Page 19 of The Fadeaway

Banks trails Ruby at a distance as she pokes her head into each of the bedrooms, where she clocks the decor: floral bedspreads with matching curtains; thick shag carpets in jewel-toned colors like citron and peridot; cheap wood dressers with doilies on top and clocks whose arms stopped sweeping across their faces eons ago.

But the last bedroom door in the hallway opens into a nursery. It’s painted white and the carpet is a faded pink shag. The small toddler bed is pushed up against the wall and covered with a pink tufted spread, and there is a white shelf filled with teddy bears, dolls, and a Raggedy Ann whose red yarn head is tipped to one side quizzically.

Ruby says nothing, but takes a tentative step into the room. Banks stays in the hallway. Inside the small room that had clearly belonged to a little girl, Ruby runs a hand over the top of a dusty dresser. On it is a framed photo that she picks up cautiously, looking around the room as she does. The picture is of the same toddler from the photo on the fridge, only this timeshe’s not covered in chocolate and strapped into a high chair. In this image, she’s standing barefoot on the sand between two long female legs, holding the hands of a woman who is bent over and laughing. Ruby can tell from the trusting look on the toddler’s face that she’s being held by the loving hands of her mother.

She skims the image, trying to decipher the face of the woman that’s hidden behind a curtain of shiny auburn hair, but all she can make out is the length of the nose and the curve of the lips as the woman smiles down at her baby. In the end, it’s not the face that helps her understand the identity of this young mother, but the gold bracelet that hugs the woman’s wrist. It’s made of two gold ropes that are twisted together, and in the center of the bracelet is a gold anchor.

Ruby knows this bracelet. She knows as sure as she knows the sun will rise tomorrow that if she took a magnifying glass to the picture, she’d see a small Ruby sparkling at the center of the anchor.

She also knows that if she could sweep aside that long, hanging hair to reveal more of the face that this woman smiling down at the baby girl would be Patty—her own mother. Ruby also knows that the little towheaded girl in the photo is not her. She has no idea who the child is.

The room swims around her and the stuffiness of the house hits her like a wave of heat.

“Banks,” Ruby says, setting the framed photo back on top of the dusty dresser as she grips its edge, searching for her balance, which she seems to have misplaced. “Banks, I think I’m going to?—“

The room goes black.

Patty

“Trixie, Trixie, my happy little pixie,” Patty singsonged, scooping water in a cup and dumping it over the blonde head of her baby girl as she splashed in the bathtub on Jekyll Island. “You’re Mommy’s best girl,” she said, watching as bubbles swirled around Trixie’s round belly. Her parents had been unimpressed by her choice of Trixie as a name, but they’d loved the baby instantly, and had been to Jekyll twice already to see their granddaughter in person.

Patty leaned forward and pulled the plug in the bathtub. Trixie put her pudgy hands underneath the water and squealed. “Oooooh!” she shouted in her tiny voice. “Ooooh, Mama!”

With a fluffy towel in her hands, Patty leaned down and scooped her slippery girl from the tub, folding her into a yellow terrycloth cocoon and holding Trixie tightly to her chest.

“We miss Daddy, don’t we?” Patty cooed to the baby as she laid her on the changing table next to her Raggedy Ann doll and quickly powdered and diapered her. The windows of the beach house were open, and from the kitchen, she could hear the sounds of The Bee Gees singing from the radio that Trixie’s grandmother kept on the windowsill.

Trixie gurgled and grabbed her own tiny toes as Patty kept a hand on the baby’s belly to keep her from rolling off the table. Even at twenty, she knew how to be a good mother. She had defiantly insisted to her parents that—even though Bradley was in Vietnam by the time she found out she was pregnant—she was going to be the best mom in the world, and that she would raise her baby to be good and smart and kind-hearted. She had never loved the world of adolescence, and even though she’d had to defer her acceptance to the University of Washington when she’d fallen pregnant, she was ready to leave her teenage years behind and become a mother. Her own parents had been less than impressed and more than disappointed by this turn of events, so when Patty had informed them that Bradley’s parents had asked her to join them on Jekyll Island and raise the baby there until Bradley came home, they’d been happy to have her leave Seattle and raise a baby born out of wedlock in a place where no one they knew might see her.

