half was thinking about that damn key. Or what it opened.”
Her earlier question idles in her eyes.What was down there? Under the shed. I have to work harder this time to pretend like the answer is nothing.
“So why is the embroideryhere?” I ask. “Why did you bury it? In our woods.”
“I had to hide it from my grandfather,” she says. Then she sighs. “Andy broke my heart that night. So when I got home, I was a mess. And when Grandpa came to my room to check on me, I couldn’t stop sobbing. I was lying on my floor, in a pile of Andy’s notes—you know, the ones we’d write together, the funny little phrases? I’d kept them all.” She wipes her nose before rubbing her fingers on her jeans. “And Grandpa was like, ‘What’s all this? What’s got you so upset?’ And I was so sick of hiding that I loved someone. I knew that was Grandpa’s biggest fear: that I would fall in love and leave him. Just like my mother. Just like his wife. But I couldn’t fake it anymore. That love is who Iwasright then. Do you know what I mean?”
Her question reaches into me, tugging at my starkest truth. Because yes. I do know what she means. My love for Andy is who I’ve always been.
I can’t say that, though. My throat is a closed fist. So I nod, encouraging her to go on.
“I showed him the notes. They didn’t make sense to him; they were all likeyour hair is made of wishes and salad forks. Silly phrases that no one had ever thought of but us. But I told Grandpa what they meant: we’d had a relationship, we’d loved each other. Or so I thought.”
She pulls the embroidery out of the box and scrapes at the threadwith dirty nails. It’s as if she’s trying to unstitch the letters, unwrite her love for Andy after all these years.
“So I thought,” she repeats, the words even wryer this time.
My voice is pinched when I speak. “I think you just… you caught Andy at a bad time.”
She glares at me. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing, just—” I force a shrug. “You know how he was, right? With the trees? Sometimes, some… bad feelings came over him, and he had to hurt something to get them out. I just think that, that night, that something was you.”
She bites her lip, considering. “But it was his birthday. Your siblings had come back to celebrate. What bad feelings could he possibly have had?”
I see the photographs again: the darkBon an ankle, someone’s skin singed from the brand.
Wheredidthe brand end up? I wonder if it was part of what Andy found when he hacked open the chest, if it was with him that final night, in his pocket maybe; if when his clothes decomposed in that awful grave, the soil swallowed it down, deeper than the police would later dig.
Instead, they dug for it in our house.
I focus on Ruby. “Families are complicated,” I say. “It was the first time we’d all been together in eight years. It could have easily stirred up frustration. Resentment.”
She doesn’t seem convinced. “When I asked him if he really didn’t want me to love him, he said, ‘I don’t want you to love me.’ No hesitation. He made his feelings perfectly clear.”
She picks at the embroidery again, scraping a tight thread. “So I told Grandpa what happened: I loved Andy, we’d talked about leaving, I thought we’d make a life together, but he’d rejected me. Andthen Grandpa—he got so mad. He grabbed some of the notes and, like, shook them in his fist, mumbling that he was going toget that Lighthouse boy.”
I recoil at the phrase. “Gethim,” I repeat. My skin tingles with unease.
“I’d never seen him so enraged,” Ruby continues. “But more than that, he seemed hurt. Reading those notes, he could see we’d been close. And I tried to tell him: I wasn’t my mom, or my grandma; loving Andy didn’t mean I lovedhimany less—but the next thing I know, he’s storming out of my room, slamming the front door, and I didn’t see him for the rest of the night.”
