Brewster's Angle
by Laura Steadham Smith
Matthew noticed the man at the hospital on the third day. His hair was wild and curly above a short-sleeved button down, and in his hands he cupped a tiny cactus in a clay pot. Matthew first saw the man down the hall looking lost, but plenty of people looked lost in the hospital. He stepped back into his wife’s room without thinking anything of it.
He sank into the same laminated seat where he’d spent the past three days and resumed his vigil. The rain continued without stopping, the same rain that three days before had lifted his wife’s tires off the road and spun her into a tree. They were lucky, a police officer told them. If she’d hydroplaned twenty feet earlier, she’d have crashed through the railing and fallen into Mobile Bay.
Matthew measured time by the updates the nurse left on the whiteboard. Cranial pressure 88. Then 76. Then 94. He noticed that the manufacturer labels on Ruby’s hospital bed were repeated in German, and he wondered why. Why not Spanish? It seemed more useful. He noticed that the skin on the bottom of Ruby’s feet was dry and cracked. That her chest still rose and fell. He massaged lotion into her feet and tracked details as though they offered problems to be solved, goals to be worked towards. As though they would give him something else to know.
So far, there was nothing else to know.
Over the past three days, people had floated in and out. Ruby’s sisters, the religious one showing up with anointing oil that Matthew politely declined, the hippie one red-faced as though she’d been punched. A pastor who’d known Ruby in high school fifty years earlier, who talked too long about her witness and the power of the Lord, which told Matthew that the man hadn’t seen his wife in decades. Their adult daughters, both teary-eyed, wanting to be helpful but with nothing to do, endlessly rearranging the flowers on the windowsill or stroking their mother’s hand. Caroline brought a CD player with Celine Dion’s greatest hits, and Anna brought warm donuts every morning, each girl trying to lure Ruby back to consciousness with something she loved. They were days Matthew wouldn’t know how to describe later, days when he wasn’t sure what life would be on the other side.
There had been so many people in and out, former clients of Ruby’s who swore she was like family, cousins whose names Matthew had forgotten or never known, that he didn’t think anything of it when the lost man from the hall wandered in and set his cactus on the windowsill.
The man wore sandals beneath his khakis, which struck Matthew as odd. His shirt was too loose and his hair too long. He nodded hello. He held his chin at an unnatural angle, like though his shoulders were relaxed his body was tense, as if he were strung through with wire. Matthew wanted quiet, a respite from the chaos of nurses checking vitals at all hours, of endless family and questions, but even more he wanted someone there so that he wouldn’t have to be alone with Ruby’s body, with the question of what would remain when the swelling in her brain subsided.
So he extended his hand and said his name.
“Jay,” the man said. His grip was firm.
They stared at Ruby without speaking for a long moment.
Then the man spoke. “Nice weather.”
Matthew looked up incredulously.
The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I mean, for the plants. Not so hot. Plenty of water.”
Matthew studied Jay’s face. He had a strong nose and thin lines on either side of his mouth, his eyes. The skin of his throat exposed by his open top button was lighter than his neck, as though he worked outside in a t-shirt. Matthew rested his elbows on his knees. “How do you know Ruby?”
“From law.”
Another client, Matthew assumed. “The electric plant?” It had dumped toxic coal ash into an unlined retainer pond that leaked into the delta, at least until Ruby went after them on behalf of the thousands of citizens downriver.
Jay nodded. He looked at Ruby rather than Matthew. “I followed that case, yes. It set an important precedent about the extent of liability.”
Then Anna returned with a bag of fried chicken, and when Matthew looked back up the man was gone. Just as well, Matthew figured. Why did he think Ruby would want a cactus? Matthew and Anna ate quietly, then licked their fingers, and when he had wiped his hands Matthew began to rearrange the gifts on the windowsill.
When Ruby woke up, he wanted the view to be calm and serene. He pulled a vase of pale day-lilies to the center, flanked by a foxtail fern in a pot and a small vase of violets like crushed velvet. He pushed the cactus to the back, but Anna stopped him.
“I like the variety,” she said.
Matthew held the cactus and considered it. “All those spikes. Doesn’t look like something that would tell her subconscious to heal.”
Anna rose and poked the cactus’ fat lip. It swelled in protrusions across the pot, with large spikes around the rim. “You never know. She might like succulents.”
Ruby was a complex woman. Matthew tried to know her, to anticipate what she wanted, but sometimes his daughters knew things about his wife that he didn’t, and Matthew was willing to try anything to understand what Ruby needed to heal. So Matthew left the cactus tucked between the lilies and the ferns and resumed his vigil at the foot of the bed, where he was waiting when the doctor came in with her daily evaluation.
She was efficient and kind. Ruby’s swelling was trending down, which was a good sign. They would continue the medically induced coma for the time being, but they might not need it as long as they’d feared.
