Soft Place to Land

by Susan Rebecca White

Genres: Siblings; Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of Bound South comes a powerful, moving novel of family loss and sisterly redemption. For more than ten years, Naomi and Phil Harrison enjoyed a marriage of heady romance, tempered only by the needs of their children. But on a vacation alone, the couple perishes in a flight over the Grand Canyon. After the funeral, their daughters, Ruthie and Julia, are shocked by the provisions in their will…not the least of which is that they are to be separated. Spanning nearly two decades, the sisters’ journeys take them from their familiar home in Atlanta to sophisticated bohemian San Francisco, a mountain town in Virginia, the campus of Berkeley, and lofts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As they heal from loss, search for love, and begin careers, their sisterhood, once an oasis, becomes complicated by resentment, anger, and jealousy. It seems as though the echoes of their parents’ deaths will never stop reverberating—until another shocking accident changes everything once again.

Release date: March 25, 2010

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Prologue

In the months following the accident Ruthie and Julia imagined and discussed the last days of their parents’ lives so often it was almost as if the girls had been there, had accompanied them on the trip out west. Except of course they had not. That had been the whole point of Phil and Naomi’s vacation.

Their plane crashed at approximately 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday, March 24, 1993, during the girls’ spring break from the Coventry School, where Ruthie was in seventh grade, Julia a sophomore. Most of the well-to-do families from Coventry, which is to say most of the families, were taking vacations together that week, to the mountains to ski, or to the beach to relax by the ocean. Ruthie’s best friend and sometimes nemesis, Alex, was going all the way to London with her parents. But Phil’s caseload at the firm was especially heavy that year, and Julia had so many late and incomplete assignments to finish that she needed an unscheduled week at her desk just to get caught up.

And so no trip for the Harrisons was planned, until Julia’s theater friend Marissa Tate casually mentioned that Julia could come with her to her family’s beach house on Pawleys Island. Phil and Naomi made a show of extracting promises from Julia that she would spend at least two hours a day catching up on her assignments, but they readily agreed to the trip. Freed of one child, and with Mother Martha—Phil’s stepmom—willing to come stay with Ruthie, they began thinking of a romantic destination for just the two of them.

Phil and Naomi lived for time alone with each other.

Naomi’s favorite place in the world was Paris, in the Sixth Arrondissement, where she would sit for hours in the cafés, drinking espressos, eating pastel-colored macaroons, and observing the sophisticated people around her. In Paris, unlike in Atlanta, caffeine didn’t bother her; she could drink espresso all day and still fall asleep easily at night. Phil’s favorite place was wherever Naomi was happiest, but nearly equal to his love of pleasing his wife was his love of a good bargain. And since there were no bargain plane tickets to be found for a last-minute trip to Paris (he checked), he booked them on a trip to Las Vegas instead, where he got a tremendous deal on their stay at the Mirage and secured tickets for them to watch Siegfried and Roy tame the tigers.

They planned to stay put in Las Vegas for three days. The city’s slightly seedy element was not a deterrent. In fact, it added to the allure of the vacation. How much further could they be from their mortgage-bound life of duty and responsibility in Atlanta than to be playing craps in a flashy casino in the middle of the day after spending the morning in bed? On the fourth day of their vacation, they would venture out of the city, renting a brand-new 1993 cherry red Mercedes convertible that they would use to drive the 270 miles to the Grand Canyon, where years ago Phil and his first wife, Beatrice, had (rather uncomfortably) camped during a cross-country drive to visit his sister, Mimi, who lived in San Francisco.

Naomi would be seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.

Julia and Ruthie speculated that Phil was probably more excited about driving that new Mercedes than he was about any other part of the trip. Phil was a sucker for cars, trading in his old one every couple of years for whatever was the latest, fastest model he could acquire for a good price. Once he took his wife to look at a BMW he had bought for a tremendous bargain, many thousands below its Blue Book value. It turned out that the original owner of the car had been killed while driving it, in a multiple-car crash that brought traffic to a stop on I-85 for hours. All his widow wanted was to get rid of the car, fast.

