S
ylvie still can’t get ahold of Robert, and she worries. But strangely, she finds comfort in this new anxiety, grounded as it is in something
real
for a change. There is legitimacy to this fear. It has a cause. A purpose.
The radio said that here in Vermont they could expect three to seven inches of rain as well as sustained winds of thirty-five to forty miles per hour. The governor has already declared a state of emergency, anticipating downed trees and power lines. There will likely be some flooding of rivers and streams. Still, no one is being evacuated; perhaps the powers that be know that most Vermonters wouldn’t heed an evacuation order anyway. People here are used to blizzards and arctic temperatures. To endless winters. A storm, even a big storm, is nothing to fear.
As she waits for Ruby to return home, she fills empty milk jugs with water. She showers and then fills the bathtub with clean water. She locates every candle, every match. She makes ice and finds an old Styrofoam cooler on the front porch. She is a survivalist, she thinks. A survivor.
When Ruby comes into the house, breathless, Sylvie is digging through the junk drawer looking for the battery charger, trying to remember where the rechargeable batteries are.
“Mama,” Ruby says, running toward her, clinging to her.
Ruby’s arms feel strange around her. Sylvie cannot remember the last time she clung to her like this.
“What’s the matter, honey?” she asks, feeling her insides melting like wax. Puddling, pooling.
“Grover’s at the hospital,” she says. Her shoulders shudder and she starts to cry.
“What happened?” Sylvie asks.
“Izzy gave him CPR and then the ambulance came. And now he’s at the hospital. And did you know his real name isn’t Grover? It’s George?
George Downs?
” Ruby is sobbing, tears soaking into Sylvie’s shirt.
Sylvie’s body responds to this need in a way that surprises her. As Ruby clings to her, it’s as though each nerve, each muscle, each sinew recollects. And she cradles her. She holds her tightly and bends to breathe the scent of her hair. She can feel Ruby’s ribs beneath her fingers, the hard boney cage that surrounds her chest.
“Okay, slow down,” she says when Ruby pulls away.
“He might die.”
Sylvie thinks about the kind old gentleman who has been like a grandfather to Izzy, to Ruby even. Ruby’s only experience with death has been losing Jess.
“I’m scared,” Ruby sobs, her face streaked with tears, and her nose running.
Sylvie shakes her head.
No, no, no,
she wants to say.
There’s nothing to be afraid of.
But how can she tell her this? How can she, of all people, assure her that
anything
will be okay? And so she says, “He’s very old, honey.”
Ruby shakes her head hard. “He can’t die. What if somebody needs him? What if somebody is looking for him and he doesn’t know?”
“What are you talking about?” Sylvie says, confused. Ruby seems almost delirious. Her whole body is still wracked with sorrow, her tiny chest heaving.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s nothing.”
R
uby needs to get to Nessa to tell her about Grover. She needs to ask her how she knows him. What she wants with him. She needs to tell Nessa that he’s sick. She tries not to think about what will happen if he doesn’t get better, and she tries not to think about the look on Gloria’s face, on Izzy’s face, as they put him in the ambulance and took off down the street with the lights and sirens clearing their way. But when dusk falls that night, she knows that her mother is not going to let her go anywhere. It is not raining yet, but the sky has turned an ominous shade of gray, and the air feels thick. With the windows boarded up, it is dark inside the house.
Things feel strange with her mother. She is almost embarrassed now by how upset she got when she came home earlier. It’s been such a long time since her mother held her like that. Since Ruby needed her to. Afterwards, when she had finally stopped sobbing, she pulled away from her mother, excused herself and went to the bathroom, where she washed her face with cold water.
“Mama, where’s our old TV?” she asks now.
“What old TV?”
“The TV we used to have, before?”
After the accident, her mother couldn’t watch TV anymore. It didn’t matter what channel they put it on. The news, the stories about all that suffering, of women murdering their husbands and children drowning in backyard pools, of accidents and storms and wars were too much. And the soap operas and sitcoms, all those make-believe people with their make-believe problems seemed to mock her. And so one afternoon, not long before Ruby and her dad moved out, her mother ripped the plug out of the wall, heaved the TV up, and carried it outside.
“In the shed maybe?” her mother says. “Why?”
Outside, Ruby examines the sky as if it has some sort of answers. It isn’t raining, and the sky is a benevolent shade of indigo. But she also thinks about how quickly things can take a turn for the worse. How the world can flip upside down in just an instant. How everything that seemed certain is no longer true.
In the shed, she searches and searches until she locates the TV in the corner. It’s so much smaller than she remembers. Bunk has a huge fifty-inch flat screen that takes up the entire living room wall. She lifts it up, following the cord, which has snagged on a pile of tools, and carries it back to the house.