“She was always an A student,” Matthew joked, and the doctor’s smile filled him with warmth.
She had a new project for him: to collect things that would be familiar to Ruby. Not an overwhelming amount. Just a few mementos, things that might remind her of the scope of her life when she came to. Gentle, sentimental, happy things.
The instruction was a goal, clean and direct, something that Matthew was grateful he could do. It was also a permission. For the first time in three days, Matthew went home and slept.
The next morning, Anna met him at the house to gather items to jog Ruby’s memory.
This turned out to be easier said than done. Matthew agreed with his daughter that they should minimize their selections so that Ruby wouldn’t be overwhelmed. They also agreed that they should pick items that showed different parts of her life. They didn’t agree on much else.
“Here,” Anna said. She pulled an old suit from the back of Ruby’s closet, a brown wool three-piece set complete with a vest. Decades before, Ruby had worn it with a cream silk shirt that featured a bow at the throat. Anna held the coat hanger with one hand and fanned a sleeve across the other.
“A go-getter from the start, ready for battle,” Anna said, though irritation ran through her voice.
Anna wasn’t completely wrong. In her career, Ruby had spearheaded high-profile environmental litigation in southwest Alabama. There was plenty to remember. The coal ash suit, for one. The mercury case, the one where the chemical plant contaminated the Cahaba River and everything downstream to the Gulf. The year Ruby made partner, the case she argued before the state Supreme Court, then the case she argued before the actual Supreme Court in D.C.
But that wasn’t the whole picture, either. “She was a go-getter,” Matthew said. “But she was sweet.”
Anna rolled her eyes and turned back to the closet.
Anna’s anger was no secret. She speared them with it with what felt like constant speed and accuracy, and she’d turned it on herself in the past to devastating effect. She’d imploded in college, failing classes before she attempted suicide. Matthew couldn’t look at the memory directly, though he felt it every day. Anna’s illness had been the turning point, really.
Anna’s decline had caused a shift in Ruby. It showed them all that some things came with a cost. Ruby might work 90-hour weeks, but she came home a shell of herself. And when Anna emulated her, the husk of her that was left almost disintegrated.
When Anna was in therapy, Ruby took a step back at the firm. Cut her hours, stepped down as partner. Somehow these gestures only angered Anna further. But Matthew was grateful. He and Ruby, they both became different people after Anna’s illness. That was what he wanted Ruby to remember. The self she was becoming.
Truth was, Matthew didn’t know which version of Ruby would wake up. He had been with her all along, knew her better than anyone, but there were just so many versions of her. The beginning, when she was an idealistic law student, full of dreams. When she put her lipstick on and practiced her speech to the mirror before she flew to D.C. When they brought Anna home from the hospital and held their breath.
And truth be told, he didn’t want to live with the old version. For years she had been brittle as a rod about to snap. He had accepted it as a necessary cost of the work that she did for the health of the community. But at a certain point, it was a relief to let go.
Anna strode across the room and lay the suit across the bed. “What else would you give her?”
Matthew held up a finger. Then he retrieved a painting from the mantel in the living room and propped it against the bedroom wall.
“See,” he said. Once Anna had recovered enough to live in her own place again, Ruby had taken up painting. In this one, pine trees rimmed a pond, but the water’s surface was split at an angle. One half glimmered with reflected sunlight. On the other, Ruby had painted an entire world beneath the surface. Submerged lilies, a snapping turtle, two yellow-bellied fish who circled each other playfully. The effect was surreal and somehow highlighted both the beauty of the light and everything it obscured.
Matthew knew what had inspired it. The two of them had canoed the pond at Ruby’s mother’s place one afternoon when Anna was home and stable. Matthew sat up front, the water spread before him, while Ruby sat in the back and steered.
He’d brought an SLR camera with a polarized lens. And he’d explained it to Ruby: how the light scattered, at least until it hit the water, and then it bounced back with a clear trajectory, obscuring everything underneath. He had gotten more technical than she probably cared to hear, he could admit. He got into the weeds a bit, explaining how to calculate the angle of refraction, how Brewster’s Angle told you how to create polarization yourself and cut back on the glare. He might not have taken a case to the Supreme Court, but he was an engineer, and he understood his own wheelhouse.
The point, he told Ruby, was that if you knew what angle to use to cut out all the noise—all the extraneous light bouncing around—you could see beneath the surface. Then he slipped the polarizer on the lens and captured the moment.
When they developed the film, there was the shot without the polarizer, nothing but searing light like a scar. And then there was the second shot with the polarizer in place. There, the water was like a window to the marsh grass and bream tucked beneath.
“Would you look at that,” Ruby had marveled. Matthew was tickled when she produced the painting a month later. A memory of a happy day, of a moment when they looked at the same beauty together.