Naomi told Ruthie about accompanying Phil to the body shop to see the car while it was being repaired. Its windshield was shattered and there was a little bit of human hair poking out from one of the cracks. Naomi said that she could never ride in that car without feeling queasy. It was a huge relief, she said, when two years passed and Phil traded the car in for another, newer one.

Phil had made other sketchy deals. Ruthie remembered a time when Phil was late coming home from work and Naomi was agitated because he had not phoned to inform her of the reason for the holdup. Ruthie was already dressed for bed by the time Phil finally pulled into the garage, driving a new black Jaguar. He walked into the kitchen beaming, and to an incredulous Naomi he explained: a Middle Eastern man who had once been his client had phoned him at the office, saying that he needed to sell the car within forty-eight hours, and he needed to sell it for cash.

“I had the cash, babe,” said Phil, standing in his blue suit in the red-tiled kitchen while Naomi glared at him, not even saying a word. “You won’t believe the deal I got.”

The thing about Phil’s deals was this: they usually didn’t save him any money. He would often end up buying even more expensive items than he ever intended to purchase, simply because they were offered at a price below retail value. That was why Julia, at sixteen, was given a brand-new Saab 900. Phil had been planning to buy her one of the old Hondas listed in the automobile section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when his eye hit upon the lease deal advertised by Saab. At the astonishingly low rate of $288.99 a month—no money down—how could Phil not lease a new Saab for his daughter, who was actually his stepdaughter but whom he claimed fully as his own?

Julia was embarrassed by the car, which highlighted her self-consciousness about being a rich girl at a rich prep school. The friends she hung out with at Coventry were mostly boys, smart stoners who wore black and loved to make fun of their privileged classmates. (Somehow they were able to overlook their own privileged lives.) They had a field day with Julia’s Saab, and when she told them to shut up and leave her alone—she hadn’t asked for the car in the first place—they told her to please stop with the “saab story.”

As for Phil, he proclaimed Julia a reverse snob, adding, “I can’t wait until the day you have to support yourself. Then you’ll really miss your old man.”

When speculating about their parents’ last days on earth, Ruthie told Julia that she hoped they had ordered dessert after their last dinner, the night before they drove out to see the Grand Canyon, the night before they decided to board that ancient Ford Trimotor—known as “The Tin Goose” to airplane aficionados—that was supposed to fly them into the canyon itself, revealing the canyon’s details up close. Julia assured Ruthie that yes, dessert was ordered, for Naomi loved chocolate above all other foods. Indeed, she was forever breaking her diet by eating chocolate and drinking champagne with Phil, after a dutiful dinner with the girls of overbaked chicken and steamed broccoli, or turkey meat loaf and a microwaved potato, or sometimes Lean Cuisine. During the day, too, she would be diligent, drinking a Slim-Fast for lunch, or having a fruit plate with cottage cheese. But if Phil opened a bottle of bubbly after dinner, she could rarely find the willpower to say no. And loosened by the champagne, how could she refuse chocolate?

The night before they drove to the Grand Canyon, Phil and Naomi had eaten at Kokomo’s restaurant in the Mirage Hotel. Julia and Ruthie imagined that their mother wore the emerald green raw silk top she had purchased from Isaacson’s in Atlanta, that and a pair of wide-legged black satin pants that swished when she walked. She would have worn heels, of course. Tall ones. She always wore heels when she dressed up, and the feet she slipped into them would have been creamy and free of calluses, the toenails painted with Estée Lauder Vintage Cognac. The girls both knew that Phil had a thing for pretty hands and feet, that he encouraged his wife to get a manicure once a week and a pedicure every other week, and that Naomi, though she often spoke of feeling guilty about the extravagant lifestyle Phil provided, loved to be pampered and happily, guiltily, obliged.

Phil would have worn a dark suit and white shirt, not unlike what he wore to the office most days. His tie was most likely the green one with minute white polka dots that Naomi had bought for him at Mark Shale. It would have matched Naomi’s outfit, and the girls knew that he had that one with him on the trip, for it was found, curled up with the others, in one of the suitcases that were returned to their house the week following the accident.

