You can read the newspaper articles about the whole saga. They’re all saved in the top right-hand drawer of my desk. Or you can go on the internet. Libby tells me there’s an entire entry about it on some online encyclopedia.
And yes, yes, I know we’ve already covered some of this, but only the facts. How I vanished on a family picnic when I was just three, how I was found months and months later living with the Darnells in Alabama. How Mrs. Darnell insisted that I was not Ruby McTavish at all, but her own child, Dora, and how Mr. Darnell eventually confessed that while in North Carolina on a construction job (for my own father, as luck would have it), he had gotten drunk on a Sunday afternoon and wandered into the woods. How he had seen me alone, a miscommunication between my nanny and my mother meaning that both women thought the other was watching me. How he had thought of his wife, Helen, and the child just my age who had died only a month or so before. How easy it had been to scoop me up, carry me to his truck parked on some back logging road, and spirit me away to his family’s shack in Alabama. A replacement for the child his wife so mourned.
Of course, I remember none of this.
Or rather, I remember fragments that I’m not sure are actually memories. I read the stories so many times, you see, and envisioned so much of it that I can’t be sure if something is a memory or a conjured-up image.
A dream.
That’s why I spent so much time in my father’s office as a child.
He kept all the newspaper clippings there, in the very same drawer I mentioned earlier.
I learned that by accident one afternoon in 1950, when I was just ten years old. I’d had a doll, one of those fancy ones with the eyes that opened and closed and silky blond hair, her lips strawberry pink, and her cheeks dotted with painted-on freckles.
I’d gotten her when I was seven or eight, for Christmas or a birthday, I can’t remember which. What I can remember is Nelle howling that her doll had brown hair and mine had yellow hair, and that was unfair since Nelle herself was a blonde and I was a brunette. I had been worried that my parents might make me trade dolls with Nelle, and I had sat there, only a little bitty thing, thinking, If they do, I will throw this doll into the fire. I will burn it before I let Nelle have it.
I meant it, too. The image of that beautiful doll melting and folding in on itself, the yellow hair sparking, the pink paint of the lips bubbling and cracking, was far less painful than picturing the doll, whole and complete and perfect, in Nelle’s arms.
Do all children think like this? I’ve never spent much time with children other than the ones either born into or brought into this family, so I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s all perfectly normal, and not some quirk of either my DNA or the very essence that seems to emanate from the walls of Ashby House. But at the time—and hell, who am I kidding, even now—it seemed that there must be something uniquely wrong with me.
In any case, Mama didn’t ask me to trade, and Nelle was eventually consoled with an extra piece of cake or some other sop, and the doll was mine. I had named her “Grace,” but when I said the name, something had passed over Mama’s face, an ugly look like someone had suddenly hit her.
“I don’t like that name,” she’d said sharply. “What about Kitty?”
I thought Kitty was a stupid name, but Mama so rarely paid any attention to me that I’d readily agreed even as I’d known that in my head, I would still call her Grace.
And it was Grace’s fault I was in Daddy’s office that hot summer afternoon.
One of her eyes had gotten stuck, half-opened, half-closed. There was something about that half-mast gaze that reminded me of Mama when she had her headaches. That’s what we called them then, although of course now I know that Mama drank too much, which meant that she was perpetually either intoxicated or dealing with the aftermath.
Do you know, to this day, I cannot stand the smell of gin? It was her favorite, and any time I get a whiff of that herby, medicinal scent, I think of Mama, swaying in her bedroom door, her face puffy, eyes red.
The last time Grace’s eye had gotten stuck like that, Daddy had fixed it with a paper clip, and the only place I could think to find one was his office, so I’d crept in there, the air stifling, smelling like cigar smoke, furniture polish, and the faint hint of my father’s cologne.
We weren’t forbidden from entering, exactly. It’s just that Daddy was out of town for business (well, “business.” Later we’d learn he was driving to Charleston to stay with his mistress and our future stepmother, Loretta), and I’d never been in there without him.
I can still remember how hard my heart was beating as I crept across that thick green carpet, the same carpet that is under my feet now as I write this. How the brass knob of the drawer felt hot in my hand, my fingers sweaty.
I didn’t mean to snoop, but when I opened the drawer, the very first thing I saw was my name. It was emblazoned across the top of a newspaper, the letters inches high, bold and black:
BABY RUBY HOME AT LAST!
I remember wrinkling my nose at the “baby” part, already sophisticated enough at ten to reject anything that smacked of babyishness, but then I started to read.
And kept reading.
I’d known about the kidnapping. This is not that moment where a child learns some dark family secret by accident. Our town was too small, our family too well known for that kind of thing to stay hidden. But I only knew about it in the vaguest sense. A bad man had lost his child and saw me, taking me home to his wife so she wouldn’t be so sad anymore, but that wasn’t right, you could not take someone else’s child, and Daddy had spent so much of our money to find me, to bring me home where I belonged.
But here, in this newspaper, I learned the name of the man who had taken me.
Jimmy Darnell.
His wife was Helen. They had called me Dora. They had another baby, too, born just after I was returned to my family. Her name was Claire, a pretty name that I immediately resolved to give to the next doll I got.
And then I’d seen another name.
Grace.
There in black and white, a sentence: The child’s former nanny, Grace Bennett, left North Carolina after questioning, and her current whereabouts are unknown.
Paper clip and doll forgotten, I’d sat in Daddy’s big leather chair and pulled out all the papers in that drawer.
It took me awhile to find it, but eventually there had been a picture splashed across the front page of The Atlanta Constitution. I recognized Mama and Daddy, their expressions serious, Mama’s hat tilted so that the brim covered most of her face. And behind her, another woman, younger, her hair dark, her face a rictus of anguish, tears streaming, one gloved hand clapped over her mouth.
The parents of Baby Ruby leave the Tavistock, North Carolina, police station accompanied by the child’s nanny—and the last person to see Baby Ruby—Grace Bennett.
I looked at that face for what felt like hours.
The grief on it. The pain. The horror. How she must have loved me. How tormented she must have felt, letting me slip away on her watch.
Guilt crept into me, too, a sick, slippery feeling.
How could I not remember someone who loved me this much? How was the only thing left of this person the faint memory of a name, a name I gave to a doll?
But mixed in with the guilt was that strange sort of elation you feel when reading about yourself. Pages and pages of newsprint, all about something scandalous that had happened to me.
What child can resist that?
So, naturally, I wasn’t listening as closely as I should have been, which is why, when Nelle pushed her way in and pointed at me, I actually jumped in my seat.
“You’re in Daddy’s office!” she cried, triumphant. “I’m gonna tell him!”
“I’ll say you’re lying,” I fired back. “You’re just a baby. He won’t believe you.”
Her narrow face creased into a frown. Christ, I’ve just realized it’s the same expression she wears ninety percent of the time now. How tragic for her.