Sarah Dessen: Lock and Key

            We Have Always Lived in the Castle suggested this book to me, because of the gorgeous use of houses to structure the story of Ruby Cooper letting go of her home with her sinister and dysfunctional mother and gradually accepting the new home she finds with her long lost older sister. Ruby and her mother live in a filthy and squalid little rental house together, where Ruby does her very best not to want or need anything from anyone, because she’s not going to get it. She skips school, smokes pot with a distant boyfriend who punishes her with more distance any time she even thinks about asking for anything, puts as little effort (and time) into school as possible, and does her mother’s job for her, delivering lost luggage from the airlines in the evenings.

            Ruby’s mother is a shadowy figure, neglectful to the point of cruelty, selfish, violent, lazy, and abusive, but all in such a low-key and self-absorbed way that Ruby takes this narcissistic behavior as normal and internalizes her own insignificance as a lack of any intrinsic value. Sarah Dessen is masterful with the destructive mind games a narcissistic mother can inflict on a daughter. Ruby’s mother gradually disappears from Ruby’s life, leaving for longer and longer periods until one day Ruby is forced to admit that she’s actually not coming back at all. She actually manages on her own for a couple of months before she gets caught living alone in the house as a minor and the social workers find her long lost sister for her. Ruby gets handed over to her sister and her wealthy husband in their perfect mansion, feeling just as unwanted there as she did with her mother.

            The novel isn’t structured this way, though. In the very first sentence, we start out with Ruby being introduced to her bedroom in the new house, with no context at all. I just find this to be fantastic precision characterization:

            “I was braced for pink. Ruffles or quilting, or maybe even applique. Which was probably kind of unfair, but then again, I didn’t know my sister anymore, much less her decorating style. With total strangers, it had always been my policy to expect the worst. Usually they—and those that you knew best, for that matter—did not disappoint” (1).

            She didn’t just expect, suspect, or dread pink. She was “braced” for it, like an imminent collision. On page one, we don’t know where Ruby has come from, or even her name, never mind what past of hers could be so wonderful that a sparkling clean and freshly painted suburban bedroom would inspire such dread. Why does she treat it like a jail cell and think of nothing but escape, planning her flight for that very first night?

            This nightmare beautiful bedroom in Cora and Jamie’s nightmare beautiful home is where we start. I love the cognitive dissonance with no context because it’s such a strong character engine, making us immediately ask the crucial questions that drive the entire novel on both the character level and the story level. Ugh, I want to be able to do this! This book just kills me! The houses are crucial in the way that they are in every gothic novel, but this feeling of dread attaches to the clean and prosperous house, while Ruby’s immediate goal is to get back to the trashed little rental with no heat or running water, the place where her mother spent all day smoking and drinking silently in the darkened living room, shades pulled shut, face only lit by the flickering tv light, where her mother’s boyfriend watched Ruby silently at all times. Why would she want to go back there?

            The dirty little house embodies her old, familiar life, yes, but we also gradually learn that despite everything, Ruby wants to be there because she constantly expects her mother to come back to her, months after she left without any warning and without any contact since. Not only that, Ruby’s sister Cora left for college ten years ago and Ruby never saw or heard from her again right up until the day when the novel begins. To Ruby, living in poverty and squalor and abuse, the wealthy sister who abandoned her years before clearly takes second place to the awful mother who was at least around.

            There’s a secret that neither sister knows, however, one that only comes out accidentally. Cora tried repeatedly to reach Ruby during that time, but their mother destroyed all of her letters, kept the phone unlisted, gave fake addresses at Ruby’s schools, moved them around erratically at a moment’s notice, and told Ruby that Cora left and never wanted anything to do with them again. When Ruby finds this out, she has a breakdown and runs away from her clean new life, back to her burnout friends, getting stoned and drunk in the woods in an effort to get any piece of her past back. But to get there she begs a ride from an acquaintaince at school, who passes the info to Ruby’s next door neighbor, Nate, who drives back out there and finds her left unconscious and abandoned by her friends in a clearing in the woods.

            How does a character who was meticulously taught to want nothing, need nothing, expect nothing, learn to accept help from others and help them back in return? Nate turns out not to be the perfect specimen he appears. The matching mansion next door to Cora’s where Nate lives contains a mirror image of Ruby’s mother in Nate’s father, a controlling, abusive financial disaster of a man who screams at and beats up his son even while making him quit swim team (and lose his college scholarship) and skip school to help with the family business, like Ruby doing her mother’s job delivering lost luggage. When Nate gives Ruby a ride back to the little rental to pick up her stuff, Ruby is astonished to discover that she had been living so close to the edge that nothing is even salvageable. Even the clothes she had hung on the line to dry in the unheated kitchen have mildewed and can’t be saved. There’s nothing left of her old life. It takes this discovery and the abandonment by her friends for Ruby to be able to move on. It takes a severe beating from his father for Nate to make the same drastic change.

            The lock and key of the title run through the entire novel. Ruby wears the key to the little rental on a chain around her neck all throughout the book. She gradually learns to lower her guard a little bit and let people help her, while she’s learning how to befriend others who need it. When Ruby’s mother finally turns up, abandoned unconscious in a hotel room in an awful echo of the way Ruby’s old friends left her, it’s clear that Cora rescued Ruby just in time. We’re spared any kind of reunion or reconciliation, and in fact with their mother in rehab against her will, it’s pretty clear there will never really be one. Their mother’s reappearance makes it seem miraculous that Ruby and Cora ever managed to overcome the barriers put between them, to lose the decade of anger their mother induced between them, to get Ruby from the wretched little house and miserable abandonment to belonging to the big, beautiful house and feeling like she deserves a real family.