“Thanks.”
“Well thank you for talking to me,” Ruby says. “We haven’t talked for, like, a long time.”
Izzy nods. “Did you bring your bike?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Maybe we could ride over to Carmine’s and get ice cream,” Izzy says, and suddenly it feels like everything is back to normal, like this whole past week has been nothing but a bad dream.
They get their bikes and climb on, Izzy riding out to the front like she always does, and Ruby following behind. She notices that Izzy has a 1D sticker on the back of her helmet that is new. But other than that, she’s the same old Izzy. Skinny legs pumping furiously, wet hair flying out behind her.
They get ice cream from the window of Carmine’s and then walk over to the park by the train tracks. There’s a statue of Arthur Quimby, who founded the town, there. He was from the Revolutionary War; he had something to do with the Green Mountain boys, but Ruby can never remember what. But the statue is big, and it has cool granite steps, shaded by his hulking figure. They settle onto the steps and lick their ice cream silently for a few minutes.
“So what’s up?” Izzy says finally. She has a small sliver of peppermint stuck to her cheek. Ruby motions to it, and she flicks it away.
Ruby hates to spoil this moment, but she did come for a reason. She didn’t just tell Marcy off for the fun of it (even though it
was
pretty fun). She needs to tell Izzy about Nessa. It feels like so much has happened in the last five days. It used to be that she and Izzy were together every minute of every day. There’s no way a secret, even a small one, could survive. But here she was, with this giant one. She isn’t even sure how to start.
“Listen, I need your help. But you
cannot
tell your parents. Do you promise?”
Izzy’s eyes widen, but she nods. She offers Ruby her pinky, bent and ready to lock with her own. Something about this gesture makes Ruby miss her even more than she has all week. She lifts her own pinky finger and hooks it against hers.
And then she tells her: about how she found the girl hurt in the sugar shack, about how even though she doesn’t talk, Ruby worries that she’s in danger and that’s why she’s hiding. Then she pulls the piece of paper out of her back pocket, unfolds it.
“She’s looking for somebody named George Downs,” Ruby says, reading from the slip of paper.
Izzy has her ice cream cone in one hand and a napkin in the other, so she crumples up the napkin and sets it down on the cool granite. “Who’s
George Downs?
” she asks.
“I have no idea.”
“And she’s pregnant? Like a little pregnant or
really
pregnant ?” Izzy asks.
“I don’t know,” Ruby says. “She’s pretty big.” She stands up and holds her arms out in front of her, making a round belly with her bent elbows. “Like this.”
“Couldn’t your mom help her?” Izzy asks, but then her face reddens, probably remembering that her mother can’t help anyone anymore. “So she’s living in the
woods?
”
“Yes, I told you all this,” Ruby says.
“Why didn’t she just call him? You said she has his number?” she motions to the note.
Ruby looks down at the slip of paper again.
“She doesn’t talk,” Ruby says.
“Is she deaf?” Izzy asks.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Iz.”
“Maybe she like robbed a bank or something,” Izzy says, her eyes growing wide. “Maybe she’s some sort of fugitive.”
“I don’t think so,” Ruby says, shaking her head.
“Then why is she hiding?”
“She hurt her foot,” Ruby says. And while this explains her immobility, it doesn’t explain why she hasn’t just asked Ruby if she knows anybody who can give her a ride into town. Ruby is more confused than she was before. “I think she’s afraid of whatever it is she’s looking for. Like maybe she’s afraid of this George Downs guy.”
“She gave this to you?” Izzy asks, reaching for the note in Ruby’s hand. As she reads it, her forehead crinkles the way it does when she’s trying to work out a difficult math problem.
“Yeah,” Ruby says, feeling her heart pounding hard in her chest.
“But Ruby,” Izzy says, her eyes wide, “that’s
my
phone number.”
S
ylvie brings the raccoon inside, leaving a dark, slick puddle of blood in the backyard. She had thought about just putting it in a bag or box and burying it. But she can’t forget that look on Ruby’s face, the tremble in her voice when she accused her. When she called her a
killer,
the word more destructive and painful than a bullet.
She sets it next to the robin she’s been working on at the kitchen table, which is covered with a bleach-stained towel. Compared to the birds, the raccoon seems like some sort of monster. It is enormous; she’d been surprised by how heavy it was when she lifted it up. She’d had to struggle to hold on to it with one arm as she opened the back door. She is accustomed to the delicacy of birds, to their tiny bones and hearts and feathers. She doesn’t know the first thing about the taxidermy of mammals, and so she searches for instructions in her grandmother’s book and then sets about skinning the raccoon. She stumbles when she gets to the bone in the tail, overwhelmed by the smell of it. She finds a bandana in the junk drawer and draws it across her face. It smells of Robert. Of sawdust and his aftershave. She swoons for a moment, overwhelmed by something so old and primitive, it’s hard to even identify anymore.
