by Amy Bourret
This whole thing was organized in a brief few hours while Ruby slept. She climbs out of the hospital-regulation wheelchair at the doorway, walks gingerly beside Margaret down the aisle. She can’t help compare this feeble processional of two to what she had imagined for her wedding day.
Ruby eases down beside Lark in the first pew, squishes her daughter in a sideways hug, kisses her head. Margaret takes a seat in the row behind them, next to Molly. The other side of the aisle is crammed full of Monteros. In the front row, the immediate family.
Ruby scans the small crowd. Chaz is not there. She doesn’t know whether she feels relieved that she won’t have to face him, or sad that he didn’t come to meet his own child.
Before she can sort through her feelings, the heads of the entire Montero side turn in unison and emit a collective sigh as a nurse carries the baby up the aisle. Ruby almost expects them to stand, throw rose petals in the nurse’s wake. Father Paul steps out into the aisle, takes the bundle of baby from the nurse, walks through the gate at the railing and up onto the riser.
With the baby in the crook of one arm, the priest pours water from a weary plastic pitcher into a gleaming silver bowl. He sets down the pitcher, picks up a small glass vial. This water, he says as he empties the vial into the bowl, is from the River Jordan. The vial disappears into a pocket of his billowy robe as he clears his throat.
“What is the Christian name of this child?” Father Paul sweeps his eyes across both sides of the room, waits. “This situation is a bit out of the ordinary order of service, but we need to name this child before God.”
The room is so silent that Ruby feels as if she can hear the candles breathing their carbon into the air.
“Charles Henry. Charles for his father, Henry for his great-grandfather.” The name comes from Ruby’s mouth unbidden. She had consciously, deliberately refused to think of her baby with names or endearments since the moment in Texas when she thought up her plan, and all the names she and Chaz had discussed before then were for girls. She looks across the aisle, wondering if maybe the Monteros would object to using Chaz’s name, but she sees only nods of approval.
Father Paul proceeds through the short ceremony of baptism, then ends with a prayer. A rustle rises up from the Montero side as they reach across pews to make a chain of hands for the amen squeeze.
“Wait!”
ONE HUNDRED FIVE
Lark is on her feet before the reverberation of the amen settles back over the pews. She walks up and through the gate, takes the baby from the priest as if she has been holding newborns her entire life. Father Paul steps aside, looks down at her.
“When Mama said yes to this, she said, ‘But let’s do it right.’” Lark pauses, looks past Ruby to the Ms. “So we, well I, decided that besides a baptism this would be sort of a farewell, not a party because it’s too sad, but a nice good-bye.”
Lark walks with the baby through the gate, stops in front of Celeste. The priest glides past her, slips into a pew behind the throng. Lark explains what she has in mind, shuffles the baby from her arms to Celeste’s, and returns to her seat next to Ruby.
Celeste sits there for a moment, looking down at the child of her child. Then she stands, walks to the railing, turns to face the small group. She cradles the baby in her arms. “What I want for you”—Celeste’s voice quivers—“is for you to never for a moment forget that you are loved, by many, many people.” She motions to Chunk, who comes up and takes the baby, then Celeste picks up a votive, blows it out, carries the candle back to her seat.
The father of three gazes at that infant as if he were the first baby on earth. And Chunk cries. His tears roll like mercury down his fat cheeks, splash on his grandson’s face. The baby shudders, limbs jerk; during this second baptism, arms escape the tight swaddling.
Abuela approaches next, her crepe-soled shoes squeaking on the industrial flooring. The old woman takes the baby as casually as she would take a loaf of bread. She holds him upright, a hand at head, a hand at bum, and brings the baby’s face to hers. She holds the infant like that, nose to nose, for several minutes, then she settles the child at her neck. Abuela leans her head into the bundle, and she whispers.
Ruby remembers a story that her grandmother used to tell, about why people have that little cleft just below their nose. Before a baby is born, she said, it knows all the secrets of the universe, and just before it enters this world, God puts a finger to its lips, says, “Shhh, don’t tell.” And the imprint of God’s finger remains forever, to remind our souls to keep His secrets.
