T
hat night as her mother disappears into the recesses of the house (Ruby hears the water running into the tub, knows that she will be there for at least an hour), Ruby closes her bedroom door, fills her backpack with food, water. A bar of soap, a flashlight she found in the kitchen, a pillow. She stuffs everything into her backpack and carefully slips out the back door, like a thief, only backwards. She is giving rather than stealing, breaking out rather than breaking in.
The air is strange, almost electrified. She thinks about the storm that is coming and about the bags of sand that Gloria has left to keep them safe. She knows she should move them against the back of the house, that she and her mom should prepare. But hurricane preparations seem silly on this star-filled night. The sky is the color of a ripe plum, it is warm, and the air hums with possibility.
Ruby knows the girl wants to leave. She hasn’t said a word, but Ruby can sense a restlessness in her eyes. As soon as her foot is better, she will go, make her way to wherever it is that she’s headed. All of this she has communicated with nothing more than gestures. And her impending departure hits Ruby like a dull fist in the chest. There is something so comforting about her being out there. Taking care of her has given Ruby a sense of purpose. Without the bridge to build, without Izzy, without her father and Bunk, she has felt so alone. She wonders if this is what her mother feels like. This odd absence from the world. It is different than feeling out of place. It is more like feeling like you have become a shadow. Dimensionless. Inconsequential.
She walks through the brush, crushing twigs and leaves and other brush under her feet. She wonders if the girl can hear her. She calls out softly. “It’s only me,” she says.
The girl pushes open the door, and ushers her into the tiny dark room.
Ruby sits with her and silently watches as she eats. She uses both hands, stuffing her mouth and chewing loudly. She even growls a little, her body’s response to the cheese and fruit. To the leftover chicken, the skin crisp and freckled with pepper. When she finishes, Ruby can see the slick grease on her lips. Crumbs across her big belly.
Ruby gestures toward the girl’s foot, and she nods as though to say, “It’s okay.”
“I brought you some books,” she says then, reaching into her backpack and pulling out the books she pilfered from her mother’s shelf. When she selected them, she thought she was being helpful, but now as the girl scowls, she worries that she’s made a mistake.
Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy. What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
Nessa pushes them aside, shaking her head, and instead reaches for a worn paperback copy of
Bridge to Terabithia
that Ruby always keeps in her backpack. This is Ruby’s favorite book, and from the look in the girl’s eyes, it is hers as well. This makes Ruby smile. And as her smile widens, her face hurts. How long has it been since she’s smiled? But despite the discomfort of her happiness, she continues to grin as the girl thumbs through the pages, nodding, touching her belly absently as she reads. She notices the girls lips move as she reads, like the kindergartners at school. And suddenly she realizes that this girl is not much older than she is. Despite the fact that she’s going to have a baby, that she’s all alone in the world. She needs to know how many years are between them.
“How old are you?” Ruby asks.
The girl looks up from the book, absently, as though she is being pulled from another world. She sets the book down and holds up both hands. Ten fingers. She closes them and reopens them, showing seven fingers this time. Seventeen. She’s just six years older than Ruby. This is somehow both thrilling and terrifying to her.
“Do you want to see something?” Ruby asks, and Nessa nods.
She has brought the sketches of the bridge and now she shows the girl, who runs her fingertips, which are callused with filthy nails, across the drawings. She flips through the pages quickly, as though she is reading a catalogue and trying to pick out a dress or a new pair of shoes. She stops at the last page and presses the binding open so she can study it. She holds it close to her face, scrunches her nose and looks. Really looks.
This is the one that she hasn’t shown to Izzy. The one that she has only dreamed of and hasn’t shared. Izzy would say it was impossible: the one that, at first glance, defies all rules of physics. Only Ruby knows that it only
looks
impossible. And the illusion of unachievable construction, of architecture that relies somehow on magic rather than geometry, is exactly what she’s been trying to achieve. Izzy, who is practical at best and annoyingly pragmatic at worst, would scoff at it. Would roll her eyes. And for the first time, looking at the bridge with this girl whose face is alight with wonder at what she’s created, she feels a plunk of sadness. About Izzy. About what if their friendship is just
over?
When the girl presses her hand against her belly, looking uncomfortable, shifting her weight, Ruby hands her the pillow she’s brought and the girl puts it behind her back. The girl tilts her head, as though trying to figure something out. Her eyes are glossy. Ruby wonders what questions she is keeping inside. She reaches then into her bag, which lies next to her, and pulls out a slip of paper. It is folded into a tiny square, like the paper fortunetellers that she and Izzy used to make. She hands it to Ruby, presses it into her palm. And she knows with this gesture that she is asking for her help. That this piece of paper may be the most important thing in the world. And so Ruby looks at it. It’s just a name, a man’s name, and a phone number. A phone number she knows as well as her own. Ruby cocks her head, confused. She doesn’t understand.
