The cracks, the fault lines, may have been there even when she was child, but were too small to register: the seismic rumblings so deep under the surface that she didn’t even notice them. Not until she became a mother. Not until that one morning, just three days home from the hospital when she lay with Ruby in the bed (this bed), studying her miniature features, her tiny hands and feet, as her fingers stroked her feathery hair, and then stumbled at the boney ridge. Locating the soft spot, the abyss between the two boney plates of Ruby’s skull, she was overwhelmed by a crushing realization. For the first time, those quiet quivers, that tremulous feeling she sometimes felt, now shook and quaked with a violence she could barely comprehend, and she felt herself splitting in two, her
life
splitting in two. Because in this moment, as her fingers skipped across the fontanel, that fleshy undefined place bridged by the certainty of bone, of skull, she realized that she had not only the obligation to protect this child, this life, but also the power to destroy it.
It shook her to her core, the epicenter of this convulsion located deep in her chest. But instead of relief, the stillness that followed brought only further unease. And every single day afterwards, until the accident, provided a series of startling and painful aftershocks. She had spent her entire life waiting for that cataclysm which would render her powerless. In this way, the accident seemed not accidental at all, but rather
inevitable,
simply confirming what she’d been dreading all along.
She knows what people think, what people say about her. That she’s lost her mind. That she’s gone off the deep end. But they forgive her her eccentricities, because what else can they do? They try to empathize, to imagine how they might respond to this same loss.
A little boy. God, he was just a little boy.
But it is an impossible kind of imagining. There is no way to understand, and patience and tolerance go only so far. People expect you to eventually pick yourself up and move on. Grief has a shelf life, and hers expired long ago. And so she has exiled herself, alone and trembling in this chasm between
before
and
after.
Ruby does not belong here.
Why can’t Bunk understand this? But here he is, waiting for her to answer, as though this is not her life. As though there is any sort of normalcy to any of this. It’s not as though he can’t see with his own eyes what she has become. How the terror of every single moment has laid claim to her. Perhaps he still believes she might pull through this. But she is a rope trying to fit in the eye of a needle. There
is
no pulling through.
She’s always liked Bunk, always respected him as a man. He works hard. He is loyal to his brothers. A good uncle to Ruby and Jess. He was the first one, the only one after the accident who thought to say,
I believe you,
when she tried to explain that there was another car, that the headlights were blinding as they entered the covered bridge. Why else would Robert have steered them over the edge? Robert, who could remember nothing afterwards except for the score of the Celtics game, blamed himself for being distracted by the radio. By the rain. Ruby recollected nothing either; she’d been so lost inside her book. Bunk was the only one who would listen when Sylvie insisted that someone else was there. That someone else had caused the accident and then backed away into the night.
I believe you,
he’d said, sitting across from her at this same kitchen table nearly two years ago.
We’ll find them, Syl.
He was the only one who knew exactly what she needed to hear, even if it was an impossible promise, a futile one.
And now he sits across from her with his imploring eyes and this proposition, and she tries to imagine having Ruby home again. She thinks of how it would feel to tuck her into bed. She thinks about the sound of her voice. Of the softness of her skin. God, how she misses her, nearly as much as she misses Jess. She misses every single thing about her, the missing like a living thing. It breathes. But this is no place for a child, and she is no mother. Not anymore.
And here again is the fissure, the breaking. It starts in her center, as it always does. And that stitch, that cramp in her side spreads, splitting her. Bifurcating her. And her heart, banging hard in her chest, does not know which way to go. One part of her resists, protests. And the other, the one that controls that corroded voice box in her throat, relents.
“Isn’t there some sort of storm coming that way?” she asks. She doesn’t have a television anymore, but she does have a radio, and they’ve been talking about a hurricane that’s supposed to hit the East Coast.
Irene.
That’s what they’re calling this one.
Bunk shrugs. “We’ll be fine. Storm’s way out in the Caribbean right now. Probably blow over by the time we’re driving back home. It’s just a week.”
“One week,” she says. Neither agreement nor refusal, but Bunk hears what he needs to hear.
“It’ll be okay, Syl. I promise.”
But after Bunk disappears down the road and she is alone again, she wonders at what she has done.
