Ruby (11 page)

“Yes. I want your baby,” Olivia said. “Yes.”

Ruby waited, expressionless.

“You don’t want it,” Olivia said. “You said so yourself.” She tried not to sound too desperate.

“Sometimes I do,” Ruby said.

“But you always say—”

“I say I’m scared. I say I wish I wasn’t knocked up. But I mean, this baby moves around inside me. You know what happened this morning? He got the hiccups. I felt them, little gasps of air.”

Now it was Olivia who waited.

“I think I could make this kid something really great. Like my mother had all these opportunities to make a real family for me, but she couldn’t get her act together.” Ruby’s hands rested for an instant on her stomach. “I’m different from her. I could do so much.”

Olivia’s heart was pounding hard enough to send blood pulsing in her temples. Ruby is just a kid, she thought. She shouldn’t have this baby. I should. I need someone to love more than Ruby does. Ruby will have other chances. She couldn’t say the same for herself.

“On the other hand,” Ruby said, slumping into a chair, “sometimes I don’t. Most of the time. In Home Ec, they made us carry around an egg for like three days. We always had to watch this egg. We couldn’t put it down. We couldn’t break it. We had to take care of it. Like a baby.”

No wonder this kid’s pregnant, Olivia thought. What kind of teaching is that? An egg. Jesus.

“I hated that stupid egg,” Ruby said.

And when she said it, Olivia felt, for the first time in months, hope.

“Why don’t you stay and we’ll see how you feel when the time comes,” Olivia said, forcing her voice into steadiness. There were counselors and professional people who would urge Ruby to give this baby to Olivia. She thought of Ellen, the faceless lawyer whom she’d spoken with on the phone yesterday. Ellen would be on her side. Things were stacked in her favor.

“If I stay here and you take me to that doctor and feed me and stuff like that and then I keep the baby, you can’t do anything about it,” Ruby said.

“Right,” Olivia told her. But what she knew was that Ruby would never keep this baby. “I hated that stupid egg,” she’d said.

Pete Lancelotta was balder than balding, heavier than big, with a beard. Olivia never liked facial hair much, except for the scratchy feel of David’s face on weekends when he didn’t shave. She used to like how he would rub his cheek on the inside of her thigh. That was the only facial hair Olivia liked. Also, Pete smoked. He’ll be dead in twenty years, Olivia thought. Once a widow was plenty for her, thank you.

But the paella was good, overflowing with fish and lobster and clams and sausage and chicken. It was as if Olivia hadn’t eaten seafood in years; the salty taste almost excited her.

“Jeez,” Pete said, watching her. “You can really eat.”

Time was moving differently for Olivia. Instead of the plodding, slow-motion feeling of these last months, she felt something pulling her forward, toward something she was not yet ready even to think of as a future. But she could think: In twelve weeks, I will have a baby. And when she thought it, she could see past those twelve weeks, to some point where Ruby was gone and she, Olivia, was holding an infant. It was cooler and drier in that future. The long, hot summer was over, and the tips of leaves had turned color. Seeing that made her lighter, as if she might float away like a balloon that had been let go. Or like that puff of smoke she’d imagined David had become. The sangria, too sweet, clung to Olivia’s teeth and tongue. Delicious.

Since she would never fall in love with this man, Olivia even entertained the thought of having sex with him. Lately, she’d begun to think of it again, and thinking of it made her wet enough to put her own fingers there between her legs, to bring herself some pleasure. Hadn’t Winnie been urging her to find someone for that kind of companionship at least? “You’re a widow,” Winnie had told her, “not a nun.” Olivia tried to think of Pete naked, inside her, and the image made her want to laugh and cry at the same time.

It made her want to leave. She stood, abruptly, foolish in her backless summer dress and the sandals she’d found in the closet, left there since last summer. When she’d found them, fine strands of cat hair stuck to the straps, and she didn’t have the heart to wipe them away.

On the curvy silent ride back to her house, Olivia knew that Pete Lancelotta was absolutely the wrong man for her. He had lived in Rhode Island his whole life, had only journeyed as far as Montreal to see an Expos game once. He didn’t like to read. There was the smoking and the weight, making him a candidate for horrible things: stroke, heart attack, worse. But she had Ruby and the baby. She felt generous and risky and optimistic. So when they pulled up to her house and he asked her if she’d see him again, Olivia said, “Sure, why not?” His quick scratchy kiss was almost pleasant, but not quite.

