They were on the couch, supposedly relaxing—Ruth with her laptop while Scott deleted emails from his phone.
“Why don’t you put that away,” he said. “I’ll rub your feet.”
“I know you have to go to your parents’.”
“I do. But you don’t.”
“I feel terrible. We already bought my ticket.”
“It’s changeable.” Scott always refused to catastrophize with her. “You just need time alone, without interruptions. You are so close.”
“Maybe,” she said, feeling around for the slightest optimistic inclination. It was there.
On the wall across the room hung an early Christmas present Scott had given Ruth, hoping it would motivate her in the weeks leading up to her deadline: a framed photo from an auction site. The image showed Annie Oakley from behind, with long wavy brown hair, a tiny nipped waist, a voluminous skirt that ran to her calves, and thick leggings that continued down and over the tops of sensible black shoes. A gun was set over her shoulder, pointing behind her as she looked into a handheld mirror. A favorite trick. An odd photograph. Aiming backward.
Backward.
It had given her a little shiver, even then—a good shiver, she’d thought at the time. At the very least, a strange and memorable one. Ruth could imagine looking back on this moment years from now, thanking Scott for his refusal to turn small problems into big ones.
It was fallacious to see history as a clear series of turning points, evident to the people living in the heat of those moments. But at the same time, it sometimes was possible to feel it: history happening, like a warm current of water passing beneath a swimmer’s treading feet, or about to happen, like a swell building at sea. She had that feeling now.
She asked, “But what’ll you do for New Year’s?”
“Dad will fall asleep on the couch. I’ll make my mom a grilled cheese sandwich. We’ll try to watch some TV countdown, but she’ll keep getting up to fold laundry and probably miss the ball drop.”
“That sounds bad.”
“Not really. My folks aren’t going to be around forever. Midnight’s just midnight. And you’ll give me something good to read when I come back.”
In a week, Ruth covered only two more years of Annie Oakley’s life, but that wasn’t important. She’d broken through the bottleneck, she knew she could finish in just a few weeks more—and all because of Scott’s steadfast support.
Now would be the perfect time to express thanks, and Ruth knew exactly how. Neither of them liked her mom’s house. It was finally time to sell it and start their life together fresh.
That afternoon, while others were stocking up on New Year’s Eve liquor and snacks, Ruth was in the basement of her mother’s house. There she found all the documents she’d barely glanced through in the grief-blurred weeks after Gwen’s funeral: a sagging banker’s box with old rental agreements, canceled checks, mortgage documents, inspection reports and printed emails between Ruth’s mother and the neighbor, Van, from whom Gwen had first rented and eventually purchased the house. The emails at the top of the pile all involved haggling over the health of the septic system.
The irony wasn’t lost on Ruth. These sorts of documents, when related to a historical figure of importance, were captivating clues to lifestyles long forgotten. Locate them in the present or recent past, and they were tedious.
Ruth looked at the date of the first email again: 2013. That was odd. At least a year before the house had changed hands, they were debating the septic system’s age and the house’s value. Ruth’s mother hadn’t even thought of buying it until 2014 at the earliest, when she already had cancer. Van had lowered the price $25,000 below its true value—a bargain inspired by generosity. But if the neighbor had meant to be generous, why did he seem so argumentative and petty in his emails? If he was doing a supposed favor that he’d initiated, why did the sale seem shadowed by acrimony?
Every document confirmed it. The house was quietly inspected, appraised, and purchased not during the year Ruth’s mom was diagnosed with cancer—the story Ruth had always been told—but a year earlier, in 2013. The year Kennidy had died.
Maybe, then, Ruth was remembering incorrectly, and their neighbor’s act of generosity was not a gesture meant to help soften the blows of cancer, but to mitigate the loss of a troubled child.
Ruth wanted it to make sense.
But it didn’t.
Because negotiations for the house sale were too early even for that: July 2013. Summer, not fall. They predated Kennidy’s death by three months.
When Scott called on New Year’s Eve from his parents’ house, Ruth didn’t mention the inconsistencies she’d found, though they troubled her. When he asked what her plan was for the next day, her last one to herself, she said, “Everyone else will be sleeping in with hangovers. I’ll hit the grocery store while it’s empty.”
The next morning, despite having avoided any kind of holiday binge, Ruth felt less than clearheaded. She awoke several times, and finally, at 4 a.m., she went back to the banker’s box, flipping through the emails again for something she’d missed, like a more personal note explaining why Van had decided to sell. Her search only yielded more questions.
Ruth went for a morning drive in the country—8 a.m., no souls around—with a travel mug full of coffee and a muffin on her lap. She headed northwest without thinking and got off Highway 68, turning down a county road and taking it for a while, then turning left at another county road, then a right. Random zigzags. Big squares. Endless numbered roads.
