Mothers and Other Liars (22 page)

Ruby storms past the reception area and barges into John’s office. “They served me with papers. A constable came right into the salon. In front of everyone.” She presses her palms to her cheeks. Just when she was starting to feel like everything was going to work out. She
knew
better than to jinx herself that way.

“Let me call you back.” John sets the phone receiver in its cradle as he rises. He walks over to Ruby, puts a hand on her shoulder. “I left voice mail at your home and a message at the salon. I just found out that they had filed this morning.” He guides her to a chair.

The receptionist, a younger woman than the receptionist who was here when Ruby was here before, enters the office with a tall glass. The woman stumbles, spills water on the geometric-patterned rug, then hands the dripping glass to Ruby. John lets out an exasperated sigh and waves the woman away as Ruby wipes the glass on her pants.

“But what does it mean, the lawsuit?”

John sits across from her, rests his elbows on his knees. “The Monteros are seeking an injunction to prevent the adoption of the baby.”

“The judge already approved it, though. Chaz agreed. Can they go against him? Can they stop me?”

“They can try. Anyone can file a lawsuit for anything,” John says. He explains that the first step is a hearing for a temporary restraining order to stop her from turning over the baby to the Tinsdales when he is born. “A judge
might
give them that, just to maintain the status quo until he can set an evidentiary hearing. I’ve got someone researching this, but I would be shocked if even the temporary order were granted, and I don’t see how they have standing to win a permanent injunction.”

“Then why? Why are they doing this?”

John scratches one ankle with the other shoe. Loafers without socks today. “My guess? This is a ploy to build a case to seek visitation rights, a gesture for evidence of how much they care.”

Ruby sets the glass on the table. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit shit shit.” She shifts her weight in the chair as the baby kicks her.

“Ruby, their chances are really slim. It’s highly unlikely—”

“The Tinsdales.” Ruby shakes her head. “If the Monteros ask for visitation, Philip Tinsdale will blow a gasket.” She looks at the ceiling, at her lap. The Tinsdales wanted
Lark
to themselves, cutting off all contact with the outside. She can’t imagine that they’ll accept anything less with their new baby. The papers for Lark’s adoption haven’t even made it to preliminary approval in the clogged Texas family court; the Tinsdales could still change their minds. Ruby puts her head in her hands. “Chaz’s family is going to screw the whole thing up.”

John leans back, crosses a leg on his knee. “Let’s just take it one step at a time.”

“I can’t believe that Antoinette…she didn’t even warn me.” Ruby chews her lip hard until she can feel the pain at her mouth separate from the ache in the rest of her body. She folds her arms against her chest, feels that looser second skin of grief from losing Lark, like a shirt of an old boyfriend that a woman wears around.

“Ruby, listen. I think I should call the Tinsdales’ lawyer, give him a heads-up. Better that they hear it from us.”

“They’ll freak, they’ll friggin’ freak.” Ruby tries to gird herself for yet another battle. She knows that winning means losing something—someone—too. But losing? That cannot happen, not for Lark, and not after all Ruby has been through.

Little Miss Red Suit is waiting on the driveway when Ruby steps out to go to work. “Just give me a minute.”

This siren, who
almost
lured Chaz to the cliffs, is a scarlet reminder as vivid as Hester Prynne’s
A
of his betrayal. “I don’t have anything to say to you.” Ruby brushes past the reporter, heads for the Jeep.

Little Miss Red Suit scurries after her. “Woman Chooses Foundling Over Biological Child!” Her whisky voice is somewhere between normal talking and clarion. “Nurture Trumps Nature!”

Ruby stops, turns to her. “Please. Just leave me alone.”

“The story is out there,” the reporter says. “Grant me an exclusive, and I’ll do it right. I won’t exploit you or your daughter. You don’t want those other headlines.”

Ruby leans against the side of the Jeep, her belly like the heavy medicine ball her grade-school teachers made the kids throw around the gym on snowy days. “How did you hear?”

The reporter steps in beside Ruby, her skinny red hip resting against the car. “The grandparents.”

Of course. Ruby just might vomit this news onto the driveway. The Tinsdales are already squirming at the possibility of a legal battle. If the Monteros fight through the court of public opinion…

“Mrs. Tinsdale already agreed to an interview.”

Ruby shakes her head. “She wouldn’t, Darla wouldn’t…”

“Not the trophy wife,” the reporter says, “the mother, his mother.” Little Miss Red Suit tells Ruby that old Mrs. Tinsdale of the high tea and crinoline, a woman who would tell you that a true lady’s name is in print only three times in her life—her birth, her marriage, and her death—rather liked the buzz she generated at her stuffy Dallas country club because of the trial, doesn’t mind stirring up a bit more interest.

