Ruby (17 page)

Ben cleared his throat. “I mean, we made a baby together.”

“By accident,” Ruby said.

His hand rubbed her stomach now like a man rubbing a lamp with a genie inside.

“Still,” Ben said. “We did it.”

Olivia said, “You want to keep the baby, then?”

The silence stretched between them.

“Of course I want to keep the baby!” Ben said. “It’s got my genetic code. And Ruby and I would have the most awesome kid.”

Olivia hated him, Ben the poet and his genetic code.

“But,” he added, “I’m only nineteen years old. I can’t keep it.”

Ruby grinned at Olivia, satisfied, as if to say,
There!

“Look,” Ben said, “I have twenty-four hours off. That’s all. And it took me nine hours to get here. And nine to get back. Then it’s back to the fucking Adirondacks and a bunch of spoiled brats who couldn’t serve a tennis ball or lob a shot if their life depended on it.” He nuzzled Ruby’s hair. “It’s back to life without Ruby.”

“Can’t he stay, Olivia?”

She wanted him gone; Olivia wanted Ben out of her house.

“I didn’t lie about the movies,” Ruby said. “I’m on my way and I look down the street and it’s like I see a mirage or something. Ben. Coming toward me. And I blink like a hundred times. But he’s still there, coming toward me.”

“I surprised her,” Ben added.

“He hitchhiked the whole way,” Ruby said, sighing because, of course, hitchhiking was the most romantic way to travel.

“Because I’m saving every penny I make up there for our tickets out,” Ben said again.

Could they have worked out this story so carefully? Olivia wondered.

“And I told him everything that’s happened. How you’ll keep the baby for us,” Ruby said.

Olivia focused on the word
keep.
This baby was not going to be on loan until they got older and were ready to take it themselves. You kept someone’s cat while they were out of town. You kept their plants. But a baby was something else.

“We couldn’t give it to strangers, you know. That sort of freaked me out,” Ben said. “They could be anything. Republicans even.

“First thing in the morning, he’s got to leave. And I won’t see him again until August,” Ruby said, frantic.

“She might even have the baby by then,” Ben said. He was nuzzling again, stroking her arm.

“Stop!” Olivia said, startling both of them enough for them actually to stop and look at her.

Until now, she had avoided confronting Ruby about the legal end of all this. As much as Olivia was watching Ruby, wanting to trust the girl, she had also been trying to make sure that Ruby trusted her. Olivia wanted to prove that she was going to be not just a good mother to Ruby’s baby but the perfect mother. She wanted Ruby to be absolutely convinced that this was where the baby should be, that there was no better choice for Ruby. She didn’t want Ruby to change her mind. But now, Olivia realized, it was time to get to the legal details with Ruby. And with Ben.

“I’m going to have to get something in writing. An agreement that you two will let me have this baby.”

They glanced at each other.

“And I have to know about your parents, Ben. Ruby’s are out of the picture,” Olivia said, and an image of Ruby’s mother in the doorway of that rust-colored house drifted into her mind. Olivia took a breath. “But where do you stand?”

“Man,” Ben said. “I thought you said she was cool, Ruby.”

“I just can’t take any chances,” Olivia said. She could not keep her voice from trembling, sounding weak.

Ruby and Ben exchanged looks again. They were at that age and had that belief in romance that allowed them to communicate this way. They were pure, in a way—untouched by couple’s counseling and broken hearts and catchphrases like “what I hear you saying.” They were, simply, in love.

“Okay,” Ben said. “That’s cool.”

And Ruby nodded.

Olivia tried to think of where to begin, but Ben was already talking.

“My parents know about the baby,” he said. “They totally freaked and sent me up to that camp like a slave.”

“They forbid him from seeing me,” Ruby said proudly.

“Like I could stay away,” Ben said, burying his nose in her hair.

“Where are they?” Olivia asked him.

“Westchester. Living their white-bread lives in a six-bedroom colonial. Driving their Mercedes-Benz into Manhattan every day to screw people out of money.”

“They’re lawyers,” Ruby said, disgusted.

Olivia noticed for the first time that Ben wore two small gold hoop earrings, one in each ear. Girls must love that, too. Those earrings and all his talk about hating the bourgeoisie.

