The last time Maya had tried to find Ruby—before Dr. Barry convinced her to stop looking—all she’d come up with were a couple of MySpace pages. But now Maya found over a dozen Rubys on social media who called Hood River, Oregon, home. She ruled out the very old and very young and was left with seven women named Ruby, any of whom could have made the mix CD for Frank.
They were almost all Hispanic, and two looked like his type: high cheekbones, straight black hair, dark eyes. Like Maya. Or maybe she was imagining it. Her sleep was broken and her dreams felt close. She messaged the seven Rubys, asking them to please contact her if they knew Frank Bellamy.
She waited.
Just two more hours until she could crack open the gin. She felt as if a strobe light was pulsing inside her skull, catching all her thoughts in strange shapes. The key with its jagged teeth. A young Frank lost in the woods, searching for help, for a door to knock on.
She heard her mom get home from work but didn’t go to greet her.
Her eyes ached from staring at her phone. “Ruby” and “Hood River” had turned up plenty of Google results: pet videos, a real estate agent, the winner of a spelling bee, an article from 1901 about a girl who’d been thrown from a buggy. Maya couldn’t narrow her search down. All she had was a first name and the town where Frank had lived with his mother after his mother divorced his father.
When she came across the obituary of an eighty-year-old woman, a dark thought crossed Maya’s mind, and she added “death” to her query. This yielded more obituaries and several articles. Hood River’s population was under eight thousand, so it wasn’t long before she found an article about a woman named Ruby Garza who’d died in a fire ten years ago. She’d been nineteen, a first-year at Columbia Gorge Community College who had recently moved into an apartment close to downtown. Ruby fell asleep without blowing out a candle beside her bed, and never woke. She was alone. Her hair was black, her eyes brown, and her face still childlike in the grainy black-and-white photo. She died less than two months before Maya met Frank at the library. Right around the time he left Hood River and moved to Pittsfield.