A
t the swimming pool on Tuesday morning, it’s not the same boy with the clipboard at the gate. Instead it’s one of the few adults who seem to run the pool and the park. He’s Ruby’s dad’s age, and there’s no way on earth he’s going to let her leave in the middle of swimming lessons. When she tells him she’s not feeling well, that she needs to go home, he shrugs and says, “Sorry, kid. Why don’t you just sit and watch? I can’t make you go in the water, but I can’t let you leave.”
And so she walks back to the Tadpoles and sits down on the edge of the water, drawing her knees up to her chest.
“Coming in?” Nora asks brightly, her optimism never wavering. But Ruby just shakes her head and stares at the water.
The air is loud with the sounds of children squealing, water splashing, and whistles blowing. It’s all the sounds of summer at once. The ice cream truck that comes by and waits for the kids to be released pulls up, blares “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and all of it is almost more than she can bear. She almost wishes she could just get in the water and let her ears fill, let the cool blue water of the pool drown out all those sounds.
She also can’t stand to look over where the Junior Lifeguards are swimming. Watching Izzy pretending to be cool (flipping her hair, putting her hands on her hips, throwing her head back in laughter) makes her feel even more like a little kid than taking lessons with the Tadpoles. And so she stares at her feet, callused and brown from the summer. She studies the way her second toe seems to have an extra joint, making it longer than her big toe. Her mother told her once that this meant that she was descended from royalty. She thinks it just makes her look like a freak and none of her shoes fit right.
She looks up when she feels cold water dripping on her. Izzy is standing there, her arms crossed across her chest.
“Hi,” Izzy says, and it sounds like an accusation. Like Ruby has done something wrong.
Ruby shields her eyes from the sun and peers up at Izzy’s face. She’s wearing mascara. And lip gloss. At the pool.
“Hi,” Ruby says.
Marcy is standing a couple of feet behind her, as though she is her bodyguard.
“My mom says we’ll be by to pick you up for the fair tomorrow at ten. If you’re still coming,” Izzy says.
Ruby doesn’t know what to say. She knows she should shake her head, say
No thanks, I’m going with somebody else.
But there
is
nobody else. Izzy is her best friend.
Was
her best friend until two days ago. These are uncharted waters, and she can’t swim. She is doing everything in her power just to keep her head up. To keep from crying.
“Okay,” she says, and Marcy sighs.
“And make sure you bring your own money,” Izzy says then, and Ruby feels her throat grow thick. Of course she’ll bring her own money. She always brings her own money. But the way Izzy says it made it sound like she is some sort of mooch. Like she is poor. The old Izzy never talked about money. Marcy nods, as though it’s her job to make sure Ruby plays by these new rules.
“Well, bye!” Izzy says and walks away, Marcy following behind her.
As soon as the whistle blows and all of the kids scramble out of the water and the lifeguards jump in, she gathers her things and runs toward the gate. She has a dollar in her pocket, and on any other day she would go straight to the ice cream truck and order a rocket pop. She and Izzy would get them together and eat them as they sat on the swings in the playground. But the money in her pocket makes her think about the fair. About Marcy. And so she just gets on her bike and pedals away, her towel waving out behind her like a cape. She flies past the library, past Marcy’s house and past Miss Piggy. Gloria is outside on the porch painting a chair. Ruby doesn’t stop; she doesn’t even wave when Gloria calls after her. Instead she rides her bike the short way, the wrong way.
It is out of habit that she finds herself here. But the moment the bridge comes into view, it’s as though she has fallen into the pool. Her vision gets wavy, her ears fill, and her lungs collapse. She can’t breathe.
Crying, she turns the bike around and rides the other way, back through town, back past the park and the library and the school. She goes the long way, the
safe
way, like she’s supposed to, until she’s back at her mom’s house again.
She walks her bike up the overgrown drive and tries not to think about what Marcy will say when Gloria pulls up to pick her up tomorrow. She tries not to think of the disdain in Izzy’s face.
She hears rustling by the shed and is startled to see her mother outside. She is dressed in an old pair of blue jeans and one of her dad’s T-shirts. She looks smaller inside the old shirt. She’s dragging a piece of plywood from the shed.
“What are you doing?” Ruby asks.
“Somebody came into the garden last night,” she says. “I don’t know why I didn’t hear anything.”
“How do you know?” Ruby asks.
“Well, half of the tomatoes are gone. The green beans are all picked over, and the watermelon is gone too.”
