At the restaurant we go to for dinner, Ruth orders seafood like she usually does, although she barely picks at the shrimp salad and crab cakes. I offer her some of my barbecue ribs, but she says no and goes back to nibbling. I wonder if Ellie or Eddie notices in the midst of excited conversation with their daughter.
The happy news is Darcy keeps us all laughing. The three of them are good at telling family stories, the memories from their past, in a way that includes those of us who weren’t there. Ellie tells us about a time when they all went to an art exhibit and spent over an hour looking for Darcy before they finally found her asleep under a bench in the Matisse room.
“We had called security and everything,” she says.
“What can I say?” says Darcy, shrugging. “I was tired. Also six.”
We’re all laughing when the waiter comes to refill our drinks. Even Ruth manages a short snicker, and I’m glad. Maybe she’s just been tired, or fighting off a summer cold or something like that. I’m still not exactly sure where the signs are pointing—normal blahs, virus, bad day, or something else. I’m still watching the signs.
And tonight, at this restaurant, I’m hopeful. It’s sometimes a struggle for Sick Ruth to muster energy or interest in what’s going on, even when it’s something Healthy Ruth normally likes, so I’m taking her investment in the meal and the conversation as some good signs, and I relax a little.
I decide I like this restaurant a lot. The dark wood tables are classic, but the neon signs and posters crowding the walls and the chattering from all the tables around us add a casual, easy air. The sweet potato that comes with my ribs is overflowing with butter and cinnamon and marshmallow. The talking subsides, the sign of a good meal. It sort of fills you up all the way to your fingertips, and then you get into a rhythm.
Darcy is the first to break the silence. “So remind me what you guys are doing while you’re here?”
“Oh yeah,” Ellie says. “What was that museum you were asking about, Olivia?”
“Ooh!” Darcy interjects. “We should go to the aquarium! It’s an absolutely awesome one.”
“Aquarium?” Ruth says, picking apart a roll. “That sounds cool.”
Ellie’s looking at me and my brain starts clicking fast. If Ruth seems interested in something, that’s important. Yes, the museum has dinosaur bones, like last time, but it doesn’t have to be exactly the same, does it? All it needs is Ruth and Something Old. I could figure out something else, couldn’t I? If Ruth wants to go to the aquarium?
“Yeah,” I say. “The aquarium sounds great.”
There’s another thought in my head, telling me Something New already didn’t go how I wanted, and now this, and don’t I always end up compromising on what I really want? And then another thought. An even less happy thought. A question, wondering if Ruth would have thought the aquarium sounded cool if I’d been the one to suggest it.
Are these thoughts really me? What about the other thoughts, already beginning to flip through my mind, confident I can think of something great, even if it’s not dinosaurs? Both voices are playing their song loudly in my mind, like earbuds playing a different song in each ear.
Darcy says something to Ruth, and Ruth laughs. Regardless of the confusing jumble in my head, there’s a relief that comes anytime Ruth is happy. I home in on that and try my best to make my mental earbuds play that song the loudest.
We get a refill on rolls and honey-butter and keep eating and talking. Everybody is so relaxed—the warm rolls are probably helping—and for a while I feel that vigilant guardian in my brain relaxing too. We talk about our trip so far, about whether we’re excited about school in the fall (me: yes; Ruth: meh). Darcy tells us about the summer internship she’s doing, helping with an art class at the local juvenile detention center, and also the sculpture project she’s working on.
“Oh, hey!” Darcy points at me. “My mom told me about your Instagram and I just kept staring at it all last night. I’m more a sculptor than a photographer, but seriously, you have such a different, unique eye for things. All your pictures are this almost strange, particular reminder of like, whoa, oh yeah, our weird world is kind of awesome.”
I sit still in my chair, a little stunned. That may be the best thing anyone has ever said to me. She sees what I’m trying to do. What I desperately wish everyone saw.
“Thank you,” I manage. “Wow.”
As in my conversation with Mom, the perfect words have been given to me to express something in my mind that felt unclear before. On this trip, the support and enthusiasm from Ellie and Eddie has felt almost surprisingly wonderful, but this feels like Darcy’s not only seeing and appreciating my pictures, but understanding them at the deepest level.
“I’m totally serious,” she says.
“Me too,” I say.
She smiles, then turns and says something to her mom. The dim lights and smell of barbecue float around me while my mind processes this, because Darcy has managed something kind of miraculous. Ruth is talking, watching things like they’re important, like she’s a little bit glad to be here. But there’s something else too. In only a few words Darcy has made me feel important. Like she really gets me, and she’s glad I’m here.
