Ruby (13 page)

They all watched her approach. Olivia wished she recognized the music that was coming from one of the cars. Familiar music would soothe her. But this—a woman shouting above an electric guitar—was even more unsettling than the fact that these kids, up close, looked like they might have guns or switchblades. They looked stoned. They looked angry.

“I’m looking for a pregnant girl with reddish brown hair and freckles,” she said, stopping in front of them, placing one hand on her hip. And she was pleased by how her voice sounded—strong and tough.

None of them answered.

A girl—one of the waifs—lay flat on her back on the asphalt, her eyes half-opened, a thin line of drool at the corners of her mouth. Before she asked the crowd if the girl needed help, Olivia watched the girl until she was certain she was breathing.

They all laughed at the question.

Olivia thought she heard raccoons in the dark area behind the teenagers. But it was two kids, rooting around in the trash bin, handing half-eaten french fries and bits of hamburger buns to the others.

The girl on the asphalt made a strange sound, a kind of laugh, and Olivia realized she was simply stoned, so out of it that she could not hold herself upright.

“Look,” Olivia said, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of there, “this girl, Ruby, she has something of mine and I want it back. She can keep everything else.”

“Gee, lady,” one of the big girls said, “we don’t know no pregnant teenagers.”

“No, ma’am,” another one said. “We practice safe sex.”

“We practice abstinence,” still another one added, and everyone laughed.

She wanted to be forceful and threatening. But these kids didn’t care about her. About anything, she supposed.

“If you see her,” Olivia said, “tell her Olivia is looking for her.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” one of them said from the darkness. “You bet.”

They were still laughing—even the girl on the asphalt was laughing in an odd stoned way—when Olivia turned her back on them. Someone came running up behind her, and Olivia let out a little yelp, turning around fast to face off whoever it was. But it was just one of the waifs, a little skinny girl who didn’t seem to be more than thirteen.

“They’re bad, aren’t they?” the girl said. She wore a gauze dress with a soft floral print that Olivia liked—pale blue and orange flowers floating on an off-white background. Still, she turned her back on the girl and kept walking. The girl hurried to catch up and walk beside her.

“That girl on the ground,” she said to Olivia, her voice squeaky. “She did crack for the first time and it knocked her down. That’s what it does the first time.”

Olivia glanced over her shoulder and saw the girl getting shakily to her feet.

She slowed down and looked at this girl beside her.

“Crack?” she said, feeling stupid. She remembered her mother’s horror at discovering she was smoking pot in college. “Marijuana?” her mother had gasped.

“Oh,” the girl said, shaking her head, “they’re bad.”

“You should stay away from them,” Olivia told her. “You should go home.” She glanced back again and saw the girl leaning against two of the boys. For an instant, Olivia wished she were that girl, numb and oblivious, here but not here.

“I know who you’re looking for,” the girl said. She walked right in front of Olivia, forcing her to stop. “Ruby.”

Olivia swallowed hard. Her heart raced. Ruby, Ruby, she thought, but she didn’t want the girl to see how important this was to her. So she said, “What about her?” as casually as she could muster.

“I can find her for you,” the girl said, and Olivia saw in the brighter light that the girl was not sweet or innocent or any of the things her little flowered dress and squeaky voice made you think.

“Okay,” Olivia said.

“Twenty bucks,” the girl said.

Olivia pushed past her. “Forget it,” she said.

But the girl didn’t leave. She walked right beside Olivia, matching her step for step.

“Look, kid,” Olivia said, weary now, “just leave me alone. Okay?”

They had reached the car by then, and Olivia wanted nothing more than to be inside it, heading home. The girl said, “I guess you don’t want to find her very bad.”

Olivia opened the door, climbed in. “Oh,” she said, “I’ll find her.”

The girl stood under the restaurant lights, looking small and, from this distance, young again. The lights shone right through the thin fabric of her dress. She didn’t have on any underwear; Olivia saw her flat breasts, dark nipples, a thatch of blond pubic hair. She needs a flesh-colored body suit under there, Olivia thought, turning the car toward the road. That’s what she used to wear under a dress she had like that. She stepped on the brake, then sat there, watching the girl in the rearview mirror.

“Shit,” Olivia said, pushing the shift in reverse. That was
her
dress the girl was wearing.

Her tires squealed when she turned around and jerked into the same spot she had just left.