She’d been disappointed to see the door to Ruby’s room closed—she had moved a cot into the nursery that afternoon for her. Olivia had half-expected to tell her all about the date. And now, alone, in her own bed, Olivia was struck by a sadness so extreme that she got jittery. She felt as if she could jump right out of her skin. And into what? she wondered. Some other form, like David?

It was not that she wanted to be with Pete Lancelotta. In fact, Olivia was certain that she did not. But she remembered how often she’d gone on dates with men before David—B.D.—that were fun and without potential but somehow made her aware of all the men out there with potential. Was that it? Was that what was making her so nervous? If she could have a kind of fun with one man who wasn’t her type, what would happen if she met a man who was her type?

“And then what, Pal?” Olivia said out loud. She thought of that morning when he’d wanted to make love and she’d refused. She had sent him to his death, jogging down that road when he should have been with her. Would it always come to that, her last act with her husband, her rolling away from him? She did not even have a final image of him. She had not bothered to watch him go.

Olivia paced.

She went downstairs to get a glass of wine. She decided to take one of the pills that Winnie had given her months ago, back in winter, a pill that Winnie had told her would help take the edge off things. In bed, she drank the wine and took the pill—thought fleetingly of Karen Ann Quinlan and wondered if she would want that, to be nowhere, suspended between life and death. Olivia decided no, she wanted to be here after all. But she had already taken the pill; there was nothing to do about it. Even now the effects of it were grabbing at her; the room and everything in it floated nicely around her. She did something her mother had advised her to try: “When you’re feeling bad, try to remember all the good things you still have.”

Olivia thought of Ruby sleeping across the hall. She thought of that baby hiccuping inside her.

That baby could be hers.

She held tight to that thought, brought it with her into a restless sleep. Olivia dreamed of sex, not the act so much as the sounds of it: squeaky bedsprings and stifled groans and ragged breaths. She dreamed of footsteps and giggles and falling out of windows.

When she woke up, slightly hungover and headachy, the house was still, too quiet. Olivia had one thought: Something is wrong. When she got shakily out of bed, the first thing she saw was that her jewelry box, the one that held her passport and pearls, the one that held David’s voice, was gone. She ran from the room on quivering legs, calling to Ruby, wondering what else had been taken.

“Ruby!” Olivia called in a hoarse voice. “Ruby, we’ve been robbed.”

It wasn’t until she flung open the door to Ruby’s room that the truth of what had happened hit Olivia.
They
hadn’t been robbed;
she’d
been robbed. Ruby was gone, and she had taken everything with her.

T
HAT MORNING THAT SHE
discovered Ruby gone, Olivia drove straight from her house to the college. She didn’t realize until she was almost there that she still had on her white cotton nightgown. “Underwear as outerwear,” Winnie would say. She could be counted on for tips like that. And counted on to steal Olivia’s life, the one she should be living at this very moment instead of chasing after a horrible thieving kid. Maybe this was one of the signs the woman from the occult store was talking about; maybe genetically this baby would grow into a teenager who stole things. Maybe Olivia should just turn around and forget the whole thing.

But the big granite sign with the college’s seal gleaming gold in the sunlight loomed before her and Olivia turned onto the campus. She couldn’t go back to that in-between life. She had to find the girl and get that baby. She had to reclaim the new life she’d imagined for herself, omens or no omens. The school had lots of trees and ivy-covered buildings and winding roads. David and Olivia had gone to a dance performance there and a James Dean movie festival, but she didn’t really know the campus well, so it was by sheer coincidence that the road Olivia turned down was the one where all the fraternities were located. Where else could Ruby have gone except back to the subterranean safety of one of these houses? Olivia would walk from door to door, looking for Ruby, not stopping until she found her.