“And what do you do, Ben?” Olivia asked him, sounding the way her own mother used to twenty years ago when longhaired boys came to pick her up for dates. If Ben only knew that many of those boys, with their torn jeans and rolled joints and American flags sewn on their jackets, had become lawyers and businessmen and investment bankers.

“I go to school.”

“I told you that,” Ruby said. “Except he’s not in a fraternity.”

They both scowled over the very idea of that.

Then Ruby added, “But he did tell me to stay there.”

“Figures they’d have fleas,” Ben said, still scowling.

“So your parents are where in Westchester?” Olivia asked.

“Bedford Hills,” Ben said. “I heard that’s where that movie
The Stepford Wives
was based on. And that is my mother to a tee. Zombie Mom. She takes classes on how to arrange dried flowers or make wreaths. She sits around planning her garden on graph paper.”

Olivia narrowed her eyes. “I thought she was a lawyer.”

Ben didn’t miss a beat. “That’s my stepmother who’s a lawyer. You got to have like two sets of parents and all these stepbrothers and half sisters and shit. My old man is classic. He leaves my mother for a junior partner in his firm after my mother put him through law school and gave up her own life and blah, blah, blah. Then my mother marries our dentist. Can you believe it? He’s been in all of our mouths.”

“That is so creepy,” Ruby said, wrinkling her nose. “When he told me that, I like almost puked, you know?”

Olivia tried to sort through the information, the lies from the truth. They were a good match, Ruby and Ben, full of wild ideas and large imaginations. Full of bullshit, too, Olivia reminded herself.

Ben said, “We’re in the phone book. My father’s John Adams—”

“They’re related to the
real
John Adams,” Ruby said, and again her voice swelled with pride.

She had a name and a town. Tomorrow, she would get to the bottom of this. She was comforted by the John Adams part; no one would make up something as ridiculous as that.

“I didn’t believe him when he told me that,” Ruby was saying. “I was like, ‘Right. You’re related to a President. And I’m the Pope.’ But it’s true.”

“Abigail Adams brought ice cream to the United States,” Ben said. “Did you know that? She tasted it in France.”

Olivia wanted them to stop talking, to stop plying her with information. She had read somewhere that liars gave too many details, to convince you they were not lying.

“Listen,” Ruby said, suddenly serious. “I won’t tell you where my parents are. They kicked me out when I told them I was pregnant. They don’t want me or this baby. You got to believe me, Olivia. You know the A&W? Where you found me? I lived near there.”

That was true. All of it. So why didn’t she feel any relief? Maybe that wouldn’t come until she actually had that baby in her arms. Until she saw the last of Ruby.

Ruby kept talking, adding details, answering questions that Olivia didn’t even ask.

“The way Ben and I met was so cool,” Ruby said. “We used to buy pot from a guy in Ben’s dorm. And one day, Betsy and I are waiting for this guy and I see Ben and, like, I almost die. He’s so gorgeous, right?”

Ben laughed, obviously pleased with this description of himself.

Ruby said, “Then the guy comes and everything and I keep thinking about Ben. I mean, I didn’t know his name or anything, but I’m like, I’ve got to meet him. So we get high with this guy and he tells us he’s going to this poetry slam and do we want to go—it’s in Providence—and we figure that sounds cool, so we go. And Ben reads
his
poetry. I almost died when I saw him. It was like karma. And then I heard his poem and I was like, This is it.”

Ben took over the story. “And while I’m up there, I see her with Jamie—”

“The guy,” Ruby said.

“And I see her and I start hoping she’s not
with
with him, you know. She had this green leotard thing on, and these turquoise beads, ropes and ropes of them, and her waist was about this big.” Ben made a small circle with his hands.

“Can you believe it?” Ruby groaned.

“No,” Ben whispered to her. “Don’t say it like that. You are so beautiful like this. With our baby.”

“Anyway,” Ruby said after they nuzzled some more, “he comes up to me and asks me if I want to get high and, like, would Jamie mind, and I crack up because Jamie is so not my type, except he always has good drugs. And so I say, ‘I don’t think he’ll mind,’ and we take a walk to that park in Providence—the one with that big statue of Roger Williams?—where you can look out and see the whole city. The statehouse was all lit up and everything. You know that statehouse has like the third-largest unsupported dome in the whole world? Ben told me that. He should be on
Jeopardy,
honest to God.” She beamed at Ben before she continued. “Anyway, it’s really beautiful there. And we get high and I make him say all his poems again. And then he asks me if I’ll come back with him, to his room, and I say Yeah—”

“You don’t have to tell her everything,” Ben said.

