“No, Ruth. Comfortable, cheerful. Warm.” He sat then at the kitchen table, watching her while she continued to putter around. “I started to say I’m sorry for showing up with no warning. I can see that it threw you. I just, well, I was just so excited. You have no idea what these past few days have been like.”
She set cups on the table. “When did you get out?”
“Three days ago. I’m living in a studio apartment about a half hour away in Pine Island. I have a job at a gas station for now. They help you with all that before you get out. A place to live and a job are part of the conditions of parole.”
“I see.”
He took a deep breath. “God that smells good. A kitchen filled with the aroma of fresh brewed coffee. It’s just…so normal.”
She sat across from him, but neither of them touched the sugar or milk. His eyes shone.
“You know, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“I thought so.”
She could see him hesitating. Then he asked, “Is that why you didn’t come back?”
“Partly.”
He looked down at the table, then up at her again. “But you don’t know everything. And that’s why I came.”
She spooned sugar into her cup, poured milk, stirred. Waiting.
“Whatever happens, Ruth, I want you to know the truth. I need that.”
“All right.”
“I’ve been trying for weeks to find the right words to tell you this, hoping for a way to, well, to lessen the impact. But,” he shrugged and shook his head, “it was hopeless. I should have just told you that day you came to visit.”
She said nothing, simply gave him a small, encouraging smile, and waited.
“I knew that once I told you, everything would change. I’d hoped somehow we’d be able to get past it, that somehow you’ll be able to remember who I really am. Because you know me better than anyone, Ruth. And if you believe nothing else, I hope you’ll believe that.”
She was suddenly aware of her heart, fluttering wildly in her chest, the same as it did when she sat in the dentist’s chair and opened her mouth. The anticipation of something awful.
“Just tell me everything,” she said softly.
He nodded. “You know the charges, I guess, and that I pleaded guilty. Kidnapping and terroristic threats.”
Hearing it out loud, in his voice, made what did not seem like it could be real, suddenly too real. He ran a hand through his hair, and she could feel her entire body begin to pulse, as if she’d had too much caffeine. He sat a moment, shaking his head with a sad smile.
“I did do it, but there was a reason. My parents were very old school, my mother an old-fashioned Italian mother, my father Polish, and they had their own little version of the American dream in Albany, a dry cleaning business. I was an only child and it was always understood I’d take over the business. I didn’t mind. They made decent money and truthfully, I didn’t have grandiose visions of anything else. I was a simple guy.”
He picked up his coffee with a trembling hand and took a sip.
“My father died just after I got out of high school and even though I thought about going to college, I jumped right into the business then. After a while I moved out and got my own place, and my mother stayed in the apartment over the store. And life was pretty decent for a long time. Years. My mother was getting older and I began to talk to her about retiring. She had a sister who’d moved to Florida and truthfully, the cold Albany winters were killing her arthritis. Someday, she’d say, but I always wondered. I knew she’d been saving money all those years. I just didn’t realize she was putting it under her mattress.”
“She didn’t trust banks?” Ruth asked, surprised, although she remembered her parents finding her grandfather’s life savings stashed in the barrels of several rifles after he’d died. Her parents had explained it had to do with the Depression.
He shrugged. “They were old school. It was probably my father who started it and, you know, rather than drive the money to the bank, she just hid it where she thought it was safe. One day, though, I’m pressing shirts and she comes in and I think she’s going to die on the spot, her face is so white and she can’t seem to speak. Then she told me the money was gone.”
There was only one person who could have done it, he told Ruth, a cleaning lady his mother had had for years. Who complained time and again about her worthless boyfriend. But his mother had loved her, trusted her, and wouldn’t believe it. They called the cops, but there was simply no proof. His mother wanted him to let it go, but something had gone out of her with that loss. He felt her slipping away.
“I showed up at the cleaning girl’s house one day and when she opened the door, I walked right in before she could even stop me. There was a big new flat screen TV, a nice new pickup truck out front, and she had on some flashy jewelry. I asked her where she got the money for all of it and she said her boyfriend got a new job. Anyway,” he sighed and closed his eyes and Ruth felt a pang of sympathy for him, “I waited. Because I knew. The boyfriend, I found out after doing some more digging, was out partying the rest of my mother’s money away.”
“You’re certain of that.”
He nodded. “I went back one night. With a…gun. I wouldn’t let them leave until they confessed, which they finally did. I told them I wouldn’t go to the police if they gave me what was left, sold the TV and the car and gave me that, too. My parents worked their entire lives for that money and here they were just pissing it away. Even if it wasn’t all of it, I wanted it.”
Thomas was perspiring now, his face ashen as he stared at the table. After a long time, he looked up at her, his eyes glittering. “I told my mother I was getting her money back and she was so happy.”
“I’m sorry, Thomas.”
He shook his head. “I was stupid, Ruth. So stupid. The cleaning girl didn’t come back, the police did. She told them the confession was a lie, that they’d been afraid I was going to kill them. And…there was no proof of the money being taken.”
“What happened then?”
“I went to prison. My mother died a year later.” He shrugged. “I know what I did was wrong, but…they were lowlifes. My mother was a hardworking, honorable woman. We had a lot of pride. It just didn’t seem right.”
