“O
h my God,” Ruby says. And this startles Nessa out of the words inside her head, off of the page behind her eyes, the ink dissolving into scattered pixelated fragments. “Is the baby coming?”
Nessa somehow remembers how to move her neck, how to nod up and down to communicate
yes, yes.
“We need to get you across the river, to my house,” she says. “My mother can help you.”
But already Ruby’s words are also scattering, fracturing, as the next surge comes. It is electric, thunder imbued with lightning. It starts in her spine, somewhere in the deep marrow. And it takes the form of a tail, the vestigial, primal remnants of another lifetime. She imagines it hitting the floor, sweeping in great arcs of pain, a warning. And when she is able to focus again, her eyes no longer rolling back in her head, Ruby looks terrified.
“What do you need?” Ruby asks her. “What can I get for you? I have water. Do you want water?”
Nessa remembers the opposite of
yes,
though the word escapes her. She remembers only the back and forth shake of her head, and she tries to relinquish the memories of all the other times she has made this small and futile gesture, always failing to communicate.
He was careless. He didn’t care.
“Are you cold?” the girl asks, and it must be because her body is quaking. She doesn’t know how to tell her that despite the trembling, it’s as though her entire body is smoldering.
“Hot?” Ruby asks, and Nessa could kiss her.
And so she takes something from her pack and presses it against Nessa’s forehead. Something cold. A water bottle? Whatever it is, it cools her, calms her. Gives her something to focus on. It’s like a rock in the middle of a stream. The pain rushes around it, but there is stillness where it sits in the center.
“I’ll stay here with you then,” she says, “if you can’t come with me.” The girl looks as though she might cry. “I can help you.” And then, blinking the tears away, and wiping them with the back of one filthy sleeve, she says, “I’m not afraid.”
W
hen Sylvie woke and found the note sitting on the counter, she felt her knees weaken beneath her. It took every reserve of strength she had to not collapse. She was a fool to think that what happened yesterday between them meant anything. That the tenderness and helplessness she felt in Ruby’s little body had anything to do with her. That one embrace could make up for months and months of failures. For what happened that night last spring.
Now at dusk, she stands on the front porch, staring out at her empty driveway, listening to the rain and waiting for Ruby to come home. It is coming down hard now, and the wind is howling; the trees bending in abeyance to its assault.
She had picked up the phone to call Ruby’s cell number, but then worried about what would happen if she didn’t answer. She knows she needs to call Gloria. Her hope is that she is just at Izzy’s house, doing whatever it is that she and Izzy do. She tries to imagine her inside that warm, safe house. She can practically see Ruby sitting at a stool at their cluttered kitchen counter, sipping at one of Gloria’s mugs filled with cocoa. She can smell the fire in the fireplace. She can hear the bluesy music that Neil loves coming from their stereo. Ruby is safe. She knows this. Gloria probably just talked her into staying, to waiting out the storm. Sylvie wonders if maybe her own phone has just gone out again. Maybe Ruby has tried to call but hasn’t been able to get through. She lifts the receiver and waits for the hollow confirmation. But the dial tone is strong and steady. Her hands begin to tremble.
She tries to remember the last time she used the phone to call Gloria, the last time she reached out to her. She is amazed when her fingers recollect the numbers, the pattern across the keypad. She clicks them rapidly before she has time to change her mind. And then she presses the cold receiver to her ear. Her entire body is trembling.
“Hello?” It’s Gloria, and it sounds like she’s eating something.
Sylvie pictures her sitting at the counter with the girls, maybe eating some homemade oatmeal cookies with them. Suddenly the kitchen smells not only of the wood fire but also of brown sugar, raisins.
“Hello?”
Gloria repeats, a tinge of irritation in her voice this time.
“Gloria, it’s me. Sylvie.”
A pause. “Sylvie! Hi! Holy cow, do you hear the rain out there? Are you sure you guys don’t want to come into town and stay with us? I can come get you. It’s not too bad out yet, but it will be.”
“Um, no, we’re okay. I was actually calling because I was wondering if Ruby is with you. I was napping, and I think maybe she went into town?”
