S
he has killed her. For one blinding, horrific moment, Sylvie stares at her daughter who has collapsed to the ground and thinks,
she’s dead.
She drops the gun on the porch and feels herself turning inside out. Her heart rises up through her throat, exits from her mouth in a deafening lament that peels her skin back. That cracks her ribs at the sternum, flaying her. She feels her insides exposed (lungs, liver, large and small intestines). Her heart beats outside herself now, the inner workings of her body revealed to be just that—an imperfect and unoriginal anatomy. A machine of blood and breath both similar and entirely different from every other woman in the entire world. In a fractured second, she is eviscerated, just one of her broken birds.
But then, Ruby looks up at her, her eyes wet, and Sylvie sees that she is not dead, not at all. There is a moment of confusion and then the stunning revelation that she has made an error. She has not shot Ruby, but whatever it is that she holds in her arms. Ruby is okay. Unharmed. But whatever she is holding, the
animal,
is large, gray, and bleeding. Her heart that beats beyond her begins to sink. To collapse in on itself.
It’s the mama raccoon.
Sylvie should be overwhelmed by relief. She should feel that same heart-pounding adrenaline rush she felt the one time they lost Jess at the JC Penney and found him inside one of the round racks of clothing, hiding among a colorful sea of women’s blouses. The way she has felt a hundred times when she braked just in time, her car stopping just short of another’s bumper, the slow graceful skid across an icy road. The stammering relief each time she unwound a baby, blue and breathless, from its umbilical cord. She should feel the fear and terror abating like a tidal wave receding from a ravaged and unsteady shore. She should feel reprieve.
But instead, the grief continues, a tsunami of sorrow.
Ruby is on her knees and crying, sobbing, her whole body is shaking as she cradles the raccoon in her tiny arms. Sylvie has to keep herself from reprimanding her about germs, rabies, about the danger of wild things.
Tears run down Ruby’s pale cheeks, leaving red scars in their wake. Her eyes are frantic and angry.
“You killed her!” Ruby screams, her voice raw and scathing. “You killed the mama.”
Sylvie blinks hard, trying to refocus, as though she can change the scene before her by simply adjusting her vision. Here is her daughter, bug bites and scab-covered arms. A dirty T-shirt and jeans. It is cold, but she doesn’t have a sweater. Why is she outside? Where did she come from? Was she running away again? Will she ever come back?
The animal twitches in Ruby’s arms, which startles both of them, and Sylvie feels the raw edges of her own nerves, no longer protected by that layer of skin. The failure of epidermis. She is vulnerable now, excoriated. The raccoon releases itself all over Ruby’s arms, urine soaking her cut-off jeans, but still Ruby clings to her. She buries her face in the animal’s fur.
At the same time, Sylvie thinks she has begun to cry, the tears coming not only from her eyes but from her whole body. It’s as though without flesh, the tears from all the years are now unleashed, the dam broken. That without her body to hold them captive, they are convicts, fleeing imprisonment. The tears soak her, a fever breaking into a cold sweat. She is drenched in her own sorrow.
The power clicks back on, filling the backyard with light. And in this new bright light, she can see it is
not
sorrow but rain beading up on the cool white of her neck and shoulders. Rain coming down in sharp drops, each a sort of painful reprimand. Even the sky is chastising her. She looks up then at the starless night for some sort of explanation, to face her punishment, to acknowledge her culpability perhaps. She focuses on the rain that is coming down like bullets, and accepts the assault. Welcomes it even. And as the rain soaks her hair, streams down her face, penetrates her nightgown, she wonders if this is what it feels like to be at war. Constant terror. Paranoia confirmed by violence. Unnecessary death, moments of respite that feel like admonishments instead.
“You killed her,” Ruby cries again, trembling in the cold rain, but the anger is gone, and now her voice is filled only with the sounds of disappointment. And Sylvie can’t decide which is worse: to have enraged her or to have failed her in yet another indescribable and unforgivable way.
