Ruby Read online

  I turn and see the young woman with flowers in her golden ringlets. She is smiling mischievously, everything about her twinkling in the candlelight. Then her image blurs, as if I am watching her through a scrim of smoke or a fall of moonlit water.

  Suddenly I am so tired I can’t hold my head up.

  I lie down on the soft earth and close my eyes.

  I wake some time later with a heaviness in my limbs. My head feels fuzzy, and when I open my eyes, the dark forest spins and tilts around me as if I have been turning in circles. So I close my eyes again and curl up into a fetal position, trying to make the nauseating dizziness stop.

  After a while, it does. There is only a gentle rocking motion. I open my eyes and see that I am held in the arms of the dark woman I met in the forest once before. She takes a small cloth, dips it into the pool of water, and presses it against my forehead. The scent of lavender is so strong I can taste it, like the pale purple pastilles that my mother gave me on May Day in an oval-shaped purple-flowered tin. I remember collecting lavender as a child, drying it on wax paper in the sun and keeping it in a little purple-and-white flowered cloth box with a mirror inside. When I was upset or unable to sleep, I would open the box and inhale.

  The woman strokes my hair and I feel her braid tickling my cheek and her heart beating at her breast. I want to stay here with her forever. I try to say something but no words come out, and I realize I am falling asleep again.

  The next time I open my eyes, everything has changed. I am no longer in a forest, but lying on parched ground, surrounded by rocks that resemble the bones of giants in the darkness. There are no sounds of water or trees, no wind, just arid silence.

  But there is some water—the same small, round pool. This time, the surface is as thick, black, and still as ink.

  I lean over the edge, wanting the smiling child again. Instead I see a white face with eyes that seem to be popping out of their sockets, tangled hair, and sharp incisors, bared like an attacking animal’s fangs. I remember the Christmas Eve when I went to check on my mother and sister, armed with my flashlight and phone. I hadn’t recognized the Ruby I saw in the mirror that night, either.

  I hear laughter like flames crackling. The old woman is standing above me, her lank white hair hanging over her face. Her eyes, black and bottomless as the pool, are the only really visible feature. She is cupping her gnarled hands in front of her chest as if she is holding her own torn-out heart.

  This is when I realize that I have made a mistake. I do not want to harness the fates. I do not want power, or to hold Orion, or to bring upon myself the three-fold law.

  “The child was you,” the crone says. “And so is the shadow in the pool. It can be a part of you or it can consume you. If you step into the water, your spell will be complete.”

  I WAS STILL HALF ASLEEP when I reached for the ringing phone, trying to silence it. My whole body ached as if I had been beaten. I was surprised that I was not purple with bruises.

  When I heard Opal’s voice, I knew it was something serious. My mother and sister wrote letters that didn’t say much, just asking how I was and reporting on small town news, sending love. They never called.

  My father had had a stroke. He was dead.

  My wish had come true. I would never have to see his face again, or hear his voice. If I ever returned to the place where I grew up, I would never have to glance over my shoulder, waiting for him to appear with his clenched teeth and his smoldering cigarette. I could finally end the story of the Ruby who existed before Orion. But Orion was gone.

  The fear began then. More than any fear I had felt before. Because you can fight back with your nails and fists, by taking legal action, by moving away, by disciplining your mind. But how can you fight back against a malevolent spirit?

  MY GRANDFATHER DIES in our house. I am nine years old. I think he had a heart attack or something, but no one talks about it. I don’t want to be alone in the house, ever again. At night, sometimes it is cold in an unearthly way, hellishly cold, just in spots of the house, not all over. No one can explain this. Also, my father complains of hearing banging noises in the night. He develops migraines from them. We don’t hear the sounds; we think he is just crazy. We do not consider that he is haunted.

  These are the emotions I felt coming from my father at the death of his father:

  Anger. Pain. Malice. Revenge.

  It seemed normal at the time. I didn’t have anything else to compare it to.

  I KNOW THAT MY FATHER’S FATHER grew up very poor in a house with a dirt floor. His grandmother lived there with them. She mumbled to herself and carried a pincushion full of pins with her wherever she went. There were eight people crammed into that tiny house. I saw it once. It gave me shivers, how dirty and small it was. What happened to my grandfather in that house?

  I remember that my mother never wanted to leave Opal and me alone with my grandfather. And when my grandmother went out of the room, she’d almost always tell Grandpa, “Behave yourself, now,” as if she were saying it to a boy. I never knew what she was talking about.

  My grandfather never laid a finger on me or on Opal. He wore overalls all the time and chewed tobacco, the kind that came in a block called a “plug.” He’d stand with his back to the corral and make clicking noises with his mouth. My horse, Vixen, would come running from wherever she was. When she saw him, she’d slow down and sneak up behind him. She’d put her head over his shoulder and, very carefully, she’d reach into his front overall pocket with her teeth and take a big bite of that nasty tobacco. Then my grandfather would burst out in this fit of laughter.