T
hings haven’t been right with her mom in a while. Not since the accident. Ruby knows that. Still, it doesn’t change the way her stomach bottoms out when Uncle Bunk, Daddy, and she pull into the driveway today and she sees the house.
She lives with her dad and her Uncle Bunk in town at Bunk’s now. She used to come sleep at her mom’s on the weekends, but since last time, the time the ambulance had to come and her mom had to go to the hospital, her mom’s stopped asking her to stay with her. It’s too hard, she thinks. Ruby reminds her of too many things that hurt her heart. The last time she even saw her mom it was spring, Easter, but here in the woods there was still snow up to her waist. They could barely see anything but the top bit of the house: the faded blue metal siding, the tar paper roof. But now that the snow is gone, now that they’re nearing the end of summer, she can see what all that snow was hiding.
The first thing Ruby notices is the mailbox, which is lying on its side in the driveway. She bends down and tries to right it, but the post is wedged into the ground and won’t budge. She opens the metal lid and a bunch of pincher bugs scramble in the sunlight. The envelopes and flyers inside are wet. She grabs them, and they disintegrate in her hands. She sees there’s a card from her stuck against the back, one she sent almost two months ago with her spring class picture inside. She lifts the flap and realizes the whole thing is glued together, and so she tries to tear the envelope away, to salvage the picture, but it just peels her whole face off the paper. It was a good picture; she wasn’t making that stupid face she usually makes in her class pictures, the one where she smiles with her mouth closed tight and her eyes bugged wide open. She was wearing the dress her mom likes, even though she never wears dresses anymore, the one her mom says brings out the green in her eyes.
Bunk is helping Daddy get out of the van. He’s got Daddy’s wheelchair out, and now he’s leaning into the car to scoop him up. Ruby turns away. Daddy doesn’t like her to watch this part. She doesn’t blame him. There’s no dignity in your little brother having to carry you like a baby. Once Ruby can hear the familiar grunt that means he’s settled into the chair, she turns and motions for them to follow her to the house.
That’s when she notices that all that waist-high snow has been replaced with hip-high weeds and grass. There is a path worn through the middle of it, probably from the guy who delivers groceries and the lady from the library who brings her mom books, but it still feels like the jungle. It is August, and the mosquitoes and horseflies are thick. She slaps them away from her ankles as she makes her way toward the house. She can hear Bunk struggle to push Daddy’s chair through the weeds; the path is barely wide enough for a single person, never mind a wheelchair.
“Jesus Christ,” Daddy mumbles, but Ruby doesn’t turn around to look at him. She already knows what his expression looks like.
The driveway is longer than she remembers. It feels like a mile of twists and turns before they finally see the house.
“I warned you,” Bunk says. Bunk came up last Sunday to talk to her mom about Ruby staying with her. Ruby heard him and Daddy talking about it when they thought she was asleep, their voices as soft and low as music in the kitchen over the shuffling of cards. They don’t know she listens.
Ruby feels her mouth twitching in the way it does just before she’s going to cry, so she sucks in a breath to stop it.
Bunk and Daddy built this house before she was even born. They put up these walls with their own hands. They plumbed and wired it. They dug the well, put in the septic tank. They raised the roof and installed the windows. They insulated and painted. They put in the light fixtures, the toilet, the cabinets, the sink. And before the accident, Daddy started to build the addition that was supposed to be her new room, which now sticks out from the side of the house like an abandoned husk. It’s framed up of course, with warped and faded Tyvek paper wrapped around it like a gift. But there’s no roof over the top, and the woods beyond the house seem to want to reclaim this little piece of land. A sapling has worked its way up through the unfinished floor. There is a
tree
in the middle of this room,
her
room, its branches reaching out through the windows. The new green leaves climbing the unfinished walls.
The front porch is the same as it’s been since Ruby and her dad left, bamboo shades rolled down, their pull strings rotten. The three steps leading up to the door are missing one of the treads now. She suspects it’s probably buried somewhere in the overgrown grass. The screen door hangs from one hinge, and there’s a blanket tacked to the back of the door, so you can’t see in.
“How the hell am I supposed to get into the house?” Daddy asks.