H
er mother finally leaves, finally retreats back into the house, but Ruby stays outside in the rain, holding on to the raccoon. Her throat is raw from crying, and her chest aches. She is soaked and cold, the rain still coming, unrelenting, as she clings to the lifeless animal. She knows she needs to do something for the babies. She needs to make sure that they get fed, but she has no idea how to take care of them. She wouldn’t even know where to start. Milk? Water? What do raccoons even eat? The fact that she doesn’t know what to do to help them further infuriates her. She cannot believe how angry she is at her mother. The rage feels like an infection, like an illness. She is feverish and sick with it.
Finally, when she is beginning to feel numb with the cold, she lays the raccoon down, covers it with an old blue tarp. And she goes into the house, expecting to be alone, expecting that she will need to go find a clean towel to dry off, that she will need to heat up water to make tea to begin to thaw her insides out. That she will need to take care of herself as her mother, once again, disappears. But surprisingly, she finds her mother sitting at the kitchen table. There is a stack of clean dry towels sitting next to a teapot. Steam rises from the spout like ghosts. She can hear water running in the tub in the bathroom. Her mother’s face is calm, pale. She looks at Ruby through the haze of steam and says, “I’m sorry.”
Ruby waits for something else. An excuse. And explanation. Her mind plays tricks on her, and she is transported back to a different night. Another midnight kitchen. Another pot of tea and dry towels and running bathwater. Another apology. But this is no déjà vu, this is only history repeating itself. Again and again, an endless loop.
“You killed her,” Ruby says. “And she has babies to take care of. What will happen to them now? Who will take care of them now?”
Her mother squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head, and Ruby waits. She won’t back down this time. She doesn’t want apologies. She doesn’t want promises. Promises are as empty as the clothes hanging on Jess’s side of the closet. She wants answers.
But her mother had nothing to give her then, that other night when the river soaked her clothes and hair. When she and her mother sat alone in this kitchen. Jess gone, Daddy at the hospital. Red and blue lights spinning like a carnival ride across the front yard. And her mother gives her nothing now. And so she stands to leave her, to go to her room. Ignore the hot bath, the warm towels, the tea. She will sleep in these wet clothes, the wild smell of the raccoon still on her hands, the metallic scent of blood still on her clothes. But just as she stands to leave, her mother says, “Wait.”
And so she does. She waits. She allows herself to hope that her mother will do something. That she will make things better. That is her job. That is what a mother is supposed to do.
“Come here,” her mother says, but her voice is fragile. Uncertain.
Ruby goes to her, and her mother takes one of the towels and wraps it around her. Ruby squeezes her eyes shut and lets her mother enclose her. Swaddle her.
He mother pulls her onto her lap, as though she is still just a little girl, and Ruby feels her throat swelling with something indescribable. Want. Sorrow.
She studies her mother’s face, wills her to look at her. To see her. If she could just
see
her.
But the moment passes. She was there,
here
with Ruby. But she is gone again. She rubs the towel absently against Ruby’s arms. But she is elsewhere.
“Do you remember that story? The one about the bear hunt?” her mother asks.
Ruby nods. Of course she does. It was Jess’s favorite. He used to act out the whole story,
We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re gonna catch a big one! I’m not afraid! Are you?
Her senses are flooded, a deluge. The pounding of Jess’s feet on the wooden floors, his laughter something raw and deep and good. His voice filling the quiet room.
I’m not afraid!
She shakes her head. She does not want to slip into this place her mother has gone. She cannot let her lungs fill with the cool wet recollections of Jess (of applesauce and strawberry milk). Ruby shakes her head, trying hard not to dip below the surface: his freckled cheeks, the bright green rims around his pupils, the earthy scent of his hair. But her mother is gone, sinking to the cold dark bottom.
S
ometimes bridges fail.
Ruby knows this, yet still searches for evidence of their fallibility. She needs to understand that this is a common occurrence, that she is not the only one to watch as something that is supposed to be indestructible is destroyed. As something that is supposed to create safe passage becomes a death trap.
