Page 22 of The Fadeaway

Having to write a letter to Bradley explaining that their baby had died suddenly in her sleep from an undiagnosed heart condition had nearly killed her. What kind of woman was she to send her beloved a letter that he’d receive in the midst of a war, telling him that the daughter he’d never even met was dead? But what kind of woman would she be if she didn’t send the letter, letting him go on believing that everything was fine when nothing would ever be fine again?

She let her mother lead her over to the gold couch and she sat down there, eyes wide as saucers. “I think you should come home with us, Patty,” her mother said, sinking down onto the gold velvet cushions next to her. “Evelyn and I discussed it, and we think it would be best. The cold, fresh air in Seattle will do you good, as will a change of scenery. Nothing good will come of you staying here and being surrounded by the memories.”

Against her will, a sob escaped from Patty’s chest. It came out like a wail, and a few people stopped their conversations to glance her way, then politely resumed their talking so that the grieving mother could cry in peace.

“I need to wait here for Bradley,” she said weakly. “He can’t come home to find me gone.”

“Honey,” Margaret said, taking her daughter by the arm, pulling her up from the couch, and leading her out the front door so that no one would overhear their conversation. “You beinghere is hard for Evelyn and Jacob. They need to heal too. It’s time to come home.”

It was these words that finally jolted Patty out of her trance. “They want me to go.”

Margaret nodded slowly. “We all think it’s for the best.”

And so Patty packed her things. She left behind everything of Trixie’s aside from one small stuffed bear and a baby blanket, and she kept the gold anchor bracelet with the tiny chip of ruby that Jacob had gotten for her as a gift to mark the month that Trixie was born. He’d said she was their anchor, their reason for being. Patty had known that Trixie gave them all something to focus on while Bradley fought in Vietnam, and without Trixie, there wasn’t much to live for. For any of them.

She went back to Seattle with her mother, moved back into her childhood bedroom, and saw a therapist who told her to find a new purpose and put it all behind her. She chose law school and put the teddy bear and the blanket into a box—both literally and metaphorically—and refused to speak about Trixie to anyone.

Her daughter Ruby would live the first fifty years of her life never knowing that she’d had a sister once, and for that, Patty would never be sorry. Some secrets were meant to be kept.

Ruby

“Some secrets are meant to be kept,” Ellen says now, talking to Ruby on the telephone.

Ruby has called Ellen in Seattle from Jekyll Island, where she’s gone back to her hotel room, showered, and is sitting on the balcony wrapped in a white terry cloth robe with the phone in her hand. It was clear from the first words of this conversation that Ellen has been expecting Ruby’s call.

“But we shared everything,” Ruby protests. She has her bare feet up on the railing, and she’s looking out at the green expanse of lawn and trees that surround the resort. “There’s nothing that my mother could have told me that would have made me not love her.”

“That’s not it, honey,” Ellen says. “Some things are not meant to be shared. Your mother found a method to deal with her own sadness and loss, and for her, this was the way to do it.”

“By burying it?” Ruby asks disbelievingly. “Didn’t her parents encourage her to talk? To process?”

Ellen snorts. “Ruby, love, this was fifty years ago. No. Your mother had given birth to a daughter outside the bonds of marriage. She’d gotten pregnant at nineteen by a boy who’d gone to Vietnam. She moved across country to have the babyand stayed there for two years. There was so much hurt and disapproval coursing through that family…just take a moment to unpack all of that.”

“But my grandparents were wonderful people,” Ruby says.

“Of course. They were kind-hearted and loving parents, but they were also a product of their time. Never underestimate the pressures of expectation, Ruby. People expected their young daughtersnotto get pregnant,notto be drinking and driving with their friends and getting into serious car accidents, andnotto move across country and wait for a soldier boyfriend to return from war—a man who wasn’t even her husband, I might add. There was a lot of scandal surrounding your mother at that time.”

“But people love a scandal.”

“Ah, ah, ah—people love a scandal when it’s not their own. You should know that best of all.”

Ruby falls silent as she watches three men in plaid shorts park a golf cart and get out of it on the gravel drive below her. They’re talking and laughing as they head into the bar that’s located on the ground floor.

“You’re right. I’m being shortsighted here. My grandparents would have had plenty to take issue with at that point, and if my mother came home, it would have been easier not to talk about any of it.”

“It always is.”

“So what did she do next? She was, what—twenty-one?”

“She was.” Ellen pauses. “She enrolled in college almost immediately and got an English degree, which is how she met Ruben.”

“My dad,” Ruby says, feeling her heart clench at the mention of her beloved father’s name. “They met in college.”

“They did indeed. And Ruben didn’t really want to become a lawyer, but it was what his family expected of him, so he wasthere, doing his best to get through it. But meeting your mother sidetracked him a bit, and he decided to let her be the one to pass the bar, while he started an insurance company in Pismo Beach.”

“Only she had me instead, and stayed at home with me until my dad died.”

“Your mother was a wonder,” Ellen says, sounding wistful. “She was the classiest broad I ever knew.”

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