by Amy Bourret
When Ruby steps out onto her back porch, all she sees is flowers. Pink and red and yellow rose petals strewn along the floor, bundles in full bloom tied to the posts.
Chaz stands beside her, a sheepish grin creasing his face.
“How?” Ruby asks.
Chaz shrugs. “I called some elves.”
Ruby crumples into a chair, eases her feet out of Antoinette’s mangling pumps. She watches Clyde, whom the Ms must have brought back when they did their elf magic, run laps around the yard, snuffling nose pointed up in the air. The sky is a community-theater backdrop, a swag of dark burlap punched with strings and strings of Christmas lights.
“You okay?” Chaz asks.
“I don’t know.” She breathes in the pure air, relieved to have access to oxygen in a gaseous form as opposed to the soggy Jell-O that Texans are expected to inhale, more relieved to be here, home. She doesn’t think she has ever felt this tired, every bone begging her to crawl into bed, despite the fact that she was asleep before the plane took off from Dallas, then slept again through the drive from Albuquerque.
Ruby rests her leaden head against the back of the chair, draws in an eight-count breath. Be still and know that I am God. She expels the air in steady four counts, pulls her rib cage against her lungs. Be still and know. That I am God. This was her grandmother’s breath prayer, which usually presented itself when Ruby had pushed her too far. Ruby hasn’t thought about it in years, but now here it is, a bit of Nana come to tuck a heavy quilt of comfort under her chin.
She is still counting breaths when Chaz pushes his chair back, drops to his knees in front of her. He clasps her hands in his, rests them on her belly. “I know I can sometimes be an ass,” he says. “But what ever happens, I’m here.”
He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a small square box, places it in on her belly. The black box cartwheels, seemingly in slow motion, down to her thigh, bounces, swan dives to the porch floor. Chaz grabs the box, puts it in her hand, folds her fingers around it. “No matter what. I want us to be a family. You. Me. This baby.”
Ruby is too stunned for words. Now he proposes?
Chaz rises on his knees, draws one leg up in an old-movie proposal stance. He pulls Ruby’s hand onto his bended knee, squeezes her fingers around the box. “I love you, Ruby Leander. Would you honor me, will you marry me? Please?” His eyes glisten mercury-bright in the dark.
Ruby lifts her free hand, touches his cheek, feels the hard lump, like a pistachio, that remains from his tussle with the angry gangbanger. This moment, this whole day, nothing feels real except the breath in her lungs, and the voice in her head. “I love you,” she says. “I love your whole stubborn, sometimes sanctimonious, sometimes ass-acting self.”
Chaz’s eyes bore into hers. “But?”
“Before I can answer…” Ruby adds her free hand to the knot of fingers and box on her lap.
“No, you don’t have to convert to Catholic.” Chaz slips one of his hands from the pile, stacks it on top of Ruby’s. The proverbial upper hand.
“There’s something…”
“Anything,” he says.
“This is big. Huge.”
Chaz shakes his head. “Anything.”
Ruby remembers reading something, an old philosopher guy who said that in every person’s life there are one, maybe two, moments that define who she is. She imagines those moments as river channels, forging the course of a person’s life, like water carving through a wall of rock. Her one moment, she always figured, was finding Lark. Now, she is about to jump into the raging waters of her second. She swallows, squares her shoulders, and tells Chaz her plan.
SIXTY-NINE
Chaz’s body is as rigid as the post beside him. Ruby sets the ring box on the table next to her chair, stands, sits again.
“They don’t want Lark,” she says. “They want the baby they lost. I…we…can give them that.”
Chaz sits on the porch floor, stares off into the silhouette of hills. She waits for the words to find their way to his mouth. “You can’t just…swap…children.”
Ruby slips in beside him. Her legs hang off the edge of the porch. She knows that the gentle slope of the yard is there, just beyond her toes, but in the inky dark of this night, once again she has the sensation that she is at the edge of the world. Yet this time, for the first time, she feels like she has the ability to step back from the precipice. This time she has a plan.
