Hush Hush (3 page)

“Alanna?”

“Yes?”

The voice on the other side of the door was persuasively wan. Except Ruby wasn’t persuaded. “Can I come in?”

“No. If you open the door the light will bother me.”

“Then close your eyes,” Ruby said.

A pause. Alanna was probably trying to come up with an argument for that. But one reason that Ruby had success with Alanna, where so many grown-ups failed, was that she took a no-nonsense approach, one she had learned from the various nanny programs on TV. Stay calm, stand your ground, don’t criticize. Be consistent. Yes, it was weird for a fifteen-year-old girl to be using
Supernanny
techniques to deal with her seventeen-year-old sister, but the Dawes family was so beyond the country of weird that Ruby didn’t worry about it. She was her sister’s keeper. People expected it to be the other way, because Alanna was older. Maybe it had been that way, once, but Ruby had no memory of it.

“Okay,” Alanna said, and Ruby opened the door and closed it quickly behind her, walking with the softest possible tread into her sister’s room. She knew, from past experience, not to sit on the
bed. Alanna would claim that aggravated the migraine. So Ruby sat cross-legged on the floor. The room was very dark. Blackout blinds had been installed when they moved into the new house, something Alanna had lobbied for since the migraines were diagnosed, three years ago. Alanna had felt vindicated, briefly, by that diagnosis. For years, her headaches had been dismissed as simple tension headaches, a convenient way to avoid doing anything she didn’t want to do. But years of being called a fake had, in Ruby’s opinion, persuaded Alanna that she was owed some fakeness.

“I could have gone without you,” she said.

“That wouldn’t be right.” Alanna’s words were muffled. She had her face pressed into her pillow.

“No.” It wouldn’t be. But if Alanna was faking today, then that wasn’t right, either. Not that Ruby would ever say anything like that out loud to her sister. And if not to Alanna, to whom? Not her father. Not Felicia, never Felicia. Sometimes, when she was in a room alone with her new baby brother, Joey, she unburdened herself to him. Joey was six months now, so he just smiled and gurgled approvingly, no matter what Ruby told him.

She sat in the darkness, listening to her sister breathe. No point in asking any questions, such as
Why did you change your mind after you promised you’d do it? Did Dad get to you? I thought you were going to stand up to him, for both of us. That’s what you promised.
She could not ask Alanna larger questions about their past.
Do you really think she meant to hurt us that day, too? Why did she give us up and move so far away?
No point in revisiting wistful arguments, either.
Maybe we could have saved her that day. Saved her and saved Isadora. She couldn’t have left us in the car. We would have gotten out and run, gone for help.

Ruby was four the last time she saw her mother.

“I have to go away for a while,” her mother said. “To get better.”

“Daddy said you are better.”

“I am. But they want me to get treatment. Just in case.”

“I thought you had a sickness that women get after having a baby.”

“I did.”

“Were you sick when you had me?”

“No.”

“What made you sick?”

“They don’t know. It’s a sickness they don’t understand.”

“Are you still sick?”

“No, I don’t think so. But we have to make sure.”

“Do you miss Isadora?”

“Of course I do. Every day. Don’t you?”

That had been a tough question. “She was just a baby and I was a big kid. I loved her—”

“Of course you did.”

“But I don’t miss her. Is that bad?”

“No. Ruby, you haven’t done anything bad, okay? You and Alanna—you are very good girls.”

“We weren’t always good. When you were sick. We made noise sometimes.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered, sweetie. It wouldn’t have mattered.”

Ruby did not understand then that her mother was never coming back. That became clear only later, and even then Ruby wasn’t sure why. Why couldn’t her mother come back? She said she was going to South Africa because she had lived there as a child, but it felt as if she had picked the farthest location possible. For years, Ruby kept thinking she would come back, just walk through the door one day, the way the song promised.
Mommy always comes back
. Of course, she was thinking of the door of the old house, back in Bolton Hill.

In
this
house, you couldn’t hear anyone coming through the door unless you were in the living room or dining room. This house was large, almost too large, with strange acoustics. If it weren’t a new house, built to spec, Ruby might have thought it haunted. Right now,
she could hear Joey crying—well, not exactly crying, but making the odd seagull noises he made when he was happy. That meant Felicia and Joey were nearby, probably in Joey’s room, the smallest of the four bedrooms on this level, but also the only one with its own bathroom. Felicia wasn’t awful. She was just—Felicia. Their father’s second wife.

They still owned the old house. It sat empty. No one wanted to buy the house where the lady had gone crazy and murdered her kid, even if it hadn’t actually happened in the house. Ruby knew enough about real estate to understand that if her father lowered the price enough, someone would buy it. But he kept the listing artificially high. So while it was true that no one wanted to buy it, it was also true that her father, for some reason, wasn’t ready to sell it. He said he needed to find a special buyer, someone who appreciated what he had done to the interior. He said he might convert it to apartments. One day. It made Ruby sad that her childhood home sat empty. She couldn’t have said why. She just knew it was terribly sad. Maybe it was because an empty house could hold only one memory, the big memory, the thing that no one wanted to remember. Whereas if a new family moved in, perhaps the house could start over. Her father had started over, with Felicia. New wife, new house, new baby.

How would Alanna and Ruby start over? When?

She decided to risk putting her hand on her sister’s bed, as softly as possible, palm up. Seconds passed, but Alanna finally rested her palm, damp and sticky, on Ruby’s. It was uncomfortable sitting that way, with her wrist bent back. But Ruby sat there for a very long time, listening to her sister breathe in and out.

Interview with Elyse Mackie, filmed March 5, at her home