Mothers and Other Liars

by Amy Bourret

  Ruby takes Lark’s pajamas from her, pulls the top over her daughter’s head. “All this make you want to go back to Texas?”

  Lark leans her head against Ruby’s arm. “How ’bout maybe next never?”

  ONE HUNDRED

  How does a person explain the inexplicable to a nine-year-old? At first, Lark was so relieved to be home that she didn’t ask why or how. Ruby unplugged the television, didn’t bring newspapers into the house. But, of course, kids at school talk, and now the questions come. Lark is an old soul, in many ways wiser than Ruby. Yet this is a lot of albatross to hang around her skinny neck.

  They sit on the rug of the living area, Ruby and Lark and Clyde. This carpet picnic is borne out of feeling vulnerable rather than adventuresome. Ruby hasn’t been to the salon in a week. The commotion became too much for everyone, that and the fact that Ruby’s belly gets in the way of her nail table.

  Ruby has been pacing this cage of a house, feeling so much like a zoo attraction even with every pane of glass obstructed. When she and Lark moved into Mrs. Levy’s house, Ruby felt as if she was crawling into Nana’s big iron bed after a thunderstorm, but today she finds no comfort anywhere. Her ankles are swollen, her back aches, she’s just downright grumpy.

  She tried woodworking, but she is too ungainly to be around sharp objects. Besides, Margaret heard from one of her clients that the people in the house behind Ruby’s have rented out a second-story window to paparazzi, and Ruby doesn’t want a shot of herself waddling to the shed at every cash register in America.

  So here they are on an otherwise glorious fall Saturday, or glorious as far as Ruby can tell from quick peeks out the window, picnicking on the carpet instead of under a canopy of brilliant gold and orange leaves.

  The baby kicks at the tender spot between her separated ribs. Over the past months, Ruby has been so caught up in an emotional whirlwind that she hasn’t paid nearly enough attention to this baby. In the torrent of the trial, the details of getting Lark back, the devastation of breaking up with Chaz, this burgeoning life has been anything but nurtured. Yet now, when Ruby most needs the detachment in order to do what she has to do, the baby’s presence, its sheer physicality, is consuming.

  As Clyde shifts his sprawl across their legs, Lark giggles. She pokes at Ruby’s protruding belly button, visible through her shirt. Ruby takes her daughter’s hand, rests it on the steep side of the mound, where a ropy appendage writhes.

  “Ooh,” Lark says. “Does that hurt?”

  “Sometimes.” What Ruby doesn’t say is that the physical discomfort is nothing compared to where her mind keeps taking her. Her third-trimester nesting instinct has kicked in, and she can’t eat away the hours readying for the baby she won’t be bringing home.

  And now Ruby needs to explain to Lark about the swap. She sets her tuna sandwich on the blue willow plate, tucks a wisp of hair behind her daughter’s perfect ear, and begins. If nothing else, she wants to make sure that Lark doesn’t think that she was rejected by the Tinsdales, that they preferred someone else’s infant over their own biological kid.

  The trick is how to make Lark understand without her realizing that Ruby essentially made the same choice as the Tinsdales, swinging back to smack Ruby in the face.

  “I get it, Mama.” Lark pats Ruby on the knee. “I think. They wanted me, but you wanted me more.”

  Ruby starts to interject; she doesn’t want Lark to think this was some competition for her love. No child should have the burden of being anyone’s whole world. But before she can say anything, Lark continues.

  “I didn’t know how to dotter around those people. I know how to dotter with you.”

  Ruby puzzles over Lark’s words. Did the Tinsdales subject her to one of those overachiever-kid schedules, with no time for dawdling, meandering around?

  “And you know how to mother me better than they do.”

  Finally, it is Ruby who gets it; her sage child really does understand. Daughter, not dotter. Daughterhood creates as much of an action verb, as much of a sense of place in the world, as being a mother does.

  ONE HUNDRED ONE

  Finally, the press siege has wound down. Ruby thinks of that Sinatra song about a fickle friend blowing in. Not that the media was ever her friend, but indeed it was fickle. After the reporters’ collective thick skull finally absorbed the fact that Ruby was never going to speak with them, the story petered out. There just wasn’t enough there there to feed the voracious appetite. Little Miss Red Suit did ride her crimson carpet to the big leagues, though; Zara saw her behind the desk on a network early-bird news program.

