Page 65 of The Family Plot
“I talked to them about your grandfather.”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
She flexes her fists at her sides, and as I answer, I watch her hands curl and uncurl.
“There were things you said that I wanted them to look into. Things that didn’t add up.”
Or added up too well, I keep myself from saying.
“That’s none of their business.” Ruby steps forward, shoving a finger into the air, so close I can see the dirt beneath her nails. “Grandpa and me—we’re just trying to get by. We don’t need the police coming over, riling him up, digging into my past with Andy.”
So Elijah did question Lyle. I feel a gush of relief, almost gratitude, even as Ruby’s finger jabs toward me.
“Your grandfather was riled up?”
“Of course he was! I told you how he gets when it comes to Andy.You saw it yourself the other day. The detective got him so upset, and— You had no right, absolutely no right, to accuse us of anything.”
“I didn’t accuseyou,” I say, leaning away, my back against Elijah’s car. “Why are you so mad?”
For the first time, her eyes aren’t big at all; they’re narrowed to slits as thin as paper. Moments pass, the ocean throbbing in the distance, and it’s a while still before her stare loses its sharpness. When her hand falls back to her side, it’s stuck in a fist, knocking against her thigh.
“It’s just,” she starts. Then she sighs, finally relaxing her fingers. “I thought you and I… I thought we connected yesterday.”
“Connected?”
“Yeah. As friends.”
The wind circles us, and Ruby breaks my gaze to button her coat. I cross my arms, tightening against the cold.
“We’re not friends,” I tell her. I try to be gentle about it, but I want to be clear: I’m not her path back to Andy, her detour from loneliness.
“We’re something,” she insists. “We understand each other. We were closer to Andy than anyone else.” She sniffles loudly. “We feel the same loss.”
We don’t, though. Whatever pain Ruby feels, it’s only residue from a teenage crush. It’s nothing compared to the crater I will harbor inside me forever. Someday, Ruby will find another boy to love, but a twin, my twin,Andy, is irreplaceable. I will only grow emptier, the older I grow without him.
Ruby moves some loose pebbles on the driveway with her foot, her bottom lip curling into a pout. “You didn’t change your mind, did you? About including the embroidery in the memorial?”
“No,” I assure her, even though I haven’t thought of it since yesterday, when I closed those words—Ruby loves Andy—inside a drawer.
“Good,” she says, punctuating the word with a choked and bitter chuckle. “It all went so wrong, you know.” She shakes her head, jaw tensing. When she speaks again, she shoves the sentence through gritted teeth. “That night I tried to give it to him, everything went so terribly wrong.”
Terribly wrong. Wrong.It echoes off the trees, her voice gusting around us like wind. Ruby doesn’t seem to notice. She squints at her shoe, still stabbing at gravel.
“I need to get back to Grandpa,” she adds. Her eyes harden, tiny and tight once again. “In the meantime, stop talking about me behind my back.”
“I wasn’t—” I start, but she’s already turned around, rushing toward the woods. I watch her go, hands shoved into her pockets, curls billowing out behind her, until she’s too far for me to distinguish her from the shadows cast by trees. I pull out my phone to check the screen.
No messages.
“Updates soon,” Greta promised me earlier. It hasn’t been long since we hung up, but as I wait for Elijah, arms taut across my chest, I hope for another call. I want to know what Greta would make of it—Ruby’s strange anger, prompted, it seems, by Lyle’s reaction to the police; Elijah questioning Lyle only to return, again, to question Charlie.
I look at my hand, scraping at Charlie’s “trademark flair” that he Sharpied across my skin. So far, it’s refused my attempts to scrub it away. It lingers defiantly, a day later, this tattoo I didn’t ask for. When my hand turns raw from rubbing, I turn my attention to the clouds growing thicker above me. Andy always struggled to find shapes in them. Me, I saw everything: cars, trees, deer.Look, it’s antlers, I said to him once. He scrunched up his face, followed my finger with his eyes, then kicked at the grass, giving up too soon.It’s just moisture, he replied.Just water and ice.
He was like that, always seeing what things were made of, instead of what they could be.Who knows what’s in my blood?he asked Ruby, as if the unnatural lifestyle he wanted to escape was woven into his DNA.
When I finally hear the front door, I leap off the car. Elijah clomps down the walkway, gripping his folder tightly.
“I was looking for you,” he says, stopping a few feet in front of me. “Inside.”