Maybe Abuela tells this infant about his father and all the history of the Monteros so that he will always know where he came from. Maybe she tells him stories, folklore. Maybe even that Abuela will someday be his guardian angel, will always watch over him. Ruby doesn’t know what Abuela says, only that this baby whisperer whispers for what seems like a very long time, until Antoinette steps forward and puts a hand on her grandmother’s shoulder.
Antoinette looks straight at Ruby as she speaks her wish. “May you be blessed with friendship, even one true friend, because that will make you rich no matter what is in your piggy bank.”
And so it goes. The Monteros move up to the railing one by one, tell the precious child their hopes for his future, blow out a candle, and return to their seats. A tidal wave, of words salty with emotion, crashes into Ruby. A few voices tremble, but most resonate in the tiny room. To know God, to know happiness, to know himself, to know football, the wishes go on and on.
Ruby is rapt, wrapped in the warmth in the room. She doesn’t notice what Lark is doing beside her until a yellow scrap of paper floats to Ruby’s feet. She reaches down, picks it up, hands it back to Lark. Her incredible old-soul daughter is writing down the wishes on colorful strips of paper, in careful schoolgirl script.
When each of the Monteros has taken a turn, four glowing candles remain on the rail. Lark and the Ms couldn’t have known how many to place there, how many Monteros would attend. This is just one of those God things.
Margaret and Molly walk up to the rail together. Margaret takes the baby first. “May you always love people for who they are inside, not for their race or gender or sexuality. May your heart always be open to new ideas, new ways of doing things.”
Margaret hands the baby to Molly. “And may you always nurture both sides of your brain, both your intellect and your creativity.”
Then Margaret looks at Ruby, nods to her.
ONE HUNDRED SIX
For a moment, Ruby isn’t sure she can do it. Then she stands, pauses to place a palm on Lark’s head. That Lark, not Ruby, should be last to speak feels as right as the rest of this ceremony. Her knees are shaky, and her virginia winces in pain. She takes the baby, her baby, from Molly, waits as the Ms each take a votive, blow them out in unison.
Ruby holds so, so many wishes for this child, too many to be captured on a scrap of paper. She wishes Chaz were here to take part in this ceremony, that the ceremony didn’t need to happen in the first place. Finally, she holds the baby up Abuela-style, peers into his eyes. “My hope is that someday you understand, that one day you forgive me.” As Ruby speaks, the baby stares back at her, as if they are looking further than just into each other’s eyes.
“Imprint this, all of this, in your heart, baby goose,” Ruby whispers.
Lark joins Ruby at the railing but doesn’t take the baby in her arms. Instead she reaches out, grabs that impossibly tiny fist in her own tender hand, leans in close to the baby’s face. “I wish that your other mother will take care of you in lots of special ways, like our mother takes care of me.”
Then Lark reaches both hands around the baby’s neck, and when she steps back Chaz’s Saint Christopher medal hangs from a tiny gold chain. “And this is from your daddy. He asked me to give it to you.” The mysterious package, Ruby thinks. When the wash of tears clears her eyes, she is surprised to find that she still is upright.
Too soon, the hospital social worker steps forward to
take the baby from her. Ruby instinctively clenches the bundle against her chest, as if she were saving her infant from a fall. The pull is visceral, starting somewhere deep in Ruby’s sore gut and coursing to her arms. The woman peels Ruby’s hands, finger by finger, from the blanket, and takes the baby into her own arms. Ruby swallows a scream as her uterus contracts, this time pushing her child not out of her body but out of her world.
As the social worker walks away with her baby, the emptiness in Ruby’s arms is only a fraction of the hollowness in her core. Yet the feeling is almost comforting in its perverse familiarity. Loss, a guest, albeit unwelcome, too often has visited before.
In her haze, Ruby feels a nudge at her elbow. Lark, the one sweet miracle Ruby has wrested away from that festering guest, hands her a votive. Mother and daughter, too, blow them out in unison, and Margaret helps Ruby back to her seat.
