PART 5
The petition was dismissed with prejudice, which Ruth explained to me in the parking lot means he does not get to come back and try again with a different haircut.
The trust paid out in September. Emma’s quarter went into an account with her name on it, and the other three are held until each of them turns eighteen, and a court-appointed trustee who is not me and not Richard Vance signs off on everything, which is exactly how Ruth Marsh wanted it in 1998.
Richard’s attorneys made one attempt at a settlement — a number, in exchange for dropping everything and never appearing again. Emma read the letter, laughed once with no humor in it at all, and said, “He’s still trying to sell us.”
We didn’t respond. There was nothing to respond to. A man with no rights has nothing to trade.
I haven’t seen him since that room. Sophie looked him up once, on her laptop, at two in the morning, and then came into my bed at nineteen years old and cried like she was six. That’s the only real damage he managed. He got one bad night out of my daughter, and I hope wherever he is he never knows it, because I think he’d count it as a win.
Here’s what I did with the notebook.
I copied every page. I gave each of the girls their own copy, sealed, with instructions not to open it until they were eighteen. Emma had hers already. Sophie opened hers on her birthday in November and didn’t come out of her room for a day. Kate’s is in her closet, unopened, and she knows what it is, and she’ll get to it when she gets to it. Ruby’s is in my safe.
Because Ruby is the one it’s hardest for, and Ruby is the one who most needs to read it, someday, in her mother’s actual handwriting: that there was one page where Lily’s pen pressed hard enough to go through the paper, and that eleven days later she put three kids in a car at four in the morning and drove four hundred miles for a baby who wasn’t born yet.
Nobody chose Ruby harder than Lily chose Ruby.
In October, all four of them asked to change their names.
Not their first names. The other one. We did it at the same courthouse, different room, and it cost four hundred dollars and took eleven minutes, and Doris came, and Frank came, and both Alvarez brothers came, and afterward thirty people came back to my yard and Doris made the potato salad again, and I stood on my back steps in the same spot where I’d stood in June and looked at the same folding table and had to go inside for a minute.
Emma found me in the kitchen.
“You okay?”
“Give me a second.”
She leaned against the counter. Eighteen years old, her father’s jaw, her mother’s everything else.
“Can I ask you something,” she said. “Would you have said yes? If she’d told you all of it. That night. If she’d said, there’s a man, and he’s coming, and it’ll be four kids and a court case and your parents will stop speaking to you — would you still have said yes?”
I thought about lying.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to think so. But I don’t know.”
Emma nodded slowly, like that was the answer she’d wanted.
“Good,” she said. “Then she was right not to tell you. She got you the yes.”
I have thought about that more than anything else. My best friend spent the last clear day of her life deciding not to tell me the truth, because she’d done the arithmetic on what I could carry, and she’d worked out that I could carry four girls but maybe not four girls and Richard Vance. So she put the second thing in a box, prepaid the box for twenty years, taped the key behind my silverware drawer, and paid a florist in advance to hand it to me on the exact day I’d need it — with a note, in her own handwriting, so I’d have to believe it.
She didn’t ask me to be brave. She just made sure I’d be ready.
Every June, on Emma’s birthday, a bunch of white lilies still shows up at my door. She paid for twenty years of those too. There are nine left.
We take them to her.
The five of us drive out to the cemetery in a car that is too small and has been too small for a decade, and Ruby holds the flowers on her lap the whole way because she has decided that’s her job, and we put them on Lily Marsh’s stone and we tell her everything she missed that year.
Last time, Kate asked me if I thought her mom knew it had worked out.
I said I thought her mom had known before any of us did.
Then Ruby said, “Sorry about the mattress,” because Emma had told her, and all four of them laughed, and I stood there in a cemetery watching Lily’s daughters laugh at Lily’s joke, ten years after the fact.
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