It all comes together in a very fragile and alarming thought: She’s made me feel how I’d want a sister to make me feel.
And I wonder if Ruth is thinking the same thing.
In the morning, I catch Ruth smiling while she puts on her makeup, and I see Dropkick Murphys playing on her iPod. Definitely a good sign. There’s something fascinating about watching her put on mascara. One of my favorite parts of playing pirates with her when we were kids was spending over an hour in the bathroom while she gave me thick black eyes and bushy eyebrows and a sleek goatee. After Mom had bought us those face paints, of course. I roll to my side.
“Morning,” I say. She clears her throat in acknowledgment. “Where is everyone?”
She sticks the mascara brush back in the tube and pulls out one earbud. “Ellie and Eddie went to see the campus with Darcy. They’ll come pick us up later for the aquarium.”
She’s talking. Complete sentences. No snips of sarcasm. She’s smiling. I need to thank Darcy one day.
I need to learn how to do whatever it is she did for Ruth.
My little pile of tattoo sheet and feather and concert program are still undisturbed on Ruth’s shelf. I point to the program. “So is the concert your favorite part of this trip so far?”
“Probably,” she says. “You? Camera still awesome as you hoped?”
“Oh yeah,” I say, trying not to sound like I want to fling my arms around her waist for asking. “It’s almost like the camera itself is better than my skill level, and I just hope I can get good enough for it.”
“Well,” she says. “What I know most about you is that you don’t give up, so I’m sure you’ll get there.” She pops her brow liner back in her bag.
Where’s pixie dust when you need it, because I’ve got everything else required to jump off this loft and float right up into the clouds.
Ruth tilts her ear toward the mirror and leans in. She’s trying to get a close look at her new tattoo. The swelling has gone down a little bit, I can tell.
“What did Mom say about that?”
It comes out before I think about it too much.
Ruth looks over at me with an eyebrow raised, a look somewhere between who cares and none of your business.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says.
I sit up and let my feet dangle over the ledge. “I mean, it kind of does.”
Something new and daring is trilling in my sternum and pushing me on. So often I don’t have the right words for things, and I’m not sure I do now, but in this moment I’ve got to try.
Ruth turns to me and folds her arms across her chest.
“I mean,” I say, stumbling on. “It matters that you did something that made Mom worried. That hurt her.” And me, I think. It matters that you hurt me.
Ruth takes a small step toward me. I’m tempted to pull my dangling legs up into the safety of my loft, but I stay still.
“Are you judging me?” Her words are quiet and dangerous as viper fangs.
“I…” Why am I doing this? It started out as such a perfect morning and now I’m ruining it. Now I’ve started, though, and I can’t stop myself. This is something bigger than me and I need her to understand. “No, I’m not judging. I just … aren’t there ways to … to do the things you want, to be yourself, without ignoring Mom and Dad? Without hurting them?”
Without leaving me behind?
Ruth boils me in another perfect pause before she takes two more steps forward. “You little prick,” she says. “You have no freaking clue, Miss Self-Righteous. I’m sorry we can’t all be as perfect as you. I’m sorry everything’s not always rainbows and glitter, that some of us actually have hard crap to deal with in our lives.”
“That’s not—”
“Don’t even.” She jabs her finger at me like a cutlass. Now she’s close enough I can see the intensity in her face, but it’s not exactly what I expect. It’s that hurt and suffering I’ve seen before, whirlpooling and storming and battling behind her eyes. “Congratulations on living in a world where you can control everything that’s in your head, but don’t you dare look down on me for at least having some say about what’s on mine.”
My throat feels like cardboard. My whole face is burning and my hands and my stomach feel shaky. All over my skin feels tingly and I wonder if this is how it feels to go into shock. I feel too panicked and scared to be angry. My mouth is closed like it’s sewn shut.
In a movie, this is when somebody walks in, Ellie or Eddie or Mom, and there is a sweet but awkward scene where everybody talks things out and all the fights and problems are resolved. But not in real life. In real life, I stay frozen, staring between my feet that are still dangling off the ledge of my loft, until Ruth has decided she’s won, decided that I have been sufficiently shut up.
I know in my head that this really isn’t about me, that it’s a battle between Healthy Ruth and Sick Ruth. I know there’s that storm in her mind that I can’t see. I know all these things, but still it doesn’t change the freezing in my body, and I wonder, maybe, if that mental miscommunication is a tiny bit what she’s dealing with all the time.
How can a morning change so drastically, like the sudden snapping in half of a ship’s mast?
Ruth releases me from her glare, and I turn back to my pillow, barely mustering enough dignity to not pull my blanket over my head.