For as long as she can remember, she has had two cousins named Ruby. Her so-called cousin, who lives in this world and whom she can’t stand, and the cousin she meets in her dreams—her Real Cousin Ruby. Her siblings all dream about Real Cousin Ruby, too. But why?
“My Real Cousin Ruby” by World Fantasy Award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and in other ebookstores.
My Real Cousin Ruby
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
MY COUSIN RUBY is forty-seven years old and obese. She’s been married a million times and has more children than I can count. She never went to college. She didn’t even go to trade school until she turned forty. Then she learned how to be a hairdresser.
I’m sure she’s a changeling child.
I’ve been sure of that since I was a little girl. Even before I had the words to confirm how I felt about Ruby, my actions confirmed it. I ditched her in the most creative ways. I told her we were playing hide and seek, then left her in the attic for an entire day. I locked her in my backyard playhouse and threw away the key.
I didn’t get punished too heavily—I’m only a year older, and when you’re five, that year doesn’t count for much. But because of that slight age difference, I was always supposed to “bring Ruby along,” a task no one but me seemed to realize was impossible.
No one but me and my Real Cousin Ruby.
My Real Cousin Ruby appears to me in dreams. She’s the same age as the person I’ve been told to call my cousin Ruby, but otherwise they’re nothing alike.
My Real Cousin Ruby is short and dark-haired and thin. She walks slightly hunched over, probably from all that reading she’s done, and her Birkenstocks slide across the ground, making a shush-shush sound wherever she goes.
She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, got into Harvard Law, hated it, graduated anyway, then immediately registered at the University of Wisconsin for a Masters in Physics. She’s on her third post-doc, this time in bioengineering. No children, of course—how could you study that much and bring up hordes?—and only one or two boyfriends.
She’s bitterly funny, but only my side of the family understands her jokes—my college educated parents who raised a Rhodes scholar (my brother), an award-winning physicist (my sister), a world-renown playwright (my other sister) and me. The disappointment. The housewife with two children, one grandchild on the way, and a bucketload of ambition that gets foisted off on the PTA.
We all dream about her—everyone on my side of the family. My siblings don’t talk about her much any more, but when we were kids, we compared notes.
We all dreamed of my Real Cousin Ruby winning what was then called the GE/Westinghouse science competition, kicking butt at a national Model United Nations competition, and creaming the opposition in the famed College Debates.
But I’m the only one who held her small sobbing frame (and woke up to find a large wet spot on the right shoulder of my favorite sweatshirt) when she lost her first boyfriend to the head cheerleader. I’m the only one who heard about her fears before she aced the L-SAT, the only one who held her hand while she waited to have an ill-advised abortion on her thirtieth birthday.
And so far, I’m the only one who knows about her upcoming wedding, even though she claims she’s sending the invitations next week.
Which is a problem. I can’t talk to anyone. First, I promised I wouldn’t say anything. Second, even if I did say something, no one would listen. My siblings all figure this is some sort of shared hallucination, so the less we discuss it, the better off we are.
Occasionally I can talk to Pam (the playwright) but only in the context of fiction and only when we’re discussing the power of dreams. Mostly, she doesn’t like to think about it any more than my very logical, very political brother does.
My scientist sister used to discuss the dreams with me, back when she was studying time travel theories.
Alternate dimensions, she’d said once.
Branching universes, she’d said later.
Severed possibilities, she’d said that last time, the time she said she no longer believed.
Severed possibilities. My brother liked that one, but I don’t. Because my Real Cousin Ruby isn’t a severed possibility.
She exists. She has a life—a real and solid life, even if it is in our dreams.
She has a better life than the woman posing as my cousin Ruby, the changeling child.
Although my physicist sister Debbie did correct me once: She can’t be a changeling, my sister said, because changelings get traded one for the other. If she were a true changeling child, then that means something can travel from our dreams into our world and back again, plucking children out of them and replacing those children with something else…something not quite right.
Like my supposed cousin, Ruby. Something not quite right.
Although my husband says that it’s snobby of me to think my so-called cousin Ruby isn’t quite right because she chose to climb down the economic ladder.
So I’m snobby.
And deceitful.
Because, in 21 years, I’ve never ever told my husband about my Real Cousin Ruby.
Nor can I talk to him about her fiancé.
Whom I hate.
You’d think a woman at the age of forty-seven would pick an appropriate man. You’d think after decades of consideration, after decades of adulthood and self-knowledge, someone as brilliant as my Real Cousin Ruby would find the kind of man who enhanced her.
But this guy—this guy detracts.
First of all, he’s homely. I know, I know, one shouldn’t judge on appearances, but I firmly believe that old adage that the face you have at fifty is the face you deserve.
His face is set in frown lines, with angry edges to his beady little eyes. His teeth are yellow from too much coffee and his hairline is receding.
His name is Lon. He runs a drive-through espresso stand that he built with his own hands, and which I’m sure he’ll close soon with those self-same hands, since he undercharges Starbucks by a dollar on every coffee drink, no matter what it does to his bottom line.
