A Soft Place to Land (41 page)

At the traffic light Ruthie turned left onto Northside Drive. Saw Memorial Park to her right. She turned onto Wesley, one of the streets bordering the park. She could not keep driving. She was too overcome. How angry she felt at Julia on the day of the funeral, when she had refused to entertain the notion that maybe there was life after death, that maybe Ruthie would see her parents again, even if it were in some unknowable form. On that day she had needed her sister to acknowledge the possibility of heaven.

At twenty-eight Ruthie no longer had much faith in an afterlife, though she still held on to a stubborn faith in some sort of God. If Gabe had remained a Jew she would have converted, been a Jew with him. Officially joined the tribe of Robert and Dara and Schwartzy, who were her tribe already, who constituted her family as much as anyone. Joined a faith that held the story of Jacob wrestling with God as a supreme example of engagement with the divine. A faith that would allow her to wrestle with God, too.

Oh God. Why couldn’t Julia have given her the hope of heaven when she was only thirteen and had just lost her parents? Why did her sister insist that—at most—Phil and Naomi were cosmic dust gathering in some distant galaxy, cosmic dust that might one day become a minuscule part of a star?

Ruthie had parked the car, but the engine was still on. The voices on the radio were still talking about the crash. And why shouldn’t they? One hundred and fifty-five people should have
died, and yet they had not. Instead they were veritably walking on water: standing on the wings of that plane, floating on evacuation rafts, swimming away from the downed jet, bright yellow life jackets hugging their necks.

The voices on the radio were calling the pilot, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, a hero. What if a hero had been flying the tiny plane that her parents had strapped themselves into in order to have a grand adventure over the Grand Canyon? Would it have made any difference?

She couldn’t think about that. She turned the key in the ignition, turned the car off. The radio went silent.

She wondered if those people who nearly died in the crash would grow to see themselves as invulnerable, the way her father did after being pushed aside for dead as a baby. Or perhaps they would have the opposite reaction. Perhaps those 155 survivors would live the rest of their lives cognizant of that thin, thin line separating the living from the dead.

She stuffed the speckled notebooks and the letter to Julia back into the yellow envelope, which she pushed inside her purse. Taking her purse with her, she stepped out of the car. Closed the door. She would walk across the dewy grass and make her way to the swings, where she and Julia had gone after her parents’ funeral. She would read her mother’s letter to her sister, though she would not be the first one to do so. Evelyn Edge had already broken the seal on the envelope. Evelyn Edge got to it first. She would read her mother’s black-and-white-speckled notebooks, which with their dated pages surely were journals.

Funny, Naomi never spoke of keeping a journal. Perhaps it was a habit she kept under wraps. Or maybe she wrote in them only during that time when she was leaving Matt for Phil, when she destroyed her reputation among her friends in Virden, her family in Union City. Naomi once told Ruthie that when she left Matt her own father thought she was out of her mind. Thought she was crazy. “If he could have put me in a mental hospital without further damaging his reputation, he would have,” she had said.

Ruthie reached the swings. They were empty, which seemed
strange, considering it was the middle of a Thursday afternoon. Well, maybe the media was right. Maybe kids no longer played outdoors. Maybe they were all being raised by videos, starting with Baby Einstein and going from there. She sat on one of the U-shaped swings, made of black rubber, with chains on the side to hold on to. She remembered Julia telling her that if she swung too high she would flip over the bar and fall to the ground.

She used to believe all of Julia’s stories.

She pulled her mother’s letter from the envelope with the broken seal. Unfolded it. Saw her mother’s handwriting, round and pretty, though the words were more tightly squeezed together than her normal script, as if Naomi had been writing while agitated, or in a hurry.

November 5, 1978

Dear Julia,

I don’t know if you will ever be able to forgive me for what I am doing, taking you away from your father when you are just a little girl. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully forgive myself. But I suppose what I’m hoping is that by writing this letter I can at least try to explain what was going on inside of me during this tumultuous time in my—in both of our lives.