“Where did you get this?” Ruby asks, wondering now if it’s truly an accident that she’s wound up here. That they’ve found each other.
But Nessa doesn’t speak, and Ruby gingerly puts it in her own pocket.
Nessa leans against the broken wall of the shack, and Ruby turns off the flashlight. After a while the girl starts to drift off to sleep, and Ruby peers down at her. It strikes her that this is like some odd fairytale. She wonders, for just a quick second, whether the girl even exists or not. What moral there might be to this story. And how it will end.
She leaves reluctantly to go home. She knows that the girl won’t stay here forever, that she has a reason for being here, and that reason is folded up inside that note in her pocket. That her job is to help her. And so, she feels strangely serene as she walks back toward her mother’s house. Despite everything that’s happened with Izzy, despite being worried about her dad, despite her mother, she feels like she has a mission now. A purpose.
The wind is really howling. It sounds like wolves. Like something wounded in the woods. She runs downstream until the river narrows and she is able to pass. It seems to be moving more quickly than usual, and when her foot dips into the water it rushes fast and cold over her foot, as if it has somewhere to go. She runs across the lawn toward the broken fence. The house is completely dark. She feels herself awash with relief. Her mother isn’t awake, waiting to reprimand her, to demand to know where she was. She can slip back into the house, into her bed, unnoticed.
T
he hot bath makes Sylvie drowsy, and it is all she can do to dry herself off and put on her nightgown before crawling into the warm softness of her bed. She walks down the hall, sees the light under Ruby’s door has gone out. She must have gone to sleep already. She said at dinner that she just wanted to go to bed early. She considers opening the door and checking on her, but she knows that sleep is a gift and doesn’t want to steal that from her.
She agonizes over whether or not to take a pill tonight. The pills work well,
too
well. Sometimes, when she takes them, it feels as though she has fallen into a pit of quicksand. A well filled with sludge and mud and leaves. It is not sleep, but a sort of
death
she experiences when she takes the medication. But sometimes she has no choice. Sometimes, it is the only way to quiet her mind.
She senses that tonight might be one of those nights. Gloria’s visit has reopened a wound. Once, several years ago, she cut her finger on an aluminum lid. The cut was thin but very deep. The slice healed quickly, surprisingly so. But even though it looked fine on the outside, it still ached inside. It was as though the tissues beneath the skin’s surface were still damaged. Every time she bumped it on something, the pain nearly brought her to her knees.
She is worried about Robert as well. He is another wound that goes deeper than simple flesh. He is an ache that runs deeper inside her than almost any. Yet, they pretend for each other, for Ruby, that being apart is for the best. That the pain isn’t bottomless. The wound festering under the fragile pink flesh that conceals it.
But her worry now is as vivid and real as it has ever been. She has tried to call his cell number, but it goes straight to voice mail. She has not been able to get much information from the radio, only that the storm should make landfall in the Carolinas tonight or tomorrow. She and Robert went there years ago when they were first married. Larry’s house is just a few blocks from the ocean. When she closes her eyes she thinks of the footage of the tsunami in Asia, she worries about the hurricane carrying Robert and Bunk away. And she knows that this loss would be one she wouldn’t survive. Because as long as Robert still breathes, there is hope. There is possibility of healing. Of
true
healing. Despite every bit of better judgment, she clings to this.
As she pulls back the sheets and climbs into the bed, she remembers the way he always made sure to face her when they fell asleep at night. She remembers his arm, pulling her close into his body, the strong clean smell of his skin, his callused hands running down her back. He never turned away until after she’d fallen asleep.
She tries and fails to turn off the flickering, skipping machine that is her mind. It makes her think of the old microfiche machines they used to have before the Internet. Every single night she scrolls backwards through the sepia recollections, moments blurring past and then coming suddenly into focus again. She tries not to linger too long on any of the images, just long enough to orient herself, but still, each of them causes deep pangs of regret and shame. The entire process just another exercise in self-loathing.
And so she reaches into the drawer and opens the bottle, tossing the pill down her throat like you might feed a pill to a dog. So that before she can second guess the decision, it is already gone.
