The Future Is a Longed-for Past

Even still, her mother’s voice looped, a dream of a memory. Ruth could hear her saying, “We must always be in service to others.” It repeated like a song, her sentence. She hadn’t seen or spoken with her mother since she was thirteen. She didn’t feel the same call of altruism, and she grew ashamed of her desires. She wanted now, more than anything, to belong somewhere. It felt impossible, an ever-present longing.

They had moved often, wherever her father found modest jobs, wherever someone put them up in their basements or garages. Their “work” was to serve God, and so the worldly wonders of living were kept apart from her daily concerns. It created in her a sense of being untethered, of a life spent in a waiting room; the boredom crept in, and she turned to her imagination.

The longest she ever lived one place was in a trailer in Montana. They rented it from a rancher who gave work to her father and milk to her mother and her brother made friends. Ruth never knew how. Her mother, a nurse, offered her assistance to families who could not afford medical care. She delivered babies and eased the suffering of the elderly, of the dying, of anyone who needed it. Ruth’s best times, her favorite times, were when her mother took her with her on jobs. “Watch what I do, so you’ll learn how to do this yourself one day,” her mother said. And Ruth made a good student. She delighted in what most found frightening — the screams of labor, the blood of birth, the gore of farm injuries, the last moments before dying. When people felt pain, they really started to live. They were called from the waiting.

When she was thirteen and her little brother just turned eight, her mother stopped letting her go with her to help. “I need you to watch your little brother for me,” she said each morning, and each morning Ruth begged to go with her.

One day, when she and her brother walked near the river close to the farm, Ruth had an idea to go on the jobs again. The river was filthy with trash and run-off chemicals from the paper plant nearby. People threw things in the river like it was the city dump. It smelled of dead fish and mud. The water, so thick with muck, seemed to flow slower than a river should flow. It threatened even then to go underground leaving behind the soft remains of sand. “Do you want to go swimming?”

Her little brother’s eyes widened with possibility and excitement. He loved to swim. “Mom and dad said we can’t swim in there. It’s too dangerous.”

“I swim in the river all the time,” she said. “It isn’t dangerous at all. There’s a mermaid who lives in it, and if you swim far enough out, she’ll find you and carry you away.”

“There’s no such thing as mermaids,” he said. “And even if there were, they’d live in the ocean, not a dirty old river.”

“There are both kinds — sea and fresh water — like fish. The river isn’t dirty at all. It’s an illusion she creates to keep people out of her home.”

He thought about it long and hard and asked, “Will you go with me?”

“She won’t come if there’s two of us.”

Her little brother’s face, freckled and dirty, contemplated the possibility. He was such a smart boy, so logical, but in the end, he decided to go in.

She smiled and watched as her brother went to the river’s edge, a small turn where it could be a river again, deep and moving. He took off his tennis shoes with holes worn out by his big toes because they were too small. Hand-me-downs. “It’s slimy,” he said, ankle-deep in. He started back towards her.

“It won’t be once you’re in. I promise,” she said.

* * *

When she remembered it now, she thought she’d hesitated. She remembered regret. She hadn’t thought it through, only hoping at the time to solve her boredom. She called him back to her, didn’t she? She moved toward him to bring him back to ground, hadn’t she? But by then he was waist deep and caught in the current and then he was gone.

The rancher saw the whole thing, having come up behind them. He’d been looking for a goat that wandered out of the pasture. She didn’t hear him call out, but when he passed her running to the river and then jumping in, her heart vibrated. On the way out, dripping with water and holding her brother in his arms, the rancher gave her a look reserved for danger and said, “I saw you, girl.” But what could he have seen?

Her brother spent a day in the hospital, nearly drowned and scraped up from the rocks and debris, but he was otherwise safe. She waited at home, and when her parents returned, she felt like a ghost. Her father carried her brother inside without saying a word to her, and he never did again. She thought about it now. What was the final thing he’d said? That morning, in the before, he’d asked for his boots. Was that it? Or maybe he’d told his joke about the blind barber. The memories collapsed time, and she could no longer remember sequences, only circles.