Anna surveyed their offerings. The brown suit, the family photo, the painting. “We need more from her career,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s best,” Matthew said firmly but gently. He put his hand on Anna’s shoulder and squeezed, though the truth was, he wasn’t sure.
Anna had a shift grooming dogs that afternoon, so Matthew loaded up the car alone and drove to the hospital. It was difficult to pin down a woman who had changed as much as Ruby had over the course of their life together, but Matthew knew every inch of her. The tilt to her chin that meant she was stressed, the soft fuzz always above her lip, the way her fingertips turned white when she was cold. He had agreed to the brown suit and talked Anna into sentimental items for the rest. Ruby’s heart would swell when she saw what they’d curated. She would remember her life. She had to.
He cradled the bags they’d filled with mementos up the elevator and was surprised to find two visitors already in the room.
His daughter Caroline offered him a cup of coffee and a scone, and Jay sat in Matthew’s laminated chair with a dazed expression and a mason jar on his knee. He wore another rumpled button down, though it looked clean. This time, wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose.
Matthew strode across the room and set his treasures beneath the window, then accepted the coffee from his daughter. Jay reacted by slowly lifting the jar over his head. “Honey.”
“Jay knew Mom in Tuscaloosa,” Caroline said. She seemed excited by the connection. “You were in law school?” Matthew asked.
Jay held the honey aloft. “I was.”
“Are you a lawyer?”
“I was.” Jay rose to his feet and extended the honey more emphatically, so Matthew took it in his free hand.
Caroline looked at Matthew expectantly, her brown eyes a mirror of his own, telegraphing isn’t this great?
The coffee seared Matthew’s hand, but he didn’t let go. “You think she wants honey?”
Jay stood with one hand in his pocket. “I thought it might remind her.”
“Of what, exactly?” Matthew said, his voice rising.
Jay leaned his arms against his knees. “Well, her father.” He tossed hand, as though to say his gift was inconsequential. “He kept bees.”
He had. It was true. He had stopped keeping bees when Matthew was in the military, and by the time Matthew and Ruby married there was only one hive still at the back of the property.
“That’s enough,” Matthew said, and Jay stood without meeting his eye.
“Jay raises succulents,” Caroline said softly.
“I’m headed back to Tuscaloosa this afternoon,” Jay said, and that was all Matthew really wanted to know. He held his shoulders back and stood in the doorway. Jay slipped past him into the hall, head down, and Matthew tossed the honey into the trash. It clinked against the bottom. He took a sip of coffee that scalded his tongue, but he swallowed it anyway.
Caroline’s eyes were wide. “Granddaddy did keep honey,” she said.
“That’s all over now,” Matthew said. He put the coffee on the windowsill, then retrieved the brown blazer and reached high to hook it over the curtain rod. Then he pulled the pond painting from its bag and placed it against the flower vases, and finally tucked the photo of the two girls in front, where she’d see it first.
The truth was, his wife was unknowable.
He had tried. He had cooked dinner and bathed the girls after working himself, then stayed up until she came in from the office, though he often fell asleep in his chair. But when work consumed her, there was nothing left when she came home except exhaustion. She would crumple into bed and sleep deeply, then leave early.
When she talked in those days, it was about work. She was so obsessive, so single-minded, that he never worried that there was someone else. There was no question. During those long hours, Ruby poured over law tomes and environmental reports. She did what she said. Matthew had no doubt.
But what she thought while she worked—who she thought about—that was another story. He felt close to her, that was true. He was the only one who saw her relent and sleep, who saw her when she wasn’t focused on the courtroom. But that didn’t mean she let him in, either. Not fully. She came home exhausted, and on weekends when she stepped away from work, she might sit on the back patio and stare blankly into the woods beyond.
Not blankly. Never blankly. Her blue eyes were sharp, always, and so dark that in certain light they looked purple. But what she felt, what she thought, who and what she saw in those trees, she kept to herself.
It hadn’t always been that way. Once, when they were young, she talked and talked and talked. He had, too. But then there were the girls, always chattering over each other, and the busy rhythm of their lives. It felt like intimacy to be quiet together, until Anna fell apart and Matthew began to wonder what distance hid in Ruby’s silence.
The honey nagged him. How could someone he hadn’t known remember something he didn’t? He felt like a strong wind had blown through and rattled the sashes that held him together. But maybe it was only something to fixate on while Ruby healed, or didn’t, and so much was uncertain.
He didn’t want the cactus on the windowsill. And yet he wanted to know if Ruby would recognize it. He wanted to see that, no matter what would make a man who had known her two and a half decades earlier come to her hospital bed looking like a lost dog, it meant nothing to her in the present.