  Lark sits on the kitchen counter, her feet in the sink. She trims the leggy ivy cuttings, nips some brown edges off the basil. Ruby looks at her supple form bent over her knees, imagines the day when she can even see her own knees again.

  “You ready?” Ruby puts a hand on Lark’s back.

  “I don’t want any of it.” Lark slides off the counter and onto the floor. “I don’t want to even touch that stuff.”

  “That just means a bigger bonfire.”

  They walk together out the screen door to the back porch, or rather Lark walks while Ruby lumbers. The boxes are lined up against the house, where Lark demanded the deliveryman carry them. She was adamant that they not enter her bedroom, her house. She said she would need to burn incense just to cleanse the porch. That comment prompted Ruby to respond that perhaps the two of them had spent too much time in Santa Fe amid the seekers and reincarnates and general crazies.

  Ruby slices open the first box and lifts out frilly dress after frilly dress, piles them to one side. Then she hits the rock-star clothes—slinky fabrics, sequins, spangles, outfits that Ruby doesn’t think belong on any nine-year-old body. “Was Darla schizophrenic?”

  “Skiza what?”

  “Never mind. I just can’t imagine the same person buying these two extremes of clothes.”

  Clyde noses open the screen door, pads over to Lark before her giggles subside. “Actually, Dingbat Darla bought the trendy stuff,” Lark says through a face full of fur. “And the creepy grandmother gave me the others.” She stands up. Clyde nuzzles her belly.

  Ruby doesn’t scold Lark for her language. The counselor whom John recommended told Ruby that this is a way for Lark to work through her anger.

  “Can I go now?” Lark’s voice is colored with desperation. “Please, can you just do this?”

  “Pick out two outfits, one from each pile. We’ll burn those and give away the rest to children who need them.”

  Lark points to the most hideous of each, avoids touching any of them. “Now?”

  “Now.” Ruby rubs the spot between her breasts, trying to soothe the heartburn that is her companion these days. “But don’t—”

  “I know. Don’t talk to anyone. Blow my whistle and run if I see any cameras.”

  Although Ruby hasn’t spotted a reporter in several days, she’s still skittish. She can’t keep Lark cooped up forever, though. She watches her daughter and Clyde bound down the driveway. They look more like puppies on the loose than a nine-year-old girl and an at least five-year-old mutt. When the last shimmer of head bobs out of sight, she turns back to her task.

  The bonfire was Lark’s idea. Each September, Santa Feans gather in Old Fort Marcy Park and set fire to a three-story marionette. They burn Zozobra in effigy for all of the bad things that have happened in the past year, throwing scraps of paper that list what they each want to put behind them. The festival started out as an ancient new year’s ritual—the Aztec calendar, like the Jewish calendar, starts each year in September—but has morphed through the years into an excuse for teenage gangs to rampage. The gang kids Chaz used to try to help.

  With Zozobra just around the corner, Lark decided they should have their own ritual burning, of everything that even touched anything in Texas. Ruby sets aside the two outfits Lark chose and sorts the rest into garbage bags that she will deliver to local charities.

  The scrapbook and CD
that Molly sent to Lark are wrapped in a flowery sweater at the top of the second box. Ruby will store them for later; Lark may want them when her emotions are less raw. The rest of that box contains hair bows and headbands in various colors, prissy nightgowns—Lark must have hated sleeping in those leg-constricting things—and sexy-girl pan ties that Ruby would be embarrassed to wear.

  Finally, when she reaches the bottom of the third and final box of more and more clothes, she finds what she is looking for. There, nestled all together in a corner, lies the photo of Ruby and Lark, the note she slipped into Lark’s duffel bag. And the giraffe.

  Ruby lifts them out reverently. She smiles at the photograph, vows to take Lark up to the top of the Chamisa Trail before the fall colors fade, even if she needs to be hoisted by a crane to get there. The letter has been folded and refolded so many times that it feels like tissue paper. Ruby opens it carefully, lays it across the patch of lap that the baby has not overtaken, which most people call “knee.” The ink is smeared, words here and there obliterated, others barely legible. Ruby didn’t want to read it anyway; she doesn’t want to be reminded of what she wrote.