T
here are strings pulling at her limbs; she is a marionette, a wooden doll. She can’t seem to lift her eyelids though, those strings somehow unattached, or severed. Still, there is the sound of something against the far wall of her bedroom, and she knows that she must climb out of the well, must rise up from these impossible depths to acknowledge it. Her heart is pounding wildly inside her chest, but her legs and arms and neck will not comply.
Finally, through sheer will, she is able to sit up. The effort exhausts her further, though, and she can feel cold sweat running down her sides. And even as she is upright, her entire body feels weighed down, as though someone has poured cement down her throat, into her belly, filling her legs and arms. She is leaden. She has been rendered into stone.
The sound is under her window, the one that faces the backyard. It is loud. Insistent. But also careful. Whoever is making the sound is trying to be quiet. They’ve come back. She wishes she had left the signs up. As if her words of warning were enough to keep someone away. She is even, for a moment, angry at Ruby for shaming her into taking them down.
She opens the drawer, and the bottle, now nearly empty, rolls toward the front. She reaches past it and pulls out the gun.
She drags her body, her burden, from the warm bed and shuffles across the cold floor like an old woman, clutching the gun as though it can somehow ground her. As though it is enough. And she makes her way to the kitchen. She peers out the kitchen window at the backyard, but it is dark. Despite the movement, the motion in the backyard, whoever is out there has managed to not set off the sensors. The floodlight is out. She wonders if they have smashed the bulb again the way they did before. If she somehow slept through another bit of careful destruction.
She flicks on the wall switch for the kitchen light to act as a warning, but the light does not come on. Confused, she looks toward the stove where the time is usually illuminated in blue block numbers, but it is also out. She opens the refrigerator door to warm darkness. The power has failed, and she wonders if the pill made her sleep through a storm. If the hurricane has come and gone already. She wonders how many hours she has lost. How many days, how many years.
But the air is quiet, no rain. Only the deep low hum of wind. She runs her hand across the counter, looking for the flashlight the grocery delivery boy dropped off, but she can’t find it. She fumbles like a blind person through the kitchen, terrified of whatever the darkness is hiding outside. But when she hears that sound again, crushing leaves and scratching, she throws open the backdoor. And when she sees the dark form moving through her backyard, she raises the gun and aims.
N
essa is startled awake by the explosion. It punctuates whatever strange dream she was having. And for only a second, she is unable to determine which world it came from: the world of her dreams or this one. This one of howling wind and hard floors, and an aching back. This one made of hunger and discomfort and longing.
She sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and looks first for the little girl, Ruby. She must have left while she was still sleeping. She peers around the small room, but it is too dark to see, and her eyes are still struggling to focus on this landscape, rather than her dreamscape. She has gone from a world of color to a world not of black and white but only black. She has awakened not to sunlight but to incredible darkness.
It was a gunshot, she realizes. This becomes immediately clear and she surfaces back into this world. The loud reverberating pop is not a sound of nature but of man. And she struggles to remember what season it is. She remembers when she lived here that some of the boys, the ones in her classes, were excused from school to go hunt with their fathers. These were the same ones who started school late in the fall because they were busy haying their families’ fields. They were also the ones who came late to school because before school they had to milk the cows and feed and water the horses. These were the boys who wore soft plaid shirts and whose Wranglers’ pockets had faded round circles from their packs of Skoal. These were the boys who tasted like winter. Like tobacco and pine. She loved the wood smoke smell of them. As if they were part of the woods themselves, these boys. A whole new species of man.
But it is summer now. Deer season is during the school year, after the leaves have fallen from the trees. She remembers the trucks driving like the Fourth of July parade through town with wide-eyed deer tethered down in the back. She remembers the smell of horse shit on their work boots and the way their skin smelled like sweet grass.
There is a strange silence that follows the explosion, and then Nessa becomes oriented, her eyes adjusting, and the silence is followed by a low, deep wailing. A keening. She squeezes her eyes shut. The sound is soft but certain, and difficult to separate from the prevailing rush of wind through the trees. But she is overwhelmed suddenly by a sense of urgency. A connection that makes no logical sense (besides proximity) between the little girl and that violent sound. She just knows that something terrible has happened, and she rises as though she can do something about it. But as she stands, hobbled by three broken toes and her enormous belly, she knows that it is ludicrous. She is worthless. Who can she help like this? She has been rendered a child by motherhood. It is ludicrous but true. She is helpless, dependent, afraid.
And so she sits in the doorway of the shack, her ears pricked for whatever comes next. An ineffectual bystander. Once again, an impotent witness.