Ruby (26 page)

“There’s no room in here for anything else,” Ruby said.

But Olivia made her red currant iced tea and tortellini with pesto sauce, Nikki’s suggestions for natural ways to induce labor.

“I can’t,” Ruby said, and pushed away the food, the tea.

Sometimes, Olivia came home from her morning jog and found Ruby in a bathtub of cold water, the skin of her stomach so stretched that Olivia saw whorls and patterns on it, like blown-up fingerprints, like the blots on Rorschach tests. Ruby’s breasts drooped the way Olivia remembered her grandmother’s doing, resting ugly on her belly, the nipples dark brown and swollen, the breasts themselves covered with puffy blue veins. They leaked, too, a thin, clear liquid, like tears.

“No wonder Ben doesn’t love me anymore,” Ruby said one morning when Olivia came home sweaty and aching, to find her in the tub, crying. “Look at me. I’m so disgusting.”

“You’re not,” Olivia said, kneeling beside the bathtub. She thought, Only two more days. Only two more days of this.

“Oh please. I look down and I get so freaked out,” Ruby said, lifting her arms to indicate her body, all of it. “Once I broke my leg. I was in fifth grade and I fell down our front steps. Just stumbled really. And my leg broke. It was so weird. I had to wear a cast up to here”—she indicated somewhere under the water—“for like seven weeks. About halfway through, it got really itchy. I thought I was going to lose my mind, you know? And then it even started to smell kind of funky. I kept pretending it was happening to somebody else, all that pain and the itching and the smell. But this is even worse. And I can’t escape it. I mean, I can’t breathe, I can’t sleep. And it’s so hot.”

“I know,” Olivia said.

She thought of herself this way—pregnant and uncomfortable. What would David do? she wondered. He would wash her hair and rub her back and give her ice cubes to rub on her neck. So that was what she did. Olivia washed Ruby’s hair with the shampoo that smelled like rum. She put ice cubes in the bathtub. She read
Green Eggs and Ham
out loud to Ruby, because Winnie said that hearing rhymes made babies smarter. For a little while, Ruby felt better.

Olivia agreed to go out to dinner with her parents and her sister. They wanted to talk her out of this. She wanted them to be ready for the baby. She left the number of the restaurant all over the house—by the telephone, beside the bathtub, next to Ruby’s bed. Then she put on a new dress, a long flowered one with buttons down the front, and met her family at the Spanish restaurant on the ocean.

They ordered calamari as an appetizer, and before it came, Amy began to talk.

“I see a pattern of irrational behavior,” she said. “This is just one more thing.”

“What irrational behavior?” Olivia said. “I didn’t kill my husband. He just died. And that is the only irrational thing I can think of in my life.”

“How about eloping with someone you hardly knew?” Amy said. “How about dressing your cat up in doll clothes? How about a million nutty things you did your whole life?”

“I’m finally taking charge of my life again,” Olivia said, her head reeling from Amy’s accusations. How could her sister see marrying David as foolish when it had been the smartest thing Olivia had done? “I finally see a future for myself,” Olivia added.

Amy lowered her voice. “Is that what sleeping with Jake was all about? Taking charge?”

“Did he tell you that?” Olivia said.

“He didn’t have to,” Amy said. “It’s so obvious.”

Their mother interrupted. “Girls! I don’t want to hear this kind of talk. Olivia, I can’t believe that you are having sex with men at this point in your life. You are supposedly grief-stricken.”

“Supposedly!” Olivia said.

But her mother waved her hands dismissively. “I don’t want to discuss morals with my thirty-seven-year-old daughter. The point is that you shouldn’t make any big decisions for a while yet. If in six months or a year you still feel like you want a baby, adopt one then. It hasn’t even been a year, Olivia.”

Olivia recognized this advice from the articles her mother clipped from magazines for her.

“It will be a year,” Olivia said. “In one week.”

“The point is, you need to get past each season without him,” her mother continued. “Every landmark. Christmas and anniversaries and birthdays.”

“We’re past all that,” Olivia said, weary. “Where have you been?”

Olivia’s mother was wearing a ridiculous hat, a bronze thing with a dark brown band. It wasn’t one of Olivia’s, even though Olivia sent her a hat every Mother’s Day. Hats that she never wore, that sat in her closet getting dusty and misshapen. Why do I even bother? Olivia thought. Her mother’s gold seashell earrings looked like bugs. And her lipstick made her seem almost ghoulish. Her father sat, looking out the window, though it was too dark to see the ocean lying beyond it. These people could not possibly understand why she was doing this.

