Chapter 3: What Ruth Remembered
Ruth's eyes stayed on Ivan.
Not uncertain anymore.
Steady.
"You're the husband," she said.
"Jessi talks about you."
Ivan stepped closer.
"She does?"
"She says you used to bring her coffee before she was even awake." Ruth's fingers stopped moving in her lap.
"She says you don't anymore."
The words landed without cruelty.
That was what made them worse.
Jessi had turned toward the window.
Her back was straight, her arms crossed low, the way she stood when she was holding something in.
"Ruth," Jessi said quietly, "you don't need to—"
"He came all this way," Ruth said.
"He should know."
Ivan pulled the small wooden chair from the corner and sat down near the bed.
"Know what?"
Ruth looked at him for a long moment.
Her hands resumed their slow movement.
"That she almost stopped coming."
Ivan glanced at Jessi.
She didn't turn around.
"About four months ago," Ruth continued, "she sat right where you're sitting.
She was very tired.
I could see it.
I told her she didn't have to keep coming.
That I would manage." A faint, dry sound that might have been a laugh.
"I wouldn't have managed.
But I told her."
"What did she say?" Ivan asked.
Ruth tilted her head.
"She said, 'You're the only person left who knew my mother.
If I stop coming, I lose her too.'"
The room was very quiet.
Ivan looked at the back of his wife's head.
The way her shoulders had dropped slightly.
The way she was gripping her own elbows.
"Jessi." His voice came out lower than he intended.
She turned.
Her eyes were dry, but the skin beneath them was dark in a way that had nothing to do with makeup.
"I wasn't going to tell you about Ruth," she said.
"Not because I was hiding something wrong.
Because I knew what you'd say."
"What would I say?"
"That we couldn't afford it.
That it wasn't our responsibility.
That there were systems for this, facilities, social services." She said it without anger.
Just recitation.
"And you wouldn't have been wrong.
But I couldn't stop."
Ivan opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Ruth reached out and touched Jessi's hand.
"Show him the photograph."
Jessi hesitated.
Then she went to the dresser, opened the small top drawer, and took out a photograph.
She held it out to Ivan.
Two women, young, standing in front of a house with a porch.
One of them had Jessi's eyes.
The same set of the jaw.
The same way of holding her chin slightly up.
"That's my mother," Jessi said.
"And that's Ruth.
1987."
Ivan held the photograph carefully.
The two women were laughing at something outside the frame.
"Your mother never talked about her," he said.
"My mother talked about her all the time.
You just weren't there for most of those conversations."
It wasn't an attack.
It was a fact.
And it was worse for being a fact.
He set the photograph down on the edge of the bed.
Ruth picked it up and held it against her chest without looking at it, the way someone holds something they no longer need to see to remember.
"She paid the rent here for three months out of her own account," Ruth said, still looking at the photograph.
"Before she told anyone.
Before she told me, even.
I found out when the landlord mentioned it."
Ivan turned to Jessi.
"You paid her rent."
"The building was going to move her to a shared room.
She gets confused with strangers.
It makes things worse." Jessi sat down on the edge of the bed beside Ruth.
"It was four hundred dollars a month.
I had some savings from before we were married.
I used that."
"Jessi—"
"I wasn't taking from us.
It was mine."
"I'm not angry about the money."
She looked at him.
"Then what are you?"
He didn't answer immediately.
He looked at the room.
The handwritten note on the wall.
The two medication bottles lined up with their labels facing out.
The small stack of library books on the nightstand — large print, the spines worn soft.
"I'm trying to understand," he said, "how I didn't know any of this."
Ruth made that dry sound again.
"Because she didn't want to need you for it."
Jessi closed her eyes briefly.
"That's not—" she started.
"It is," Ruth said, not unkindly.
"You told me yourself.
You said, 'If I ask him and he says no, I'll never get over it.'"
The silence that followed was the longest of the evening.
Ivan set his hands on his knees.
"I wouldn't have said no."
Jessi looked at him.
"You don't know that."
"I do."
"You answered the phone during my mother's funeral, Ivan.
You said it was important."
He had no answer for that.
He remembered the call.
He remembered telling himself it would only take a minute.
He remembered it taking eleven.
Ruth reached out and patted Jessi's knee once, twice, the way someone does when they have lived long enough to know that some silences need company more than they need filling.
Outside, a car passed slowly on the street.
The small television in the corner cycled through its muted images.
Ivan looked at his wife.
She was looking at the floor.
"I want to help," he said.
"With Ruth.
With whatever this is.
I want to help."
Jessi didn't answer right away.
She looked at Ruth instead.
Ruth looked back at her with those clear, steady eyes.
"He drove all the way here in the dark," Ruth said.
"That's something."
Jessi almost smiled.
Almost.
"We'll see," she said.
But on the drive home, she didn't change her blouse in the car.
She walked inside still wearing the one she'd had on all evening.
Ivan noticed.
He didn't say anything.
He just noticed.
That night, after Leo was asleep, he found a notepad in the kitchen drawer and wrote down the names of both medications.
He looked up the dosing schedules.
He looked up what the progression of the disease looked like in the next twelve months.
He read for a long time.
When Jessi came downstairs for a glass of water and found him at the kitchen table with his laptop open to a caregiver resource page, she stopped in the doorway.
May you like
She didn't say anything either.
But she didn't go back upstairs right away.
