Ruth
Scott answered on the second ring. “Are you all right?”
Ruth had felt strong while dialing, but the moment she heard his voice, she broke down.
“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Let me take this in another room.”
She caught her breath between sobs. “You’re not alone.”
“No. We were watching a movie. It’s okay. Just tell me what’s going on.”
Ruth could picture the moment: Margot on the couch, movie paused, half-empty plates, two beer bottles. The life she would have lived. Obsession had stolen that possibility from her. Ruth now knew that this obsession had a purpose, but she couldn’t let her distress about Kennidy obscure the path forward.
She explained the daybook codes and the even more damning evidence-destruction letter. “Now I understand why Gwen was able to buy the house so cheap and why Ken went into a tailspin . . . And I know who it was, Scott. He’s still at the school. We’ve got to do something about it.”
“Wait a minute. Stay calm. The only thing you know for sure—the only thing you think you know—is that your sister was dating someone named V. And that’s just based on scribbled notes.”
“V isn’t a common letter, Scott. And it came right after several notations for Coach V. All the other names dropped away: the other boys, her other girlfriends, too—everything else.”
Scott was silent at the other end of the line.
Ruth said, “The other day, I saw Vorst wearing a Toronto Blue Jays jacket. The one with the blue bird and a little red maple leaf, for Canada, obviously.”
“Yes, that’s where the Blue Jays are from. Everyone but you knows that.”
She ignored the taunt. “How many people have anything with that logo in our town?”
“A few dozen?”
“It reminded me. I saw a pennant like that years ago, at the cabin I went to with Kennidy.”
“I’m lost now.”
“That’s not all. Reece told me Vorst is known as a predator. The kids at school talk about it. Reece knows it. He’s been getting away with this for years.”
“Well . . .”
“Don’t do this to me, Scott.” Her sinuses were filling, and her throat hurt both from crying and trying to hold in those tears. “It’s exactly what I did to her. What my mother did to her.”
“Bad things happened to Ken, and they didn’t happen to you. It’s normal to feel guilt about that. Do you think that’s where this overreaction is coming from?”
“Overreaction?”
“You sound a little hysterical.”
That word. A century later, and so little had changed. She exhaled slowly. “As for the guilt, you were the one who always thought guilt was pointless. I do feel guilt, but what I’m trying to focus on here is responsibility. It’s only fair to Ken to find out what really happened. To be a witness and get some kind of justice, even though it’s too late. It’s even more important to keep an eye on Vorst, and to think about other students he might be—”
“Stay calm, Ruth.”
He’d said that to her twice now. Now that she thought about it, during their two years together, he’d often told her to stay calm, which had always enraged her more.
“It’s on us to make sure he’s not harming other kids, Scott. Please don’t let me down.”
“We’ll talk.”
“Talk?”
“After I ask around discreetly.”
“Inform the principal, at a minimum. Reports, even casual ones, have an effect.”
“So does gossip.”
“But maybe gossip has a function, when people’s stories line up. Sometimes gossip needs to be looked into.”
“I hear you.”
“Stop using your faculty-meeting voice. Please don’t be detached about this.”
“You’re going to tell me what voice to use? Ruth, I’m trying to help here.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I take that back. I just can’t . . .”
“Let me find a way. I don’t want to start slandering a good man based on some confused codes in a teenager’s journal from half a decade ago.”
“Okay,” she said. She wasn’t sobbing any more, but she still wasn’t satisfied. “Thank you, Scott. But please, don’t put it off.”
Let it out.
But she couldn’t.
She washed her face. She looked in the mirror. Nothing was right anymore.
Ten minutes after hanging up with Scott, Ruth called Joe again, who answered from his home office. It was late, but he was awake and would be for several more hours. He never got any writing done unless the kids were asleep. “What’s up?”
“Those American Indians who saw the distant future—did any of them think they could change it?”
“Yes, they believed change was possible and that prophecy wasn’t failproof prediction. But I don’t have a ready-made story of a specific personal disaster averted, if that’s what you’re asking for.”
“But in general?”
“Well, I’d say if a lot of Indians could have seen the future and easily changed it, North America would have a million more brown faces today. And one less Kevin Costner movie.”
“I’m serious, Joe.”
“Me too.”
At least he was listening. Joe could joke or argue or grow quiet, but he always listened without judgment or a time limit.
“How about traveling to the past? Do they talk about that?”
“Time travel? Not in so many words. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t.” Classic Joe, no absolutes and no surprise at the turn their chat had taken. “I imagine if they had special skills—visions, ways of traveling through time in either direction—they would have used them.”
“You’d think they would have done something to avoid a genocide.”
His pitch dropped. “Blaming the victims, are we?”
“It’s not that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. I’m just saying, they could have tried—”
“You don’t know they didn’t. But geez, Ruth, where would a person even start? It’s not like what happened to Native Americans boiled down to one person’s mistake on one bad day. It involved millions of people, probably billions of individual actions. Genocide is stage IV cancer. You can’t come in when the patient’s being systemically assaulted and make a few cuts here and there and expect everything to change.”
“Sitting Bull knew he was going to die.”
“That’s right. So he went home for it. Back to the rez.”