They had both grown into new versions of themselves, since Anna. He comforted himself with this. An image of young Ruby might have seared onto Jay’s memory, but he didn’t know who she had become. The version of Ruby who left work early, who avoided praise, who locked herself in her studio for hours and emerged glowing—this was the version she had allowed him, and only him, to watch unfurl.
Ruby woke up a week after the accident. Seven days gone, yet there she was. Deep blue eyes like the shadows inside a glacier. Matthew took her hand, and when he squeezed, she squeezed back. Her eyes flitted over the windowsill, curated like an altar.
“Matthew,” she said. She went back to sleep quickly, peacefully, but the worst fears had broken.
There would be a long road ahead, of course, physical therapy and pain and slow moments, but she began to stay awake for longer periods. She remembered the pond painting, the girls’ baby shoes, but not the Christmas wreath from their first house together. She knitted her brows together in frustration.
“I didn’t remember it, either,” Anna said cheerfully, and Matthew agreed that maybe it didn’t matter.
Matthew limited visitors to an hour a day while Ruby was in this nebulous state, alternately alert and exhausted, but the flowers kept coming. Some faded, and Matthew tossed wilted stems and replaced them with fresh. He told her about her sister and the anointing oil while he jostled the vases around, then pushed the cactus to the front for a moment to clear it out of the way.
Ruby laughed. “She always has something.” Then, her voice higher: “What’s that?”
Matthew paused.
But Ruby didn’t need an answer. “Was James here?”
James, not Jay. A misunderstanding, then. Someone so inconsequential she didn’t even know his name anymore. “No,” Matthew said with relief.
And then Ruby asked about some novels on her nightstand, if he could grab those the next time he went home, and her attention was wholly his.
But then there was the question: had the man said James, after all? It was hard to remember, the moment a blip in time that Matthew hadn’t recorded as important in the present.
He considered it on the drive home. The rain had relented, as it always would, eventually, and the sun set over the bay to the west. The sky was a coral blister, beauty too bright to look at directly. Matthew shielded his eyes and steered with one hand.
He could probably track Jay down, if he wanted to. Ruby stayed in touch with her law school roommate. Maybe she’d know a last name. He had already tried search terms on his laptop with no promising result. JAY UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA LAW CLASS 1974. 1973. JAMES. There had been pages of names, plenty of Jameses and Jays, but nothing familiar when he tried searching some of their names and considered the graying smiles on their Facebook profiles. But if Matthew were to reach out to Ruby’s roommate, what could he say that wouldn’t expose the fear in his question?
It was better left alone, he knew. Whatever was, was in the past. The present, the future—those were all new.
He felt lighter when he pulled into the driveway. There was the passion vine he’d planted beside the garage door, already bursting into flower. There were Ruby’s rainboots tucked beneath the stairs. Small intimacies that showed that the choices they had made together were the ones that counted. The ones they came home to.
He entered his home feeling relaxed and open. He wandered through the kitchen and opened the cabinets mindlessly. Maybe there were other treats she’d appreciate. A bag of Lindt chocolates. A tiny picture in a shellacked refrigerator magnet of toddler Anna, her hands folded neatly across one knee.
He walked through his home as through a museum, tracking the artifacts of their life together. Clues that confirmed for him that his wife was the woman he knew, had known all along. He wandered through the dining room where Ruby displayed delicate china cups. The study, where law books and romance novels lay in haphazard piles.
He came last to her studio. A glass sun porch at the back of the house, where once she had kept houseplants that died when she worked on cases and surged when she was home. Now, a few lush green leaves whispered with the air conditioner. A collection of easels faced the east side of the yard, where the woods were blanketed with a dense wall of kudzu.
It felt like a transgression, to enter her sacred space. And yet. He lived there, too. Maybe there was something there, something small that she would want to see. He stepped inside and looked at the paintings she hadn’t touched in weeks.
Nine canvases of various sizes were hung on the easels and leaned against the wall. Seven of them with verdant cacti.
Their bulbs fat and round. Their paddles studded with spines, their arms thick, wet stripes of green. A few crowned with flowers like crepe paper. Cacti on a wire shelf before a single-wide trailer. They leapt off the canvases, their colors somehow warmer and sharper than green should be. Cacti that caught the light against a background that faded to purple, then to gray.
Wordlessly, Matthew opened the studio door and walked into the yard. The sunset was wiped from the sky, replaced now with a violet haze like gauze. Bats swooped from the trees. He walked toward the woods, all the way up the to line where his grass gave way to the scattered leaves of the understory. He reached the edge and stopped.
He would go this far, but no further.
The trees whispered as night fell. Matthew stared into the dark shelter of their limbs. Life was a series of before and afters. Before Anna imploded. Before Ruby hydroplaned. Before Matthew saw which memories she had curated for herself, that she must come back to again and again. And yet there was no before, no after. Nothing had changed, except what he knew. Matthew saw only what was, always, in a different plane.
