During the ceremony the bride was fidgety and the groom had trouble with the sun in his eyes, but Ruth stood very still and did not take her eyes from the minister’s face.
Later, when her father’s friends told her how pretty she looked — “Just like a Renoir!” one gushy matron proclaimed — Ruth smiled shyly, but said nothing.
No one was surprised. It was well known among her acquaintances that Ruth was a quiet child who enjoyed playing alone and reading her books behind closed doors.
At the reception she ate a small piece of cake and tasted her first champagne. She didn’t like it very much, but was too polite to say so.
Just before her father and his new wife left, they came to her to say goodbye. Her father kissed her and his wife, a plumpish blonde with stiff sculptured hair, gave her a hug.
“Now you’re my little girl too,” she whispered into Ruth’s ear. And you, Ruth thought, are my very own Wicked Stepmother and I shall hate you as long as I live.
Then she put her lips against the perfumed cheek close to her own.
“How sweet!” everyone said.
While her father and his wife were away on their honeymoon, Ruth stayed at the home of a classmate.
Every third day a postcard came for her. Ocean scenes with golden sands and blue water. Once there was a sunset with a lone palm tree black against the vivid sky.
“That’s pretty,” said the classmate, whose name was Patricia. Ruth thought her stupid, but at least she didn’t giggle like some of the other girls.
“Yes,” Ruth said.
The card was signed “Mother and Daddy,” but the fussy, curly handwriting was not her father’s.
When she was alone, Ruth tore each card into bits and flushed them down the drain.
That night she had the dream.
It was not a new dream. From time to time, as long as she could remember, the same house blossomed in her sleep. A silent place of higgledy-piggledy rooms with many doors and windows. There was bright sun outside and the rooms were filled with the airless, heavy heat of summer.
In the dream she was alone, walking from room to room, but always with the feeling that just beyond a certain wall or just beyond the next door was the person she was looking for. She also knew she must move with stealth so as not to be seen or heard.
Her breath came quickly. Not from fear, but from something close to exultation and a sense of purpose.
And always she held something in her hand.
What it was, she did not know. She could only feel it there, tight in her hand. Something hard and a little heavy. Something vital to her mission.
The dream always ended the same way. She was climbing the stairs, slowly, lightly, with the thing in her hand held close against her side. She climbed and climbed, but never reached the top of the stairs, and the dream dissolved around her in a red, shifting haze.
But the night the postcard came, there was a difference in the dream. Just as she started up the stairs, breathing the hot, sulfurous air, she looked down and understood at last why she could not see the thing she held in her hand. It was hidden in the folds of her long skirt. The kind of skirt that had not been worn for many years. And she knew that she was not a child, but a tall grown woman. She could almost feel the contours of her body and the strange lines of her face.
This time the dream did not fade. She was dragged from it by busy hands and a voice whispering in her ear.
“Wake up, Ruth! Wake up.”
Pushing the hands away with a strength not her own, she said, “That’s not my name.”
She opened her eyes to see Patricia’s impassive moon face close to her own.
It was almost morning. The windows were pale with light and the shadows in the room were turning gray.
“You were talking in your sleep,” Patricia said. “I think you were having a scary dream.”
Ruth didn’t say anything. She felt an urge to reach out and smack that stupid blank face. To keep from doing so she turned over and buried her face in the pillow. She could still feel the house in the dream. It was just out of sight in her mind, hiding from her.
After a minute Patricia padded back to her own bed.
The room grew brighter and colors began to appear. A blue lampshade. Pink ballet prints on the wall.
Ruth turned over. “What did I say?”
Patricia lifted her head. Her short hair frizzed over her ears. “What?”
“What did I say in my sleep?”
“Oh.” Patricia flopped back down and the bed squeaked. “Nothing that made much sense. Something about blood.” Then she yawned and turned over to finish her sleep.
When Ruth’s father and his wife came home they were brown from the sun and both of them laughed a lot. Ruth could see they were happy being married to each other.
The three of them moved into the house that Ruth had shared with her father. It seemed to have grown smaller. Nowhere could Ruth escape the sight or the sounds of her father and his wife. She made excuses to stay in her room or out in the yard under the maple trees. Sometimes she even visited Patricia, playing endless card games, often letting Patricia win just to postpone going back to the house where she lived.
She hated the house now. The warm colors in the rooms, the worn old rugs, were giving way to pale brittle things. Busy flower patterns covered the chairs and hung across the windows. Ruffles appeared — on the curtains and the beds and even on the tablecloths. Fat china animals of all sizes (“my collection” her father’s wife announced with pride) came to sit on the mantels and shelves. Some of them even had painted eyelashes, and Ruth was not safe anywhere from their coy, mocking smiles.
She was glad when the school term began, where for long hours she could hide in her studies, protected by the familiar smells of chalk dust and new books.
The dream came again and again and she began to look forward to it as she would to a puzzle that must be solved.
Sometimes when she woke from it, even in the middle of the night, she would go to the mirror and turn on the light, wondering who she would see. She was disappointed to find her own slender face and straight dark hair there in the glass.
On the first day of November the weather turned suddenly and bitterly cold. Ruth walked home from school slowly, savoring the emptiness of the streets and the wind that smelled of dead leaves and lost summer.
Inside the house she found her father’s wife wrapped in a heavy sweater and complaining of drafty windows. She insisted that Ruth put on more clothes and drink a cup of hot soup. “We’ll catch our death,” she said ominously.
That night Ruth’s father brought in a supply of wood and stacked it against the house near the back door. Ruth watched as he chopped away at the logs with a small hatchet, trimming them to fit the fireplace in the living room. Brown leaves swirled around his ankles and the blade of the hatchet flashed in the light from a single bulb over the back door.
Later, as flames began to flower in the fireplace, he put one arm around his wife and the other around Ruth.
“That should keep my girls warm,” he said and hugged them both.
To Ruth the room was already suffocatingly hot, and in the light from the fire the china animals were laughing at her, their hard mouths melting in glee.
That night she had the dream again.
She glided through the crazy-quilt of rooms, her long skirt brushing the walls and doorways without a whisper of sound. Sun glittered against the windows and the air was furnace-hot, burning in her throat and lungs.
She climbed the stairs and the thing in her hand pressed against her leg with heavy intent.
For the first time she reached the top of the stairs and saw the door she was to enter. It led into a bedroom.
A sound pulled her out of the dream.