He brings a six-pack to every gathering, whether appropriate or not, and if no one else drinks it, he finishes it alone.
My Real Cousin Ruby wants me to approve.
First she said I’d like him better after I spent time with him. Then I spent time with him, and liked him worse.
So she gave me the old tried and true line—the one every teenager uses on her parents about that rebel boyfriend: Don’t you understand? He makes me happy.
Yes, I said. And then, because I have more courage in my nighttime world than I do in my daytime one, I added, That happiness’ll continue, so long as the sex remains good.
She didn’t show up in a single dream for nearly two weeks. When she finally did, she waved a diamond at me (this from the woman who thought diamonds an abomination just the year before) and said in a strangely calm voice, I’m marrying him. You can be my maid of honor or you can stay far away from both of us.
I chose maid of honor—after I explained to the poor woman that I was a matron; I hadn’t been a maid in nearly thirty years.
The following morning, in that groggy sometime between opening my eyes and my first cup of coffee, I realized that my Real Cousin Ruby was naïve. Two boyfriends (that I knew of) in twenty years, a traumatic abortion, and an assault by a graduate assistant had put her off the male side of humanity for quite a while.
Which left her vulnerable to the likes of Lon.
It also struck me that my Real Cousin Ruby and my so-called cousin Ruby actually had something in common.
Bad taste in men. Only my so-called cousin Ruby has outgrown her bad taste. The latest guy—maybe the last guy—adopted her myriad children and urged her to open her own beauty shop and has quietly supported every single thing she’s done for the past ten years. His name is Delmar, and he’s actually kind.
Yep, he’s a keeper. And that morning, I actually found myself wondering if she’s kept him because she knows his value, or if she’s kept him because the bouncing ball landed on red and she doesn’t have the energy to bet again.
Then I found myself wondering if everyone has a dream self and a real self, if everyone has a different identity in the realm of dreams.
Which then brought me back to the question my siblings and I used to ask about my so-called cousin Ruby. Is she real or is the dream Ruby the real one? Back then, we had decided that the dream Ruby was real because we liked her better. She was much more a member of our family than the fat and sloppy bottle blond who lived in our world.
Revisiting that question is the thing that got me in trouble.
Revisiting that question opened a door a child would never have even seen.
Revisiting that question led to the inevitable:
If something happened to the Ruby in our world, what happened to the Ruby of our dreams?
***
I became, in a word, obsessed.
First I tried to solve the conundrum myself.
I retired to the upstairs office that my husband had designed for me in a fit of guilt. We have a five-bedroom home, but only two children. They have their rooms, we have our master suite, we have an office, and then we have a junk room.
As the office became his, my husband felt guiltier and guiltier. He believes in equality, does this wonderful man I married, so he cleaned out the junk room, found me a desk, put up some shelves, and presented it to me as a fait accompli.
I didn’t bother to tell him that I felt the whole house was my personal domain, a domain that he and the kids visited from time to time. Instead I graciously accepted the office and never used it.
Until that day.
The office overlooks the back yard, which I have designed for maximum pleasure—perennials that bloom from May to September, mixed with hedges and lots of comfortable outdoor seating arrangements. The office and the garden face east (east of the sun, my husband used to say, quoting the title of one of the kids’ favorite fairy tales. And west of the moon, I’d say, finishing the phrase. We are steeped in fairy tales here).
I opened that window, sat in the window seat, and thumbed through all the books on dream analysis that have found their way into my house. (Many of them are signed with birthday or Christmas wishes from one of my siblings. Go figure.)
I found representational imagery. I found puns. I found directed dreaming. But I didn’t find anything about the dream world crossing into our world or vice versa.
So I left the volumes on the floor beside the window seat, and went to my computer. There I found a lot about dreams crossing into the real world—if I wanted to see analysis of the Freddy Krueger movies or Clive Barker’s fiction.
I found very little actual research on the dream world itself. Everyone who examined dreams started from the premise that dreams were random images of events, real and imagined, that played in a sleeping person’s consciousness. The purpose of those images, real and imagined, are the subject of debate. Are they coherent stories? Random memories? An attempt to clear out the flotsam and jetsam of a day’s accumulated thoughts?
It seemed that most people believed their dreams were figments, whether of the imagination or of the subconscious mind. No one else seemed to have an entire life going on in their dreams.
No one except my siblings, that is.
And while I liked to believe we were unique, I couldn’t. Not entirely. Because that either meant a genetic predisposition toward insanity or a shared hallucination like my siblings believed or the beginnings of some form of true schizophrenia.
Since we were mostly too old to fall into schizophrenia (and we didn’t take drugs, which often sent previously stable [a word we could argue] adults into schizophrenic behavior), then we were either insane or having that shared hallucination.
Or we actually experienced another world, one we could only access in dreams.
I spent days in that office. Days of reading, days of researching, days of staring into the garden, hoping to find an answer.
