A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Read online

  It had been a week since the will was read. Ruthie and Julia were in bed in Julia’s room whispering in the dark. Before the accident it had been a special treat for Julia to allow Ruthie in her bed, but now the girls almost always slept together. They lay on their backs, a printed cotton sheet, soft from years of washing, pulled up to their necks, the blanket and comforter in a messy pile by their feet.

  “I mean, I like Aunt Mimi,” said Ruthie. “A lot. But I don’t really know her. And now I’m supposed to move all the way to California and live with her and Uncle Robert? I just don’t understand. What were Mom and Dad thinking?”

  “They weren’t,” said Julia. “Do you think Phil ever believed—for a moment—that he could possibly die before he reached, I don’t know, age ninety-five?”

  She was right. Phil had always expressed extreme confidence in his longevity. It had something to do with the fact that he was in a terrible car accident as an infant, had flown through the front windshield—he had been sitting on his mother’s lap—after another car smashed into the side of the one his father was driving on that rainy day in rural Tennessee. When the ambulance came, the medics pushed the broken baby, his blood streaked by the rain, away from the middle of the road but did not tend to him, for they thought he was dead and others could be saved.

  Except Phil was still alive. His father, too. Indeed, Phil’s father walked away with only scratches, while the others, Phil’s mother and two of her cousins, were dead.

  The doctors at the hospital nicknamed baby Phil “Lazarus.” Because of the apparent miracle of his recovery, he was told by the aunt who helped raise him that God had spared him for a reason, that he was put on this earth to achieve mighty things. His father went off to Korea, to fight in the war, enlisting just a few months after the car accident, perhaps hoping to die over there, too. He did not die but instead returned home with a new bride, Martha, whom he had met when he was in basic training at Camp Breckinridge, and who wrote to him faithfully while he was overseas. Martha would give Phil his sister, Mimi. Phil’s aunt argued that the arrival of Mimi—a companion for the lonely Phil—was further proof of God’s special love for the boy.

  Phil told his daughters that for a long time he believed in the divine specialness that his aunt attributed to him. As a teenager he even considered going to seminary. But during college Phil traded in his religiosity for skepticism. He still attended events sponsored by the Wesley Fellowship, in an attempt to meet girls, but he no longer believed. It was enrolling in a class on the history of the Holocaust that did it. How could he have faith in a God who would choose to snatch one baby in Tennessee from death but would turn a blind eye to the tens of thousands of babies snatched from their mothers’ arms by Nazi soldiers and killed in front of them? Still, Phil held on to one steadfast tenet or, rather, one steadfast superstition: having faced death so early, he would not face it again until he was an old, old man.

  “At his core, he didn’t believe he was vulnerable,” said Julia. “He might not have believed in God, but he sure had a God complex. Remember that dream he told us about, his dream of driving through Atlanta in a bright, white car?”

  Ruthie did not remember, so Julia—whose ability to recount past events was almost creepy—told it to her in exacting detail. It was several years ago, and they had all been in the kitchen, eating a breakfast Naomi had prepared of soft scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and hot buttered toast, when Phil told them he had a dream to share.

  In the dream, Phil found himself on the open road, speeding along, until suddenly and unexpectedly he came upon miles and miles of stopped traffic, six lanes wide. Phil had no choice but to stop, too. People honked their horns and shook their fists out their windows, but not one car moved, not one inch. Phil was frustrated, annoyed, until he realized that he and his car were somehow shrinking, shrinking until they were both so small that he was able to drive underneath all of the other cars stalled in traffic, just drive right through, until he was past the traffic jam and once again on the open road, where he sped off.

  “What do you think it means?” Phil had asked his family.

  “I think it shows an inferiority complex,” said Julia. “I mean, the fact that you were smaller than everyone.”

  They all knew that Phil did not have an inferiority complex. Julia was just goading him.

  “Wrong,” said Phil, as if Julia were a contestant on a game show and he, its host, had access to all of the answers.

  “It means you really like cars,” said Ruthie.