“I can carry you,” Bunk says and then realizes that won’t happen in a million years. “Here,” he says, quickly realizing he needs to come up with another solution, and goes to the side of the house where there is a stack of plywood sheets leaning against the wall.
Bunk fashions a sort of ramp for Daddy’s chair over the broken steps, though as soon as he puts the chair on, they all know it’s probably going to just snap in half like a cracker. Still, he somehow manages to get Daddy up the ramp and through the broken door onto the porch.
Ruby can’t help it now. Her mouth is twitching something fierce as she looks at the wicker loveseat where her mother used to sit with her and Jess on summer nights to read them stories and watch the fireflies. The wicker is ragged, as though something’s been chewing on it, and the rose-covered cushions are torn, the stuffing pulled out. She moves closer and sees that the stuffing is mixed in with a pile of straw. It’s some sort of
nest,
and wriggling inside are three baby raccoons. She closes her eyes and concentrates on pushing the lump that’s in her throat back down. Neither Bunk nor Daddy says a word, but it doesn’t matter, because Ruby knows exactly what they’re thinking. They’re thinking there’s no way on earth they can leave her here for a whole week. They’re thinking about how they’re going to tell her mom that this is no place for an eleven-year-old kid to be. They’re trying to figure out if a heart that’s already broken can be broken all over again, wondering what would be left.
Daddy wheels himself up to the door and bangs his fist against the glass three times. Ruby hears scurrying and think it’s the raccoons, but they’re still sleeping. Maybe it’s the mama raccoon. Or maybe it’s something else altogether.
Her mom doesn’t answer the door right away. And every second they wait makes Ruby nervous. She tries to imagine what she’s doing inside the house. The last time they were here, it took her mom almost five whole minutes before she answered the door. But then when she finally did, she laughed and apologized and said she’d just been in the bathroom. That day Ruby gave her one of the cream-filled chocolate Russell Stover eggs she always used to like, and everything was okay. But this feels different. This feels scary. The twitchiness of Ruby’s face moves down into her chest. She feels shaky all over, like there’s a nest of baby raccoons stirring inside her ribs.
She can see the cracked vinyl shade in the door’s window move a little, and this is enough to settle her down a little bit. And then when her mom opens the door, she feels most of that awful trembling feeling go away.
It’s just her mom. The same mom she’s known for eleven years, with her pretty twinkling dark eyes and soft hands which reach for her, and then she is hugging her, smelling the same familiar smell that makes her feel both happy and so sad she can’t keep the tears inside anymore. And so Ruby lets them come, hot and certain, but her mom has her pressed so tightly against her chest it’s like she’s a sponge just sucking them all away.
When her mom pulls away, she holds on to Ruby’s shoulders and pushes her back to look at her. She’s almost as tall as she is now, and her mom notices that first. She frowns and shakes her head. “You look like you’ve grown a foot,” she says, smiling sadly. “I’m not ready for you to grow up yet. Can you please just stay little for a while longer?”
Then it’s like she’s noticing for the first time that Ruby didn’t come alone. “Hi, Bunk,” her mom says, smiling at Bunk, who leans in and gives her a little hug.
“Robert,” her mother says, nodding at her dad, and then she reaches out awkwardly and takes his hand. They hold hands like this for a minute before Daddy spoils everything.
“Syl, you got raccoons living out here.” He motions to the loveseat.
Her mom looks at the loveseat, and her face turns red. She brushes her hand as if she could just make it go away. “I know, I know. The mama came in through the broken screen this winter, I think. To get warm. And now we’ve got this.”
Bunk says softly, “Syl, you can’t have wild animals living in the house. You know that, right?”
She nods up and down, too many times. “I know. I’ll get somebody to take care of it.”
Daddy snorts.
“I
will,
Robert,” she says, and now she’s the one with tears in her eyes. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”
Her mom is a terrible liar, though, and they all know she can’t call anybody. Her phone went out during the last big storm this summer, and she never got it fixed. Every time Ruby’s tried to call her, she’s just gotten a busy signal. There’s no cell reception up here either, so even if she had a cell phone she wouldn’t be able to use it.
“I don’t know about this,” Daddy says suddenly to Bunk. “Maybe this isn’t the best idea.”
