Ruby (15 page)

Ruby was walking across the kitchen as she talked, trying to keep her feet on a line in the floor. She’s walking the plank, Olivia imagined. Or taking a sobriety test. She was somewhere else, that was for certain. Softly, Ruby hummed. Olivia recognized the tune. “Crazy.” In her head, as Ruby hummed, Olivia filled in the words.

They settled into a routine, Olivia and Ruby: walks on the beach and visits to the obstetrician and videos to rent. Olivia began to feel as if she was entering the real world again. Whenever she and David had been apart, for a night or a weekend or a week, they called those first few hours of coming back together and catching up on each other “reentry.” It was how she thought about this time with Ruby. Reentry. Olivia saw the beach differently, the oiled bodies stretched out before her in the daytime, the radios blaring, all on different stations, the smell of clam cakes and seaweed. In the evening, it was quiet, with salty air and treasures on the shore—beach glass and shells and pieces of oddly shaped driftwood.

There were long talks, too; Olivia heard about eight of Ruby’s nine guys. She did not hear about Ben. But Ruby told her about each of the others in great detail: Jay, the football player and student council president, who used Ruby to defy his parents—“He smashed my teeth when we kissed, like I thought they would fall out or something”; Rollo, the local drug dealer—“He like never came because he rubbed coke on his dick; I swear to God”; all of the stories horrible and sad in some way, even though Ruby always made them funny, always made herself the ironic onlooker instead of the lonely girl desperate for love that Olivia suspected she really was.

At night, when Ruby was asleep—and she went to sleep early now—Olivia watched her. She went over in her mind how foolish she was, how crazy, really, to take in this girl. How foolish she was to want Ruby’s baby so badly. What did she know about raising a child? She had never even held a baby, not a newborn. Olivia thought she should be terrified. She thought she should be cautious. She thought she should stop all of this before Ruby did something worse than robbing her. But mostly, she thought that some little part of her had come back to life. Mostly, she sat across the room from Ruby and kept an eye on her until all the late-night talk shows were over and the local news had been replayed and television finally ended. Then Olivia roused Ruby, led her up the stairs, and put her to bed. That was when Olivia slept, too.

It was the first of July, relentlessly hot, and Ruby was in her seventh month. Her face was blotchy and bloated; she no longer looked like a kid. She was uncomfortable, complaining about a foot in her ribs, indigestion, sinus trouble. On the phone, Winnie reported the same kind of things to Olivia, but Olivia lived them every day with Ruby. Their due dates were exactly three weeks apart. Whenever Winnie told Olivia a new symptom or development, Olivia would say, “I know. I know.”

Olivia started to make hats again. She ordered supplies from New York and got to work on a new series, all of them straw the color of the sand on different beaches: Bermuda pink, wet sand, black volcanic sand, the sand of the beach Olivia walked with Ruby here. The hats had wide brims, contrasting trim, and flat, tight bows—beach hats like women wore in the twenties and thirties. She sat on the lawn, shaping them, naming them for famous beaches: Cape May, Truro, Captiva. Ruby watched from a chaise longue beside her, wearing her own funny pink hat.

That was how the Realtor found them one hot afternoon.

She teetered toward them on her too-high heels. She wore a suit the color of cantaloupe, the jacket’s underarms damp.

“Hello,” the Realtor said, with so much cheerfulness that Ruby laughed and answered with a big false hello.

“Just checking on your progress,” the Realtor said, frowning at Ruby and Olivia and the house.

Olivia spread out her arms. “Well,” she said, “here we are.”

“Yes.” The Realtor chewed on her bottom lip.

“I’m thinking,” Olivia said, “that maybe it’s not time to sell.”

“No, it is! The market is up, up, up. You’ll make a killing.”

“Not that,” Olivia said, aware of Ruby watching her, aware of the Realtor’s thick perfume, and the grass itching beneath her, and Ruby’s obviously pregnant self, and her hats spread before her. “I’m not ready to sell yet. That’s what I mean.”

The Realtor bent down as best she could in her tight cantaloupe miniskirt. “It’s a hard thing. I know that. To sell your dream house. But when you let go of it, you’ll be able to move on.”

“The thing is,” Olivia said, looking right into the Realtor’s eyes, “I’m not ready.” The woman’s mascara was caked in the corners and made little dots where she blinked.

