Ruby (6 page)

If she hadn’t been mad at Winnie, this would have been a good time to call her. I’m going crazy, she’d say. I’m losing it. I’m eating canned food and waiting for David to appear as a bug or something. But Winnie had gone and fallen in love herself, at her twentieth high school reunion, which she had complained and complained and complained about going to. She had gone and ran into her old high school boyfriend, Jeff, and they had fallen in love and eloped during a weekend in Zihuatanejo.

Worse, Winnie had gotten pregnant right away, that very weekend, without even trying. Now she was big and lumbering, slow-witted and slow-tongued. She couldn’t stop herself from talking about her breasts—large and veiny; her belly—also large and veiny; pregnant sex—intense and awkward even when she was on top, which she always had to be; her sonograms and amnio and due date.

Olivia hated Winnie.

Winnie had taken Olivia’s life. The one she was supposed to have had with David.

Olivia’s gaze settled on the stretched-out macramé bag that Ruby had left hung across the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Upstairs, the girl slept so soundly that Olivia had actually waited in the doorway of her room, watching until she saw Ruby’s chest rise and fall. The last thing Olivia needed was a dead runaway. But Ruby was alive, even emitting a tiny snore before Olivia had made her way downstairs.

The bag, Olivia thought as she picked it up, could be from her own teenage closet. She’d had a belt made from the same stuff, with two cheap round metal circles for looping the ends through. It felt familiar in her hands, the bumpy texture, the bulky weight of it. The inside was lined with cheap shiny material that had been stained red from a spill of some kind. Olivia glanced up at the ceiling, waiting for a sound of Ruby waking. But the house was still and quiet.

“I have a right,” Olivia explained to the empty room before she plunged her hand into the bag. “After all, a person could go to jail for harboring a runaway. For being an accessory.”

An accessory to what, she wasn’t certain. The word conjured Winnie, who had told her the last time they’d talked that citrus colors were in style now, and Jackie O sunglasses, and small handbags shaped like flowers. Winnie, who, along with Jeff, the investment banker, was living Olivia’s life with the perfect accessories. She had bought a country house in Rhinebeck. She had started to take yoga for pregnant women. They had bought a station wagon to drive back and forth to their house in Rhinebeck.

Olivia took a deep breath, then looked through the bag in earnest. She remembered her own outrage and betrayal at her mother looking through her things when she was Ruby’s age. But the memory didn’t stop her from snooping herself. Her mother had feared all the stories going around about teenagers smoking marijuana and taking the pill. “I have a right,” her mother had said, indignant.

She hadn’t found anything in Olivia’s drawers or pockets; Olivia had been smarter than that. Apparently, so was Ruby. Two tubes of cheap lipstick, a pot of Carmex, a broken emery board, some loose pennies and a few French francs jangling around at the bottom of the bag. There was an address book, a cheap Hallmark giveaway, with all the names and phone numbers written in a loopy childish hand. Olivia flipped through the pages, but the name Ben did not appear there.

When a folded piece of paper fell out, Olivia opened it almost gleefully. She was disappointed to recognize it as a snippet of an Elizabeth Bishop poem that the girl had copied down: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here …” Olivia tucked it back into the book, then continued her search. Her hand settled on another square object that could be yet another address book. But when she pulled it from the bag, she saw that it was a wallet, the kind one might give a child as a toy. Small and pink plastic, with a cracked image of the Brady Bunch on it, bulging with school photos of adolescents.

A fortune from a fortune cookie read: “You are special and will travel far.” A daily horoscope cut from a newspaper: “Keep your eyes open today, Aquarius! You and your soul mate will cross paths!” Some mimeographed lavatory passes. Half of a letter setting up an appointment with the principal: “…
unexcused absences, cutting classes, and persistent tardiness.
” Olivia smiled in spite of herself. She thought of the term
wayward teen,
of movies of the week. With some makeup and better clothes, Ruby could star in one of those, and then she’d turn out all right in the end.

