Ruby Read online

  SO WE WERE TOGETHER three years. It is hard to imagine that I stayed that long. And in some ways, it isn’t. You become what you come from. Unless you refuse.

  On the morning of my twentieth birthday, Steven called me. We had plans to go to the one nice restaurant in town that night. We were going to discuss our move to California. Steven would go into real estate. I was going to work as a nanny, get my massage license, and publish my short stories. We would live in a cottage by the ocean, covered with morning-glory vines.

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “Hi, honey. What’s up?”

  “I can’t make it tonight.”

  “Oh. Okay. Why? Are you feeling okay?”

  There was a pause, but not a very long one. “I can’t see you anymore, Ruby. I’m seeing someone else.”

  “What? Why are you telling me this?”

  “I can’t take all your baggage, Ruby,” he said.

  states of sound and silence

  I HAD VERY LITTLE BAGGAGE when I left. That’s what I told myself. A backpack and a tote bag. Not much at all. I saw an ad in the local paper, for a nice Midwestern nanny to take care of two children in Los Angeles. Their grandfather was the doctor who had examined me in the hospital when I was seven. I’d seen him around town since then; I’d babysat for his friends’ grandchildren. He hired me on the spot.

  Amy and I drove out together. I mostly remember just long expanses of highway and sky, the cornfields turning into mountains, then desert. A feeling of freedom like a landscape spreading out inside of my mind, infinite. But one night we came to a town in Colorado, where the deer hunters were out in full force, wearing the fluorescent orange suits that were supposed to protect them from each other’s guns. There was a restaurant with a sign advertising free steaks for the person who shot the biggest stag. My stomach was hurting. We came to a deserted part of the highway and there they were—the deer. They were standing along the roadside, very still, like statues, and they were watching us. I wondered, did they know we were kin, would never hurt them? Were they soul messengers? Or were they just so trusting that they would have done this for any car? Even the ones filled with orange men and their guns?

  Amy and I got a motel room with a leaking faucet, mildew, ugly yellow-and-brown bedspreads. We ate our cheese sandwiches, washed out our underwear in the sink, and hung them near the heater to dry for the next day.

  Very little baggage. That’s what I believed. But that night, I lay awake. There was more baggage than I thought.

  IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE. Usual holiday cheer. Dad is in the basement, drinking, listening to country music. Always the basement. He’s taken all the phones out and brought them into the basement with him. Before he went down there, he gave Mom the keys to the gun cabinet. Told her she’d better hide them.

  Steven is with me in my bedroom. I want him to take me home with him. Instead, he gives me a Maglite flashlight and a phone in case of emergency. He kisses me good-bye and sneaks out. I go to bed wishing for the warmth of his body next to me.

  A scream. I am awake.

  I’m frozen, can’t move my legs. Then I think of my mom, my sister. I force myself out of bed with the flashlight in one hand and the phone in the other. As if these things will protect me. Outside my window the new fallen snow is sparkling in the moonlight. A perfect Christmas scene. The silver-white of sugar cookies, pearl necklaces, angel wings. There are no footprints.

  I check on my mom first. She is snoring softly, wearing curlers so she’ll be extra pretty for Christmas, alone in the twin bed she has pushed up against my father’s twin and covers with one bedspread in the daytime, to make it look as if they still sleep together.

  I go downstairs to check on my sister. In this house, too, her bedroom is the farthest away from the others.

  On the way to her, I catch a glimpse of someone in a large, framed mirror. Shoulders hunched, eyes burning, mouth grim, hair wild. It can’t be me. The creature looks crazy, animal-like, ready to spring. Ready to kill, if you want to know the truth.

  Opal is sleeping peacefully, snuggled in her blankets, still holding her teddy bear even though she’s a freshman at college. I close her door softly, wishing I could lock it from the inside for her, but there are no locks. My father used to say he was worried about us locking ourselves in by mistake. But that was when we were toddlers, in the first house. He still gets rid of all the locks, every time we move.

