Ruby (25 page)

“And this section is for the father to sign, agreeing to all the same things,” Jake was saying. “I need to ask you if you know who the father is.”

Ruby nodded solemnly.

“Does he admit he’s the father?” Jake asked.

Ruby nodded again.

“Okay. Good. Well, he needs to sign right here. And then you get the whole thing notarized, and then you have your baby and hand it over legally to Olivia.” Jake turned his attention to Olivia.

“I have adoption papers being drawn up for you. It’s all routine really.”

Olivia nodded, too. It was as if some force greater than she or Ruby had taken their voices. In no time, she would have this baby with her. She would hold it, swaddle it, take it home with her to New York. She and Winnie would push their strollers side by side through the Village. Go to story hour at Tootsie’s and buy baby ice cream cones at Moon Doggie’s.

“You should read this yourself,” Jake told Ruby.

“No,” she said in a quavering voice that Olivia did not recognize. “I believe you.”

He slid the papers across his desk, toward Ruby. “I’ve marked where you need to sign,” he said, and placed a pen on top of the papers.

Ruby’s lips moved as if she were talking. Talking herself into this? Olivia wondered. Or out of it? Ruby picked up the pen, hesitated, then put it back down.

“There’s a provision here,” Jake said, pointing with his pen, “that gives you the right to change your mind within sixty days.”

Olivia looked at him, startled. How could he have left out such an important detail? Hadn’t he said this was pretty routine? Hadn’t he made it sound practically finished?

“You mean I can take the baby back?” Ruby asked him.

“You have sixty days,” Jake said. “But it’s highly unusual.” This last, he seemed to add for Olivia’s sake.

“I want to talk to Ben first,” Ruby said, getting up. “I need to talk to him.”

“Ben?” Jake said.

“The father,” Olivia said miserably.

“I’m afraid he won’t sign,” Ruby said.

Olivia looked at Jake, desperate, as if to say, She has to sign.

“Well,” Jake said, “can we call him in here now?”

Ruby shook her head. “He’s in New York.” She grabbed Olivia’s hand and held on tight. “I just want this over with,” she said, and Olivia was relieved.

The other teenager in childbirth class had her baby, a girl, six pounds, twelve ounces.

“Hillary Jane,” Nikki announced. “Isn’t that pretty? Everything went smooth as pumpkin pie. No drugs!”

They all groaned. The pressure was on for a smooth, drug-free delivery.

Ruby whispered to Olivia, “I want drugs. I’m telling you right now. I don’t want to remember any of it, and I just want to hand you the baby and go home.”

It was time for creative visualization. The pregnant women lay down, with their heads on fat red pillows, their partners kneeling beside them. Ruby and Olivia had problems with getting the breathing right, when simply to pant, when to
hee-hee-hoo.
Hopefully, they would do better at this.

“I mean it,” Ruby said. “Tons of drugs. Whatever they’ve got.”

“Okay,” Olivia said. But she couldn’t shake something Ruby had just told her: She wanted to go home. Where did she mean? The girl had no one, no place to go. Olivia thought of that small house on Strawberry Field Lane, of the red-faced mother—“A bedpan cleaner,” Ruby had said. And what lay beyond that door that the woman had held so protectively closed? Olivia imagined scenes from B movies, from cheap novels. But perhaps those scenes were really Ruby’s life, her home. Somehow, Olivia hadn’t thought past getting this baby. But now she wanted Ruby to have something better, too. Something good. What would happen to Ruby?

Nikki was telling the mothers to close their eyes and imagine something peaceful. Olivia tried to do the same, but she kept getting ugly pictures instead, images of Ruby alone in that fraternity basement, in that A&W parking lot, on the street somewhere.

“The most peaceful thing you know,” she said in a hypnotic voice.

“A handful of Quaaludes and a big fat joint,” Ruby whispered to Olivia. “That’s what I intend to do.”

“Sssshhhh,” Olivia said. “Close your eyes.” But she took hold of Ruby’s hand and held on tight.

“Hey,” Ruby said, “lighten up.”

Nikki stood over them.

“What are you imagining?” she asked Ruby.

Why did they always have to go first? But of course Ruby had already come up with a lie.

“The beach at sunrise,” she said. “Before it gets crowded, you know? It smells like seaweed, but not in a bad way. And like salt. I like that part of the morning.”