Ruby drops her chin to her chest. She can’t face another media mad house, can’t put the salon through it again. And what about Lark, if the press gets hold of her? “I can’t…I won’t.”

Little Miss Red Suit shoves a card into Ruby’s hand, squeezes Ruby’s fingers as if she is kneading bread. “Call me. I promise to be fair.” She strides down the driveway, a vulture in search of her next carrion. “You don’t want those headlines.”

Ruby groans herself off the Jeep. She takes the crisp white card and tears it into snowflakes, a little flurry of winter there on the late-summer ground.

“Don’t you think?” Ruby’s client asks.

Ruby looks up from her nail station, where she holds the client’s hand, brushing each fingertip with I’m Not a Waitress red. “Sorry?”

“Don’t you think a Russian theme for the Chamber Music Festival party would be fun?”

“Oh, yes.” Ruby takes the client’s other hand, bracing her own hand on her other pinkie, a manicurist trick for steady polish strokes. She has learned over the years; clients want pretty nails and an hour to vent to a good listener. The hand-in-hand intimacy of the manicure chair opens the floodgates. All that is required, desired even, from Ruby is a few “uh-huhs” and nods along the way, which is a good thing at the moment, because she is incapable of cogent thought.

She makes the occasional “mmhhh” noise as the client continues her monologue: it’s Shostakovich after all; they could hang jewel-toned fabrics from the ceiling, faux Fabergé eggs on the tables, create a whole Hermitage feel.

Ruby finishes the top coat on Mrs. Kremlin, then sends her to dry under the ultraviolet light with a comment that the Chamber Music Festival event surely will be a smash. She motions to Zara that she is ready for her next appointment, then readies her station, changing out the towels, laying out clean instruments, returning the bottle of polish to the rack on the wall.

When she steps from the back room with a fresh dish of warm sudsy water, Antoinette is sitting at the nail station. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

“Yeah, I guess I have.” Ruby sets down the shallow manicure bowl, places Antoinette’s left hand in the suds. “I’m sorry. I…”

“No, I’m sorry,” Antoinette says. “For my family’s behavior. I didn’t know about the lawsuit. They didn’t even tell me. I had to hear it from a friend in the clerk’s office.” Antoinette shakes her head. “You didn’t think I had anything…you know I would have called to tell you.”

Not long ago, Ruby assured Antoinette that their friendship could survive anything. But this is a whole lot of anything, for anybody. “I don’t blame you. It’s just hard.” The ache of missing Chaz is still such tender skin. Being with his sister is like fingers picking away at bits of scab, making Ruby bleed again and again and again. And now a court battle with his family. Antoinette glances over at Margaret, who is sweeping a patch of already-swept tile around her station. “He left, you know.”

Ruby holds Antoinette’s right hand, squirts cuticle cream around each nail. “Left her?”

Antoinette takes her other hand out of the soaking dish, wipes it on a towel. The linen is marshmallow-white against Antoinette’s vanilla-cream skin. “No, left town.”

Ruby moves the dish to the other side of the table, dunks Antoinette’s right hand in the suds. She squirts the cuticle cream on Antoinette’s left hand, massages it around her fingernails, then nudges the cuticles with an orange stick.

Antoinette rubs her nose against her upper arm. “Left all of us. Phoenix. He quit the force and took a job with a company that helps people find runaway kids. Works for a guy he knew from that gang task force stuff.”

A bounty hunter of children. Chaz, too, is still a rescuer, trying to bring babies home. “How did your family, how are they about…”

“The prodigal son?” Antoinette’s cheeks flush with emotion. “They’re sure he’ll return someday to claim his rightful place. Just like the Bible story.”

Ruby dries Antoinette’s hand, sets the soaking dish aside. “I never understood that story.”

“Me neither.”

Ruby knows Antoinette refers to more than just a parable. She trims the cuticles on Antoinette’s other hand, files the nails into the squar-ish ovals that Antoinette likes, and lets her talk. The anger is directed at Chunk for not caring about Ruby’s baby—even wanting it to go away—until he found out it was a boy. All the pain that Antoinette has managed to bury through the years has burbled to the surface, of feeling slighted, held back, because she was a girl. “I just don’t know how to be around any of them right now.”

Ruby’s belly feels leaden, like a wrecking ball that has cut a swath of devastation through the Montero homestead before coming to rest again in her lap. “These are my problems, my actions. They shouldn’t drive you and your family apart.” Ruby lifts the lid of the apothecary jar, slips her clippers and metal files into the green antibacterial solution, replaces the lid.

“None of it should have ever happened, not to you or to Lark.” Antoinette hands Ruby a bottle of peachy nail polish. “My dad’s not going to let go of it. The suit, I mean. He’s a dog with a bone.”

