We spent the month living with Joe Brewer in town, me in my new school and Mother doing some kind of training with Joe Brewer so she could get a job. I was broken in unspeakable ways. Mother was better, but I worried where we would go, or what we would do. I wasn’t entirely sure Eleanor had trained Mother enough to take care of me all by herself. I missed Eleanor Rose so much it hurt my heart, the real one beating in my chest.
I often wandered around the apartment pointlessly, trying to be grateful because I knew that was what Eleanor would have wanted. I wanted to please her; after all, I had made that bargain with God, but I didn’t recognize the bargain anymore. She was alive, but in prison. What kind of deal was that?
One night I was particularly restless; I had done my homework and gone back to the kitchen to wash the dinner dishes. The hot water on my hands calmed me. I wondered why I had ever thought I had healing hands. Who had I ever healed, really, medically? I couldn’t even heal myself into hope. While the water ran, reddening my hands, I told myself that healing takes time.
Joe Brewer came up from behind. He reached over my shoulder and turned the water off. He hugged me.
I wiggled away and walked out to the terrace. He followed me. The constant thought of my Eleanor Rose in prison cut like razors at my heart.
I said, “I thought trusting would make a happy ending. But I didn’t know that I would lose Eleanor…”
“Trust is stepping into the unknown,” he said.
“I do that,” I said. “I step into the unknown all the time.”
“I know you do. But trust is stepping into the unknown with another person. Together. Trusting the other to have your back. I have your back.”
Joe Brewer took my hand and held it to his heart. We stood looking at the sparkling lights, which were so very beautiful, painfully beautiful.
I realized for the first time that I wasn’t dizzy in his apartment anymore. The floor didn’t feel like it was swaying beneath my feet. I was on solid ground, sort of. Solid ground up in the sky.
That’s when Joe Brewer told me that he had found another place for us to live, a place where Mother and he could both find work and we could start over.
“You’re coming with us?” I asked.
Joe Brewer said, “I couldn’t control the case, Ruby Clyde. But caring for you is something I have complete control over. You and your mother will never be alone.”
“I like that,” I said. “And so would Eleanor.”
“Yes,” he nodded. “She was counting on it. That was part of her plan.”
* * *
Joe Brewer was moving us to St. Louis. Of course we had to go. We couldn’t stay anywhere else in Texas. But I knew that I would keep the Hill Country in my heart forever. Turtles carry their homes with them, why couldn’t I? Besides, my home was no longer a place, it was my people. People heal each other, and it takes time.
I was not certain that I knew what to do with a fresh start. Trouble was familiar. Trouble had seemed to be my destiny. I had embraced trouble and survived. A new and unfamiliar life was coming. The gift of a new life—freely given from Eleanor to the three of us—was the last thing I ever expected. Every day would be a gift.
Joe Brewer got a job in St. Louis. St. Joe, he was.
“You’d give up your job here, for us?” I asked, when he first explained it to me. He wasn’t giving up anything, he said. He was gaining everything.
“Besides,” he spoke slowly as if he were working it out in his head, “I don’t feel that I can be an officer of the Texas court any longer. I didn’t plan this, but I turned a blind eye and allowed it to happen.”
“Are you sorry?” I asked.
“Heavens no! I’d do it again. Listen to me, Ruby. I have given this much thought. Certain people will think that what I have done is wrong. And they would be correct. Other people will think that what I have done is right. And they would also be correct. Sometimes we are faced with impossible choices. And that is life. But I can’t stand up in the same Texas court in good conscience, as if nothing has occurred. That would be a lie. We know the truth. We will go forth and build our new life on the truth. I will be like your uncle. Would you like that?”
My uncle? Joe Brewer may not have known it but he would be more than my uncle soon enough. I’d seen his eyes when he looked at Mother. I knew the extra hours he gave us. He’d given up his job. Joe Brewer could say whatever he wanted, but I knew better. I was no fool. And frankly, I liked getting back to knowing more about adults than they knew about themselves.
And wouldn’t you know it, even though he’d given up the practice of law in Texas, Joe Brewer could still teach it in Missouri. He had a job teaching legal ethics in St. Louis and running a clinic for the downtrodden. We’d go there, to St. Louis, and be a family: an uncle, a mother, a little girl.
Joe Brewer had everything in his apartment packed up by professional movers. Mother and I had very little of our own. We left the household items at the ranch for the next nun. Eleanor Rose had few worldly possessions, as she called them, only the books by Charles Dickens, which she wanted me to have and made me promise to read, every one of them.
Nobody was at the ranch on the day we stopped by to pick up the books that Eleanor Rose had insisted we take with us. I lifted them off the shelf one by one, dusting them and placing them in a cardboard box. “Be sure to look at Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities,” she said twice, and she made Joe Brewer promise to remember. “I’ve left messages for you there,” she said.
When I opened Oliver Twist, an envelope fell out. Eleanor had written Barbara across the front. I picked it up from the floor and shook the book, hoping to find a letter for me. There wasn’t one, but Eleanor had written in the front of the book:
Dearest Ruby Clyde,
I have done everything in my power to keep you from being an orphan like Oliver Twist. The rest is up to you.
Love always, ER.
P.S. When you are ready to have birthdays again, start with A Tale of Two Cities. It is the story of an innocent man who gives his life for someone he loves.
Joe Brewer carried the box of books to the car. I took Mother’s letter outside, where she stood on the porch. I handed her the letter from Eleanor Rose. She took it and read it to herself, then she read it to me.
Dearest Barbara,
Please forgive me for shutting you out of my life. We waste our lives for reasons that, looking back, seem so small, so wasteful. We throw out love because it doesn’t reach the level of perfection that we demand. At the first pain, we run, but we must walk through pain to find our way back to love.
Love begets love, even if the love is in small flawed pieces.
Ruby Clyde taught me about pieces of love. Let her teach you also.
What happened to that child is enough to bring a grown man to his knees. She will tell you, in time, about hearing the gunshots at the gas station. About being alone under the stars with no hope. She has walked through pain like a tiny soldier. It is time for her to find what’s left of her childhood in a peaceful place.
All she has wanted from us was complete love, but we could only give her pieces of it. Maybe pieces of love is all that we can give one another. Maybe pieces of love must be enough for all of us. But it feels like Ruby Clyde has given me more and that is why I gave my freedom for her, my whole love so that she can have a mother.
Can you take care of her now, Barbara, for both of us? Will you?
Your sister, your twin,
Eleanor Rose
My mother lowered the letter and looked at me. “Yes, I can take care of you. I can and I will.” Shading her eyes with one hand, she looked out past the peach orchard to the sunlit hill and said, “This is your day, Ruby Clyde.”
* * *
I am sitting in the backseat of Joe Brewer’s car. We are headed east. There’s a big wide river in St. Louis—the Mississippi. I crossed it once, when I was asleep, the night Catfish drove us west. I plan to be awake this time to see the water flowing from the north, from towns I have never seen, water swirling in a muddy rush south toward the Gulf of Mexico where it will mix with salt water and spread across the whole entire world.
A Tale of Two Cities (one of the books by Mr. Charles Dickens) is open on my lap. Eleanor Rose wrote in the front: This is the story of a man who gave his life for love. Please know, Ruby Clyde, that it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.
I turn the pages and read the first lines of the book:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope …
Eleanor underlined those last words—the spring of hope. I flip through and see that she underlined many passages and made notes to me in the margins. I close the book and look at the road ahead. In time, I know I will read her pieces of love to me, but not now—later, when I am ready again for birthdays.