A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Page 3

  Mother Martha, who had a black maid named Gwen in Tennessee who prepared and served her meals, was delighted for Ruthie to fill Gwen’s place. Indeed, the meal Ruthie planned to serve—chicken breasts cooked in cream of mushroom soup, baked beef rice, and steamed broccoli with cheese—was not all that different from what Gwen would have fixed.

  Using the back of a wooden spoon, Ruthie spread the soup over the skinless chicken breasts, which she had arranged in an eight-inch-square Pyrex dish. The soup was so gelatinous that when Ruthie first plopped it out of the can a ringed indentation remained around its middle. Ruthie knew from past experience that once heated the soup would loosen and turn into a yummy sauce.

  The phone rang twice and then stopped. Mother Martha must have answered. That was okay. Ruthie’s parents usually called later in the evening—it was only 5:30—and all of her friends were out of town with their families, on spring-break vacations that had been planned months in advance.

  Then it occurred to Ruthie that it might be her sister, Julia, calling. Julia was spending spring break with her friend Marissa Tate, at the Tates’ beach house on Pawleys Island, and had not yet phoned to tell Ruthie “hi.”

  Ruthie walked toward the phone. She would rescue Julia from Mother Martha, who was notorious for never letting anyone hang up. Even if you said, “I’ve got to go; I’m going to be late” for a birthday party, ballet practice, youth group, whatever, Mother Martha would ask you a new question, would refuse to let you say good-bye.

  Ruthie picked up the phone. “Julia?” she asked.

  “Hang up, dear,” said Mother Martha, a little sharply. When Ruthie hesitated—was her grandmother crying?—Mother Martha said, “Now.”

  Ruthie hung up the phone with a sinking feeling. Julia must have gotten in trouble. Julia was always getting in trouble, and the problem was, her getting caught was almost always unnecessary. At least that was what Ruthie thought. Like the Saturday night that Julia came home from a cast party drunk. Had she gone straight to her room and closed the door, neither Naomi nor Phil would have bothered her. But instead she approached Ruthie’s room, waiting in the doorway while Naomi said good night. Julia pretended to read while she was waiting, but she was so tipsy she didn’t realize that she was holding her book—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—upside down.

  Naomi noticed.

  And once Naomi noticed that, how could she not notice the fact that Julia smelled of alcohol? And so Julia was busted, grounded for two weeks, the use of her Saab limited to driving to and from school. In a way this pleased Ruthie—it meant Julia would be forced to spend more time with her—but also, it scared her. Ruthie hated for her sister to be in trouble, hated that her sister got drunk.

  Ruthie couldn’t worry about Julia. She would think about dinner, about the chicken. It would take about forty-five minutes to cook, and the rice an hour, so she would put the breasts aside for a moment. She went to the refrigerator to take out a stick of butter, then to the pantry for the rice and the beef consommé. To a yellow porcelain pot her mother had bought in France Ruthie added a cup of uncooked rice, a chopped onion, the can of beef consommé, four tablespoons of butter, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. Following her mother’s instructions, written in perfect script in a black-and-white-speckled notebook Naomi had filled with recipes when she was in the tenth grade, Ruthie would bake the ingredients, covered, in the oven at 350 degrees. The ingredients would meld, and an hour later the rice would be tender, rich, and buttery.

  She was sliding the yellow pot into the oven when Mother Martha walked into the kitchen, her face pale and drawn. The pink rouge she wore stood out against her white skin.

  “Ruthie dear,” she said.

  Ruthie closed the oven door and turned to face her grandmother.

  “Ruthie, I need you to sit down with me,” said Mother Martha, her voice strange, choked.

  Concerned, Ruthie hurried to her grandmother, whose legs were shaking, on the verge of collapse. She put her hand on Mother Martha’s forearm and guided her to a seat at the kitchen table.

  What had Julia done? Ruthie sat in the chair next to her grandmother, already thinking up excuses for her sister’s bad behavior. Mother Martha just sat there. Twice she opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “What’s wrong?” Ruthie finally asked.

  Though Mother Martha was looking at Ruthie, her filmy blue eyes seemed focused on something far away. “Oh God,” she said.