What I did figure out was this: If other people had the kind of dream life that I did, they didn’t admit it. And they weren’t the type to study such things. Because, if they were the type to study things—like my physicist sister—then by the time they had enough training to investigate this part of the psyche, their scientific background made them deny the possibilities that existed for them each and every night.
If they weren’t the type (like me) they had no idea how to prove what they thought to be true.
In other words, my research gave me no answers either.
Which meant I had to rely on myself.
And that proved to be my second mistake.
***
Sometimes I dream about my Real Cousin Ruby’s world without seeing my Real Cousin Ruby at all. I spend my dream time in our favorite coffee shop, or I find myself shopping on our favorite street, both of which have counterparts in my awake world.
Sometimes I’m in an apartment, which is more of a penthouse suite—the kind you see in upscale movies about New York. This apartment isn’t all cold modern furniture done in black and white; it’s art deco—black and white with touches of bright red and a vibrant turquoise. I find the place stunning.
It’s also comfortable—the kind of place I would design if I lived in the city without any children at all. Because the place is never messy. It looks lived in—the magazines and books on the glass-topped coffee table are different every time I’m there (and often they’re the same as the magazines and books on my coffee table at home)—just not the scattershot level of slop that even the cleanest home has when a busy family resides inside.
I’m scared to go into the bedroom of that apartment. I’m afraid of what (who) I might find.
So I relax in the living room, read a book or watch a movie on the incredibly huge flat-screen television that hangs like modern art on the far wall.
Sometimes my Real Cousin Ruby is there. Once I arrived in the middle of a dinner party, filled with people I only partially recognized (a few of whom were famous), and I forced myself to wake up, heart pounding.
For some reason, I didn’t want to be part of that event. Even now, memory of it makes me uneasy, as if I had become the hostess of a party I hadn’t even known was going on.
Then, one night I dreamed I was in the coffee shop.
It’s a funky place in both the dream world and our world. I prefer the dream world version. The layout is better—tables across the front, and beneath the flight of brick stairs that lead to an actual coffee bar where you sit on high stools and watch the baristas make your lovely cuppa. You can also see yourself in an ancient wavy mirror, trimmed in silver.
The coffee bar in my wide-awake world has the same stairs and the same general floor plan. Only the tables are up a flight and the workstation is against the west wall. There is no bar or ancient mirror, no comfortable place to sit and watch the baristas work when you’re alone.
The coffee recipes are all the same, even the house blends, and as far as I can tell, they taste the same in both worlds.
In the dream, I was in the coffee bar alone, but I wasn’t at my usual place at the end of the counter. The counter was full of people, mostly men, all of whom are watching the new barista toss silver mixing cups as if she’s in a real bar, not a coffee place.
A coffee mocha with extra foam sat in front of me, and judging by the pile of empty artificial sugar packets beside it, that mocha was my second of the day. I tapped the stirring stick and forced myself to think.
I knew I was in a dream. I recognized the dream world.
If I recognized it, then, maybe, I could control it.
The books called that dedicated dreaming.
I decided to give it a try.
I wanted to see if other people existed in this world as well. Besides me and my siblings and our Real Cousin Ruby.
First, I checked to see if my Real Cousin Ruby was anywhere near the place. She wasn’t at the ordering station, and it didn’t appear that anyone else had been sitting across from me.
So I grabbed my mocha, and went to one of the free Internet computers.
It was already logged onto the coffee shop’s website. I went to one of those people search pages, like the white pages in the phone book, only the ones that access places all over the United States, and I typed in the name of my supposed cousin Ruby’s boyfriend/husband/partner in the real world.
Delmar Musslewhite.
I’d already checked out Delmar in the real world. There was only one other Delmar Musslewhite in all of the United States, and that was Delmar Musslewhite Senior, the father of the Delmar Musslewhite I knew.
So I figured in the dream world there couldn’t be more Delmar Musslewhites, unless there was a Delmar Musslewhite the Third.
In the dream world, I only got one Delmar Musslewhite, and I couldn’t tell if he was a junior or a senior. He lived two towns over, in an area I hadn’t been to in either world.
I wrote the information on the back of my coffee napkin—both the address and the phone number. Then I reached into my purse, grabbed my cell phone to call Delmar—
And stopped.
What would I say to him?
Hi, I’m Ruby Frayno’s cousin, and I’m from what my physicist sister thinks might be a parallel universe, although my playwright sister thinks it could be a world filled with magical creatures. Anyway, I don’t really belong here, and I want to see if you do.
Nope. Wouldn’t play in either world.
If I tried some fakey phone scam or a wrong number, that wouldn’t work either, because I didn’t know what Delmar Musslewhite Senior sounded like. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I really knew what Delmar Musslewhite Junior sounded like, and I’d spent every single family reunion with him for the past ten years.
So I would have to drive out to see him.
I grabbed the keys from my purse, and realized that the car key was different than the one in my real life. This one had an electronic chain with buttons that looked unfamiliar. And the key itself was smaller, more compact.
I cursed silently, and hoped to hell I’d be able to figure out which car was mine.
