“I
need you,” Ruby says.
And Sylvie feels her entire world starting to cave in. It’s as though the weight of these words, the impact with which they strike, are the same as the car hitting the side of the bridge. Of the car with her family nestled inside as it smashes into the bridge and that other car backs away, leaving them to bear the impact alone. As she stands on the porch with only inches between her daughter and her impossible demands, she is once again hurtling inside the car, free-floating like an astronaut as they crush through the bridge and tumble down into the water. She is watching as the steering wheel comes down on Robert’s lap, crushing his legs before the door swings open, releasing him into the night. She is sitting in the front seat, holding her mascara in one hand as she watches the glass shatter, as the current tugs her and Jess into its arms, as she watches Ruby hurled like a ball toward the shore. She is pulled into the rush of dark water, blinded and deaf to anything but Jess’s cries. She can see his one pale arm, his sweet small face illuminated by the headlights that are still, miraculously, shining like a spotlight on the scene in the river.
“Mommy!” he cries, and she tries, she tries so hard to reach him, but the closer she gets the harder the river pulls, and then, in only moments, his head dips under the water, and then, a moment later, that pale white arm is gone. A recollection. A memory.
After this moment, there was nothing left but this crippling fear.
She remembers almost nothing of the hospital that night, of the days and weeks after the accident. There were pills and sleep. Robert was in the hospital for nearly a month before he came home. They’d had to amputate both legs. There was no way to save them. There was a funeral, outside, a cold sunny day before Christmas, a casket that looked as though it were made for a doll. There was Ruby sitting on the couch watching cartoons and eating cereal. There was Bunk lumbering around the house fixing whatever he could fix. Gloria with her sad eyes sitting at her kitchen table like an odd guardian. And there was her fear. The fear she had lived with since she was a little girl, the fear she kept quiet in the back corner of her mind. But now the fear lived
inside
her. It controlled her hands. It maneuvered her eyes and mouth. It spoke through her. She was only a marionette, she realized, and Fear her puppeteer.
“I need you,” Robert had said, with his worried face as he learned to navigate this strange new world.
I need you to help me, to love me.
“I need you,” Gloria had said as she waited and waited and waited for her to get better.
I need your friendship, your company.
“I need you,” said all the mothers.
To bring my baby into the world, to take care of me, to make us safe.
“I need you,” Ruby says. “I
need
you.”
It takes everything she has to go to the closet. She is resisting every impulse, defying every instinct.
She hasn’t worn this coat since the night of the accident. When the paramedics found her, she was a mile downstream, clinging to a rock, screaming Jess’s name; her bright red coat ultimately saved her. She reaches into the pockets and feels something inside. It’s an envelope. She pulls it out now; it has long since dried and hardened. It is stiff as she unfolds it. The kids’ report cards. The reason they’d been headed toward the school during the storm. As Ruby waits in the other room, Sylvie unfolds the fragile paper, studies the assessment of her child. Her eyes scan the paper and go to where the teacher has handwritten her notes, which, despite the river, are miraculously preserved.
Jess is a hardworking and sweet boy, but he is easily discouraged. It is difficult to get him to participate in class, but only because he lacks confidence. He is shy and somewhat fearful of new things. And while he does not test well . . .
Here, the last words written about her son. This odd obituary. This strange eulogy. She remembers being frustrated when she first read this. She’d been a little angry, even, with Jess.
Why don’t you raise your hand in class? What are you afraid of?
As though she herself had not been tentative like this. As though he wasn’t exactly like she had been as a child.
She sets the report card on her bureau and unfolds Ruby’s.
Ruby is such a bright child. She is eager to learn, kind to others, and a joy to teach. I feel lucky to have her as my student.
