A Soft Place to Land (2 page)

“But don’t you think he might have bought a bottle of
champagne at the grocery store or something, and surprised Mom with it when she came out of the bathroom?” asked Ruthie. This was during one of their early discussions about what happened the night before, during those first few months when they were still living in Atlanta, supervised by their aunt Mimi, Phil’s sister, who had moved into the house on Wymberly Way for the time being, leaving her husband and her interior design business unattended to in San Francisco, just until everything got sorted out.

The girls were sitting in Julia’s room, on her queen-sized bed with the green and pink floral coverlet.

“That’s possible,” said Julia. “Especially because the trip was such a fuck fest for the two of them.”

“Don’t say that!” said Ruthie, hitting her sister hard on the thigh with her open palm. Ruthie did not want to think of her dead parents disrespectfully. Plus, she hated it when Julia said “fuck.” There was a strong evangelical contingency at Coventry, and Ruthie had been swayed enough by the proselytizers to purchase a necklace with a small silver cross dangling from it at James Avery, the Christian jewelry store at Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, just a mile away from their house.

It wasn’t that Ruthie believed Julia was going to hell for saying such words, but she worried that every time Julia cursed, God turned a little further away from her. And with Julia on the verge of failing out of Coventry, Ruthie felt strongly that her sister needed God on her side. Had Ruthie expressed these thoughts to Julia, she would have snorted, would have asked, “Where was God when Mom and Phil were on that plane?”

Ruthie wondered the same thing.

“I’m sorry, my darling, delicate one. Sorry for springing the ‘f’ word on you, but do you not remember the sound of the train?”

Ruthie was ten years old the first time she heard her mom making the train noises. Her bedtime was hours past, but she was awake, reading the thriller
Daughters of Eve
by a compact flashlight that she kept under her pillow. She could not figure out where the high, rising sound was coming from. She decided it must be a
train barreling down the tracks over by Ardmore Park off Collier Road. Which was strange, considering that the park was miles away. She turned on her side, placed her pillow on top of her exposed ear to block out the sound, and managed to keep reading, holding the flashlight with one hand while turning pages with the other. Pretty soon the train noise stopped.

The next day she asked Julia if she had heard the train that last night. Wasn’t it strange, Ruthie mused, that the noise would travel so far, all the way from the tracks on Collier? Julia looked at Ruthie as if she were a total idiot.

“That was Mom you were hearing, dummy. She and Dad were having sex.”

“But the noise was so
loud
.”

Julia shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I’ve always found that noise during sex is optional.”

Ruthie covered her ears with her hands.
“Kittens and puppies and bunnies,” she chanted. “Kittens and puppies and bunnies . . .”

Ruthie didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at Julia’s allusion to “the train.” Ever since the accident she did both—laugh and cry—at unexpected moments. In the four weeks since her parents’ death Ruthie had already been sent out of the room for getting the giggles in the middle of Bible class, during the discussion of
The Hiding Place, a book by Corrie ten Boom, a Christian woman who was sent to Auschwitz after it was discovered that she and her family had helped hide Jews.

There was nothing funny about
The Hiding Place, and yet every time someone said “Corrie ten Boom” Ruthie began to laugh. It reminded her of something her uncle Robert once did when she was little. Uncle Robert and Aunt Mimi were visiting from San Francisco, during the summer. One afternoon all of the grown-ups put on bathing suits and went to sit by the pool. It was the first time Ruthie had ever seen Uncle Robert with his shirt off. He had a hairy chest and back, and his belly bulged over the waist of his swim shorts.

“Meet my chubby hubby,” said Mimi. Robert slapped his stomach and said, with gusto, “Ba boom!”

Corrie ten Boom, her uncle Robert’s “ba boom.” This was not a connection Ruthie could explain to her Bible teacher. She didn’t get in any real trouble, though. After the accident all of her teachers were cautious around her.

Even more often than laughing at inappropriate moments, Ruthie cried. During the dumbest times, too, when someone sitting beside her in homeroom complained about what a bitch her mom was, or the math teacher Mrs. Stanford used “Mom’s meat loaf” as a subject for a word problem. Ruthie discovered that the best way to avoid crying was to sit as still as she possibly could and think only about immediate things, such as: would the spider making its way across Jason Purdy’s desk climb up onto his arm, and if it did, would he notice? (Once a bug crawled out of his hair and Jason seemed only pleasantly surprised.)

