One evening, not long after the bad news, Eleanor called me down to the front room. I left Bunny by the bed. The stairs weren’t so easy for him anymore, all that growing. Once a day was plenty. I scampered down the stairs in my blue balloon pajamas.
Eleanor and Mother wanted to talk to me, she said. I sat on a stool facing them. They sat on the leather sofa looking at me.
Finally Eleanor said, “Ruby Clyde, this is going to seem exceedingly strange to you.”
Strange didn’t bother me, I thought. What could be stranger than my entire life? I waited.
Eleanor lifted a stack of papers that was beside her on the sofa.
She cleared her throat and said, “Your mother and I have been worried about what is to become of you.”
I knew that—nothing strange there. What was to become of me was the first thing I worried about every morning.
“Joe Brewer has informed us that it is possible that Barbara will go to prison for ten years. That means that you will be without a mother until you are twenty-two years old.”
Mother took over the conversation and said, “We have a plan.”
Silence.
“Does anybody want to tell me this plan?” I asked.
“Eleanor is going to adopt you,” Mother blurted.
Okay, that was strange.
“We know this is sudden, Ruby Clyde.” Mother took the papers from Eleanor’s hands and held them up for me to see. “But we are running out of time. And if they put me back in jail…”
“But they won’t,” I said. “You’re innocent.”
And then I remembered what Mother had said back in the jail, the first time I saw her after the robbery. She hadn’t wanted me then, and she still didn’t.
“Fine, just give me away, if that’s what you want to do,” I said. And the weirdest thing was that I didn’t mind being owned by Eleanor Rose, but I didn’t want Mother to give me away.
“Listen to the whole plan, Ruby Clyde,” Eleanor said.
Mother and Eleanor Rose looked at each other, then Eleanor Rose leaned toward me, took my hand, and said, “There’s more. First, the three of us are going into family court and arrange this adoption. Then your mother and I are going to swap places. So if anybody had to go to prison it would be me.”
Holy cow! Holy Longhorn cow!
They were going to swap places. Mother and Eleanor Rose. Mother would put on Eleanor Rose’s nun habit, and Eleanor Rose would put on Mother’s dress and … if anybody went to jail it would be Aunt Eleanor.
“Wait a minute!” I yelled. “She can’t wear your habit. Don’t you have to give it back?”
“I can take my time,” she said. And when I looked back and forth between Mother and Eleanor I saw they were dead serious.
“Your brains have walked right out the door and floated away into the clouds.”
I stomped upstairs, closed the door, and threw myself into bed. I leaned over the edge to speak to Bunny on the floor. “Oh, pig of mine, we are living in a monkey house and they are throwing bananas at us.” He pointed his piggy eyes at me as if this was old news.
The sisters followed me upstairs and sat on my bed. Holding my hands. Crowding me.
“No!” I said. “I can’t choose between you.”
That’s when Eleanor took my chin in her hand and made me look her in the eye.
“Ruby Clyde,” she said. “This is not your decision. It is mine. You are the child and I am the adult. This is my life. No matter what you say, I will not change my mind. So don’t ever look back on this day and think it was your decision.”
She explained her plan, step by step, and told me exactly what she expected me to do.
“But you’ll get caught,” I said. I had questions and I expected to get answers. I had given the criminal-minded twins control of my life, and this was what they did. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
They had thought it all out. Nobody else knew they were identical twins except Joe Brewer, because the way they dressed disguised that fact. Mother in her summer dresses and newly short hair. Eleanor who hid her newly grown stubble under her nun’s wimple. It would be easy to swap clothes.
“What about your cancer?”
Mother explained that nobody had done a medical exam yet. If she was convicted, they would do an intake exam at the women’s prison over in Mountain View. A strip search, she called it. I thought that would be pretty embarrassing, to get naked and be searched by strangers.
Other than the cancer, she said, they were identical.
“Not the fingerprints,” Eleanor reminded her. “We are not exactly 100 percent identical. But Joe Brewer told them that the fingerprints they took of Barbara when they booked her in the jail are just filed in a national database. If they fingerprint again at Mountain View Prison it will also be uploaded to a database of millions of fingerprints. Nobody is ever likely to pull them out and compare every little sworl. So long as neither of us gets arrested.”
She turned her eyes to Mother as if to say that she expected Mother to never get arrested again.
They were going to practice swapping places beforehand. They would go to the clinic and family court. If they pulled off the adoption, then they would swap places for the trial.
“Is Joe Brewer okay with this?” I couldn’t believe that a man like that would ever agree to their scheme.
“He hasn’t been told, if you know what I mean,” Mother said.
“It’s called plausible deniability,” Eleanor said.
Deniability was a Wordly Wizard word, but I didn’t shout it out. We weren’t speaking the same language anymore. We were living in the Tower of Babel.
“He loves you, Ruby Clyde,” Mother said.
“If you can’t handle this,” Eleanor said, “tell us right now. Because if you ever tell, we all go down. It is the only thing you have to do. Keep your mouth shut forever.”
She knew that was not an easy thing to ask of me. My mouth was one of my best weapons. But if it meant keeping the ones I loved safe, then I could lock my lips closed for the rest of my life.