“Your poor mother.” She couldn’t imagine the anguish, being robbed of everything she’d saved her entire life, and then losing her only child to prison.
“I got fifteen years and now…after serving ten, I’m free.” He gave her such a sad smile, she felt her heart breaking.
She pulled a tissue from the holder on the table and wiped her own eyes. “Thomas, I…” but before she could finish, he put a hand up.
“I want to show you something.” He pulled a new brown wallet from his back pocket, opened it and took something out, handing it to her.
Ruth looked at it. It was a photograph, a mug shot of a very large man, almost obese. “I don’t understand. Who is this?”
“It’s a different man, Ruth. The man I was when I went to prison.”
She looked at him and at the picture again, and there were his kind brown eyes, buried in the heavy face, a grim look as the picture was snapped.
“I carry it with me everywhere, Ruth, to remind me. I’ll never be that man again.”
She handed him back the picture.
“I don’t know what to say, Thomas.” There were no words to describe how she felt.
“Just remember the me you’ve come to know, Ruth, okay? That’s the real me.”
Slowly his hand slid to the middle of the table, and paused. She closed her eyes, but try as she might, her own hand wouldn’t move. A moment later she heard the scrape of his chair. And then the front door closing.
RUTH POURED HERSELF A GLASS OF WINE, her entire body trembling. She sat again, staring at the chair where he’d been, her mind reeling. As awful as it was, his story made sense. There was even a certain honor to what he’d tried to accomplish, righting a horri
fic wrong. Easing the pain of someone you loved. She had only to think back on the awful, gut-wrenching days after Colin was first paralyzed to know the desperate feeling of wanting to do something.
But there was one thing she couldn’t seem to grasp. One question she realized she should have asked: Why on earth would he have had a gun?
The first glass went down quickly and she got up, puttered through the house, poured water into Sam’s empty bowl. The dog didn’t eat, though, just sat there staring at her. She poured a second glass of wine, then went out and sat on the back porch. It was after nine, but there was still light in the sky, although a dampness had settled and the air was chilly for late June.
She stared across the yard at the patch of garden she’d once tried so hard to nurture. Over the years she’d planted tomatoes and peas and even leaf lettuce, but something or other always wore down her efforts. The hunger of the rabbit that lived under her shed. The slugs that seemed to gnaw everything in sight, even her marigolds, the simplest of flowers that anyone could grow.
No, Ruth had never been much of a gardener. Sipping her wine, she thought, she hadn’t been much of a cook, either. Or a wife. She was a decent mother. Or a lucky one. Her kids had turned out fine, although Colin was still a worry. And probably would be for the rest of her days. Or his. No, she wouldn’t think that way.
There was just one thing she was good at, or so she told herself. Books.
She took the last sip, went into the house, grabbed her purse and car keys and drove to Main Street, where now, late at night, there was plenty of parking. She got out and stood in front of her store. The Book Lover.
She unlocked the front door and turned on just the counter light, so that the store was dimly illuminated, with the glow of the window display and just that small fixture. She looked around and inhaled deeply. This was her world, her passion. This store had been the crux of her life for so many years, that not having it would be like saying tomorrow the earth would revolve around something entirely different. Mars, perhaps. This had replaced all of the love she’d had to lock inside herself because there was no man to give it to.
Slowly she walked past the shelves, the children’s section, her favorite, with the colorful covers, and the old classics. Alice Through the Looking Glass, Where The Wild Things Are, and Colin’s favorite, Drummer Hoff. There was Plath, and Faulkner, Shreve and Hoffman, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, her favorite. The magic of all these worlds, of Gatsby and Santiago and all of the people who’d spurred the imaginations of countless readers who walked through her door. And she’d been part of that world. Sharing her books. Living through her books.
Maybe her husband had been right. Maybe she couldn’t love him because he was real. Maybe what she really wanted couldn’t ever exist. Like her fantasy with Thomas.
In the back of the store, she sank to the floor, her back resting against the section of The Hobbit and Narnia and the new fantasies, all of the worlds she’d longed for once as a girl. But what was wrong with the real world? Why had she chosen to shut herself away here? What was she afraid of?
She closed her eyes, the room spinning, her body not used to two full glasses of wine. She felt the wetness on her cheeks. She wasn’t afraid of Thomas, no matter what he’d done. Maybe she was a fool, but she believed him. She could have asked him to stay longer. This night could have ended differently. But she knew, too, that too many years had gone by. The fantasies she’d allowed herself to visit again and again were just that. Fantasies, like in those books.
She was a widow who’d not been with a man in decades. Maybe in books such things were possible, but this was real life. And for Ruth Hardaway, such romantic notions were simply too late. There was only one love for her. One thing she was capable of sharing.
Books.
20
DRIVING TO THE RAPTOR CENTER THAT AFTERNOON was different from the last time, when Lucy had felt so awkward with Colin. This time they chatted the whole way, partly because she kept asking so many questions.
“A raptor is any bird of prey,” he explained as he drove. “Hawks, eagles, owls, falcons, anything with a hooked beak and taloned feet.”