Probably you will never read this. Dr. Zachery told me that was okay. When I first left Matt, Mother and Daddy insisted that I go see a psychiatrist. I think they were hoping he could give me electroshock treatments, zap me back into sanity. Instead Dr. Zachery gave me the book
I’m O
K
—You’re O
K
.
Told me it was time to discover my “inner adult.” Told me to start writing things down. Told me to write to you. Pretend you were grown and old enough to understand how a person can simultaneously love her child, love her child fiercely, while doing something that will, irrevocably, damage her.

Ruthie’s cell phone began to ring from inside her purse. She ignored it.

If you ever do read this letter, I hope that you will be grown (my little girl, a woman!) and well past the age I was—only twenty—when I married Matt.
I hope you will be able to recognize how very young I was. And on top of that, I was a young twenty, immature. Take the fact that the only alcohol I had ever tasted was in vanilla extract. I was that good of a girl. I had signed a temperance pledge at United Methodist, and I was not one to break the rules. So even though all of my sorority sisters at Meredith College would drink beer or a cocktail at fraternity parties, I stuck with ginger ale.

Julia, at that time in my life I didn’t know how to be anything but a good girl. Ever since my sister Linda got pregnant at sixteen—when I was only thirteen—I had been making up for her transgression. I made A’s. I went to church and MYF every week. I never stayed out past curfew. I did not drink. I did not smoke.

It’s funny. I was so good at saying no to things that ultimately did not matter—whether or not I drank a Tom Collins, whether or not my miniskirt was more than three inches above the knee. Yet I was horrible at saying no when the answer had real consequences. Like when Matt proposed.—

Her cell phone rang again.
God!
It was probably Gabe, home from White Oaks and wanting to know where she was. She ignored the ring, kept reading.

In truth he and I never should have even dated. He’s a good person, Julia, and a wonderful father, kind and loyal and sweet. But as long as I said that initial “yes” to him, to being with him, he never said no to me. Never. If I were to say the sky was green, he’d say, “Yes, it looks pretty green today.”

We were a bad match. Dr. Zachery said that in my own quiet way, I dominated him. I was so frustrated with his passivity that I would be mean just to let my frustration out. And he would show me—by a look, a sigh, a drop of the shoulders—how wounded he was. Wounded. He was always so wounded.

But he would never say anything to openly rebuke me. Would let me do anything I wanted, as long as I didn’t leave him. And you have to remember, sweetheart, this was long before we were married and—

For the third time Ruthie’s reading was interrupted by the phone ringing.
Jesus.
Why was Gabe so pushy? But then it occurred
to her that it could be Chef A.J. from the restaurant. Though technically it was her day off and technically she was a pastry chef and not a “hot” chef, Ruthie was expected to fill in for last-minute emergencies. And Chef A.J. had been run-down these past few days. Which probably helped explain his parade of pissy Post-it notes. What if he was sick and desperately needed Ruthie? Answering the phone was the last thing she wanted to do, but she was scared of A.J.’s wrath. And really, who but A.J.—or, god, Big Steve—would have the audacity to call three times in a row?

Grabbing the phone out of the side pocket of her purse, she flipped it open without even looking at the caller’s number.

“This is Ruthie,” she said, using her “professional” voice.

“Oh god. I’m so glad you finally answered. It’s me.”

Julia. It was Julia, though she did not quite sound like herself. She sounded sad, and full of wonder.

“Oh. Hi.”

“Are you sitting down?”

“Um, kind of. I’m sitting in a swing at Memorial Park.”

“The park we used to run around?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you there?”

She would not tell her sister about visiting Wymberly Way. She would not.

“I was visiting a friend who lives in the neighborhood.”

“Are you with her now?”

“No. I’m by myself.”

“Ruthie, you’re not going to believe this, but I was just in a plane crash. I was just in a plane that crashed. We landed in the Hudson River. We were supposed to die. I was supposed to die. But I didn’t . . .”

The hair stood on Ruthie’s arms and a thousand tiny bumps popped up on her skin. “You were on the US Air flight, that just crashed?”

Julia drew in her breath. “My god, how do you know?”

“Oh my god, Julia. I heard about it on the radio, when I was
driving over here. Are you hurt? Are you at the hospital?” She imagined Julia on a stretcher, bandaged, broken.