He would have been freshly shaved; he would have smelled like Tsar cologne, which Julia had given him for Christmas to replenish his supply. His glasses might have had a speck of dust or debris or even food on them—they often did—but Naomi would have taken out the special wipes she kept in her purse to clean them. Before they left for the hotel restaurant, she probably pulled out the lint roller from her suitcase and used it on the front of his suit, too.

Phil would have been ready before Naomi, would have been dressed and waiting to go, sitting on the hotel bed and watching a basketball game on TV while she finished applying her makeup, while she dabbed the hollow beneath her ear with Chanel No. 5. Had he been waiting for her to finish getting ready in Atlanta, Phil would have sipped from a can of beer, from whatever brand was on sale at the grocery store. Naomi wasn’t really a beer drinker, and so he didn’t have to suit her tastes when he made his beer purchases. But in Las Vegas, Julia and Ruthie were sure, Phil would have waited until he was at the restaurant to get a drink. Phil’s attitude toward the price of items in a minibar most clearly resembled moral outrage.

“But don’t you think he might have bought a bottle of champagne at the grocery store or something, and surprised Mom with it when she came out of the bathroom?” asked Ruthie. This was during one of their early discussions about what happened the night before, during those first few months when they were still living in Atlanta, supervised by their aunt Mimi, Phil’s sister, who had moved into the house on Wymberly Way for the time being, leaving her husband and her interior design business unattended to in San Francisco, just until everything got sorted out.

The girls were sitting in Julia’s room, on her queen-sized bed with the green and pink floral coverlet.

“That’s possible,” said Julia. “Especially because the trip was such a fuck fest for the two of them.”

“Don’t say that!” said Ruthie, hitting her sister hard on the thigh with her open palm. Ruthie did not want to think of her dead parents disrespectfully. Plus, she hated it when Julia said “fuck.” There was a strong evangelical contingency at Coventry, and Ruthie had been swayed enough by the proselytizers to purchase a necklace with a small silver cross dangling from it at James Avery, the Christian jewelry store at Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, just a mile away from their house.

It wasn’t that Ruthie believed Julia was going to hell for saying such words, but she worried that every time Julia cursed, God turned a little further away from her. And with Julia on the verge of failing out of Coventry, Ruthie felt strongly that her sister needed God on her side. Had Ruthie expressed these thoughts to Julia, she would have snorted, would have asked, “Where was God when Mom and Phil were on that plane?”

Ruthie wondered the same thing.

“I’m sorry, my darling, delicate one. Sorry for springing the ‘f’ word on you, but do you not remember the sound of the train?”

Ruthie was ten years old the first time she heard her mom making the train noises. Her bedtime was hours past, but she was awake, reading the thriller Daughters of Eve by a compact flashlight that she kept under her pillow. She could not figure out where the high, rising sound was coming from. She decided it must be a train barreling down the tracks over by Ardmore Park off Collier Road. Which was strange, considering that the park was miles away. She turned on her side, placed her pillow on top of her exposed ear to block out the sound, and managed to keep reading, holding the flashlight with one hand while turning pages with the other. Pretty soon the train noise stopped.

The next day she asked Julia if she had heard the train that last night. Wasn’t it strange, Ruthie mused, that the noise would travel so far, all the way from the tracks on Collier? Julia looked at Ruthie as if she were a total idiot.

“That was Mom you were hearing, dummy. She and Dad were having sex.”

“But the noise was so loud.”

Julia shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I’ve always found that noise during sex is optional.”

Ruthie covered her ears with her hands. “Kittens and puppies and bunnies,” she chanted. “Kittens and puppies and bunnies . . .”

Ruthie didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at Julia’s allusion to “the train.” Ever since the accident she did both—laugh and cry—at unexpected moments. In the four weeks since her parents’ death Ruthie had already been sent out of the room for getting the giggles in the middle of Bible class, during the discussion of The Hiding Place, a book by Corrie ten Boom, a Christian woman who was sent to Auschwitz after it was discovered that she and her family had helped hide Jews.

