And I was up to the task, I knew it. I could keep Mom going in a way that Dove, who ran and hid from her family and the foundation, had never been able to. I would stay and take care of the people I loved. Build them up and protect them. Everybody may sing Dove’s praises, but I would be the one they could count on.
And I would shield the foundation from her lies. If anyone so much as dared to suggest Dove Jarrod wasn’t everything she claimed to be, I’d shut them down. If anyone even considered slandering my grandmother, I’d make sure they regretted the words before they even left their mouth. I’d see that Dove’s legacy endured intact. For my mom. For my family. This was all that mattered.
The next day, I started working at the Jarrod Foundation. I was only part-time, but I knew as soon as I graduated from college, I’d take on a full-time role. And I did, sinking my fingers into every aspect of the organization. I saw to it that the foundation did valid, lasting work—after-school programs for at-risk children, aid for sex workers, jobs and education for abused women. I helped people, got us good press, and pursued donors with the tireless zeal of a true believer.
Even though that was the furthest thing from who I was.
What I believed in was being prepared. In a locked drawer of my desk, I kept a prepared official statement that addressed any claims that Dove was not exactly who she said she was—a woman with a gift of healing. I also had a vague plan to fly us all off to Hawaii or St. Lucia to hide from prying eyes when and if the truth actually came out. Over the top, maybe, but I’d seen the havoc a scandal like this could wreak.
Aside from a nominal sum of money, the gray-shingled three-story Pasadena house was my mother’s only inheritance. The day after the funeral, Mom, Danny, and I moved out of our condo and into the spacious home. It had 5,500 square feet of furnished rooms, a kidney-shaped pool, and a gnarled hawthorn tree by the back terrace. My new bedroom, originally a guest room, was done completely in ivory. The first night there, I had a muscle spasm in my weak arm and spilled Coke all over the carpet.
I didn’t clean it up. Instead, I lay down on the fluffy white bed and stared up at the ceiling. I flexed my fingers out, then curled them into a fist. Open, close. Open, close. As I worked, I chanted a litany.
Intrauterine stroke, upper extremity hemiplegia, permanent nerve damage in my right arm . . . Intrauterine stroke, upper extremity hemiplegia, permanent nerve damage in my right arm . . .
It was my private affirmation of reality. I’d been diagnosed soon after birth. When I was a toddler, my mother had flown us down to Alabama. She told me that Dove prayed for me—for hours. Apparently, I’d cried my eyes out the whole time, but nothing happened. My tiny arm still hung limp.
Mom doubled down and in the ensuing years, dragged me to church visits, tent meetings, and healing conferences, all in her quest to fix my arm. Eventually, when I wasn’t healed, she persuaded herself that my arm must be a gift given to me by God. When it ached, she claimed it was a sign from Him. When it twinged, she said a miracle must be just around the corner.
But I grew impatient with divine signs and lackluster wonders. All I wanted was an arm that worked well enough to pass a driver’s test. So one bright spring day, without my mother’s knowledge, I bought myself a plane ticket, flew down to Alabama, and demanded my grandmother give me the miracle I’d been waiting for. The miracle I deserved.
I didn’t get it. Instead, I got a big dose of the truth.
Dove’s terrible secret.
That first night Mom and Danny and I spent in Dove’s Pasadena house, I lay in the guest bed and lifted my arm straight out in front of me. I studied it closely, taking note of the developing muscles, the smooth skin and light strawberry-blond hairs. It was a nice arm, I thought. An arm any sixteen-year-old girl should be proud of.
I rotated my palm, slowly, deliberately, in each direction. Then I carefully, one by one, curled each finger of the right hand inward with my left. Thumb, index, ring, pinky—until only the middle one was left sticking straight up in the air. I held the finger there, tall and proud. It may take two hands to get the job done, but it could be done.
“Rest in peace, Dove,” I said to the ceiling. Then I rolled over and went to sleep.
Chapter Four
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
1930
In the hours since breakfast, Ruth Lurie had come up with a doozy of a plan.
No one would’ve thought it, the way she was meandering aimlessly across the east lawn of Pritchard Insane Hospital’s grounds, weaving around the patients and attendants like she hadn’t a care in the world. But she did have a plan, and she considered it to be a good goddamn gravy one, if she did say so herself. If all went well, by this time tomorrow, she’d be gone.
Over her faded blue-and-white checked cotton dress, she wore one of the aprons from the kitchen, which was a mite unusual for her, if anybody’d had a mind to notice. Another oddity: she’d come outside to the hot yard for recreation time, even though she usually stayed in the cool to play gin rummy with Eunice and Ethel, the sweet old twins, epileptics both, who cried whenever one of them happened to beat her. But nobody noticed the apron or the fact that she was outside instead of in, and that gave her courage.
In the sunbaked yard, a handful of patients flitted here and there, like a swarm of listless flies. Dell, a boy her age who’d been born here and was now motherless like her, played marbles alone on the patch of dirt under the boughs of a hawthorn tree. The tree wasn’t big, but it was leafy and provided a cool spot. The low branches were still loaded with tiny bright-green thorn apples, which would be good for jam when they ripened.
Beside Dell, the Major sat on his chair, singing snatches of his favorite marching song from the War, the parts his addled brain could remember. He’d been wounded at the battle of Spanish Fort when he was a young boy and had never quite recovered, so his family had put him in Pritchard. He couldn’t possibly have been a real major, but that’s what all the attendants called him.
“Sittin’ by the roadside on a summer’s day,” the Major sang to no one in particular. “Talkin’ with my comrades to pass the time away. Lyin’ in the shade underneath the trees. Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas . . .”
The silly song provided a pleasant distraction. Took her mind off the incident earlier that morning. Just after breakfast, as Ruth had hurried down the corridor of the women’s ward on her way to the laundry, Jimmy Singley, one of the attendants, had snagged a fistful of her skirt and dragged her into one of the empty, unlocked dorms. He’d pushed her against the wall and breathed his stinking tobacco and pickle breath onto her face.
“Thirteen years old tomorrow. Happy birthday to you, little Ruthie.”
She’d steeled herself for whatever Singley was about to do. Round about spring of last year, the fella had taken an interest in her. He’d started following her wherever she went—down to the laundry and the vegetable garden, to the day room when she played cards. He never spoke except to fling taunts. And his only touches were slaps, pinches, and the occasional hallway tussle that she’d been able to wriggle loose from.
He liked her; she could tell. And she wasn’t no dummy. If she was smart and played a gambler’s hand, he might prove useful.
“Listen close,” Singley said in the half-light of the deserted dorm. “I’ve got something real serious to talk to you about. I’m going to put you in the nursery, right after supper.”