  I look through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the enclosed porch. There’s no sign of anyone. No sounds except the clock ticking, the gentle creaks of the wood.

  I go back to my room and stay awake the rest of the night, holding Steven’s gifts.

  THE NEXT DAY, he and my father go hunting together. Steven follows him through the snow. They are both wearing bright orange caps and vests. Steven squints at my father’s back and puts his hand on his gun. He is thinking how easy it would be to shoot him, the orange a perfect target.

  I THOUGHT I WOULD FEEL LIGHTER, shedding, but, in every state we drove through after that, I felt heavier with the weight of what I didn’t want to believe existed.

  In Utah, what I think of mostly is the silence.

  One day, we came to a reservation. We drove up to the gate to pay the entrance fee but no one was there. As we stepped out of the car, it was as if we had been sucked into some kind of vacuum. There was no sound. Not a voice, not a car, a bird, a bug. The silence itself was like a thing you could touch.

  “I’ve never been here,” I said.

  “What?” I heard Amy’s voice but it felt far away.

  I turned to my right and began walking down a marked path. Along the way were open structures with displays of guns and tools, what the white man had brought to civilize the natives over a hundred years ago. My insides were churning. PLEASE STAY ON PATH, the sign said. I turned and walked off the path down a slope to a large, flat area surrounded by trees. I walked forward and looked to my left, already knowing what I would see. A circle of stones. Nothing grand, just regular river rocks, not huge, just big enough to notice.

  “Now I’m going to look up to the right and see a hawk.”

  There was the bird, making wide, lonely loops in the cloudless blue space.

  “Ruby?” I heard Amy’s voice, bringing me back.

  I started running back to the car, running so hard that my chest hurt.

  “What was that?” she asked in the car as I sped away.

  “I don’t know. I know we can’t be here. None of this, this park. It’s holy ground. I mean sacred. No one, no white man…”

  She knew me well enough not to be too freaked out by the things I said. She also knew me well enough to know that I was right—we had to leave.

  THERE IS A WOOD behind my parents’ house. Sometimes I go there to play. I make tea parties for fairies, using moss-covered tree-stump verandas, acorn cups, bluebell bowls, Queen Anne’s lace tablecloths, toadstool chairs and tables. Then I sit and wait for the fairies to come and visit me.

  I am here with Opal. We venture deeper into the woods, into a part we have never been before. We are holding hands and we just keep walking, like Hansel and Gretel following the bread crumbs, unable to stop ourselves. Later, we talk about it and say we both had the same sensation of being pulled forward by some dark thing we can’t explain.

  The trees are thicker here, the light hardly penetrating the branches. The air smells rich with humus. Our feet sink in the mud. We keep walking. There are no fairy picnics, no tea parties or pixies.

  All of a sudden, I stop.

  “Here,” I say.

  “What?” whispers Opal. I can tell she is trembling.

  “Something happened,” I say. “Something bad happened here.”

  Like Amy years later, Opal has learned to trust my knowing. And we know enough to leave this place and never come back again, in spite of what pulls us.

  We only wish we could follow my knowing inside the walls of our own house.

  L
AS VEGAS, NEVADA, was the opposite of Utah—all overwhelming sound and light. Fake Egypt, Paris, Rome, New York. The fantasies I saw everywhere had nothing to do with mine. On the way out, we stopped at a roadside casino for dinner. The air was cloudy with smoke and ringing with the sound of slot machines. A Neil Diamond impersonator wearing too much rouge and eyeliner sang on a tiny stage with two barely dressed dancers. I wanted to leave but Amy was starving; the sandwiches we’d brought had run out and we hadn’t seen anything but fast food for the last few hours.

  Two elderly couples were sitting in a booth in the corner. I smiled at them. You could tell they weren’t from these cornfields or mountains or deserts, from these stucco apartment buildings or houses with picket fences and dark basements.

  One of the men came over on the way out. He was holding his wife’s arm in a gallant way.