There was nothing funny about The Hiding Place, and yet every time someone said “Corrie ten Boom” Ruthie began to laugh. It reminded her of something her uncle Robert once did when she was little. Uncle Robert and Aunt Mimi were visiting from San Francisco, during the summer. One afternoon all of the grown-ups put on bathing suits and went to sit by the pool. It was the first time Ruthie had ever seen Uncle Robert with his shirt off. He had a hairy chest and back, and his belly bulged over the waist of his swim shorts.

“Meet my chubby hubby,” said Mimi. Robert slapped his stomach and said, with gusto, “Ba boom!”

Corrie ten Boom, her uncle Robert’s “ba boom.” This was not a connection Ruthie could explain to her Bible teacher. She didn’t get in any real trouble, though. After the accident all of her teachers were cautious around her.

Even more often than laughing at inappropriate moments, Ruthie cried. During the dumbest times, too, when someone sitting beside her in homeroom complained about what a bitch her mom was, or the math teacher Mrs. Stanford used “Mom’s meat loaf” as a subject for a word problem. Ruthie discovered that the best way to avoid crying was to sit as still as she possibly could and think only about immediate things, such as: would the spider making its way across Jason Purdy’s desk climb up onto his arm, and if it did, would he notice? (Once a bug crawled out of his hair and Jason seemed only pleasantly surprised.)

When Ruthie was home, finally, and alone in her room she cried and cried, all the while trying not to make noise, because it would have embarrassed her to have Aunt Mimi overhear her distress. Even though Aunt Mimi was always telling Ruthie that there was no wrong way to grieve. Especially because Aunt Mimi was always telling her that there was no wrong way to grieve.

Alone in her room after school, Ruthie prayed. Though she wore the cross from James Avery around her neck, her belief in God was not bedrock, and more often than not her prayers to God were pleas for him to exist, for him to be real. If he did not, if he was not, that meant that Ruthie would never again see her parents.

Most afternoons Julia was away at play practice. She had always been a gifted performer, but after the accident her talent deepened, her interest intensified, and she was given the lead in the spring play, even though the lead was usually reserved for a senior. Julia was happiest during rehearsal, happiest inhabiting another person’s life. She would remain this way throughout her life, always writing about others. Only once, in her memoir about rehab, would she focus her gaze almost exclusively on herself. After play practice she would often go to Steak ’n Shake or the OK Cafe with other cast members, or meet up with her stoner friends who wore black and avoided sanctioned extracurricular activities.

Mimi did not keep a tight rein on Julia, and so Julia was not usually home until 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. She would have stayed out even later had it not been for Ruthie. Sometimes Julia would swing home after play practice, pick her little sister up in her Saab 900, and take her out to dinner with her friends. And somehow, even though she, too, had lost her mother, she, too, had lost Phil (he was “only” her stepfather, yes, but she was closer to him than she was to her real dad), Julia was able to give Ruthie comfort.

Whether it was allowing her little sister to accompany Julia to Mick’s for chocolate pie with her stoner friends, or allowing her little sister to sleep in her bed at night because it comforted both of them to be near each other, Julia alone made Ruthie feel better. Sometimes at night Ruthie would wake up crying and Julia, more often awake than not, would wrap her arms around her sister, would hold her tight, would use enough pressure to contain the radiating loneliness Ruthie felt.

It was funny. Ruthie wasn’t used to hugging Julia. As close as they had always been, as much as they had always relied on each other, they had never been huggers. No one in their family was. Even Phil and Naomi, who were so much in love, were not big huggers. Phil always embarrassed Ruthie to death by sensually massaging Naomi’s neck during parents’ events—award banquets and such—at Coventry, and every night while watching TV Phil would rub Naomi’s feet, but they did not hug good-bye in the morning before Phil left for the office. Phil would give his wife a wet smack on the lips, announce, “I’m off,” and be gone.

Before the accident, the only time Julia and Ruthie hugged was while playing Egg and Biscuit. Egg and Biscuit was a game that Julia created, and because she created it, she got to make up all of the rules, the primary one being that Julia was always the Egg, Ruthie was always the Biscuit. Julia would stand on the far side of the room, looking forlorn, casting her eyes about but never resting them on anyone or anything until they rested on Ruthie, who stood across the room, her back to Julia.