She never tried to explain to her parents. She wasn’t sure what to explain. There was an impenetrable air of suspicion, and even her mother grew ever more distant. One night, she went to check on her brother and turned the knob to his room, but it was locked. A few moments later, her mother came out and gave her the same look the rancher had. Her mother was afraid of her. Ruth sat outside alone until after midnight and then tiptoed back in. For a time after that, her world became silent.

The rancher asked them to leave his property, a question of insurance. He’d known Ruth’s father from when they’d served in Afghanistan, a life her father had lived before he was her father. The rancher said he knew he was a good man, but he couldn’t be responsible for what might happen. He had suspicions about Ruth’s soul.

Ruth stayed outside most of the time. The last night they lived together as a family, her mother walked outside in a white linen nightgown and sat beside Ruth under a tree. She’d been crying. She put her arm around her daughter. She said, “What you put in your heart stays there forever.” Her parents and brother moved to California the following week, and she was sent to live with an aunt in Mississippi, where she’d be under the influence of her aunt’s strict interpretation of Christian values. She attended church three times a week, volunteered at food kitchens, and cleaned houses for church members. Her aunt did not allow her to socialize outside of her watch, and she was made to wear plain clothes, no makeup, no color. No one said it was a punishment, but Ruth knew she was being kept away from love for fear she’d turn it dark.

Ruth stayed there until she was sixteen, when her aunt broke her hip and was no longer able to keep watch. Ruth’s parents decided she was old enough to be on her own. Her mother sent her an envelope with a card that had a scripture on the outside. There was a note inside the card that said, “This is all we could spare. I pray you will be good.” There was a small gold ring in the envelope that had a cross engraved on a flat circle. There was $500 in cash. She put the ring on and never took it off. She took the $500 and rented a room in town.

She kept going to church, finding odd jobs, until finally a family hired her as a live-in nanny for their three children, and that was the end of it. And that was the all of it.

* * *

It’d been ten years, somehow. Vera hired Ruth six months ago to help care for her elderly father. The fish were dying, and no one knew why. Vera bought the small bowl and two goldfish on impulse, filled it with tap water, placed it in the window to settle and added the fish a couple of hours later, “Like the guy at the pet store told me,” she said to Ruth. “But they keep dying.”

Vera wanted the bowl near her father’s bed so he could see them when he woke up or was going to sleep, which were the two things he did most. Ruth had never seen someone sleep so much, and she wondered if he dreamed of being young and fancy in his military uniform or if he dreamed of fire, or if he dreamed at all or if he lived always in a dream.

Vera liked Ruth, and Ruth liked the job. It paid well, and she didn’t have to be alone.

She lived by herself and had no friends. She’d had a roommate, Lily, for two months, a girl her age who seemed so much younger. Lily answered an ad she put up in the apartment complex lobby. They got along well enough for a while. Lily wasn’t very bright, and Ruth helped her fill out applications for jobs and organized her clothes according to color and type. She tried to help her. When Lily started dating a rough fellow with bad breath who sold pills, Ruth pushed her luck. She told Lily to stop seeing him. Lily left one day without telling Ruth. Ruth saw her a few months later in a pharmacy holding a newborn and buying cereal.

Ruth enjoyed being around people again. Vera asked her to get rid of the fish like she had expertise in getting rid of dead fish, but Ruth didn’t mind. “Make yourself useful,” her father said on days she sat lingering in the fields with a book.

Mr. Miller, Vera’s father, had for several years lived in an apartment within a larger retirement village that was secluded from the rest of the city, until he was no longer able to take care of himself. Vera was busy making calls and filling out forms, trying to get him in a full-care facility. Ruth filled in the gaps. Visiting families moved around the property holding tight to their youth and the living world. The entire building smelled of medicine and bad hygiene, and the residents took years to get from one end of the hall to the other end. The pace suited Ruth fine. She liked to watch people soothe their guilty feelings by visiting on Sunday afternoons and bringing fried chicken and pie so that the whole place smelled like medicine and bad hygiene and fried chicken and apple pie.