That was when I woke up. I was clutching the sheet and blanket in my right hand, my head propped against the pillow as if I’d fallen asleep reading, the taste of mocha lingering on my tongue.
My husband snored softly from his side of the bed.
I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, so I got up, took a shower, and got dressed. Then I went to the kitchen, toasted two cinnamon Pop Tarts, slathered them in butter, and nuked myself some coffee from last night’s dregs. I carried the entire mess to my office upstairs, figuring I had at least an hour before the rest of the household woke up.
If my family existed in both worlds, and Delmar Musslewhite existed in both worlds, then it was safe to assume that the horrible fiancé Lon existed in both worlds as well.
I had to struggle to remember his last name. My Real Cousin Ruby had only told it to me once.
But then I remembered: Lon Goudy. Pronounced Goo-dee. I had said to her in shock, You aren’t planning to take his name, are you? You wouldn’t want to be known as Ruby Goudy.
I’ve already thought of that, she answered. It doesn’t bother me.
That lovely memory conjured Lon’s last name for me, and I was able to type it into the search engine I had at home.
In return, I got several L. Goudys, one London Goudy, one Lonna Goudy, and a Lon Goudy, complete with address, e-mail address, phone number and website.
Of course, I clicked on the website link.
It took me to a loud, gaudy home page for a man whose business was, so far as I could tell, being the best Lon Goudy he could be. His site was psychedelic. The flashing colors and lights crashed my computer twice before I figured out how to bypass the lovely light show that made up the first page.
Then I was inside a tie-dye extravaganza of Lon. Lon’s baby pictures (presented in a swirl of blue and yellow), Lon’s high school drama pictures (complete with a soundtrack [scratchy and out of tune] of Lon singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business), some grownup pictures of Lon laughing with a bunch of friends, ending with a life-sized portrait of the man himself, complete with jaunty smile and handlebar mustache.
It was the Lon of my dreams. Well, not of my dreams. Of my Real Cousin Ruby’s dreams.
I sighed, went back to my first search page, and printed up the current information on Lon Goudy.
Then I went to see him.
***
His house was nicer than I imagined. It was a two-story Victorian with a well kempt yard and a new car in the driveway. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the new car was courtesy of Goudy Wholesale Autos—We Have the Right Kind of Junk in the Trunk, a slogan worthy of my Real Cousin Ruby’s Lon—although the big Shop at Goudy’s sign in the front window was a big clue.
I wasn’t sure what to do once I pulled up outside the house. I couldn’t very well introduce myself to this man either, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted from him.
So I sat in my late-model minivan (clean on the outside and filled with kid-trash on the inside) and watched until Lon came out of the house.
It didn’t take long. He was carrying a briefcase and a travel mug. His hair was shorter than it was in the dream world, and the handlebar mustache from the website had morphed into one of those bushy 1970s behemoths that threatened to eat the man’s entire face.
This Lon had eyes just as beady, although he didn’t hunch as he walked like the dream Lon did. This Lon also wore nicer clothes. He got in his car and drove off, leaving me sitting there, trying to figure out what to do.
I didn’t want to follow him. I wasn’t sure what I would gain from it, any more than what I would gain from talking to him.
Then the side door opened, and a too-thin woman ushered two children outside. She had her hands on their shoulders, propelling them forward as they struggled with heavy backpacks.
The small family crawled into the other car, the one I hadn’t seen until now since Lon’s car had blocked it. The car’s reverse lights came on, illuminating the My Daughter is an Honor Student at King Elementary and the My Son is in the Top of His Class at Lincoln Middle bumper stickers. This car also had a Shop at Goudy’s sign in the right backseat window.
My breath caught. Could this Lon Goudy be married? Married to someone who looked vaguely like my Real Cousin Ruby?
Now I wanted to know the thin woman’s name. But I wasn’t going to get it by following her on her carpooling expedition.
Instead, I went home, logged on again, and searched for Lon Goudy’s biographical information. Not just the stuff from his gaudy website, but the profiles a local businessman should attract.
What I found were the puff pieces that any business put out, as well as a few articles in the neighborhood paper. It took several searches before I found the family information.
Lon Goudy had married his high school sweetheart, an intense dark-eyed girl named Constance Gutterman, planning to support her brilliance by working at car dealerships while she finished college. He did that. But as she was finishing up her economics degree (and just before she received a fully funded offer to study at the University of Chicago’s famous school of economics), the wholesale car business he worked for went up for sale. He bought it, she went to work in the bookkeeping department. They became rich (“Not rich,” he lied in one article. “We’re comfortable. And if we can do it, so can anyone else. We’ll help with that first step—establishing credit. So come on down to Goudy’s, and we’ll get you into the car of your dreams at a dream price.”) and then they became parents.
The real-world Lon Goudy was an upstanding citizen, the kind of person I’d like my so-called cousin Ruby to know. I wouldn’t even mind if my Real Cousin Ruby wanted to marry him, not that she could because he was in this world and she was in the dream world.