Olivia parked, then threw on her jeans jacket over her nightgown. Feeling like an overgrown Nancy Drew, she found herself thinking about Winnie again. Winnie would be strangely pleased by the fact that barefoot, Olivia was snooping around college fraternities this early in the morning, wearing her white cotton nightgown and the same jeans jacket she had owned since college. Underwear as outerwear, Olivia thought again. Maybe these kids would find her amazingly hip. Maybe they would hand Ruby over to her without a fight.

It was the same at every house—and there were more than Olivia had thought, a dozen or more, all big and white, with Greek letters hanging on their fronts. No one, none of the sleepy-eyed, musty-smelling boys who leaned in the doorways, staring out at her, had heard of a Ben or a Ruby. One said there was a Ben there, but he was not from New York and did not work at a camp upstate; in fact, he lived in Westerly—another seaside town right in Rhode Island—and worked with his father at the boatyard. All of the boys were sorry they couldn’t help. Some offered her a soda; it had gotten very hot and they could see how Olivia was sweating in the heavy jeans jacket. One offered her a yearbook to look at. Happy to step into the cool basement, she accepted. But she did not know whom she was actually looking for. None of the faces meant anything to her.

This boy, the one who showed her the yearbook, worried that somehow drugs were involved. He told her that a fraternity had been kicked off campus for dealing drugs. The boy’s face, smooth and tanned and so young, almost broke Olivia’s heart. His fraternity, he told Olivia earnestly, was a good one. They sang at a nursing home at Christmastime. They cleaned up the beaches at season’s end. Good kids, he insisted.

“Why do you need these folks?” he asked finally, finished with his pitch.

At first, Olivia considered lying: Ruby was her daughter. She had run away and her family wanted her back. But Olivia was too hot and angry and weary to shape the lie convincingly. Besides, the boy’s innocence disturbed her. Standing there with him, Olivia could not reach far enough back to remember herself this way—open and innocent. Trusting. She actually started to hate the boy for all those qualities he possessed that she had lost.

He grew impatient, glancing over his shoulder into the cool darkness of the fraternity house.

“So,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot in an annoying hop.

Olivia told him everything. About her great love story and their City Hall wedding, about how she’d sent him off that morning so she could sleep and how he’d died, that her best friend had eloped and Ruby had robbed her. She told him about the answering-machine tape, how that was gone now, too.

His eyes, a muddy blue, opened wide with surprise. He could not believe that life could be so bad, that husbands could be killed jogging, that a young girl could rob the woman who had taken her in. For a moment, Olivia was sorry she’d told him the truth; she felt like she had taken something from him, too, robbed him. But then, as she handed the heavy yearbook back to him, she was glad she’d told him. Maybe he wouldn’t be so foolish to think that life would always be beer parties and cramming for tests and trying to get laid. He knew something important now.

She wished him luck, then walked away quickly from the look that spread across his young innocent face. It could be a look of horror at what happened to her. But Olivia was afraid it was something else, something worse. She was afraid that the boy pitied her, a woman in her nightgown whose husband was dead, who had been robbed by a girl she’d been stupid enough to trust.

“It will make you forget your troubles for a while,” her sister, Amy, had promised. “Reading takes your mind off things.” If Olivia still wrote everyone’s advice on her thigh, Amy’s would take up a lot of room. “Book clubs feed your mind and soul,” Amy’d said. The she reminded Olivia of how in second grade she had read every Nancy Drew book, in order, right up to
The Mystery of the Ninety-Nine Steps.
It was true that until David died, Olivia read a book a week. Good books, the kind the
New York Times
reviewed. And that since then, she’d read nothing except true-crime paperbacks, savoring the grisly details of mutilated bodies hidden in cellars and the tricks killers used to lure their victims into their cars.

When Olivia climbed the wooden stairs to Amy’s condo that night, she was sure that nothing was worse than a book club that consisted of Amy, who used to boast that the last book she’d read was
To Kill a Mockingbird
back in ninth grade, and three other divorced women. Nothing except getting robbed by a fucking juvenile delinquent, which was the term Olivia had settled on by the time she’d returned home that afternoon.

Amy’s condo was new, built across the street from the beach but sitting right on the scenic route. Occasionally, there was the sound of waves or a foghorn, but mostly it was just traffic noises that filtered inside. The stairs leading to Amy’s had open spaces between them, so that Olivia felt as if she might fall through at any moment.