“I’ll give you ten,” Olivia said.

The girl came to the car and held out her hand. When Olivia counted ten dollars into it—two dollars’ worth of change she had to scrounge around the floor and in her pockets for—the girl smiled and pointed at the restaurant.

“What?” Olivia said, thinking that this kid better not fuck with her.

The girl just pointed again.

Then she set off in a full run back to the far corner of the parking lot.

Olivia got out of the car, shielding her eyes from the bright restaurant light reflecting off the wide glass window. Inside, there were skinny men in baggy clothes sitting at the counter. And there, in one of the bright orange booths, pregnant and laughing, sat Ruby. Olivia pressed her face to the plate-glass window, looked right in Ruby’s face. Ruby stopped laughing and looked her right in the eye.

Olivia moved forward, opened the door, and stepped inside. She was hit in the face with the overwhelming smell of grease and a blast of cold air-conditioned air; she had not realized until that moment that the humidity that was forecasted for that night had actually arrived. She had not realized how sticky she was until the cold air sent goose bumps up her arms.

Moving toward Ruby, Olivia remembered something the girl had told her on their ride to the clinic: “Karma is a boomerang,” she said. “You do something bad, it comes right back at you.”

Here I am, Olivia thought, coming right back at you.

Ruby was waving at her, happily.

“What a surprise,” she said, practically chirping.

The girl had nerve. “Brass balls,” David would have said. She sat there, smiling and waving and chirping at the person she’d robbed less than twenty-four hours earlier.

“I know why you’re here,” Ruby said.

Olivia was right in her face now, no plate glass between them. She could smell her, she was so close, a smell of smoke and sweat and—Olivia flinched—sex. The boy she was sitting with—Ben, maybe?—had the flat stoned look of those kids in the parking lot. Between them on the bright orange table were onion rings, french fries, empty packets of catsup, and grease-splattered wrappers.

Despite the cold air in there, heat rose in Olivia; she felt her face flush, felt the hot grip of anger tear through her.

“You little shit,” she hissed.

She had Ruby’s fleshy freckled arm in her hand and she gripped her so hard that she knew there would be bruises when she let go. Olivia tugged Ruby right out of the tight booth. When Ruby was on her feet, Olivia recognized the Japanese baseball shirt she wore, and the khaki drawstring shorts: They were David’s.

“Those are his clothes, you stealing little shit,” Olivia said, and then she was tearing at the clothes, at the girl. She felt the sweaty tangle of Ruby’s hair in her fingers, the familiar way those clothes felt under her hands. How she had struggled to untie those shorts, to pull them off David and release his penis to her waiting body. “You fucking shit,” she said, and started to drag Ruby out of there, and the girl, too pregnant to slip from her grasp, let herself be pulled away, into the hot night air.

Outside, Ruby managed to free herself. She didn’t run. She just stood under the fluorescent lights and tried to pull herself together—straighten the shirt, smooth her hair, wipe her face. Olivia heard her own ragged breath. She could kill this kid. She really could.

Ruby held her hands up in front of her face.

“Look,” she said. “Okay. Jesus. Calm down.”

It was those words—“Calm down”—that sent Olivia at Ruby like a football player tackling an opponent. She slammed into her, and the two of them tumbled to the ground, awkwardly nailing at each other, rolling around on the hot asphalt. Ruby hit back, but her blows were so ineffective, they seemed almost comical. Thinking this, how silly Ruby’s soft punches were, Olivia was struck by how comical all of it was—the eerie lights, the shabby A&W, the pregnant girl wearing Olivia’s dead husband’s clothes, and Olivia herself, rolling around like this, scraping her knuckles against the gravel and tasting the iron tang of blood in her mouth—and so Olivia stopped hitting and rolling and settled instead into an awkward hug, lying spoon-fashion with this girl, this thief, this JD. At last, their breathing slowed to a normal intake of air. That was when Olivia realized that she was still holding on to Ruby, holding on tight, not about to let go.

O
LIVIA SAT ON
the rocks above the ocean, the rocks where college kids came to watch storms, where every year at least one got swept away by a wave. Beside her sat Ruby. Olivia did not want to take Ruby back into her home. Not yet. She knew that she should have taken her to the police. She should have pressed charges. But she could not do it. She wanted something from the girl, something big, and important: that baby Ruby had inside her. Olivia could not let it go. Instead, she let good judgment and common sense go. Instead, she had brought Ruby here.