“I can give them back what I took from them. And bring Lark home.”
Chaz’s eyes flash with intensity. “Could you really, though? Give away your own baby?”
“I don’t know how I’ll do it.” She loves this daughter inside her. She will always love this child, will miss her every second, with the per sis-tent yet phantom pain of an amputated limb. There is more room in a broken heart after all. But the baby won’t miss Ruby, won’t miss someone she never knew. “I just know I have to do it.”
“This is more crazy talk.” He drapes an arm across her shoulders. “You’re exhausted—”
“No. I mean, yes, I’m exhausted. But I know what I’m saying.”
Chaz rises, retrieves the ring box, presses it into her hand again. “Get some rest. You’ll see things differently in the morning.”
“I won’t.” Ruby speaks to the ring box, as Chaz leaves her on the porch.
SEVENTY
Her plan sounded so logical, reasonable—and right—when she laid it out for him. But now, alone with this blooming life inside her…Could she do it, could she really give away her child? Her rationalization that she doesn’t know this baby seems anything but rational when Ruby counts the ways she does know her already, how she gets restless when Ruby eats garlic, how she prefers that Ruby sleep on her left side, how Ruby’s grandfather’s show tunes soothe her hiccups.
Then Ruby remembers reading in People magazine about those switched-at-birth kids in Florida, how both families were shattered when the kids were returned to their biological parents. Didn’t one of those girls end up dead?
The arguments are still spinning in her head, the ring box still in her hand, when Clyde darts around the house toward the driveway. Crap, Ruby thinks. John thought the media would leave her alone for now, until sentencing.
A moment later, Chaz climbs the porch steps, Clyde at his heels. “This. This is our child. My child.”
“A child you weren’t even sure you wanted,” she says softly.
“A child we didn’t plan for, a surprise. I never said…” His face is tight, skin stretched across his cheekbones. The pistachio pops out against the sharp bone like Ruby’s belly against her hips.
Ruby stands, moves closer to him. “You thought about it. We both did.”
Chaz steps back against a post as if she struck him. “For a moment, maybe. But I never would have…I’m Catholic. And now, seeing you, seeing her. She is my child.”
“A child who would never know the difference, who wouldn’t be scarred for life. A child who would be loved. Just by someone else.”
Ruby and the baby inside her share DNA, but a person is so much more than mere genes. She thinks about gazing at Lark and seeing every Lark she has ever been, every moment, every experience there in her face, experiences Lark shared with Ruby. This child will grow up to be the sum total of her own experiences, shared with someone else. “We can have another baby.”
“I want to have more. I want a whole basketball team.” Chaz’s focus shifts somewhere to the future before coming back to Ruby. “But this one—she’s ours, too.”
Lark’s “Do something” beats in Ruby’s marrow like a mantra. “I have to do this.”
“It’s crazy.” Chaz shakes his head. “And what makes you think those people in Texas would even agree?”
Ruby pictures Darla Tinsdale staring wistfully at Ruby’s belly. “It’s the only way I can make things right for them.”
Chaz places his hands on her shoulders, squeezes. “I love you. I want to marry you.” His words slide across his tongue as
if it were saturated with tequila. “But I will never, never agree to this.” He walks down the steps to the driveway, turns back to her. “Call me. When you come to your senses.”
SEVENTY-ONE
Sawdust dances in the workshop light. With safety glasses on, Ruby shoves a plank of wood into the saw’s gap-toothed mouth, slicing the board in half with a satisfying screech of metal against tree. The saw snarfs board after board, pried off an old oak armoire, and regurgitates two-by-two slats into a gangly pile. Then Ruby sands and sands and sands, until each piece is satiny soft, its grain breathing healthfully once again.
When the armoire is all chewed up, she turns to a stack of unfinished deck chairs. She screws legs on to seats, her emotions threaded as tightly as the metal studs. Chaz basically handed her an ultimatum: Lark or him. She wouldn’t just be giving up her baby, she’d be giving up the man she loves as well. Shouldn’t a mother, though, be willing to sacrifice anything for her child?