He seemed about as different from my Real Cousin Ruby’s Lon as…well…my supposed cousin Ruby seemed from my Real Cousin Ruby.
Which made me nervous.
How different were the rest of us in our dream lives?
***
Some questions are best left unanswered. I think I knew that even then. I didn’t want to think about that lovely penthouse apartment with the high-end toys that existed in my dreams. Nor did I want to think about that dinner party with the celebrities or the fact that it always seemed I lived within walking distance of the coffee shop.
The coffee shop, which existed in both worlds, in the most upscale neighborhood in the city—a gentrified area of downtown where Hollywood celebrities, the very rich, and New York theater people bought second (or third [or fifteenth]) condos. My husband and I had priced the area (for our retirement, he said; as a daydream, I always said) and realized that even if we saved every dime of our salaries, invested wisely, sold our home, and didn’t pay for the kids’ college educations, we’d still need a miracle to afford a place there.
I couldn’t imagine that the prices were that much different in Dreamland.
But, as I said, I didn’t investigate this. Instead, the next time I fell asleep, I directed my dreaming self to Delmar Musslewhite’s house.
Because I wanted to spy on him in the dream world, just like I had spied on the Lon Goudy who lived in the real world.
In my dream, I didn’t drive to Delmar’s house. I was already there, sitting in a brand-new Mercedes SUV, clearly oblivious to the rising gas prices. A takeout coffee sat in a cup holder beside the driver’s seat, along with a Prada purse that matched my shoes and an older carryall bag from Saint Laurent’s signature store in Paris.
In my right hand, I held opera glasses with an impressive zoom function. Lying next to my left was the most complicated phone/Blackberry/electronic thingie I had ever seen.
It took me a few minutes of getting my bearings in that upscale car before I remembered to look out the window.
All of the houses on this block looked the same. They were 1970s split levels with a view of the river. The houses were well maintained, but the kind of maintained that had clearly been done by the owner, not a service.
A few of the houses had bicycles lying on the front lawn. A few of the houses had lawn decorations, the kind an older couple might have put out a generation ago, thinking them attractive.
Delmar Musslewhite’s house had kids’ toys and lawn decorations. It also needed a new front door (this one had a foot-sized dent near the bottom) and a paint job to get rid of the 1970s browns with forest green trim.
The light told me the time of day. Morning again—and relatively early, judging by the cars still in driveways all over the block.
Shadows moved inside the house. Clearly people were in there. Twice the front door opened, and twice it closed almost immediately, as if whoever was trying to leave couldn’t quite accomplish it.
Finally the door banged open and a parade of children trooped out. The first three were clearly stair-stepped eight, nine or ten year-olds, all white blonds and somewhat pudgy. Only their clothes revealed their gender, and then only because I had a daughter the same age and I recognized some of the styles.
Two more children followed. These two were younger, dark-haired, and clutching each other’s hands as if they had been ordered to do so. All five children carried the ubiquitous backpacks. The two younger children looked like they might topple over backwards as they picked their way down the stairs.
The first three waited in the yard. The other two caught up, and then the group headed toward the end of the block, where a school bus sign stood.
A teenage girl came out of the open door. She bounced down the stairs, her red curly hair tied back with a jaunty bow. She yelled at someone inside, her voice muffled by my extra-thick soundproofed window.
A boy who was probably just a little older followed. He had her features, only his skin was darker and his hair coal black. He whacked her shoulder playfully when he reached her side, and she grinned at him, then ran down the block to join the other children.
Finally, a young woman came to the door. She wore a short skirt, midriff top revealing her bellybutton ring, and had her blond hair pulled up into the kind of ponytail that Madonna had worn back in her Material Girl days. The woman also wore leg warmers and platform shoes, completing the 1980s look.
She held a gargantuan purse at her side. She started to pull the door closed, when a doughy hand caught it.
The Material Girl rolled her eyes and shook her head, then clunked down the stairs. Her movements revealed her age—she still had to be in high school, and as she left, she had to be talking to a parent.
She sauntered to the bus stop and stayed a good five feet away from the troop of kids. She pulled a compact out of her huge purse, and held it open so that she could see in the mirror.
Movement caught my eye. Another woman stood in the doorway. Only this one was clearly middle aged. Fat and sloppy in a robe that had seen too many washings, she held a cup of coffee in one hand and the edge of the door in the other.
She was looking over her shoulder, talking to someone. Her hair, which hadn’t been combed yet, was an ugly mix of yellow dye and black roots.
Then a man grabbed her and pulled her against him. He kissed her as she held her cup of coffee to the side so she wouldn’t spill it on him. His right hand cupped her fleshy buttock, and she slapped it away, laughing as she did so.
She went inside. He left the house, wearing a mechanic’s uniform, and carrying a lunch pail.
My breath caught as I watched him.
Delmar Musslewhite.
Laughing as he walked to a battered truck parked at the side of the road.
Delmar. With a fat, bottle-blond, and too many children.
A fat, bottle blond whose only resemblance to my supposed cousin Ruby was her sloppiness, her fatness, her children, and her bad dye job.
