When he saw her walking on the other side of the chain-link fence that separated the school from the soccer field and inside which was the most revered of the sports fields – the football one – he rubbed his hands together and prepared what he wanted to say. His bravery this time came not from having kissed me – a goal he’d set himself a full year before its completion – but from being, at fourteen, intensely lonely.
I watched Ruth approach the soccer field, thinking she was alone. In an old home her father had gone to scavenge, he had found her a treat to go along with her new hobby – an anthology of poems. She held them close.
She saw Ray stand up when she was still some distance away.
“Hello, Ruth Connors!” he called and waved his arms.
Ruth looked over, and his name came into her head: Ray Singh. But she didn’t know much more than that. She had heard the rumors about the police being over at his house, but she believed what her father had said – “No kid did that” – and so she walked over to him.
“I prepared tea and have it in my thermos here,” Ray said. I blushed for him up in heaven. He was smart when it came to Othello, but now he was acting like a geek.
“No thank you,” Ruth said. She stood near him but with a definite few feet more than usual still in between. Her fingernails were pressed into the worn cover of the poetry anthology.
“I was there that day, when you and Susie talked backstage,” Ray said. He held the thermos out to her. She made no move closer and didn’t respond.
“Susie Salmon,” he clarified.
“I know who you mean,” she said.
“Are you going to the memorial service?”
“I didn’t know there was one,” she said.
“I don’t think I’m going.”
I was staring hard at his lips. They were redder than usual from the cold. Ruth took a step forward.
“Do you want some lip balm?” Ruth asked.
Ray lifted his wool gloves up to his lips, where they snagged briefly on the chapped surface that I had kissed. Ruth dug her hands in the peacoat pocket and pulled out her Chap Stick. “Here,” she said, “I have tons of them. You can keep it.”
“That’s so nice,” he said. “Will you at least sit with me until the buses come?”
They sat together on the shot-putters’ cement platform. Again I was seeing something I never would have seen: the two of them together. It made Ray more attractive to me than he had ever been. His eyes were the darkest gray. When I watched him from heaven I did not hesitate to fall inside of them.
It became a ritual for the two of them. On the days that his father taught, Ruth brought him a little bourbon in her father’s flask; otherwise they had sweet tea. They were cold as hell, but that didn’t seem to matter to them.
They talked about what it was like to be a foreigner in Norristown. They read poems aloud from Ruth’s anthology. They talked about how to become what they wanted to be. A doctor for Ray. A painter/poet for Ruth. They made a secret club of the other oddballs they could point out in our class. There were the obvious ones like Mike Bayles, who had taken so much acid no one understood how he was still in school, or Jeremiah, who was from Louisiana and so just as much a foreigner as Ray. Then there were the quiet ones. Artie, who talked excitedly to anyone about the effects of formaldehyde. Harry Orland, who was so painfully shy he wore his gym shorts over his jeans. And Vicki Kurtz, who everyone thought was okay after the death of her mother, but whom Ruth had seen sleeping in a bed of pine needles behind the junior high’s regulating plant. And, sometimes, they would talk about me.
“It’s so strange,” Ruth said. “I mean, it’s like we were in the same class since kindergarten but that day backstage in the auditorium was the first time we ever looked at each other.”
“She was great,” Ray said. He thought of our lips brushing past one another as we stood alone in a column of lockers. How I had smiled with my eyes closed and then almost run away. “Do you think they’ll find him?”
“I guess so. You know, we’re only like one hundred yards away from where it happened.”
“I know,” he said.
They both sat on the thin metal rim of the shot-putters’ brace, holding tea in their gloved hands. The cornfield had become a place no one went. When a ball strayed from the soccer field, a boy took a dare to go in and get it. That morning the sun was slicing right through the dead stalks as it rose, but there was no heat from it.
“I found these here,” she said, indicating the leather gloves.
“Do you ever think about her?” he asked.
They were quiet again.
“All the time,” Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. “Sometimes I think she’s lucky, you know. I hate this place.”
“Me too,” Ray said. “But I’ve lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.”
“You’re not implying…”
“She’s in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“I do,” Ruth said. “I don’t mean la-la angel-wing crap, but I do think there’s a heaven.”
“Is she happy?”
“It is heaven, right?”
“But what does that mean?”
The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. “Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.”
When my father knocked on the door of Ray Singh’s house, he was struck dumb by Ray’s mother, Ruana. It was not that she was immediately welcoming, and she was far from sunny, but something about her dark hair, and her gray eyes, and even the strange way she seemed to step back from the door once she opened it, all of these things overwhelmed him.
He had heard the offhand comments the police made about her. To their mind she was cold and snobbish, condescending, odd. And so that was what he imagined he would find.
“Come in and sit,” she’d said to him when he pronounced his name. Her eyes, on the word Salmon, had gone from closed to open doorways – dark rooms where he wanted to travel firsthand.
He almost lost his balance as she led him into the small cramped front room of their house. There were books on the floor with their spines facing up. They came out three rows deep from the wall. She was wearing a yellow sari and what looked like gold lamé capri pants underneath. Her feet were bare. She padded across the wall-to-wall and stopped at the couch. “Something to drink?” she asked, and he nodded his head.
“Hot or cold?”
“Hot.”
As she turned the corner into a room he couldn’t see, he sat down on the brown plaid couch. The windows across from him under which the books were lined were draped with long muslin curtains, which the harsh daylight outside had to fight to filter through. He felt suddenly very warm, almost close to forgetting why that morning he had double-checked the Singhs’ address.
A little while later, as my father was thinking of how tired he was and how he had promised my mother to pick up some long-held dry cleaning, Mrs. Singh returned with tea on a tray and put it down on the carpet in front of him.
“We don’t have much furniture, I’m afraid. Dr. Singh is still looking for tenure.”
She went into an adjoining room and brought back a purple floor pillow for herself, which she placed on the floor to face him.
“Dr. Singh is a professor?” my father asked, though he knew this already, knew more than he was comfortable with about this beautiful woman and her sparsely furnished home.
“Yes,” she said, and poured the tea. It was quiet. She held out a cup to him, and as he took it she said, “Ray was with him the day your daughter was killed.”