Ruby (20 page)

“The thing is,” she said, “you can’t keep this girl. You have to notify the authorities.” She lowered her already-smooth low voice and added, “You’re not in any frame of mind to make such big decisions. That’s clear.”

That was clear? Olivia wondered how she must seem to this self-assured woman, this widow once removed.

“Excuse me?” Olivia said.

“The girl,” Rachel said, impatient. “Her parents must be worried sick. And this boy. Ben? He needs to be held accountable.”

“Don’t you think I’ve taken care of that?” Olivia said. She had planned to call Ben’s parents—or to call John Adams in Bedford Hills, New York. But it was the fucking Fourth of July. Someone named John Adams would be off doing something patriotic.

“It’s irresponsible,” Rachel said.

And the way she said it, the
largeness
of her words, made Olivia think that Rachel thought all of it was irresponsible—not just Ruby, but David getting hit by that car and dying, and even the meager way that Olivia had carried on since, though of course Rachel had no idea what Olivia had done these months.

“Look,” Olivia said, and now it was she who lowered her voice, afraid Ruby would hear what she was about to say. “I’ve talked to her mother. You have no idea what she’s like.” She wanted to explain about the ruddy-faced mother—a drinker, maybe—and her willingness to dump Ruby and the baby on Olivia or anyone who might take her in. But she was too worried that Ruby would hear her, so she just shook her head.

“She’s just a child,” Rachel said, as if Olivia had not told her anything. “Please. And you’re promising her solutions that aren’t in anyone’s best interest.”

Olivia was aware of movement somewhere behind her. It was Ruby, of course. She had not gone upstairs at all. Instead, she’d stayed, hidden.

Rachel heard Ruby, too.

The girl’s footsteps hurrying up the stairs echoed in the kitchen.

“I think she needs some space to really consider what she’s doing. You don’t want a young woman out in the world wondering about her choices, regretting a snap decision—”

“It isn’t a snap decision!” Olivia said, her own voice anything but calm. “I’m helping her!”

“Then you won’t mind if I talk to her?” Rachel said.

“It’s a free country,” Olivia said, but Rachel was already up, on her way to Ruby.

Olivia waited for Rachel to get upstairs, then quietly followed, hiding in the dark hallway outside Ruby’s room. It was her turn to eavesdrop.

“What were you afraid we were going to say?” Rachel asked Ruby, who was pretending to watch television.

Ruby shrugged, kept her eyes focused on the screen.

“May I touch your stomach?” Rachel said. “Just kind of check on the baby?”

Olivia did not hear Ruby’s answer, but she watched as Rachel stood and placed her hands on the girl’s belly. Olivia was reminded of healers she’d once seen in a documentary, women who used their hands to stop bleeding, heal sores, take away pain.

“I hope it’s a boy,” Ruby said eagerly. “I would like that. A boy like Ben.”

Rachel removed from her neck the thin silver chain with a small cross hanging from it.

“
It feels
like a boy,” Rachel said. “Let’s see what the universe says.”

Olivia fought back a laugh.
The universe?
And here she was, so convinced of Rachel’s common sense. But of course, like David, she probably placed a mirror at the front door, refused to put beds against the wall, hung tinkling wind chimes out front, all to keep her environment in harmony. Olivia had relented to David’s wishes, and look where it had gotten her. Look where it had gotten him.

Rachel held the cross above Ruby’s stomach. Even crouched in the hallway, Olivia could see it sway back and forth, in a straight line.

“Yes,” Rachel said. “It’s a boy. Girls move in a circle. Like this.” She swung the chain in a circular motion. “So they say.”

Ruby was grinning. Her hands cupped her stomach; Olivia was always surprised how big she looked lying down.

“Hey, Sage,” Ruby cooed. “My man. You almost ready to meet the world?”

This was the first time she’d heard Ruby do this, talk to the baby, sound like a mother.

“Sage?” Rachel said. “What a good name.”

“Come on, Sage,” Ruby said, her voice lilting like a lullaby. “I’m waiting for you.”

“What you do,” Rachel was saying when Olivia walked into the kitchen, “is walk up this spiral staircase, and there’s a door at the top that leads right to the roof. From there, you can see both bridges—”

“The Golden Gate Bridge? Really?” Ruby said.