Ruby thinks about what her grandmother did for her, the sacrifice to shield Ruby from just one moment of horror. “Do something,” Lark implored. How can Ruby not do this? That is, if she can figure out how to get it done.
Sometime after midnight, she pulls her grandfather’s other bible, his woodworking book, from its place on the shelf above the workbench, next to the bits-and-pieces case he crafted, using old wooden Velveeta boxes for drawers.
The time-stained pages of the book, a school textbook really, cover every aspect of basic woodworking—from selecting wood to fancy finishes to repairs—in dry, unemotional sentences. Grooved joints, dowel joints, dovetail, mortise-and-tenon, so many ways to bind pieces of wood.
Ruby runs her hand down the flyleaf, where as a child, she wrote his name. This book belongs to Henry Leander. And now to Ruby Leander. If only there were an instruction manual for putting a family together, making it adhere.
SEVENTY-TWO
Mrs. Levy’s kitchen wall clock looks like the ones in every classroom of Ruby’s life, except for the birds that circle its face. The minute hand takes its own sweet time, inching up up up on the long hard climb to twelve. The second half of the hour is passing so much more slowly than the first, perhaps a mere function of gravity rather than nerves.
Ruby watches the clock, having given up all pretense of keeping busy. Since dawn, she has done three loads of laundry, trimmed and watered the herb pots, washed windows with newspaper and vinegar, ironed to crispness the pile of limp linens that has lived in the bottom of the spare laundry basket for months if not years. Not even Clyde escaped her mania; he scowls at her through the porch door, his almost-dry red coat shiny and clean.
Finally the oriole chirps nine o’clock. Ruby waits another agonizing six minutes, so that it doesn’t look like she was waiting until exactly nine. She doesn’t know Mr. Tinsdale’s schedule, but she figures that, with the time change, he is sure to be out of the house by ten, even if he is not a morning person. Finally, she picks up the phone and dials the number that has been reeling through her head like the news bits that crawl across the bottom of the television screen.
Darla Tinsdale answers on the third ring. Her voice is breathy, still seems detached from her body. Ruby introduces herself, apologizes for calling out of the blue.
“No, no,” Darla says. “This is like one of those psychic things…. I was going to call you this morning.”
They both speak at once, laugh awkwardly.
“You first,” Darla says.
“No, you,” Ruby responds.
Darla tells Ruby that she would like to get a list from her, of Lark’s favorite foods, her interests. “The counselor said…I just want to help her settle in.”
Ruby prods Darla for a report, but Darla doesn’t need much prodding. She seems eager to talk, to vent even, as if she doesn’t have close friends of her own. She tells Ruby that Lark is still sad, that she prefers to stay in her bedroom and read, that she acts like a guest, tiptoes around. “She won’t even open the refrigerator and help herself to a snack.”
“Of course I’ll send a list. I’ll do what ever I can.” Ruby’s voice catches as she tells Darla that all that matters is making this better for Lark. “Could I speak with her, would you mind?”
“Oh. Philip dropped her off at his mother’s on his way to work, to meet some of her friends from the club. Sort of a sip-and-see.” Darla giggles like a sorority girl. “Without the bassinet and cute baby.”
The thought of her daughter on display makes Ruby cringe. Lark has always related well to older people; she begs to go along when Ruby makes her monthly rounds offering manicures at the nursing home. But this sounds stuffy, awkward. It reeks of crinoline and smocking and dainty teacups. Lark will be itchy, worried about using the right spoon.
“It’s just so different from what I expected, what I hoped for all those years.” Darla’s voice is slick with tears, whiny even. “It’s so hard.” She starts to say something else, something about her husband, then swallows her own words in an audible gulp. “Maybe it’s easier when you have time, when you grow with the child instead of having a nine-year-old drop from the sky.” She tells Ruby that they haven’t been around kids this age, that of course some of their friends have children, but they don’t socialize with them. Her sister, who lives in East Texas, has a two-year-old son; she wishes that he and Lark were closer in age.