Vera spent as much time there as she could, but she was a psychologist with a busy schedule, and she took on most of the family’s responsibilities. In addition to her aging father, her husband was going through chemotherapy. Recently, Vera’s daughter asked to ship her grandson down to stay with her after he was kicked out of three schools and caught his math teacher’s pants on fire with lit matches during recess. The teacher was unharmed, but the matches were verboten on school premises, and violence generally frowned upon. Vera explained it to Ruth one evening. “I don’t think he meant to hurt him. He made a bad grade, and the teacher called his mom and told her he’d been causing problems in the class all year, and then Nathaniel called him a liar.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Ruth said. Vera nodded.

“He’s got more imagination than we know what to do with,” she said. “He’ll arrive early next week. He’ll be around here a lot. Will you be able to stay longer hours?”

Ruth hesitated. She wasn’t sure why. She thought about being sent to her aunt and stood still in the memory.

“You’ll be compensated, of course,” Vera said.

Vera used words like compensated and smelled like a rose. She brought the residents tomatoes from her garden and chocolates from Europe. Ruth admired her organized and careful approach to the details of life. Ruth held her shoulders up, imitating Vera’s posture. “Sure, I like to keep busy.” It sounded like something Vera would say.

Ruth walked to the window, picked up the tank, brought it to the bathroom, lifted the plastic lid, and dumped it in the toilet. She said, “Goodbye, fish,” before flushing. The bathroom, white and steel, smelled of bleach and urine. Always two opposing smells in this place, she thought.

Ruth returned to the living room and watched Vera brush her father’s hair and whisper something about Virginia in the fall. “The leaves have already begun to change,” she said. Vera, the youngest of a brood of children, seemed too young to have a father so old. She was pretty with her painted red nails and simple gold jewelry. She wore tailored clothes and silk blouses. One of Ruth’s errands was going to the dry cleaner once a week for Vera and her husband. She’d often peek inside the pressed wardrobe and admire the tasteful display of wealth and society.

Ruth couldn’t wear silk blouses for this job. She wore scrubs, hair pulled back, no makeup. It reminded her of living with her aunt, almost comforting in a job that asked her to appear plain. Still, she admired Vera’s confidence and beauty.

Vera looked up at Ruth and said, “Before you leave, would you set out his nighttime medicine?”

“Sure,” she said and so she did.

* * *

Mr. Miller looked too old to be alive and only awoke for brief spurts between long naps.

When she first started caring for him, he spent more hours awake. The first few weeks were a trial of patience. She hadn’t quite anticipated the difficulty of character she faced in changing adult diapers. Early in the job, he punched her in the face when she tried to shower him. It didn’t hurt, but it caused a struggle and tangled them together in a way that left him bruised. She worried the bruises would get her fired, so she told Vera that he slipped in the shower. “I’m sorry,” she’d said.

“It’s not your fault, dear,” Vera replied. Ruth liked being called dear. Vera bought a plastic chair made for such a thing and kept it in the shower. She had a handyman put in rails in the bathroom and place mats on the floor.

Ruth carried on. She went grocery shopping, cleaned the apartment, waxed and shaved, brushed and cut, whatever put Mr. Miller at ease, whatever helped him retain some dignity. She clipped his toenails and massaged his feet, her least favorite chore, somehow worse than changing diapers. His toenails were made from petrified wood and his feet from sand, she was sure. It took special clippers, and she spent four hours one day driving everywhere she could think of that might have clippers until she finally found a pair at a medical surplus store. The store itself was a thing of wonder, sterile and contained. Quiet. They didn’t normally sell to individuals, she was told. There was a guy around her age working, and he’d asked, “Why didn’t you just buy them online?” She shrugged. It hadn’t occurred to her. She liked to move in the world, walk into shops, get asked questions by cashiers. It made her feel a part of things. She never had enough money for a computer, and her phone was provided by Vera. She’d rarely even gone online.

