Last Day by Domenica Ruta

Author:Domenica Ruta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

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MARY HAD BEEN the one bright spot in Kurt’s life after he’d dropped out of art school. Kurt was nineteen when he met her and Mary was a sophomore in high school. She was a gorgeous earth child with large brown eyes and dark, gleaming hair, the kind of girl who wore sandals with wool socks in the dead of winter, who smoked like a chimney but wouldn’t touch a plate with meat on it. She thought Kurt’s illustrations of dragons and heroes were genius and she loved his family as much as her own. She hailed from a long dynasty of semi-important Americans—the last of whom was her uncle Bear, an astronaut—WASPs clutching desperately to relevance as their storied past collected more and more dust in the annals of local libraries.

“We were switched before birth,” she liked to joke about Kurt. She fit in so much better with his German-Irish Catholic family, and in a parallel world, Kurt would have been much happier in hers. Mary’s vague ambition to one day run a daycare center out of her home was applauded by Kurt’s parents, while his artistic impulses—mostly ignored, at times derided by his folks—would have been nurtured to the fullest if he had been born into her clan instead. Mary was the first member of her family not to go to Choate. She said she’d bombed the entrance exam on purpose. But she would have done poorly regardless of her effort. She wasn’t stupid, just simple, content with whatever knowledge landed in her lap, curious about her world, but only to a point. She felt no need to waste time reading that the woods were lovely, dark, and deep when she could just go there and see for herself. She was looking forward to marrying Kurt as soon as she was eighteen and wanted nothing more than to start a family.

“Her parents hated me long before the accident,” Kurt told Sarah. “I don’t blame them. I’d bring her home drunk or stoned, she’d have twigs and pine needles and sap in her hair. Those expensive sweaters they bought her would be all ripped. They’d say, ‘What were you doing, Mary? Rolling around in the forest?’ And she was so goddamn sweet she couldn’t lie. To anyone. She’d look at them with her full-moon eyes and just say, ‘Yes.’ ”

Kurt cleaned the dust off another picture frame he pulled out from under his bed and handed it to Sarah. It was a badly scanned photograph of Mary, printed at a drugstore, but Sarah could see, even in this slightly pixilated, desaturated form, how beautiful and unself-conscious the girl was. It was a picture of her smiling face, a scrap of shadow creeping up under her chin, suggesting Kurt, her photographer, hovering above her, probably in some delightful springtime field. She was so heartbreakingly pretty. Even the bump on the bridge of her nose was pretty, as though her beauty was so powerful it cracked under its own weight, becoming greater from the resulting flaw.

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