The chapel now is lit only by the two candelabra. They cast their light higher, paler, than the votives. In the dim room, Ruby tries to recognize something profound in how a dozen or two tiny lights can make such a difference, but her brain refuses to grab the thought.
Lark still stands at the rail. “Take these candles home with you,” she says, “and light them when you want to feel a little bit of Charlie.” The nickname flows smoothly from Lark’s mouth and feels natural in Ruby’s ear. “And maybe,” Lark continues, “he will feel a piece of you, too.”
After Lark returns to her seat, the Monteros file out of the shadowy chapel like good Catholics—one row at a time, front to back, with a curtsy and the sign of the cross at the first step out of the pew.
In the faint light of the empty chapel, Ruby sits beside her daughter while Lark folds each strip of paper into thirds, places it reverently into the treasure box that Ruby made when Lark was six or so. What up until now has held a rabbit’s tail, a few pottery shards, a handful of special rocks, will be the repository of all those wishes. Ruby doesn’t remember what she mumbled this morning, but even through the ache in her gut, she recognizes that the dear Ms and her amazing daughter created a sacred garden for the farewell Ruby didn’t know she needed.
ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
A powder-sugar dusting of snow sparkles in the bright sunlight. The air is razor-sharp, stings Ruby’s lungs. On her skin, it tingles, how she imagines her grandfather’s Old Spice felt slapped against his just-shaved skin.
She walks away from Lark’s school, back toward home. Ruby used to enjoy this walk from the little school on Acequia Madre, sometimes stopping at the nearby bookstore café, where she would read the newspaper and Clyde would beg for pastries from people as if he had never been fed in his life.
These days, though, Ruby can barely manage to command herself to crawl out of bed, shove a cereal box across the counter, and trudge along beside Lark. The walk, her very life, feels like a forced march. She has whittled down her voluntary motion to the barest of necessities, bathing when she reeks, eating when her stomach thunders, speaking when spoken to. She curses her body for tormenting her with its involuntary actions, breath, pulse, brain waves. Only pain, and sleep, are welcome.
The thought she can’t seem to stop bouncing around her head is where she would be if she had never found the magazine article. She pictures the game Mousetrap, a relic from her own mother’s childhood that Ruby found in a closet when she was young. Blue and red and yellow pieces of plastic snapped together on a board, creating a rickety course for a metal ball to travel, ultimately knocking into a rod on which the domed mousetrap perched, sending the red trap skittering down the rod to capture some loser’s mouse.
If Ruby hadn’t found the article, Lark never would have been sent away. Ruby never would have been put through a trial. Ruby and Chaz wouldn’t have broken up. And Charlie would be with all of them now. Ruby can’t stop feeling like a little plastic mouse peeking out through the bars of a cage, wishing she had never started the ball rolling in the first place.
She tells herself to chase away the black dog, the mean reds, the colorless funk, what ever this is that haunts her. She tells herself she has to pull herself together for Lark, just as she did for the baby while Lark was away. She worries that Lark might think Ruby regrets her choice, wary of making her daughter believe she needs to earn a place in Ruby’s heart continually.
Lark’s birthday is coming, the holidays, too. Ruby wants, needs, to make those days special. Her doctor says to be patient, that her hormones are still adjusting, that postpartum depression is common, especially when no baby comes home.
The gardens along the road that were summer-lush just a few months ago are now a nuclear winter, dead-brown stalks, leaves black and mushy from frost. Ruby’s grandmother used to say that this was faith, hacking away your plants for winter in the belief that spring would come and grow them back. “And spring always comes,” Nana said.
Even though this November day is August-bright, spring seems a long, long way off to Ruby. She knows that winter is hanging out around a corner, a kid loitering in front of the Rexall, waiting to come blustering through. And she is having difficulty gathering the faith, like the squirrel collects the last pieces of nuts from under the tree beside the road, that winter will require.
She tells herself she should be used to the sadness. This is just one more on a long list of loss. The hurt of her breakup with Chaz is still there, a layer of scar-tissue ache under her acorn shell. But she carries the absence of her baby in her gut, a weight as if she has yet to give birth at all.
