Jessie Humphries - Killing Ruby Rose

She raised her head and gave him the scariest look I’d ever seen in my life. Her mascara had run and the demon glare she gave him made me flinch. “Don’t do this,” she said quietly. “For her sake. Don’t.”

“It’s not up to you anymore. Both you and Jack had your chances, and you failed to take them. I warned you it would come to this.” Martinez wasn’t intimidated. His lowered eyes matched her defiant stare. “If you don’t tell her, I will.”

“I’ve been trying to tell her. I was going to, but—”

“What are you talking about?” I yelled. “Mom, what are you not telling me?”

“Ruby, I know I haven’t been the perfect mother,” she said, leaning toward me. “I know I’ve let you down, but don’t let him—”

“Enough!” he roared. “We don’t have time for this.” Martinez showed his first signs of losing composure. If he was expecting my mom to cooperate, he was mistaken.

“Mr. Violet, you know what to do,” he said with eyes narrowed on my mom.

Mr. Violet didn’t look like he knew what to do at all. He stared back at Martinez with a pleading expression.

“Now.”

Violet scurried to a table behind him and came back to my mom’s side with a long knife. “I don’t want to do this,” he whimpered, wiping his snotty nose on his sleeve.

“What, it’s OK to do it to innocent young women, but not to the guilty?” Martinez asked. “You know your choices, Violet.” Martinez raised his weapon and aimed it right at the shaking predator.

I couldn’t stand it.

I started to move toward my mom, but Martinez stopped me with a bullet sparking on the floor six inches from my foot. “Ruby, be patient. You need to hear this.”

“Really?” I screamed, finally pulling out my gun. “You want me to be patient while you let this freak with no soul murder my mom right in front of me?”

“She’s not your mom, ” he responded. “She’s a thief, a liar, and a murderer.”

“No, Ruby, don’t believe him,” my mother called out.

“Mr. Violet!” Martinez called out louder.

Violet placed the knife against my mom’s neck without conviction. A sliver of blood formed and ran down her skin. She screamed again.

“Stop!” I cried over all the madness, shooting ten feet to the left of Violet to scare him away. He cowered aside. “Do not hurt her.”

I spoke directly to her. “Mom, just tell me what he’s talking about.”

“I’m your mother, Ruby, I’ll always be your mother. I love you.” She sobbed through the pain. Though her bloody neck wound was unnerving, it wasn’t fatal. Not yet. “I was never any good at showing it. But I swear, Ruby, you’re everything to me. I couldn’t bear to burden you—”

“Lies, Jane,” Martinez interrupted. “Even faced with your own death you continue to lie.”

“I tried to tell her, but I couldn’t. I never wanted to hurt her—”

“No, you lie for your own sake,” he argued. “You lie to protect yourself. Through Jack’s death, your daughter’s misery, you deny the truth. The truth that you caused the death of Ruby’s real mother.”

My breath caught.

“No, that’s not true!” Mom reared her head.

“The truth that you stole Ruby and pretended she was your own,” he continued.

“It was all legal,” she said through labored breaths.

Everything was going fuzzy around the edges. I could see the bloody court papers in my mind.

“The truth that you never even wanted her, but you thought you could save your failed marriage and repent for the sin of our affair if you adopted the perfect baby girl.”

“That’s a lie!” she seethed.

“The truth that when the baby’s biological father learned he had a daughter and demanded to know his child, you denied him at every turn.”

I was the baby from the petition.

A chill went through me as the “truth” froze me to the spot.

I could barely process the ramifications of his words, let alone the obvious pleasure he had in telling this twisted story.

“He abandoned her—”

“He didn’t know she existed,” he said icily. “I told you he’d come back for her!”

“Her mother was mentally unstable, she couldn’t take care of her,” Jane said. “As the appointed Guardian, I did what I had to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Ruby was in danger. The biological father was gone! It wasn’t my fault that Kelly overdosed.”

My lungs struggled for air. An invisible fog was suffocating me.

“You pressured her and lied in your reports. You wanted Ruby from day one, and you did what you had to do to get her,” Martinez said.

“Ruby was found alone in a crib when the neighbors called the paramedics! That woman overdosed right in front of her own two-year-old child. What more evidence do you need that she was being neglected? I saved Ruby!”

“Oh, Jane,” he said, “your argument would be so much more convincing if that wasn’t the night you had Kelly Bracken served with the petition to terminate her rights.”

The world started spinning. Their words kept flowing into my consciousness, but I was being taken back to the crib, to apartment 4E, to the sound of a woman’s weak sobs just out of reach, to the feel of the bars, to being trapped and abandoned. The sketch at the fair, the picture on the wall of the burning apartment. It was her—my real mother. I could almost see her face in my mind. Not how it looked in the pictures, but in real life. Her long blonde hair, her soft skin, her smile.

Somewhere deep inside, I’d been holding on to her.

“I gave Ruby a good home,” Jane Rose said. “An education, resources, things she never would have had in those seedy University apartments. Things I never had but fought to earn.”

“That wasn’t your call to make. She belonged with her mother—her true mother.”

“No, she belonged with us! Jack and I tried for years to do it the right way. We paid thousands of dollars in fertility treatments for a baby of our own. That woman had a fling for a few months, and oopsie, here was an unwanted pregnancy. Kelly didn’t want a child. She wanted sorority parties, football games, and hot young military men to screw on the side.”

“Do you really want to talk about women who like to screw on the side?” he warned.

“I’m not the only one at fault here! Kelly contributed to the problem, and though I know postpartum depression must be truly horrendous,” she said with all the sarcasm she could muster, “it didn’t give her an excuse to neglect her own baby. I wasn’t the one who called Child Protective Services on her. It was her neighbors, her friends.”

“Odds are, she would have figured it out without your threats and sabotage. You backed her into a corner. You are responsible for her death. You are responsible for too many crimes to count. Not only in letting criminals walk free because of your incompetence, laziness, and selfish pursuit of political power, but in neglecting, abusing, and turning your back on everyone you’ve purported to love. You manipulated Kelly, just like you manipulate everyone else in your life. Like you manipulated Jack into marrying you, like you manipulated me into an affair that was going nowhere, like you manipulated the voters into electing you—and last, but certainly not least, like you attempted to manipulate Ruby’s biological father to keep him away from her. So tell me, Jane, what did that get you?” His smirk widened as his voice rose. “Besides a dead husband?”

The world spun cobwebs of imaginary fog around me, cocooning me too tightly, constricting me too forcefully. I couldn’t breathe. Was he saying that my father killed Jack—the man I’d always believed was my dad?