I set the opera glasses on the seat beside me, my hand shaking.
I leaned my head against the leather seat, watching the children laughing with each other at the bus stop. They seemed happy. The whole family seemed happy.
Just like my supposed cousin Ruby’s family in the real world.
I shook my head. This couldn’t be.
Was attraction something as simple as extra pounds of flesh and a bad dye job? Or was it more complicated than that?
Had my subconscious mixed up dreams and reality to present me with this narrative? Or was this somehow true, just like the real world was somehow true?
I willed myself awake, then lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling. Usually, my husband’s regular breathing beside me soothed me. But nothing could soothe me right now.
I didn’t want to believe this was all about looks and nothing else.
***
“Do you know someone named Lon Goudy?” I asked my so-called cousin Ruby the next day. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, and she still wore her purple sateen pajamas with a matching pair of mules. The mules had a purple puff over the arch, and they left a trail of thin feathers wherever she walked.
“Lon Goudy?” she said and frowned. My so-called cousin Ruby always managed a world-class frown. Her entire face bent toward her nose, making her look like a child about to pull a tantrum. “Sounds familiar.”
She poured me a cup of her extra strong coffee and handed me a lemon bar, even though I didn’t ask for it. Her kitchen smelled of fresh baked bread and a slab of beef just starting to brown in the giant roaster she had on the surprisingly clean counter.
“Lon Goudy,” she repeated. Then she smiled. “Yeah. I know him. Delmar and I bought our first car from him way back when we couldn’t afford nothing.”
Anything, I wanted to correct her, knowing that my Real Cousin Ruby would never make that mistake. But I didn’t speak up. I’d learned long ago that correcting my so-called cousin Ruby led to a fight.
“Did you like him?” I asked.
“Like a car salesman?” she asked. “Are you kidding?”
I felt a slight shock. Who knew that my so-called cousin Ruby had standards? I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it, not from the parade of men she slept with before she met Delmar.
“He’s not just a salesman,” I said. “He owns the business. I hear it made him rich.”
“I bet it did.” She sat next to me, her manicured fingers picking at the lemon bar on her plate. “Fifteen percent interest would make anyone rich.”
“Is that what you paid?” I asked, shocked.
“When you don’t have credit and you have to drive to work, you pay exorbitant rates for a car and you’re grateful for it,” she said.
“I thought he advertises that his cars are cheaper than a regular car dealer’s,” I said.
“They are. He makes all his money on the financing. And the payments are exactly what you’d pay at some reputable dealer’s. I certainly couldn’t’ve gotten a car loan back in those days from a normal financing company. Neither could Delmar. Much as I hated paying the rates, it was Goudy’s that got me back on my feet. Because I got credit through him, I was able to buy the house, and once I had the house, I could rent my business. It all worked out.”
It was my turn to frown. Lon Goudy, car dealer, had had an impact on her life. I wondered if that meant Delmar Musslewhite, car mechanic, had had an impact on my Real Cousin Ruby’s life.
“That bother you?” my so-called cousin Ruby asked.
I blinked. She’d caught the frown and figured another reason for it.
I shook my head. “I guess I had no idea you were in that kind of financial trouble.”
“It’s not what you discuss with the Perfects,” she said.
It took me a moment to understand what she had said. “Us?”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “All of you are so educated. Pam’s in like every magazine being interviewed, and I even saw Debbie on the Discovery Channel one night. And then there’s you with those kids. Did they even spit up when they were babies? They were always so damn clean.”
I stared at her. I’d had no idea she was jealous of me. Or of my siblings. “You call us the Perfects?”
She shrugged. “Nothing bad ever happens to you people.”
“Of course it does,” I said. “Bad things happen to everyone.”
She gave me a crooked smile, then got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. I hadn’t even noticed her drinking the first one.
“You said you needed help with something,” she said.
I took a sip of the coffee, then tried not to grimace. The burned bean taste was what coffee from my childhood tasted like, before Americans knew any better.
“Pictures,” I said. “Do you have family reunion photos from when we were kids? None of us can find any.”
“What do you want pictures for?” she asked.
“My kids have never seen us when we were kids,” I said, making up the first thing I could think of.
She grunted in acknowledgement, then stood. I stood too, but she waved me down. “I know where they are. I have a box.”
She waddled out of the kitchen. I took a bite from the lemon bar. It was good, which wasn’t a surprise. My so-called cousin Ruby had always been a good baker.
I picked up my coffee cup and wandered toward the hall. There dozens of school pictures hung—every child with the current photo, plus the marriage photos of the older two, and a baby photo for the first grandchild.
I heard Ruby return before I saw her, breathing hard and stepping heavily on the scuffed wood floor. She balanced a large box on her large hip and swept the dishes aside. I grabbed a few so that they wouldn’t fall off the table. She set the box down where they had been.
“Heavier than I thought,” she huffed.
I smiled politely. The scent of mildew mixed with the browning beef. She opened the box and grabbed handfuls of black-and-whites, some with scalloped edges, all with dates along the white space.