  This was shocking. Ruthie’s grandmother never took the Lord’s name in vain.

  Tears pooled in the old woman’s eyes. “Oh, my poor, poor baby.”

  “What? What is it?” asked Ruthie, her heart rate increasing.

  Mother Martha reached a shaking hand out to her, and Ruthie grabbed it, more because she wanted to steady the hand than anything else. Her grandmother’s hands, which she rubbed with cocoa butter every night, were smooth and soft.

  “There was an accident.”

  “Is Julia okay?” asked Ruthie. It was hard to get out the words. Her mouth was dry.

  “It’s your parents, dear. They were in an accident.”

  Ruthie’s first feeling was relief. Julia was not in an accident. Julia was not in trouble.

  “Are they okay?” asked Ruthie, not even imagining that they might not be.

  And then Mother Martha started crying, tears spilling over her eyes, running down her cheeks, and taking her makeup with them so that her pink cheeks were streaked with pale lines where the skin showed through.

  “Oh, you poor, poor baby,” cried Mother Martha.

  Ruthie shivered involuntarily. “What happened?” she asked. “Where are they?”

  Mother Martha could not keep it together. She was crying so hard now she couldn’t speak. She was pressing her fist into her mouth, as if trying to press back words she did not want to say.

  Ruthie had to speak for her, trying to narrow down the possibilities by asking the right questions, as if they were playing a game, as if her next question should be, “Is it bigger than a bread box?”

  “Are they in the hospital?”

  She imagined her father driving too fast on some desert highway, not slowing for the curve. She imagined Phil losing control, the car spinning, sliding off the road, finally stopping when it hit a lone tree. She imagined a tuft of hair through broken glass, blood. And then she saw them lying on separate hospital beds, banged up, bruised and bandaged, separated from each other by a long hall and cold, efficient nurses, like the nurse in that movie Julia made her watch, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  Mother Martha opened her mouth but again said nothing. She blinked her eyes several times in a row. “Get me a napkin please, dear,” she said.

  Ruthie stood, walked to the counter, opened a drawer, and grabbed a paper napkin for her grandmother, a heavy white one with a scalloped design along its border. She sat down again at the table, handed the napkin to the old woman. Mother Martha dotted her eyes with it, swallowed hard, and spoke.

  “They died, sweetheart. In a small plane that crashed into the Grand Canyon. Everyone on the plane died. Your parents, the two other passengers, the pilot . . . all lost.”

  Ruthie was trying to listen, trying to understand, but Mother Martha’s words just did not make any sense at all.

  Ruthie was upstairs in her sister’s room, burrowed beneath the pale green bedspread flecked with tiny pink flowers, waiting. She told herself it was all a mistake. Her parents were not dead. Mother Martha was old and had been confused. Julia would straighten things out. As soon as they figured out where she was, Julia would make things okay.

  Except they could not find her. When Mother Martha phoned the Tates’ beach house, asking to speak to Julia, Mrs. Tate had sounded confused. “Why, Julia couldn’t come,” she said. “Marissa invited her, but Julia said she had too much schoolwork to catch up on and her parents wouldn’t let her go.” Next Mother Martha had called Julia’s father, Matt, in Virginia. He had not heard from her, eithe
r, and then Mother Martha had to explain everything, had to tell Matt that in addition to the fact that his daughter was missing, his first wife was dead.

  Mother Martha asked Ruthie if there were any friends of Julia’s they could call. Ruthie knew that Julia hung out with a group of boys who wore black, but she didn’t know any of their real names. She only knew the nicknames they called each other: Roach, Wanker, Dickhead, and Guido. She thought about Dmitri, Julia’s first boyfriend, but decided there was no way she could be with him. Dmitri was too straightlaced, too good, to allow Julia to hide out with him when she was supposed to be at the Tates’. Mother Martha was starting to panic, was walking up and down the tiled kitchen floor, wringing a red dish towel in her hands, muttering, “I just don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.”

  The raw chicken, surrounded by the cold gelatinous soup, still sat on the counter in its eight-inch-square Pyrex dish.