The Rialto Bridge collapsed under the weight of too many spectators at a wedding parade. In 1845, seventy-nine people died when people gathered on the Yarmouth Bridge to watch a circus clown go down the river in a barrel pulled by geese. Most of the people who died were children. A one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old pedestrian bridge in Bhagalpur, India, collapsed onto a railway train that was passing beneath it, killing more than thirty people.
Poor design. Structural weakness. Inability to sustain load. Earthquakes, fires, and floods have caused the collapse of dozens of bridges. But accidents,
accidents
seem to be the primary cause behind the failure of bridges. Trains, and barges, and trucks. Collisions. Human error.
Inverythan, Bussey, Duplessis.
She is not allowed to go over the covered bridge anymore. But what are they afraid of? That it will happen again? That there is anything left to lose?
And so on Friday morning, she takes the short way from her mother’s house into town, and within ten minutes she can see the bridge in the distance. It looks innocuous. As though the worst thing in the world didn’t happen right there. There is no evidence that the accident was anything but a dream. She doesn’t know what she expected. But it is not this. It is fully repaired. Clean slate tiles on the roof, brand new boards on the deck. The sunlight glistens in the river below.
She rides her bike slowly, cautiously to the bridge, noticing then that it is
not
the same. They have built pedestrian walkways on either side of the main passage. You can walk or ride your bike through here now without the danger of a car not seeing you. This should give her comfort as she rolls her bike over the bridge, but it doesn’t take away the truth that the bridge is still only built to hold one car. Whoever is passing through by vehicle is no safer than before. You have to trust that another car coming will alert you. Three quick honks to say, “I’m here. Wait for me to pass.”
And she knows that sometimes bridges fail. Sometimes people fail. No matter how safe you are, there is always, always the possibility of someone else’s carelessness.
Today is the last day of swimming lessons. The pool will close, summer will end. School will start again. Her father will come back. She will return to that tiny room that used to be the laundry room at Bunk’s house. Everything will be normal. She keeps telling herself this, though she knows it is a lie. The piece of paper in her hand, the note from Nessa, is evidence of this. She doesn’t know what it means yet, but she does know that it may just change everything. If Nessa finds what she is looking for, she will leave her. She won’t need her anymore.
She stands at the entrance to the bridge and peers down at the river below. She considers letting it drop into the rushing water. She imagines it bobbing on the surface at first, and then slowly being caught up in the churning tumult of the current. She thinks of the ink blurring, the clues smudging. She understands that with one simple flick of the wrist she could bring about a certain erasure. She thinks how easy it would be to change the course of history that way. How, for once, destiny is in her hands. But if ink on a page creates a truth, then isn’t that truth impervious to destruction? She thinks of the sketch in her notebook, the bridge that Nessa had marveled at. Does erasing it, destroying it, make it any less real?
And so she takes the note and carefully folds it back up according to its remembered creases and gets on her bicycle. She rides along the narrow walkway of the bridge, holding her breath the entire way, and when she arrives on the other side, unscathed, unharmed, she knows that she has just managed the impossible. That if her mother could see her now, maybe this would be enough to convince her. This might change the way she sees the world. This: the fact that she has crossed this bridge, and nothing has happened to her, that she is still the same girl with a stinging scab on one knee, dirty hair, and a strong beating heart that she was before she crossed it. That one can tempt fate without fate giving in to that temptation. That sometimes life is as simple as that.
She is going to the pool. It is the last day of lessons, and she knows it is probably the only way she will get a chance to talk to Izzy. And regardless of what has happened between them, what inky truths have started to blur, she needs her right now. Izzy is the only one left that can help her. She rides her bike, aware of her trembling knees and the hot rush of relief that spreads from her shoulders down into her hands that grip the handlebars until she gets to the pool and then she takes a deep breath and goes through the gate.