It sounded convincing enough for Nikki to coo, “Wonderful.”

Someone else thought of a forest; another person chose a meadow. Olivia closed her own eyes, willing to let a peaceful image in. But it was that damn Jake Maxwell who worked his way inside her head, pressing against her eyelids. Jake Maxwell shirtless, in cutoffs, standing at his door and letting her in. She opened her eyes and Ruby was staring at her all funny.

“What?” Olivia said. But Ruby shook her head, closed her eyes again, and went back to her beach.

Before they left, they were asked to choose a focal point, something to take with them to the hospital and stare at when things got rough.

“Something,” Nikki explained, “that will keep you focused.”

The others chose quilts and sonogram pictures and a wedding photograph.

Ruby took Olivia’s hand and whispered, “I choose you. When I start to lose it, before the drugs kick in, I’ll just look at your face and that will get me through.”

When they got home, Ruby announced that she needed to be alone. She had to call Ben and get him to agree to sign the parental consent form. “Then we’ll fax it to him and everything will be settled,” she said. Her voice had taken on a weary seriousness.

Satisfied, Olivia decided that Ruby was determined to do it. She drove to Mia Bambina, the specialty baby store in town. There, she turned herself over to a woman named Mara, who assured her that they carried everything she would need for the first few months of her baby’s life.

Mara helped her choose blankets, tiny things called “onesies,” baby bottles with balloons and the ABCs on them, a black-and-white mobile, booties and hats and a hand-knit sweater, and all of the Winnie-the-Pooh characters in miniature soft stuffed animals sitting in a plush blue honey jar.

“If you have any black baby clothes,” Olivia said, grinning, thinking of how pleased Ruby would be, “I’ll take them.”

Mara added those to the pile, too: tiny black leggings and high-tops and turtlenecks.

“It’s really wonderful, isn’t it?” Mara said as she wrapped all of the items in tissue paper. “We get a lot of people in here preparing for an adoption.” She smiled warmly at Olivia. “You and your husband must be pretty excited.”

“Thank God for adoption,” Olivia told Mara, because that was exactly what she felt. Thank God for adoption and thank God for Ruby.

The colorful bags with Mia Bambina emblazoned across the front filled the trunk. Olivia stopped at the A&P and bought two cases of formula and a case of Pampers. When she got in her car to drive back home, the faint sweet smell of babies filled the air. The sun was bright and hot, and Olivia began to hum an old Jackson Browne song as her car hugged the curves on the windy scenic route. Her hands beat out the rhythm on the steering wheel. No lullabies for her baby, she decided. She would hum him Beatles songs, and Simon and Garfunkel, and all of those Jackson Browne, Van Morrison, and Bruce Springsteen tunes from her college days. She would teach him to dance the twist, the swim, the monkey. Olivia saw herself with a little boy who looked like David, the same curly brown hair and straight nose, the two of them twisting across the hardwood floors of her apartment on Bethune Street, with the stereo turned up too loud, and both of them grinning and sweaty.

Around the next curve, the sun was so bright that she was blinded for an instant; and in that instant, she heard a small thump beneath her car. She had run over something. Olivia pulled over, beyond the shoulder, onto the scratchy grass that grew there. Trembling, she got out of the car.

It’s just a paper bag, she told herself. A bag with empty beer cans in it.

She saw those all the time, tossed from car windows onto the side of the road.

Whatever it was had been thrown by the impact, and Olivia had to walk several yards to find it, thinking the whole time of David, of how he’d hit that Honda Civic and was airborne for an instant before he landed with a sound that the girl—Amanda—had described as “sickening.” She thought of all the details she had tried to forget: how his sneakers had been knocked from his feet, how they’d recovered only one. She thought of the way the policeman held the few things David had carried in his pocket: his house key, a five-dollar bill, and a scrap of paper with her name written on it and their phone number below that. By the time she saw it, she was crying. It was a cat, and it was very dead, eyes opened in horror, guts spilling onto the road.

Her own stomach flip-flopped as she bent toward the cat, a fat orange one with a red collar with a charm hanging from it. Olivia recognized the charm as a
milagro,
a good-luck charm from Mexico, this one a hand with a heart on its palm. There was no tag, though, no owner to call. In a way, Olivia was relieved; she didn’t want to knock on someone’s door and deliver such news.