“It could have been animals,” Ruby offers. Though she can’t imagine what animal would walk off with a watermelon.
“The bulb in the floodlight is smashed. There’s glass everywhere.”
“Wow,” Ruby says. The idea that somebody was in the garden is strange. Everyone around here has a garden. What on earth would somebody want with her mom’s tomatoes?
“Help me build this fence?” her mom says, and Ruby nods. But she doesn’t know how to make a fence. She doesn’t know the first thing about fences. What she knows are bridges. When they did the unit on bridges last spring in fifth grade, Mrs. McKnight taught them how to make a bridge out of balsa wood. She worked on hers every single day for three weeks until it was finished. It was a thing of beauty, Mrs. McKnight said. She leaned over and whispered just that in her ear. “That,” she said, “is a beautiful bridge. Ruby, I hope you realize that you have a very special talent. I think you may have found your calling.”
She likes to think of the future this way: like a voice calling out to her. Like something speaking to you from far, far away. And the closer you get to it, the clearer the voice is. She imagines herself on one island, and that voice calling to her from another island she can’t even make out yet it’s so far away. And she knows, somehow, that her job is to build a bridge between the two.
The last time she was in the shed was not long after the accident, before her dad came home from the hospital and she tried to build a ramp up into the house for his chair. But the ramp split in half, and Bunk had to help her. She didn’t know then what she knows now. About suspension, about load.
She helps her mom drag the sheets of plywood out of the shed and they stand together, staring at them. She thinks about the delicate pieces of balsa wood, the graph paper they used to map their bridge plans out. She recalls the precise task of gluing the pieces together, the pliability of the wood, the way it bent at her will. She thinks about how all those fragile pieces wound up making something so strong.
Her mom hands her her dad’s old drill, but the battery’s dead, so she searches everywhere for the long orange extension cord. It’s like a spider den in the shed. She’s not afraid of spiders, but she
is
afraid of snakes. She knows there aren’t any poisonous ones living in Vermont, but her throat still gets thick every time one of them slithers out of the grass or out from under the porch.
She plugs the cord in the kitchen and runs it out under the door. It barely reaches the backyard where she tries to envision how this is all going to work. That is one thing she learned from building the bridge: you can’t just start building. You need to think ahead, to plan.
The backyard is overgrown as well, the grass and weeds thick. The lawn mower is broken or else she’d get back here and take care of it herself. Jess and she used to have a swing set back here, but it rusted out and their dad took it to the dump. Now there are just the cement blocks he poured into the ground to hold the swing set steady, the rusty severed pipes from where he sawed the frame off. They also used to have a dog, a mutt named Foster, and the run he was chained up to still crisscrosses the backyard. The sight of that run makes her feel bad. She didn’t love that dog the way she should have. Nobody did. He was a mean dog, but it was probably just because he hated being stuck outside, hated that nobody paid any attention to him unless he was barking. Ruby fed him every night but that was about it. Her dad wouldn’t let him in the house; he said animals weren’t meant to live inside. Maybe if he hadn’t been tied up in the backyard he could have made a good pet. That’s just one of those things she’ll never know though. It seems to Ruby that life is made up of stuff like that. A billion questions with endless multiple choice answers. Sometimes you get them wrong, even when the right answer is sitting there in front of you.
“What do you think?” her mom asks.
“I don’t know,” Ruby says. “I guess we need to fasten the first one to the house somehow.” She finds some hinges in the shed and drills them to the plywood, then she drills the other side of the hinge to the side of the house. It makes an awful sound and a few sparks when she drills into the metal siding. She tries to use what she remembers from building the model bridges to build the fence, but it’s not the same.
A bridge is meant to connect people, but a fence is meant to keep people out. Or in.
One by one, they drag the big sheets of plywood from the shed to the backyard. One by one, they lean one up against the next, fastening them together with whatever hardware they can find in the shed. By the time they’re done, they’re both sweaty, their hands blistered, and the wind is blowing so hard Ruby’s worried this house of wooden cards they just made is going to blow right over. It looks terrible. Like an eleven-year-old made it. The pieces don’t stand up straight at all; they lean in on each other like football players in a huddle in a losing game. Defeated.
But her mom seems happy. “That’ll do the trick,” she says. And she reaches for Ruby’s arm. Her skin feels electric; Ruby almost expects sparks to come flying off her. “Thank you.”
She leans into her mother then, closing her eyes as she presses through that wild force field that encloses her mother. And for a single moment, she feels connected.