“B-B-Biscuit?” Julia would ask, disbelieving.

Ruthie would turn, would look at Julia, would squint her eyes. “E-E-Egg?”

“Biscuit?” Julia would say again, hope creeping into her voice.

“Egg!?” Ruthie would ask.

“Biscuit!”

“Egg!”

Finally the two girls would run toward each other, screaming, “Biscuit! Egg! Biscuit! Egg!” They would meet in the middle of the room, Julia lifting Ruthie off the floor and twirling her around and around in a hug while each of them cried, “Oh, my yummy Egg! Oh, my fluffy Biscuit!”

They never really outgrew this game, continuing to play it even after Julia began high school. Of course, it was a private thing for them. Nothing they would play in front of others.

For Ruthie, it was easier to imagine the night before the accident rather than the day of. The night before, her parents were still safe, still tucked inside their fancy hotel with the glittering, flashing lobby and a myriad of overpriced restaurants to choose from. And even though their hotel room was on the twenty-sixth floor, they were, for all practical purposes, grounded. They would not plummet from the sky at the Mirage. And what they did there—the gambling excepted—was not all that different from what they did on Saturday nights in Atlanta. Get dressed up. Leave Ruthie at home with a sitter. Go somewhere expensive for dinner where Phil would order them each a glass of champagne to start and Naomi, temporarily unburdened from her motherly responsibilities, would lean back in her seat, would begin to relax.

Julia was unlike Ruthie in that she obsessively imagined the details of her parents’ final day and she seemed to relish doing so. They did not know yet, during the months that followed their parents’ death, that Julia would one day be a successful writer, would indeed one day write the story of her mother’s early adulthood: her decision to leave her first husband, her young child—Julia!—in tow, in order to marry Phil, the man who had captured Naomi’s heart during their brief romance when she was a freshman at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he was a senior at Duke. Phil would head to Nashville to begin law school shortly after his graduation. And because she was angry at Phil for dashing off to Vanderbilt without seeming to give a speck of thought to their budding relationship, Naomi finally agreed to go on a date with Matt Smith, a North Carolina State sophomore who had already asked her out three times.

It was Matt she would marry, Matt who would give her Julia, and Matt whose heart she would eventually break when she left him for Phil.

And so it made sense, retroactively, that Julia the writer was able to imagine Phil and Naomi’s last day in such unflinching detail. And while Ruthie did not want to imagine the details herself, she allowed Julia to tell of them, because it fixed a story to the horror, which somehow made it less random. (Nothing chilled Ruthie more than the possibility that the world was a random place where parents could die for no reason.) Julia’s story, which she embellished with details plucked from the encyclopedia about the Ford Trimotor, was comforting—to an extent—because it had a defined villain, Dusty Williams, the pilot. In Julia’s version Dusty had started his day with a six-pack of beer, followed by a little weed. In Julia’s version, Dusty’s plane had twice failed inspection.

(In truth, Dusty had possessed a clean flying record, and was by all accounts a model pilot. His plane had recently been inspected. Yes, it was old, but it was in good shape. It should not have crashed. Why it did remained a mystery. Maybe there was a bad fuel load? Maybe Dusty had a heart attack once the plane was up in the air, and no one else on board knew how to fly the old Tin Goose? No one would ever know. It wasn’t as if Dusty’s Trimotor was equipped with a black box.)

“Well,” said Julia. “You know that they got off to an early start. That Phil woke first and went down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee for Mom.”

“With cream and Equal,” said Ruthie. Her mother always took her coffee with real cream and Equal, an incongruity that Julia and Ruthie used to tease Naomi about.

“Right. Mom would have gotten out of the bed and pulled back the curtains, revealing a gorgeous day, the rising sun still a little pink in the sky. She would have looked out the window at the empty hotel pool, blue and sparkling all of those many feet below, too cold to swim in but nice to sit by. She might have wondered why they were leaving the hotel, were driving so many miles only to see the canyon and return to Las Vegas that night. She might have even considered asking Phil to cancel the trip, telling him that she had a headache and that the drive across the desert might make it worse.”