  “You are a lovely girl,” he said to me gently, with a thick Italian accent. “Like a little tomato or a rose with that hair. You should come to Italy. Apollonia? She should come to Italy!”

  The woman smiled and nodded. She was wearing an elegant print silk dress and gold jewelry.

  “Special thing will happen to you in Europe. You are good luck!”

  He blew me a kiss and waltzed off with his wife.

  I AM DRIVING IN THE CAR with my father on the way back from a trip to buy cat food.

  I am sitting as far away from him as I can. The car stinks from his cigarette butts. My palms feel clammy. Rain drizzles on the windshield. I am wondering why I agreed to come with him at all.

  He says, “I have something to tell you.”

  I tense and keep staring straight ahead at the soft rain. We’ll be home soon, I tell myself. He doesn’t even exist, I tell myself. I am Ruby, I tell myself. Like the jewel that is said to open one’s heart to love. My mother named me. For the jewel that is said to chase away evil spirits.

  “You know,” he says, “you hold my life in your hands, girl.” His voice is soft but his teeth are clenched. His teeth are always clenched. I keep staring straight ahead, watching the road disappear under the car. We are almost home.

  “And I hate you for it,” my father says.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED IN LOS ANGELES, it was like the walls closing in. Like I couldn’t breathe. Everything moving so fast. On our way to the agency in West Los Angeles, Amy and I got lost. We pulled into a gas station, because our tank was almost empty.

  A tall, thin man came out of the darkness, moving slowly with his hands up in front of him. He stopped ten feet away from us.

  “Now, Missy,” he said. “I’m not coming any closer. You need to get that purse off the back of your car and get yourself out of here. This is no place for a couple of little white girls.”

  He backed away and I managed to thank him before he had disappeared again.

  I grabbed my purse, got in the car with Amy, locked the doors, and headed back the way we had come. I wasn’t really afraid, though. It’s amazing how much more scary the light can be sometimes.

  I said to Amy, “Remember Artis Woodbridge?”

  “Who?”

  “When we were kids. That guy reminds me of him.”

  Sometimes on my way home from school, Artis Woodbridge would come and meet me by the edge of the meadow. He was a perfectly manicured, elderly gentleman who always wore a vest and a little bow tie. He could identify all the bird songs and plants, and I told him about my day at school. We walked together every day until my father found out. He told me he’d better never catch me with Artis Woodbridge or that would be the end of that. The way he said it made me not want to cross him. It was different when someone else was involved, someone I wanted to protect. He must have spoken to Artis, too, made him feel the same way about my safety, because he wasn’t there the next afternoon or the one after that. Once I saw him in town, and he looked at me with such a sad, helpless gaze. I knew he wanted to keep me safe somehow, and he thought staying away was the best thing he could do.

  AMY AND I GOT LOST AGAIN but this time we were too far west, so we decided to keep going to the beach. I had never seen the ocean before. I felt like an alien who had landed on some strange planet. The sun was rising and it was just like some kind of cheesy painting of a sunrise on velvet, almost too beautiful, a wash of colors shimmering in the sky. I wanted to stare right into the ball of flame. It was almost worth going blind just to really see it, brighter than I’d ever imagined, reflected by the water.

  In the tide pools at the shore we saw a strange shape moving. We got closer; it was a small octopus.

  “Do you think these are here all the time?” Amy asked.

  I knelt down in the wet sand. It was red and alien-looking. I wondered what it meant to see one, if there was some symbolism. “I don’t think so. I think it’s really unusual.”

  “That makes sense,” she said. “I guess I just have to stick with you for the miracles, Ruby.”

  We found the agency and checked into the motel down the street. We slept all day, and the next morning I met with a lady at the agency for a background check and blood test and all the other paperwork that I’d need to fill out before I could see the Martins.

  The agency lady was small and squat and wore an orange suit. I kept trying not to think of pumpkins. She told me that I needed to wear something conservative but playful to the interview with the Martins.

  “There’s a Disney store in the mall,” she said. “A nice Mickey Mouse tie would do the trick.”