  “That’s part of it, squirt,” said Phil. “But go deeper.”

  “What it means of course,” said Naomi, after swallowing a bite of egg, “is that deep down you believe that you have the ability and agility to get out of tough situations that others can’t.”

  Phil beamed. “You girls have a smart mother,” he said.

  The girls did have a smart mother, or rather, they had a smart mother, and her interpretation of Phil’s dream stuck with them.

  Their father could get out of anything.

  “Which is why,” Julia explained to Ruthie in the dark of her bedroom, “the instructions in the will are so absurd. They’re like . . . they’re like a recipe for a cake no one will ever bake. They don’t need to work.”

  “But what about Mom?” asked Ruthie. “She worried about everything. And she was always giving us her little ‘cautionary tales.’ Like if I told her I was going to walk to Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, she’d tell me about the girl who just the week before was kidnapped while walking there. How a van pulled up to her, and a lady leaned out the passenger window and asked for directions. How the girl couldn’t hear what she was saying and so she stepped closer, and suddenly someone jumped out of the back of the van, grabbed the girl, and whisked her inside before the van took off at a hundred miles an hour, never to be seen again.”

  “But think about it, Ruthie. Mom never worried about her own death. She worried about ours. She probably worried so much about ours that she forgot that she could die, too.”

  “I still can’t believe she’d send you to live with Peggy.”

  “I don’t know what choice Mom had. Peggy’s married to my dad.”

  “But you don’t even know him,” said Ruthie. “Not really. I probably know Robert and Mimi as well as you know him.”

  “That’s not really Dad’s fault. Mom’s the one who left.”

  “But Peggy is so—so awful. Think about the first time you met her.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Tell the story,” Ruthie demanded. “About that first time.”

  It was a horrible story, deliciously so, and one that Julia told well.

  “I’ll tell it only if you’ll tickle my arm while I do, and scratch my back afterwards.”

  “For how long?”

  “For as long as it takes me to tell it.”

  “No, I mean how long do I have to scratch your back afterwards?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Five,” said Ruthie.

  Because Julia never took off her black Swatch, wearing it even to bed, she was the one to keep track of time whenever Ruthie agreed to scratch her back. The hands of the watch did glow in the dark, making it easy for Julia to count the minutes, but Ruthie was pretty sure that her sister cheated, counting one minute for every two.

  “Eight,” said Julia.

  Ruthie gave an exaggerated sigh and then agreed to the deal.

  Julia stretched her arm out on top of the sheet and Ruthie began running her nails up and down it.

  “Dad and Peggy had just that spring gotten married, and none of us had met her yet, though we had heard from Mom’s old neighbor in Virden that Peggy was really pretty and really young. She was twenty-two, which was actually two years older than Mom was when she married my dad. She had just graduated from college, from Radford University, and she was already pregnant with Sam.

  “The plan was for me to spend the first week of July with Dad and Peggy in Virden. S
o July first Mom, Phil, me, and you all drive up there. Of course you were only a baby, so you mostly just slept and pooped. I remember Mom insisting we take the Volvo wagon instead of the Mercedes. She didn’t want to be flaunting Phil’s wealth. Phil pooh-poohed her of course—claiming she was a reverse snob—but he went along with her wishes.”

  Phil was always proclaiming his wife and daughters reverse snobs.

  “It was a long drive from Atlanta to Virden, despite the fact that Phil terrified Mom by driving really fast. Along the way he made three stops, once for McDonald’s and twice for a bathroom break. He wouldn’t have stopped that many times, but Mom insisted.”

  “He loved to make good time,” said Ruthie, remembering the uncomfortable sensation of holding her pee during car trips to visit their relatives in Union City, Tennessee.

  “When we were getting back into the car after lunch at McDonald’s, Mom glanced at me while fastening you into the car seat. ‘Damn it,’ she said, which was surprising because she rarely cursed. I had a ketchup stain across the pretty little ruffled T-shirt she had dressed me in. She sighed—you remember those sighs of hers—but then she said, ‘Oh well. Peggy is going to have to get used to the fact that young children are messy.’