“They’re not in order,” she said.
We searched. She pulled out the reunion photos, starting with the photos from the 1980s. I found the 1960s pictures beneath them and stared at them in surprise.
My Real Cousin Ruby, thinner than I had been, slightly hunched, her bright, brilliant eyes gazing directly at the camera, stood with me, arm in arm, as if we were best buddies.
How did my Real Cousin Ruby get into the real world?
“Remember that?” my so-called cousin Ruby said. “Those three years we went to Kent, everyone thought we were sisters.”
Kent was a private school that my father had finagled us into. My siblings all went to it, and I did too. I had thought my Real Cousin Ruby went, and my so-called cousin Ruby hadn’t gone at all. I thought she was too stupid to go.
“Then Mom and Dad moved out of the district and the fees would’ve been too high.” She smiled ruefully. “So I had to go to public school.”
She slapped another picture down. In it, she sat alone next to a picnic basket. She was much heavier—what we would call pudgy now—and her brown hair was stringy.
“I wasn’t a fan of public school,” she said.
Something in her voice made me look at her.
“I don’t remember this,” I said.
“Of course not.” She set down more pictures. The next year, and the next. We no longer stood together. She was always in the back of the great big family photograph, using someone (and then several someones) as a shield for her widening body. “I have a gift for disappearing.”
I frowned at her. My so-called cousin Ruby wasn’t self-aware. She had never been self-aware. It was one of the reasons that I didn’t like her.
But how long had it been since I really talked to her? I always avoided her at family reunions, preferring to make snide little comments later to my siblings. My husband always defended her, but, as I used to say, he liked to defend the weak.
I looked at the photographs again. I had been hoping to see a young Delmar or Lon Goudy at the fringes of the crowd. Instead I saw some happy, healthy children, laughing and playing. And one very sad, very lonely little girl on the sidelines.
My stomach twisted. “Something happened to you.”
She picked up the photograph of herself, sitting alone by the picnic basket. “Your brother would say what happened was that I discovered food.”
Yeah, he would say that. And he probably had said that. We weren’t kind. I didn’t remember being mean to her in those years, but I didn’t remember standing arm in arm with her either.
“What would you say?” I asked softly.
She tapped that photograph along the edge of the table. “I would say that Mr. Eckhart happened to me.”
My gaze met hers. My stomach ached even more than it had when I first looked at the pictures. I wanted to blame the bitter coffee, but I knew that wasn’t the cause.
“Mr. Eckhart?” I repeated.
She nodded. “I was his special girl that year. In the bleachers. In the music room. In his office.”
She wasn’t looking at me. Her cheeks were rosy, but not with any joy. She was blushing.
“My therapist wanted me to prosecute the bastard, but by the time I actually told her what had happened, he’d been dead for ten years.”
“You have a therapist?” I asked, unable to disguise the surprise in my voice.
“What? Do you think I got better on my own?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I guess I credited Delmar.”
She smiled. “Delmar was great. He was a good friend. He wouldn’t date me—and in those days, that meant sleep with me—until I got professional help.”
I shook my head a little. The world was tilting.
“It seems really obvious from a modern adult perspective,” she said. “You see a bright, active child who withdraws, gains weight, won’t go near people, and you realize something’s gone wrong. I’d know that about my kids. But in those days, who had any idea?”
My mouth was dry. These days, who had any idea? I certainly hadn’t. This was all new to me.
“I learned that those kids—the ones who fatten up and disappear—have two responses, sexually, to the abuse. One group withdraws completely. Never gets touched. The other group lets any old damn fool touch them. Because it doesn’t matter.”
She bit her lower lip. It mattered to her, telling me. She was afraid to tell me, afraid of my response.
And who could blame her? Judgmental me. I hadn’t even noticed a problem.
“Delmar knew me then. He said he’d be with me if I valued the relationship. I didn’t know what that meant. He gave me a book about healing. And that started it all.”
Her flush was deep now. Her eyes swam with tears.
“So you are right,” she said. “He saved me.”
Then she wiped her hands along her sateen robe.
“At least, part of me. I’ll never stop eating. I don’t want to.”
My Real Cousin Ruby forgot to eat sometimes, especially after the abortion. She would curl into a ball and not talk for a while too.
I was there for my Real Cousin Ruby. But this woman—this girl, who had stood arm in arm with me in a beautiful green park forty years ago—never really had me at her side.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s in the past.”
She got up, got another lemon bar, and handed me one without asking.
Then she sat down. She stared at the bar for the longest time.
Finally, she said, “But I wonder sometimes, you know? Who would I have been without Mr. Eckhart?”
***
Had I known who she would have been?
Had we all known, me and my siblings?
Children rarely react with compassion. Children see danger and flee from it, because children know how easily they can be victimized. Children are the ultimate savages. The kindness of the world, the obligations, the responsibilities, all have to be learned.
Was my so-called cousin Ruby a changeling child because she had become someone I didn’t recognize? Were all my dreams about her just directed dreaming about the person I wanted her to be?