Olivia got the blanket from her trunk and used it to drag the cat off the road to the grass. She could not stop thinking of the policeman who had come to her door that warm Tuesday morning last September, grim-faced and nervous. “Mrs. Henderson?” he had asked, sweating, almost ashamed. In that instant, Olivia had known why he was there—a little earlier, she had heard the wail of sirens close to home—and, not wanting to hear the news, she had shut the door on him, leaned against it, shaking, muttering,
“No, no, no, no.”

What would these people think of a crying woman coming to their door with a bundle wrapped in a sandy beach blanket? This way, she thought, leaving the cat in the blanket beneath a row of beach roses and sea lavender, they might think the cat had simply wandered off. They might remain hopeful that it would return. They might imagine it with another family, happy somewhere else, loved. It was what she imagined Arthur doing. Though of course she knew how unlikely that was.

That
milagro
was what she thought about for the rest of the ride home. Someone’s hope that death could be held at bay by a foolish charm. But once home, she wished she had taken it from the cat’s collar. Maybe it was meant to do some other magic—to make good things happen. Olivia even considered driving back and retrieving it.

But then Ruby came outside. She had been crying; Olivia recognized the red blotches that crying always left on her face.

Olivia stepped out of the car, but she couldn’t seem to move closer to Ruby, who stood at the front door. Behind her, the house looked more run-down than ever, the purple paint blistered in the heat, the roof sagging a little in the middle.

“You talked to him?” Olivia said. Her knees were weak; that cat with his guts spilling onto the street, the thump, the small
milagro
around his neck.

“He says okay,” Ruby told her. “He says he’ll sign.” Relief so strong washed over Olivia that she feared she might fall over. When she opened her hands to welcome Ruby into a hug, there were cuts on her palms from her nails digging in, small half-moons of hope.

O
LIVIA WAS READY
. She spent each night in a half sleep, listening for sounds from Ruby’s room: a gasp at her water breaking, a groan from the first twinges of labor, the creak of bedsprings as Ruby got up to tell Olivia it was time.

In their childbirth class, half the women had already had their babies, all of them early. Each week, there were fewer pairs there, more reports of babies born, labors induced. As Olivia listened to the women’s stories, to the names of these new lives, she rocked in her seat, gently, back and forth, as if she already had a baby to soothe. Sometimes, she left the class angry at Ruby for taking so long.

“Jeez,” Ruby told her, “it’s still early. Give me a break.”

But Olivia was anxious. She paced and prodded Ruby with questions. Was there any sign of labor? Anything at all?

“It’s easy for you to want labor to start,” Ruby said. “But I’m the one who’s got to go through it. Right now, I feel like it would be okay just to stay like this. You and me living here, thinking about the baby and stuff. In limbo, you know?”

But Olivia couldn’t imagine anything worse. Get on with it, she willed the girl. Get on with it already.

One morning, sounding young and frightened, Ruby described how the baby’s head was lodged in the birth canal.

“It’s like so low, I feel it could drop right out. I mean, I keep feeling like I have to pee, but then I don’t; it’s just the baby. And you know, I was thinking, If it’s so low already, maybe it won’t hurt so much. It doesn’t have that far to go to get out, right?”

It was easy for Olivia to forget that Ruby was a child herself really. Especially lately, with the baby so close to being hers that Olivia could think of nothing else. But she saw how scared Ruby was, and she drew the girl close to her. Ruby smelled of strawberry shampoo and sea air.

“Think of all the people from class who’ve done it now,” Olivia said. “It’s all over and they have their babies.”

The girl stiffened in Olivia’s arms. “Yeah. Right. But I’ll go through it, the water breaking and the pain and the pushing. But in the end, I won’t even have the baby. I won’t have anything.”

“Of course you will,” Olivia said guiltily, because for the life of her, she could not think of one thing that Ruby would have. Not one.

There was no relief in the heat, and Ruby stayed inside in her underwear, in front of a fan, miserable and uncomfortable, cranky.

“I can’t breathe,” she moaned, trying to adjust the baby inside her, to move it out from under her rib cage with her fingers.

She pushed away all food except for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, the smooth variety.