She started to like Mr. Miller — he told her stories and laughed at things that weren’t funny. One evening, his mood swung from bliss to anguish and back around, and she couldn’t get him to rest. He asked, “Are you Martha?”

“No, Mr. Miller. I’m Ruth. I’m your …” but she wasn’t sure what to tell him or if he’d recognize her. “I’m your friend,” was all she came up with.

He said, “I want to see Martha.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Miller.”

“Martha and I went to New Orleans one summer to get married. Her folks thought she was in school. She wore my army jacket, and I bought her beignets at that café — what’s it called …”

“Du Monde. Café du Monde.”

“We danced on the Riverwalk at midnight.”

Ruth wondered who Martha was, not his wife or Vera’s mother, but someone else from a time long past. There were always two pasts parallel to one another, one known, one private.

“I miss Martha.” He sang, “I go walking after midnight,” and looked at Ruth with a smile. She sang along. For the next two hours, she listened to stories about Martha.

The next week, Nathaniel arrived like a terror. Vera enrolled him in a private school, and Ruth picked him up and brought him to the apartment in the afternoons. On the first Friday, with the rush of weekend freedom, he walked in the apartment ahead of Ruth and flung his Spiderman backpack on the table, knocking over the bottles of pills she had meticulously set in order, some of the bottles were opened. She shot him a dark look but stayed calm and measured. She stood up from the table, picked up the backpack and put it on the couch beside him, where he’d already turned on the television.

She said, “I prefer Batman.”

“He’s not even really a superhero.” Nathaniel said this like she was the lamest person on earth. Nathaniel was nothing like her own little brother, but being around him made her miss him, and so she liked being around him. She thought always of her brother. She wondered where he lived, what his favorite subject was in school, if he had a talent. Missing was an echo of love.

Vera arrived with a single grocery bag. They didn’t need anything, but Vera seemed to be worried she’d forgotten something important. Ruth put the groceries away: a single sweet potato, a pint of vanilla ice cream, and garlic. Nathaniel’s parents were both professors and he did things like go sailing and visit museums, things she’d never done at twice his age, and yet he was the most unrefined thing she’d ever met.

“Why don’t you go read something to Papi,” Vera said. “You like to read.”

“I don’t have anything to read,” Nathaniel said.

“Well, your Papi has some books. Why don’t you go to the bookshelf?”

“I don’t want to read them.”

“Well, then why don’t you make up a story?”

“That’s boring,” he said.

“You could draw,” she said.

“I want to play on my iPad.”

“No devices.”

“Then I want a soda.”

“You can’t have a soda.”

“I want a soda,” he said.

And on and on this went until finally Vera said to Ruth, “Be a dear and take him down the hall to get a soda.”

Ruth took Nathaniel down the hall to the drink machine, and he found the one he wanted in D8, but the slot was jammed, so she said, “Get the one in D7.”

“I don’t want the one in D7. I want the one in D8. Eight is my favorite number.”

“They’re the same thing.”

“If you don’t get me the one in D8, I’ll tell granny you used corporation punishment on me.”

“Corporal.”

“What is corporal?”

“It’s the word you meant to say.”

“You’ll get in trouble.”

“Adults can’t get in trouble,” she said, but she knew it wasn’t true.

“Please? Please, please, please. Please! Please!” Each “please” went up a pitch and he wound up on the ground, a full-blown tantrum.

“Good grief. Where did you even come from?”

“Virginia.”

“Look, I can’t make the D8 slot work. I don’t have special powers or anything. What do you want me to do?” Then she remembered the soda machine downstairs. “We can try downstairs. I’m not sure if they have a D8 or if it’s even the same thing, but we can try.”

He ran down the hall to the elevator and waited for her, saying in an exasperated voice, “I’m waiting,” until she reached him, but she took her time.

This is how things went between them for weeks. Eventually, he wore her down, and she didn’t mind his company. At least he was interesting. Better than fish for the old apartment.

One evening, when Vera left Nathaniel in her care for an extra fifty dollars, he helped her change his great grandfather’s sheets. “Are you married?” he asked and pointed at the small, gold band on her hand.

