from JAMES LOVES RUTH

1981

“Absolutely not,” Ruth’s mother said, without conviction.

No one else stood at the top of the stairs, where she and Ruth had met accidentally on their way between floors, but she wasn’t talking to Ruth. She was just saying it, as she did on order of thirty times a week now that Russell was dead.

“Absolutely not,” she’d say in response to nothing, as she was folding laundry, or stacking china, or scrubbing a clot of tomato paste out of the sink. The first few times, she caught herself and blinked, and Ruth could tell that she’d been taken aback by the machinations of her own mind—she hadn’t meant to issue the two words audibly.

But Cora soon lost shame. She started saying it seemingly at random, producing the phrase from some secret, outraged vein of thought. “Absolutely not,” she said one morning at dawn, in the kitchen, where Ruth had crept up behind her as she was loading the coffeemaker. When Cora heard her, she turned around, and her posture seemed confrontational, as though she were hiding something. But when Ruth got closer and looked, it was just the percolating machine on the counter behind her. Cora turned back around. “Absolutely not,” she whispered to the coffee, and Ruth forgot what she needed from the refrigerator and went back to bed.

When her mother said it in response to an actual question, after Wendy asked if she could have a brand new stereo system for Christmas, Ruth started crying. “Absolutely not,” Cora said then, in response to her tears, and Ruth bolted upstairs to her bedroom.

She no longer shared her bedroom with Russell but she shared it with the aftermath of Russell, since neither her parents nor Wendy would box up his swim participation trophies or toss out the lopsided clay masks he’d made in the third grade, his fourth and last year of formal schooling. No one had even changed his bedsheets—they’d lain, hastily rolled to one side, for the three days after his death, until finally, the morning of his funeral, her mother had come into the room and made his bed up to hotel standards. When Ruth came home from the funeral and tossed a quarter at the sheets, it actually bounced once before landing.

It took a week for Ruth to grow tired of seeing the stiff bed, so empty of her brother, and she sat on it then, hard, hoping to leave an impression of her own living, breathing ass. She lay on his pillow and rolled onto her face. She left rumpling, dimpling. During the cold, sleety month of April she began to reassemble his things into piles: plastic cowboy collection in the northeast corner of the room, Spider Man comic books in the southwest corner, near the head of her own bed. The room wasn’t his anymore, but it was no longer hers, either. Now that he was dead it was just a room, four walls a floor a ceiling and an exactly square window hurtling with her around the center of the planet through different points of time; since no one but her entered the room now, she’d been left as some sort of gatekeeper, contemplating the limitations of the human references the room still contained. The things left in the room weren’t shrine to her dead brother so much as they were now shrine to impossibility, and the failed hope for all the things Russell had so rarely touched when he was alive. She felt irreparably vicious, scooting aside his Lego cabin with the edge of her bare foot, but she persisted in pushing it to the wall, even as it fell in half and then crumbled into chunks of joining plastic bricks.

She went through all his old socks and found the ones with holes and discarded them in the outside trash bin, where her parents wouldn’t find them. She arranged the clothes hanging in Russell’s closet, first by color, and then by size within the color, and then, if she couldn’t...