This, more than the note about Jess, feels like a blow: these observations by someone who had only known Ruby for a few months, who had not seen her take her first steps or listened to her sing or watched as she helped Jess put blocks in the shape sorter; someone who didn’t know she liked plain donuts and meatball grinders and that her favorite color was orange; someone who didn’t know she talked in her sleep or that she broke her arm when she was three. And still, this woman felt fortunate to know her. This
stranger
counted Ruby as one of her blessings. She feels oddly jealous and then just filled with remorse. How could she have let things go so wrong? How could she deny herself what she has left? How she could have deprived Ruby a mother all this time? What kind of mother was she? And what has she become?
Ruby leads the way through the house, grabbing things along the way and stuffing them into her backpack. She has heated up water and poured it into her Thermos. She has towels, scissors. She’s talking rapidly about a girl in the woods, a runaway. Sylvie has no idea what she is talking about, but still she listens. She tries to understand.
“There’s a girl in the woods, Mama. And she’s having a baby.”
Sylvie’s eyes widen.
“Just come,” she says. “Please. She needs us.”
N
essa has become the pain now. She has ceased to exist as anything but this throe. Her entire body is burning up. She is fever. She is heat. She is not a body but an element. Volcanic. Molten. She feels as if a fire is starting; her flesh burns so badly. It recalls the first time, when the boy whose name she can’t remember but whose hands and eyes she won’t forget, kissed her until her face was sticky with his saliva, an ineffectual balm for the searing pain he’d caused. It is a memory of other times, when the men were too rough. When they cared for nothing but their own pleasure, even if it caused her pain. It is the memory of fire that lives between her legs now. A sort of primordial remembrance. She could be the first woman ever. She could be Eve.
She needs to get outside of her body, because it is about to destroy her. And so she crawls on hands and knees, lowing like an ancient beast, as she makes her way through the broken wall. The rain greets her with its cold hands, pulling her, even as it pushes. She lies in a pile of wet leaves, presses the cold wet mud against her skin, and opens her eyes until the rain fills them, until she is not only mute but blind as well. And, for a moment, there is respite. Cool rain on hot skin; the fire sizzles even as it smolders on. She feels as though someone is tearing her body apart, as though she is being ripped down her center, just threads holding together a seam. The girl is gone. When did she go? Was she ever there at all? Maybe Nessa dreamed her, conjured her. Maybe she is feverish, delirious, foolish, and deluded. She might die here, she thinks, and this thought is punctuated by a loud, wild creaking and the sudden and momentary certainty that something terrible is about to happen.
R
uby tries to open the back door, but the wind pushes back, resists like a child on the other side who doesn’t want them to come out. She pushes harder, pressing her shoulder into it, leaning with all of her weight. The door swings open and she stumbles down the steps. When her eyes adjust to the darkness, she feels like she’s stepped into a dream.
The first thing she notices is that the river is no longer the quiet creek it was yesterday. It is wide and high, and it roars like the engine of a car. She takes the flashlight and shines a weak spotlight into the distance. It doesn’t seem possible, but the river has come closer to the house as well now.
She turns around to see if her mother is following her. But her mother stands in the doorway, her old red coat wrapped around her, her arms wrapped around her waist. She is looking at the river too. Suddenly, Ruby is overwhelmed by a memory of her mother standing at the edge of the river after they finally found Jess. She had stood like this then too. She was soaking wet, and someone, one of her dad’s friends, another paramedic, wrapped his arm around her shoulders. But she’d only stood there, shaking, staring out at the water in the same strange way. As though she were watching the world end and was powerless to do anything about it.
“Are you coming?” Ruby says to her mother, afraid of her answer. Afraid that she will only stand there just as she had that night, staring out into the darkness like a statue.
But instead her mother pulls the hood of her coat up over her head, pulls the drawstrings tight and nods at Ruby.
“Q
uick!” Ruby says to her. “We need to cross here. Upstream it’s going to be too hard.”
The rain pounds down on them, and Sylvie has to will her legs to move. She feels as though she is a tree that has grown roots in this spot. That she is tethered to this house by a strange underground network of nerves, intricate and complicated. Is this paralysis from her own stubborn unwillingness, she wonders, or
inability?