“No,” she said.

“Then why do you wear a wedding ring.”

“It’s not a wedding ring. It’s my mother’s. She gave it to me when I was sixteen. She said it was to remind me to always be good.”

“Are you bad?”

“Sometimes.”

“I’m bad sometimes, too,” he said.

“Sometimes?”

“It’s not even a pretty ring. Grandma has lots of rings. I bet she’ll give you one, so you don’t have to wear that one anymore.”

“I like my ring. Anyways, I’m not your family, Nathaniel.”

“You sort of are family. You’re here more than anyone else in our family.”

She smiled kindly to Nathaniel, and he returned her warmth. It was a nice moment between them, but then he got bored again and held the matches up to the fire alarm while she was giving Mr. Miller a shower, and the entire building was evacuated. She dressed a wet Mr. Miller in a bathrobe and struggled to get him to understand why they had to leave the apartment. Nothing moves slower than the evacuation of a retirement home. “We would have all burned, if it’d been real,” she told him, and he laughed. “It’s not funny, Nathaniel. What is it with you and matches?”

“They make fire. What’s cooler than fire?”

* * *

As soon as she’d reach her limit, he would do something kind and surprising. They watched a game show in Mr. Miller’s room, and Nathaniel spotted a jumping spider on the quilt Mr. Miller kept over his legs on colder days. He pointed at it, and she shot up from the seat by the bed and swooshed it off with her hand. The spider jumped along the floor to the bathroom nearer Nathaniel than her. “Stomp it,” she said.

“No,” he said.

She mimicked stomping.

“I don’t want to kill it.”

“I’ll kill it then,” she said and moved toward it, lifting her foot when she was near enough.

“No, don’t kill it,” he said and grabbed her foot. “It’s not venomous.” They looked down at the spider frozen, trying not to be noticed.

“Okay, well. then get it out of here.”

He went into the kitchen, got a small glass from the cupboards and a postcard from the table, and very gently placed the glass above it and slipped the postcard under it. He walked slowly to the opened window. “Get the screen,” he ordered, and she removed the screen, spreading dust that made her cough. He put his hand out of the window and shook the glass. “There,” he said. “Don’t be such a baby. You can’t just kill things because you’re a baby,” he said and picked his nose.

“Go get a tissue,” she said.

He rolled his eyes and sighed and got up and got a tissue and blew his nose and sat back down.

* * *

Ruth and Nathaniel found a routine. Vera spent less time in the apartment and threw money at Ruth to compensate for sitting with two people instead of one. Vera bought another fish. This time a white goldfish called Angel. She shimmered in the light and her fins were like chiffon swaying in the water. Ruth thought it was heavy-handed on the metaphor to call the fish Angel, but it didn’t matter much, because from the time she shimmered to the time she died, Angel’s symbolism shifted into something funny. At least to everyone except Vera. Mr. Miller laughed a labored laugh that sounded more like a cough. He clapped his distorted hands, his eyes wide as he looked at the bowl.

“What am I doing wrong?” Vera asked her. Vera was wearing a white, tailored pants suit with a navy-blue polka dot shirt, red lipstick, and a gold necklace. To Ruth she looked to be the very image of classy. Ruth felt shy and small in her scrubs.

Ruth said, “It’s just a fish.”

Vera cried, ruining her perfect makeup.

“It could be the water or the food, maybe,” Ruth said. “I’ll go to the store tomorrow and ask.”

“No more fish. Do you hear me? No more fish,” Vera said loudly so everyone — even Mr. Miller in his slumber — could hear.

Vera was around less after Angel died, and Ruth was around more. Nathaniel and Ruth sat at the kitchen table playing Go Fish, Nathaniel’s idea of a joke, and he asked, “Why are you sad?”

“I cut my hair,” she said.

“Why did you cut your hair then?”

“I was sad.”

“You’re weird,” he said.

“You’re weird,” she said back.

“All of the adults are sad around here, and I have to be here with all of you and all the sad.”

“Sadness,” she corrected. “Do you have sevens?”