He stared into the woods until night fell, and then he came inside alone.
He sank into the same laminated seat where he’d spent the past three days and resumed his vigil. The rain continued without stopping, the same rain that three days before had lifted his wife’s tires off the road and spun her into a tree. They were lucky, a police officer told them. If she’d hydroplaned twenty feet earlier, she’d have crashed through the railing and fallen into Mobile Bay.
Matthew measured time by the updates the nurse left on the whiteboard. Cranial pressure 88. Then 76. Then 94. He noticed that the manufacturer labels on Ruby’s hospital bed were repeated in German, and he wondered why. Why not Spanish? It seemed more useful. He noticed that the skin on the bottom of Ruby’s feet was dry and cracked. That her chest still rose and fell. He massaged lotion into her feet and tracked details as though they offered problems to be solved, goals to be worked towards. As though they would give him something else to know.
So far, there was nothing else to know.
Over the past three days, people had floated in and out. Ruby’s sisters, the religious one showing up with anointing oil that Matthew politely declined, the hippie one red-faced as though she’d been punched. A pastor who’d known Ruby in high school fifty years earlier, who talked too long about her witness and the power of the Lord, which told Matthew that the man hadn’t seen his wife in decades. Their adult daughters, both teary-eyed, wanting to be helpful but with nothing to do, endlessly rearranging the flowers on the windowsill or stroking their mother’s hand. Caroline brought a CD player with Celine Dion’s greatest hits, and Anna brought warm donuts every morning, each girl trying to lure Ruby back to consciousness with something she loved. They were days Matthew wouldn’t know how to describe later, days when he wasn’t sure what life would be on the other side.
There had been so many people in and out, former clients of Ruby’s who swore she was like family, cousins whose names Matthew had forgotten or never known, that he didn’t think anything of it when the lost man from the hall wandered in and set his cactus on the windowsill.
The man wore sandals beneath his khakis, which struck Matthew as odd. His shirt was too loose and his hair too long. He nodded hello. He held his chin at an unnatural angle, like though his shoulders were relaxed his body was tense, as if he were strung through with wire. Matthew wanted quiet, a respite from the chaos of nurses checking vitals at all hours, of endless family and questions, but even more he wanted someone there so that he wouldn’t have to be alone with Ruby’s body, with the question of what would remain when the swelling in her brain subsided.
So he extended his hand and said his name.
“Jay,” the man said. His grip was firm.
They stared at Ruby without speaking for a long moment.
Then the man spoke. “Nice weather.”
Matthew looked up incredulously.
The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I mean, for the plants. Not so hot. Plenty of water.”
Matthew studied Jay’s face. He had a strong nose and thin lines on either side of his mouth, his eyes. The skin of his throat exposed by his open top button was lighter than his neck, as though he worked outside in a t-shirt. Matthew rested his elbows on his knees. “How do you know Ruby?”
“From law.”
Another client, Matthew assumed. “The electric plant?” It had dumped toxic coal ash into an unlined retainer pond that leaked into the delta, at least until Ruby went after them on behalf of the thousands of citizens downriver.
Jay nodded. He looked at Ruby rather than Matthew. “I followed that case, yes. It set an important precedent about the extent of liability.”
Then Anna returned with a bag of fried chicken, and when Matthew looked back up the man was gone. Just as well, Matthew figured. Why did he think Ruby would want a cactus? Matthew and Anna ate quietly, then licked their fingers, and when he had wiped his hands Matthew began to rearrange the gifts on the windowsill.
When Ruby woke up, he wanted the view to be calm and serene. He pulled a vase of pale day-lilies to the center, flanked by a foxtail fern in a pot and a small vase of violets like crushed velvet. He pushed the cactus to the back, but Anna stopped him.
“I like the variety,” she said.
Matthew held the cactus and considered it. “All those spikes. Doesn’t look like something that would tell her subconscious to heal.”
Anna rose and poked the cactus’ fat lip. It swelled in protrusions across the pot, with large spikes around the rim. “You never know. She might like succulents.”
Ruby was a complex woman. Matthew tried to know her, to anticipate what she wanted, but sometimes his daughters knew things about his wife that he didn’t, and Matthew was willing to try anything to understand what Ruby needed to heal. So Matthew left the cactus tucked between the lilies and the ferns and resumed his vigil at the foot of the bed, where he was waiting when the doctor came in with her daily evaluation.
She was efficient and kind. Ruby’s swelling was trending down, which was a good sign. They would continue the medically induced coma for the time being, but they might not need it as long as they’d feared.
“She was always an A student,” Matthew joked, and the doctor’s smile filled him with warmth.