  My grandfather was a nice man. I was never afraid of him.

  What did my grandfather do to my father? What did my grandfather’s parents do to him and what did their parents do to them?

  It all gets passed down, on and on. Until it stops.

  You can change things with your will, your determination, your strength. You can move away, track down your true love, treat your children differently than you have been treated. But how strong do you have to be to fight a ghost?

  I decided I would go home. Not to honor my father but to be with Opal and my mother. And to learn exactly how strong I really was.

  home

  AS SOON AS I LEFT the airport, my body slammed into a wall of hot, gray air. I had forgotten what this kind of humidity felt like. Sweat sprang out of every pore. Even my eyes felt as if they were perspiring.

  I took the shuttle to the rental car and then drove along the curving roads, past cornfields and farms. After a while, a light summer rain fell, tapping the windshield. I was glad for the hypnotic sound of the wipers, back and forth, lulling my brain so I didn’t have to think. But that didn’t last long.

  On one of Isabelle’s decks of healing cards were the words, “Whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.” I wondered what happens to something that is continually, repeatedly, over and over, exposed to darkness.

  Before I left, I had told Isabelle about my past and how I had used the potion and worked the spell. She saw my tears then, for the first time, and she rocked me in her arms. From the shelter of her body I sputtered that I thought I had killed my father.

  “No, sweetheart. It was a strange coincidence, that’s for sure. But Harnessing the Fates doesn’t work that literally. It’s about accessing your own power.”

  I said I was afraid the first part of the threefold law would come back to me in the form of my father’s ghost.

  “But you didn’t go into the pool, Ruby. You saw your own crone power but you chose not to enter the dark water. The spell wasn’t completed.”

  I still wasn’t sure, but I had to face whatever was coming directly. There were some things I didn’t tell Isabelle: that I loved her son, that I had hunted him down, and that part of the reason I had worked the spell was to make him come back to me. I was afraid that the second part of the threefold law would manifest as something having to do with Orion. That was why I had sent him th
e book I had been writing. If he knew everything, he would be done with me for good and I would no longer have to worry about losing him.

  My mother lived in a small brick house in a wooded area at the edge of town. She was going to nursing school and dating a nice, shy widower. My sister lived nearby with her former college boyfriend, whom she had married. She was four months pregnant with their first child. Both my mother and sister looked as if a weight had been physically removed from their shoulders. They stood up straighter and their faces were bright, more youthful-looking than I could remember seeing them in years. I wished I could feel that same relief at the death of my father.

  My mother used to say that when she died she would try to come back and visit me as a spirit. She didn’t seem worried about my father doing the same thing.

  They hugged me and brought me inside, where we ate potato salad and slices of watermelon. My father always insisted on a large, three-course dinner with a meat dish, but ever since we’d left him, we stopped eating that way. Sometimes we skipped the protein altogether. It reminded me of the times when he went away overnight and we’d feel so free, munching on popcorn in front of the television. We still jumped at loud noises, though, on those nights. Maybe we always would.

  I told Opal and my mother about England but not about Orion. It was too hard to explain. Now that I was here, the whole thing didn’t even seem real. Maybe I had imagined it, like my childhood fantasy about the island of the animals. If I told my family, they’d probably think I had made it up anyway.

  You were seeing whom? Orion Woolf? The movie star, the most eligible bachelor of the year, one of the most beautiful people in the world?

  My mother and sister talked about their very real, live men, about baby names, painting a mural in the baby’s room, about recipes and what they were reading in their book club. They seemed so content. I didn’t think I’d ever feel that way. I had been haunted for such a long time, even before there was a real ghost.

  AT THE FUNERAL, I PUT MY HAIR in a bun, wore a black linen shift dress, and kept my sunglasses on. I wasn’t hiding tears, of course. There were no tears. I was hiding from the corpse in the box.

  When we got back that evening, the air was so heavy with moisture I knew it was just a matter of time before the rain came. I sat on the porch with my family, drinking lemonade in tall glasses, listening to the cicadas and waiting for the lightning bugs to turn on. I was waiting for something else, too. When it got dark, I was going to excuse myself and drive to the house where we lived when my father came into my bedroom. It was also the house where he had spent the rest of his life, until he died there, inside its walls.

  A car was coming up the drive. Suddenly I saw the trees that lined the road differently, the way I used to when I was a child—each one animated with a different spirit. These trees were all women, and they were swooning, shaking out their green hair, scratching away at the rough bark that enclosed them, restless for rain. The first drops started, then, and the rich scent of the earth rose up. For a moment, it seemed that even the insects were silent.

  “Who’s that?” Opal said. “Did you invite anyone else over, Mom?”

  We all waited as the car pulled to a stop. A man got out and shut the door. From where I sat on the porch swing, I could see the dark curls and the slow spread of the grin across that face.

