Opening
In these chapters, two lives move toward collision: Norma, a young woman building a future she hopes will feel lighter than her past, and Joe, an old man whose grief hardens into anger and regret. A chance sighting in Boston cracks open decades of secrecy, while loss—of children, of memory, of self—rearranges every relationship around it.
What Happens
Chapter 6: Norma
Norma leaves home for Boston just as her mother, Lenore, relapses into debilitating headaches. Raised in a house where quiet feels like weather, Norma clings to books, a supermarket job, and the urgent wish to escape her parents’ watchful love. She moves in with Aunt June, whose warmth, color, and imagination feel like oxygen after years of heaviness.
On a walk through a park, June and Norma pass an Indigenous protest. Norma notices a young woman and a man by a tent. When the man finally turns, he stares at Norma, leaps to his feet, and shouts, “Ruthie!” It’s Ben. June’s grip tightens; she drags Norma through the crowd as Ben calls after them, still yelling “Ruthie!” Shaking, June hustles Norma into a bar, orders drinks, and makes her pinky-swear never to tell Lenore what happened. Tipsy, Norma remembers that her childhood imaginary friend was named Ruthie and waves it off as coincidence.
Two years pass. Norma meets Mark on a train. He is steady, kind, and sociable, and he helps her dismantle years of shyness. She introduces him to June and to her therapist, Alice. With their blessing, Norma and Mark get engaged, graduate, and move in together—an act that earns Lenore’s silent disapproval. Norma vows to make a home of laughter and light, the opposite of the house she grew up in.
Chapter 7: Joe
Now old and dying, Joe sits with his daughter Leah and turns over the past. He keeps his sister Ruthie’s tiny boots close and tells Leah that Ben once claimed he saw Ruthie in Boston. That memory returns Joe to the years after their brother Charlie died: the family stopped going to Maine, Joe drifted in rage, and Ben moved to Boston to join Indigenous rights protests.
In 1979 Ben comes home with a story that detonates the household: he saw Ruthie in Jamaica Plain—a young woman with their mother’s face—who looked straight at him before an older white woman pulled her away. Their mother, Joe’s Mother, floods with hope. Joe, terrified of false hope, accuses Ben of lying or cruelty. The argument explodes. Joe storms into the night, steps into the road, and is hit by a truck.
Joe survives with a ruined body: chronic pain, a limp, and months of rehab. Back home by the fire, Ben swears again that he saw Ruthie. The brothers make a pact to search for her secretly in Boston so they won’t shatter their mother with hope they can’t deliver. In the present, Joe’s voice thins with illness as he admits his last wish: “If she’s still out there, I’d just like to see her before I die.”
Chapter 8: Norma
Norma and Mark marry, settle in Augusta, and she starts teaching. When she becomes pregnant, Lenore is thrilled but frightened in ways Norma can’t read. At 33 weeks, Norma realizes the baby isn’t moving. The doctor confirms it: their daughter has died. Induced, Norma delivers a stillborn baby they name Sarah. The hospital’s gentle, clinical words dissolve into a gray blur. Norma can’t hold Sarah; the image of a child with a face feels unbearable.
Grief silences the house. Norma withdraws. She tries her parents, but Lenore refuses to speak about the loss. Mark suggests a trip to Nova Scotia; for a few days, the sea air loosens something, then the sight of a newborn on the ferry shatters her again. On a beach she hears the laughter of children she can’t see and feels a peculiar, intimate familiarity with the land. A stark knowledge settles: she can’t try again. Any living child would be smothered by the love she now reserves for Sarah. She will not remake the heavy, haunted home of her childhood.
Chapter 9: Joe
After the accident, Joe’s pain curdles into fury he aims at Mr. Richardson, the man who hit him. His sister Mae finally confronts him: he’s wallowing; he doesn’t own the family’s guilt about Ruthie; he isn’t special for being the last to see her. Mae’s bluntness breaks something open. Joe decides to be “useful” and takes a job at Mr. Richardson’s gas station.
There he meets Cora, freckled and kind, nearly a decade older. They marry on New Year’s Eve. For a while, Joe is loved and steadied. Then the drinking he uses to numb pain consumes him. Fights escalate. One night, drunk and raging, he falls on the stairs; when Cora tosses down a blanket instead of helping, he bursts into violence and breaks her nose. Horror arrives the instant after. Hearing the neighbor at the door, Joe bolts—steals his father’s truck and cash, and abandons the wreckage of the life he built.
Chapter 10: Norma
On the ferry home from Nova Scotia, Norma tells Mark she won’t try for another baby. He is shattered, and the marriage ends in that quiet, decisive moment. They separate; Mark returns to Boston. Norma sells the house and buys a solitary cabin on a lake. She invites her parents, June, and Alice for a weekend and explains her decision by the fire. Lenore answers, “Are you blaming me?”