The Ms’ cabin on the Pecos River, just on the other side of the Santa Fe ski mountain, is a refuge. Dense pine forest blocks the view from the road behind Ruby; the river is a moat in front of her. She sits in a canvas soccer-mom chair, watches the dogs as they play. The big dogs jump from rock to rock. The terrier runs back and forth along the riverbank, barking at foam and floating sticks.

John’s warning that the press would crucify her was an understatement. Ruby is the fodder for the twenty-four-hour news machine. The street in front of her house is a parking lot of vans sprouting satellite dishes. If this were just about a gross invasion of privacy, like being raped in a public square, Ruby could bear it. She would be bruised, battered, but she would bear it.

But the Tinsdales are livid. John told her Philip is ranting about all kinds of legal action, against Ruby, against the Monteros. He’d sue God Himself if he could serve the papers. Ruby has left messages for Darla, but she hasn’t returned Ruby’s calls.

From the chair beside Ruby, Molly pats Ruby’s arm. “This will all blow over. It’ll be forgotten before the next news cycle.”

“A deal breaker. John said they’re calling it a deal breaker.” Ruby almost has to shout to be heard over the swift water.

“Chaz’s family won’t win. Your lawyer said the court wouldn’t grant them the injunction, right?”

“Wasn’t
likely
.” Ruby shakes her head. “There’s no such thing as a sure thing. But it’s not just the legal stuff that will kill the deal. The media attention…”

All the criticisms that have blared from the television now scroll across Ruby’s mind. The biology junkies argue that Lark belongs with the Tinsdales, and this baby with Ruby. The family-first activists are screaming about grandparents’ rights. Ruby has her moments when she wonders if they are all right. Maybe they are right.

She tries to quiet the arguments against the swap by focusing on the arguments she made for the deal in the first place. This baby won’t miss her, but Lark is withering in Texas. Giving her baby to the Tinsdales is recompense for keeping Lark after Ruby found her. But those reasons will be worthless if the Tinsdales back out of the agreement.

Clyde and Daisy bound past Ruby, showering her with icy river water. She jerks around.

“Relax,” Molly says. “It’s just Margaret.”

Clyde runs circles around the chairs, and Daisy escorts Margaret from the cabin. Dudley never shifts his attention from the river foam he is determined to bark into submission.

Margaret hands a portable telephone receiver to Ruby. “It’s John.”

The inside of the Albuquerque airport looks like the face of the Mexican pyramids in the photos Ruby has seen. Two pairs of escalators and two wide staircases rise up to the middle tier. Beyond a few shops and restaurants at the second level, two more sets of escalators frame the stairways to the departure lounges above.

Ruby looks over her shoulder once again to make sure she hasn’t been followed, rides the escalators, up, up, up until she reaches the skylit top of the hill. She joins the short line winding through the security checkpoint, shows her gate pass to the first agent, walks through the metal detector.

“You got any contraband in there?” The security agent on the other side of the detector points to her belly. Ruby gives him the scantest of smiles in response, not wanting to engage him in the inevitable “when is it due, what is it, when my wife gave birth…”

At least he doesn’t try to touch her. She has realized through all of the mauling—by clients, by strangers on the street—just how much she values her personal-space bubble.

The plane is pulling to the jetway as Ruby arrives at the gate. Its orange and mustard nose sniffs at the window. A tide of people gushes through the tunnel. First out are the businessmen, wielding briefcases like shields as they push past the people milling around the gate area.

Next comes the old lady with the walker, holding up the line, probably the same way she does with her big Buick on her hometown streets. When she finally steps out of the jetway, people stream around her like river water around a rock, more businesspeople dragging their black suitcases, vacationing families laden with backpacks and strollers. Ruby doesn’t think traveling with cranky kids would be much of a vacation for the parents.

The stream sputters to a slow trickle before Ruby sees her, walking with a flight attendant and a young boy. For eighty-eight days, Ruby has prayed for this moment, not daring to hope too hard that it would actually happen. Yet now, when the time comes, she can’t move. She is frozen in place like a fat statue while a dad walks over to the attendant, signs the paperwork for the boy, ruffles the boy’s hair as he steers him past Ruby. The flight attendant looks at Ruby, tilts his head in a question. And still Ruby doesn’t move.

Finally, Lark drags the flight attendant over to Ruby. Ruby shows her ID, scribbles her name, and drops to her knees. She sweeps Lark into her arms, squeezes limbs, sniffs skin, strokes cheeks, laughs. And cries.

Until Lark scrabbles out of Ruby’s reach. “Mo-om. You’re making a scene.”

Those are the sweetest words Ruby has ever heard. She wants to clamp her hands over her ears, trap the sound in her head forever.