What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

The Ramirez family of Staten Island is shaped by a single devastating absence. In a prologue-like opening, Nina, the youngest of three sisters, sketches the family's history: Her father Eddie married her mother Dolores when both were teenagers in Brooklyn, and together they had three daughters: Jessica (born 1981), Ruthy (born 1983), and Nina (born 1986). The family moved to a pink town house in West Brighton, Staten Island. In 1996, thirteen-year-old Ruthy vanished after track practice. Dolores gained sixty-two pounds and developed diabetes. Eddie died five years later. Nina describes the void Ruthy left as a black hole that obliterates any logic in the family's timeline.

Nina recounts the night Ruthy disappeared. Dolores loaded the girls into the car and drove the streets, making them shout Ruthy's name from the windows. Police canvassed the neighborhood for a month, circulating Ruthy's description: five foot one, long red hair, a beauty mark beneath her left eye. Eddie sat at the precinct daily to keep the case alive; detectives initially suspected him until his boss confirmed his alibi. Nina spent years arguing with Jessica about whether Ruthy ran away or was taken; that morning, Ruthy had muttered to Dolores, "I can't wait to get out of here." Nina eventually escaped Staten Island on a college scholarship, avoiding home for years until Jessica demanded she return to help care for Dolores.

It is 2008, and the recession has left Nina broke and rejected from medical school. She takes a job selling lingerie at Mariposa's in the Staten Island Mall under a sharp-tongued manager named Savarino. One November night, Jessica calls at midnight and tells Nina to turn on the television. On a late-night reality show called Catfight, a woman who looks exactly like Ruthy appears, with the same beauty mark beneath her left eye. She calls herself Ruby, wears bright red hair, and lives in a condo in Boston with a cast of combative women. Nina is skeptical, but Jessica is certain. They leave a message on the show's website identifying themselves as Ruthy's sisters. Ruby never responds.

Jessica, who works as a patient care technician at St. Lucy's Hospital, shows the clip to Lou, her longtime boyfriend. Lou cannot recall Ruthy's face well enough to confirm the resemblance, and Jessica realizes she, too, has lost the memory of how Ruthy's face naturally moved. That night, Jessica pulls out a page she tore from Ruthy's diary before handing the journal to detectives. Titled "Things I Would Never Tell My Mother," the entry includes "I love you. (I just would never say it.)" Jessica also recalls that when detectives asked who could have hurt Ruthy, a name surfaced in her mind, but she could not bring herself to say it.

Chapters narrated by Ruthy reconstruct her final day at IS 61, her middle school, in a shifting second- and third-person voice. In the cafeteria, her former best friend Yesenia makes a snide remark about Ruthy's outfit, and another girl sticks gum in Ruthy's hair. A fight erupts, and the dean threatens to remove Ruthy from the track team. Humiliated, Ruthy vows never to forgive Yesenia and decides to walk to a different bus stop after practice. A later chapter reveals the deeper fracture: On a New Year's Eve when both were twelve, Yesenia disclosed that she had been sexually abused and assumed Ruthy's father was already "touching" his own daughters. The assumption horrified Ruthy and introduced a coldness she could never forget.

Dolores narrates her own chapters, detailing a life organized around grief and routine. She practices self-defense from a Christian Women Warriors DVD and teaches parenting workshops at her Pentecostal church. She is fired after a young mother taunts her by saying her own daughter ran away from her; Dolores snaps and hits the woman. That night, Nina finds Dolores practicing kicks alone in the dark and silently joins her.

Nina's college backstory includes a formative betrayal. A chemistry professor, Dr. Wilkins, mentored her through difficult coursework, but at a senior party he attempted to kiss her. When she later requested a recommendation letter for medical school, he declined without explanation. The experience deepens Nina's awareness that harm can come from trusted figures, a thought that haunts her when she considers what may have happened to Ruthy.

Nina and Jessica binge-watch Catfight, studying Ruby. Ruby plays the clown, always drunk and provocative, but her audition tape reveals genuine poverty: an empty apartment with garbage bags of clothes and a single tended pot of flowers. Ruby drops specific knowledge about Staten Island that convinces Jessica. They learn the cast will appear at a Boston club called the Balloon Factory on Black Friday.

Dolores discovers the Catfight website on Nina's laptop and sees Ruby's face. She calls Irene, her sixty-year-old church companion, and the two investigate on their own. Dolores calls a family meeting, taping an agenda to the china cabinet with the final item in red: "Get Ruthy Back." She insists on joining the trip to Boston.

The meeting erupts. Dolores declares her daughters were spoiled and protected. Jessica pushes back, revealing for the first time that she was sexually abused at age ten by Mr. Alvin, the adult son of Doña Miriam, a church woman Dolores trusted to babysit. Nina admits Alvin was present in the house, acknowledging she always sensed something was wrong. Dolores is shattered: "How could you have not told me?" Jessica reverses course and consoles her mother, insisting things were fine.

The four women drive to Boston, arguing about money, identity, and language. At the Balloon Factory, Dolores and Irene charm the line of young women with Ruthy's story and are ushered to the front. Jessica and Nina eventually talk their way inside.

The Catfight cast takes the stage. During the performance, cast members attack Ruby, and one pushes her off the stage. Dolores catches her, brushing hair from her face: "It's me, baby, it's Mami." A brawl erupts. Dolores and Irene fight the cast; Jessica tackles a go-go dancer approaching her mother; Nina removes her glasses and joins in. When police break up the fight, everyone freezes: The beauty mark beneath Ruby's left eye is gone, smudged away. It was cosmetic, penciled in daily. Ruby is not Ruthy. Dolores whispers "No" and slides to the floor.

After a night in lockup, the family drives home in silence. They gather at Jessica's house to watch the episode in which Ruby is expelled from the Catfight house, rooting for her throughout. Ruby has become their surrogate, whom Nina calls "a sister of ours in her own right." When the episode ends, Julie, Jessica and Lou's baby daughter, cries upstairs. All three women go up together, whispering, "You are not alone, baby girl. You are loved."

The final chapter returns to Ruthy on the day she disappeared. After track practice, she waves at Yesenia, hoping for reconciliation, but Yesenia does not wave back. Ruthy walks alone to a different bus stop. A man pulls up and offers her a ride. She refuses. He drags her into the back seat and knocks her unconscious. The narration reveals that construction workers will eventually find her body with her school ID, nearly twenty years later. But the novel ends with Ruthy's final free thought: the memory of running, of sprinting past every other girl. "And for a brief moment, for just one small moment, nobody was able to touch her" (224).