Ask Him Why (20 page)

I pulled apart all my stuff in the basement. Laid it out to take inventory. It had been too hastily packed in used cartons from the grocery store. And worse yet, plastic garbage bags.

It seemed to amount to about half of what I figured I owned. Or used to own.

I never asked where everything else had gone. What difference did it make? It was gone.

The basement did have a working phone line, so I could do dial-up Internet. So I sat in the basement, on piles of clothes, and Googled my own name. My old name. And the sentence
Ten years is not enough
in quotes.

I watched the number of hits until it climbed up over a million.

I attempted to savor what I had done.

I carefully ignored the fact that it was already clear Luanne was right. The thrill of doing the unthinkable was wearing off.

I had accomplished exactly nothing.

That’s really all I have to say about that summer of my life. Hell, that next nine years of my life.

What else can I say that’s interesting?

The nice thing about my life—the
only
nice thing about my life—from May 2003 to August 2004 is that it was unique. It was hell, but it was unlike anybody else’s. And it made people’s eyes go wide. It made a good story. Nobody else knew how it would feel to be me. Why do you think they were crowding our gates with cameras and microphones, asking?

But our mother was right. Damn her, she was right. For once. Joseph did not continue to be interesting. So neither did we.

I resented that.

It was one thing to disrupt our lives because we mattered. It was quite another to disrupt our lives because we mattered for a split second in the great scheme of their news cycles. Disrupt and discard. Now
that
you could grow to resent.

After that, we were just like everybody else.

After that, it was just life at the Rogers household.

We had very little. We struggled to make ends meet. Four people got by on one car. When we asked for things, we were mostly told “no.” We had to wear our shoes until they were too tight and our jeans until they showed too much of our ankles.

After a year or two, my dad worked his way back up to a better position. We moved into a slightly bigger house. But he never spent more than we had again. So it was still pretty different from the way it had once been.

Then our dad left our mom, and us, for a younger woman.

But even so. Let’s face it. All those details—even the last one—made us anything but unique.

What’s the point of telling a story that 98 percent of the people in the country could just as easily tell?

Part Four

Blindside

Spring 2013

Chapter Seventeen: Ruth

I had Maya on the diapering table and in a briefly undiapered state when my cell phone rang. Motherhood dictated that I didn’t dare leave her alone for even a split second to go fetch it off the dresser, but I could see it from where I stood, and I could see who was calling. I wasn’t close enough to read names or numbers, but I had it programmed to bring up a photo of most of my regular callers.

I found myself peering, at some distance, into the wrinkled and wizened, yet beautiful, face of Regina MacCallum, Ham’s seventy-year-old daughter.

“Oh, shit,” I said, and then clapped my one guaranteed-clean hand over my mouth. “You didn’t hear that,” I told Maya. “And you’re not old enough to repeat the things you hear.” Then, as more of a mumble to myself, “And I have to grow a filter before she
gets
old enough.”

The phone was still ringing, of course. And my heart had more than sunk—it had crashed through the nursery floor.

“Sean!” I yelled out at the top of my lungs, and Maya startled and cried briefly.

“I’m in the shower!” he yelled back.

“Can you come help me? It’s important!”

He stumbled in maybe thirty seconds later—dripping onto the hardwood, towel in one hand, hair still full of shampoo—but of course by then, the phone had stopped ringing and gone to voice mail.

“Can you finish diapering her? It’s Regina. I have to call her back as fast as I can. I’m afraid—”

“I know what you’re afraid of,” he said. “Go.”

I grabbed up my phone and touched the screen twice to ring back her number. It rang three times, which felt frustrating. Shouldn’t she be right there beside it? She’d called like a split second ago. I prayed she wasn’t marching through a list of notifications, one after the other, already having moved on to her next call. I watched Sean coo at the baby and dry himself off at the same time.

Then she picked up.

“Ruthie,” she said in that beautiful Scottish voice. “First of all, I know I scared the piss out of you, so let me start by saying my father is still on this earth.”

“Oh, thank God. Is he okay?”