“No,” interrupted Ruthie. “She was looking forward to seeing the Grand Canyon. She told me before she left. Plus, Dad was so excited about driving that Mercedes.”

“I know, I know,” said Julia, impatient. “I’m just thinking that maybe that morning she had second thoughts about all of that driving. You know how bad a driver Phil was. But then he would have burst into the room holding her coffee in one hand, a Danish in the other, looking so eager, so excited, that she would have abandoned her misgivings and gotten dressed for the trip.”

“It was a cool day,” said Ruthie. “That’s what the newspapers said.”

“Cool but not too cold. Perfect for her brown linen pants and crisp white sleeveless shirt that she wore with a thin black cardigan. Phil was wearing khakis and one of those white linen shirts Mom was always buying him, a sweater tied around his waist.”

“Alex’s mom says you’re really not supposed to wear linen until the summer,” said Ruthie.

“You think they gave a shit what Alex’s mom thought of them way out in the desert?”

Ruthie shrugged. No, of course not. In Buckhead, their tony Atlanta neighborhood, and among the other Coventry mothers, Naomi worried about all of the rules she didn’t know, but she wouldn’t have cared out there.

“They would have kept the windows of the convertible rolled up, even though the top was down, so Phil’s shirt wouldn’t get dirty from all of the dust kicked up on the drive.”

“They were on the highway,” said Ruthie. “It wasn’t like they were driving through the desert.”

“They would have had the windows rolled up anyway. To protect Mom’s hair from getting all windblown.”

Their mother, like Julia, had been a natural redhead, auburn, really. But while Julia’s hair grew in loose curls, Naomi’s was straight like Ruthie’s. Naomi, who had been self-conscious about her looks, about her long nose and the little gap between her front teeth, always said that her red hair was her best feature.

“She would have wrapped a scarf around it,” said Ruthie. “One of the silk ones she and Dad bought in Florence.”

“Right. That’s right. A Ferragamo. So they were all dressed and ready to go—no need to pack the luggage; they were coming back late that night—but just before they left the room Mom suggested that they call home, just to check on you, just to say hello.”

In fact, her parents had not called the morning of the accident, and the possibility that Naomi had considered doing so caused Ruthie’s throat to tighten, caused her to have to lay her head on Julia’s bed to account for the heaviness she suddenly felt.

“But Phil said no. If Mother Martha answered they would have to talk with her for at least ten minutes—she was so hard to get off the phone—and besides, they had spoken with you just the night before. Plus, it was already nine A.M., they had a long drive ahead of them, and they did not want to waste away the morning in the hotel room. So Mom said fine, she’d call tomorrow when she could tell you all about seeing the Grand Canyon.

“Phil would have already arranged to have the rental car dropped off at the hotel, and so they would have stepped outside the lobby doors to find the cherry red Mercedes convertible waiting for them, keys in the ignition, top already down.”

“Otherwise Dad wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to do it,” Ruthie said.

(Phil’s lack of mechanical know-how had always been a running joke between the two girls. They used to tease him mercilessly about his habit of watching This Old House every Saturday afternoon.

“Do you even know how to hammer a nail?” Ruthie would ask her father.

You had to be careful about teasing Phil, because if his feelings were hurt he might lash out fiercely. But he always had the same response to his daughters’ jokes about his devotion to This Old House.

“I need to know what to look out for when I supervise the help,” he would say, and Julia and Ruthie would groan and roll their eyes.)

“They would climb in the car, which smelled of new leather, and Phil would slip The Eagles—Their Greatest Hits, brought from Atlanta, just for the occasion, into the CD player. Mom would check and make sure he had his driving directions with him, and he would wave away her concern but then go ahead and pat his breast pocket to make sure the directions were there. And then they were off.”

There was not too much they could imagine about the drive to the Grand Canyon, besides the wind whipping around their parents’ hair, despite the windows of the convertible being rolled up. Neither Ruthie nor Julia had been anywhere out west besides San Francisco, so they didn’t really know what the scenery looked like. They imagined that the road was empty, the sun was big, and there were cacti everywhere.

The noise from the wind would hav