Then how to explain the bad twists of fate? The wet sweatshirt? The fact that Lon and Delmar existed in both worlds?
I told my physicist sister Debbie in general terms about the dreams I’d had, about the men who existed in both. I described them by their professions, not by their names.
“That car dealer,” she said, “does he have ads? Like on TV?”
He did. They were on the web too. He kept them archived on his website. And one, which aired about six months ago, featured his hunched little economist wife, Constance.
Who looked like my Real Cousin Ruby.
Suggestions, suggestions. Logical real world explanations for dreams that once seemed to make no sense.
“It’s just guilt,” my playwright sister Pam said when I told her in general terms about the girl I’d befriended then abandoned when she got in trouble, the dreams I had about the girl she could have been. “You wanted to help her and at what—ten?—you knew you couldn’t. So you made up a new life for her and dreamed it. You dreamed it all.”
It sounded so easy.
It seemed almost true.
And weirdly, neither sister tied these questions to our Real Cousin Ruby, whom they’d dreamed about too.
But all this logic didn’t stop the wedding. It happened several nights later—a spur of the moment thing, my Real Cousin Ruby said.
“We can’t deal with invitations. Come join us this afternoon at the courthouse. We’re tying the knot.”
I went. At least, my dream self went. I bought flowers just in case my Real Cousin Ruby forgot them, and I stood at her side, and I made myself smile as she married a poor Lon Goudy who wore dirty blue jeans, a paint-splattered denim shirt, and a baseball cap.
I woke up and cried for her, just like I should have cried for my so-called cousin Ruby.
My real cousin Ruby, who’d lived through hell in the real world, and never told a soul about it. We’d never noticed. No one noticed, until Delmar.
No one really cared.
“Sometimes I think,” my physicist sister Debbie said on the way to this summer’s family reunion, “that physicists postulate the existence of alternate realities because we’re old enough to understand how the world works.”
“What?” I asked. I was driving her truck. It had a stick shift, and she had injured her left foot, making using the clutch impossible.
My husband had the kids. He was traveling in our van, along with the food I’d spent the last two days preparing.
“You know,” Debbie said. “You get older, and you watch the opportunities vanish. When you’re ten, you can be a firefighter or a doctor, President of the United States or a famous rockstar. It’s all in the future. When you’re twenty, you’ve narrowed it down to your skill set. Doctor, maybe, or biologist or world-famous scientist. You’re going to get a Nobel Prize and discover the cure for cancer. Then when you’re forty, you realize you’ll never be more than the best surgeon at the second-rate hospital in your smaller-than-average town. Closed doors everywhere.”
“So how does that fit with alternate realities?” I asked, because I didn’t want to think about my skill set. I’d abandoned them all in my twenties when I got pregnant. I figured being a wife and mother would be enough.
“Simple,” she said. “You remember what it was like when the possibilities extended before you. Now they’re cut off, but those branches—in your imagination anyway—are still there. You just have to find a way to access them.”
“Through dreams?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Dreams are where the possibilities came from in the first place. We dreamed big, and most of us end up living small.”
We pulled up at the park. Someone stretched a banner across proclaiming this the sixtieth Folger family reunion. Beneath it, children I didn’t recognize played some kind of game. Adults who looked like the adults forty years ago, only in different clothing and with different haircuts, placed food on long wooden picnic tables.
“Ready for the ordeal?” Debbie asked, grinning.
I parked, then sighed. “Do you always think about your alternates? Or do you dream about other people’s as well?”
She gave me a penetrating look, the kind that makes the rest of the family nervous. I thought she was going to mention the cousin Ruby dreams, but she didn’t.
Instead, Debbie said, “I dream about you. If you hadn’t married and squeezed out babies. You could’ve been something, kiddo.”
Then she got out of the truck and limped toward the picnic tables.
I could’ve been something.
But I was something now.
I was a mother. A wife. A woman who never saw her cousin, whom she had apparently loved, lose herself to a sexual predator.
Maybe I should have explored that penthouse suite that appeared in my dreams. Maybe I should have seen who I might have been.
Or maybe I should simply look around now, and see what’s before me. All the changes from last year to this, all the closed doors and the newly opened ones. The people who were really hurting and the people who were doing fine.
I stepped out of my sister’s truck and stood at the edge of the parking lot, staring at my extended family. People I didn’t know. People I would never know, and children who would become people I didn’t know.
Branches, disappearing into infinity.
Too much to contemplate.
Too much for a single human brain to encompass.
At least when it was awake.
I still don’t have any theories of dreaming.
But I have dreams—a jumbled mess of images and memories, of fears and imaginary monsters.
The dream Ruby is gone, replaced by the real-life Ruby. She’s still obese. But she doesn’t dye her hair any longer. Her brown has turned silver, giving her a dignity she hadn’t had before.
Or maybe I’ve accorded her that dignity.
In our lives.
Instead of my dreams.
Copyright © 2014 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, WMG Publishing, April 2014
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2014 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Kireev Art/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Send to Kindle