“I’m fine. Whatever that means. I was sitting right by the wing. I was one of the first out. I stood on the wing, pushed up against all the others, and then a commuter ferry came and there was a ladder off its side and one by one we climbed aboard. A few people who were more badly hurt had to be pulled onto the boat, but they got on. Someone threw a coat over me. I was only wet up to my knees, but I was shaking, shivering. We all were. It was so cold. They took us to Pier 79. There was a triage unit waiting. I think they were expecting a lot worse. All I really needed was dry socks, another blanket. I wasn’t cut; nothing was broken. Not even my cell phone. It was in my jacket pocket. It’s completely intact.”

Julia couldn’t have been in an airplane crash. It was impossible. Impossible that Ruthie nearly lost all three members of her immediate family by virtue of heavy machinery falling from the sky.

“Wait,” said Ruthie, trying—somehow—to negate Julia’s story. To make it not true. “They said that plane was going to Charlotte. Why would you be going to Charlotte?”

“I was going to stay at a friend’s house near there. She teaches at Davidson, but she’s on sabbatical in France. I was going to use her house as a writing retreat.”

“Oh. That’s right. You told me about that in the e-mail you sent. Oh god. Julia. You almost died. I’m so glad you didn’t die.”

Ruthie glanced up to see a pretty woman walking toward her, toward the swing set, wearing jeans and a khaki-colored barn jacket, her dark hair pulled into an efficient ponytail. She held the hand of a young girl, three or four years old, who wore a red coat with Paddington buttons over leggings and tiny brown boots. Mother and daughter, surely, come to use the playground. Ruthie looked at them with a mixture of irritation and envy. She did not want her conversation with Julia interrupted or overheard—and yet she couldn’t help but notice their easy contentment. To wonder, briefly, what it might feel like to hold your own child’s hand.

“Listen, Ruthie, I need to tell you something. I need to tell it
to you right now. Before this moment passes and something happens to make you hate me again.”

Ruthie started to cry at Julia’s use of the word “hate,” though Ruthie knew it was true, accurate. For a long time now it had been easier just to hate her sister. Easier to try to define the relationship with that simple emotion than to live with the conflicting set of feelings Julia brought forth.

The mother and her child were standing by the swing set now, the mother looking quizzically at Ruthie, who was clutching the phone to her ear, snot hanging from her nose, her face wet with tears. Ruthie did not look up but shielded her forehead with her hand, as if she were trying to block out the sun.

“Let’s go on the slide, sweetheart,” the mother said.

“Why is that lady crying?” asked the little girl.

“Shh,” said the mother. “Come on with me.”

They walked toward the curvy plastic slide. Ruthie heard the girl ask her mother if they could ride it together, heard the mother say that she had an even better idea: she’d be waiting at the bottom to catch her daughter when she came sliding down all by herself, like a big girl.

“Remember how we used to try to imagine what Mom and Phil’s last few moments were like? On the Trimotor? Well, now I know. I mean I know what happens when a plane is going down. When the engine is silent because it’s no longer working and the smell of gas is so strong you can’t ignore it. And you look out the window and see a fire coming out of the engine. And then the skyscrapers are coming toward you, or you are going toward them, and the pilot comes on the loudspeaker and says, ‘Brace for impact.’ And the flight attendants are telling you, ‘Feet flat on the floor! Heads in your laps! Seat belts tight as they will go! Link arms with each other!’”

“Oh God,” said Ruthie, crying harder. She felt sick, nauseated. That Julia had to live through this.

“And the funny thing is part of you is still in denial. Part of you is thinking, ‘This can’t be happening.’ But on a physiological level, you know. I knew I was experiencing a plane crash. I started
hyperventilating. The woman next to me, whose arm I was linked with, an older black southern woman, soothed me. Murmured, ‘It’s going to be okay, baby. Keep praying to Jesus. Everything is going to be okay.’ But things were not going to be okay. We were about to die, and I imagined it was going to be an excruciating death by fire, or drowning, or, God forbid, having our bodies dismembered when the plane broke into pieces on impact.”