The sky is strange. It seems like a nice day, but there is a humming thrumming feeling to the air. And she wonders if this is the storm’s warning. Like a moaning foghorn, a gentle reminder of danger ahead.
She has no choice but to pretend that nothing has changed. That she belongs here. And so she undresses, leaving her clothes in a colorful heap near Izzy’s beach bag, which is sitting at one of the picnic tables.
She goes to her lesson, and she sits on the edge of the pool. She is attentive as Nora comes by with her big white teeth and shrill whistle. She tickles each of the little kids’ feet as she passes, but stops when she gets to Ruby. Instead she winks and says, “So you’ve decided to join us again. Good to see you.”
Ruby stares into the sterile water, into that chlorinated dream. She wonders who thought of making a pool, who dreamed of creating a new kind of body of water, one made of blue water and concrete and so much sunlight.
Around her the other students kick their feet, disrupting the cold quiet surface of the water with their joy and enthusiasm. Nora encourages this. As though she is telling them that they are the ones in charge. That the water must yield to them rather than the other way around. And so Ruby kicks her feet as well, enjoying the resistance the water gives and the sharp cold certainty of the splash.
“Okay, everybody, are we ready?” Nora asks. She is standing armpit deep in the water in front of them. She is wearing a red suit like Izzy’s, and her hair is tucked up underneath a red rubber cap.
Nora lifts her whistle, looks down the row of expectant faces, stopping at Ruby and nodding. It’s as though she knows. It’s as though she is somehow able to see the sudden loss of fear in Ruby’s face. It’s as though she is saying, “You can do it. Don’t be afraid.” And so when Nora puts the whistle to her lips and lets loose that wild trebly signal, Ruby pushes herself off the edge of the pool and dips into the water.
She slips into its cold blue recesses inch by inch until she is up to her neck in it, and then when the whistle blows again, she does as she is expected to do. She no longer resists. She bends her knees and allows the water to creep up her neck, feels as her hair gets wet, the water flowing over her closed mouth and then a sudden whoosh as it enters her ears, the quick blindness as she closes her eyes and then nothing but silence and darkness as she disappears completely under the water’s surface.
When she emerges—seconds? hours?—later, the teacher is smiling and clapping. “That was awesome,” she says. “That was great!”
Ruby blinks the water out of her eyes, feels the chlorinated sting of it. She brushes her hair away from her face and breathes again. Amazed that she has surfaced. That she was able to plumb those depths and arrive again, alive, unharmed. It is like the way she felt after crossing the bridge earlier. It’s as though she is testing everything today, every risk, and she’s finding that her mother is
wrong,
that there is nothing to fear. This realization would normally feed the anger she feels at her mother who has given into her dread, who has surrendered to it. But Ruby knows she is guilty of this as well. That she has also believed the world to be an unkind place, a series of traps and landmines. She is no different than her mother, but because she’s a kid, it’s okay. Children are supposed to be afraid. Children are supposed to need the grown-ups in their lives to assure them: that the boogeyman isn’t real, that they will never be hungry, that they will wake up in the morning.
And so it is with this new fearlessness, this terrific intrepidity that she searches for Izzy after the last whistle blows. The Junior Lifeguards are taking their certificate test today. This is what they have been working toward all summer. And because she knows Izzy (or at least used to know Izzy), she knows that Izzy is nervous about this. Izzy gets nervous about every test at school, even the weekly spelling and vocabulary tests in English. She hates to be wrong, and so whenever presented with the possibility of making an error, failing in any way, she stiffens. Freezes. Once, in the third grade spelling bee, she misspelled
clamor
in the final round, losing to Hughie Bartell, and she refused to leave the stage. She couldn’t believe she’d misspelled the word, and with tears in her eyes, she kept shaking her head and asking Mrs. Vanderbilt, the PTA president, to repeat the correct spelling. After that, she refused to participate in anything that might put her on that stage again; Gloria even had to send a special note saying she was excused from the school’s production of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
they did every year.