  “I need to lie down,” mumbled Ruthie. “I’m feeling sick.”

  She had slunk out of the kitchen, not even sure if Mother Martha noticed.

  There was a pink Princess phone in Julia’s room, on the bedside table. That night the phone rang often. Ruthie would lift the receiver and listen in after she was sure Mother Martha had answered. She had to make sure the caller was not Julia, calling to say where she was, calling to explain why she had not been with Marissa. But it was always someone else, someone who had heard about the accident and was calling to express sympathy, to ask, “What can I do?” Relatives. Old friends of Naomi’s. Colleagues of Phil’s. Even the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called. They were running a story. They wanted a current photo of Phil and Naomi. They wanted a photo from Phil and Naomi’s wedding day.

  The wedding had been at city hall. Naomi, who was only beginning to show, had worn a pale blue pants suit over a white blouse. Julia, in a blue and white plaid jumper and white collar, stood by her side. Phil wore the black pin-striped suit he had worn that day to the office. Naomi used to say that she felt so guilty for leaving Matt to marry Phil, she didn’t think she deserved a real wedding. Not for the second time around.

  Ruthie heard Mother Martha walking up the front stairs, slowly. Pulling the bedspread over her head, she closed her eyes. She would pretend she was asleep. She heard the flick of a switch as Mother Martha turned the hall light on. Ruthie heard a soft knocking on the door. She did not answer, but Mother Martha opened it anyway.

  “Dear,” she said, standing in the doorway. “Dear, I’m going to have to call the police if we don’t locate Julia soon. You don’t have any idea where she might be, do you? She won’t be in trouble, I promise. We just, we must find her.”

  Ruthie slowly lowered the bedspread from over her head.

  “I don’t know where she is,” she whispered.

  She pulled the cover back over herself so that all Mother Martha could see was a bit of her dark hair.

  Where could her sister be? Not with Marissa, not with Dmitri. Possibly with other friends of hers from the theater group, but wouldn’t most of them be on vacations with their families? When she heard Mother Martha close the door to her bedroom down the hall, Ruthie pushed away the covers, got out of bed. Julia had given Ruthie dire warnings not to touch her stuff, but it wasn’t as if she were here to get mad. Ruthie opened the single drawer of the bedside table, looking for clues as to where her sister might be. There were some scattered matchbooks, a Bic lighter, some safety pins, a bunch of blue pens without tops, some folded-over notebook paper that when opened revealed several poems that Julia had started.

  Ruthie walked to the chest of drawers. Opened the top left drawer where Julia kept her underwear. Ran her fingers beneath the panties and bras. Came up with several quarters and some price tags clipped from new clothes. She opened the top right drawer, the one where Julia kept her socks. Pushed the balls of socks around. Found a box of Altoids. She opened it, and inside was a thin white cigarette. A joint.

  Ruthie closed the box, quickly, as if its contents were contagious. Looked at herself for a moment in the mirror above the dresser. Looked at her straight, flat brown hair. The two pimples on the lower half of her face. The circles under her brown eyes, circles that had mysteriously appeared within the past few hours, as if her body were marking itself for grief. As if her body had decided to proclaim to the world: Here is an unlucky girl.

  Ruthie noticed something in the corner of the mirror. A strip of four photos, taken in a booth. Photos of Julia—her mouth open wide in every one, as if she were dying laughing—with a straight-faced boy with long blond hair that came past his shoulders. Jake. Jake Robinson. Jake the senior who wore a black leather jacket atop glaringly white T-shirts, who wore his long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail during the day—per Coventry’s rules—but let it loose as soon as he left campus. Julia had pointed him out to Ruthie, said he burst through doors at school as if he were storming out of a bar after a fight.

  Julia had told Ruthie that his mom had died when he was little and now he lived alone with his dad in Ansley Park, a pretty neighborhood bordered by the High Museum on one side and Piedmont Park on the other. Julia said that Jake and his dad acted like bachelor roommates. If no one answered when you called their home, the answering machine told you to leave a message for “the Robinson boys.” They would drink beers while watching sports on TV; they would make sure to knock before entering each other’s rooms.