  “Which is all to say that I arrived looking a little out of sorts. Phil pulled the Volvo into the driveway of the little brick ranch on Fairwoods Road, and before Mom had a chance to fix my hair or help me find a new shirt this pretty pixie of a woman opened the door and came and stood on the front porch, looking toward the car.

  “‘There she is,’ said Mom. ‘And she certainly is attractive.’

  “Peggy was wearing a bright yellow blouse tucked into a wraparound denim skirt with a big butterfly embroidered on its side. She was so tiny and cute. She didn’t look pregnant at all. She wore her blond hair in a long braid down her back. She looked like a preschool teacher, like someone who would greet you at the classroom door, hold your hand, and lead you over to the table where the apple juice and cookies were all set out.

  “When Mom saw Peggy standing on the porch, she put the pink plastic Goody brush back in the glove compartment. ‘I guess we should go meet your new stepmommy,’ she said.

  “Phil had already gotten out of the car. He opened my door. I stepped out and started walking on the front grass toward Peggy.

  “‘Sweetheart, use the path, please,’ she called, in her melodious, tinkling voice. And so I walked over to the brick path that wound from the driveway to the door. Phil and Naomi hung back, hovering by the Volvo, as if planning to take off as soon as they saw me safely enter the house. I was so anxious that they were going to leave that I kept turning around, checking to make sure they were still there.

  “Finally I reached Peggy. I remember being overwhelmed by how pretty she was, with her shiny blond hair, the light dusting of freckles over her cheeks, her heart-shaped lips.

  “She studied me for a moment and then said, ‘My goodness, for all the child support Matt sends, I would have thought you’d come better dressed!’”

  Ruthie squealed in horror. Peggy was like someone out of a fairy tale, but with a twist. From her looks and general cheerfulness you would assume her to be a good witch when really, underneath, she was awful.

  Or at least, that was how Julia painted her to be.

  “Of course then she blushed, realizing she’d been rude, I guess, and said, ‘Well, this just means we can go shopping at the mall and get you some cute new things!’”

  “God,” said Ruthie. “What a mag.” “Mag” was a word that Ruthie had invented. It meant “bitch,” but you could say it without swearing.

  “I think she was actually trying to be nice at that moment. Trying to be chummy.”

  “Okay. Then what a dumb butt.”

  “Yep,” said Julia, “I think Mom scared Dad out of marrying smart women. Not to mention women his own age.”

  Peggy was only five years Matt’s junior, but even though she was now thirty-five she seemed younger. There was just something so girlish about her, so hopelessly naïve. She was someone who adored the idea of projects—but was horrible at follow-through. Julia loved to tell Ruthie about all of the unused appliances in Peggy’s kitchen: the Cuisinart that was purchased so she could make homemade baby food for her one and only biological child, Sam; the pasta roller; the ice-cream maker; the juicer.

  They all went untouched. Gerber, Mueller’s, Breyers, and Tropicana filled Peggy’s grocery cart instead.

  “She’s an overgrown, very pretty child,” said Julia. “And now she’s supposed to be my mom.”

  Julia turned over and lifted her shirt around her shoulders. Ruthie still owed her eight minutes.

  The next afternoon when Julia and Ruthie arrived home from school—they had returned to Coventry that Monday, after taking the week of the funeral off—Mimi was sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking a glass of white wine and flipping through a Horchow catalog.

  “Hi, beauties,” she said, smiling sadly.

  During the week and a half that Mimi had been with them, her moods had been erratic. Sometimes she was all spirit and energy, as if it were up to her to replace her nieces’ grief with joy. Other times she would burst into a little crying jag, apologizing between shakes if either Ruthie or Julia was around.

  “Hi,” said Ruthie, dropping her L.L. Bean backpack—heavy with books—onto the floor. Julia, who carried her books in a woven Guatemalan bag that Dmitri had given her back when they were dating, placed the bag on the counter. Judging from its drape, it didn’t look as if it had much in it.