The Realtor stood and cleared her throat. “When you’re ready, you’ll call. You can’t rush things like this. I know that. I understand that.”

She held out her business card and Ruby took it from her.

“You’re?” the Realtor asked.

“The pregnant teenager,” Ruby said.

“It made me sad,” Ruby said as the Miata drove away. “When she called this your ‘dream house.’ Dreams always get smashed, huh?”

“Who do you know like that?” Olivia asked her.

“My dad. My real dad, that is. Not the loser my mother married. I haven’t talked to him in like five years. But he wanted to be a writer. He wrote like three novels that never got published. Then he’s got to pay child support and pay a mortgage and stuff and he’s forced to take shitty jobs.” She swallowed hard. “He maybe drank too much because he was so far from what he wanted. I don’t see him anymore. He tried AA and NA and every other A. But they never quite fixed him, you know? And we sort of lost touch. Maybe he’s even dead. Maybe he died in some real tragic way.”

This last would make Ruby happy, Olivia realized. A father who gave his life for art.

“Can I ask you something?” Ruby said. “I mean, since you’re older and everything, maybe you can help me out here.”

Olivia shrugged. “I’ll try,” she said.

Ruby lay down on the grass, which was only green in spots; mostly, it was brown from lack of water. There was a drought.

“Did you ever wish you could take something back? Like totally change something you did?”

“Like what?” Olivia said. But already her gut was twisted with regret. Already she was imagining a different day last year, a day when she turned toward David and his unshaven face, his searching hands, and saved his life. A day when she kept him away from that blue Honda Civic.

“Like why didn’t we just use a rubber?” Ruby said. “I just want to, like, go into a time tunnel and play that one time over, except this time do it different, you know?”

“It doesn’t get you anywhere to beat yourself up about a mistake,” Olivia said, without much conviction. It was advice Winnie had given her often enough. Advice she was still not able to take.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ruby said, waving her hands dismissively. It was foolish advice for someone ridden with guilt. “I have this moment frozen in my brain and I keep replaying it, you know? Here we are, in Ben’s room at school and slightly stoned, good stoned, not like totally blasted, but just riding this high and like totally into what we’re doing, you know, and he goes inside me and he says he’ll pull out, you know? He says, ‘Just this once, don’t make me put on a rubber,’ and I know in my brain that it only takes one fucking microscopic sperm and I know one can leak out before he even comes. I know everything, but I think, What are the chances?”

Bingo, Olivia thought. What are the chances that you go back to sleep instead of making love with your husband and he gets killed by a college girl driving a blue Honda Civic?

“I guess,” Olivia said, “the chances were pretty damn good.”

“No shit,” Ruby said.

Usually, Olivia did not let herself think about the girl who had done it. A college sophomore on her way to get a few things for the house she was renting with three other girls. Milk and toilet paper and M&M’s. Olivia knew these details because the girl had come to the house, shown up there the next day with her roommates to explain. “We like M&M’s. While we study, you know?” she’d said. She had explained about the bright sunlight, about the curve, how David had appeared out of nowhere. But of course that wasn’t right. He had appeared straight from Olivia’s side. He had shaved and had a glass of orange juice and then gone out and run smack into the girl’s car. “I didn’t know what I’d hit,” she’d said, still awed by what she’d done. Later, a letter had come to Olivia in New York. “I can’t sleep at night,” she wrote. “I keep thinking, If only I’d stayed put. If only I’d taken the main road instead of the scenic route. But it was such a beautiful day. And now I’ll regret that decision the rest of my life.”

“Regret,” Ruby said, “is the worst thing, don’t you think?”

For a moment, Olivia wondered if she’d spoken aloud.

“What do you mean?” she asked stupidly, because as much as that girl had regrets, had dropped out of school for a semester and gone home to New Jersey and taken Prozac, as much as her life was now shaped by regret, so was Olivia’s.

“Take my mother,” Ruby said. “My mother regrets that she let my father go. That she didn’t fight harder for him. And like I regret some things. Little things. Like robbing you. I regret that.”

“That’s not such a little thing to me,” Olivia said.

