Ruby (27 page)

But it was Jake Maxwell at the door.

“You called?” he said.

In the living room, he sat across from Olivia, at a safe distance.

Although they were facing each other, they managed not to look at each other.

They sat that way for some time, before Jake cleared his throat and said, “The wall? In the kitchen?”

“It helped,” she said.

“Are those bugs on it?”

“Coffee,” she said. “From Guatemala. It’s a long story.”

He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “I can’t wait to hear all of your long stories.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. I have a few myself.”

The idea of that, of beginning again from nothing, made Olivia feel tired.

“Sometimes,” Jake said, “I get to New York on business. Or to visit friends.”

“Would this be you and Patricia?” Olivia asked him.

“This would be just me.”

She waited.

“I could visit you in New York, one of those times. Maybe.”

This is how you start, she thought. “Yes,” Olivia said.

“I didn’t mean to take advantage of you,” he said.

Olivia laughed. “Whoa,” she said. “I meant to take advantage of you. What I didn’t mean to do was actually like you.”

“Oh?” he said. “You like me?”

Olivia sighed. “I like you.”

“That’s good to hear.”

When he left, Olivia leaned against the screen door and looked out into the darkness. But there were so many stars, the darkness was not even that dark.

Olivia decided that it was time to go. One week after Ruby left, Olivia started to pack up. She took all of the baby clothes, the blankets and toys, and the formula and diapers and put them in boxes. She would give them all to Winnie and Aida. Already, Winnie had Fed-Exed pictures of the baby, all bloody and new, then cleaned up and sleeping, then looking right at the camera, frightened. Olivia studied the photographs, searching the scrunched-up face for something she could not name, expecting to feel jealous or sad or defeated. But she felt nothing except amused at this child of Winnie’s.

She sat at her kitchen table and stared at the wall, considering adding to it. But she had nothing to add, she realized.

She said to herself, “I am a widow. I am a woman on her way home. I am scared.”

Olivia looked at her suitcases, at the boxes of baby things.

She tried to imagine herself with a newborn baby right now. But she couldn’t. For a moment, Olivia thought Ruby had actually done her a favor by keeping this baby; she just did it all wrong. Olivia stretched out her arms and began an awkward dance, a solo jitterbug to a Van Morrison tune that she hummed in her head.

She did not know how long she did that, humming and dancing by herself, before someone spoke.

“I leave you for one week and you go completely bonkers,” Ruby said.

Olivia stopped dancing, not really expecting to see Ruby standing there.

But she was. She was standing in the doorway, still pregnant.

“You hate me, huh?” Ruby said.

“I don’t hate you,” Olivia told her, and it was the truest thing she could say.

“I couldn’t just leave like that. I had to come back. To explain. At first, I thought that Ben would just change his mind. I mean, all along he was the one talking about Bali, about us keeping the baby and raising it free on an island. So that morning, I hadn’t slept at all, and I decided I had to see him. I mean, what is love if it isn’t this?” She cradled her stomach. “Oh,” she said, “I took a hundred dollars from your purse.”

“You did?” Olivia said.

“I figured you wouldn’t mind. I mean, you wouldn’t want me pregnant and hitchhiking, right? I bought a train ticket, and it took forever to get up there, to that camp. How was I supposed to know it was the last weekend before the thing shut down? Everybody had gotten pretty cozy up there over the summer. So I come waddling in, and there’s Ben in his tennis whites, sitting under a tree with Cindy, some skinny blonde who goes to Vassar or something. ‘It just happened,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with her or anything.’ She taught swimming. What a pair, huh?”

Olivia expected Ruby to cry, but the girl was past that; she was all cried out.

“I never trusted him,” Olivia said.

“You were right. He’s a total asshole. He’s like ‘Don’t you think you’d better go back and have the baby?’ He was scared shitless I’d have it right there in front of Cindy. That I’d embarrass him or something. At least my father had the balls to be there when I was born. I mean, he had his problems, but he was there. He saw me all covered with birth guck, and you know what he said? He said I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.” She took a deep breath. “But Ben, he wants nothing to do with me or the baby. He made that clear. In fact, his father is going to send me a big fat check to make sure we stay out of his life for good.”

“Where does that leave everything?” Olivia asked.

She wondered if a part of her was still hoping for that baby? She paused, trying to find it. But no. Now that Ruby was back, Olivia realized that it was Ruby she had missed. She could see her own life before her: her apartment, the city in autumn, walking through the West Village, her local Chinese restaurant welcoming her home, the smell of the caffè latte she got each morning on Bleecker Street, her little shop on St. Mark’s, her hats. Olivia could see it as if she were already there.

“I couldn’t very well go home,” Ruby said. “On the way back here, I actually thought about it. About my room and stuff. It’s just a crappy little room, but I painted it lavender. Real pale. And my mom made me these pillowcases out of yellow velvet and on one she stitched
DREAM
and on the other one she stitched
DO
.” Ruby shook her head. “But she deserves a second chance, you know? We all deserve that, right?”

Dear Amanda, Olivia thought.

“And I kept thinking about you,” Ruby said. “How I used to sort of hate you. And how we became a family. You know?”

Olivia nodded.