Late that night, moonlight on the lake and the smell of smoke pull Norma into a vivid scene that feels like memory: she is a small child in a patchwork dress holding a doll; beyond the flames, a woman she knows is her mother lifts a hand to her. In the morning she tells her father about these “dreams.” He says he remembers them—and warns her not to tell Lenore.
Years pass. Norma grows content in her solitude. When her father dies of a sudden heart attack, she stands among family headstones and notices the “Italian” great-grandfather’s name is Brown. Another hairline crack in the story she was raised to believe. The dead, she thinks, keep the best truths.
Key Events
- Ben locks eyes with Norma at a Boston protest and shouts “Ruthie!”; Aunt June pulls Norma away and swears her to secrecy.
- Joe, enraged by Ben’s news and his mother’s renewed hope, storms into the road and is hit by a truck, leaving him with lasting injuries.
- Norma and Mark’s daughter, Sarah, is stillborn; grief suffocates their marriage.
- Norma decides never to try for another child, and the marriage ends.
- Joe’s drinking culminates in an assault on Cora; he flees town in shame.
- At her lakeside cabin, Norma experiences a moonlit vision that feels like a recovered memory of her earliest life, widening the crack in her family’s stories.
Character Development
These chapters widen the emotional distance between characters even as they drive them toward truth.
- Norma (Ruthie): Moves from sheltered daughter to self-reliant, emotionally guarded adult. The stillbirth forces her to reject the generational script of grief-driven motherhood and choose solitude over repetition.
- Joe: Defined by unprocessed loss that becomes violence, he oscillates between the desire to atone and the urge to run. Mae’s rebuke briefly redirects him, but guilt and pain reclaim him.
- Aunt June: The family’s keeper of the central secret, acting out of fierce, protective love that edges into control.
- Ben: A catalyst powered by hope; his act of naming “Ruthie” sets both timelines on a collision course and inadvertently precipitates Joe’s accident.
- Mae: The family’s conscience—unsentimental truth-telling that punctures Joe’s self-mythologizing.
- Lenore: A tragic mother whose fear-based love arises from unbearable losses; she cannot speak the language of comfort because silence is the only protection she knows.
Themes & Symbols
Themes
- Family, Loss, and Grief: Loss organizes both plots—Ruthie and Charlie on one side; Sarah on the other. Grief isn’t an event but a climate that shapes choices, silences, and homes. Norma’s refusal to have another child is an act of care that resists the suffocating love that once shaped her.
- Memory and Trauma: Joe’s trauma erupts outward as rage and physicality; Norma’s turns inward, surfacing as “waking dreams” and bodily recognitions—a landscape that feels known, laughter out of nowhere. The body keeps score when the mind cannot.
- Secrets and Lies: June’s panic, the brothers’ secret pact, and the family’s manufactured ancestry show how lies accrete to protect and imprison. Each concealment delays pain but compounds it, distorting Identity and Belonging for everyone involved.
- Guilt and Atonement: Joe hoards guilt as proof of love and punishment; Mae insists it belongs to all of them. His attempts at atonement—work, marriage—collapse without honest reckoning.
Symbols
- The Moon: A white flare over black water becomes a key to Norma’s locked rooms. Under its light, memory coheres; it signals truth surfacing through darkness.
- Water: Ocean ferry crossings mirror disorientation and grief; the still lake offers solitude and the conditions for memory to reassemble. Water holds both drowning and baptism.
Key Quotes
“Ruthie!”
Ben’s cry fuses recognition, hope, and panic into a single syllable. Naming collapses time, momentarily making Norma both who she is and who she was, and exposes the fragile membrane separating their two narratives.
“If she’s still out there, I’d just like to see her before I die.”
Joe’s last wish strips away anger’s armor. It reframes his rage as love afraid to become hope, and it measures a life by a single unanswered absence.
“Are you blaming me?”
Lenore’s question reveals how grief becomes defensiveness. She hears accusation where Norma is naming patterns, showing how trauma can make even love feel like an indictment.
The quiet of her birth and her death followed us. It came home with us in the car. It stuck to my clothes, my hair. It burrowed under my nails, took up residence in Mark’s sighs. It slept between us.
“Quiet” becomes an agent of grief, not an absence of sound but a presence that occupies space and erodes intimacy. Norma’s move to a quiet cabin is, paradoxically, an attempt to reclaim silence as safety rather than suffocation.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters set the novel’s emotional architecture: parallel lives shaped by a single disappearance and its ripples across decades. The reader holds the dramatic irony that Norma is Ruthie, so every protest, ferry crossing, or moonlit night vibrates with double meaning. Introducing Norma’s stillbirth deepens the book’s meditation on inherited grief and whether love can be remade without repeating harm. Joe’s descent—hope curdled into violence—offers a dark counterpoint to Norma’s repression and cautious self-preservation. Together, these sections tighten the circle around the truth while asking whether truth, once named, can heal what secrecy has kept alive.