Ruby on the Outside (2 page)

Chapter Three

I've never intentionally missed a
visit
to see my mother. That's not to say there haven't been weekends we didn't get to go. Weeks we didn't get to go, or
couldn't
go, or someone was sick, or the car was not working, or there was a lockdown at Bedford Hills and we waited for hours and never got inside.

When she first went to jail, before her trial, before she got sent to Bedford Hills and we were still living up near Saratoga somewhere, I didn't see my mom for eight months. But since then I've never willingly turned down a chance to visit my mom, until just now.

Until today.

“I'm just thinking I can't go with you this time, Matoo,” I am saying, but even as the words are coming out of my mouth I am regretting them. I feel bad already.

But I have to stay home today, because I know Kristin is going away again—she calls it a “play-date” which seems to be another mothery-type expression that never made its way into our house. And I am hoping that while Kristin is away, that girl Margalit will be at the pool and I'll get a chance to meet her.

“Well, it's visiting day and I'm just thinking you
are
going to come.” Matoo is wiping out the top shelf of the fridge with a paper towel.

I am standing at the doorway to the kitchen watching her, and now I am really thinking hard. The air conditioner kicks on and the hum is like my brain working. I know I could just tell my mom the truth.

I can always tell my mom the truth.

And the truth is I've never had a real friend. A best friend, not just a condo friend. I think, partly it's because of my secret-keeping. I think the thing about having a best friend is that you don't have any secrets, at least not from each other. Most girls I know, and even boys I know, have one really, really important friend that rises above all the others who are just regular friends. It's the kid who always comes over after school. Sometimes they even have special sayings together. The boys make up crazy handshakes. The girls do each other's hair or dress alike on prearranged days and then act like it was just a coincidence because they are such good friends. There are two girls in my school who call each other “twins” even though they look nothing alike. They aren't even sisters.

So I know I could just tell my mom why I want to stay home today and she would understand. I just don't feel like explaining all this to Matoo.

So I almost start to tell Matoo that I have a big, huge book report due, which is the usual go-to excuse for everything, but then I remember it's nearly the end of June and a big, huge book report with a week left of school seems unlikely. The air conditioner shuts off as quickly as it went on, and the room is dead silent.

Matoo closes the fridge door and looks at me. “What is it?”

I saw something about migraines on television news this morning and it's the first thing that comes into my head, so I say, “I have a bad headache.” And then, just to make sure, I add, “And I think I have a little stomachache.”

Bad move. Matoo looks worried. Sickness is her best thing. She isn't so keen on things that hurt that you can't see, but she's really good at taking a temperature, spooning out cough syrup, or setting up the humidifier and filling it with that nasty VapoRub.

“Well, you know, it's going around. There's that summer virus. Or it may be food poisoning. Some kind of parasite. What did you eat yesterday?” Matoo says.

She looks really worried and I feel bad. Matoo lost her husband when she was younger and he was still young too. They had only been married five years and they never had any children. He died of a brain aneurysm so whenever someone has a headache I bet she thinks about her husband, Uncle Thomas. And now I feel terrible but not so terrible because maybe I think it is working.

“No, I'm not that sick,” I say quickly. “Maybe I'm just tired.”

“Ruby.” Matoo is holding her glasses in her hand and rubbing the indent on her nose. Matoo wears thick glasses—really thick glasses. When she takes them off, there's a deep groove in the bridge of her nose.

I can't imagine holding up all that weight on my nose all day long. Maybe that's why she's always so worried. It's those heavy glasses.

“Maybe I should stay home with you,” she says.

“No,” I blurt out too fast. “I'll be fine. I'll just lie on the couch and watch TV. I mean, a little TV, and I'll read some.”

I finally get Matoo to agree to leave me home alone, and then as soon as I watch her car pulling out of our spot in parking lot—space 102, like our house number—I really
do
get a stomachache, and it's a
horrible
stomachache.

I watch Matoo's car heading out of the condo complex without me and I am all confused. Maybe I should run out into the parking lot after her, but it's too late. I feel like I am losing my mother all over again. And there goes my heart, beating like crazy again. But I remember what my mother has told me:
We don't have so much time together, Ruby. So when we are together there is no pretending. I never want you to visit me and be wishing you were somewhere else. We don't have time for that. It just gives us more to talk about when you do come.

So here I am, lying on my back, on my towel in the grassy area that surrounds the concrete ledge of the pool, trying to figure out how I can get to meet this new girl at our condo, when a shadow comes across my body. I feel the heat of the sun disappear from my face. I open my eyes.

“Hey, I'm Margalit. Wanna be friends?”

I sit up.

“Huh?”

“I'm Margalit. I see you watching me so I thought maybe you wanted to be friends.”

“I wasn't watching you.” It's a knee-jerk reaction.

She sits down on the edge of my towel. “Oh, well, I thought you were. I'm Margalit.”

Today she is wearing a different bathing suit, a red one, like a lifeguard's but without the big white cross and without the wording. But you could get confused, I bet, if you were drowning or something.

“I'm Ruby Danes,” I answered, not sure why I just gave my full name.

“Oh, cool,” she says.

Then she falls quiet and that doesn't seem to bother her either, like it's just okay to sit here, so close to each other on my towel, and not talk, which I suppose it is.

Her black hair is wet and it shines, practically glistens in the sun. We sit like that for a while, and I am wondering if I'll just wait like this, watching this girl's hair dry.

“I'm hot,” I say after another beat or two.

Margalit jumps up. “Great, let's go in the pool.”

