Ruth
Midnight, and Ruth couldn’t sleep.
She turned on the light and looked in the motel mirror, to one side of the television. Her face still looked strange, her features out of alignment. She lifted a finger toward her eyebrows and noticed her right hand trembling. She dropped her arm and leaned on the desk to still the tremor. She tested the weak arm, leaning forward. She couldn’t support her own weight. Of all the body parts injured in the car crash, her right arm had never been a problem. She lifted both hands out in front of her, palms down. The right arm drooped, tired before the left.
Ruth looked at her face again. Then she thought to cover her right eye. Now, her face looked closer to normal. She covered her left eye. This was the blurry side. The image in the mirror stuttered like a weak flame about to go out. Was she having mini strokes?
Aloud, she said, “I am so, so fucked.”
She hated hospitals, the ER especially. Doctors had rarely believed her symptoms were real, and what would they make of these latest ones? Yes, she’d had a brain injury from the car accident—already noted. They’d already told her what to do: stay off the computer, avoid screens, don’t read too much, don’t work too hard, try to get more sleep.
Scott’s voice came to her. You’re fine. You’re just really tired.
Whereas Joe would have said, Damn, woman. What’re you gonna do about it?
She missed Joe. They’d had a good run in those few months together, however long they had been and however exactly they had ended.
“I’m not even sure anymore,” she said. And now she was talking to herself.
But at least she wasn’t hearing those old phrases from long ago, the ones she hadn’t mentioned when Dr. Susan asked with her annoying degree of perceptiveness, “Any voices? Specific words or phrases?”
She hadn’t heard or thought lately, for example, Open the cabin door. If it had meant only that she should look deeply into not only Annie’s past but her sister’s, maybe Ruth had opened it. Maybe she’d opened it and left it open, rusted hinges squeaking, the door banging in the wind.
Ruth felt the need to get out of bed. She went to the motel door, fingers reassured by the flip of the bolt. Locked. Yet she still had that feeling, as if she’d left a car window open with rain in the forecast.
Her car was back home, undriven, windows closed. In the garage.
Still standing near the foot of the bed, Ruth could sense the image of Scott hovering close to her consciousness, like an optical illusion—faces on either side of a lamp—that invited you to choose how much you were ready to see. She thought of crawling back under the covers, but instead lowered herself to the ground, sitting cross-legged, in a meditative posture. A way to tell her brain, This is on purpose. This is not panic. This isn’t a nightmare, either. I’m not afraid.
Without resistance, the image appeared more gently, in slow motion. A remembered image, not a lived one. There was Scott’s face and the upper half of his body, wearing a white button-down shirt. This was not Scott at his heaviest, the summer before last. This was Scott as he’d looked since beginning to date again. He was wearing the newer eyeglass frames she’d noticed him wearing at her house when he’d come to move his boxes.
Ruth kept her eyes closed. There was nothing to fear and no reason to hurry.
She allowed her inward gaze to sweep across Scott’s face and torso in even slower, measured movements, like a lighthouse beam. Her eyes continued around the outline of the frames and over to his left temple, where she noticed for the very first time, a thread of silver. She paused there. If she had noticed this detail two years ago, she would’ve been able to place the image better as something not belonging to the pre-accident recent past or present, but without a doubt to the future.
Scott Webb, you have gray hair.
Ruth sighed, on the edge of a smile.
And then, maybe because her attention had traveled back to earlier memories—the two of them on Ruth’s thirtieth birthday, laughing about the vanity of aging—his image vanished. She tried to recall any part of it: his face, his body, the ground on which he was standing, the sky or grass. Nothing.
She started all over again, but it was as if her shift toward another memory had displaced the entrance to wherever she had been. The way was blocked, but she also felt oddly relaxed, and perhaps it was this very feeling—the sudden, utter lack of anxiety—that made any more visualization impossible.
There was no way to tell when the image, now vanished, was from. It could be a week from now, yes. But it could also be five years away, or ten. Perhaps she’d missed an important lesson in all this: that even if some dark vision in the future were true, we couldn’t worry about it every day, throwing away any potential happiness in the process.
For the moment, she believed Scott was safe. She couldn’t muster a deep-seated anxiety she didn’t feel or head toward a target she couldn’t see.