And here Ruth had interrupted her father again; her bunk bed didn’t have a headboard, and she didn’t know what “gnawing” was. Her father explained.
“It seemed to Tom that the sound was definitely the sound of an armless, legless monster dragging its thick, wet fur. ‘It’s a monster!’ Tom cried.
“ ‘It’s just a mouse, crawling between the walls,’ his father said.
“Tim screamed. He didn’t know what a ‘mouse’ was. It frightened him to think of something with wet, thick fur—and no arms and no legs—crawling between the walls. How did something like that get between the walls, anyway?
“But Tom asked his father, ‘It’s just a mouse?’
“His father thumped against the wall with his hand and they listened to the mouse scurrying away. ‘If it comes back again,’ he said to Tom and Tim, ‘just hit the wall.’
“ ‘A mouse crawling between the walls!’ said Tom. ‘That’s all it was!’ He quickly fell asleep, and his father went back to bed and fell asleep, too, but Tim was awake the whole night long, because he didn’t know what a mouse was and he wanted to be awake when the thing crawling between the walls came crawling back. Each time he thought he heard the mouse crawling between the walls, Tim hit the wall with his hand and the mouse scurried away—dragging its thick, wet fur and its no arms and no legs with it.
“And that . . .” Ruth’s father said to Ruth, because he ended all his stories the same way.
“And that . . .” Ruth said aloud with him, “that is the end of the story.”
When her father stood up from the edge of the bathtub, Ruth heard his knees crack. She watched him stick the piece of paper back between his teeth. He turned out the light in the guest bathroom, where Eddie O’Hare would soon be spending an absurd amount of time— taking long showers until the hot water ran out, or some other kind of teenage thing.
Ruth’s father turned out the lights in the long upstairs hall, where the photographs of Thomas and Timothy were perfectly all in a row. To Ruth, especially in that summer when she was four, there seemed to be an abundance of photographs of both Thomas and Timothy at about the age of four. She would later speculate that her mother might have preferred four-year-olds to children of any other age; Ruth would wonder if that was why her mother had left her at the end of the summer when she was four.
When her father had tucked her back into her bunk bed, Ruth asked him, “Are there mice in this house?”
“No, Ruthie,” he said. “There’s nothing crawling between our walls.” But she lay awake after he’d kissed her good night, and although the sound that had followed her from her dream didn’t return—at least not that same night—Ruth already knew there was something crawling between the walls of that house. Her dead brothers did not restrict their residence to those photographs. They moved about, and their presence could be detected in a variety of unseen ways.
That same night, even before she heard the typewriter, Ruth knew that her father was still awake and that he wasn’t going back to bed. First she listened to him brushing his teeth, then she heard him getting dressed—the zip of his zipper, the clump of his shoes.
“Daddy?” she called to him.
“Yes, Ruthie.”
“I want a drink of water.”
She didn’t really want a drink of water, but it intrigued her that her father always let the water run until it was cold. Her mother took the first water that ran from the tap; it was warm and tasted like the inside of the pipe.
“Don’t drink too much or you’ll have to pee,” her father would say, but her mother would let her drink as much as she wanted—sometimes not even watching her drink.
When Ruth handed the cup back to her father, she said, “Tell me about Thomas and Timothy.” Her father sighed. In the last half-year, Ruth had demonstrated an unquenchable interest in the subject of death—little wonder why. From the photographs, Ruth had been able to distinguish Thomas from Timothy since she’d been three; only their pictures when they were infants occasionally confused her. And, by both her mother and her father, Ruth had been told the circumstances surrounding each of the photos—whether Mommy or Daddy had taken this one, whether Thomas or Timothy had cried. But that the boys were dead was a concept that Ruth was newly trying to grasp.
“ Tell me,” she repeated to her father. “Are they dead?”
“Yes, Ruthie.”
“And dead means they’re broken ?” Ruth asked.
“Well . . . their bodies are broken, yes,” Ted said.
“And they’re under the ground?”
“Their bodies are, yes.”
“But they’re not all gone?” Ruth asked.
“Well . . . not as long as we remember them. They’re not gone from our hearts or from our minds,” her father said.
“They’re kind of inside us?” Ruth asked.
“Well.” Her father left it at that, but this was more than Ruth would get, in the world of answers, from her mother—her mother would never say “dead.” And neither Ted nor Marion Cole was religious. Providing the necessary details for the concept of heaven wasn’t an option for them, although each of them, in other conversations with Ruth on this subject, had referred mysteriously to the sky and to the stars; they had implied that something of the boys lived somewhere other than with their broken bodies, under the ground.