Inside, her mother sits on the couch as she plugs it in and attaches it to the antenna wires. The antenna is still up on the roof. She finds the converter box they got a few years back in the junk drawer and hooks it up. Within minutes, there is a fairly sharp picture on the screen. She flips through the four channels they get (ABC, CBS, PBS, and a station that just broadcasts weather). This was the station she always used to flip past, but now she lingers there, looking for anything to confirm her mother’s concerns. To prove that a storm is coming. That there is reason for her mother to worry. Reason for her mother to keep her prisoner here.
And she is right. The storm is headed north. There is a red banner flashing across the top of the screen saying SPECIAL WEATHER ALERT. They sit watching the forecast on the TV, waiting for the rain. When it starts, they look at each other, eyes widening in something between disbelief and relief. It’s as though they’ve been waiting for this their whole lives.
In her room, she listens as the rain taps and then pounds against the roof. She used to love this sound. She used to love storms. Jess was afraid of thunder, and so on nights like these, she would let him curl up in the bed with her. He always smelled so musty, dusty. Like such a boy. He liked to lie on his stomach, hands tucked between his legs. And every time the thunder rumbled and lightning flashed, she would rub his back. Just small quiet circles to calm him. She could feel his muscles tense underneath her fingers.
But this is not a normal storm. And she is alone in this bed, alone in this room.
She thinks of Nessa in the woods, and her heart aches with the idea that she might think that Ruby has forgotten her. She needs to get to her before the storm gets too bad. Before it’s dangerous. The forecast said to expect rain all day tomorrow, winds, and later some flooding.
She can’t leave now. Her mother is glued to the TV set, refusing to go to bed. And even if she could, after what happened with the raccoon, she’s afraid to go out in the night. Of what could happen to her in the darkness.
She’ll need to go to Nessa in the morning, to help her. To figure out where she should go.
When thunder growls like an animal, and she can feel its violent tremble rattle the windows, she wishes Jess back. Wishes his cold bare feet against her calves. The smell of grass and dirt, his musty breath. Because while she liked to think he needed her to protect him during the storms, she needed him to protect her too.
T
he agony is not inside her, but rather the other way around.
Nessa is
inside
her pain. That is where she is. She has never felt anything like this in her entire life. It isn’t the way they described it in the books she found on the library shelves and then pored over in the quiet shadows of the carrels. Every single one of those books described it as a gradual thing, a slow pain building, after hours (even days), to some sort of marvelous crescendo. But this does not feel like gentle, manageable waves of pain. It feels like a tidal wave, a tsunami. It feels as though her body is
made
of pain, as though she is no longer a
body
at all but rather one enormous ache. It is dull, persistent, a low hum and thrum that she can feel in her bones.
She wonders if she will die here in the woods.
She hasn’t seen a doctor once since she got pregnant, unless you count the trip to Planned Parenthood to confirm the pregnancy, the one after which she left clutching the brochures with colorful illustrations of girls her age, girls
in trouble,
girls with what the nurse practitioner had referred to as “options.” She did go to the MinuteClinic once this winter when she had a cough that wouldn’t quit. They’d asked her if she could be pregnant, and she’d nodded yes, and so they had prescribed her rest and tea and lozenges. She’d coughed so hard she’d thought she might just cough the baby out. But other than that, she has lived by the rules in the stolen library books. She has tried not to worry about all the things that can go wrong. She skipped the chapters that talked about preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, miscarriage. She didn’t eat sushi (this was easy) or tuna (which was not so easy). She pilfered a bottle of prenatal vitamins from the drugstore, which she took religiously until she left Portland, remembering two hours into her bus ride that she’d left them in Mica’s medicine cabinet.
She has tried to eat well, at least as well as she has been able, which has been difficult given her lack of money. There have been times that she’s gone hungry, that the ache in her belly has made her afraid that the baby was going to come early. How foolish she had been to think that those hollow pangs were anything like labor. How silly she’d been. How stupidly naïve.
Because this is indescribable. Sometimes words fail.
She tries and tries to picture the pain as a poem, as something with a rhythm, a body, a form. She tries to study it line by line, the end-stopped lines when the pain recedes, the enjambment where respite is an illusion and the line runs on and on. She tries to imagine her pain on a page. The way the pen would feel in her hand. She tries to think only of the movement of ink, the continuous scribble and scrawl.
But this is an endless poem, one without stanza breaks, without line breaks even. If this pain were a poem, the words would rush to the margins, push
through
the margins, continue on the back of the paper. It would be the scrawling of a madman, filling page after page after page.
It has a sound, this pain. The ticktocking iambs, this clamorous scansion. The rhythm is deafening.