She had a new project for him: to collect things that would be familiar to Ruby. Not an overwhelming amount. Just a few mementos, things that might remind her of the scope of her life when she came to. Gentle, sentimental, happy things.
The instruction was a goal, clean and direct, something that Matthew was grateful he could do. It was also a permission. For the first time in three days, Matthew went home and slept.
The next morning, Anna met him at the house to gather items to jog Ruby’s memory.
This turned out to be easier said than done. Matthew agreed with his daughter that they should minimize their selections so that Ruby wouldn’t be overwhelmed. They also agreed that they should pick items that showed different parts of her life. They didn’t agree on much else.
“Here,” Anna said. She pulled an old suit from the back of Ruby’s closet, a brown wool three-piece set complete with a vest. Decades before, Ruby had worn it with a cream silk shirt that featured a bow at the throat. Anna held the coat hanger with one hand and fanned a sleeve across the other.
“A go-getter from the start, ready for battle,” Anna said, though irritation ran through her voice.
Anna wasn’t completely wrong. In her career, Ruby had spearheaded high-profile environmental litigation in southwest Alabama. There was plenty to remember. The coal ash suit, for one. The mercury case, the one where the chemical plant contaminated the Cahaba River and everything downstream to the Gulf. The year Ruby made partner, the case she argued before the state Supreme Court, then the case she argued before the actual Supreme Court in D.C.
But that wasn’t the whole picture, either. “She was a go-getter,” Matthew said. “But she was sweet.”
Anna rolled her eyes and turned back to the closet.
Anna’s anger was no secret. She speared them with it with what felt like constant speed and accuracy, and she’d turned it on herself in the past to devastating effect. She’d imploded in college, failing classes before she attempted suicide. Matthew couldn’t look at the memory directly, though he felt it every day. Anna’s illness had been the turning point, really.
Anna’s decline had caused a shift in Ruby. It showed them all that some things came with a cost. Ruby might work 90-hour weeks, but she came home a shell of herself. And when Anna emulated her, the husk of her that was left almost disintegrated.
When Anna was in therapy, Ruby took a step back at the firm. Cut her hours, stepped down as partner. Somehow these gestures only angered Anna further. But Matthew was grateful. He and Ruby, they both became different people after Anna’s illness. That was what he wanted Ruby to remember. The self she was becoming.
Truth was, Matthew didn’t know which version of Ruby would wake up. He had been with her all along, knew her better than anyone, but there were just so many versions of her. The beginning, when she was an idealistic law student, full of dreams. When she put her lipstick on and practiced her speech to the mirror before she flew to D.C. When they brought Anna home from the hospital and held their breath.
And truth be told, he didn’t want to live with the old version. For years she had been brittle as a rod about to snap. He had accepted it as a necessary cost of the work that she did for the health of the community. But at a certain point, it was a relief to let go.
Anna strode across the room and lay the suit across the bed. “What else would you give her?”
Matthew held up a finger. Then he retrieved a painting from the mantel in the living room and propped it against the bedroom wall.
“See,” he said. Once Anna had recovered enough to live in her own place again, Ruby had taken up painting. In this one, pine trees rimmed a pond, but the water’s surface was split at an angle. One half glimmered with reflected sunlight. On the other, Ruby had painted an entire world beneath the surface. Submerged lilies, a snapping turtle, two yellow-bellied fish who circled each other playfully. The effect was surreal and somehow highlighted both the beauty of the light and everything it obscured.
Matthew knew what had inspired it. The two of them had canoed the pond at Ruby’s mother’s place one afternoon when Anna was home and stable. Matthew sat up front, the water spread before him, while Ruby sat in the back and steered.
He’d brought an SLR camera with a polarized lens. And he’d explained it to Ruby: how the light scattered, at least until it hit the water, and then it bounced back with a clear trajectory, obscuring everything underneath. He had gotten more technical than she probably cared to hear, he could admit. He got into the weeds a bit, explaining how to calculate the angle of refraction, how Brewster’s Angle told you how to create polarization yourself and cut back on the glare. He might not have taken a case to the Supreme Court, but he was an engineer, and he understood his own wheelhouse.
The point, he told Ruby, was that if you knew what angle to use to cut out all the noise—all the extraneous light bouncing around—you could see beneath the surface. Then he slipped the polarizer on the lens and captured the moment.
When they developed the film, there was the shot without the polarizer, nothing but searing light like a scar. And then there was the second shot with the polarizer in place. There, the water was like a window to the marsh grass and bream tucked beneath.
“Would you look at that,” Ruby had marveled. Matthew was tickled when she produced the painting a month later. A memory of a happy day, of a moment when they looked at the same beauty together.
Anna surveyed their offerings. The brown suit, the family photo, the painting. “We need more from her career,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s best,” Matthew said firmly but gently. He put his hand on Anna’s shoulder and squeezed, though the truth was, he wasn’t sure.