She’d enjoyed drives like these when she was a teenager with a brand-new driver’s license: flat pavement, no traffic, big sky, plenty of time to daydream. But she wasn’t just daydreaming this time. She was trying to remember that summer night with Kennidy, just months before her sister killed herself and—as she now knew—just a month before Gwen had bought the house for an artificially low price from a man who didn’t seem likely to be generous. The events themselves were odd and closer in time than she’d realized. But it was her late mother’s strange legacy of obscuring certain dates and specifics that bothered Ruth most of all.
Ruth kept driving, looking for a certain stretch of hayfields, a particular gravel road, a familiar oak tree. But she couldn’t find any landmarks. All county roads looked the same. It had been dark, and they’d been drinking. Nothing stood out to her now.
Later, she would remember this moment and question whether the problem had been her need to search or giving up on that need. Because she had, in fact, let it go. She put the problem back in its box, something that—when her mind was sound—she had always been able to do, though not with complete ease.
Driving back toward town, Ruth tried to clear her head of foggy images and the week’s worries. She still had grocery shopping to do. After that, she might have a productive afternoon of writing.
Focus, Ruth.
But still her mind slid: first to Kennidy, and then to their mother and to the house again. A cost and timing equation that never balanced.
It was 11:26 on the morning of New Year’s Day, just one day before Scott was due home, when Ruth’s mind slid to that equation a final time only seconds before her wheels locked into their own alarming skid on the ice at the Fifteenth Street Bridge, requiring her to pump her brakes, trying to avoid the fishtailing of the car heading toward her.
Red Toyota, one man inside, still hungover from a party the night before.
Red.
No way to stop.
It happened too fast for her to store the memory for proper retrieval later. Ruth was informed by police that the other car had been blue, not red. She couldn’t even get that detail right.
What she did remember was a vision of office towers rising on the far side of a frozen lake. That meant her car had swung to face north before spinning again, hitting the south guardrail, splitting the edge before stopp
ing, caught before falling, nose tilted down. What she remembered was the sound of the bumper tearing off and undercarriage scraping, metal buckling, all of it deafening, and her own panic.
Not the water. Please. No. Don’t drop into the water.
The doctors told her she had either lost consciousness by that point or had been in such a state of shock she couldn’t perceive with accuracy at all.
Traumatic images become fragmented, they had told her. In states of high terror or stress, during combat or rape or extreme physical trauma, the prefrontal cortex of the brain shuts down. Chemicals surge.
You can’t go back without going forward.
It didn’t work.
The fear circuitry, especially the amygdala, takes over. The hippocampus is impaired.
Be firm, be honest. I’ll believe you.
You can’t go forward without going back.
Short-term memories aren’t stored properly. Spatial and time information—sequencing—is altered.
Don’t walk away, Ruth.
Open the cabin door.
They told her: you may have a sharp memory from just before, but what you think you’re remembering during the accident isn’t reliable.
But it sure seemed reliable to Ruth, especially after the panic and all the voices in her head quieted, especially when her frenzy of thoughts funneled down to just one. Not the water. No, no, no. Foot on the pedal. Hands on the wheel in front of her, the air bag not yet inflated. And then the perfectly clear image of Scott.
It wasn’t, as her therapist suggested after the accident, because she had been thinking of Scott just before impact. She’d been thinking about Annie Oakley. She’d also been thinking about her sister and her mother and her own unfinished work.
At that moment, she was in love with Scott, in that comfortable way that allows us to take the person we most need for granted. He was so reliable, so faithful, so integral to her recent past and her much longer future to come, that he didn’t take up much space.
But then he was there, in front of her, in the car now filling with a cloud of air bag chemicals, as close as the shattered windshield, which was impossible to see clearly in comparison with Scott’s face.
His eyes were wide and his mouth was slack, like he’d just received hurtful news or a physical blow to the stomach. His neck and the front of his button-down shirt were white, and then the shirt wasn’t white, and it was horrible—more horrible even than what Ruth was experiencing. Her experience was completely unreal, impossible to assimilate. His experience was the real one, the undeniable nightmare.
No, no, no.
None of it made sense. He wasn’t in the car. He was at his parents’ at that moment on New Year’s morning. He was five hundred miles away. He was safe.
No matter how many times they would tell her the Toyota was blue and although she knew the half-frozen lake that she barely missed falling into was blue and the slice of sky that might have been glimpsed later through the door pried off by rescuers was blue, none of that matched the vision she’d had on impact with the guardrail.
No, no, no.
Her shoe pushed so hard into the brake pedal it felt like the bones in her foot would break. Her arms locked hard, trying to press her entire body back into the seat even as she felt the car tipping downward.
She had never wanted something so clearly, so purely. She wished to stop the fall from happening, to be anywhere but here. And she felt sorry—for all she had taken for granted, for all she had missed.
And with that longing, the image of Scott’s face. The flash of color. Not blue at all. But red red red.
10
Ruth
Dr. Susan Joy Hovsepian had been the first therapist to whom Ruth had confessed the disturbing image she had seen of Scott back when they still lived together. Dr. Hovsepian suggested it was connected to either an urge or a persistent thought that presented itself as an urge.