“Anyway,” Ruby said, “that was back in September—”

“The last day of summer,” Ben said, locking his fingers into hers.

“And we’ve been together ever since.”

It was not an especially beautiful story; there were the drugs and the fact that Ruby was only fifteen years old. But at the end, Olivia was crying. Because she knew what that felt like, to be together ever since. She believed in so little these days. But she guessed she still believed in this: love that will never end. Such a stupid thing to believe in. But she did.

She was crying and she said, “Okay. Okay. He can stay.”

Of course Olivia couldn’t sleep.

She gave them her room, her bed, and went into Ruby’s room, the nursery. Curled up on the cot there, she heard the murmur of their voices. Then she heard their breathing, heavy, ragged. They were making love. Olivia knew she should cover her ears, but she didn’t. She listened. Her own breath caught as theirs escalated. “This is sick,” she said out loud. Embarrassed, she went downstairs.

She wrote:

Dear Amanda, I hope you are not still on Prozac, because I don’t think it’s good to stay on it too long. Amanda, I wish you had taken the shortcut, too. You see, he wanted to come back to bed that morning and I was sleepy, so I told him to go jogging instead. So I sent him there, to that road, that curve, but if you had taken the shortcut, he would have come around that corner fine. Amanda, we are both to blame.

Olivia almost sent that one. But how do you tell a nineteen-year-old girl she really is guilty? Especially when you know who’s really to blame.

Without even thinking, she called Winnie in Rhinebeck.

“Insomnia,” she said when Winnie sleepily answered.

“I won’t even ask what time it is,” Winnie said.

Olivia thought of all the things she could say, but only one made sense. “I miss him,” Olivia said.

“I know, sweetie.”

Olivia was crying again. She wondered if the crying would ever stop. She’d read that a woman was born with all the eggs she’ll ever have; maybe the same was true with tears. Maybe she would run out soon.

“I want him back,” Olivia finally managed to say.

“Of course you do,” Winnie said. “I know you do.”

“You’re the only one who knows it’s my fault—”

“You’ve got to stop that,” Winnie said. “How many times did you send him off and nothing happened? We don’t remember those times, though.”

“You know what?” Olivia said. “Fuck him for dying. Just fuck him.”

“It was so stupid of him to die like that,” Winnie said.

“I mean, why didn’t he see that one stupid car? All the times he jogged in his life and he saw cars and trucks and dogs and all sorts of dangerous things, right?”

“Right.”

“But he doesn’t see this one stupid car. And that girl doesn’t see him.”

“You know,” Winnie said, “they say with plane crashes, a series of things have to go wrong. And they do. A whole bunch of things go wrong and the plane crashes. That one in Bosnia? There was bad weather and pilot error and even a broken beacon.”

Olivia wondered what series of errors had happened to David. A glare of sunlight, a car going just a little too fast.

“Why didn’t he just pay attention?” she said finally. “Or jog a foot closer to the woods? Half a foot?”

“I don’t know,” Winnie said.

Olivia’s crying was slowing down. She thought she could stretch out right there on the kitchen floor and go to sleep. “Just fuck him,” she said.

“Yes,” Winnie said.

“Oh, Winnie,” she said, “why didn’t I just let him in bed that morning? Why did I send him away?”

Instead of answering, Winnie said, “I was thinking of coming to visit you.”

“Really? But what about Jeff? What about Rhinebeck?”

She heard Winnie take a deep breath.

“Olivia,” Winnie said. “I’m going to come for August first.”

Olivia moaned. She had not let herself think about it, even though it was less than a month away. She had actually forgotten about her own birthday last October until her parents and Amy showed up with a cake from the supermarket. Such a last-minute cake, she’d thought, imagining them arguing about whether or not to take it to her, then racing to buy one with her name hastily written across the top in pale pink icing, and arguing even as they stood on her doorstep, the cake with its pink rosettes in the box.

But David’s birthday, she couldn’t forget. She had considered flying out to California to be with his parents, two people she hardly knew; but at least they would be uncertain what to do that day, too. She had considered going away somewhere, someplace far from anything else she and David ever did or dreamed of doing. Peru or Alaska or Vietnam. But now that Winnie said it, Olivia knew that being with Winnie would be the best way to spend that day.