Emily Ruskovich Quotes

But now, seeing these letters his father wrote to June Bailey Roe, seeing his father's painful devotion to someone who simply wasn't real - a daughter he never had - Wade is unable to suppress his dread. All that love, all those feelings, all that pain, fastened to nothing, a terrible, drifting chaos. His future loss of mind becomes the new premise of his life, and he feels, already, the loss of the things he loves, feels himself trying to find some other way to hold on to them.

He whispered, "Life." And so she lived. Is living still. Will go on living, to the end of that whisper.

sibling laughter–he can hear it– not the laughter of school friends or neighbors or cousins. Something secret in that laughter, private, edged with meanness and devotion

There was a coldness in his unwavering ease, his constant and impersonal joy.

Perhaps it's what both their hearts have been wanting all along - to be broken. In order to know that they are whole enough to break.

Take your picture off the wall
So I won't have to see your eyes
And maybe soon I won't recall
The painful things that once were nice

Minutes pass, and between the minutes, June is slashing out the possibilities. She is narrowing her sister's life down to its essentials. The first to go is the vet's office where May might have worked, which is a loss, but the next to go is the mansion that May has been inside of in her dreams, a terrible, vast, cold place where the pictures are old and of other families. And so it is a relief to see it go, slashed out, burned to the ground with the hot friction of June's pencil. Then there is the loss of all possible sons, which is a tremendous relief, and then the crossing out of husbands, one by one, save one.

Take you picture off the wall
And carry it away
Dye your hair the shades of fall
Don't let time turn it to gray

Don't think of me, I'll be all right
Seems I've always done okay
Just give me one more kiss good night
For the last time, turn away

But that was long ago. She has long since lost interest in motives, in the details of other women's crimes. Even the hatchet makes its usual sense. A mother who loves her child with all her self is only so far from the hatchet anyway; one casual swing and it's done. Hatred, love, all muddled up in that space inside a whisper, when the words don't matter anymore, when the baby's half asleep and you can carry it all the way there if you want, on nothing but the tone of your voice. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Sing it as softly as you like - the words clench their own teeth. The child still falls.

He knows the names of all those mountains he can see, every name of every mountain except the one he's standing on.

How could this word be a party of May's vocabulary if neither one ever taught her? Just like that, she has deepened. Beneath her blond-white hair are these two new eyes that see what he can't guess. She is capable of withholding, then revealing. How has she learned to be this new thing that she is? He cups his hand to the back of her head, and holds her close, feeling already that all of it will pass too soon, that she is already becoming her own self, composed of secret knowledge.

I could take care of you," she said softly. She was very surprised to hear herself say this, but even so her voice was calm, as if she had been intending to say it all along. But

He sings so softly. Almost a whisper. Not like her father at all. Like the voices they give to the dolls, the men.

She learned how to deal with the moments when his memory lapsed. Sometimes, she felt it happen even without him saying a word. On a sunny fall day, she lay next to him on the ground, and as he dozed she felt his old life, his memories, radiate off his skin. She felt everything leave him but her. She shed her own life, too, to match him. They lay there together like a point in time. A cloud drifted in front of the sun and things to shift inside of him, and when she sensed this, she allowed things to shift inside of her, too. They became their regular selves again, still warm from the lost memory of a minute ago.
But underneath her happiness was a dread that one day this would be all they had. All associations would be lost: the smell of the gloves, the sound of the truck door slamming shut. All the details she still wanted to know. Everything reduced to nothing more than itself.

The revelation of kindness hurts worse than cruelty. There is no way to equal it. Nowhere to put her gratitude, and so it thrashes in her body.

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom.
It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June.
We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder.
She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.

She feels in fact that Wade's death is the very end of her heart. It is strange to arrive here at the end after all this time, and also strange to realize she hasn't been here before.

Jenny's absence seems to describe her better than her presence does; she is a looming vessel of her own withholding.

If only the winter could have opened up to show her it was vulnerable, too. The