“Go fish,” he said. “My uncle is the only adult I know who isn’t sad. He rides motorcycles in Hawaii.”

“For a living?”

“He’s a construction worker. I want to live with him, but mom says he doesn’t have a lifestyle conductive for a child.”

“Conducive,” she corrected.

“I visit him sometimes in the summer, but not this year. He doesn’t have the internet or anything, so it’s kind of boring, but he takes me out looking for snakes. Last time he let me shoot a rifle. Don’t tell grandma. She hates guns. He lives in an RV. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” she said.

“He has a big dog called Russell. I like dogs. And he took me to see the wrestlers.”

“What wrestlers?”

“I don’t know. Just some wrestlers.”

“Do you like wrestling?”

“It was better than sitting around here all the time.”

“Maybe we can go to the movies tomorrow.”

“What’s playing?”

“I don’t know. Let’s check,” she said and pulled out his iPad.

“You don’t even know how to use it,” he said and took it back. “What’s your last name?”

It gave her pause to say it aloud, but at last she did. “Myers,” she said.

He typed something and shook his head. “You’re not on here,” he said.

Mr. Miller slept more and more and more until one day Vera said, “He was finally admitted into a full-time care facility. It’s funny how slow the whole process goes, and now the move is next week, and I’m not ready.” Vera looked out the large living room window. “I used to smoke. God, I miss it.”

Ruth was surprised to hear that.

“I want to ask you something. Would you ever consider? Well, you see, my husband, Gerald, is responding to chemo, and we’re hopeful for the first time in a long time. He needs me now. He told me so. He’s never asked me for anything, and so I know he means it.” She breathed in deeply. “He adores Nathaniel, that little terror, but it’s too much energy. It’s not a matter of love; it’s a matter of resources. Nathaniel will soon return to his mother. He’ll visit us in the summers, but he needs his mother, and my husband needs me.”

Mr. Miller laughed at something on the television. Ruth and Vera laughed at Mr. Miller’s laugh, contagious like a yawn.

“Well, I’ve talked to my daughter, and she’s got a guest room. She’d have to hire somebody, and we thought maybe, since you already know Nathaniel, and you get on so well …”

“Oh,” Ruth said, softly.

“It’s a big move for you.”

“Not the biggest,” she said.

“Virginia is beautiful. You could have a fresh start.”

Ruth teared up. She felt hope and guilt all at once. “There’s something I need to tell you. I should have told you when you hired me. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“Ruth, do I look unprepared to you? Impulsive? Unthoughtful? Like I don’t do my homework?”

“No,” she said. Ruth’s fear seized her breath. She felt hot all over.

“I hired you after the Smiths, remember? They went to church with you and your aunt.” She smiled in a knowing sort of way. “Your aunt told them about the river, about your brother. I think as a warning. Anyway, you can tell me whatever you want, but it won’t change a thing.”

It was a strange thing to have kept a secret that was not a secret. “My family never forgave me.”

“Well, dear, it’s not up to them. Forgiveness belongs to God.”

“I don’t believe in God,” Ruth said.

“Oh, that’s fine, dear,” she said and laughed. “It’s an idea, you know? God can be whatever you’d like. The point is, you’re forgiven.” Vera lifted her index finger in the air and formed a cross. She said, “If you don’t want to move to Virginia, then I’ll help you find another job here, but golly, Ruth, you were a kid. Remember why Nathaniel was sent here? You know what I did when I was thirteen? I stole my father’s truck and a bottle of whiskey and drove ten miles on a highway before crashing into a loblolly and killing a fawn.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re just making that up,” Ruth said.

“I did. We all have a difficult past, Ruth,” Vera said with a smile. “Anyway, I don’t know your parents, but I know you. You’ve got to take whatever it is you put in your heart all those years ago and put a little life in its place.”

Ruth sighed, and they looked into one another’s eyes, as friends. Vera reached her hand across the table, across the medicines and grocery lists, across time itself, and held Ruth’s hand, an invitation accepted. Virginia is beautiful in the fall.