But she cannot be distracted. She needs to get this project done as quickly as possible. She splits the tail, and removes the bone, runs it under the sprayer in the sink until all the fat slips down the drain. She scrapes the rest of the fat from the hide until there is nothing left but the fur. She splits the eyes, the lips, and turns the ears. She salts the hide, but she needs a board to tack it onto to dry for the next twenty-four hours.
Outside, the wind is howling, but the sky is a bright, bright blue. She knows the storm is coming, that the rain last night was just a prelude, and the wind seems to echo its portentous call. She finds one of the signs,
NO TRESPASSING
scrawled in neon spray paint, and she tries to recall her state of mind when she painted them. The only thing she recollects, however, is Ruby’s fury.
Ruby had been right. It was just the raccoon making noises in the night.
This
raccoon. Only an animal, just as Ruby had said. She is crazy, she thinks. Paranoid. Certifiable. And, though there is no logic behind it, she feels angry at the raccoon for fooling her, for triggering that place in her brain that causes her to panic, to go into survival-mode. As she carries the hide outside, she even thinks that justice has somehow been served. This is the kind of thinking that got her sent to the hospital, though. She knows. She knows that this is the sort of reasoning that caused the spiral last time, that day like a tunneling tornado in her brain.
She tacks the hide carefully to one of the boards. In twenty-four hours she’ll be able to reassemble it, to bend its flesh back over a frame, to sew up the incisions she has made, to replace the eyes. She will give it life again, or the semblance of life. It’s the best she can do.
She leans the board against the side of the house where the sun is shining the brightest; it will help quicken the drying process. Then she goes through the screen door to the porch. The baby raccoons are sleeping now, and the sight of them tears at her heart a little. She will need to have someone come get them now. With their mother gone, they probably won’t survive for long. She wonders what she should feed them, if they will drink from a bowl of milk like kittens. She reaches to open the front door, but it’s locked. Of course it is. She always locks herself in. She goes outside again and around to the back of the house, pushing her way through the gap in the fence and up the back steps. The door is closed, though she is sure she left it open. This crazy wind must have blown it shut. She reaches for the handle, but as she tugs, nothing happens. The handle is stuck. She tries again, this time with more force. Certainly, it’s just stuck. But as she grows more and more anxious, tugging harder and harder at the handle, she realizes that it is also locked. Somehow, the wind must have blown it with such force that the little safety latch clicked into place. She is locked outside of her house.
She stares at the backyard, the tangle of weeds, the pathetic fence. Her garden is overgrown and bountiful despite the pillaging raccoon. She doesn’t know when Ruby will be home with the key. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be out here. She tries hard to focus on her breath, conscious of each inhalation and exhalation, taking care not to hyperventilate. This was a trick they taught her at the hospital. Counting each breath, concentrating on the air coming in through her mouth and going out through her nose. She sits down on the back steps and bends over, her chest resting on her knees.
The wind whips through the backyard, creating a cyclone in the fenced-in area. She feels it striking her, lifting her hair. Whispering across the exposed skin of her neck and shoulders.
One, two, three.
She breathes in and starts to tick off a checklist. Did she leave the oven on, the dryer on, the iron on? Is there anything inside that might ignite a fire? She thinks about Ruby’s room. Is there anything in there that could suddenly combust? The uncertainty of it makes her forget to count.
Inside the house, the phone rings, and so she goes around to the front of the house, stepping onto the front porch, where she stands helpless before the locked front door. The phone rings again inside. It seems to be shriller this time, insistent. And on the loveseat the baby raccoons are making a horrible sound as well. It sounds like a rattle, a chattering, rattling screech, as they search and search for their mother. She sits down on the front steps with her back to the screen door and covers her ears. But still, despite the press of flesh against her ears, the phone screams and the babies cry and it’s all so loud, you can barely hear the sound of her own slow and quiet sobbing.
She is stuck outside. She can’t get into her house. She feels exposed, her entire body a raw nerve. And because of all the noise, this cacophony of misery, she doesn’t hear the truck as it pulls up the driveway.
N
essa knows this sky. She has seen it before. Like one magician understanding another magician’s trick. She has seen this illusory sky, this sleight of hand. It is a deception, a good one, but a lie no less. This ominous blue and sunlight. In Cleveland, in Salinas, in Denver, and in Portland; she has been audience to this particular chimera a hundred times. She understands the machinations behind it. There is a storm coming. A big storm.
She knows she needs to leave these woods, that the baby will not wait much longer.