“Come on,” Ruby said, laughing. “That pile of junk? I did you a favor, honest to God.” She sighed and got her dreamy look. “My grandma?” she said. “She was like the one person who made me think I really mattered, you know? I used to pack my stuff in a garbage bag and tell my mother I was moving to my grandma’s. She always used to keep animal crackers for me, in this big cookie jar she had that was shaped like an apple. But the thing is, I never ate them. I played with them. Sometimes I’d pretend I was a kid whose parents took her to the circus for her birthday and I’d march those stupid little cookies around the floor and I’d go, ‘Animals on parade’ in this fake announcer’s voice. The thing is, I never went to the circus, so I never really knew what a kid would see there.”

Impulsively, Olivia reached out and took Ruby’s hand, but the girl recoiled.

“Don’t,” she said sharply.

“I’m sorry,” Olivia said. “I just—”

“No one feels sorry for me,” Ruby said, her tough-girl voice back again, all hard and edgy. “I mean, the fucking circus chains animals to cages and totally mistreats them, so who would want to go anyway? It was just a stupid little kid thing. I’m sorry I even brought it up.”

Olivia nodded. “I know,” she said, because she was sorry for trying to comfort the girl, for thinking about the one who had killed her husband; she was sorry for so much.

“My grandmother has lungs like Swiss cheese,” Ruby said, “honest to God. I saw the X rays and they blew my mind. Emphysema.” She pointed at Olivia. “But she says she has no regrets. She would smoke a cigarette in a flash if it wouldn’t blow up because of the oxygen she’s on. She says she loved every smoke she ever had. She doesn’t even believe smoking causes all this shit. She thinks that’s just propaganda. My grandma says regrets get you nowhere but feeling sorry for your own sorry ass.” Ruby smiled. “So I don’t regret being pregnant. I mean, I wish it was different and stuff, but you can’t imagine what it feels like. I mean, it sucks. Yeah. But on the other hand, it’s almost like a mystical experience. Like when you drop acid. Some people freak out, but I always liked it, you know. This other reality. That’s what this is. A baby rolling around inside your stomach. It blows my mind.” Ruby shook her head, amazed. “It can hear us,” she whispered. “It can see bright light.” Her hand moved to her stomach and hovered above it like a bee. “It blows my mind. It really does.”

“Good idea,” David had said when Olivia sent him off to his death. If only she had held him. If only she had opened her arms and her legs and let him in, she would not be sitting here with this pregnant teenager worrying. She would be with David. She would be talking to her own baby inside her stomach.
Good idea.

“The thing is,” Ruby said, “giving away your baby can certainly be one of those things. Major regret factor, I’d say. You could walk around the rest of your life wondering if you would have been happy together. You could make yourself crazy imagining a future that can’t be, you know?”

For some time now, Olivia had considered writing to that girl and telling her to move on with her life. It was an accident, she wanted to tell her. She wanted the girl to feel absolved from what she’d done. But Olivia had been unable to write the letter. If she absolved the college girl, then it really was all her fault.

Still, she tried. She sat at the kitchen table and wrote, “Dear Amanda, I hope you remember me. …”

That was a foolish start. How many guys had Amanda killed, after all? How many widows were writing her letters?

“It has been almost a year since the accident and slowly I am moving on with things. I have started to make hats again. …”

More foolishness.

“Also, I am going to adopt a baby …”

She paused, then wrote: “You stupid idiot, why didn’t you look where you were going? Why didn’t you have on sunglasses if the sun was so fucking bright? Why didn’t you see a guy over six feet tall in bright orange running shorts—”

“Ooooh,” Ruby said, appearing out of nowhere and looking over Olivia’s shoulder. “Is that a poem? Ben’s a poet, you know. Did I tell you that? He writes these incredible poems. He won’t give up, either. No matter what it takes.”

Olivia folded the letter carefully, nodding at Ruby as if she, too, believed that Ben was a real poet, someone who would make it someday.

“We might go and live in Indonesia,” Ruby said. She stood by the sink and let the water run to get it cold. “It’s really cheap to live in Indonesia. You can get a house and cook and a maid and a nanny for next to nothing.”

“Really?” Olivia said, swallowing hard. “In Indonesia?” She had not heard this fantasy before. The word
nanny
caught in her throat. “When did you decide all this?”

“It’s not decided. It’s just an idea. Something to think about. Like the Greek islands. Ben has been to these places. He’s been everywhere. And he says that’s the thing to do.” She put one hand under the faucet to test the water, deciding it still wasn’t cold enough.