Another longer, deeper pause. An awful pause. And in this terrible moment, Sylvie anticipates exactly what Gloria will say and everything that will happen next. In a fraction of a second, she is able to envision the next thirty years of her life. Ruby has disappeared. She is lost; she is gone. Someone has taken her, or she has run away. The only certainty is this uncertainty. This is the beginning of a nightmare from which she will never wake up.
“Syl, Ruby hasn’t been here. I’ve been home all morning. Izzy’s been here too.”
Sylvie begins to rock back and forth, her body remembering the strange primitive motion of motherhood, that instinctual soothing of a body in motion. Only now her children are gone; her arms are empty. She is soothing a memory. She is pacifying a ghost.
“I’m coming over,” Gloria says. “We’ll find her, Syl. It’s going to be okay.”
“No,” she starts. But what is she saying no to? No, don’t help this nightmare to end? No, I am not standing alone in a dark kitchen rocking on my heels like a mental patient? No, I don’t need you?
“The truck’s dead, and Neil’s run out for a minute in Grover’s car. But as soon as he comes back, I’ll come get you.”
“Okay,” Sylvie says. It is this easy. “Thank you.”
Outside the wind moans, but she doesn’t know anymore if it is a warning or a lament.
R
uby knows that she needs to go get help. That if she cannot get Nessa to her mother, perhaps she can get her mother to Nessa. But even though she knows that this is the logical, the
simple
answer, she also knows that it is illogical, impossible. Her mother has not left the house in a year and a half. Why would she leave now to help some girl she doesn’t even know? For some figment of Ruby’s imagination?
Ruby paces around the small wooden shack, listening as the rain pounds against the roof. Water now pours through the collapsed portion of the roof, spilling into an old sap bucket that she has placed here. Nessa is lying on her side, her knees curled up, as though she is only a child with a stomachache. Ruby remembers her mother instructing her to do the same on the nights when her belly roared and complained.
Outside the sky is strangely dark. It is only twilight, but there are low, ominous clouds moving in from the east. They look like illustrated clouds in a child’s picture book. The world looks like a painting. The rain is insistent but also strangely soothing. It is a storm without thunder or lightning. Only wind and this incessant rain. She wonders how much this shack can withstand, how much it would take for the entire roof to collapse.
The sounds that Nessa makes are not human sounds. There are no words, only guttural complaints. Glottal pleas.
Ruby is terrified. She tries to give Nessa water, and as she drips the water from the bottle onto Nessa’s dry lips, she thinks of the baby raccoons. How this thirst, this impulse is the same. She can do this. She can help her. But then Nessa is rolling over onto her hands and knees, swaying, and vomits up all the water she has given her. There is a slick pool of water and bile on the roughhewn floor. Ruby takes the rest of the water and splashes it on the puddle, trying to wash it away. Nessa rocks back and forth, her belly grazing the ground, and vomits again.
“I need to go get help,” Ruby says, articulating exactly what she’s been thinking. Waiting for Nessa to either affirm this or reject it. Should she stay here or should she go?
Nessa’s eyes are rolling back in her head. Ruby and Izzy stayed up late one night and found a horror movie on one of the cable channels. It was about a girl who was possessed by the Devil. This is what she looked like. And she realizes that Nessa, the girl she found cowering in the woods a few days ago, is gone now. She has been consumed by pain, withdrawn into it. She has disappeared. All that remains is the body, this aching, rocking body. And Ruby knows that the choice is hers alone to make.
“I’ll be back,” she says, touching a tentative finger to Nessa’s forehead. “I’m going to get help. I’ll get my mother. She’ll have to come.”
Nessa’s face relaxes a little, and in the second before she is overtaken by pain again, Ruby can see her answer. Her
Yes. Please. Help.
R
uby has left her now, and Nessa doesn’t know if she will ever come back. There is the definite possibility that she will have to deliver this baby alone. She wonders at the stories of teenage girls who have given birth in high school bathrooms, in fast-food restaurants. Closing themselves behind the clean white doors and delivering their own infants without anyone hearing them. Without anyone suspecting anything. Who are these girls and their painless labors? Who are these children who are able to somehow exist outside their pregnancies? She has always been baffled by the stories of girls who manage to hide their swollen bellies from their families. How sometimes, they don’t even realize they are pregnant themselves until the baby is screaming in their arms. It seems like something made up. How could anyone be oblivious to such incredible transformation, to their body’s own miraculous violence?