  Ruthie knew her sister had a crush on Jake but hadn’t realized they were actually hanging out. But here was proof, Julia’s laugh captured on film. She would call his house, see if he knew anything about where Julia might be. See if she might possibly be there, hanging out with “the Robinson boys.”

  Ruthie looked under the bed for the Coventry directory. For some reason, her sister always kept it there, as if it were a thing to be hidden. She found it beside a box filled with photos of Julia and her theater friends, plus Phil and Naomi’s copy of The Joy of Sex, stolen from underneath their bed.

  Under normal circumstances Ruthie would have taken the time to flip through its pages, to ogle the drawings of the woman with the hairy armpits, the man with the scraggly beard. But not tonight. Tonight the strange pictures held no allure. Ruthie flipped to the “Rs” in the Coventry directory and found the listing, Jake Robinson, 22 Westminster Drive. She dialed the number. The phone rang and rang. On the sixth ring, a man picked up. His voice was low and scratchy, and he sounded confused, as if she had woken him in the middle of a dream.

  “This is Ruthie Harrison—may I please speak with Jake?”

  Her best friend Alex Love’s mom had taught her that this was the correct way to introduce yourself on the phone, after Ruthie once called and simply asked, “Is Alex there?”

  The voice on the other end coughed. Then it was silent for a minute. “May I please speak with Jake?” Ruthie asked again, louder this time.

  There was silence, a silence that lasted so long Ruthie was about to hang up, but then she heard rustling and another male voice said hello.

  “Is this Jake?” she asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “It’s Ruthie Harrison, Julia’s sister,” she said, wondering as soon as the words were out of her mouth if Jake would be confused. She and Julia did not share the same last name. Julia’s last name was Smith, same as her biological father’s.

  “I really need to speak with Julia. Is she there? It’s an emergency.”

  Jake, or whoever it was on the other line, mumbled “fuck.”

  “Hang on,” he said, and then he whispered, “Jules, I think you need to take this.”

  “Tell them I’m not here,” Ruthie heard Julia whisper back.

  “I think it’s your little sister.”

  And then Julia was on the other end, her voice higher than normal, as if she were trying to disguise it. “Hello?”

  Ruthie started to cry. Disguised though it might be, it was her sister’s voice on the other end of the phone. And this meant that she was not
in another state, not far away. Indeed, Ansley Park was fewer than four miles from Ruthie and Julia’s home in Buckhead.

  “Is that you, spaz? What the hell are you doing? Why are you calling me here?”

  Ruthie cried harder. There was too much to say.

  “Sweetie, what is it? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be a jerk, it’s just—I’ll be up shit creek if Mom and Dad find out I’m here. You can’t tell them. Promise?”

  “Mom and Dad are dead and you have to come home,” said Ruthie. “You have to come home.”

  And then something happened. Suddenly. She dropped the phone and she was on the floor by Julia’s bed choking and crying, crying so hard it was difficult to breathe. She was a baby in the crib, crying for milk. She needed her mother. She needed her mother. Her mother whose gentle voice could soothe her after a nightmare, whose fingernails were always kept long, perfect for scratching a daughter’s back. She needed her mother.

  Her sister would come.

  Within twenty minutes Julia was pulling up the driveway in the Saab 900, jumping out of the car and slamming its door shut, walking briskly around to the back of the house, since the heavy front door could only be opened by the turn lock inside and not a key. Ruthie heard Julia moving through the kitchen, heard Julia running up the back staircase, the staircase that included a “moving” chair that chugged up and down a metal ramp, a leftover from the time an old invalid woman had lived in their house. Julia was opening the door to the upstairs hall and then Julia was there, in the doorway of her room.

  Julia. Julia. Her lips were red and swollen, probably from kissing Jake Robinson all afternoon. The rims of her eyes were red, the whites bloodshot. She wore a filmy shirt with a swirly purple design, hippie looking but sexy, too. She did not have on a bra; her nipples poked out from the thin fabric. Her jeans, Levi’s, were well worn, faded. Beneath them she was barefoot. She always went barefoot, drove barefoot, too, and though this made Phil crazy, made him go out of his mind, she kept doing it anyway.