What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

by Claire Jiménez

Sometimes it feels like the three of us are still stuck in that car. Shouting out Ruthy’s name into the unanswering dark.

Jessica flipped open her laptop, and we waited four minutes for its dusty ass to buzz, beep, rattle, and blink on.

He had already been gone, had left the city, had been missing for years before Ruthy disappeared in 1996. He was probably dead somewhere, the motherfucker, thank God.

First of all, if you really want to know what happened to Ruthy Ramirez, then you got to understand what happened that day at school.

You live on the north edge of Staten Island with your crazy-ass moms, your sisters, and your dad in a little pink town house. And after you turn thirteen, nobody can control you.

That’s the real unfortunate tragedy of it all. In reality, you are the good girl, and nobody knows it.

But I just smiled at the woman very politely, full of love and said, “That’s why the Lord breaks the teeth of the wicked.” In other words, I’m not going to say it, because I’m a Christian, but, Cuidao, bitch.

“I don’t need the Lord to break the teeth of my enemies. I’ll do it myself,”

never wanted that for my girls—to experience that type of violence, because sometimes getting hit like that made you think you didn’t deserve to fucking smile.

All the Puerto Rican mothers in the room glared at him, their palms itching to just reach across the kitchen and hit the boy with un cocotazo.

She laughed, her lips bright red. And it’s the laughter that gave her away, the laughter that made me certain.

But I swore that the next time Irene decided to be blessed with the Holy Spirit and pass out for an hour after church, I was going to “accidentally” step on one of her fucking fingers. I imagined her pulling her hand away from underneath my foot while cursing in the sacred house of God and me saying, “Oh my, how quickly the spirit has left you!”

One shouts through a bullhorn: “Sluts and harlots, you are going to hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell.” Ruby is tickled. She screams out the window, “No, papi, we’re going to the club!”

Me? I was merely some chimpanzee she adopted from the Staten Island Zoo.

“Ay, fo,” she said, trying to wave the smell away with the palms of her hands.

“Me cago en tu madre,” she said. “You hear me, young man…I shit on your mother.”

On the door, the club had taped a piece of paper that said: If you’re in trouble and need someone to call the cops, order a Connecticut Punch. No questions asked.

Ruthy stumbled forward, her arms raised and flailing, as if in worship. She fell. But there was my mother at the bottom of the stage, ready to catch her body. She landed in my mother’s arms, and Ma gently brushed the hair out of Ruthy’s face before pushing her back up on her feet.

My mother was unleashing some of her Jesús Cristo Karate on the Catfight girls like they were her stepchildren.

Me, my mother, my sister, and Irene all stood there, frozen, stuck in place, because there was no longer a beauty mark on Ruby’s face.

We cheered for Ruby, our Ruthy lookalike. Our Ruthy imposter. How many girls in the world were there who looked like Ruthy, talked like Ruthy? Laughed like her? How many of us were missing?

And this is where we reach the end of Ruthy Ramirez’s story. It is not a happy one; I hate to say it, because I like happy endings.

Before the strange man opens the door, before Ruthy stands there startled by his shape, before he drags her into the back seat of the car, and she screams, but there is no one there to hear her. Before he knocks her out, locks the doors, and drives away. Long before a crew of construction workers building the new mall by the Staten Island Ferry finally find Ruthy’s body with her school ID hanging off the lanyard, almost twenty years after she disappeared,

And for a brief moment, for just one small moment, nobody was able to touch her.