  So that afternoon Amy and I went shopping. I bought a white button-down shirt, a black pleated skirt, and black Mary Janes at the nearest department store. Then, against my better judgment, I bought a Mickey Mouse tie, just like the pumpkin lady had suggested.

  That was what I wore when Amy drove me to the Martins’ in Beverly Hills. We sat in her car in front of the sloping lawn, looking up at the large white house with the glassed-in porch and the green trim. I thought of the plantation house on my island. Were there animals inside this one? I knew one thing—if there were, it wouldn’t be like at my father’s house, where the animals and I would have to protect each other.

  Amy grabbed my hand.

  “It’s huge!” she said.

  I nodded. The house was its own little island. I wouldn’t mind being stranded there for a while.

  I squeezed her hand back, she wished me luck, and I darted out of the car.

  Mrs. Martin flowed into the sitting room, wearing some expensive perfume I didn’t recognize and a beautiful lavender-and-black suit. I bowed my head, wanting to apologize for my silly outfit. Pumpkin Lady must have wanted to make sure I looked subservient enough. But Mrs. Martin only smiled at me. She spoke in a thick South Texas drawl.

  “Ruby, how nice to finally meet you. Everyone just raves about you. I’m so excited you’re here! And the kids, too. That’s all Juliet talks about. She and Chase are upstairs now with my assistant, Jennifer. Let me show you around a little while we talk.”

  While she talked; I couldn’t get a word in, but I didn’t mind. There was something so soothing about Mrs. Martin’s voice and her scent and her smile. And the house she was showing me left me speechless, too. It was like a museum. There were English Old Master paintings, ancient pre-Columbian and African sculptures, Chinese cloisonné vases filled with flowers, and walls lined with so many books. But at the same time it was cozy and comfortable, with large, soft chairs and sofas and lots of light flooding through the windows.

  The master bedroom was like a tree house—high up, glass all around. You could sit there and feel as if you were right inside the Chinese magnolias and the lemon trees that overlooked the pool.

  We got to the room that Mrs. Martin called the nursery, and a little girl came running toward me. She had long, brown braids and big, dark eyes. I got down on my knees beside her.

  “Hi, Juliet, I’m Ruby. Who’s this?” I pointed to the white toy horse she was holding.

  “That’s Orion,” she said. “He’s my sun stallion. Isn’t he incredible and
also amazing?”

  “Most amazing and also incredible,” I said. “How old is he?”

  “Four. Like me.”

  Mrs. Martin winked at me. “Juliet loves her horses.”

  Juliet neighed, whinnied, and began to gallop around the room. It was uncanny how much she sounded and moved like a horse.

  “Maybe we’ll go riding together,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, Ruby! That would be so much fun.”

  Chase was wearing shorts over some kind of leggings with swim shoes, a T-shirt with a lightning bolt on it, an eye mask, and a swimming cap. “Hey, Chase,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is that a superhero outfit you have on?”

  “Chase thinks he is a superhero,” said Mrs. Martin.

  “I was hoping I’d get to meet a real live superhero one of these days,” I said. “Everyone could use one of them.”

  Juliet tugged on my arm. “Let’s go into the garden for a tea party! Chase can protect us from the scoundrels who try to eat all the cookies.”

  So we went out into the garden that was dripping with moisture from the sprinklers. I thought about my island again, because I’d never seen most of these flowers before. They were bigger and more exotic than anything in the Midwest, like strange tropical birds. Juliet led me down into a small grotto, where we set out a tea party for Orion and the dolls. Chase played a villain who stole all the cookies and then the hero who returned them to us.

  I knew I was here to protect these children and I knew I would make sure they were never hurt. But in some way I knew they were going to protect me, too. From the spirits that had once haunted me. In the Martins’ house, I was, for maybe the very first time, completely safe.

  THE NEXT DAY, Amy dropped me off again. She had tears in her eyes.

  “I’ll miss you so much,” she said. “Everything will be so different when I see you again.”