  Lark, alone in a room in the huge state of Texas, crying over this note. Ruby tears up herself as that picture forms behind her eyes. She refolds it carefully, sets it with the clothes to be burned. This will be her own offering to Zozobra, to satiate the beast of bad days.

  She picks up the giraffe. Just touching it brings a flood of memories. Those first weeks with Lark, Ruby was terrified she would break the baby, harm her somehow. Yet she also remembers feeling, right from the beginning, that they were supposed to be together, that Lark was a sudden gift of fate.

  She lifts the giraffe to her face, rubs it against the tip of her nose like baby Lark did while sucking her thumb. Ruby closes her eyes, inhales deeply through her nose. And she could swear that it is there, a tiny trace, the merest hint even, of talcum powder, of formula, of Larkness.

  ONE HUNDRED TWO

  “Tough day, Mama?” Lark tosses her backpack onto the rear seat and climbs into the Jeep. “You look tired.”

  Ruby drives away from the school. “I am tired, baby. I’m gonna have to stop doing pedicures. My big fat belly gets in the way.” She will never get tired of hearing Lark’s giggle, which is sounding closer to normal. “How was school?”

  “Not as bad as stinky feet. The afterschool part was fun. We played games in the gym. And I aced my spelling test.”

  “Of course you did, my little prodigy.”

  Lark sits up straight, clasps her fingers together at her chest, arms triangled out at each side. “Prodigy. P-r-o-d-i-g-y. Prodigy.”

  “And how do you spell smart aleck?”

  “M-o-m,” Lark says.

  Ruby smothers a yawn with her laugh. “You got me.”

  “Good thing it’s pizza night. Or you might fall asleep at the stove.”

  “That,” Ruby says, “is why God created pizza night.” The sun is sliding into the cleavage of the mountains when she stops the car at the foot of the driveway. Sunset is arriving noticeably earlier each of these late-fall days. “Hop out and get the mail. I’ll send Clyde down to greet you.”

  Ruby stomps the pedal to give the Jeep a shot of gas; tired, too, the engine needs a boost up the driveway. She enters the house through the back door, lets Clyde out behind her. “Go fetch the girl, dog. Go fetch.”

  She kicks off her shoes, drops Lark’s backpack on the table, then plods over to the phone to call in the pizza order. She’s still on hold when Lark and Clyde tromp in. Lark lays the mail on the counter beside Ruby. Bills, probably. And catalogues. No matter how many opt-out services Ruby tries, she can’t get off those mailing lists. Most of them are still addressed to Mrs. Levy, who was apparently quite the catalogue shopaholic.

  Lark makes a beeline for her bedroom. As the pizza guy comes on the line, Ruby snaps her fingers, points to the backpack. Lark retraces her steps, slings the backpack over her shoulder. When she turns again, Ruby spots the tan envelope poking out from between Lark’s arm and side. A small Bubble Wrap mailer, it looks like.

  After Clyde has devoured the last of the pizza bones, as Lark calls the crusts, and they are settling in to watch a movie, Ruby asks about the envelope. “What did you get in the mail?”

  Lark points the remote at the television screen, fast-forwards through the dire FBI warning. “Nothing really. Just one of those stupid doodads from Girls Inc.”

  Ruby swallows a stream of questions before she can give them voice. Her daughter is not fessing up to something.

  ONE HUNDRED THREE

  The hospital room is standard-issue. Ruby wonders which genius decided that pale green was a soothing institutional color. At least she has the room to herself; it’s a slow birth day here at St. Victims, and the hospital wanted her in a private room anyway, to keep the media at bay. She is beyond exhausted, can’t figure out how limbs can be spaghetti and lead at the same time, and her virginia, as Lark coined it when she was seven or so, feels like it has been turned inside-out and bathed in astringent.

  St. Vincent’s encourages rooming-in to foster the bond between mother and infant as well as for security purposes. They wouldn’t want a baby going home with the wrong mom, after all. But in the case of adoptions, the hospital’s policy is to keep the infant in the nursery.