This slender opening is all Ruby needs to wedge in a shoulder, wrest it into a gaping maw, a door big enough for her enormous plan. She charges through while Darla is vulnerable, and alone. “I want to give you back that baby girl, the one you missed out on all those years.”
Darla is silent for a moment. Ruby imagines she can hear the pert blond brain processing the idea. When she does respond, she does so with giddiness. “We talked about adopting, after I mean. But some of the agencies didn’t like our age difference. And the wait for an infant, a healthy…well, a baby that matched our backgrounds…”
Ruby is disgusted at Darla’s words, thinks that if Chaz’s skin weren’t as light as an early-season golf tan, Darla probably would not even consider the plan. But then, Ruby thinks, don’t most people want their children to look like them?
“…Of course I’ll have to talk to Philip. But, oh, this could be…oh!”
Ruby hangs up the phone and drops to her knees. Clyde noses open the screen door and bounds over to her, rubs his head against her chin, a poignant waft of Lark’s kiwi shampoo pricking her nose.
SEVENTY-THREE
John grabs a file off his desk, eases his tall frame into the chair beside her.
“Well, it’s unusual to say the least.” He flips through the papers in the file while Ruby holds her breath. “But I can’t find anything in case law or in state procedure—or in ethics for that matter—that would prevent it.”
Ruby expels her breath in a slow, steady stream. Her body melts, molds itself into the contours of the low-slung chair as John explains the intricacies that would be required to carry out her plan. Two separate adoption proceedings in two separate states. Two separate waiting periods. Two sets of social workers.
“But it can be done?” Ruby asks. “What about my criminal record?”
“It can be done.” He explains about the standard of “best interests of the child” and tells her that the Texas court is likely to appoint an attorney or advocate who will represent Lark. Lark probably would need to state on the record her preference, which can be hard on a kid, having to choose openly between parents. In New Mexico the process will be less cumbersome, because an infant rather than an older child is involved, but Ruby will still have to jump through plenty of hoops.
“I’ll get my circus-poodle costume ready,” Ruby says.
“I talked to the Tinsdales’ lawyer. He confirmed that they are dropping the civil suit. I’ll make sure they sign a broad release. And they are sending a letter, asking for leniency in your sentencing. That should carry a lot of weight. We just have to make sure that it doesn’t look like all this is p
art of the adoption deal, that a child is being bought.”
Ruby tries to focus, but her head feels overstuffed with legalese. She is thankful that she trusts John to lead her through the legal labyrinth, and that she can have Antoinette translate some of this for her later. Although if pushed, Antoinette will surely side with family, with Chaz.
“And the father?” John asks, as if reading her mind. “Chaz is on board?”
“He will be.”
John closes the file, leans forward, hands clasped between his knees. “This is big, Ruby. If those media whores catch on, even friends and family…You’re going to get crucified for choosing one child over another.”
Ruby stands. “I know.”
“Just make sure you are ready, really ready, to make that choice.”
“I don’t see it as a choice,” Ruby says as John’s new receptionist steps in to announce his next appointment. “I’m not choosing; I’m doing what has to be done.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
The plaza is a beehive in the center of Santa Fe, abuzz with summer tourists and locals, khaki-pantsed government workers and broom-skirted retail clerks on their lunch breaks. The open green center is cut into four pie pieces by sidewalks leading to the center pavilion and is boxed in by historic buildings that house shops and restaurants and galleries. The shops used to be run by local vendors, but like everywhere else on earth, even the City Different hive has been invaded by killer-bee franchises.
Along the sidewalk beneath the Palace of the Governors, Native Americans spread their silver bracelets and woven dream catchers, laid out on colorful blankets. Only the “certified authentic” Indians are allowed in the cool of the blue overhang; others set up shop on folding tables that line the edge of the green across the narrow street.