“Not very, Ruth, no,” she said, with that distinctive inflection on the
R
s. “He has pneumonia. He’s in the hospital in San Fran, and the doctors are treating it. And he’s a tough old bugger, you know? So he might pop up just fine, like those blow-up clown dolls you can’t ever knock down for long. But I don’t have to tell you that everything’s a bit of a scare when you’re ninety-five. Here’s hoping I’m worrying you for nothing, Ruthie, but if I didn’t tell you, and you’d missed the chance to see him . . . I couldn’t have lived with myself over that.”

I realized I had one hand to my chest, breathing in relief. I looked up at Sean, who was wrapping Maya in a clean disposable diaper, the towel around his waist, and gave him a little thumbs-up.

“No, of course, you did just the right thing, Regina. I’ll come up.”

“Excellent. Here’s hoping I worried us all for nothing and it’s just a lovely chance to visit. Haven’t seen you in ages, Ruthie.”

“Well, of course it’s been harder with the baby . . .”

The baby. Right. Good self-reminder. It was hard to get away for a visit with the baby, and I still had one of those.

“Can you manage it now?” Regina asked, as if reading my mind.

“I’ll work it out. I’ll call you when I know my timing.”

And we said our good-byes so I could hurry off the phone.

I looked up at Sean with a look in my eyes that I’m guessing communicated the question just fine, because he never forced me to ask it.

“How long will you need to be gone?”

“If I fly, maybe just two days,” I said. “Two and a half, maybe.”

“So that’s three days off work for me.”

“I’ll take Maya.”

“Into a hospital?”

“No. Right, I won’t. What if I got my mother here?”

“That would help. Think she’ll do it?”

“Are you kidding? She lives for her granddaughter. As she so often tells us. Just in case we were fooled into thinking her life had anything to do with us.”

“Short notice, though.”

“I’ll call her.”

“No,” he said. “Go.” He snapped the last snap of Maya’s onesie and lifted her by her underarms, setting her on her freshly dry butt in her crib. Then he took me by both shoulders. “I’ll take tomorrow off work. I’ll call it in as a family emergency. I’ll put the baby’s car seat in my car, and Maya and I will drive out to Bakersfield and pick up your mom.”

I sighed out a frightening amount of tension—I’d been in a deeply rattled panic mode without fully realizing it—and relaxed between his hands. Then I rested my temple against his bare chest.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” I said. “But if I ever identify it, I’ll do it again.”

“I know what Ham means to you.”

I took a deep breath and then pulled away, ready to get down to the task of packing.

At the nursery door, it hit me.

“I just had a terrible thought,” I said. “Joseph is due to get out of prison in less than a month. If that’s too late to see Ham again . . . if he misses him by only that much . . . can you imagine how bad he’ll feel?”

Sean chewed on that for a moment, then said, “Wouldn’t Ham say that’s one of those life situations that’s entirely out of our control?”

“Well played,” I said, and got down to packing for my trip.

Sean dropped me at LAX, one small overnight bag on my lap.

“I’ll call when I know more,” I said.

“Give Ham my best. And if you feel like you need to stay longer, we’ll manage.”

I leaned over and grabbed him around the neck and pulled us closer together, so that I was more or less hugging his head.

“You’re amazing. And appreciated.”

I kissed him on the temple and then pulled away, leaving him smiling shyly as if I’d embarrassed him in front of a crowd.

I jumped out, then opened the back door and leaned in and gave Maya a kiss on her smooth, soft-haired, sweet-smelling baby head.

“You be a good girl for your daddy,” I said.

I had a flash of the future—the not-too-distant future—when she’d be old enough to call me “Mommy.” Would I even be able to walk away with her voice calling out to me, appealing to me by my sudden new name?

I pushed the thought away again and slammed the door, waving as they drove away.

Then I pulled my phone out of my pocket, mostly to see if I’d missed an update from the airline. So far there had been no flight delays, but I wasn’t entirely sure I believed in the concept of an undelayed flight.

There was one voice mail, and it was from Regina. I froze, feeling my heart fall again. And I don’t mean a light sag. I just kept feeling it, and it just kept going down. With half-paralyzed fingers, I played back the message.