The baby, like the sky, makes false promises of peace. Of safety. She hasn’t been counting the days, the weeks. She has relied only on her body to tell her how close she is to its arrival. She is vaguely aware of seasons passing; this is her pregnancy’s third season. It’s going to happen soon.
Her foot still aches, but the pain no longer has the same immediacy and urgency as before. It has softened into a dull ache, like the memory of pain. The swelling has subsided, and the colors have gone from deep plum to a less disturbing greenish-yellow. And so she tests it, tries to put weight on it, but there again is the sharp reminder of her injury. And she knows that her healing is fallacious. Broken bones take time to heal, more time than she has been here. Though time strikes her as a construct as well. Deceitful, even whimsical in its deception. Because the months that it has taken for this baby to grow, for her body to be transformed by it, suddenly seem but only a moment in her entire lifetime. A whisper. Each long day on the road and all those nights spent trying to find a safe warm place to stay were agonizing in the moment, time dragging like a wounded leg behind her. But now, in this long and excruciating moment, she can gather her memories in one handful. Like a palm full of colored beads. She stares at them, mystified that they had each once seemed so enormous.
Not only is the sky a liar and time deceptive, but these woods too (while they have provided a good hiding place) are not as benevolent as they seem. Her broken bones are evidence of this. She tries not to think of all the other dangers that are lurking out there.
She is hungry again, though there is plenty to eat. Ruby has brought enough food to practically last her through the winter. She has cans of peaches and green beans. Hard-boiled eggs and granola bars. She has cereal and little tubes of yogurt. But every time she tries to eat, the food will not go down beyond the burning place in her chest. The first time she felt it, she thought she was having a heart attack. That the fiery flume meant that she was dying.
The baby has dropped in the last couple of days. She can even see it in the way it distorts her shape. For a long time, her belly started to round just under her breasts, as though someone had shoved a basketball under there. But now, she can feel the baby in her hips, her lower back in a new kind of constant pain. There is not a single position in which she is comfortable. She can feel her tendons stretching, complaining each time she tries to move. And still, her foot.
She will wait for Ruby to come back. She needs to stay just one more night, and then she can go. If Ruby’s mother, the midwife, cannot help her, then Ruby will help her find him. She gave her the note and after looking confused, Ruby had nodded. But that was so long ago. She is rattled still by the gunshot she heard last night. She worries that Ruby might never come back. That she is stranded here in the woods. That she will have to find her own way.
She doesn’t know exactly what she will do when she finally finds him. It’s not as though she has words she can offer anymore. Her silence is so absolute, she has to rely on other ways of communicating. Besides, there are no words for what she needs to tell him. They haven’t invented that language yet. The vocabulary of loss and regret.
She peers out through the door, and listens as the wind howls. Watches as it bends the trees. They resist, but she can see how some of them acquiesce, how some of them bow down, surrendering, to its unrelenting assault. Dead leaves and loose pine needles blow across the ground, giving the illusion that the earth is somehow moving. Even the river seems to be hustled along by the wind’s insistence.
She needs a distraction as she waits. She needs something to do until Ruby comes again with the answers she needs. With the solution to the puzzle she’s been trying so hard to solve. She tries not to think about what will happen if Ruby never returns. If there are no answers to this question (the only question anymore), no solution to this problem.
In school, she had a teacher who loved conundrums. Each week, she sent the children home with one to solve.
How much dirt is there in a hole that measures three feet wide and three feet deep?
She would puzzle over the questions, scribbling her mathematical musings along the margins of the paper. She would come up with an answer and then second-guess herself. And then, inevitably, the answer was not at all what she’d been shooting for. It was never as complicated as she made it. The answer always seemed obvious, and always made her feel a bit foolish.
How much dirt is there in a hole that measures three feet wide and three feet deep?
None. A hole doesn’t have any dirt in it. A hole is empty.
She wonders if the puzzle she’s been trying to solve is simply like one of these conundrums. If the answer is somehow there,
obvious,
in front of her. She tries to come at the question from all directions. To sneak up on it rather than tackling it head on. She tries to think of the least obvious answer. She thinks of it as something solvable, something with a solution. The idea that it might not have one is more than she can bear.
The baby slips farther down. She feels it this time. It plummets and lands heavily on her pelvis. It nearly takes her breath away with its sudden certainty. She doesn’t know what this means, but she can only imagine that there isn’t much time left. That it is readying itself. Like someone jumping from an airplane. She imagines the baby strapping on a tiny little parachute, miniature goggles, a harness. It is fearless, this little one. She thinks it might be a girl, a girl who is unafraid of anything. For whom the conundrums are obvious. Who never complicates the simple things, but simply dives headlong into life.