She doesn’t really know anything about birth. These were the chapters she only skimmed in the library books. Because when she was reading them, this hour seemed impossibly far away. A speculation, a distant dream. She knows nothing of what to do. What had she been thinking?
Her logic has never transcended the moment. Not really. She has never been one to think beyond the immediate impulse. She wants something, she takes it. She feels something (hunger, lust, anger), she feeds it (with food, with sex, with fists). Even with the baby inside of her, she has still lived in this moment-by-moment way, hoping that when
this
moment finally came, she would simply react to it in the same way she has responded to any other problems.
But now here she is, and she is both gripped and paralyzed by the enormity of what is about to happen. Though the pain seems endless, limitless, boundless, she knows enough to know that it will not go on forever. This baby will come out eventually. And with its release, the pain will be released as well.
She needs to trust that Ruby will come back. That she will not have to do this alone. She is bringing her mother. The midwife.
Pain is a time machine. It transports her. She is reeling backward, removed from her body. Removed even from this rain, from this dark forest, from the storm that is gathering outside. She is at once inside and outside. She is body, and she is ethereal. She is the rain, beating against the roof. She is the aching moan of the wind.
She returns to the position on her side, with her knees drawn up as far as they can go, her belly pressing against the thick flesh of her thighs. And waits for the next wave of pain to come. And when it does, she slips away, out of this body into another body. Another time.
R
uby forgets the lies she has told. The fabrications come undone as she runs through the rain back downstream to the place where the river is usually narrower, but she is disoriented in the dark, in the storm. Has she gone the wrong way? She wonders as she stares at the wide expanse of rushing water. As she hears the roar of an angry river, rushing toward some unknown destination.
She stands, bewildered, on the bank and peers at the backside of her mother’s house, at the broken fence and the sandbags lined up along its edge. She needs to get across the river and get to her mother. To convince her, somehow, to come with her to Nessa. She knows Nessa doesn’t want her to call an ambulance, but she will if she has to. She will do whatever it takes to make sure she and the baby are okay.
Ruby knows she’s just going to have to leap. It’s not that much deeper and wider than it was; it just looks that way in the rain. And so she backs up and runs headlong into the storm, eyes squinted against the rain, and holds her breath as she jumps.
She lands on the opposite side of the river, and it feels as though the river is inside her body now, as though her blood has been replaced by this angry, muddy current. She can barely feel her legs anymore as she runs toward the house. The entire fence has collapsed now, and the remaining boards are scattered about the backyard like playing cards, leaving the back of the house exposed.
She runs to the backdoor and reaches for the handle. It is locked. She bangs and bangs and bangs. The lights are on, and she can see her mother moving around inside, but then the lights go out and everything is dark. She is filled with rage. Is her mother hiding inside? Is it possible that she is simply pretending she isn’t home so that she won’t have to answer the door?
She runs around to the front of the house, up onto the porch, and smashes the door with her fists until they ache with pain. She wonders if she has broken her bones. If she might just bang until they are all broken and she is just a pile of dust.
A voice swims to her through the rushing water in the gutter. “Ruby?”
And then the door opens and her mother’s shadowy face swims out of the darkness, a strange, ghostly white, disembodied face.
“Mom, you have to come with me,” Ruby says, breathless.
“Where have you been?” her mother says, her voice changing from relieved to angry. “I called Gloria and she said you weren’t there. I’ve been worried sick,” she says, her voice trembling and furious. “God, Ruby. Why are you doing this to me?”
Ruby stands in the doorway, incredulous. “Why am I doing this to
you?
” she says, almost laughing. She thinks then of Nessa on the floor of the sugar shack, the sounds coming from her throat. All of the agony in the world concentrated in her body.
“I
need
you,” she says, and she realizes that she is crying now. Because these three words are the ones she’s been waiting to say for so long. The words she’s been most afraid of. The ones she fears will go unheard. “I need you,” she says again, only this time more firmly. She is giving her mother one last chance, an ultimatum. If she says
no,
if she shakes her head in the way that she always does, if she slips away from her, hiding in her cowardice, lost inside her fear, she will walk out into the storm alone. She will let her mother go. She will walk away and never, ever look back again.