“And the Bay Bridge, yes. And you can see Alcatraz and the Bay. Everything really. It’s one of the reasons I bought the house. The view.” As she talked, Rachel drew on a napkin: long parallel lines for the bridges and a circle for Alcatraz, and little
v’s
for the water.

“You know,” Olivia said, sitting across from the two of them, “in the winter, when the trees are bare, you can see the ocean from my bedroom window. Just a sliver of it.” She held up two fingers to show how small a piece.

But Ruby and Rachel stared back at her as if she was the intruder here, when really neither of them had been invited guests exactly. Olivia frowned. Even though she was simply across the table from them, she felt as if she were on another planet—a planet somehow spinning away from theirs.

Rachel cleared her throat and began to clear away breakfast dishes. While she slept, Rachel and Ruby had had a feast, apparently. Food, Olivia knew, was the way to Ruby’s heart.

“I was just telling Ruby about my house,” Rachel said as she cleared eggy plates, plates with crumbs and smears of red jelly. “It’s one of those special places that you find and have to have. Of course, it’s funny to be in it alone. It’s meant for a family. It’s practically screaming for one. I suppose that’s partially my fault, the way I painted it and arranged all the rooms.”

She glanced around at the disaster—unpainted, hardly any furniture—that was Olivia’s house.

“We had big plans for this place,” Olivia explained. “We loved it. We really did. And now, well, now I don’t know.” She felt awkward and embarrassed by the house suddenly, with all its bad memories. Why, she could almost see David walking out this door the day he died, could see the shadow of his back right there in the spot where morning light spilled now. She could remember how the sheets felt when she rolled back into them after pushing him away from her and suggesting he go jogging. If only she had given in to his touch, his searching fingers, his lips. “Good idea,” he’d said, disappointed. “Better than a cold shower.” And she’d been happy to go back to sleep.

Rachel stopped, a coffee cup in each hand, and said, “‘One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it.’”

“Wow,” Ruby said. “Did you just, like, make that up in your head?” She looked at Olivia accusingly. “She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

“I can’t take credit,” Rachel said, returning to her efficient table cleaning, now swiping a damp sponge across the top. “Jane Austen said it first.”

“Cool,” Ruby said. “I love her. She wrote that movie with Gwyneth Paltrow in it, right?”

Olivia didn’t like the way Rachel’s mouth turned up at the corners, satisfied. She didn’t like the woman’s tanned bare legs and khaki wraparound skirt, the way she’d tied her sleeveless white blouse so carelessly around her waist. She tried to imagine her with David. She’d seen pictures, the two of them always frozen in some athletic moment: in skis or on bikes, triumphant on top of mountains, both of them sturdy and sure, wrapped in fleece or Gore-Tex or down.

Her
David, Olivia thought, had let her try new hat designs on him, sat in bubble baths until his fingers and toes grew raisinlike, ate in bed and slept late. This woman isn’t even mourning the right guy, Olivia thought angrily.

“I brought coffee from Guatemala. There’s a fresh pot,” Rachel said. She inhaled sharply, then blew it out in a fast exhale. “I know how much David liked his coffee. Do you know that he never went camping without Peet’s coffee and a Melitta one-cup?” She pressed on her temples. “Jesus,” she said.

“We didn’t do much camping,” Olivia said. “It’s hard to pitch your tent in Washington Square Park.” She had meant it as a joke, but it came out flat. All right, she admitted, Rachel had had him longer. But she hadn’t had him better.

“I think,” Rachel said evenly, “it’s time for me to leave.”

Later, after Rachel had cleaned the counters and scrubbed the sink with Ajax, after she had put the Guatemalan coffee in an airtight container, after she’d gotten in her rented Geo and driven away, and the day grew hot and muggy and long, Olivia could only wonder why Ruby would not let go of that stupid napkin with the childish drawing of a floor plan and a view from a place she would never go.

When Ruby had wandered outside, waving good-bye to Rachel like an idiot, like an old friend, Olivia had thrown the coffee grounds onto the wall, where they scattered and settled like a colony of ants.

She made sure Ruby was still outside; then she called information in Westchester.

There was no John Adams in Bedford Hills, New York.

For days after Rachel left, Ruby ignored Olivia. If Olivia walked in on her in bed while Ruby was playing music on her Walkman, the headphones on her stomach, Ruby pretended not to notice her standing there. Another time, Olivia heard her in the bathtub, the water sloshing and Ruby whispering, “Sage, Sage, can you hear me?” “I can hear you,” Olivia shouted through the locked door. Then the bathroom grew silent.