The last thing in the wallet was a library card. Olivia started to slide it back into its spot, but then she looked at it again “Ruby Grady,” it read, “15 Strawberry Field Lane.” The town, Olivia noticed from the stamp on the card, was the same one where her old high school friend Janice lived. Perhaps this was significant. Perhaps the fact that Ruby lived near Janice was a sign of some sort. A woman from the occult store next to her hat shop had once told Olivia that nothing was an accident. Take everything as a sign, she’d said, almost like a warning. Olivia replaced everything, then slipped the bag back over the chair. As she walked out the door toward her car, she sang softly to herself, the song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

Finally, Olivia thought as she studied the street map and formulated a route. Finally, she was taking charge of her own life again. Almost smugly, she navigated the secondary roads that would take her to 15 Strawberry Field Lane. Ever since David died, people had had advice for Olivia. At first, she took it. All of it. She had to; she was incapable of thinking on her own. Her brain had turned to oatmeal, thick and sluggish. There were decisions to be made about funeral arrangements and personal effects, about notifying work and filling out insurance papers. Slowly, those had turned into larger decisions, which all led to the same question: What was Olivia going to do now? She couldn’t begin to imagine an answer.

So much advice, Olivia thought as she drove down a long stretch of empty road, from so many people who had never lost anything more than an elderly distant relative. She used to write it all down on the inside of her thigh in laundry marker: “You can’t be alone.” She’d written that on her thigh just before she got into the backseat of her parents Oldsmobile and let them take her home with them. After three weeks of Olivia mostly staying right there in bed and sometimes stumbling about the house at night like an intruder, her mother sat her down and told her that she had to get a grip. “Get a grip”—Olivia wrote that, too. “It’s time to resume your life,” her mother had said, so matter-of-factly that it seemed a simple task: returning to New York, to work, to nights out for all-you-can-eat sushi, to facials by the Polish woman on the corner. “Resume life,” Olivia had written on her thigh.

While she tried desperately to make hats, alone in the back of her shop late at night, the woman from the occult store next door brought her tea made from roots. “It only tastes bad because you feel so bad,” the woman told her. “It will start to taste good when you don’t need it any longer.” The tea left grainy sludge at the bottom of the cup, like the sand inside a wet bathing suit. The woman told her to look for signs.

Olivia tried. She looked for omens and guideposts everywhere she went. She copied the advice that screamed from the covers of copies of
You!
that Winnie brought her:
YOU CAN SAY NO!
and
CONTROL YOUR BUTT NOW
! She wrote the phone numbers from posters on the subway for laser surgery, lawyers, lab-technician schools, and even poems from the Poetry in Motion series on the insides of her arms, like a junkie. “Stop writing on yourself,” Winnie told her, and Olivia wrote that down, too.

In the car now, she tried to find meaning in the random songs that played. But what was she to make of “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I’ve Got Love in My Tummy” or “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am”? Instead, she switched from the oldies station to Lite Rock and started to count the roadkill she passed. So many dead animals! As a young girl, death had frightened her. She remembered Harriet Lindsay North (“Linzer Torte,” they had called her behind her back), her Sunday school teacher at the Congregational church her family had attended. Harriet used to wear her hair in two long braids down her back. She had very thick glasses, the shadow of a mustache, and wore gauzy skirts and bracelets of bells. One day, Harriet took a group of them into the middle of the church and pointed to the ornate Tiffany windows on each wall. “The east windows,” she told them, “represent life and birth; the west windows represent death.”

Olivia had swung her head to gaze west, where fuzzy glass symbolized heaven and the unknown. Terrified, she had hyperventilated. The teacher stuck Olivia’s head in a paper bag and forced her to breathe deeply, but every time Olivia glanced westward, her breath left her again.

Olivia added to her roadkill list: one squirrel. So far, she had seen two skunks, a raccoon, and something too squished to identify. At least David hadn’t been squished. She passed another dead raccoon.

“Great,” Olivia said into the empty car, “I am actually counting roadkill.”

B.D., she would not have done this.

B.D. was a Winnie expression.
Before David.
Winnie liked to remind Olivia of her life B.D. B.D., Olivia had gone to art school, had lived for a million years with a man named Josh, had moved to New York and started to make her hats. Winnie was right: It just felt like that all belonged to someone else.
Her
life, Olivia thought, was about David.