But then the phone rings, and her mom’s eyes grow wide and scared again. They separate and Ruby’s runs through the back door into the kitchen, picking up the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, Ruby,” her dad says.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says, smiling, missing him suddenly more than she ever has.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
She thinks about that pathetic fence. About whoever it was who knocked out the bulb and stole the watermelon. She thinks about Izzy and Marcy and the bridge. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m going to the fair tomorrow.”
“Oh good, baby. Gloria taking you?”
She nods, the lump in her throat swollen and thick. “Yep.”
“Listen, remember there’s that storm coming up the coast?” he says.
“Yeah. Irene.”
“Well, they’re saying now it could hit North Carolina sometime in the next few days. I’m not too worried about it, but just wanted to give you and your mom a heads up. We’re going to help Uncle Larry shore up the house. Sandbags and all that. Hopefully, it’ll pass real quick and then we’ll be on our way home this weekend.”
She nods again. She can’t believe he’s only been gone a couple of days. It feels like the whole world has turned upside down since he and Bunk left.
“Hey, thanks for getting your mom’s phone back up. You caught that mama raccoon yet?”
“Nope.”
“Well, keep checking,” he says. “And as soon as you’ve got it, call Animal Control.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she says.
“Okay, baby girl. Listen, I love you. And I miss you.”
“Miss you too, Daddy. Say hi to Bunk.”
“Can I talk to your mom?”
Ruby looks up, but her mom isn’t in the room. She can hear the shower running and she knows that she’s doing this so she won’t have to talk to her dad.
“I think she’s taking a shower,” Ruby says.
“Okeydoke. I’ll call again tonight.”
Ruby sits down at the table and sees that her mother has been working on another bird, one with a spotted chest. It’s almost done; the invisible threads sewing shut the place where its heart used to be just need to be clipped. She’s got some birch branches scattered across the table to give the bird a habitat inside its glass jar. When she’s done, you won’t even be able to tell that it’s dead. That its chest is empty, its heart replaced with puffs of cotton.
N
essa knows she needs to ration the food, but she is still so hungry. Deliriously hungry. She eats the tomatoes as though they are apples. She chews on the green beans, not even bothering to spit out the sharp ends. The watermelon she will save, though she salivates at the mere thought of that sweet pink flesh. She will eat the seeds. The rind.
She knows she can’t stay here for long. Someone is bound to spot her here. Whoever owns the house with the garden she pillaged last night must know she’s out here, even if they don’t know exactly where.
She hung her wet clothes on the backside of the shack, but now they are damp with dew. The wind is incredible. Warm but almost violent. The clothes should dry quickly, and when the sun goes down again tonight, she’ll leave. She needs to find her way back into town.
Inside the shack, she lies down on the hard floor and stares up at the rotten ceiling. The baby squirms under her fingers, and she presses back. A way of communicating. She tries not to think about what will happen when the baby is ready to come out. She knows she needs to find him before that happens. This is something she cannot do on her own.
A fat housefly buzzes over her and smacks into the window again and again. She resists the urge to swat it. What a stupid creature, she thinks. There’s a door right there. There are a thousand ways to get out. She feels tears coming to her eyes as she watches the fly hurl itself again and again and again against the unyielding glass.
Later, when the sun goes down, she gathers her clothes, which are finally dry. She rolls them and stuffs them into her backpack along with her sleeping bag, which still smells of a deep earthy funk, as though her body and the ground have merged together. For dinner, she smashes the watermelon open on a rock and eats the sweet insides with her hands. But there is little sustenance to be found. It is an illusion of nourishment: her mouth flooded with flavor, but her stomach still aching and angry even after it is gone.
She knows she needs to go back to the garden again. She won’t make it to morning without something else to eat. She needs to gather her strength. She may be walking for a while. It clearly looks as though she’s gotten off track. None of this looks familiar. None of this looks like the place she used to know.
When the sun goes down, she slips off her shoes and makes her way across the river, the cold shock of it just as startling as it was before. It’s amazing how the body forgets, the amnesia of the flesh. She is wet and trembling with cold and with fear as she makes her way to the house with the garden. She stops, confused.
There wasn’t a fence here last night; she’s sure of it. She looks around, perplexed. Disoriented. This is the same place. Then her heart pounds with the realization that this fence has been erected to keep her out. Though, it’s not much of a fence. More like a ramshackle barricade. It’s haphazard, pathetic, and something about it makes her feel almost sad. She considers just turning back, getting her stuff and then moving on. But she is hungry. So hungry. And so she walks the perimeter of the fence, looking for a way in, for a weakness in this ridiculous fortress.