Ruby sees her mom’s hands clench into fists at her sides. She’s like a little girl, she thinks. She’s seen her best friend, Izzy, do the same thing when she gets mad. She half expects her to stomp her foot. But she just keeps nodding.
“It’s
fine,
” she says. “I’ll call somebody. And I’ll get the screen fixed.”
She reaches for Ruby again with her tiny hands. And Ruby remembers all of a sudden the way she used to lie down next to her in her bed when she was little and stroke her hair until she fell asleep at night. How big her hands seemed then.
“You
want
to stay, don’t you, Ruby?” she asks. Her voice sounds like two voices, one that is strong and deep. The voice she remembers singing in the shower. But it’s like it’s split into two now, like a thread that’s been separated. And the other strand is high and fragile and scared.
Ruby nods, even though she’s afraid to be here. She’s afraid that she looks so much like her old mom but is so different at the same time. Still, Ruby misses her. She misses this house, or at least what it used to be. And she
does
want to be here. At least she thinks she does.
“We don’t have a lot of other options, Rob,” Bunk says. “And it’s just a week.”
Her dad nods. “I know.”
Bunk is taking her dad down to visit Uncle Larry in North Carolina. They say it’s because of the scratch-off ticket, that now they don’t have any excuses not to go see him. They looked into flying, but it was too expensive, so they decided to just take the van down. Make a road trip of it. This is the official reason why they’re dropping her off at her mom’s. But there are other reasons, secret reasons they don’t think Ruby knows about. The first is that Larry’s got some problems. She doesn’t really know what they are, but she’s pretty sure it has something to do with drinking. Maybe even drugs. The second is about a little piece of land for sale down there. A house and a commercial fishing boat that Larry knows about. This is what Ruby has gathered from those nights when they thought she was sleeping. A few beers into the nights when they would forget to whisper, and their voices, her dad’s dreams, found their way down the hall and under her closed door. About leaving behind all the bad memories. About taking the insurance money and selling the house.
This
house. About starting over. And helping Larry get himself back on track at the same time. But what Ruby hasn’t been able to gather, the words that haven’t found their way to her ears, are the ones that explain what will happen to her mom. Where
she
will go.
She looked up the town, Wanchese, on the Internet at the library, studied the little island off the coast of North Carolina. Tried to imagine their life there. But it was like trying to draw a picture of an animal you’ve never seen before. Like trying to imagine God.
She knows this is the real reason she isn’t invited to come along, but her dad makes up excuses.
“You can’t really afford to miss all those swimming lessons,” her dad offered as if this were a bad thing. She
hates
swimming lessons.
“You wouldn’t want to spend the last week of your summer with a couple of old dudes anyway,” Bunk said, playfully punching her in the shoulder.
And while this didn’t actually sound bad at all, it
was
the last week of summer. By the time they got back, it would be almost Labor Day. The leaves would be starting to turn, the mornings would be crisp, the air cold and quick instead of thick and slow. Summer would practically be gone.
“Besides, you’d miss the fair,” her dad said, slapping his knee, as though he’d just solved a riddle.
And so Ruby nodded. They didn’t want her to come along. And it had nothing to do with any of these excuses and everything to do with that little town she could barely find on the map. Ruby tried to convince herself she’d be better off staying behind. For one thing, she
would
miss the fair. She and Izzy had gone to the fair on opening day every single year since they could walk. It was a tradition. In ten years, she hadn’t missed the fair even once.
There was also the model-bridge building contest, the one Mrs. McKnight told her about last spring. She’s the Gifted and Talented teacher at school, and she’s always finding cool projects for them to do. At first Mrs. McKnight was worried that Ruby wouldn’t want to do the bridge unit, that it wasn’t a good idea, after the accident. Everyone at school knew what had happened that night at the river, at the bridge. “You don’t have to do this, Ruby,” she’d said after class when they were alone. But building bridges soothed her, made her feel like she had a purpose even. She couldn’t explain how it felt like she was fixing something, like she was solving a problem with each drop of glue, each slender, bendable piece of balsa wood. And so after Mrs. McKnight saw how much Ruby enjoyed it, she encouraged her to enter the contest, which was sponsored by the college.