This time, as she hung up, she sighed, then sat down on the bottom step, laying the phone beside her. When she saw me watching her she said, “I have a doctor’s appointment this morning.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is everything—are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. Then she quickly added, “I mean, I’m fine, health-wise. I’m not sick or anything.”
I nodded, not sure what to say.
“It’s just . . .” She smoothed her skirt with both hands. “We’ve been trying to get pregnant for a while, and it’s just not happening. So we’re meeting with a specialist.”
“Oh,” I said again.
“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Lots of people have problems like this. I just thought you should know, in case you ever have to take a message from a doctor’s office or something. I didn’t want you to worry.”
I nodded, turning back to the window. This would be a great time for Nate to show up, I thought. But of course he didn’t. Stupid Gervais. And then I heard Cora draw in a breath.
“And like I was saying, about earlier,” she said. “About the wedding. I just . . . I didn’t want you to feel like I was . . .”
“It’s fine,” I said again.
“. . . still mad about that. Because I’m not.”
It took me a moment to process this, like the sentence fell apart between us and I had to string the words back together. “Mad?” I said finally. “About what?”
“You and Mom not coming,” she said. She sighed. “Look, we don’t have to talk about this. It’s ancient history. But this morning, when I said that thing about the wedding, you just looked so uncomfortable, and I knew you probably felt bad. So I thought maybe it would be better to just clear the air. Like I said, I’m not mad anymore.”
“You didn’t invite us to your wedding,” I said.
Now she looked surprised. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I did.”
“Well, then the invitation must have gotten lost in the mail, because—”
“I brought it to Mom, Ruby,” she said.
“No, you didn’t.” I swallowed, taking a breath. “You . . . you haven’t seen Mom in years.”
“That’s not true,” she said simply, as if I’d told her the wrong time, something that innocuous. “I brought the invitation to her personally, at the place she was working at the time. I wanted you there.”
Cars were passing by the mailbox, and I knew any moment one of them would be Nate’s, and I’d have to leave. But right then, I couldn’t even move. I was flattened against the window, as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. “No,” I said again. “You disappeared. You went to college, and you were gone. We never heard from you.”
She looked down at her skirt. Then, quietly, she said, “That’s not true.”
“It is. I was there.” But even to me, I sounded unsure, at the one time I wanted—needed—to be absolutely positive. “If you’d ever tried to reach us—”
“Of course I tried to reach you,” she said. “I mean, the time I spent tracking you down alone was—”
Suddenly, she stopped talking. Mid-sentence, mid-breath. In the silence that followed, a red BMW drove past, then a blue minivan. Normal people, off to their normal lives. “Wait,” she said after a moment. “You do know about all that, don’t you? You have to. There’s no way she could have—”
“I have to go,” I said, but when I reached down for the doorknob and twisted it, I heard her get to her feet and come up behind me.
“Ruby, look at me,” she said, but I stayed where I was, facing the small crack in the door, feeling cold air coming through. “All I wanted was to find you. The entire time I was in college, and after. . . . I was trying to get you out of there.”
Now, of course, Nate did pull up to the curb. Perfect timing. “You left that day, for school,” I said, turning to face her. “You never came back. You didn’t call or write or show up for holidays—”
“Is that what you really think?” she demanded.
“That’s what I know.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” she said. “Think about it. All those moves, all those houses. A different school every time. The jobs she could never hold, the phone that was rarely hooked up, and then never in her real name. Did you ever wonder why she put down fake addresses on all your school stuff? Do you think that was some kind of accident? Do you have any idea how hard she made it for me to find you?”
“You didn’t try,” I said, and now my voice was cracking, loud and shaky, rising up into the huge space above us.
“I did,” Cora said. Distantly, from outside, I heard a beep: Nate, getting impatient. “For years I did. Even when she told me to stop, that you wanted nothing to do with me. Even when you ignored my letters and messages—”
My throat was dry, hard, as I tried to swallow.
“—I still kept coming back, reaching out, all the way up to the wedding. She swore she would give you the invitation, give you the choice to come or not. By that time I had threatened to get the courts involved so I could see you, which was the last thing she wanted, so she promised me. She promised me, Ruby. But she couldn’t do it. She upped and moved you away again instead. She was so afraid of being alone, of you leaving, too, that she never gave you the chance. Until this year, when she knew that you’d be turning eighteen, and you could, and most likely would. So what did she do?”