When Ruthie was home, finally, and alone in her room she cried and cried, all the while trying not to make noise, because it would have embarrassed her to have Aunt Mimi overhear her distress. Even though Aunt Mimi was always telling Ruthie that there was no wrong way to grieve. Especially because Aunt Mimi was always telling her that there was no wrong way to grieve.

Alone in her room after school, Ruthie prayed. Though she wore the cross from James Avery around her neck, her belief in God was not bedrock, and more often than not her prayers to God were pleas for him to exist, for him to be real. If he did not, if he was not, that meant that Ruthie would never again see her parents.

Most afternoons Julia was away at play practice. She had always been a gifted performer, but after the accident her talent deepened, her interest intensified, and she was given the lead in the spring play, even though the lead was usually reserved for a senior. Julia was happiest during rehearsal, happiest inhabiting another person’s life. She would remain this way throughout her life, always writing about others. Only once, in her memoir about rehab,
would she focus her gaze almost exclusively on herself. After play practice she would often go to Steak ’n Shake or the OK Cafe with other cast members, or meet up with her stoner friends who wore black and avoided sanctioned extracurricular activities.

Mimi did not keep a tight rein on Julia, and so Julia was not usually home until 8:00 or 9:00
P.M.
She would have stayed out even later had it not been for Ruthie. Sometimes Julia would swing home after play practice, pick her little sister up in her Saab 900, and take her out to dinner with her friends. And somehow, even though she, too, had lost her mother, she, too, had lost Phil (he was “only” her stepfather, yes, but she was closer to him than she was to her real dad), Julia was able to give Ruthie comfort.

Whether it was allowing her little sister to accompany Julia to Mick’s for chocolate pie with her stoner friends, or allowing her little sister to sleep in her bed at night because it comforted both of them to be near each other, Julia alone made Ruthie feel better. Sometimes at night Ruthie would wake up crying and Julia, more often awake than not, would wrap her arms around her sister, would hold her tight, would use enough pressure to contain the radiating loneliness Ruthie felt.

It was funny. Ruthie wasn’t used to hugging Julia. As close as they had always been, as much as they had always relied on each other, they had never been huggers. No one in their family was. Even Phil and Naomi, who were so much in love, were not big huggers. Phil always embarrassed Ruthie to death by sensually massaging Naomi’s neck during parents’ events—award banquets and such—at Coventry, and every night while watching TV Phil would rub Naomi’s feet, but they did not hug good-bye in the morning before Phil left for the office. Phil would give his wife a wet smack on the lips, announce, “I’m off,” and be gone.

Before the accident, the only time Julia and Ruthie hugged was while playing Egg and Biscuit. Egg and Biscuit was a game that Julia created, and because she created it, she got to make up all of the rules, the primary one being that Julia was always the Egg, Ruthie was always the Biscuit. Julia would stand on the far side of
the room, looking forlorn, casting her eyes about but never resting them on anyone or anything until they rested on Ruthie, who stood across the room, her back to Julia.

“B-B-Biscuit?” Julia would ask, disbelieving.

Ruthie would turn, would look at Julia, would squint her eyes. “E-E-Egg?”

“Biscuit?” Julia would say again, hope creeping into her voice.

“Egg!?” Ruthie would ask.

“Biscuit!”

“Egg!”

Finally the two girls would run toward each other, screaming, “Biscuit! Egg! Biscuit! Egg!” They would meet in the middle of the room, Julia lifting Ruthie off the floor and twirling her around and around in a hug while each of them cried, “Oh, my yummy Egg! Oh, my fluffy Biscuit!”

They never really outgrew this game, continuing to play it even after Julia began high school. Of course, it was a private thing for them. Nothing they would play in front of others.