“But they also rescue regular birds at the Center, right?”
“Yes, any bird will be cared for, and hopefully rehabilitated and sent back out into the wild.”
The cool morning rain had stopped, but low clouds still obscured the mountains as they headed southwest through Sussex County into Warren County.
“What about the birds I saw in the aviaries?”
“Those are birds that are either unreleasable, which means they’re used for display to educate, or they’re still awaiting release. Right now it’s our busy season, spring through summer, what with mating and feeding and so many fledglings leaving the nest.”
He pulled over suddenly and turned to her. “Hey, since you’ve never actually been in the Delaware Water Gap National Park, how about a quick side trip? It’s one of the best places on the east coast to see birds in the wild.”
“I’d love to. But don’t you have to be at the Center?”
“Not any particular time today.”
A few miles ahead he turned right toward the Delaware river, driving for another twenty minutes until she saw a sign that read Worthington State Forest, which he explained was part of the National Park. They followed a blacktop road that narrowed to one lane, and soon they were sitting for a very long time at a stop light in a most unlikely place. They were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by woods. Not a car came through from the other side, but Colin explained that this was where they entered the heart of the forest and had to go through a tricky stretch that was one car wide. Sure enough, they finally went through the light and the road became gravel as the woods to the right rose sharply.
“This is Old Mine Road, which believe it or not is the oldest road in the country,” he said, as they kept driving and she spotted the river again on their left.
“Are you serious?”
He nodded. “This area was rife with copper mines, still is in fact, although they’re no longer mined. The Dutch built this road back in the 1600s and it went all the way up to Kingston, New York. But now it’s part of the park.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“This is one of my favorite places. I’ve been coming here since I was a boy.”
A few minutes later he pulled into a small clearing on the side of the road and she realized they were getting out. As soon as she opened her door, he began reaching for his wheelchair. In less than a minute, as she stood there looking across the road at the wide river, muddy from the earlier rains, he was in his chair and nodding for her to follow. They headed across the road to a grassy path on the embankment about fifteen feet above the river.
It was like stepping into a primeval forest. They walked past the deep woods along the river, with no hint of another human anywhere. The wind kicked up suddenly and the low clouds began to lift and swirl. Another cool front was moving in, and within minutes she could see the high mountains on the Pennsylvania side of the river. The path was worn and rutted in places, but didn’t seem difficult for Colin and she wondered if his was a specific kind of wheelchair to navigate outdoors, although it didn’t look much different than others she’d seen. She made a mental note to ask him another time. Right now, the silence, save for the rush of the river and swish of the wet leaves, was simply beautiful.
After a while, Colin stopped abruptly, pulling his binoculars to his eyes. Without a word, he pointed to a tree on the other side of the river, a huge sycamore, then handed her the binoculars. It took a minute to adjust, then she scanned the tree, branch by branch, spotting nothing, and finally getting dizzy from the magnified leaves rushing by. Then suddenly she saw it, a light spot in the midst of thick green leaves.
“It’s an osprey,” he said softly.
She watched, hoping to see it leave the branch and dive into the river for fish. Just as her arms began to grow trembly from holding
up the heavy binoculars, she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see Colin looking above.
Barely fifty feet overhead, a huge bird soared slowly, its wings stretched wide, riding an air current.
“Oh my God!” she whispered.
“Yup, it’s a bald eagle.”
“I’ve never seen one in the wild before. It’s enormous, and so graceful.”
“They’re one of the largest birds of prey. Its wings can span up to eight feet. In fact, an eagle nest can top a ton or more.”
She held up the binoculars to get a better look, but it was too difficult.
“This place has quite an eagle population.”
“I can see why, it’s so remote. But I thought eagles were rare?”
“They were, bordering on extinction. But tougher conservation guidelines in the seventies really helped them make a comeback.”
A moment later the eagle veered east, over the high treetops and out of sight. Lucy was surprised by the surge of emotion she felt at what she’d just witnessed.
“It’s funny, but seeing the eagle at The Raptor Center was amazing. Seeing it in the wild, soaring so majestically like that…this might sound corny, but thinking about how that creature is the symbol of us, our freedom, it’s really moving, you know?”
He didn’t answer and she looked down at him sitting in his chair. He gave her a little smile and nodded.
“Back in the 1700s, congress wanted the founding fathers to come up with a symbol for the fledgling United States. It took a while, but I think they made the right choice. The bald eagle can be found nowhere else but in North America.”
They stood there in silence.
“Thanks for bringing me here. That alone was worth it,” she said, handing Colin his binoculars again. “I thought it was remote at the lake, but I don’t think I’ve ever been anyplace this isolated. I have to keep reminding myself I’m actually still in New Jersey.”
“Let’s go a little farther.”
It was so still, the only sounds again the occasional splash of rain from the trees as a breeze blew, and of course the different birds in the surrounding forest. Colin whispered their identities each time they heard something new, from the high-pitched scream of a red-tailed hawk to the sharp jay-jay screech of a blue jay. Suddenly she heard the most beautiful birdsong coming from the woods, a repetitive warble, long and lilting. Colin stopped.
Book Lover, The Page 18