“Other people could have stopped it.”
“Other people tried. Didn’t need time travel to do it. Sometimes you can’t change things.”
“What do you think about destiny, Joe?”
“Wow, easy questions tonight. Okay.” She heard the squeak of an office chair as he leaned back. “Like the God-given right to expand west and wipe out people and spread capitalism?”
“Not manifest destiny. Just destiny. Fate.”
“That sounds like a colonizer’s word to me. Justification more than cosmology.”
“But what about changing things?”
“In the past again, you mean. Fantasy. Time travel.”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds iffy. Grandfather paradox, butterfly effect. I don’t know the physics. I just know Terminator and Looper and Superman. You remember the late-’70s Superman when he flew around the world and made it spin backward to go back in time and save Lois Lane? I rented that in the sixth grade. Man, I fell hard for Lois Lane . . .”
Ruth didn’t mean to tune out, but she kept seeing her mother, imagining how she would spend a typical Saturday night: television set on, half-folded laundry on the couch, a mug of whiskey at her side that she would pretend was only soda. No one was ever fooled. Ruth pictured her sister in her own bedroom. She pictured the door, covered with stickers that wouldn’t come off, even though at seventeen, Kennidy no longer liked unicorns or the Rugrats. How would Ruth even get to that place, that moment, if she wanted to? She hadn’t been there at the time. She was in grad school in Iowa, many miles away.
Ruth tuned back in just in time to hear Joe say, “Why are you thinking about all this? Is it personal?”
“Academic.”
“Really?”
“Cultural criticism.”
“Well, then. I’d say Americans are obsessed with time travel to the past because they—we—feel guilty, and for good reason. People can’t get enough of those time-travel movies: go back and catch the criminal; go back and stop the murder. It’s a lot easier than going back to stop slavery, the Holocaust and the slaughter of some ninety million or so indigenous peoples, but the impulse comes from the same place. We’re a nation awakening slowly to the truth of the bad things that’ve been done and wishing there were more reset buttons. Me personally, I don’t believe in reset buttons.”
Ruth thought of Sitting Bull’s own words in the letter Nieman had first sent to Joe. The future and the past are our two most difficult battles. They are not battles we are always meant to win.
These lofty phrases annoyed her now, just as they had frustrated Annie.
Ruth thought, Fuck “not meant to win.” Fuck destiny.
Ruth thought of a young Annie Oakley, stalking through the tall grass, rifle held close to her chest, self-reliant, fearless.
“I have to go, Joe.”
“Ruth, you don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m totally myself.”
Joe was right about one thing: it was justification. The view of the colonist, the missionary, the killer, the rapist: that whatever happened was meant to be so.
“Ruth?”
“I’m fine, Joe. More than fine.”
“All right. If you say so.”
Then she was alone again in the motel room. Its blandness was a balm: at least she wasn’t at home, looking out the window at the dark evergreen trees, brown grass speckled with frost, and beyond, to the house of that man—Van Vorst, his stooped silhouette passing within sight of her kitchen window.
But this sterile space also left her feeling untethered, unbound by both place and time, mind spinning.
The more she thought about the past in all its guises—Annie, Sitting Bull, the Wolves, Kennidy—the less she was focusing on Scott, the vision, and anyone else who would be affected by whatever happened. If it happened.
She wished, yet another time and with an even more intense longing, for a tranquilizer. If she were home, she would have been scrabbling through drawers, pulling up couch cushions. She could have sworn there were still three Xanax left in her apothecary drawers in the bathroom. She could even see them: the dark wood, the long white bars. Perhaps she had taken them after all. On and off for two years she had taken an uncountable number of pills.
No one had told her to take less. In fact, everyone—including Scott—had counseled her to take more. Her physical pain was real. Her brain damage was documented. Scott had been mad about her going off the clozapine.
Breathe.
The heater ticked on, blowing at the cheap orange drapes.
She was cleaner than she had been in two years. Exceptionally clean for the last few days—not even a Xanax, not a single wine or beer. Yet this week, she’d had the strongest visions yet. Intoxicants couldn’t be blamed.
Every time she started to wonder if this was just her own personal history and chemistry, she had to remind herself that she wasn’t the only one. Reece had had a vision, too. What he’d seen was different: no Scott in the frame, no clear sense of a shooter. Only panic, Ruth’s words to him, and something gone wrong. But it was a vision of something bad happening at the school all the same.
But what high school kid wouldn’t have nightmares? They’d watched training videos about active shooters and rehearsed the motions of hiding and fleeing. They’d been primed to have disturbing thoughts and dreams. There was nothing supernatural about that.
She texted Reece.
You there?
Yep.
Everything normal?
He sent a thumbs-up.
She texted: You got the news before? Talked to Bert.
Great. Finishing practice.
That was an unusually mellow reply. She’d expected him to be ecstatic.
Still?
It was nearly 11 o’clock.
Guy bailed. Redoing choreography.
She kept staring at the phone, wanting to tell him more—also wanting to make sure that he perceived no signs of trouble. But he would tell her if he knew something.
Good luck.
His reply was swift. We’re going to the diner soon, but after. After a moment he added, I’ll check in.
She texted back, That’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow. Holloway’s class.