“You’re just being unrealistic. As usual,” Amy added.

She was pouting, the way she used to when she was a child and didn’t get her way. She had on a cropped black sweater that showed her flat tanned belly. Olivia saw that and thought of Ruby’s stretched, full stomach. What am I even doing here with them when Ruby might need me? Olivia thought.

“I’m going home,” she announced.

“But you ordered paella to split with Amy,” her mother said in her fluttering voice.

“Sit right down and eat with us,” her father said. “By God, there’s been enough talk.”

But of course, as usual, there hadn’t been nearly enough.

“Any day now, I’m going to have a baby,” Olivia said. “I’ll call you before we go back to New York.”

A woman at the next table looked up at her, frowning.

But Olivia didn’t care; saying
we
felt wonderful, like the right pronoun, at last.

Ruby was sitting at the kitchen table when Olivia got home. She had put the fan right in front of her, and her face was lifted into the air the fan spit out. But the only thing Olivia could focus on were the papers on the kitchen table, all with Ben’s signature in the right spots, in triplicate and notarized.

“It’s so fucking hot,” Ruby said.

“Any pains?” Olivia asked her. “Twitches? Twinges? Cramps?”

The papers lay between them, Ben’s signature a model of good penmanship.

“Just those stupid Braxton-Hicks,” Ruby said, locking her gaze on Olivia.

Olivia waited for more; Ruby always had more to say. But the girl was quiet.

When Olivia moved toward the steps, and bed, Ruby spoke.

“You never told me,” she said. “What names you picked out.”

“Nell for a girl,” Olivia said. “Thomas for a boy.”

“Thomas!” Ruby said. “But that’s awful.”

“It was David’s father’s name,” Olivia said.

They had thought it a name filled with historical significance—like Thomas Jefferson—and fictional integrity—Tom Sawyer.

“I don’t like Nell, either,” Ruby said. “It’s a stupid name. An old-lady name.”

Olivia thought of those papers, signed and notarized.

“I told you I’d name him Sage, didn’t I?”

“I don’t care what you name him. But those names are terrible. I’m just saying.”

Olivia went over to Ruby. “Are you okay?” she asked her.

There were tears in Ruby’s eyes, but they seemed frozen there, as if the girl was actually unwilling to let herself cry this time.

“Of course I’m not okay. This is going to hurt like hell and Ben doesn’t love me and you want to name my baby stupid names like Tom and Nell and it’s so fucking hot.”

Olivia wrapped her arms around Ruby’s shoulders.

“We’re almost there,” she whispered.

The first thing Olivia noticed when she woke up the next morning was that there was a cool breeze coming through her windows; the heat had broken.

Then she remembered that today was the day. Ruby’s baby was due today. She thought of that doctor, spinning the little plastic wheel, lining up the months and dates and coming up with today. It had seemed so far off then. Some babies, the doctor had told them, were born right on schedule.

Olivia got out of bed, the cool floor a surprise under her feet after so many weeks of heat. She peeked inside Ruby’s room, but the bed was empty, a messy tangle of sheets, a pillow thrown on the floor. Ruby had told her that it was impossible to find a comfortable position for sleep. That all night she tossed from side to side. The baby kicked and turned, her nose was stuffed up, it was too hot, and she got up and paced or added more pillows, fewer sheets, any combination that might work.

Olivia yawned and made her way downstairs. It was almost cool enough to need a light robe. Good weather for having a baby, she decided.

She didn’t get nervous until she went into the kitchen, where the fan still sat whirring on the table. The parental consent forms had blown onto the floor. A loose screen flapped against the window frame. Otherwise, it was too quiet here.

“Ruby?” Olivia said, not expecting an answer.

Still, she looked in the living room and out in the yard, where Ruby’s chaise longue sat empty. She looked because she had to go through the motions. But what Olivia knew was that Ruby had left her again.

Back in the kitchen, she tried to think of what to do, but she came up blank.

Then she saw the note on the counter by the sink, held in place under a glass.

“Olivia” was written on the front. Ruby’s penmanship was the opposite of Ben’s, the kind Olivia’s mother would call “chicken scratch.”