Anna had a shift grooming dogs that afternoon, so Matthew loaded up the car alone and drove to the hospital. It was difficult to pin down a woman who had changed as much as Ruby had over the course of their life together, but Matthew knew every inch of her. The tilt to her chin that meant she was stressed, the soft fuzz always above her lip, the way her fingertips turned white when she was cold. He had agreed to the brown suit and talked Anna into sentimental items for the rest. Ruby’s heart would swell when she saw what they’d curated. She would remember her life. She had to.
He cradled the bags they’d filled with mementos up the elevator and was surprised to find two visitors already in the room.
His daughter Caroline offered him a cup of coffee and a scone, and Jay sat in Matthew’s laminated chair with a dazed expression and a mason jar on his knee. He wore another rumpled button down, though it looked clean. This time, wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose.
Matthew strode across the room and set his treasures beneath the window, then accepted the coffee from his daughter. Jay reacted by slowly lifting the jar over his head. “Honey.”
“Jay knew Mom in Tuscaloosa,” Caroline said. She seemed excited by the connection. “You were in law school?” Matthew asked.
Jay held the honey aloft. “I was.”
“Are you a lawyer?”
“I was.” Jay rose to his feet and extended the honey more emphatically, so Matthew took it in his free hand.
Caroline looked at Matthew expectantly, her brown eyes a mirror of his own, telegraphing isn’t this great?
The coffee seared Matthew’s hand, but he didn’t let go. “You think she wants honey?”
Jay stood with one hand in his pocket. “I thought it might remind her.”
“Of what, exactly?” Matthew said, his voice rising.
Jay leaned his arms against his knees. “Well, her father.” He tossed hand, as though to say his gift was inconsequential. “He kept bees.”
He had. It was true. He had stopped keeping bees when Matthew was in the military, and by the time Matthew and Ruby married there was only one hive still at the back of the property.
“That’s enough,” Matthew said, and Jay stood without meeting his eye.
“Jay raises succulents,” Caroline said softly.
“I’m headed back to Tuscaloosa this afternoon,” Jay said, and that was all Matthew really wanted to know. He held his shoulders back and stood in the doorway. Jay slipped past him into the hall, head down, and Matthew tossed the honey into the trash. It clinked against the bottom. He took a sip of coffee that scalded his tongue, but he swallowed it anyway.
Caroline’s eyes were wide. “Granddaddy did keep honey,” she said.
“That’s all over now,” Matthew said. He put the coffee on the windowsill, then retrieved the brown blazer and reached high to hook it over the curtain rod. Then he pulled the pond painting from its bag and placed it against the flower vases, and finally tucked the photo of the two girls in front, where she’d see it first.
The truth was, his wife was unknowable.
He had tried. He had cooked dinner and bathed the girls after working himself, then stayed up until she came in from the office, though he often fell asleep in his chair. But when work consumed her, there was nothing left when she came home except exhaustion. She would crumple into bed and sleep deeply, then leave early.
When she talked in those days, it was about work. She was so obsessive, so single-minded, that he never worried that there was someone else. There was no question. During those long hours, Ruby poured over law tomes and environmental reports. She did what she said. Matthew had no doubt.
But what she thought while she worked—who she thought about—that was another story. He felt close to her, that was true. He was the only one who saw her relent and sleep, who saw her when she wasn’t focused on the courtroom. But that didn’t mean she let him in, either. Not fully. She came home exhausted, and on weekends when she stepped away from work, she might sit on the back patio and stare blankly into the woods beyond.
Not blankly. Never blankly. Her blue eyes were sharp, always, and so dark that in certain light they looked purple. But what she felt, what she thought, who and what she saw in those trees, she kept to herself.
It hadn’t always been that way. Once, when they were young, she talked and talked and talked. He had, too. But then there were the girls, always chattering over each other, and the busy rhythm of their lives. It felt like intimacy to be quiet together, until Anna fell apart and Matthew began to wonder what distance hid in Ruby’s silence.
The honey nagged him. How could someone he hadn’t known remember something he didn’t? He felt like a strong wind had blown through and rattled the sashes that held him together. But maybe it was only something to fixate on while Ruby healed, or didn’t, and so much was uncertain.
He didn’t want the cactus on the windowsill. And yet he wanted to know if Ruby would recognize it. He wanted to see that, no matter what would make a man who had known her two and a half decades earlier come to her hospital bed looking like a lost dog, it meant nothing to her in the present.
They had both grown into new versions of themselves, since Anna. He comforted himself with this. An image of young Ruby might have seared onto Jay’s memory, but he didn’t know who she had become. The version of Ruby who left work early, who avoided praise, who locked herself in her studio for hours and emerged glowing—this was the version she had allowed him, and only him, to watch unfurl.