On Thursday afternoon, Olivia chopped plum tomatoes and fresh basil, boiled water for pasta. She hummed, then stopped. The basil was bright green, pungent. The tomatoes spilled seeds across the counter. She had been humming a Beatles song, “Eight Days a Week.” Olivia took all of this in: the food, the song she’d been humming, the stillness of the midsummer-afternoon air, the hushed sound of water boiling on the stove.

She stood there like that for what seemed like a long time. Then she went back to cooking, to humming.

At four o’clock, Olivia took a glass of lemonade out to Ruby, who was in her usual spot on a chaise longue in the far corner of the yard. She opened her eyes when Olivia’s shadow fell across her face.

“You’re blocking my sun,” Ruby said.

Olivia didn’t move. She held out the glass of lemonade, which Ruby took, reluctantly.

“Excuse me for asking,” Olivia said. “But what’s going on here?”

“Rachel says it’s unethical, what you’re doing,” Ruby said.

“Rachel says? What does she know about anything?”

“She’s totally cool,” Ruby said. “She says I can come and live in San Francisco if I want. She says I can bring Sage. We can
both
live there. We can be a family, a real family. You know, someone walking by, some kid, could look in at us and see a mother and a baby. They could see them together and think, I wish I had what they have.”

Olivia swallowed hard, but the lump of anger in her throat stayed put.

“You know what’s in San Francisco?” Ruby asked, as if it was a demand.

She sat up, spreading her legs to make a place for her belly to rest.

“The Gap is in San Francisco,” Ruby said.

“The Gap?”

Ruby nodded. “That’s right. I can get a job there. In corporate headquarters. I could invent colors or something. Like they don’t have red; they have mango. You know what flax is?”

Before Olivia could answer, Ruby said, “It’s beige! I’ve already got a whole bunch thought up.”

“Wait a minute,” Olivia said. “The Gap is not going to hire a fifteen-year-old high school dropout to name their colors. Did Rachel say that? Because it’s preposterous.”

“Rachel said I could go to a special school they’ve got in San Francisco that lets teenaged mothers get their high school diplomas at night and weekends, so I
could
work at the Gap and do something really interesting.”

“Like name colors? That’s not even a job,” Olivia said. Damn Rachel. Damn that do-gooder, that meddler, that asshole.

“It is too a job,” Ruby said, her face red from sun and anger. “They have a bazillion jobs that are totally cool. Like I could think up baby-clothes ideas. I’ll have a baby, right?”

At this, Olivia’s heart lurched. She sat down on the scratchy grass to try to stay on balance.

“So I could think of ways to make baby clothes easier. Or hipper. Like already I was thinking how you never see babies in black. Black is the coolest color, and they always put babies in like pink or yellow or something. I already have ideas for a whole line of black baby clothes.”

“Tons of babies wear black, Ruby,” Olivia said.

“Like who?”

“Like every baby in New York City, for starters.”

Ruby rolled her eyes in that annoying adolescent way of hers. “That’s not even the point. The point is, I have all these options. You never gave me any options. It was just like, I’ll feed you and take you to the doctor and you give me your baby. Plain and simple. But it isn’t so simple, you know. Giving up something like a baby. I mean, this kid is inside my stomach. He’s part of me. Rachel sent me this book that has all these pictures from like when it’s just a fertilized egg, and how it changes into a person. I mean,” Ruby said, “it’s a fucking miracle.”

“What about Ben?” Olivia said, desperate. She wished she could shake Rachel, hard. “What about Bali?”

“Ben is like totally pissed off because I was so willing to throw our baby away—”

“Throw it away?” Olivia said, too loudly. “I want this baby. Giving it to me is not throwing it away.”

Ruby jumped up and hovered over Olivia, her belly large and intimidating, ugly blue veins crisscrossing her legs like a map of back roads.

“Stop calling my baby ‘it’! This is a person, not an it!” Ruby shouted. “Call him Sage,” Ruby said, her voice softer.

She sunk down beside Olivia.

“You don’t understand,” Olivia said. “I would make a family for your baby. I would. And someone looking in the window at us would pause and smile and think we were happy.”

“You don’t give a shit about me,” Ruby said. “You’re using me.”

“You robbed me,” Olivia said, “and I took you in again. You had nowhere to go.”