Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz Read Free Book Online

drawers, and then he heard sobbing, a sound surprisingly different from the thin, penetrating cry he remembered rising from Ruth when she was an infant. Poor thing, with no mother to comfort her, afraid of the dark, he thought at first, but the irritating sound went on, and he pulled the pillow tight around his ears. Why didn't Amanda do something to stop it? And then he realized that Ruth was not crying at all, but laughing.
    “Again,” she shouted. “Again!”
    Amanda was upstairs a long while. He had almost fallen asleep by the time she came down and began to wash the dishes.
    “I shouldn't have let her get so wound up,” she said. “She's just like Mathilda that way, never wanting to go to sleep.”
    Carl didn't remember that about Mathilda. He remembered watching her dream in the early mornings, the way she burrowed into the blankets, so that only the top of her head stuck out, the way she flung her arm around him and held him tight without knowing she did so. But Amanda was probably right. She'd lived with her sister for almost twenty years, whereas he'd only been her husband for three, and for more than one of those they'd not even been in the same country.
    Amanda moved expertly about her kitchen, washing her dishes, putting things away, and Carl was reminded that he didn't know where things belonged.
    “Maybe Ruth and I should move back out to the island,” he suggested.
    “That's hardly practical.”
    “I guess you're right.”
    Amanda shook out her dishcloth with a snap. “We'll have you on your feet in no time.”
    “Sure,” he said, making an effort to sound hearty, to behave as if everything would be just fine very soon. “I'll be ready to work by planting.”
    Amanda blew out the lamp and the kitchen went black.
    “We'll see,” she said from the darkness.
    He listened to her steps, heavy on the stairs, and the floor creaking in her room, and finally even the mattress taking her in. And then he could hear only the wind worrying the shingles and the windowpanes.
Amanda
    After Mathilda and Carl were married, I had to sleep in the small room off the kitchen. All winter I could hear their whispering and laughing in the night. I could hear their bed moving.
    Then they needed a house all to themselves, a house on my island, that's what Mathilda proposed. All spring and summer they worked on it, but every day they rowed back to the farm, Carl to help my father and Mathilda to visit our mother, who was much recovered by then, and to help do the chores around the house. There was no longer any need for me at all. The university had accepted my application to nursing school, and I began to pack my trunk.
    I was certainly something the day I waited on the platform in my new hat, the whole family there to see me off. They gave me presents—a silver pen from my parents, a red moroccan leather notebook from Mathilda and a bluebird house from Carl, which surprised me, because I did like birds, but you wouldn't think a boy would notice something like that. I thanked him, of course. I admired the fine workmanship and the cunning shingles set in the roof, the little shutters around the entrance, that made it look like a real house. But how did he think I'd be able to carry such a thing all the way to Madison? Where did he expect me to put it when I got there?
I
wouldn't have any split-rail fence to hang it on. I'd be lucky if I had a window to call my own.
    “I'll keep it for you,” Mathilda said.
    They stood on the platform as the train pulled away, all of them waving but my sister, whose hands were full.
    I'm not blaming them, a married couple needs a place to live, after all. Still, if they'd not built their house on my island, Mathilda would not have drowned. If you look at it one way, it's as simple as that.
    Carl didn't dream of Mathilda often, although he tried. He thought about her when he lay in bed, trying to make her appear in his sleep. Sometimes he thought about the day they'd met, how he'd taken