Chapter Four

I am pretty sure that
this awful feeling I have, lying on the couch waiting for Matoo to get back from Bedford Hills, is what's known as extreme guilt. I also had to hide my bathing suit in my bottom drawer, turn on the water in the shower so it looks like I took a shower, because my hair is so wet and there's no way it will dry before Matoo gets home. Then just as I hear the front door lock turn I realize my hair will smell like chlorine anyway, and, oh, why didn't I just get in the shower and really wash my hair? Then I wouldn't be lying, at least, about one thing.

But it's too late.

“Ruby? I'm back.”

Matoo walks into the living room and sits right down at the end of the couch. Maybe she doesn't smell anything.

“How was mom?” I ask.

Matoo shrugs.

“Did she ask about me?”

“Of course she asked about you. I didn't want to tell her you weren't feeling well. You know how upset she gets when she thinks you're sick.”

Oh right, I didn't think about that. Why am I such a selfish person?

“What did you tell her?”

Matoo leans against the back of the couch.

“I told her you made a new friend at the pool and you wanted to hang out with her today.”

What?

I look at Matoo to see if I can see anything in her face that might give her away, but her glasses are so thick, like prisms. I can't tell if she's tricking me.

Does Matoo know?

Did she know the whole time?

“I knew that would make your mother happy. She doesn't think you have enough friends,” Matoo explains.

“Oh.” That's all I say.

Talk about ironic. I can't now suddenly tell the truth and tell Matoo,
I do. I do have a new friend.

But I
do
. I do have a new friend. At least, I think so.

Margalit.

We spent a whole hour in the pool. First we had a tea party under the water, holding our breath, crossing our legs, and sitting at the bottom of the shallow end, pretending to pour and sip cups of tea. To be honest, I'm not sure what the point of this was, but it was fun.

It was fun just being with someone who laughs so quickly and fully, like Margalit. I never laugh that easily, but with Margalit I was howling. Just hearing her laugh made me laugh, a deep, full laugh the kind that has a life of its own and feels like you are floating in a happiness tank.

Next we dove for dimes and nickels that I found in the bottom of my pool bag. We took turns being the one to throw the coins, scattering and waiting for them to sink.

“One, two, three, go,” Margalit shouted and we both splashed into the water, trying to remember where we saw the money settle.

We did cannonballs off the diving board and did this made-up thing where we had to call out our favorite dessert in midair before we hit the surface of the water. We played all sorts of games that Kristin would have thought were too babyish until I said I had to get home.

“Why?” Margalit asked me. “It's still early. It's still hot out.”

I had to go.

I had to get back before Matoo got home from visiting, but I said I could stay a little longer, and a little longer, and then it was almost four o'clock.

“I really gotta go.”

Matoo never seemed to suspect anything. We eat dinner and I go to bed early. She comes in and sits at the end of my bed, like she has done every night since I told her my mother used to do that. The truth was, I had no idea if my mother used to do that or not, but it was one night, just a couple of weeks after we had just moved to Mt. Kisco and I was scared. It was a new house and I was starting first grade. I was already forgetting my mother, it had been so long, nearly a year since she was arrested, so I just said that. I didn't know how else to ask. I told Matoo, kind of offhanded like that—I think she was still Aunt Barbara back then—that my mother used to sit with me until I fell asleep.

Matoo was exhausted that night, I knew. She is a lot older than my mother, and besides she was still unpacking all our boxes and she had just started her new job and she probably wasn't used to having a little kid around all the time.

She sighed, but she didn't say anything and she sat down at the end of my bed. Matoo didn't sing or tell me a bedtime story, but she did sit there for a while, quietly, not saying anything. I remember that night, peeking every now and then to see if she was still there, and she was. Then, the next thing I knew, it was morning.

Now, all these years later and Matoo comes in every night and sits down. She doesn't wait until I've fallen asleep anymore, but she sits for just a minute or two. We usually talk about the day, school, chores, or what we have to do the next day.

“So are you feeling better?” Matoo is saying now.

I almost forget I am supposed to have a headache.

“Yeah, all better,” I tell her.

Matoo is looking at me so I think it's because she can somehow tell if I still have a headache or not, just by looking at my face. But she says, “Why don't we get you a haircut?”

“A haircut?” I have been growing my hair for so long. My goal is to see if I can get it to reach midway down my back. Or does Matoo smell the chlorine after all and this is her way of punishing me for not telling the truth?

“Yes, a real haircut at a real fancy salon. You have such a pretty little face, you don't want so much hair overwhelming it.”

No, this was just one of those times Matoo thinks she's forgotten something she is supposed to do as my stand-in mother. Matoo was not one of those ladies who gets her fingernails painted pink or her hair done once a week, but she thinks it's something a girl needs to learn about.

She means well.

“But I was wanting to grow my hair, Matoo.”

“Well, we can talk about it in the morning.” She pats my feet, poking up under the covers. She stands up. “Try and get some sleep.”

When she closes the door I suddenly feel like crying. I miss my mother so badly and I missed my chance to see her today. I can't go back and fix it now.

My nose starts to tingle. I get this burning in my throat and I don't even know where it is coming from. I know I am lucky. I know I have a safe place to live and people who care about me.

I am ungrateful
and
a double liar.

Smile more,
Matoo always tells me.
When you smile you feel better.
It's another one of Matoo's famous sayings.

So lying in the dark, I try to smile. I force my mouth to turn up at the corners. I think I am smiling and I wonder what my mother is doing. She is in her cell by now, the steel bars pulled shut and locked. Maybe she is asleep. Maybe she is thinking about me. I try to smile but I feel the wetness leaking out of my eyes and dripping down my cheeks onto my pillow. I miss my mother so much.