For Ruthie, it was easier to imagine the night before the accident rather than the day of. The night before, her parents were still safe, still tucked inside their fancy hotel with the glittering, flashing lobby and a myriad of overpriced restaurants to choose from. And even though their hotel room was on the twenty-sixth floor, they were, for all practical purposes, grounded. They would not plummet from the sky at the Mirage. And what they did there—the gambling excepted—was not all that different from what they did on Saturday nights in Atlanta. Get dressed up. Leave Ruthie at home with a sitter. Go somewhere expensive for dinner where Phil would order them each a glass of champagne to start and Naomi, temporarily unburdened from her motherly responsibilities, would lean back in her seat, would begin to relax.

Julia was unlike Ruthie in that she obsessively imagined the details of her parents’ final day and she seemed to relish doing so. They did not know yet, during the months that followed their
parents’ death, that Julia would one day be a successful writer, would indeed one day write the story of her mother’s early adulthood: her decision to leave her first husband, her young child—Julia!—in tow, in order to marry Phil, the man who had captured Naomi’s heart during their brief romance when she was a freshman at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he was a senior at Duke. Phil would head to Nashville to begin law school shortly after his graduation. And because she was angry at Phil for dashing off to Vanderbilt without seeming to give a speck of thought to their budding relationship, Naomi finally agreed to go on a date with Matt Smith, a North Carolina State sophomore who had already asked her out three times.

It was Matt she would marry, Matt who would give her Julia, and Matt whose heart she would eventually break when she left him for Phil.

And so it made sense, retroactively, that Julia the writer was able to imagine Phil and Naomi’s last day in such unflinching detail. And while Ruthie did not want to imagine the details herself, she allowed Julia to tell of them, because it fixed a story to the horror, which somehow made it less random. (Nothing chilled Ruthie more than the possibility that the world was a random place where parents could die for no reason.) Julia’s story, which she embellished with details plucked from the encyclopedia about the Ford Trimotor, was comforting—to an extent—because it had a defined villain, Dusty Williams, the pilot. In Julia’s version Dusty had started his day with a six-pack of beer, followed by a little weed. In Julia’s version, Dusty’s plane had twice failed inspection.

(In truth, Dusty had possessed a clean flying record, and was by all accounts a model pilot. His plane had recently been inspected. Yes, it was old, but it was in good shape. It should not have crashed. Why it did remained a mystery. Maybe there was a bad fuel load? Maybe Dusty had a heart attack once the plane was up in the air, and no one else on board knew how to fly the old Tin Goose? No one would ever know. It wasn’t as if Dusty’s Trimotor was equipped with a black box.)

“Well,” said Julia. “You know that they got off to an early start. That Phil woke first and went down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee for Mom.”

“With cream and Equal,” said Ruthie. Her mother always took her coffee with real cream and Equal, an incongruity that Julia and Ruthie used to tease Naomi about.

“Right. Mom would have gotten out of the bed and pulled back the curtains, revealing a gorgeous day, the rising sun still a little pink in the sky. She would have looked out the window at the empty hotel pool, blue and sparkling all of those many feet below, too cold to swim in but nice to sit by. She might have wondered why they were leaving the hotel, were driving so many miles only to see the canyon and return to Las Vegas that night. She might have even considered asking Phil to cancel the trip, telling him that she had a headache and that the drive across the desert might make it worse.”

“No,” interrupted Ruthie. “She was looking forward to seeing the Grand Canyon. She told me before she left. Plus, Dad was so excited about driving that Mercedes.”

“I know, I know,” said Julia, impatient. “I’m just thinking that maybe that morning she had second thoughts about all of that driving. You know how bad a driver Phil was. But then he would have burst into the room holding her coffee in one hand, a Danish in the other, looking so eager, so excited, that she would have abandoned her misgivings and gotten dressed for the trip.”

“It was a cool day,” said Ruthie. “That’s what the newspapers said.”

“Cool but not too cold. Perfect for her brown linen pants and crisp white sleeveless shirt that she wore with a thin black cardigan. Phil was wearing khakis and one of those white linen shirts Mom was always buying him, a sweater tied around his waist.”

“Alex’s mom says you’re really not supposed to wear linen until the summer,” said Ruthie.

“You think they gave a shit what Alex’s mom thought of them way out in the desert?”

Ruthie shrugged. No, of course not. In Buckhead, their tony Atlanta neighborhood, and among the other Coventry mothers, Naomi worried about all of the rules she didn’t know, but she wouldn’t have cared out there.