“B.D.,” Winnie had told her, “you were strong and funny and full of ideas about things to do with your life. You left Josh, didn’t you? And you became a fucking milliner, which is not like the most common profession in the world. You didn’t marry that guy who wanted to marry you so bad. What was his name? Chris? You didn’t like that he said Feb-
u
-ary instead of February and li-
berry
instead of library. You were a person who had her limits. You raised a cat by yourself, for Christ’s sake.”

B.D., Olivia thought as she added another dead skunk to her list, she would not be on this road at all. She would not have let a pregnant teenager into her home. The kid was probably a professional thief. Or worse. If Olivia could call anyone right now and ask advice, she’d call David; he’d always given her good advice. He’d made lists, pro and con. He’d made graphs and time lines. He’d used logic. They used to kid that each of them operated from the opposite side of their brain, so that together they had one good functioning brain. Now here she was, stuck with just her half.

Olivia turned at the rotary that would bring her to the road that led to Ruby’s parents’ house. She needed to figure out what to say to them. What did she want, anyway? To save the girl? To save herself? Before David, Olivia had tried to save everything—Narragansett Bay, the Platte River, manatees and the great northern wolf. But saving babies and bad girls was different from saving bodies of water or endangered animals.

At this very moment, that girl was asleep in her house. Poking around. Robbing her, maybe. Forget B.D., Olivia thought. She had to decide what she wanted with Ruby.

Strawberry Field Lane sat in the middle of a development filled with streets named after fruit, not Beatles songs. Olivia would have preferred driving down Penny Lane or Day Tripper Boulevard. But here she was, navigating Pumpkin Patch Road and Apple Orchard Court, a crumpled street map on her lap. It was very hot. Rivulets of sweat trickled down her arms and back. All the houses looked alike: small and square, slightly run-down despite the cheerful street names.

Janice lived across the highway, in a newer part of town, one that was struggling to keep some of its rural flavor. Here, there were few trees, only parched patches of lawns and some cheap plastic swimming pools decorated with garish Barneys and Simbas. It was noisy from cars getting on and off the interstate somewhere behind the houses.

At last, Olivia reached Strawberry Field Lane. Number fifteen was painted the color of rust. On the front door hung a scarecrow dressed like Uncle Sam. A dog paced the length of a chain-link fence in the backyard. It was one of those dogs that eat children, a Rottweiler or Doberman. Olivia sat sweating in her car across the street, watching the house, the dog, trying to figure out what the hell she was doing there. Finally, she unstuck her legs from the seat and walked to the front door of number fifteen, where, up-close, Uncle Sam looked like a hanged man. She could hear the drone of a television inside, the laughter of a studio audience.

Olivia knocked.

The woman who answered looked remarkably like Ruby, younger than Olivia. An older sister maybe, dressed in a nurse’s uniform with a name tag that read
DENISE.
She didn’t open the door very wide, just enough to get a good view of Olivia. The smell of fried food hit Olivia and made her swoon.

“We don’t want anything,” Denise said in a tired voice. “And we don’t want to give anything.”

“No!” Olivia said too loudly and too fast. She was afraid the woman would close the door and that would be that.

“What? Lost cat? Dead dog?” Her voice told Olivia she had heard it all.

“I wanted to talk to someone about Ruby?” Olivia said.

The woman glanced over her shoulder, and Olivia followed her backward stare. Two pajamaed boys watched television. The room was small and square, like the house itself, the blinds drawn, the room cluttered with plaid furniture and some sort of oversized reclining chair and tables stacked with magazines and newspapers. Before Olivia could take more in, the woman was outside, too, the door firmly shut behind her.

“I don’t want to wake up Bobby,” she said. “If he knows I’m even talking about her, he’ll go nuts.” She took a big preparatory breath. “She okay?”

Olivia nodded.

The woman sighed, relieved. Out here in the bright light, Olivia saw that she was older. Her face was ruddy, full of tired lines caked with makeup. Her eyes were a pretty shade of blue, but flat, and the bright blue lines she’d penciled in beneath them gave her a clownish appearance. There were thick clumps of mascara on her lashes, and her hair was overpermed, overcolored. Olivia took in all of this. She tried to imagine the girl here, moving about the tiny house with her big belly and her dreamy eyes.