  “Ruthie, you want a Coke?” Julia asked as she walked toward the refrigerator.

  “Okay.”

  Julia prided herself on drinking regular Coke and not Diet, and she impressed upon Ruthie that this was an important choice for girls to make, so they wouldn’t appear to be vapid, only concerned with looks and calories. Julia also told Ruthie that it was necessary for every woman to know how to drive a straight shift. Jake had taught her how, using his dad’s 1974 BMW 2002.

  Julia retrieved two red cans of Coke from the middle shelf of the fridge, along with two packages of string cheese. She handed one of each to Ruthie, then sat beside Mimi on one of the bar stools by the counter.

  “So, Meems, I have a question for you.”

  Mimi raised her brows a little but didn’t say anything about being called Meems.

  “Say my dad wasn’t around. Say something awful happened to him and he was dead. What would have happened to me? Do you think Mom and Phil would have had me go live with you? Or with Aunt Linda, or what?”

  Linda was Naomi’s older sister who lived in Memphis. She had gotten pregnant at age sixteen, which had scandalized Naomi’s parents, as well as their fellow members of First Methodist Church in Union City, Tennessee. But Linda had made it work. She married the boyfriend who impregnated her, had the baby, finished high school, had another baby, and proceeded to earn her BA in elementary education. By twenty-four she was a second-grade teacher. By the time she was thirty-eight both of her sons had left home for college and she and her husband started taking backpacking trips through Europe every summer, reveling in their long-awaited freedom.

  Surely Linda would have resented being asked to finish raising another child after forfeiting her adolescence in order to raise her own. Plus, she and Naomi were not close. Linda had been unsympathetic regarding Naomi’s decision to leave Matt; when Naomi tried to explain to her sister that she was driven to leave Matt for Phil, that it was as if she had no choice, Linda told her that she was acting like a child, and that for her own child’s sake she should “just snap out of it.” Naomi used to tell her daughters that she was happy that the two of them had each other. That it was important to have a sister you could trust and confide in.

  Ruthie, who had also settled on one of the stools and was halfway through her piece of string cheese, did not say anything about the unlikelihood of Linda’s taking Julia, fearing that her sister would feel unwante
d. Instead, Ruthie teased Julia.

  “Say something awful happened . . . ,” she echoed, attempting a deep Jersey accent, as if she were a member of the Mafia. “Jeez, Julia, what are you going to do, put a hit on your dad?”

  Ever since the accident Ruthie had found herself full of a sort of dark, inappropriate humor.

  “Sweetheart,” said Mimi, ignoring Ruthie’s joke and placing her manicured hand on Julia’s forearm. “If your father was not around to care for you, of course you could come live with us. That would be optimal, wouldn’t it, for you and Ruthie to stay together? I hope you know that even though you are going to be moving to Virden at the end of the school year, we want you to come visit us as often as possible in San Francisco. Maybe we can even talk Peggy and Matt into letting us have you over the summer.”

  “Really?” asked Ruthie.

  “If it’s okay with Peggy and Matt, it’s okay with Robert and me.”

  Ruthie turned to beam at Julia—this, finally, was good news—but Julia was staring straight ahead, her forehead wrinkled, as if in anger. Or concentration.

  Julia took off in her Saab early that evening, so it was just Mimi and Ruthie at dinner, which was not unusual. They each ate a Lean Cuisine—Mimi apologizing for not cooking, saying that in San Francisco it was usually Robert who fixed all of the meals. Mimi had another glass of wine while Ruthie drank milk. Afterwards Ruthie went up to her room to finish her homework, which she had already started on the car ride home with Julia.

  She sat on her bed, her books spread about her, reading The Wizard of Oz. They were reading it for history class, because it had something to do with American politics and populism. According to their teacher, the Cowardly Lion stood for William Jennings Bryan, whom they had just discussed that day in class. Ruthie kept forgetting that she was supposed to be reading the book symbolically. She just found it thrilling to read an interesting book for history, especially one whose story she already knew so well from having watched the movie starring Judy Garland countless times.