“But we can’t stay that way. You’ve got your real life back in New York and everything. It felt good, though, to think we were one. My friend Betsy’s like me. Kind of free-floating. I mean, she’s got a mother who’s always in rehab herself and these uncles who come and live with them for a little while, except we’re old enough now to figure out they’re not exactly uncles, if you know what I mean. And Betsy and me used to sit around and get high and make up lives for ourselves. Like the kind of house we’d have and the kind of husband. So I went and found Betsy. You remember my friend Betsy?”

“Yes.”

“The funny thing is, she’s pregnant, too.”

“Not again,” Olivia said.

“She’s keeping this one, though,” Ruby said. “And she got a place—in Providence. It’s nothing special. But I figure I could stay with her, the baby and me. We’ll be like Kate and Allie. Betsy’s still in school. They have day care there, too, like in San Francisco. The thing is, I want to be something. I mean, like the way you are. So strong. And kindhearted. And sophisticated. That restaurant you took me to? I want to eat in places like that.”

Olivia nodded again. But she was thinking how Ruby had said she was strong. No one had said that to her since David died. Yet here she was, a year later, on her way to her life again. Surely Ruby was right; she saw the strength in Olivia when Olivia herself could not.

“The thing is,” Ruby said, “I’ve got to keep my baby. I mean, it’s right here inside me. I can’t give it away. But the thing is, I’ve got to keep you, too.”

Now Ruby was crying, and there was nothing more for Olivia to wait for. She rushed to the girl and took her into her arms.

“You’re stuck with me,” Olivia told her.

“We could visit you there, right?” Ruby said. “In New York? And you’ll still come here sometimes? And we’ll all go to the beach. Hey, you could even baby-sit.”

“Yes,” Olivia said. “Yes.”

Oh, she saw it, her life opening up still more. She saw Ruby and this baby a part of it. It was not the life she ever imagined for herself, but it was the one she got. It was a good one.

Ruby reached into her big macramé bag.

“I got this for you,” she said. “I couldn’t come back to see you until I found it.”

She held out something in the palm of her hand.

The cassette with David’s voice on it.

Olivia took it from her, folded her fingers around it.

“Thank you,” she said.

Ruby shrugged. “Yeah,” she said. “Well.” She looked around at all the boxes and suitcases. “It looks like you’re going, huh?”

“I bought all these baby things for you. Lots of black.”

“Cool,” Ruby said. “I saw the doctor. He says I’m still not dilated. What a drag, huh? Betsy says she’ll be my partner if I’ll be hers. Are you like really insulted?”

“A little,” Olivia said. “But I want to go home.”

“And get on with things, right?”

“Right.”

Ruby nodded. “But I’ll call you as soon as something happens.”

“You’d better,” Olivia said.

“What were you doing?” Ruby asked her. “When I walked in?

Olivia laughed. “The jitterbug.”

“My mom taught me that,” Ruby said. “There’s an old song, ‘Ruby, Ruby.’ Not the one by the Rolling Stones.”

“I know it,” Olivia said. She sang “‘I knew a girl and Ruby was her name. …”

“That’s the one,” Ruby said: “My mother actually told me my father wrote that. That he wrote it for me. What a dope I am, huh? I believed her.”

Ruby took Olivia’s hands in hers and led the dance. Even this pregnant, she could spin Olivia and twirl her across the floor.

Olivia closed her eyes. Dear Amanda, she thought, and only one word came to her mind. Dear Amanda: Live. She could smell autumn coming. She always loved autumn in the city. It was time for her to start her winter hats. The tape bounced in her pocket, safe. When she opened her eyes, the light shone around Ruby’s head like a halo, showing off her freckles, the ring in her nose. She is lovely, Olivia thought.

The two women danced the jitterbug across the worn floor. They sang together slightly off-key. They danced like that until the room grew dark and the cool air from the ocean crept into the room, like a ghost stopping in to say good-bye.

F
OR THE TIME AND
space to write this book, I would like to thank The Vermont Studio Center, Jessica Hempel, and Hillary Day; for legal advice, Bruce Sondler; for their love, support, and understanding, I give my heartfelt thanks to my parents, Melissa Hood, my husband and our children, Ariane, Sam and Grace; for her wise counsel and good faith, many thanks to Diane Higgins; and to Gail Hochman—agent and friend extraordinaire—my deepest thanks for her patience, advice, loyalty, and wisdom.

Ann Hood was born in West Warwick, Rhode Island. She is the author of the bestselling novels
The Knitting Circle
,
The Red Thread
, and
The Obituary Writer
. Her memoir,
Comfort: A Journey Through Grief
, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by
Entertainment Weekly
and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her other novels include
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
,
Waiting to Vanish
,
Three-Legged Horse
,
Something Blue
,
Places to Stay the Night
,
The Properties of Water
, and
Ruby
. She has also written a memoir,
Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time
; a book on the craft of writing,
Creating Character Emotions
; and a collection of short stories,
An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life
.

Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Atlantic Monthly
,
Tin House
,
Ploughshares
, and the
Paris Review
. Hood has won awards for the best American spiritual writing, travel writing, and food writing; the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction; and two Pushcart Prizes. She now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and their children.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Ann Hood

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

978-1-4804-6686-9

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com