They sat on the rocks and drank Coffee Coolattas from Dunkin’ Donuts. “This is awesome,” Ruby had told Olivia at the drive-through window. But it wasn’t; it was too sweet for Olivia.

“Isn’t this just the yummiest thing you’ve ever had?” Ruby said happily.

She slurped the last of her Coffee Coolatta, then stretched out on the rocks as if she was about to take a nap. She closed her eyes, squirmed around until she found the most comfortable position.

Olivia tried to shape her demands, but before she could say anything, Ruby said, “You know how Pooh says, ‘I have a rumbley in my tummbly?’ That’s what I have.” She opened her eyes, squinting up at Olivia. “You know. Winnie-the-Pooh. When I was a kid, that’s all I wanted. Pooh sheets and jelly that came in a Pooh glass, but my mother was always like, “Oh sure, Ruby, let’s give Walt Disney money to advertise for him. That makes a lot of sense. He should pay us to wear clothes with Pooh or Peter Pan or whoever.’” Ruby sighed and closed her eyes again. “I guess she was right. But I want my kid to have like a huge stuffed Pooh. And Tigger—”

“This isn’t exactly what I wanted to discuss,” Olivia said.

Ruby propped herself up on her elbows. “You going to drink that?” she said, pointing to Olivia’s Coffee Coolatta. “Because it’s melting and it’s not good melted. You need to drink it when it’s all slushy.”

“Here,” Olivia said.

Ruby grinned and took a big swallow, then winced immediately. “Oh,” she said. “A cold headache. Man, I hate those. I told you I hate pain, remember?”

“Look,” Olivia said, “the thing is, I want my stuff.”

“Your stuff is gone,” Ruby said. “Really, I’m sorry. I am. But I can’t undo it.”

The heat was becoming oppressive. But up on these rocks, there was something like a breeze, and the air from the ocean was clean and soothing.

“I want it back,” Olivia told her. She was surprised that actually she didn’t want it back. Not really. The image of that girl in her dress, taking her money, kept Olivia from wanting any of it. Except the tape. That was her most valuable possession. But she trusted Ruby so little that she worried if she told her the thing she most wanted returned, it would be the thing she was least likely to get.

“To tell you the truth,” Ruby said, “I was surprised how little you actually had. I mean, no offense, but it was pretty slim pickings. I kept the guy clothes because, let’s face it, I’m a fucking whale and nothing fits me anymore. Except his clothes. I like the drawstrings on the pants, so I can make them even bigger.” She sighed. “Because I’m out of control here. Growing like crazy. At first, it wasn’t so bad. Three pounds the first three months. Then I had like a growth spurt, you know? But I was cool about it. This is fucking out of control, though.” She lowered her voice. “I looked in the mirror yesterday and I cried. I mean, I’m only fifteen years old. I look like John Candy or somebody.”

Olivia was still seduced by the rise and fall of this girl’s voice. Her stories took Olivia in. But she had to keep her head now. She knew better. So she said, “Where is everything? We can drive around and get it all back.”

Ruby laughed. “Like duh, Olivia. I stole your stuff to get money. I didn’t like go to the Salvation Army and give it away. I don’t need a—what’s it called? A charitable contribution on my tax return or anything.”

How much money could she have even gotten for such a measly group of things? Olivia wondered. It wasn’t even worth stealing.

“What a joke,” Ruby continued. “I mean, I hardly got anything for it. The pearls were okay. But that was about it.”

At the word
pearls,
Olivia’s heart lurched. They were in the jewelry box with the tape. She imagined Ruby’s hands grabbing at the stuff—tape, pearls, all of it—and Ruby quickly judging what was worthwhile, what was worthless.

“Oh,” Ruby said, “and you had this ring with like a purple stone in it—”

“Amethyst.”

“Right. That was okay, too. Antique.”

Olivia swallowed hard. The ring had been a gift from her old boyfriend Josh, and although she no longer wore it, she liked having it, knowing she had it. There had been a time when she had worn it every day.

“We’ll buy it all back,” Olivia said. There’s a ridiculous notion, she thought. Buy back stolen goods. She rotated her left hand; it might be sprained, from their wrestling match earlier.