Page 47 of The Holiday

Her eyes went soft as she looked at me. It was a gaze I’d grown familiar with: married woman sees widowed man and understands how big his loss is. It is primarily the domain of younger married women, as they can scarcely imagine their own husband in my shoes. Though doing so brings a morose, romantic sense of melancholy to their hearts as they picture him mourning wistfully for the love of his life. Married for just five years now to a fisherman named Mike, after what must have felt like a lifetime of searching, Vanessa was definitely in the phase of her marriage where she couldn’t imagine either of them having to go on without the other. I envied her that feeling of security.

“You can leave it all here, if you want,” Vanessa said. “I just wanted you to see it. There are a million Ruby stories floating around out there, but I think the best thing about her was the way she just quietly loved and cared about her people. She was so proud of you, Dexter.” Vanessa watched my face. “So proud of how smart you are, and how dedicated to your craft. She talked about you proudly all the time—right up till the end.”

It was my turn to feel the warmth of Ruby’s glow on me, and it was almost too much to bear—at least publicly. I stayed composed as I bid Vanessa farewell and thanked her. I still spent a fair amount of my time on Shipwreck Key, so technically we were neighbors, but I hugged her as if we might not meet again for months or years, then walked out of the shop, looked both ways, and crossed Seadog Lane.

The beach was just yards away and I walked right to it and down to the water, where I stood with my hands in my pockets. It had been a while since I felt Ruby near me in the way I was feeling right then, but I knew somehow that she was always there. She’d been immeasurably proud of me in life, and I felt that she was still proud of me—wherever she was.

Losing someone you love is never easy, never simple. But losing someone you know is irreplaceable when you still have (potentially) decades of your own life left to live is overwhelming.

Rather than talking about it, I just want to leave you with that for now.

I stood there. I watched the waves. I cried.

That’s all you need to know.

Where the Wind Takes You

My intention was never to go on a world tour, but simply to unearth some stories or facts about my late wife, commit them to writing, and maybe polish those tales for you so that you could see who she was as a person--if, in fact, you're even interested in knowing Ruby Hudson that way. And if you're not, that's okay, too. I myself have no burning desire to know every one of our public figures intimately, to turn over the rocks of their lives and see what lies beneath. I harbor no illusions that there are untold amounts of famous people I've yet to meet whose lives are so rich beyond the public view that I must know everything there is to know about them.

And yet...we're all fascinating, in our own ways. And Ruby (forgive me if I'm biased here) is endlessly fascinating to me. I hesitate to say that I loved her from the moment I laid eyes on her, but I was certainly drawn to her. Just as she indicated in her email to Sunday about the night we met on Christmas Key, there was something there between us--some spark of interest. But unlike Ruby--and, I'll admit, maybe this is the privilege of youth--I didn't look at our age gap and think that perhaps I would look like a fool being with an older, more established woman, and it never occurred to me that our age difference could feel detrimental to her. After all, attraction is attraction, right? And love is most certainly love. Of course, once we were truly involved, all concerns of age pretty much fell away, with only the discussions of children and whether Ruby or I would pass first bringing up the hint of pain that comes with such talk.

But I want to tell her story--our story. The story of who she was, and who we became together. I hope you can see in this not just a rote, chronological breakdown of a First Lady's life and official duties, but the beating heart of a woman who was full of passion and a zest for life. So, here I am, on a world tour that I never intended to go on, trying to track down the people who mattered to her. It started out as a purely journalistic endeavor with personal benefits as the undertone, but it's become a mission for me--a reason to get up in the morning.

It was October, and I'd stopped in New York once again to meet with my editors, who loved the bits and pieces of the book that I'd shared so far. I wanted to catch up with Carmela Rivera, the woman Ruby's mom, Patty, had effectively taken on as a second daughter. Carmela and I had agreed to meet at one end of the Brooklyn Bridge on a sunny Saturday morning, and when I spotted her, she bounced up and down, waving both arms in the air.