Ruby woke up a week after the accident. Seven days gone, yet there she was. Deep blue eyes like the shadows inside a glacier. Matthew took her hand, and when he squeezed, she squeezed back. Her eyes flitted over the windowsill, curated like an altar.
“Matthew,” she said. She went back to sleep quickly, peacefully, but the worst fears had broken.
There would be a long road ahead, of course, physical therapy and pain and slow moments, but she began to stay awake for longer periods. She remembered the pond painting, the girls’ baby shoes, but not the Christmas wreath from their first house together. She knitted her brows together in frustration.
“I didn’t remember it, either,” Anna said cheerfully, and Matthew agreed that maybe it didn’t matter.
Matthew limited visitors to an hour a day while Ruby was in this nebulous state, alternately alert and exhausted, but the flowers kept coming. Some faded, and Matthew tossed wilted stems and replaced them with fresh. He told her about her sister and the anointing oil while he jostled the vases around, then pushed the cactus to the front for a moment to clear it out of the way.
Ruby laughed. “She always has something.” Then, her voice higher: “What’s that?”
Matthew paused.
But Ruby didn’t need an answer. “Was James here?”
James, not Jay. A misunderstanding, then. Someone so inconsequential she didn’t even know his name anymore. “No,” Matthew said with relief.
And then Ruby asked about some novels on her nightstand, if he could grab those the next time he went home, and her attention was wholly his.
But then there was the question: had the man said James, after all? It was hard to remember, the moment a blip in time that Matthew hadn’t recorded as important in the present.
He considered it on the drive home. The rain had relented, as it always would, eventually, and the sun set over the bay to the west. The sky was a coral blister, beauty too bright to look at directly. Matthew shielded his eyes and steered with one hand.
He could probably track Jay down, if he wanted to. Ruby stayed in touch with her law school roommate. Maybe she’d know a last name. He had already tried search terms on his laptop with no promising result. JAY UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA LAW CLASS 1974. 1973. JAMES. There had been pages of names, plenty of Jameses and Jays, but nothing familiar when he tried searching some of their names and considered the graying smiles on their Facebook profiles. But if Matthew were to reach out to Ruby’s roommate, what could he say that wouldn’t expose the fear in his question?
It was better left alone, he knew. Whatever was, was in the past. The present, the future—those were all new.
He felt lighter when he pulled into the driveway. There was the passion vine he’d planted beside the garage door, already bursting into flower. There were Ruby’s rainboots tucked beneath the stairs. Small intimacies that showed that the choices they had made together were the ones that counted. The ones they came home to.
He entered his home feeling relaxed and open. He wandered through the kitchen and opened the cabinets mindlessly. Maybe there were other treats she’d appreciate. A bag of Lindt chocolates. A tiny picture in a shellacked refrigerator magnet of toddler Anna, her hands folded neatly across one knee.
He walked through his home as through a museum, tracking the artifacts of their life together. Clues that confirmed for him that his wife was the woman he knew, had known all along. He wandered through the dining room where Ruby displayed delicate china cups. The study, where law books and romance novels lay in haphazard piles.
He came last to her studio. A glass sun porch at the back of the house, where once she had kept houseplants that died when she worked on cases and surged when she was home. Now, a few lush green leaves whispered with the air conditioner. A collection of easels faced the east side of the yard, where the woods were blanketed with a dense wall of kudzu.
It felt like a transgression, to enter her sacred space. And yet. He lived there, too. Maybe there was something there, something small that she would want to see. He stepped inside and looked at the paintings she hadn’t touched in weeks.
Nine canvases of various sizes were hung on the easels and leaned against the wall. Seven of them with verdant cacti.
Their bulbs fat and round. Their paddles studded with spines, their arms thick, wet stripes of green. A few crowned with flowers like crepe paper. Cacti on a wire shelf before a single-wide trailer. They leapt off the canvases, their colors somehow warmer and sharper than green should be. Cacti that caught the light against a background that faded to purple, then to gray.
Wordlessly, Matthew opened the studio door and walked into the yard. The sunset was wiped from the sky, replaced now with a violet haze like gauze. Bats swooped from the trees. He walked toward the woods, all the way up the to line where his grass gave way to the scattered leaves of the understory. He reached the edge and stopped.
He would go this far, but no further.
The trees whispered as night fell. Matthew stared into the dark shelter of their limbs. Life was a series of before and afters. Before Anna imploded. Before Ruby hydroplaned. Before Matthew saw which memories she had curated for herself, that she must come back to again and again. And yet there was no before, no after. Nothing had changed, except what he knew. Matthew saw only what was, always, in a different plane.
He stared into the woods until night fell, and then he came inside alone.