Rather than be upset, Patty had understood. It was 1967 when she found out she was pregnant; nineteen-year-old unmarried girls frequently took long trips to visit aunts or cousins in a different state, returning to their hometowns haunted by the babies that they’d left behind or put up for adoption. No one spoke of these incidents, and, with luck, a girl might be able to put it all behind her, marry some unsuspecting young man, and start a legitimate family without ever having to disclose the fact that she’d already given birth once before. So the fact that Bradley’s parents had welcomed her and were helping her to raise Trixie was thrilling for Patty. She loved Evelyn and Jacob Huberman like they were her own parents, and they, in turn, loved Trixie and welcomed Patty with open arms.

“Girls,” Evelyn called from the kitchen. “Dinner is ready!”

Patty made a face at her baby with wide eyes and a huge smile. “Dinner, baby girl! Should we go eat?” She reached out and picked Trixie up, sitting her on her bottom so that she could pull a clean nightgown over the baby’s head. “Let’s go eat with Grandma and Grandpa.”

Patty walked down the hallway with Trixie on one hip. Her little girl smelled like Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo, and she felt like a delicate feather attached to the side of Patty’s body. It was almost impossible to remember what it felt likenotto be a mother,notto wake up to the sound of baby giggles, andnotto think that the sun rose and set in the twinkling eyes of a tiny girl.

“Hello, lovies,” Evelyn said, bustling around the dining room table and setting down platters of fried chicken and mashed potatoes.

Jacob Huberman sat in one of the plastic covered chairs, his newspaper open as he skimmed the day’s headlines over the top of his reading glasses. When Patty had Trixie buckled into her high chair, he folded the paper and set it down.

“Good evening, Queen Trixie,” he said in his gravelly voice. As usual, Trixie grinned at him; she was gaga for her grandfather. “Were you a good girl today?”

Patty dished up some mashed potatoes for the baby, sticking a finger into the middle of them to make sure they weren’t too hot before setting the plastic bowl on the high chair tray. “She was an angel,” Patty said, taking the bottle of cold milk that Evelyn brought to her. “And I’m waiting to hear back from the doctor, but when I called today, they said he was out until Monday.”

“Hmph,” Evelyn said, wiping her hands on her apron as she walked back into the kitchen to turn off the radio. As she snapped it off, Simon and Garfunkel’s voices cut out. Evelyn emerged without her apron and sat at the end of the tableopposite her husband. “Doctors need to be better about getting back to their patients. This is serious.”

“Well, it might not be,” Jacob countered. “The baby was just drowsy. Could be nothing but a growth spurt.”

“She was more than drowsy, Jacob!” Evelyn picked a fried chicken thigh off the platter and passed it to Patty. “She wouldn’t wake up. Patty and I had to put her in a cool bath and basically force feed her some sugar water before she came to.”

Jacob looked at his plate as he dished up string beans. He said nothing more.

“It’ll be fine,” Patty offered soothingly, mashing some beans with a fork to feed to Trixie. “She’s healthy as a horse. I can’t wait for Bradley to meet her,” she said, changing the subject. It was a favorite topic of hers and Evelyn’s when they took Trixie to walk on the beach every day: what would Bradley think when he saw his little girl, the spitting image of him, cradled in the arms of the girl he’d left behind before he ever knew she was pregnant?

Jacob, however, enjoyed this topic less. He preferred not to discuss Bradley, Vietnam, or anything other than the stock market, baseball scores, and local news.

“Hey,” Evelyn said cheerily. “Let’s take Trixie on a walk after dinner, shall we?”

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