At Dr. Susan’s recommendation, Ruth attended a Harm OCD group therapy session. Listening to other people talk about wanting to stab their mothers or drop their babies on their heads did not help Ruth understand her vision of Scott suffering and bleeding. The intrusive image said nothing about her relationship with Scott or her desires, real or imagined—in fact, it said the opposite. Ruth did not want to see Scott hurt.
There was one possibility that seemed obvious, if only to Ruth: that she wasn’t fantasizing or imagining at all, but glimpsing a future event.
“Have you mentioned this to Scott?” Dr. Susan asked during the private session, which took place in early March, three months after the crash.
“No.”
Dr. Susan made an approving sound, lips pressed shut.
“You think I shouldn’t tell him, then?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it would scare him.”
“Why?”
“Because it would either mean that he’s going to be seriously hurt in some way we can’t predict or that I’m batshit crazy.”
Dr. Susan hummed again with closed lips and touched her platinum hair—a “tell” the therapist indulged when she disagreed with the use of a word or phrase.
Ruth said, “A lot of people believe in future predictions of some sort. Premonitions, dreams that serve as warnings . . .”
“A lot of people?”
“One person in ten. Something like that.”
“You seem to be doing a lot of online research. We’ve talked about limiting your screen time. You’re still having headaches, yes?”
“Fewer of them.”
“Your brain needs rest.”
“It also needs answers.”
“You’ve identified a difference between yourself and the others in the group. They understand they are imagining things that haven’t happened, that don’t need to happen, as much as they struggle with intrusive thoughts about these imaginary situations. Whereas you, Ruth, are seeing things you can’t easily distinguish from reality.”
Not the point. If it did turn out to be reality at some point, then she wasn’t having a hard time distinguishing.
“And that,” the therapist said, “brings us back to something we’ve discussed before, which is schizotypy.”
“You’re saying I’m schizophrenic.”
“These issues may exist on a continuum. Some forms of schizotypy are benign, like religious experiences or even simple creativity.” Dr. Susan smiled. “I’d like you to continue attending the Harm OCD group.”
“I’m not going to harm Scott!” Ruth hadn’t meant to yell. “I’m not even anxious about it.”
Dr. Susan leaned back in her chair. “It concerns me, actually, that you’re not anxious about it. We also need to consider PDFTBI. That stands for psychotic disorder following traumatic brain injury.”
“Psychotic?” They had just been talking about continuums and creativity. “I definitely don’t think I’m psychotic.”
“People get stuck on the label. Which is why it’s more helpful to talk about managing your symptoms. Besides that image, is there anything else that flashes into your head with regularity? Particular voices, words?”
It was a ridiculous question. Of course words were always flashing through Ruth’s mind. She read and wrote for a living, constantly turning phrases around in her head, probing them for deeper meaning.
You can’t go forward without going back.
Dr. Susan pressed her. “Voices?”
It didn’t work.
I’ll believe you.
Open the cabin door.
Dr. Susan pressed again. “Specific words? Phrases?”
Ruth was getting increasingly uncomfortable with Dr. Susan’s line of questioning. “I think I need a second opinion.”
Dr. Susan smiled again, but there was no light in her eyes. “That’s never a bad idea. I’d b
e happy to give you a referral.”
Dr. Padmesh talked less and prescribed more. Ruth went through two rounds of antipsychotics and was on the third, clozapine, without having told Scott the whole truth—what she was seeing and how often she was seeing it, despite any type of therapy.
Meanwhile, their relationship was foundering, despite Scott’s optimistic talk about “post-traumatic growth,” a catchphrase he’d picked up from Dr. Susan, which Ruth did not appreciate.
Instead of feeling like hope, it felt like pressure. Ruth was supposed to be a better person for what she’d experienced, with a greater sense of perspective and a zest for life’s simple pleasures. They were supposed to be closer as a couple, positively ecstatic.
Scott proposed in April, eager to plan a wedding ceremony while his father was still well enough to attend, and for that reason she’d given in. But second thoughts were close behind. She couldn’t walk down a grocery-store aisle, much less a church aisle—and that wasn’t even the point. Scott didn’t know her well enough to have made such a momentous decision. Since the accident, she barely knew herself.
During the months neither of them recognized as the end, she often felt an argument brewing the moment he came home. One day, seven months after the accident, Scott had barely walked in the door, beat from a long day at school. Ruth started to explain how William Randolph Hearst, the famous newspaper magnate, had allowed an outrageous false story to run in his papers, claiming that Annie Oakley had stolen some clothes in order to fund a drug habit. The story went viral.
“First, Hearst tarnished her brand,” Ruth said, following Scott as he dropped his backpack and laptop bags in the hallway. “Then, when she went after him in court, he sent a private detective to her hometown to dig up dirt on her—anything he could use to undermine her legal case.”
“Can I just use the bathroom first?”
“Of course,” she said, but she hung outside the bathroom door. When he came out and headed toward the kitchen, she tagged behind. “So, Hearst goes digging. Which doesn’t actually turn up anything, because she really was a prim and proper lady, but it was classic intimidation.”
Annie and the Wolves Page 8