It’s for this reason that Ruby watches from the safety of the picnic tables where she can’t be blamed for any errors Izzy might make during her certification testing. She watches as the students perform timed laps, an endurance test, as they leap into the water and save a struggling swimmer. As they each dive into the deepest end of the pool and pull up a ten-pound weight. They finish the pool tests and then, wrapped in towels, sit down to take the written test from the Red Cross. Ruby knows this is what Izzy is most worried about. Written tests always give Izzy grief. She gets herself so worked up that she makes silly mistakes. On math tests, she’ll do the problems perfectly on the scratch paper and then transpose numbers when she’s writing the answer down. Or, sometimes, she just gets so stuck on one test question that she can’t move on to the next one. Izzy is a genius when it comes to just about everything except taking tests.
But Ruby watches her, hunched over the little test booklet, clutching her pencil in her fist like she has since they were little, and she wishes she could root her on. Because despite the last week, Izzy is still her best friend in the world and she knows how much this means to her. She wants her to pass. She wants her not to make any mistakes.
The whistle blows again, and the lifeguard instructor gathers the booklets.
Ruby watches as Izzy finds Marcy, and they cling to each other as the instructor disappears into the locker room to grade the tests.
Figuring it’s probably a good time to distract Izzy, Ruby walks the long walk from the shallow end to the deep end and takes a breath before walking over to them.
“Hi,” Ruby says, mustering up every bit of courage she has. “I just wanted to wish you good luck.”
Izzy and Marcy look up at the same time. Marcy scowls, “We already took the test.”
“I know. I just mean, I hope you pass.”
Izzy smiles and nods. “Thanks.”
“And I was also thinking I could maybe talk to you after lessons,” Ruby says, feeling an awful sinking in her chest. She thinks of that weight sinking to the bottom of the pool. She knows she needs to dive down and retrieve it. She needs to rise to the surface, not drown in this moment.
Izzy looks at Marcy as if for permission, and Marcy shrugs.
“Okay,” Izzy says, offering an identical shrug of the shoulders. “Maybe we could all go back to my house?”
“I was kind of hoping I could talk to you alone,” Ruby says. The weight is heavy, and still plummeting. “It’s sort of important.”
Izzy cocks her head, and opens her eyes wider. It’s like she knows that Ruby is serious. “Okay,” she says, this time without waiting for a go-ahead from Marcy.
“Marcy, I can meet you back at my house in just a little bit,” she says apologetically.
Marcy rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”
“You know,” Ruby starts. She is holding the weight, she can see the light above the surface. She feels buoyed, buoyant, light. “You’re not a very nice person.”
“
Excuse
me?” Marcy says, her face turning red.
“Just saying,” Ruby shrugs in her best approximation of Marcy’s own dismissal.
The whistle blows again, and the girls stand up. They both run to the far end of the pool where the lifeguard is standing with a stack of certificates.
“Izzy Sinclair,” she says without ceremony. Marcy gives her a stupid girly hug, and Izzy goes to get her certificate. She stands with Marcy as they wait for Marcy’s name to be called. But when she gets to the last certificate, it’s for Madison Young. Marcy didn’t pass.
“For the rest of you, we’ll see you next year.”
Marcy stands with her hands on her hips, her face red. Izzy tries to give her a hug, but Marcy pushes her off. Izzy looks at her with disbelief (as if Marcy is doing anything different than she’s done for the last thousand years). And Ruby finds herself both feeling terrible for Izzy and starting to smile.
Izzy leaves Marcy, who is now demanding the teacher tell her exactly what she did wrong, and finds Ruby waiting for her.
“Congratulations,” Ruby says. “Can I see?” She gestures to the certificate.
She studies the calligraphy, and Izzy’s name hastily written in the blank in Sharpie. They’ve misspelled her last name, which she knows will drive Izzy crazy later, but for now, she is beaming. “That is awesome,” Ruby says.