“Ruthie, it’s Regina, and it’s not bad news.” I filled my lungs with a much-needed new breath. “Notice how fast I said that? It’s actually good news. They’ve released him, and we’re taking him home right now. So don’t catch a cab and go to the hospital. That would be pointless. Just go to the curb and I’ll pick you up. Or somebody will. I’ll make sure I get you a ride.”

I saved the message, though I’m not sure why I thought I’d need it again, and then stood there like a statue for three breaths, just enjoying the sense of relief. But I didn’t have much time to waste.

I got myself into the vast and unruly security line as fast as I could trot.

I paced the curb at San Francisco International for fifteen or twenty minutes, wishing I knew more about what I was waiting for. Regina’s car I would know on sight, but if she sent somebody else, would I know the somebody else? Could I trust the somebody else to know me?

She will’ve given them your cell number,
I thought.
Stop worrying.

Then I saw Regina’s car a good way down the line, surrounded by buses and airport shuttles. It was an old powder-blue four-door Mercedes, maybe twenty or twenty-five years old, with custom plates: “GR SCOT.”

It was close enough now that I could read the plates and also see that it wasn’t Regina driving. It was a man I hadn’t met before, in a big-brimmed Australian outback hat and dark sunglasses, maybe thirtysomething.

Just for a moment, I regretted the prospect of having to make conversation with a stranger.

He pulled over as soon as he saw me, before I could even raise my arms to wave, so that was interesting. He must have seen a photo of me or something.

I opened the back door and threw my bag in, then dropped into the passenger seat.

“Ruth Rogers,” I said, and held my hand out for him to shake.

He just stared at it, which made for a strange moment. I probably could have counted to fifteen slowly while I sat there and wondered what was up.

“Duck,” he said. “It’s me.”

Then I was the one who just sat quietly and stared.

He lifted his hat and pulled down his sunglasses, then gave me a shy smile, and I saw that he was afraid of this meeting.

“Joseph?” I asked, my voice hushed with surprise. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“It’s my horse-ranch disguise,” he said, setting the hat and glasses back into place.

“Not just that. You used to be a skinny little guy.”

He was wearing a salmon-colored T-shirt that showed off his broad shoulders, and his bulky upper arms stretched the short sleeves, causing them to rise up.

“Well, you know that cliché about guys working out in prison,” he said.

A sharp rap on the driver’s window made us both jump. We looked over to see a uniformed traffic cop, who signaled Joseph to get moving.

“Right,” he said, mostly to me. “Time to go.”

He pulled away from the curb, and we drove in silence through the curved maze of airport lanes, headed for the exit and the 101 freeway.

“I didn’t even know you were out,” I said. “When did you get out?”

“March,” he said. No elaboration.

“I thought you were getting out in May.”

“No. March.”

“But they put you in pretrial confinement in May of 2003. And I heard they were going to give you credit for that time served. So that would be May of this year.”

“There was a little time off for good behavior.”

“Oh. I didn’t know the army gave time off for good behavior.”

“They do. If they didn’t normally, I’m sure Brad’s hotshot lawyer would have pressed for it. Since they do, he mostly concentrated on getting me a release date while I was still younger than Hammy is now.”

“Brad got you a lawyer?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No. And I’m amazed. Because he was so tight with money. And he was busy going broke at the time.”

“Mom’s idea, I’m sure.”

I thought it was interesting that he’d called her “Janet” when he was younger, but called her “Mom” now. Maybe people get dearer during a ten-year prison sentence. Maybe even Janet. Or maybe, as you get older, your parents come back around to being your parents. Maybe that independent moment when you push them away is only a phase.

“I still can’t figure out where he got all that—”

But then I could. It sounds like a lot to be able to remember ten years later, but it was just one of those odd mysteries that gets stuck in your head. I’d never forgotten our mom telling us how, at some point before filing bankruptcy, Brad had borrowed a bunch of money and paid something that needed paying and bought that cheap car. I could feel at the time that she’d papered over something, some expenditure she didn’t care to talk about. Now I knew.