R
uby waits and waits. Morning passes. They eat lunch, and she thinks only of Nessa. Time crawls, the day stretches out, each hour swollen. She knows that eventually her mother will need a nap. Exhausted by another night spent wide awake, catching up on sleep during the day is not only necessary but inevitable. But she doesn’t sleep; she can’t pull herself away from the TV.
It is only when the reception on the TV goes out that her mother finally yawns and says, “I just need to lie down for a bit. You’ll be okay?” And Ruby nods.
And while she is sleeping, Ruby slips out of the house and into the rain. She leaves a note on the kitchen counter, promises that she will be home soon. That she had something important that she has to do.
She is afraid to go behind the house in case her mother wakes up and hears her, and so she rides her bike up the muddy road and then cuts into the forest just past the old water shed. She leaves her bike there, hidden under some fallen fir branches. There is no path here, and so she has to forge her own. She can feel the branches scraping and scratching at her skin. By the time she gets to the river, she realizes she has gone too far upstream. Here the river is wider, the water deeper, the current stronger. It is pouring rain now, and the ground is slick. She considers walking back downstream to cross and then coming back up again on the other side of the river, but it will take too long. Nessa is waiting for her. And as soon as her mother wakes up, she will be waiting for her as well.
She sets her pack down on the ground and looks around to see if there is anything she can use to get across. At first she sees nothing and then spots a fallen birch about a hundred yards upstream. She drags it back to where she’s left her backpack and stands it upright. She needs to drop it, just so, so that when it falls, it traverses the river. Then she simply needs to walk across it. She has good balance. Her gym teacher said so when they did their gymnastics unit in PE.
It doesn’t fall straight the first time, but rather at an angle that leaves the top of the tree about three feet from the opposite bank. She considers trying to lift it again, but then figures she can just leap from the end to the embankment. She takes off her shoes and socks, stuffs them in her backpack, and starts across. The water laps at her ankles. It’s not that deep, maybe two or three feet, but still she is nervous as she inches her way across. She grips the tree with her bare toes, curling them like a monkey to hold on. About halfway across, the tree rolls and she loses her balance. It feels as though it is happening slowly and not to her, as though she is watching it happen to someone else. An instant replay even as it occurs.
She tries to right herself, but it is too late. One leg is in the water, and the backpack on her back has slipped downward and is pulling her along with it. And then she is in the water. It is waist high and cold. Shocking.
She grabs for the tree and wills it not to budge again. Slowly, she walks through the rushing current, using the tree to keep her steady, until she reaches the other side. As she climbs up the muddy embankment on the opposite side, she finally realizes her fear. It’s as if it’s just now catching up with her. Her heart is thumping in her chest, her cheeks are flushed hot, and she is trembling all over. The current of the river like electricity. It’s as though she has touched a live wire. She scrambles up the embankment and stares down at the river, at the tree, which has come loose from its tentative moorings and is rushing downstream now, like a twig. It hits a large rock and splits into two, each half taking its own separate course.
She thinks about how fearless she had been on Friday, about the new bravado that she’d felt at the bridge, at the pool, with Marcy. At the time it felt wonderful, a small miracle. As though some sort of weight had suddenly been lifted; she felt unbound, untied,
free.
But now as she watches the tree smash against the rocks, as the cold river water seeps into her jeans and sweatshirt and skin, she wonders if she’d simply been foolish. Maybe her mother is right. The world is a dangerous place: always conspiring to harm you. What more evidence does she need?
She is trembling, freezing, as she makes her way through the woods to the sugar shack. Her clothes are heavy. She peels off the wet sweatshirt and feels a little better, but still, her jeans and T-shirt are soaked through as well. Even her shoes, tucked in her backpack, are wet. And the food she’d packed for Nessa, the granola and breakfast bars anyway, are ruined. Only the canned food is okay. She hopes there is enough here. That they can salvage her next meal or two.
She makes her way to the sugar shack and knocks gently at the door, like she’s just going to a friend’s house to visit. Nessa doesn’t answer.
Ruby knocks again and pushes the door gently open.
Nessa is sitting on the floor. Ruby can make out her shape in the dim light that is filtering in through the broken part of the roof. At the misty rain falling around her.
“Hey!” Ruby says brightly. “I brought more food! And I found him. George Downs? But . . .” She feels her throat start to swell up and she swallows before she speaks again so she won’t cry. Nessa, of course, doesn’t speak. And when Ruby’s eyes adjust to the light, she sees that something isn’t right. Nessa is sitting on the floor, surrounded by a strange pool of water, as though there has been a deluge, a flood. And then, when the girl’s head rolls back on her neck, her throat exposed, she realizes what is happening. Her water’s broken. The baby is coming.