Olivia unfolded the note and read it. The message was simple and clear:

I am so sorry, but I just couldn’t do it. Please don’t hate me.

Love,

Ruby

PS. I’m not in labor or anything, so don’t worry about me like that.

When the phone rang and Olivia answered it, she heard Winnie’s voice.

“Do we have a baby yet?” Winnie asked.

“No,” Olivia said.

“Isn’t this D-day?”

“She’s gone,” Olivia blurted. “She changed her mind and left.”

“You mean she took the baby?”

“I mean she’s keeping it,” Olivia said.

Winnie tried to sort it out: “Where did she go? Should we call the police? Didn’t she already sign those papers? Olivia? Olivia, are you okay? Maybe you should just come home.”

But Olivia could only think of how much those nouns still hurt.

She thought, Home. Baby. Ruby.

Olivia drove to Jake Maxwell’s house. It looked different in the daylight. There was a splendid stained-glass window that, Olivia noticed as she climbed the stairs to the front door, caught the sunlight and sparkled, amber, blue, and gold. She rang the doorbell, clutching the papers with Ben’s signature, even though she knew they were worthless.

When Jake answered the door and saw her there, he looked more suspicious than surprised.

“She’s gone,” Olivia told him.

Jake opened the door wider and motioned her inside.

“I don’t suppose she ever signed those papers?” he said. Then he added, “Not that it matters now.”

Olivia saw a woman standing in the doorway to the kitchen, wearing a man’s robe. It was the woman from Amy’s Fourth of July party, probably the same woman he’d tried to have a baby with. The on-again, off-again girlfriend, clearly on-again.

“Shit,” Olivia said.

Jake followed her gaze over to Patricia and said, “We’ve got some business to discuss.”

When Patricia didn’t move, Jake did, taking Olivia by the elbow and leading her into one of the parlors. The walls were pink, like cotton candy.

“You know,” Jake told her, “she might just be scared. Need some time to think things over. I’ve seen it happen. The birth mother changes her mind one way, then the other.”

“And where does she end up?” Olivia asked.

Jake shrugged. “I’ve seen it go both ways.”

“Shit,” Olivia said again.

“I wish I could do something.”

“Why?”

“The thing is,” Jake said, “I like you. And I want—”

Olivia put her fingers against his lips to quiet him. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t want anything. I don’t want anything.”

That night, when the quiet of the house grew too loud, Olivia drove to the A&W.

She did that every night for three nights.

The teenagers were still there, in the far corner of the parking lot, stoned and pierced, frightening. But Ruby was not one of them.

When Olivia asked if they had seen her, waving twenty-dollar bills at them, they laughed. One of the boys, a tall, skinny one with a ponytail hanging out from under a captain’s hat, grabbed at the money.

“Get the fuck away from me,” Olivia told him.

“Whoa,” someone said. “Tough lady.”

After that, she stopped going.

On the fourth night without Ruby, Olivia called Jake Maxwell. He wasn’t there, so she left him a message. “I lied,” she said. “I want everything. I want it all.”

“Dear Amanda,” Olivia wrote over and over, starting a new letter each time. “Dear Amanda.” But she could not for the life of her think of what to say to the girl. She just wrote “Dear Amanda” and stared at the blank paper until she gave up and threw it away.

In the middle of the night, when the phone rang, Olivia hoped it was Ruby. She hoped it was Jake. She hoped it was good news.

“Olivia?” Winnie said, her voice shrill and high. “It’s a girl. My water broke and all of a sudden there was the worst fucking pain I’ve ever felt and the next thing I know, we’re in a cab racing to Beth Israel and I’m screaming, ‘Give me drugs!’ But it was too late. The whole thing took under three hours and I’ve got a daughter! A baby girl! Aida, like the opera. What do you think?”

Although Olivia made all the right noises of excitement and asked all the right questions—“How much does she weigh? Does she have hair?”—what she really thought was that she wanted Ruby back even more.

On the fifth night, when there was a knock on the door, Olivia jumped to answer it. Ruby was back and Olivia was going to keep her. The thought took Olivia’s breath away. Keep Ruby? She realized that it wasn’t so much the baby she missed; it was Ruby herself. Somehow, the girl had become her family. Somehow, the girl had gotten her through these months.