She’s forgotten her shoes on the other side of the river, and the grass could be snow it is so cold. She pushes each board tentatively, waiting for something to give. But, despite its appearance, the fence is quite strong. She thinks about the garden on the other side. There were still some tomatoes left, lettuce, spinach. She thinks that if she is able to dig, she might find potatoes, rutabagas. She imagines those root vegetables filling her stomach, weighing her down. She thinks about the cold crisp snap of peas and bell peppers. Her stomach roils and rumbles, she imagines the baby, like a lion growling inside her. She pats her stomach as if to soothe, but it is as futile as trying to calm a wild animal.
The lights inside the house are all out, and it is so dark she can barely see her own hands. She uses the fence as a guide as she circles the garden. She is so quiet. She is invisible.
And then there is the loud crack of a gunshot, a firecracker? No matter its source, the bang is followed by excruciating pain, though it’s nearly impossible to locate. It seems to begin in her toes, but it radiates up her calf and into her right hip. She drops to the ground, still soundlessly, her mouth failing, even now, to let go of the fury and anguish.
It is her foot. Has someone shot her foot? Bitten it? In the darkness, she gropes for her ankle and feels instead the coldness of metal. The pain is overwhelming, nauseating. She leans over and vomits onto the grass. Her mouth is filled with the now bitter recollection of melon.
It’s a trap. At least she thinks it is. She’s never seen one before. It seems like something medieval, a torture device, and her toes are trapped inside. She feels all around the mechanism, her fingers searching for release. But it is futile in this darkness. She wonders if she is going to faint.
When she hears the back door open, sees the light (the one she smashed last night) go on, she presses her body flat against the ground. She tries not to breathe.
“Who’s there? What do you want?” The woman’s voice is trembling. She sounds scared, and for a moment, Nessa feels like she should explain herself. That if she could, she would say,
I was only hungry.
But the words are trapped inside, just as her toes are captured. And so she holds her breath. It is agonizing. The baby kicks and kicks; her ribs ache.
An owl hoots and the woman says, “I have a gun. This is private property!”
Nessa doesn’t move. Even the baby seems to know the importance of stillness, of silence. It could be hours she stays here, body pressed to the cold ground. It could be years. Finally, she hears the door shut, and eventually the light clicks off, enclosing her in darkness again. But the pain has not lessened. If anything, it has gotten worse.
She has to get back to the sugarhouse. She’ll have to drag the trap with her. She feels along the ground with her fingers, and finds that the trap is connected by a chain to a spike in the ground. She digs into the earth, releasing the spike, and then tries to stand. The trap cannot be that heavy, but it feels like an anchor as she attempts to walk. Finally, she decides that the best way might be to crawl on her hands and knees. The pain in her foot is a throbbing, living thing now. Each movement creates new sparks of sensation. It is as though the metal trap is somehow electrified. Her face is damp, her cheeks hot and streaked with tears and sweat when she reaches the river. She will have to stand to get across. It’s too dangerous to crawl. She could drown. She could die here. And she worries that even if she can cross the river, she’s not sure she can make it all the way back through the woods to the shack. She worries that the woman in the house will come out again, with her gun this time, and shoot her before she has reached the other side.
And so she uses every bit of willpower and strength she has to stand. Her center of balance is completely thrown now between the baby and the current of pain that is radiating up and down the whole right side of her body. But still, she has to choose: survive or die here? Nine months pregnant in what is, for all intents and purposes, a shallow creek. Is this her destiny?
She isn’t sure how she manages to get through that icy water and back onto land. She is barely cognizant of anything but the pain as she negotiates the dark and impossible path leading back to the shack. She is elsewhere as she makes her way inside and lies down on top of her sleeping bag. She has separated from herself. From this body. From the baby even.
This is her true talent. This ability to stay and leave at the same time. She has done it since she was a little girl. There are two Nes-sas. There always have been. One who hangs around looking normal, while the other one hovers and then flees. Tonight that Nessa, the one made of
pain
and
hunger
and
baby,
lingers on the floor of this cold cabin. And the other Nessa, the one made of
light
and
poetry
and
air,
observes and then flutters away through the cracked glass in the window. She is elsewhere. She is nowhere at all.