What if she was wrong? What if she is simply
incapable
of leaving this house, this little plot of land? What if this sentence, this exile is not self-imposed at all, but rather inflicted upon her? Mandated. What if there are greater powers than her own fear at work here?
The rain is loud as it hits the hood of her jacket; it pounds against her ears like a heartbeat.
Ruby is standing at the place where land becomes water, waiting for her. Her face is blank, neither hopeless nor hopeful. Just
waiting.
This moment is a gift, she knows. It is being offered to her—by Ruby, of course, but perhaps, even by the universe. If she refuses, if she turns away from this cosmic generosity, she is suddenly certain that something terrible will happen. And that terrible thing will be that she never sees her daughter again. And so when Ruby hollers into the storm, “Hurry, Mom!” Sylvie wills her legs to move, her body to respond. She can feel the network, the nervous system resisting. It is electric, magnetic even. But she wills herself forward, one step at a time. Her legs feel thick and heavy, as though she is tearing roots from the ground. As though she is ripping her own body from the earth. But then she is walking toward Ruby, and then she is running toward Ruby, and the house is behind her.
And nothing is happening.
She is not being sucked back into its clutch, there is nothing stronger than her own wish, her own desire, her own yearning. She wants desperately to be free of this, and then, suddenly, miraculously, she is. She just
is.
“Take my hand,” Ruby says. “We need to cross here. It’s too deep up ahead.” Ruby extends her tiny hand out to her, and Sylvie grasps it. How many times has she held her daughter’s hand as they crossed the street? There was always something so pacifying about the moment when palms touched and fingers locked in this way; as long as she was holding on to Ruby nothing could happen to her.
They move together like one strange multi-limbed body, first running and then leaping across the narrowest part of the river. It rushes against their ankles, tugs at their legs, but they are still able to cross and get to the other side. Sylvie can feel the cold water seeping into her pant legs, even her coat. It should weigh her down, but here, staring at the backside of her house from the opposite embankment, she feels lighter. So much weight lifted.
“Come,” Ruby urges, and pulls her hand, a gentle reminder that this journey has only started.
They make their way through the dark woods, Ruby leading the way. The storm feels like something alive, a beast howling into the night. It is raining so hard now, the air feels like it too is alive. But rather than frightening her, it seems, rather, to urge them on.
Ruby carries the flashlight, and the weak beam bobs and dips as they run, illuminating nothing but rain and trees, spruce and fir and cedar, their evergreen scent heady and thick. Maple, birch, beech, elm, and ash with their tender leaves. But despite the darkness, Sylvie feels overwhelmed by all of her other senses: the heady scent of the trees, the snapping of twigs and crush of leaves under their feet as they run, the howling of the wind and the roar of the rain and the river behind them. She is disoriented, but Ruby seems certain; she is not forging a new path but following along one she already knows by heart.
Ruby rushes ahead and then stops, turning as if to make sure that Sylvie is still behind her. In the dim light of the flashlight, Sylvie can see the relief in Ruby’s face. It tears at her heart. Ruby had expected her to disappear. That she would fail, again. Somehow, this makes Sylvie’s resolve grow stronger. She will not abandon her again. She will never leave her.
“This way,” Ruby says then, her words being sucked into the wind. “In the sugar shack.”
You wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. It is a crumbling sugarhouse enveloped in foliage. One side has sunken into the ground, and the roof is caved in. It doesn’t look as though it has been used for years. It’s like something from a childhood fairy tale. Like something from a dream.
Ruby shines the flashlight toward the door, which has come off of its hinges. “She’s in here,” she says but hesitates at the doorway, as though afraid of entering, as if she is second guessing her decision to bring Sylvie here.
“It’s okay,” Sylvie says. “I’m right here.”
And so Ruby pushes the door gently open and Sylvie follows close behind. They step through into the dark room, and for a moment all of the smells and sounds are silenced here. It is a quiet dark cave. But as Ruby scans the room with the flashlight, she becomes frantic. The room is empty.