  HIS MOTHER HAD SAID, “The goddess is electronically savvy.” She had been a little intimidated by the technology at first, but after a few months, she was over that. Isabelle loved how much information she could gather for her work and how quickly she could communicate with her many sisters around the world.

  He always acted as if this goddess talk was slightly amusing and maybe a little annoying, but really he valued it. Of course, there were the obvious reasons: it was a great way to get women, but that wore off soon enough. It had taught him how to really use his senses and that had helped his acting, he knew. And it had given him a strength and sense of protection he wouldn’t have had otherwise. He wondered sometimes if he would have recovered from his injury without having had the belief in magic instilled in him at such an early age. He knew that part of his recovery had to do with his mother and Marie-Therese with her potions, and he was sure it was also because of Ruby in spite of how he had tried to push her away at first. And he had been lucky that finally he could receive it, that the boundaries his first father had were not there to interfere. He wondered if his father and Isabelle would have had a different relationship if he had understood the goddess the way Phillip did.

  And then I might never exist, Orion thought.

  He no longer felt such resentment for Isabelle and Phillip. After meeting Ruby, he understood better what they had. There was no question that they must be together, no matter what the circumstances.

  So why was he here alone in New Zealand, shooting a film about battling a race of beings who, once powerful and full of light, had been driven underground by man to become demons of corruption? Why wasn’t she with him? Had he just assumed she wouldn’t really want to come? He wasn’t used to being in such a serious relationship. Being so vulnerable after what he’d been through with his back and the recovery. Mainly, he’d just been thoughtless, and now here he was, feeling almost as broken without her as when he had been lying on his back after the accident.

  The e-mail came a week after he arrived. The goddess is electronically savvy, he thought, when he saw the return address: [email protected]. It was a brief note telling him that she would be going back to the States because her father had died suddenly. There was also an attachment, and he saw that it was a long one.

  At first he thought it was fictional. He knew she was writing something and she had told him she might share it with him at some point when she felt it was ready. But slowly he began to realize that this wasn’t fiction at all. Not only the parts about him, but everything—her childhood. He wasn’t sure how he knew but he did. That Ruby had not made this up. That she had lived it and survived and it was real.

  And there was something else Orion knew then. He would go to her and stand beside her and if there were any demons to fight he would be there to fight them, too. It was one thing to do it in the movies and it was another to do it in real life for someone you loved.

  Who but a goddess could have a hand in this? All he had to do was type in a few words and they would reach her in an instant.

  the opposite of birth

  ORION AND I DROVE DOWN the winding roads, past cornfields and pastures, toward the last town I had lived with my father. The rain was pouring now. The heat from our bodies fogged up the windows.

  “Are you doing all right, Ruby?”

  I nodded, looking straight ahead. I felt his eyes on the side of my face, almost as if he were touching me. “How about you?”

  “Better now.”

  “You left the shoot.”

  “They told me I could have the weekend off. I said my fiancée’s father had passed.”

  I turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow.

  “Sorry. I didn’t think ‘girlfriend’ would have the same impact.”

  “Isabelle told you where I was?”

  “I called her after I got the book. I’m sorry I missed the service.”

  “Thank you for coming.”

  “She also told me you weren’t planning on going back. Will you stay here?”

  “No way,” I said. “I just needed to take care of this. I don’t know where I’m going. Maybe L.A. again.”

  Orion reached over and put his hand on my thigh. I felt the pressure of his fingers through the thin linen. He wet his lips and cleared his throat like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.

  We turned off the highway into the small town. We passed the square with its red brick buildings and flower baskets hanging from the street lamps. Then we drove by the high school, the courthouse, the jail. Everything looked exactly the same as when my mother and I had left.

  So did the house, except that the front law
n was overgrown with weeds and there was a FOR SALE sign up. We parked and dashed through the rain up to the back door. It was unlocked.

  Orion took my hand and we stepped into the dark kitchen. The smell of cigarettes was so strong I put my hand up to my face. How had I been able to live like this before? I had hardly noticed it then.

  “He died here?” Orion asked.

  I nodded.

  “Ruby, are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I want to spend the night here. In the basement. That’s where it happened. If he’s going to come back that’s where he’d do it.”

  Orion gripped my hand tighter. I pulled the flashlight out of my purse and we walked through the rooms. The smell of tobacco was everywhere. In the strange light, the flowered wallpaper had a sinister, devouring look.

  I jumped so much that it startled Orion. “Bloody hell, Ruby. What?”

  It was only my reflection in the large mirror.

  The same mirror that had frightened me that Christmas Eve when, armed with Steven’s phone and flashlight, I went to check on my mother and sister.

  They had smooth, round, pale faces, rounded features and dark, wavy hair. With my red hair, blue eyes, and small features I resembled someone else. Part of the terror I had felt that Christmas Eve, and now, was that I recognized him. Like my father, I was strong, a fighter. Maybe that was why he hadn’t been able to get to me the way he did with Opal. But now I’d have to prove that I was stronger than he was.