  Ruby wonders whether this rule is to ease the pain of the mother, to avoid sticky change-of-mind situations, or because they worry that a baby human, like a gosling, will imprint on the first face it sees.

  Ruby was allowed to hold the baby after the staff completed their poking and prodding and printing. She knows that in the barbaric days, a child was whisked out from between his mother’s legs and out the door, never to be seen again. The hospital social worker met with Ruby soon after the birth, and with her approval, the nurses have brought the baby to Ruby’s room a couple of times.

  The door swings open and Margaret strides over to the bed. Her entire body seems to vibrate. She has been gliding on a druglike high of having coached Ruby through the birth, witnessing the first breath of a new life. It’s the closest she’ll ever get to motherhood, she told Ruby when Ruby asked her to be her Lamaze partner. And giving birth was amazing, really, despite the whole virginia-inside-out part.

  But now Margaret radiates anger rather than awe.

  “What is it?” Ruby pushes the control button to raise the head of her bed. “The baby?”

  The baby is fine, Margaret assures her.

  “Lark? Did something—”

  “Lark is fine, too. Molly will bring her by later.”

  “Then what?” Ruby asks.

  Margaret’s words come out like the hiss of a snake, a really pissed-off snake. “They’re out there.”

  Ruby’s medicine-numb brain churns. The Tinsdales declined to be present for the birth. Darla laughed, said Philip was more the Hugh Hefner, cigars-in-the-waiting-room type. Ruby considered going to Texas for the birth, so the baby could make that trip in the security of her womb, but some wrinkle between the two states’ adoption laws made it simpler to give birth here. Ruby called Darla last night when her water broke. The Tinsdales are coming in a day or two, whenever the baby is released; they aren’t supposed to be here now.

  Margaret repeats herself. “They’re out there at the nursery window. The Monteros. The whole bunch of them.”

  Now Ruby understands. Despite its growth over the past decade, Santa Fe is really just a small town, St. Victim’s a small-town hospital. And the Monteros are one big family. Somebody must know somebody who knows somebody who. Ruby rubs her forehead with her fingertips, draws her palms down until they support her chin. She peers out through her spread fingers, as if a carnival mask will separate her from the situation.

  “Chaz? Is Chaz here?” Ruby remembers calling out for him during one of the last contractions before her epidural, thinking that if this were a movie, he would rush into the delivery room as she made her final push.

 
; “I didn’t see him,” Margaret says. “I’ll call security.”

  “No. No—”

  A gentle rap interrupts them before Ruby can formulate the rest of her thought, and Antoinette steps into the room, approaches Ruby’s bed. “Hey, girlfriend.”

  Ruby looks over Antoinette’s shoulder, expecting an incursion of the Montero tribe.

  “It’s okay,” Antoinette says. “They’re not coming in.” She sits half her butt on the edge of Ruby’s bed. “How are you? How do you feel?”

  “Like I just gave birth to an elephant.” Ruby’s tongue feels as fuzzy as her brain. “But the drugs are good.”

  Antoinette fiddles with the edge of the thin blanket, pulls at a loose thread. “I want, I need to ask…” Her eyes remain downcast as she speaks; her fingers pick at the blanket’s stitching, unrolling the hem. Ruby tries to focus on Antoinette’s words, but she keeps thinking how her friend really, really needs a manicure.

  It would mean so much to the family, Antoinette says, if they could do just this one thing, if they could have their priest come to baptize the baby before he is sent away from them. “You know, so they won’t all worry that he’ll end up in limbo or hell.”

  All of it, the exhaustion, the emotion, the reality that she is giving up her child, is an insidious fog that creeps in and shrouds Ruby as tightly as her baby was swaddled. She says something, she must, because Antoinette squeezes Ruby’s foot then disappears. Margaret holds a big plastic mug to Ruby’s lips; she drinks from the straw, feels the cool water trickle down her throat. Margaret lowers the bed. And Ruby closes her eyes.

  ONE HUNDRED FOUR

  Candles throw their golden light everywhere. Rows of flickering votives line the ledges that run down both sides of the little room and balance on the railing in front of the pews. Two tall candelabra stand like many-armed goddesses on the riser just beyond the railing. The candles transform the plain, institutional chapel into a garden of light.