As Ruby and Clyde cut behind the art galleries that line Canyon Road, she happens upon the detritus of a party. Melted ice bags are in a limp pile by a tree, reminding her of the witch in The Wizard of Oz. A hill of trash bags is buttressed by liquor boxes, flattened, bundled, and tied. The pieces of an Erector Set party tent lie waiting to be carted off.
Something about the whole scene pricks Ruby with sadness, the kind of sad of an opportunity lost or time marching too quickly. When she sees the balloons, though, she crumples to the ground, as a knife stabs her chest. Clusters of pink and red and white balloons hanging limply over tree branches like someone’s forgotten laundry. She sits there, not crying, not feeling anything but the knifepoint in her chest. She sits there until the cold, hard ground finally penetrates the numbness of her skin, until Clyde practically knocks her over with his worry.
By the time Ruby trudges behind Clyde up the final hill, her own driveway, the feathery snow has vanished, some down into the earth to nourish the slumbering plants, some up into the cloudless sky to come again another day like the childhood rain song. If only the snow in her head could dissipate as easily.
She just didn’t expect it to be this hard. Yes, she rescued Lark, brought her daughter home. Yes, that was worth any price. But she didn’t expect the payment to hurt so much. She feels the phantom ache each time she reaches for her belly, finding a barren plain instead of the mound she expects.
In a perverse way, Ruby needs to hang on to that pain, even knowing that her hurting has got to be hurting Lark. As fiercely as she loves Lark, as surely as she knows she did the right thing, Ruby doesn’t want to lose the pain of losing her other child.
ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
Her nail polish a shimmery burgundy, Antoinette blows on her fingers. “Berry tones, they’re all the rage this season.”
“Again already? Who decides that crap?” Ruby asks.
Antoinette picks up her purse with the tips of her fingers. “They, the proverbial they do. Come on, I’m driving. You’re drinking.”
In the car, Antoinette looks Ruby over with an exaggerated head-to-toe nod. “We got us some work to do. Margaret’s blitz attack on the hair helped, but we still got us some work to do.”
“That’s redundant, you know,” Ruby says. “Blitz attack. It’s like saying ‘baby puppies’ or ‘with au jus.’”
Antoinette shoots Ruby a look. “Yep, we got us some work. We’ll start with margaritas.”
Ruby gives her a wry smile. “You know, alco
hol is no cure for depression. Not even a Band-Aid.”
“Maybe the Band-Aid’s not for you, but so the rest of us don’t have to look at your ugly sore.”
Ruby’s laugh is almost a guffaw. The mere fact that her friend can joke about it, that Ruby even gets the joke, tells her that she’s going to claw her way out of her black hole.
The traffic signal turns red as Antoinette approaches the intersection of Cerrillos and Paseo de Peralta. To the right is their usual restaurant, where Ruby met Chaz, where Chaz met the reporter. Relief is a warm flush through Ruby when Antoinette turns left. She may be seeing some glints of light these days, but she’s not quite ready to see those piñatas, or the tree that bears Chaz scars more visible than her own.
Antoinette doesn’t miss Ruby’s sigh. “Gotta get back on the horse someday, girl. My mama would say, ‘Don’t ya think that tea bag has steeped long enough?’”
“Wallowing,” Ruby says. “Nana called it wallowing.” As if rolling around in sadness were a pleasure, like the Ms’ Dudley writhing in manure. “She’d set a time limit, two hours, two days, depending on the cause.” And when time was up, wallowing was put aside, tucked away like a forgotten handkerchief in a drawer. “I wonder how much time she would give me for this, for giving my baby away.”
Antoinette cocks her head. “I’ll give you, oh, about a third a pitcher of margaritas.”
ONE HUNDRED NINE
In the backseat of the Jeep, Lark and Numi chatter as Ruby drives down Canyon Road after picking them up from dance class. With her friends, Lark seems almost normal these days. She peels away a layer of the reserve that still hangs between her and Ruby.