"Dexter!" she called, walking halfway to meet me. We hugged like old friends, which we kind of were. When Ruby had first met Carmela and her three kids, Felix, Marcos, and Valeria, the kids were young, and Carmela was single and living in a New York apartment that Patty owned (but that Ruby didn’t even know about). Ruby had been bowled over by the fact that her mother had this close connection with a woman she’d never even heard of.

“You look wonderful,” I told her, meaning it. Carmela, who was Puerto Rican and had always had striking long, dark hair, was now in her fifties and wore her hair cut into a chin-length bob that was shot through with streaks of silver. “How are you?”

We fell into step and started a leisurely stroll across the bridge, trying to stay out of the way as people dashed around us, walking, running, taking photos. The sun was bright and clear, the sky blue. A perfect autumn day in New York.

Carmela took a long, deep breath and let it go. “I’m doing well, Dexter. I am. How are you?”

It went on this way for a bit, us trading the usual back-and-forth questions and answers that people do upon meeting for the first time in years, and then we stopped walking. Carmela leaned against a railing as we looked out at the water beyond.

“How are the kids?” I asked. They all had to be hovering around either side of thirty, but Felix had been the one who needed most of Carmela’s energy and attention, as he was autistic and non-verbal.

“Valeria is married and expecting her first baby,” she said, “Marcos moved to Puerto Rico and is happy there, and Felix…” She paused, tilting her head from one side to the other. “He’s doing alright. Being able to live in Patty’s apartment was a gift that even she probably couldn’t fully comprehend. It allowed me to work and to put my earnings towards finding the best care possible for my son, and that’s what I’ve done. Felix spends his days in a special adult program where they work with him on a variety of skills, and then he comes home at night and is with his mother.” She smiled here. “It doesn’t do amazing things for my love life, having a non-verbal adult son living with me, but…” She shrugged. “That’s life, isn’t it?”

I turned my head and looked out at the East River, watching as boats moved in the distance. “Yeah, life is like that,” I agreed. “And it is a blessing for you to be able to take care of him.”

“You know,” Carmela said, turning her body towards me so that I felt compelled to look down into her glittering brown eyes. “I think it’s okay for us to admit that sometimes life is just crap. It’s gorgeous, and it’s a gift, and blah blah blah, but sometimes life gives you lemons and there isn’t enough sugar in the damn world to turn it into lemonade.”

This made me throw my head back and laugh, the sun warming my forehead as I closed my eyes. Carmela’s frankness was refreshing in the face of so many people’s platitudes about love and loss and life after losing Ruby.

“Yeah,” I said, opening my eyes to look at her again. “You’re right. Sometimes it is just crap.”

“For me it’s a mixed bag,” Carmela said, moving out of the way as a knot of serious looking joggers moved past us. “I was gifted with Patty’s friendship, the absolute treasure that she was, and then the ability to care for my kids simply because she gave us a place to live. And Ruby…” She trailed off here for a moment, squinting out at the water just as I’d done a moment earlier. “We never became like sisters or anything, even though Patty essentially functioned as my mother figure for years, but Ruby was always unfailingly kind. She could have easily been angry or bitter about the fact that her mother gave a valuable piece of real estate to a woman she didn’t even know, but she wasn’t like that, was she?”

I shook my head. “She was not. Not about anything.”

Carmela nodded knowingly. “I gathered that about her. She had a way of just accepting people and things, and then moving on. Not everyone has that.”

“I sometimes think it was because of her time in the White House,” I said, talking frankly about Ruby in a way that I normally didn’t do. “She met so many people from so many walks of life, and in order to truly be a good First Lady, you need to reserve judgement and be open-hearted. And she was so like that. She met every person where they were, and rather than expecting them to change to fit her needs, or altering herself to fit theirs, she simply stopped, listened, and learned from them. I watched her do it a million times, and it never stopped fascinating me. But I don’t think you can learn a skill like that—I think it’s innate. She must have been born that way.”

"I think it was weird for her at first to find that Patty and I were as close as we were. It had to be, right? To find out that your mom had a sort of pseudo-daughter who you didn't even know about? I tried to put myself in her shoes, and yeah, I think she handled it as well as she could have, given the circumstances."

"So, in the years that you knew her, what's the one thing you would say about Ruby if someone asked you to talk about her?"